Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biologically distinct subtypes of Mycobacterium avium differ in possession of insertion sequence IS901

Mycobacterium avium causes disease, principally tuberculosis in immunocompromised individuals. It is the most frequent cause of disseminated infections in AIDS patients in the West. The pathogen is also associated with disease in animals, chiefly birds and livestock, and may be isolated from environmental samples such as soil and water. Analysis of strains of M. avium isolated from clinical, veterinary, and environmental sources for the presence of the mycobacterial insertion sequences IS900 and IS901 demonstrates the specific association of IS901 to animal pathogenic M. avium strains. In contrast, most clinical M. avium strains and all AIDS-derived strains examined so far lacked IS901. Significant differences in the plasmid contents and serotypes of strains with and without IS901 were also found. We therefore suggest that the presence of IS901 divides M. avium into two clearly distinct subtypes with differing host range, virulence, plasmid possession, and serotyping antigens. By using DNA sequence data from IS901 and M. avium DNA, a set of polymerase chain reactions were developed for the specific detection and differentiation of these subtypes.
Caves and human lifeways in Middle Bronze Age Central Italy: a social bioarchaeology approach

This thesis is about the Middle Bronze Age (MBA: 1750-1450 BC) caves of central Italy, and the faunal and plant remains found inside them using the combined approach of contextual archaeology and social bioarchaeology. I draw new inferences from these ecofactual remains, which are crucial to improving our understanding of human lifeways in the Apennine region of the Italian peninsula. This work is much needed both in the field of cave archaeology (especially in relation to the Italian area) and in that of bioarchaeology. Here, traditional methodological issues, such as a tendency to ignore the ritual aspects of cave deposits, have produced substantial biases in the interpretations of the subsistence strategies. In addition, such traditional approaches based on Higgs’ (1975) palaeoeconomy have prevented bioarchaeological disciplines such as zooarchaeology and palaeoethnobotany from being productively used in several fields of application, notably in social archaeology. By analysingthe data published over the last 35 years, as well as four archival collections and the new data from the newly excavated deposits at Mora Cavorso, Pastena and Collepardo caves, I have been able to: 1) recognise cave datasets as biased sources for the direct reconstruction of palaeoeconomy; 2) identify significant evidence pointing to the coexistence of agriculture and sheep farming even at the same sites, and to infer new information about seasonality and transhumance in the study area; 3) isolate recurrent trends in animal and plant selection in the sampled caves. This evidence points to specific ritual choices that must have been integrated into the religious framework of the communities that used these caves. This highlights both the variability of human practices undertaken at these sites, and the similarities between them, shedding more light on the nature and – in some cases – the possible significance of such rituals. In sum, I demonstrate how complex the use of caves in MBA central Italy was, and that a strict categorisation of such uses (as domestic, ritual, burial) is misleading.
Effects of Oral Epigallocatechin Gallate Supplementation on the Minimal Erythema Dose and UV-Induced Skin Damage

Background/Aims: Excessive exposure to UV radiation causes acute adverse effects like sunburn and photosensitivity reactions and is involved in the induction and development of skin cancer. It has been reported that antioxidants have photoprotective effects against solar UV radiation. We investigated the effect of oral epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), a powerful antioxidant in green tea, on the minimal erythema dose (MED) and UV-induced skin damage. Method: Female HWY/Slc hairless rats were fed the normal diet supplemented with 1,500 ppm EGCG for 8 weeks; then, the MED was determined and visual scores and transepidermal water loss were assessed to evaluate the severity of UV-induced skin damage. Results: At week 8 of the study, the use of dietary EGCG significantly increased MED. UV-radiation-induced sunburn severity and alterations in epidermal barrier function were also attenuated by the supplementation of EGCG. Conclusion: Regular intake of EGCG strengthens the skin’s tolerance by increasing MED and thus prevents UV-induced perturbation of epidermal barrier function and skin damage. These results suggest that EGCG is a potent candidate for systemic photoprotection.
Topical Hypopigmenting Agents for Pigmentary Disorders and Their Mechanisms of Action

