Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using First-Class Eyesight to Scrutinize the Development of Mechanisms and Contents

I once asked Mr. Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a Nobel prize winner, how it was that Caltech had become a world-class university. His answer was very simple and consisted of only two sentences: One, invite in the world’s first-class people. Two, give them full support and the best conditions. He maintained that this was not a complicated matter and did not require a complete set of theories. However, during my investigations I found there might have been something he did not realize: that American universities had already institutionalized their operations and had established a salutary school spirit,
The MMPI‐2 Gender‐Masculine and Gender‐Feminine scales: Gender roles as predictors of psychological health in clinical patients

Previous research measuring various biosocial factors such as age, sex, and marital status has found them to be essentially unrelated to measures of psychological health. Recent empirical studies have revealed that personality constructs may be more significant than demographic variables in the prediction of psychological well-being. The present study assessed the personality constructs of masculinity and femininity and hypothesized that the Gender-Masculine ( GM) scale of the MMPI-2 would be more effective than the Gender-Feminine (GF) scale in predicting psychological well-being. This hypothesis stems from previous research that has indicated the dominance of the masculinity model. It is suggested that previous research supporting androgyny as a primary indicator of well-being was influenced by the masculinity component of this gender orientation. One hundred and seventy-seven psychiatric patients from Australia (N = 107) and Singapore ( N 5 70) completed the MMPI-2. Hierarchical multiple regression revealed significantly stronger masculinity effects, with significance achieved on measures of ego strength and low self-esteem. No significant relationship between psychological well-being and the GF variable was found. Similarly, androgyny did not add any further variance to the model when masculinity was controlled for. Overall, the results are consistent with an interpretation that GM is a better correlate of psychological well-being as compared to the GF scale.
Calcification and inorganic carbon acquisition in coccolithophores.

A number of species of coccolithophorid phytoplankton precipitate calcite inside intracellular vesicles (coccolith vesicles). They can form vast blooms under certain conditions, and account for major fluxes of inorganic carbon (Ci) to the ocean floor. The functions of calcification have been debated for many years, and a role in carbon acquisition has been proposed by several workers. The precipitation of calcite from HCO3- involves the production of protons that can potentially be used to facilitate the use of external HCO3- as a photosynthetic substrate. For this function to be feasible, certain criteria must be met. HCO3- (rather than CO32-) should be the external substrate for calcification, photosynthesis should be facilitated by HCO3- in calcifying cells when CO2 availability is limiting, and the transport of Ci and Ca2+ to the site of calcification should be energetically and kinetically feasible. Considerable evidence exists for HCO3- as the substrate for calcification in coccolithophores. However, evidence for a direct role for calcification in supply of Ci for photosynthesis is less clear. The environmental factors that regulate calcification are still uncertain but appear to be related as much to the availability of nutrients as CO2. Transport of Ci to the intracellular site of calcification and removal of H+ from the coccolith vesicle appear to present few energetic or kinetic constraints. However, the large sustained transcellular fluxes of Ca2+ required for calcification probably occur via a pathway that does not involve diffusion across the cytoplasm.
Melodic Cue Abstraction, Similarity, and Category Formation: A Formal Model

In the first part of this article, the notions of identity, similarity, categorization, and feature salience are explored; musical examples are provided at various stages of the discussion. Then, formal working definitions are proposed that inextricably bind these concepts together. These definitions readily lend themselves to the development of a formal model for clustering - the Unscramble algorithm - which, given a set of objects and an initial set of properties, generates a range of plausible categorizations for a given context. Finally, as a test case, the clustering algorithm is used to organize a number of melodic segments, taken from a monophonic piece by J. S. Bach, into motivic categories; the algorithm also determines a prototype for each cluster and uses these prototypical descriptions for membership prediction tasks. The results of the computational system are compared with the empirical results obtained for the same data in two earlier studies (I. Delieege, 1996, 1997).
Effects of the Plant Growth-Promoting Bacterium Burkholderia phytofirmans PsJN throughout the Life Cycle of Arabidopsis thaliana

Plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) induce positive effects in plants, such as increased growth or reduced stress susceptibility. The mechanisms behind PGPR/plant interaction are poorly understood, as most studies have described short-term responses on plants and only a few studies have analyzed plant molecular responses under PGPR colonization. Here, we studied the effects of the PGPR bacterial model Burkholderia phytofirmans PsJN on the whole life cycle of Arabidopsis thaliana plants. We reported that at different plant developmental points, strain PsJN can be found in the rhizosphere and also colonizing their internal tissues. In early ontogeny, strain PsJN increased several growth parameters and accelerated growth rate of the plants. Also, an Arabidopsis transcriptome analysis revealed that 408 genes showed differential expression in PsJN-inoculated plants; some of these genes are involved in stress response and hormone pathways. Specifically, genes implicated in auxin and gibberellin pathways were induced. Quantitative transcriptional analyses of selected genes in different developmental stages revealed that the beginning of these changes could be evidenced early in development, especially among the down-regulated genes. The inoculation with heat-killed bacteria provoked a more severe transcriptional response in plants, but was not able to induce plant growth-promotion. Later in ontogeny, the growth rates of inoculated plants decreased with respect to the non-inoculated group and, interestingly, the inoculation accelerated the flowering time and the appearance of senescence signs in plants; these modifications correlate with the early up-regulation of flowering control genes. Then, we show that a single inoculation with a PGPR could affect the whole life cycle of a plant, accelerating its growth rate and shortening its vegetative period, both effects relevant for most crops. Thus, these findings provide novel and interesting aspects of these relevant biological interactions.
Science, sustainability and the establishment in a technological age

Abstract Sustainable development, balancing economic and social development with environmental protection, has become a modern paradigm in our technological age. The British government, amongst others, regards science as being important in underpinning the move towards sustainability. However, many of the principles that bolster the three pillars of sustainable development – 'people, prosperity and planet' – are often viewed as being unscientific by sceptical natural and social scientists. But these principles are no different from the rules of thumb that engineers typically employ to design technological systems. The links between science, technology and the need to achieve environmental sustainability are explored here mainly in the context of the energy sector, which accounts for ninety-five per cent of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK. It is argued that the UK national academies of science and engineering tend to provide policy advice to government that favours 'advanced' technologies. They advocate support for such technologies often without regard for the results of science based integrated appraisal methods or for the need to engage in wider stakeholder dialogue. Greater attention is paid to 'hardware' than to, for example, energy efficiency or resource productivity more generally. The national academies could instead place themselves at the forefront of moves towards sustainability, by locating themselves more firmly in the vanguard of those devising a sustainability assessment framework.
gStore: Answering SPARQL Queries via Subgraph Matching

Due to the increasing use of RDF data, efficient processing of SPARQL queries over RDF datasets has become an important issue. However, existing solutions suffer from two limitations: 1) they cannot answer SPARQL queries with wildcards in a scalable manner; and 2) they cannot handle frequent updates in RDF repositories efficiently. Thus, most of them have to reprocess the dataset from scratch. In this paper, we propose a graph-based approach to store and query RDF data. Rather than mapping RDF triples into a relational database as most existing methods do, we store RDF data as a large graph. A SPARQL query is then converted into a corresponding subgraph matching query. In order to speed up query processing, we develop a novel index, together with some effective pruning rules and efficient search algorithms. Our method can answer exact SPARQL queries and queries with wildcards in a uniform manner. We also propose an effective maintenance algorithm to handle online updates over RDF repositories. Extensive experiments confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution.
Transcription Profiling of the Model Cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. Strain PCC 7002 by Next-Gen (SOLiD™) Sequencing of cDNA

