Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is streptolysin S of group A streptococci a virulence factor?

The possible role played by streptolysin S (SLS) of group A streptococci in the pathophysiology of streptococcal infections and in post‐streptococcal sequelae is discussed. The following properties of SLS justify its definition as a distinct virulence factor: 1) its presence on the streptococcus surface in a cell‐bound form, 2) its continuous and prolonged synthesis by resting streptococci, 3) its non‐immunogenicity, 4) its extractability by serum proteins (albumin, alpha lipoprotein), 5) its ability to become transferred directly to target cells while being protected from inhibitory agents in the milieu of inflammation, 6) its ability to bore holes in the membrane phospholipids in a large variety of mammalian cells, 7) its ability to synergize with oxidants, proteolytic enzymes, and with additional host‐derived proinflammatory agonists, and 8) its absence in streptococcal mutants associated with a lower pathogenicity for animals. Because tissue damage in streptococcal and post‐streptococcal sequelae might be the end result of a distinct synergism between streptococcal and host‐derived proinflammatory agonists it is proposed that only cocktails of anti‐inflammatory agents including distinct inhibitors of SLS (phospholipids), gamma globulin, inhibitors of reactive oxygen species, proteinases, cationic proteins cytokines etc., will be effective in inhibiting the multiple synergistic interactions which lead to fasciitis, myositis and the flesh‐eating syndromes, and often develop into sepsis, septic shock and multiple organ failure. The creation of mutants deficient in SLS and in proteases will help shed light on the specific role played by SLS in the virulence of group A hemolytic streptococci.
An Exploratory Investigation into the Nature of Offensive Television Advertising

Abstract The advertising literature contains some evidence that offensive advertising is multidimensional in nature, but little is known about the character of these dimensions. In an exploratory study of TV advertising, two different dimensions of “offensive” were identified. These dimensions were labeled Offensive Products and Offensive Execution. This distinction is important both for the study of the construct as well as for advertisers who are faced with decisions on advertising execution. The Offensive Products dimension contains those products related to consumer problems which social norms dictate should not be discussed in public. The Offensive Execution dimension, the dimension over which the advertiser has more control, consists of those ads which are perceived to be offensive by the nature of the execution or themes and/or topics of the ad and not the product itself.
Robustness of interdependent networks under targeted attack

When an initial failure of nodes occurs in interdependent networks, a cascade of failure between the networks occurs. Earlier studies focused on random initial failures. Here we study the robustness of interdependent networks under targeted attack on high or low degree nodes. We introduce a general technique which maps the targeted-attack problem in interdependent networks to the random-attack problem in a transformed pair of interdependent networks. We find that when the highly connected nodes are protected and have lower probability to fail, in contrast to single scale-free (SF) networks where the percolation threshold pc = 0, coupled SF networks are significantly more vulnerable with pc significantly larger than zero. The result implies that interdependent networks are difficult to defend by strategies such as protecting the high degree nodes that have been found useful to significantly improve robustness of single networks.
Hybrid Learning of Optical Flow and Next Frame Prediction to Boost Optical Flow in the Wild

CNN-based optical flow estimation has attracted attention recently, mainly due to its impressively high frame rates. These networks perform well on synthetic datasets, but they are still far behind the classical methods in real-world videos. This is because there is no ground truth optical flow for training these networks on real data. In this paper, we boost CNN-based optical flow estimation in real scenes with the help of the freely available self-supervised task of next-frame prediction. To this end, we train the network in a hybrid way, providing it with a mixture of synthetic and real videos. With the help of a sample-variant multi-tasking architecture, the network is trained on different tasks depending on the availability of ground-truth. We also experiment with the prediction of "next-flow" instead of estimation of the current flow, which is intuitively closer to the task of next-frame prediction and yields favorable results. We demonstrate the improvement in optical flow estimation on the real-world KITTI benchmark. Additionally, we test the optical flow indirectly in an action classification scenario. As a side product of this work, we report significant improvements over state-of-the-art in the task of next-frame prediction.
Antenatal Therapy of Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome

Objectives: Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome (SLOS) is a recessively inherited disorder caused by an inborn error of cholesterol metabolism that results in deficiency of cholesterol and accumulation of the cholesterol precursor, 7-dehydrocholesterol (DHC) and its epimer, 8-DHC. Affected patients present with congenital anomalies, growth restriction, and mental retardation. Postnatal treatment with cholesterol supplementation has been shown to improve plasma sterol levels and has resulted in improved growth and development in many patients. We hypothesized that prenatal supplementation of cholesterol could potentially arrest some of the adverse consequences of cholesterol deficiency at an earlier stage of development. Methods: SLOS was diagnosed in the third trimester in a fetus initially identified by sonography with intrauterine growth restriction and ambiguous genitalia and confirmed by elevated levels of 7- and 8-DHC in amniotic fluid. Antenatal supplementation of cholesterol was provided by fetal intravenous and intraperitoneal transfusions of fresh frozen plasma (cholesterol level = 219 mg/dl). Results: The in utero transfusions resulted in increased levels of fetal cholesterol, as measured in blood samples obtained by cordocentesis. In addition, fetal red cell mean corpuscular volume rose, which further indicated that the exogenous cholesterol was incorporated into the fetal erythrocytes. Conclusions: Antenatal treatment of SLOS by cholesterol supplementation is feasible and results in improvement in fetal plasma cholesterol levels and fetal red cell volume. SLOS may be added to the growing list of human genetic disorders for which prenatal diagnosis is available and therapeutic intervention may be possible.
The Effect of Porosity on X-Ray Emission-Line Profiles from Hot-Star Winds

We investigate the degree to which the nearly symmetric form of X-ray emission lines seen in Chandra spectra of early-type supergiant stars could be explained by the possibly porous nature of their spatially structured stellar winds. Such porosity could effectively reduce the bound-free absorption of X-rays emitted by embedded wind shocks, and thus allow a more similar transmission of redshifted and blueshifted emission from the back and front hemispheres, respectively. To obtain the localized self-shielding that is central to this porosity effect, it is necessary that the individual clumps be optically thick. In a medium consisting of clumps of size ℓ and volume filling factor f, we argue that the general modification in effective opacity should scale approximately as κeff ≈ κ/ , where, for a given atomic opacity κ and mean density ρ, the clump optical thickness scales as τc = κρℓ/f. For a simple wind structure parameterization in which the "porosity length" h ≡ ℓ/f increases with local radius r as h = h′r, we find that a substantial reduction in wind absorption requires a quite large porosity scale factor, h′ ≳ 1, implying large porosity lengths h ≳ r. The associated wind structure must thus have either a relatively large scale ℓ ≲ r, or a small volume filling factor f ≈ ℓ/r ≪ 1, or some combination of these. We argue that the relatively small-scale, moderate compressions generated by intrinsic instabilities in line driving are unlikely to give such large porosity lengths. This raises questions about whether porosity effects could play a significant role in explaining nearly symmetric X-ray line profiles, leaving the prospect of instead having to invoke a substantial (approximately a factor of 5) downward revision in the assumed mass-loss rates.
Distances to Galactic High-Velocity Clouds. I. Cohen Stream, Complex GCP, Cloud g1

