Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overexpression of the Tn5 transposase in Escherichia coli results in filamentation, aberrant nucleoid segregation, and cell death: analysis of E. coli and transposase suppressor mutations

Overexpression of the Tn5 transposase (Tnp) was found to be lethal to Escherichia coli. This killing was not caused by transposition or dependent on the transpositional or DNA binding competence of Tnp. Instead, it was strictly correlated with the presence of a wild-type N terminus. Deletions removing just two N-terminal amino acids of Tnp resulted in partial suppression of this effect, and deletions of Tnp removing 3 or 11 N-terminal amino acids abolished the killing effect. This cytotoxic effect of Tnp overexpression is accompanied by extensive filament formation (i.e., a defect in cell division) and aberrant nucleoid segregation. Four E. coli mutants were isolated which allow survival upon Tnp overexpression, and the mutations are located at four discrete loci. These suppressor mutations map near essential genes involved in cell division and DNA segregation. One of these mutations maps to a 4.5-kb HindIII region containing the ftsYEX (cell division) locus at 76 min. A simple proposition which accounts for all of these observations is that Tnp interacts with an essential E. coli factor affecting cell division and/or chromosome segregation and that overexpression of Tnp titrates this factor below a level required for viability of the cell. Furthermore, the N terminus of Tnp is necessary for this interaction. The possible significance of this phenomenon for the transposition process is discussed.
Punctuating confusion networks for speech translation

Translating from confusion networks (CNs) has been proven to be more effective than translating from single best hypotheses. Moreover, it is widely accepted that the availability of good punctuation marks in the input can improve translation quality. At present, no ASR systems can generate punctuation marks in the word graphs, therefore CNs miss punctuation. In this paper we investigate the problem of adding punctuation marks into confusion networks. We investigate different punctuation strategies and show that the use of multiple hypotheses improves translation quality in a large-vocabulary speech translation task.
The Media and Genetically Modified Foods: Evidence in Support of Social Amplification of Risk

Empirical examinations of the “social amplification of risk” framework are rare, partly because of the difficulties in predicting when conditions likely to result in amplification effects will occur. This means that it is difficult to examine changes in risk perception that are contemporaneous with increases and/or decreases in social or media discussion of the risks associated with a particular risk event. However, the collection of attitude data before, during, and after the increased reporting of the risks of genetically modified food in the United Kingdom (spring 1999) has demonstrated that people's risk perceptions do increase and decrease in line with what might be expected upon examination of the amplification and attenuation mechanisms integral to the framework. Perceptions of benefit, however, appeared to be permanently depressed by negative reporting about genetically modified food. Trust in regulatory institutions with responsibility for protecting the public was not affected. It was concluded that the social amplification of risk framework is a useful framework for beginning to explain the potential impact on risk perceptions of a risk event, particularly if that risk event is presented to the public as a new hazard occurring in a crisis context.
Meta-Planning: Representing and Using Knowledge About Planning in Problem Solving and Natural Language Understanding

This paper is concerned with those elements of planning knowledge that are common to both understanding someone else's plan and creating a plan for one's own use. This planning knowledge can be divided into two bodies: Knowledge about the world, and knowledge about the planning process itself. Our interest here is primarily with the latter corpus. The central thesis is that much of the knowledge about the planning process itself can be formulated in terms of higher-level goals and plans called meta-goals and meta-plans. These entities can then be used by the same understanding and planning mechanisms that process ordinary goals and plans. However, the meta-planning knowledge now enables these mechanisms to handle much more complicated situations in a uniform manner. Systems based on meta-planning would have a number of advantages over existing problem solving and understanding systems. The same knowledge could be shared by both a planner and understander, and both would be able to handle complex situations elegantly. In addition, in planning, the use of metaplanning has several advantages over more traditional methods involving constraints or critics. Meta-planning allows the full power of a problem solver to be applied to situations that are generally amenable only to special purpose processing. In addition, meta-planning facilitates the representation of some situations that are difficult to express otherwise. We have begun to introduce metaplanning knowledge into two systems: PAM, a story understanding program, and PANDORA, a problem solving and planning system.
Is hospital 'community benefit' charity care?

