Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mathematical Tools for Evolutionary Systems Biology

Mastering many practical problems in our world demands a deeper and more integrated understanding of biochemical and evolutionary processes than we can currently muster. For example, to fight bacterial infections we need to understand the biochemistry of bacterial phenotypes for designing efficient antibiotics and we also need to understand the population genetics and ecology of these bacteria to design antibiotics usage policies that reduce the speed with which antibiotics resistance evolves [18]. To fight cancer we need to understand the signaling pathways that allow cells to ignore growth control and we also need to understand the population genetics that allow cancer cells to maintain a competitive edge, diversify, migrate and evolve resistance against chemotherapy [9]. Similar challenges of integrating molecular biology and evolutionary biology exist for controlling virus infections, developing bioenergy solutions and many other hot topics. Building bridges between systems biology and evolutionary biology has the potential to provide us with the tools to build and test the hypotheses required for addressing these problems. Developing such an integrated approach is, in a nutshell, the goal of the emerging field of evolutionary systems biology. Evolutionary systems biology is a broad field, and its key questions and the best ways of attacking them are still being defined. Progress in evolutionary systems biology demands close collaboration between experimentalists, theorists, and computational modelers. This workshop set out to bring together a diverse group of researchers from all three sub-disciplines to share problems and progress, with a focus on connecting data with models.
Efficiently Detecting All Dangling Pointer Uses in Production Servers

In this paper, we propose a novel technique to detect all dangling pointer uses at run-time that is efficient enough for production use in server codes. One idea (previously used by electric fence, PageHeap) is to use a new virtual page for each allocation of the program and rely on page protection mechanisms to check dangling pointer accesses. This naive approach has two limitations that make it impractical to use in production software: increased physical memory usage and increased address space usage. We propose two key improvements that alleviate both these problems. First, we use a new virtual page for each allocation of the program but map it to the same physical page as the original allocator. This allows using nearly identical physical memory as the original program while still retaining the dangling pointer detection capability. We also show how to implement this idea without requiring any changes to the underlying memory allocator. Our second idea alleviates the problem of virtual address space exhaustion by using a previously developed compiler transformation called automatic pool allocation to reuse many virtual pages. The transformation partitions the memory of the program based on their lifetimes and allows us to reuse virtual pages when portions of memory become inaccessible. Experimentally we find that the run-time overhead for five Unix servers is less than 4%, for other Unix utilities less than 15%. However, in case of allocation intensive benchmarks, we find our overheads are much worse (up to 11x slowdown)
“Lead by Example”

This phenomenological study explored the collaborative experiences between school counselors and principals in their work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students. The study data revealed four overarching themes: (a) learning through storytelling, (b) leading by example, (c) creating intentional partnerships, and (d) pushing the system. This article includes implications for future research and school counselor practice regarding how school counselors and principals can forge a strong, intentional relationship toward effective advocacy for LGBT youth.
The Neutrophil-Lymphocyte Ratio Is Associated with Coronary Artery Calcification in Asymptomatic Korean Males: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction. The neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is a significant systemic predictor of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The coronary artery calcium score (CACS) reflects coronary artery calcification and is an independent risk factor for coronary artery stenosis. In the present study, we explored the relationship between the NLR and CACS in terms of subclinical inflammation and coronary artery calcification. Materials and Methods. We evaluated males and females who did not have CVD, diabetes, high blood pressure, or high fasting blood sugar levels. We measured white blood cell, neutrophil, lymphocyte counts, fasting blood sugar, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides (TG), and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein levels in blood samples. We also obtained CACSs using coronary multidetector computed tomography. Results. Multivariate logistic regression showed that older age was significantly associated with a higher CACS (P < 0.001); males had higher CACSs than females (P < 0.001); and the higher the TG level, the higher the CACS (P = 0.019). The NLR of males, but not females, was significantly associated with the CACS. Conclusion. An independent association between the NLR and CACS was thus evident in healthy adult males after adjusting for other CVD risk factors. Therefore, the NLR is a significant predictor of potential CVD in male subjects with subclinical atherosclerosis.
Occupational exposure to air pollutants: particulate matter and respiratory symptoms affecting traffic-police in Bogotá.