The high- and intermediate-velocity interstellar clouds (HVCs/IVCs) are tracers of energetic processes in and around the Milky Way. Clouds with near-solar metallicity about 1 kpc above the disk trace the circulation of material between disk and halo (the Galactic fountain). The Magellanic Stream consists of gas tidally extracted from the SMC, tracing the dark matter potential of the Milky Way. Several other HVCs have low metallicity and appear to trace the continuing accretion of infalling intergalactic gas. These assertions are supported by the metallicities (0.1 to 1 solar) measured for about 10 clouds in the past decade. Direct measurements of distances to HVCs have remained elusive, however. In this paper we present four new distance brackets, using VLT observations of interstellar Ca II H and K absorption toward distant Galactic halo stars. We derive distance brackets of 5.0 to 11.7 kpc for the Cohen Stream (likely to be an infalling low-metallicity cloud), 9.8 to 15.1 kpc for Complex GCP (also known as the Smith Cloud or HVC 40–15+100 and with still unknown origin), 1.0 to 2.7 kpc for an IVC that appears associated with the return flow of the fountain in the Perseus arm, and 1.8 to 3.8 kpc for cloud g1, which appears to be in the outflow phase of the fountain. Our measurements further demonstrate that the Milky Way is accreting substantial amounts of gaseous material, which influences the Galaxy’s current and future dynamical and chemical evolution.
Food Content of TV Shows Seen by Children in Peru: A Double Dose of Food Messages?

The public health community generally agrees that TV exposure influences children’s cognitions and behaviors. Research on TV’s influence on children’s eating habits has mainly analyzed advertisements aired during TV programs for children and how they influence children’s food preferences and practices. Yet little is known about the food messages children encounter in the content of their favorite programs. Most previous studies may have underestimated children’s total exposure by failing to take food exposures within programming into account. The current study addresses this by examining the amount and characteristics of food content appearing in commercials and the content of shows seen by children in Peru. Using a sample of children’s TV programs and the ads run during the programs’ commercial breaks, it was found that overall, 17% of all commercials in the sample were for food and beverages, and 28% of all the program content included food items such as water, fruit, snacks, or prepared meals. Overall, children in Peru seem to be exposed to TV messages about food and beverages that mostly should be consumed only sparingly.
Examining Item Difficulties with respect to Science Teachers' Backgrounds and their Views on Science Instruction Soru Zorluk Derecelerinin Fen Öğretmenlerinin Özelliklerine ve Fen Öğretimi Hakkindaki Görüşlerine Göre İncelenmesi

Considering the undeniable importance of science teachers in teaching science, this study was carried out to examine the average item difficulties in TIMSS 2011 with respect to various eighth grade student groups which were formed based on their science teachers’ background information and these teachers’ views on science learning environments. The results indicate that the average percentages of the students who answered science items correctly are higher in the group of students whose teachers have a major degree in science than those in the group of students whose teachers have a major degree in science education. In addition, the average percentage of the students who answered the science items correctly is lower in the group of students whose teachers preferred to use instructional strategies to engage their students in science instruction in most lessons than that in the group of students whose teachers preferred to use instructional strategies to engage their students in science instruction in only some lessons.
Low Complexity Beamforming and User Selection Schemes for 5G MIMO-NOMA Systems

This paper investigates the resource allocation (RA) problem for the downlink multiple input multiple output-based non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO-NOMA) system, which is usually solved through a beamforming (BF) process and a user selection (US) process. In this paper, we propose the multiple-user channel state information (CSI)-based singular value decomposition (MU-CSI-SVD) BF scheme and the minimization of power (Min-Power) US scheme. Under perfect CSI scenarios, the proposed MU-CSI-SVD achieves near optimal sum rate performance with the high-complexity BF scheme while has the same level computational complexity as the low-complexity BF scheme. For imperfect CSI scenarios, the proposed MU-CSI-SVD also achieves better outage probability performance but requires the same level computational complexity as the existing low-complexity BF scheme. Moreover, MU-CSI-SVD is helpful to decrease the computational complexity for solving the Min-Power US problem. Compared with existing US schemes, the proposed Min-Power scheme can achieve larger sum rate or lower outage probability with limited computational complexity increment. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a complete RA scheme for 5G MIMO-NOMA systems, which has excellent performance while with low computational complexity for both perfect and imperfect CSI scenarios.
Construction of a rationally designed antibody platform for sequencing-assisted selection