CONTEXT The Affordable Care Act is drawing increased attention to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Community Benefit policy. To qualify for tax exemption, the IRS requires nonprofit hospitals to allocate a portion of their operating expenses to certain "charitable" activities, such as providing free or reduced care to the indigent. OBJECTIVE To determine the total amount of community benefit reported by Wisconsin hospitals using official IRS tax return forms (Form 990), and examine the level of allocation across allowable activities. DESIGN Primary data collection from IRS 990 forms submitted by Wisconsin hospitals for 2009. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Community benefit reported in absolute dollars and as percent of overall hospital expenditures, both overall and by activity category. RESULTS For 2009, Wisconsin hospitals reported $1.064 billion in community benefits, or 7.52% of total hospital expenditures. Of this amount, 9.1% was for charity care, 50% for Medicaid subsidies, 11.4% for other subsidized services, and 4.4% for Community Health Improvement Services. CONCLUSION Charity care is not the primary reported activity by Wisconsin hospitals under the IRS Community Benefit requirement. Opportunities may exist for devoting increasing amounts to broader community health improvement activities.
Unsupervised Joint Alignment and Clustering using Bayesian Nonparametrics

Joint alignment of a collection of functions is the process of independently transforming the functions so that they appear more similar to each other. Typically, such unsupervised alignment algorithms fail when presented with complex data sets arising from multiple modalities or make restrictive assumptions about the form of the functions or transformations, limiting their generality. We present a transformed Bayesian infinite mixture model that can simultaneously align and cluster a data set. Our model and associated learning scheme offer two key advantages: the optimal number of clusters is determined in a data-driven fashion through the use of a Dirichlet process prior, and it can accommodate any transformation function parameterized by a continuous parameter vector. As a result, it is applicable to a wide range of data types, and transformation functions. We present positive results on synthetic two-dimensional data, on a set of one-dimensional curves, and on various image data sets, showing large improvements over previous work. We discuss several variations of the model and conclude with directions for future work.
Sildenafil as a selective pulmonary vasodilator in childhood primary pulmonary hypertension

Primary pulmonary hypertension is a rare disease of childhood, which carries a poor prognosis. Patients often present with severe exercise limitation, and untreated life expectancy is less than 1 year. Pharmacological intervention is directed towards reduction of the raised pulmonary artery pressure with vasodilator treatment, initially with calcium antagonists, although more recently long term prostacyclin treatment has shown benefit in some patients. Heart–lung transplantation remains an option for children with severe disease refractory to therapeutic treatment. A 4 year old Bangladeshi girl with dyspnoea, cyanosis, and signs of a low cardiac output, is described. Initial treatment with prostacyclin was gradually reduced, and maintenance treatment with oral sildenafil (Viagra; Pfizer) instituted. At follow up 3 months later, her exercise capacity was greatly improved and she continues to enjoy a good quality of life without obvious side effects. In view of the encouraging initial results, this may become an acceptable adjunct in treating this patient group.
Surrogate Constraints

A surrogate constraint is an inequality implied by the constraints of an integ~r program, and designed to capture useful information that cannot be extra~ted from the parent constraints individually but is nevertheless a consequepce of their conjunction. The use of such constraints as originally propo~ed by the author has recently been extended in an important way by EGON! BALAS and ARTHUR GEOFFRION. Motivated to take advantage of info~ation disregarded in previous definitions of surrogate constraint strength, we build upon the results of Balas and Geoffrion to show how to obtain surrogate constraints that are strongest according to more general criteria. We also propose definitions of surrogate constraint strength that further extend the ideas of the author in 1965 by means of 'normalizations,' and show how to obtain strongest surrogate constraints by reference to these defini~ions also.
Discovery of High Utility Itemsets Using Genetic Algorithm with Ranked Mutation

Utility mining is the study of itemset mining from the consideration of utilities. It is the utility-based itemset mining approach to find itemsets conforming to user preferences. Modern research in mining high-utility itemsets (HUI) from the databases faces two major challenges: exponential search space and database-dependent minimum utility threshold. The search space is extremely vast when the number of distinct items and the size of the database are very large. Data analysts must specify suitable minimum utility thresholds for their mining tasks, although they might have no knowledge pertaining to their databases. Moreover, a utility-mining algorithm supports only an itemset with positive item values. To evade these problems, two approaches are presented for mining HUI containing negative item values from transaction databases: with/without specifying the minimum utility threshold through a genetic algorithm with ranked mutation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on mining HUI with negative item values from transaction databases using a genetic algorithm. Experimental results show that approaches described in this article achieve better performance in terms of scalability and efficiency.
A Semi-Lumped Miniaturized Spurious Less Frequency Tunable Three-port Divider\Combiner with 20 dB Isolation Between Output Ports

We propose a new topology based on a semi-lumped complex impedance transformer for the design of a frequency tunable three-port power divider. A prototype has been realized in a hybrid technology with commercially available varactor diodes. Our design is based on an impedance transformer in the input branch (with electrical length of 20.4deg), and a loop in the output branches (with electrical length of 2times24deg). This leads to a miniaturized device, more than two times shorter than a classical Wilkinson power divider. This divider can be tuned over plusmn30% around 1.35 GHz (from 0.95 GHz to 1.75 GHz) with insertion loss lower than 0.3 dB, return loss better than 20 dB and isolation between the two output ports better than 20 dB. Moreover, the low-pass behavior of the input impedance transformer leads to a good rejection of the second harmonic
Predictors of obstructive sleep apnea in males with metabolic syndrome