OBJECTIVES Quantifying personal exposure to particles less than 10 micrometres in diameter (PM10) and determining the prevalence of respiratory symptoms in traffic-police officers working in Bogotá's metropolitan area. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study of 574 traffic-police officers divided into two groups (477 traffic-police and 97 police working in an office). They were given a questionnaire inquiring about respiratory symptoms, toxicological medical evaluation, lung function tests and personal PM10 monitoring. The differences between groups were found using stratified analysis (i.e. comparing odds ratios). Multivariate analysis of factors related to symptoms and diagnosis of respiratory alteration was also performed. RESULTS Respiratory symptoms concerned a higher prevalence of cough, expectoration and rhinosinusitis in the traffic-police group. Medical examination revealed that the traffic-police group had higher nasal irritation prevalence; lung function tests showed no difference. Mean PM10 levels were higher for the traffic-police group (139.4 μg/m³), compared to the office work group (86.03 μg/m³). DISCUSSION PM10 values in both groups did not exceed allowable limits for respirable particles in the workplace according to ACGIH standards. Traffic-police exposed to air pollution had an increased risk of developing respiratory symptoms and signs, thereby agreeing with the results of this and other studies. Personal monitoring is a valuable tool when quantifying the concentration of PM10to which an individual has been exposed during a normal workday. This study contributes towards further research in to the effects of PM10 in populations at risk.
Ju l 2 00 3 hep-th / 9112059 Strings with Discrete Target Space

We investigate the field theory of strings having as a target space an arbitrary discrete onedimensional manifold. The existence of the continuum limit is guaranteed if the target space is a Dynkin diagram of a simply laced Lie algebra or its affine extension. In this case the theory can be mapped onto the theory of strings embedded in the infinite discrete line ZZ which is the target space of the SOS model. On the regular lattice this mapping is known as Coulomb gas picture. Introducing a quantum string field Ψx(l) depending on the position x and the length l of the closed string, we give a formal definition of the string field theory in terms of a functional integral. The classical string background is found as a solution of the saddle-point equation which is equivalent to the loop equation we have previously considered [1]. The continuum limit exists in the vicinity of the singular points of this equation. We show that for given target space there are many ways to achieve the continuum limit; they are related to the multicritical points of the ensemble of surfaces without embedding. Once the classical background is known, the amplitudes involving propagation of strings can be evaluated by perturbative expansion around the saddle point of the functional integral. For example, the partition function of the noninteracting closed string (toroidal world sheet) is the contribution of the gaussian fluctuations of the string field. The vertices in the corresponding Feynman diagram technique are constructed as the loop amplitudes in a random matrix model with suitably chosen potential.
Random walk in Markovian environment

We prove a quenched central limit theorem for random walks with bounded increments in a randomly evolving environment on $\Z^d$. We assume that the transition probabilities of the walk depend not too strongly on the environment and that the evolution of the environment is Markovian with strong spatial and temporal mixing properties.
Heterogeneous reconfigurable systems

The continually increasing integration density of integrated circuits portrays important paradigm shifts in next-generation designs, especially in the direction of systems-on-a-chip. Hybrid architectures mixing a variety of computational models are bound to be integrated on a single die. This opens the door for creative high-performance low-energy solutions to the programming problem using techniques such as reconfiguration to construct optimized architectures for a given computational problem. Exploiting the opportunities offered by these architectural innovations obviously requires a clear understanding of the trade-off's offered by the various architectural models and styles, as well as a well-thought out design methodology, combining high-level prediction and analysis tools with partitioning, optimization and mapping techniques. This paper presents an overview of opportunities of these reconfigurable architectures in the architecture domain.
Faults digital library in burning process

In this paper was developed a faults library for the steam boiler, the accent being on the study of the situations when faults occur in the burning process (furnace). This library is used in the monitoring and control system, the main object consisting in detection and localization of different faults. The system realise the fault detection in real time, comparison the process response with the response of the other models from the digital library and when are applied the same commands or signals in the same mode that in real process. In the last two sections of the paper was developed the application of fault detection algorithm based on plant model of burning process (included in this paper) and graphical results of fault detection experiments.
Digestibility and Bioavailability of the Active Components of Erica australis L. Aqueous Extracts and Their Therapeutic Potential as Acetylcholinesterase Inhibitors

Erica australis L. (Ericaceae) is used in traditional medicine to treat many free-radical related ailments. In the present work, the stability and biological activity of the plant aqueous extracts submitted to an in vitro digestive process were investigated. Chemical stability was monitored by HPLC-DAD and LC-MS/MS, while the bioactivities were evaluated through the inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and DPPH radical scavenging activity. Both extracts, whose main components were flavonol glycosides, inhibited AChE, showing IC50 values of 257.9 ± 6.2 µg/mL and 296.8 ± 8.8 µg/mL for the decoction and for the infusion, respectively. Significant radical scavenging activities were also revealed by both extracts, as denoted by the IC50 values for the decoction, 6.7 ± 0.1 µg/mL, and for the infusion, 10.5 ± 0.3 µg/mL. After submission to gastric and pancreatic juices, no remarkable alterations in the composition or in the bioactivities were observed, suggesting that the extracts may pass through the gastrointestinal tract, keeping their composition and therefore their biological properties. Moreover, the bioavailability of the components of both extracts, as studied in a Caco-2 cell model, showed that compounds can permeate the membrane, which is a condition to exert their biological activities. Our results add further support to the potential of E. australis for its antioxidant and neuroprotective properties.
Differential in Vivo Sensitivity to Inhibition of P-glycoprotein Located in Lymphocytes, Testes, and the Blood-Brain Barrier