Antibody discovery platforms have become an important source of both therapeutic biomolecules and research reagents. Massively parallel DNA sequencing can be used to assist antibody selection by comprehensively monitoring libraries during selection, thus greatly expanding the power of these systems. We have therefore constructed a rationally designed, fully defined single-chain variable fragment (scFv) library and analysis platform optimized for analysis with short-read deep sequencing. Sequence-defined oligonucleotide libraries encoding three complementarity-determining regions (L3 from the light chain, H2 and H3 from the heavy chain) were synthesized on a programmable microarray and combinatorially cloned into a single scFv framework for molecular display. Our unique complementarity-determining region sequence design optimizes for protein binding by utilizing a hidden Markov model that was trained on all antibody-antigen cocrystal structures in the Protein Data Bank. The resultant ∼1012-member library was produced in ribosome-display format, and comprehensively analyzed over four rounds of antigen selections by multiplex paired-end Illumina sequencing. The hidden Markov model scFv library generated multiple binders against an emerging cancer antigen and is the basis for a next-generation antibody production platform.
Cation Reversal of Inhibition of Growth by Valinomycin in Streptococcus pyogenes and Clostridium sporogenes

Study of the antimicrobial spectrum of valinomycin revealed that, in addition to the gram-positive bacteria reported in literature, Streptococcus pyogenes and Clostridium sporogenes are also susceptible to this antibiotic. The minimal inhibitory concentrations (MIC) of the antibiotic for S. pyogenes grown aerobically and anaerobically did not differ markedly, negating the hypothesis that oxidative phosphorylation is involved in the mechanism of action of this antibiotic. This conclusion is further strengthened by the inhibition of growth of C. sporogenes, an obligate anaerobe. In a medium with a low K+ concentration, the MIC for S. pyogenes was 0.02 μg/ml, the lowest ever recorded for this antibiotic. The inhibition of growth of S. pyogenes and C. sporogenes was readily reversed by addition of K+ to the medium, indicating a compensation for net efflux of K+ from the cells when the transmembrane potential reached equilibrium. In contrast to these bacteria, Bacillus subtilis was less susceptible to the antibiotic when the potassium concentration of the medium was low. The addition of potassium in the presence of valinomycin increased the inhibition of growth, which appears to result from dissipation of metabolic energy as in the mitochondrial system.
Third wave of measurement in the self-regulated learning field: when measurement and intervention come hand in hand

ABSTRACT Measurement is a central issue for the self-regulated learning (SRL) field as SRL is a phenomenon difficult to measure in a reliable and valid way. Here, 3 waves in the history of SRL measurement are identified and profiled. Our focus lies on the third and newest one, which combines measurement and intervention within the same tools. The basis for this approach is located in the reactivity principle via students’ self-monitoring: when students are aware of their actions, they can react and change what is needed. That happens when the measurement tools promote students' self-monitoring which turn part of the intervention then. Examples of this new approach to SRL measurement and guidelines for implementing it are presented.
Towards a Reconstruction of Proto-Tabla-Sentani Phonology

0. INTRODUCTION. As Wurm (1982) has so appropriately observed, the field of Papuan linguistics has come a long way in a relatively short time. No longer is it accurate to characterize Papuan languages as merely an undifferentiated, or at least genetically unassociated, collection of non-Austronesian speech communities. What has made the difference in the degree of our growing certainty regarding linguistic affinities among Papuan subgroups has been the marked increase in patient language-by-language descriptive research and low-level historical reconstruction.
The Dual Consequences of Politicization of Ethnicity in Romania

This paper investigates how ethnicity was politicized, to what purpose, and with what outcomes. To explore the evolution and nuances of majority-minority relations we use a single-case study approach (post-communist Romania) that is covered for more than two decades (1990-2011). We use discourse (of political elites) and document (party programs and legislative texts) analysis. Our empirical evidence illustrates how politicization can be a process producing two types of effects for the inter-ethnic relations. Moreover, we show that the structures of opportunity in ethnic relations (i.e. minority rights legislation) lead to different outcomes for the integration of ethnic minority groups over time.
Feedback outage correlated with CQI and its impact on multiuser diversity in Rayleigh fading channels