The aim of the present study was to examine the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MS) and its components among obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients vs controls, as well as to investigate which of these components are strongly associated with the presence of OSA in subjects reporting symptoms indicating sleep-disordered breathing. Included were 83 consecutive male subjects, without known concomitant diseases, who visited an outpatient clinic of obesity, diabetes and metabolism. Based on polysomnography, these were divided into two groups: OSA patients (n = 53) and controls (n = 30). Parameters indicating MS, according to the NCEP ATP III criteria (blood pressure, waist circumference, glucose, triglycerides, and HDL-cholesterol levels) were evaluated in both groups. The criteria for MS were fulfilled in 49 participants. Presence of MS was significantly correlated with the presence of OSA. However, after adjustment for BMI, only serum glucose was significantly associated with the presence of OSA (P = 0.002). Conversely, the presence of MS was associated with a significant reduction in percentage of slow-wave sleep (P = 0.030). In conclusion, these results provide further evidence for the association between OSA and MS. Between subjects with MS, elevated serum glucose levels indicate a higher probability for the presence of OSA.
The sympathetic nervous system in polycystic ovary syndrome: a novel therapeutic target?

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine condition associated with long‐term health risks, including type 2 diabetes and vascular dysfunction in addition to reproductive sequelae. Many of the common features of PCOS, such as central obesity, hyperinsulinaemia and obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), are associated with chronic sympathetic overactivity, suggesting that sympathoexcitation may be involved in the pathogenesis of this condition. Rodent models of polycystic ovaries have shown that ovarian sympathetic outflow may be increased, accompanied by elevated intra‐ovarian synthesis of nerve growth factor (NGF) which may be involved in initiation of ovarian pathology. Patients with PCOS have evidence of increased muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA), altered heart rate variability and attenuated heart rate recovery postexercise, compared with age‐ and BMI‐matched controls, suggesting a generalized increase in sympathetic nerve activity. Active weight loss can reduce MSNA and whole body noradrenaline spillover, whereas low‐frequency electroacupuncture decreased MSNA in overweight women with PCOS. Treatment of OSA with continuous positive airways pressure may reduce plasma noradrenaline levels and diastolic blood pressure and improve cardiac sympathovagal balance. Renal sympathetic denervation also reduced MSNA, noradrenaline spillover and blood pressure in two PCOS subjects with hypertension, accompanied by improved insulin sensitivity. The sympathetic nervous system may thus offer a new therapeutic target in PCOS but larger and longer‐term studies are needed before these treatments can be considered in clinical practice.
Comparison of Ocean-Surface Winds Retrieved From QuikSCAT Scatterometer and Radarsat-1 SAR in Offshore Waters of the U.S. West Coast

In this letter, we generate a temporal/spatial matchup data set between QuikSCAT scatterometer and RADARSAT-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wind products in offshore waters along the U.S. West Coast. Analysis of the resulting three-year database shows that, in general, the wind products from both sensors have characteristics similar to those reported in the literature. Then, we perform an error analysis in the space domain and find that there is significant discrepancy between the two wind products as the matchup points move closer to the coast. The root-mean-square error (rmse) and standard deviation (STD) between the two data sets increases markedly for points matched within about 100 km of the coastline. Beyond 100 km, the rmse, STD, and systematic bias become small and stable. In addition, an empirical relationship between QuikSCAT and SAR winds in coastal region is proposed. Thus, the bias and errors should be taken into account if the standard operational QuikSCAT wind products are used for forcing models in the coastal ocean.
Ultrasound guidance compared with electrical neurostimulation for peripheral nerve block: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

BACKGROUND Despite the growing interest in the use of ultrasound (US) imaging to guide performance of regional anaesthetic procedures such as peripheral nerve blocks, controversy still exists as to whether US is superior to previously developed nerve localization techniques such as the use of a peripheral nerve stimulator (PNS). We sought to clarify this issue by performing a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized controlled trials that have compared these two methods of nerve localization. METHODS We searched Ovid MEDLINE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and Google Scholar databases and also the reference lists of relevant publications for eligible studies. A total of 13 studies met our criteria and were included for analysis. Studies were rated for methodological quality by two reviewers. Data from these studies were abstracted and synthesized using a meta-analysis. RESULTS Blocks performed using US guidance were more likely to be successful [risk ratio (RR) for block failure 0.41, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.26-0.66, P<0.001], took less time to perform (mean 1 min less to perform with US, 95% CI 0.4-1.7 min, P=0.003), had faster onset (29% shorter onset time, 95% CI 45-12%, P=0.001), and had longer duration (mean difference 25% longer, 95% CI 12-38%, P<0.001) than those performed with PNS guidance. US guidance also decreased the risk of vascular puncture during block performance (RR 0.16, 95% CI 0.05-0.47, P=0.001). CONCLUSIONS US improves efficacy of peripheral nerve block compared with techniques that utilize PNS for nerve localization. Larger studies are needed to determine whether or not the use of US can decrease the number of complications such as nerve injury or systemic local anaesthetic toxicity.
Can Modern Graph Processing Engines Run Concurrent Queries Efficiently?