A major functional component of the blood-brain barrier is P-glycoprotein. In principle, inhibition of this efflux transporter would permit greater distribution of its substrates into the brain and increased central effects. Tariquidar and elacridar, potent and selective P-glycoprotein inhibitors, were investigated in this regard using the opioid loperamide as an in vivo probe in mice. Pretreatment with both inhibitors converted intravenous loperamide from a drug without central effects to one producing antinociception. Radiolabeled loperamide tissue distribution studies indicated that inhibition was associated with increased uptake into brain and testes in the absence of changes in plasma levels, along with enhanced efflux of rhodamine 123 from CD3e+ T-lymphocytes. However, with tariquidar, the loperamide dose-response curves for testes/plasma and brain/plasma concentration ratios were shifted 6- (p = 0.07) and 25-fold (p < 0.01) to the right, respectively (ED50 = 1.48 and 5.65 mg/kg), compared with the rhodamine 123 efflux curve (ED50 0.25 mg/kg). Less pronounced shifts were noted with elacridar where the brain/plasma ratio was shifted only 2-fold relative to the rhodamine 123 efflux data (ED50 = 2.36 versus 1.34 mg/kg, respectively; p 0.01). These results indicate that the P-glycoprotein localized in the blood-brain barrier and, to a lesser extent, the testes-blood barrier is more resistant to inhibition than at other tissue sites such as the lymphocyte; moreover, the extent of this effect depends on the inhibitor. Such resistance can be overcome by a sufficiently high dose of an inhibitor; however, whether this is safely attainable in the clinical situation remains to be determined.
Don't Use a Lot When Little Will Do: Genre Identification Using URLs

The ever increasing data on world wide web calls for the use of vertical search engines. Sandhan is one such search engine which offers search in tourism and health genres in more than 10 different Indian languages. In this work we build a URL based genre identification module for Sandhan. A direct impact of this work is on building focused crawlers to gather Indian language content. We conduct experiments on tourism and health web pages in Hindi language. We experiment with three approaches list based, naive Bayes and incremental naive Bayes. We evaluate our approaches against another web page classification algorithm built on the parsed text of manually labeled web pages. We find that incremental naive Bayes approach outperforms the other two. While doing our experiments we work with different features like words, n-grams and all grams. Using n-gram features we achieve classification accuracies of 0.858 and 0.873 for tourism and health genres respectively.
On Hurwitz transformations

A bibliography on the Hurwitz transformations is given. We deal here, with some details, with two particular Hurwitz transformations, viz, the $\grq \to \grt$ Kustaanheimo-Stiefel transformation and its $\grh \to \grc$ compact extension. These transformations are derived in the context of Fock-Bargmann-Schwinger calculus with special emphasis on angular momentum theory.
50 Years of Isolation

The traditional means for isolating applications from each other is via the use of operating system provided "process" abstraction facilities. However, as applications now consist of multiple fine-grained, independent and separately acquired components, the traditional process abstraction model is proving to be insufficient in ensuring this isolation. Statistics indicate that a high percentage of software failure occurs due to propagation of component failures. These observations are further bolstered by the attempts by modern Internet browser application developers, for example, to adopt multi-process architectures in order to increase robustness. Therefore, a fresh look at the available options for isolating program components is necessary and this paper provides an overview of previous activity and current research in the area.
Theory Revision in Fault Hierarchies 2 Connections