Melanin is produced in melanocytes and stored in melanosomes. In spite of its beneficial sun-protective effect, abnormal accumulation of melanin results in esthetic problems. Hydroquinone, competing with tyrosine, is a major ingredient in topical pharmacological agents. However, frequent adverse reactions are amongst its major limitation. To solve this problem, several alternatives such as arbutin, kojic acid, aloesin, and 4-n-butyl resorcinol have been developed. Herein, we classify hypopigmenting agents according to their mechanism of action; a) regulation of enzyme, which is subdivided into three categories, i) regulation of transcription and maturation of tyrosinase, ii) inhibition of tyrosinase activity, and iii) post-transcriptional control of tyrosinase; b) inhibition of melanosome transfer, and c) additional mechanisms such as regulation of the melanocyte environment and antioxidant agents.
Alcohol withdrawal: development of a standing order set.

anagementof alcoholwithdrawalinacutely illhospitalized patientswitha criticalillnessischallengingfor pharmacists, nurses,and practicing physicians.Alcoholwithdrawal isoftenadiagnosisconsideredin patientsadmittedwithtrauma; however,itcanbeconfusedwith otherconditionsinthelistofdifferentialdiagnosesofpatientsadmittedwithnontraumadiagnoses. 1-3 Investigatorsestimatethatupto1 in4patientsadmittedtogeneral hospitalsmeetdiagnosticcriteria foralcoholdependence. 4 Alcohol-dependentpatientshave ariskofwithdrawal,withsymptoms includingalteredconcentration, tremulousness,autonomichyperarousal,psychosis,seizures,and deliriumtremens. 5 Alcoholwithdrawaldelirium,commonlyknown
XML Based Wireless Patient Monitoring System Using Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The technology based ubiquitous patient monitoring is regarded as a viable solution for managing the chronic diseases and medical emergencies in order to economize the healthcare services. The reliability of end to end communication between patients and healthcare services in wireless patient monitoring is the critical requirement in such systems irrespective of time and location dependencies. In this paper, a new wireless patient monitoring service called V-Health System is proposed which utilizes the patient health information collected by the body sensors to securely transmit it to the healthcare services wireless via vehicular ad hoc network. The patient information collected by body sensors are transmitted by the vehicle in the form of XML data to the nearest road side infrastructure for the service selection of the healthcare centres and the information is transmitted to the healthcentres for the appropriate service reply. The XML dependency tree is used for the effective transmission of patient and medical information in the vehicular ad hoc network. VANETs act as the middleware platform for medical service selection between the patient and the healthcare services for the mobile patients and vehicular users. Thus, the proposed V-Health System provides personalized healthcare services by employing the XML based dependency tree for information transmission.
Log4p: An Innovative Logger Framework for Web Portals - Towards New Metrics for Web Portals

Content Management Systems and Web Portal Frameworks are more and more widely adopted in Web development. Those kinds of software often produce web pages whose layout is divided in sections called, in the case of Web Portals, “portlets”. Portlets can be produced by different sources and then aggregated in the same page by the portal. For Web portals, traditional web metrics based on page visits can be inadequate for fully understanding user’s interest, due to the heterogeneity of content and the variety of sources. This paper proposes a system for evaluating the web traffic at a deeper level than the page visit one: the level of the sections, or of the portlets. The interest of the user in the sections of the page is gauged through implicit interest indicators, such as, section visibility, mouse movements and other client-side interactions. Our system is composed of two different products: a framework that, opportunely instantiated in a web portal, allows the production of a log, and a log analyzer. The possible uses and benefits gained by research in the fields of web traffic analysis, portal design and usability are investigated in depth.
The Western Africa Ebola Virus Disease Epidemic Exhibits Both Global Exponential and Local Polynomial Growth Rates

Background: While many infectious disease epidemics are initially characterized by an exponential growth in time, we show that district-level Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks in West Africa follow slower polynomial-based growth kinetics over several generations of the disease. Methods: We analyzed epidemic growth patterns at three different spatial scales (regional, national, and subnational) of the Ebola virus disease epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia by compiling publicly available weekly time series of reported EVD case numbers from the patient database available from the World Health Organization website for the period 05-Jan to 17-Dec 2014. Results: We found significant differences in the growth patterns of EVD cases at the scale of the country, district, and other subnational administrative divisions. The national cumulative curves of EVD cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia show periods of approximate exponential growth. In contrast, local epidemics are asynchronous and exhibit slow growth patterns during 3 or more EVD generations, which can be better approximated by a polynomial than an exponential function. Conclusions: The slower than expected growth pattern of local EVD outbreaks could result from a variety of factors, including behavior changes, success of control interventions, or intrinsic features of the disease such as a high level of clustering. Quantifying the contribution of each of these factors could help refine estimates of final epidemic size and the relative impact of different mitigation efforts in current and future EVD outbreaks.
Incentives for social annotation