Analytic graph processing has witnessed an ever-growing interest both in industry and academia with the focus on providing the most effective algorithm implementations to maximize single-query performance. In a complex application scenario, where multiple users issue concurrent queries to the analytic graph processing engine, the major performance metric is throughput rather than single-query elapsed time. As of today, there is no single-node graph engine that is designed for concurrent graph processing running multiple queries in parallel. In this work, we analyze the single-node graph engine Galois and extend it to run multiple graph queries concurrently. We perform an extensive evaluation of Galois for various graph algorithms and data sets to gain a fundamental understanding of the performance bottlenecks of existing graph engines. Finally, we derive important insights and conclude that modern graph engines cannot be easily adapted to handle concurrent graph queries efficiently.
Blind Calibration in Compressed Sensing using Message Passing Algorithms

Compressed sensing (CS) is a concept that allows to acquire compressible signals with a small number of measurements. As such it is very attractive for hardware implementations. Therefore, correct calibration of the hardware is a central is- sue. In this paper we study the so-called blind calibration, i.e. when the training signals that are available to perform the calibration are sparse but unknown. We extend the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm used in CS to the case of blind calibration. In the calibration-AMP, both the gains on the sensors and the elements of the signals are treated as unknowns. Our algorithm is also applica- ble to settings in which the sensors distort the measurements in other ways than multiplication by a gain, unlike previously suggested blind calibration algorithms based on convex relaxations. We study numerically the phase diagram of the blind calibration problem, and show that even in cases where convex relaxation is pos- sible, our algorithm requires a smaller number of measurements and/or signals in order to perform well.
Toward practical public key anti-counterfeiting for low-cost EPC tags

In this work we report on a practical design, and a working prototype implementation, of a public-key anti-counterfeiting system based on the Electronic Product Code (EPC) standard for supply chain RFID tags. The use of public-key cryptography simplifies deployment, reduces trust issues between the tag integrator and tag manufacturer, eliminates the need for on-line checks by a central authority, and protects user privacy. Contrary to earlier claims of impracticality, we demonstrate that EPC tags are capable of performing full-strength public-key encryption. The crucial element in our system is WIPR, a recently-proposed variant of the well known Rabin encryption scheme, that enjoys a remarkably low resource footprint (less than 4700 gate equivalents for a complete ASIC implementation) — for a full-strength 1024-bit encryption. Our prototype system consists of an ultra-high frequency (UHF) tag running custom firmware, which communicates with a standard off-the-shelf reader. No modifications were made to the reader or the air interface, proving that high-security anti-counterfeiting tags and standard EPC tags can coexist and share the same infrastructure. Surprisingly, we identify that the time bottleneck is not the tag's computation time: the delay is dominated by inefficiencies in the way the reader implements the EPC standard. The insights from our performance measurements let us identify how a few simple changes to the reader can drastically improve the system throughput.
Developmental Cost for Models of Intelligence

We can evaluate models of natural intelligence, as well as their individual components, by using a model of hardware and development costs, ignoring almost all the details of biology. The basic argument is that neither the gross anatomy of the brain nor the behavior of individual cells nor the behavior of the whole poses sufficient constraint on the algorithms that might run within the brain, but that the process of engineering an intelligence under this cost model poses similar challenges to those faced by a human growing from a single cell to an adult. This will allow us to explore architectural ideas freely, yet retain confidence that when a system works, the principles allowing it to work are likely to be similar to those that allow human intelligence to work.
Analysis and improvement of a statistical model-based voice activity detector

From an investigation of a statistical model-based voice activity detector (VAD), it is found that the likelihood ratio defined in the VAD has a fundamental problem at the offset regions of the speech signals. Thus, we analyze the behavioural mechanism of the likelihood ratio, identify the reason for the unwanted phenomenon, and propose a solution based on a smoothed likelihood ratio. Objective test results show that the proposed method gives a significant improvement to the original VAD. Additionally, the improved VAD results in a performance that is even superior to G.729B and comparable to AMR VAD option 2.