This letter addresses a feedback outage when the channel condition of the feedback channel is correlated with that of the traffic channel the quality information of which is being carried by the feedback, and its impact on the multiuser diversity in flat Rayleigh fading channels. The correlation is described by the time delay as well as the frequency separation between the traffic and the feedback channel. The average capacity is provided in terms of the time and the frequency factor. With numerical investigations, we show that the capacity degradation due to the feedback outage is generally saturated at the great frequency separation approximately over 45 MHz (e.g., in present IS-95 cellular systems), within which it fluctuates depending on the feedback delay
The antibacterial effect of camphorated paramonochlorophenol, camphorated phenol and calcium hydroxide in the treatment of infected root canals.

Abstract The bactericidal efficacy of calcium hydroxide, camphorated phenol and camphorated paramonochlorophenol as intracanal dressings was evaluated clinically when the root canals of 65 single-rooted teeth with periapical lesions were treated. A bacteriological technique that could detect even small numbers of anaerobic bacteria in the canals was used. After treatment, including intracanal dressing with calcium hydroxide paste (Calasept), bacteria were recovered from one of 35 treated root canals. After use of camphorated phenol or camphorated paramonochlorophenol as the dressing, bacteria were recovered from 10 of 30 treated root canals. The isolated bacteria were predominantly Gram-positive and anaerobic. There was no indication that specific bacteria were resistant to the treatment. The results indicate that the endodontic treatment of infected root canals can be completed in two appointments when calcium hydroxide paste is used as an intracanal dressing.
Discriminative boosted forest with convolutional neural network-based patch descriptor for object detection

Abstract. Object detection with intraclass variations is challenging. The existing methods have not achieved the optimal combinations of classifiers and features, especially features learned by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To solve this problem, we propose an object-detection method based on improved random forest and local image patches represented by CNN features. First, we compute CNN-based patch descriptors for each sample by modified CNNs. Then, the random forest is built whose split functions are defined by patch selector and linear projection learned by linear support vector machine. To improve the classification accuracy, the split functions in each depth of the forest make up a local classifier, and all local classifiers are assembled in a layer-wise manner by a boosting algorithm. The main contributions of our approach are summarized as follows: (1) We propose a new local patch descriptor based on CNN features. (2) We define a patch-based split function which is optimized with maximum class-label purity and minimum classification error over the samples of the node. (3) Each local classifier is assembled by minimizing the global classification error. We evaluate the method on three well-known challenging datasets: TUD pedestrians, INRIA pedestrians, and UIUC cars. The experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance.
IMAGING THE GLYCOME : THE CHALLENGES OF DETECTION AND BEYOND

Polysaccharide-rich plant cell walls are important biomaterials that underpin plant growth, are major repositories for photosynthetically accumulated carbon, and, in addition, impact greatly on the human use of plants. Land plant cell walls contain in the region of a dozen major polysaccharide structures that are mostly encompassed by cellulose, hemicelluloses, and pectic polysaccharides. During the evolution of land plants, polysaccharide diversification appears to have largely involved structural elaboration and diversification within these polysaccharide groups. Cell wall chemistry is well advanced and a current phase of cell wall science is aimed at placing the complex polysaccharide chemistry in cellular contexts and developing a detailed understanding of cell wall biology. Imaging cell wall glycomes is a challenging area but recent developments in the establishment of cell wall molecular probe panels and their use in high throughput procedures are leading to rapid advances in the molecular understanding of the spatial heterogeneity of individual cell walls and also cell wall differences at taxonomic levels. The challenge now is to integrate this knowledge of cell wall heterogeneity with an understanding of the molecular and physiological mechanisms that underpin cell wall properties and functions.