Researchers are exploring the use of folksonomies, such as in social bookmarking systems, to build implicit links between online resources. Users create and reinforce links between resources through applying a common tag to those resources. The effectiveness of using such community-driven annotation depends on user participation to provide the critical information. However, the participation of many users is motivated by selfish reasons. An effective way to encourage these users is to create useful or entertaining applications. We demo two such tools -- a browser extension for bookmark management and navigation and a game.
Future Directions in the Management of Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome

Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) is the major complication of monochorionic (MC) pregnancy. The outcomes of this condition have been significantly improved after the introduction and widespread uptake of fetoscopic laser ablation over the last decade. However, there is still a significant fetal loss rate and morbidity associated with this condition. Improvements in the management of TTTS will require improvements in many areas. They are likely to involve refinements in the prediction of the disease and clarification of the optimum frequency of surveillance and monitoring. Improvements in training for fetoscopic surgery as well as in the technique of fetoscopic laser ablation may lead to better outcomes. New technologies as well as a better understanding of the pathophysiology of TTTS may lead to adjuvant medical therapies that may also improve short- and long-term results.
On Knowing the Category Before Knowing the Features

An assumption of all major accounts of categorization is that the system operates in a Features-First manner: a stimulus is mentally encoded in terms of observable properties which are then evaluated for fit to known categories. A testable prediction of this view is that people must know the features of an object before knowing what category it belongs to. Experimental results using a speeded verification task clearly show the opposite: people verify a category label more quickly than they verify a physical or functional feature. A theoretical groundwork for interpreting this finding is suggested. Categorization can be viewed as a means for constructing featural representations, rather than as the result of a comparison process between a “received” featural encoding and generic concept representations.
THE EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY OF SENESCENCE Sexual selection, sexual conflict and the evolution of ageing and life span

Summary 1. Classic evolutionary models interpret ageing as a cost of reproduction, but evolutionary research has thus far largely neglected the conceptual links between the evolution of ageing and a key mode of selection on male and female reproductive strategies ‐ sexual selection and sexual conflict. 2. We synthesize ideas and evidence linking sex and ageing, and make the case that a focus on this fascinating problem will ultimately lead to a more complete understanding of both the evolution of ageing and the evolution of sexual strategies. 3. The primary and secondary differentiation of male and female reproductive strategies is expected to produce sex-specific optima for traits that affect longevity and ageing rate, often favouring a ‘live fast, die young’ strategy in males, relative to females, although numerous exceptions to this pattern are observed and sex-differences in ageing rate, in particular, remain poorly understood. 4. Conversely, environmental factors that influence life expectancy or ageing rate can thereby determine the magnitude or even sign of sexual selection. 5. Sexual conflict is expected to displace the sexes from their sex-specific life-history optima through sexually antagonistic interactions, as well as sex-specific selection on loci expressed in both sexes. 6. Despite the availability of interesting and testable hypotheses linking sexual selection and ageing, relevant empirical studies are remarkably sparse, and the complex relation between sex, mortality rate and ageing remains poorly understood.
Quantitative 3D Ultrastructure of Thalamocortical Synapses from the “Lemniscal” Ventral Posteromedial Nucleus in Mouse Barrel Cortex