The fault hierarchy representation is widely used in expert systems for the diagnosis of complex mechanical devices. On the assumption that an appropriate bias for a knowledge representation language is also an appropriate bias for learning in this domain, we have developed a theory revision method that operates directly on a fault hierarchy. This task presents several challenges: A typical training instance is missing most feature values, and the pattern of missing features is significant , rather than merely an eeect of noise. Moreover, the accuracy of a candidate theory is measured by considering both the sequence of tests required to arrive at a diagnosis and its agreement with the diagnostic endpoints provided by an expert. This paper rst describes the algorithm for theory revision of fault hierarchies that was designed to address these challenges, then discusses its application in knowledge base maintenance and reports on experiments that use to revise a elded diagnostic system. Over the past decade, large-scale expert systems have found widespread use. However, developers have found that the cost of maintaining a knowledge base, over its lifetime, can be as high as the initial cost of its development. One response is to use machine learning to correct the knowledge base as problems emerge. Unfortunately, standard induction methods seem ill-suited to this task, as they are designed to use training data to construct a knowledge base from scratch, and the rate at which training data is generated by eld users is typically too low to support regeneration of the knowledge base each time a revision is needed. As domain knowledge is available (in the form of the knowledge base), it makes sense to take advantage of this information (even if imperfect) to bias the induction process. Techniques for theory revision are suited for the task of knowledge maintenance, since they use training data to improve an initial domain theory. In this paper, we report research on theory revision that has been driven by our experience with ctx, a elded expert system (now undergoing beta testing by 65 eld service engineers in the U.S.) that diagnoses faults in the high-voltage generator of a computerized tomography (CT) scanner manufactured by Siemens Medical Systems. Although initial feedback indicates that ctx reduces both the number of repeat visits by eld service engineers and the number of times they must consult a domain expert, users have reported errors in the knowledge base. …
Nature's Swiss Army Knife: The Diverse Protective Roles of Anthocyanins in Leaves

Anthocyanins, the pigments responsible for spectacular displays of vermilion in the leaves of deciduous trees, have long been considered an extravagant waste of a plant's resources. Contemporary research, in contrast, has begun to show that the pigments can significantly influence the way a leaf responds to environmental stress. Anthocyanins have been implicated in tolerance to stressors as diverse as drought, UV-B, and heavy metals, as well as resistance to herbivores and pathogens. By absorbing high-energy quanta, anthocyanic cell vacuoles both protect chloroplasts from the photoinhibitory and photooxidative effects of strong light, and prevent the catabolism of photolabile defence compounds. Anthocyanins also mitigate photooxidative injury in leaves by efficiently scavenging free radicals and reactive oxygen species. Far from being a useless by-product of the flavonoid pathway, these red pigments may in some instances be critical for plant survival.
Two-Stage Metric Learning

In this paper, we present a novel two-stage metric learning algorithm. We first map each learning instance to a probability distribution by computing its similarities to a set of fixed anchor points. Then, we define the distance in the input data space as the Fisher information distance on the associated statistical manifold. This induces in the input data space a new family of distance metric with unique properties. Unlike kernelized metric learning, we do not require the similarity measure to be positive semi-definite. Moreover, it can also be interpreted as a local metric learning algorithm with well defined distance approximation. We evaluate its performance on a number of datasets. It outperforms significantly other metric learning methods and SVM.
Improving the maximum-weight clique algorithm for the dense graphs

In this paper we present a fast algorithm for the maximum-weight clique problem on arbitrary undirected graphs, which is improved for the dense graphs. The algorithm uses colour classes and backtracking techniques inside itself in parallel in a form of a branch and bound algorithm. The algorithm contains also several improvements for the most complex case, which are dense graphs. Computational experiments with random graphs show that the proposed algorithm works faster than earlier published algorithms - more than 10 times faster than the best known algorithms. This difference is very sufficient for the maximum-weight clique problem.
SIMBA { Sear h IMages By Appearan e

Abstra t. In this paper we present SIMBA, a ontent based image retrieval system performing queries based on image appearan e. We on-sider absolute obje t positions irrelevant for image similarity here and therefore propose to use invariant features. Based on a general onstru - tion method (integration over the transformation group), we derive invariant feature histograms that at h di(cid:11)erent ues of image ontent: features that are strongly in(cid:13)uen ed by olor and textural features that are robust to illumination hanges. By a weighted ombination of these features the user an adapt the similarity measure a ording to his
IBM solidDB: In-Memory Database Optimized for Extreme Speed and Availability

A relational in-memory database, IBM solidDB is used worldwide for its ability to deliver extreme speed and availability. As the name implies, an in-memory database resides entirely in main memory rather than on disk, making data access an order of several magnitudes faster than with conventional, disk-based databases. Part of that leap is due to the fact that RAM simply provides faster data access than hard disk drives. But solidDB also has data structures and access methods specifically designed for storing, searching, and processing data in main memory. As a result, it outperforms ordinary diskbased databases even when the latter have data fully cached in memory. Some databases deliver low latency but cannot handle large numbers of transactions or concurrent sessions. IBM solidDB provides throughput measured in the range of hundreds of thousands to million of transactions per second while consistently achieving response times (or latency) measured in microseconds. This article explores the structural differences between in-memory and disk-based databases, and how solidDB works to deliver extreme speed.