Abstract Thalamocortical synapses from “lemniscal” neurons of the dorsomedial portion of the rodent ventral posteromedial nucleus (VPMdm) are able to induce with remarkable efficacy, despite their relative low numbers, the firing of primary somatosensory cortex (S1) layer 4 (L4) neurons. To which extent this high efficacy depends on structural synaptic features remains unclear. Using both serial transmission (TEM) and focused ion beam milling scanning electron microscopy (FIB/SEM), we 3D-reconstructed and quantitatively analyzed anterogradely labeled VPMdm axons in L4 of adult mouse S1. All VPMdm synapses are asymmetric. Virtually all are established by axonal boutons, 53% of which contact multiple (2–4) elements (overall synapse/bouton ratio = 1.6). Most boutons are large (mean 0.47 μm3), and contain 1–3 mitochondria. Vesicle pools and postsynaptic density (PSD) surface areas are large compared to others in rodent cortex. Most PSDs are complex. Most synapses (83%) are established on dendritic spine heads. Furthermore, 15% of the postsynaptic spines receive a second, symmetric synapse. In addition, 13% of the spine heads have a large protrusion inserted into a membrane pouch of the VPMdm bouton. The unusual combination of structural features in VPMdm synapses is likely to contribute significantly to the high efficacy, strength, and plasticity of these thalamocortical synapses.
Processing Along the Way : Forwarding vs

We consider a source that transmits to a receiver by routing the information packets over a communication network and examine rate benefits that finite complexity processing at the intermediate nodes may offer. We show that the processing capabilities of the intermediate nodes affect not only the end-to-end achievable rate, but also the optimal routing strategy. For example, there exist network configurations where the maximal throughput is achieved only by coding across independent information streams.
On counting independent sets in sparse graphs

We prove two results concerning approximate counting of independent sets in graphs with constant maximum degree /spl Delta/. The first result implies that the Monte-Carlo Markov chain technique is likely to fail if /spl Delta//spl ges/6. The second shows that no fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme can exist for /spl Delta//spl ges/25, unless P=NP under randomized reductions.
Analysis of protein tyrosine kinase expression in melanocytic lesions by tissue array

Background: It has been proposed that melanoma progression involves a multistep process from benign nevi (BN), dysplastic nevi (DN), radial and vertical growth phase melanoma (MM) to metastatic melanoma (MMM). Protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) may participate in this progression.
Perturbation-Based Private Profile Matching in Social Networks

Social networking has become part of our life in recent years, allowing users to converse and connect with people sharing similar interests in real world. However, networking via the social media suffers from serious privacy issues, and one of which is profile attribute leakage in friend discovery. While existing studies mainly focus on leveraging rich cryptographic algorithms to prevent privacy leak, we propose a novel perturbation-based private profile matching mechanism by mixing the private data with random noise to preserve privacy in this paper. In this paper, we consider the case where the profiles are fine-grained, meaning that each attribute is associated with a user-specific numerical value to indicate the level of interest. By carefully tuning the amount of information owned by each party, we guarantee that privacy is effectively preserved while the matching result of users’ profiles can be cooperatively obtained. We first give an introduction to a basic scheme, then detail two improved ones by, respectively, taking collusion attack and verifiability into consideration. As no expensive encryption algorithms get involved, our methods are computationally efficient; thus they are more practical for real-world applications. Theoretical security analysis as well as comparison-based simulation studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of our designs.
MQJoin: Efficient Shared Execution of Main-Memory Joins

Database architectures typically process queries one-at-a-time, executing concurrent queries in independent execution contexts. Often, such a design leads to unpredictable performance and poor scalability. One approach to circumvent the problem is to take advantage of sharing opportunities across concurrently running queries. In this paper we propose Many-Query Join (MQJoin), a novel method for sharing the execution of a join that can efficiently deal with hundreds of concurrent queries. This is achieved by minimizing redundant work and making efficient use of main-memory bandwidth and multi-core architectures. Compared to existing proposals, MQJoin is able to efficiently handle larger workloads regardless of the schema by exploiting more sharing opportunities. We also compared MQJoin to two commercial main-memory column-store databases. For a TPC-H based workload, we show that MQJoin provides 2--5x higher throughput with significantly more stable response times.
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.I thank Robert Art, Mia Bloom, Steven Cícala, Alex Downs, Daniel Drezner, Adria Lawrence, Sean Lynn-Jones, John Mearsheimer, Michael O'Connor, Sebastian Rosato, Lisa Weeden, the anonymous reviewers, and the members of the program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago for their superb comments. I especially thank James K. Feldman and Chaim D. Kaufmann for their excellent comments on multiple drafts. I would also like to acknowledge encouragement from the committee for the Combating Political Violence paper competition sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, which selected an earlier version as a winning paper.