The genome of the unicellular, euryhaline cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 encodes about 3200 proteins. Transcripts were detected for nearly all annotated open reading frames by a global transcriptomic analysis by Next-Generation (SOLiD™) sequencing of cDNA. In the cDNA samples sequenced, ∼90% of the mapped sequences were derived from the 16S and 23S ribosomal RNAs and ∼10% of the sequences were derived from mRNAs. In cells grown photoautotrophically under standard conditions [38°C, 1% (v/v) CO2 in air, 250 μmol photons m−2 s−1], the highest transcript levels (up to 2% of the total mRNA for the most abundantly transcribed genes; e.g., cpcAB, psbA, psaA) were generally derived from genes encoding structural components of the photosynthetic apparatus. High-light exposure for 1 h caused changes in transcript levels for genes encoding proteins of the photosynthetic apparatus, Type-1 NADH dehydrogenase complex and ATP synthase, whereas dark incubation for 1 h resulted in a global decrease in transcript levels for photosynthesis-related genes and an increase in transcript levels for genes involved in carbohydrate degradation. Transcript levels for pyruvate kinase and the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex decreased sharply in cells incubated in the dark. Under dark anoxic (fermentative) conditions, transcript changes indicated a global decrease in transcripts for respiratory proteins and suggested that cells employ an alternative phosphoenolpyruvate degradation pathway via phosphoenolpyruvate synthase (ppsA) and the pyruvate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase (nifJ). Finally, the data suggested that an apparent operon involved in tetrapyrrole biosynthesis and fatty acid desaturation, acsF2–ho2–hemN2–desF, may be regulated by oxygen concentration.
Rate-Distortion Optimized Video Streaming for Scalable H.264

We propose a new real-time packet scheduling algorithm for streaming scalable H.264. Our algorithm makes use of a packet importance measure, which we define, that takes into consideration transmission history, channel conditions, and the unique decoding dependencies due to the temporal wavelet encoding. Our algorithm utilizes this importance measure to minimize the expected reconstruction distortion at the decoder under a certain rate constraint. In our experimental results we show gains of more than 3 dB in decoded video quality when transmissions are controlled with our algorithm as compared to existing schedulers
An Ensemble of Three Classifiers for KDD Cup 2009: Expanded Linear Model, Heterogeneous Boosting, and Selective Naive Bayes

This paper describes our ensemble of three classifiers for the KDD Cup 2009 challenge. First, we transform the three binary classification tasks into a joint multi-class classification problem, and solve an l1-regularized maximum entropy model under the LIBLINEAR framework. Second, we propose a heterogeneous base learner, which is capable of handling different types of features and missing values, and use AdaBoost to improve the base learner. Finally, we adopt a selective naive Bayes classifier that automatically groups categorical features and discretizes numerical ones. The parameters are tuned using cross-validation results rather than the 10% test results on the competition website. Based on the observation that the three positive labels are exclusive, we conduct a post-processing step using the linear SVM to jointly adjust the prediction scores of each classifier on the three tasks. Then, we average these prediction scores with careful validation to get the final outputs. Our final average AUC on the whole test set is 0.8461, which ranks third place in the slow track of KDD Cup 2009.
AnswerTree – a hyperplace-based game for collaborative mobile learning

In this paper we present AnswerTree, a collaborative mobile location-based educational game designed to teach 8-12 year olds about trees and wildlife within the University of Nottingham campus. The activity is designed around collecting virtual cards (similar in nature to the popular Top TrumpsTM games) containing graphics and information about notable trees. Each player begins by collecting one card from a game location, but then he or she can only collect further cards by answering questions – whose solutions are obtainable through sharing knowledge with other cardholders. This ostensibly allows each player to become a subject expert at the start of the game, encouraging collaborative interaction for the game to be successfully completed. In this initial paper we will outline the structure and background of this location based game. AnswerTree has been authored within the Hyperplace framework, and is a first implementation of a wider process to develop a flexible, multi-purpose platform for both individual and group location-based mobile learning.
A Measurement Study for Understanding Wireless Forensic Monitoring

Monitoring Wireless network activities for cybercrime investigation purpose is getting to be an important task in Digital Forensic field. While malicious network users can easily camouflage their true identities through various anonymity techniques, randomly hopping on a wireless communication channel and conduct ominous activities without leaving any traces is one of the most convenient and efficient network masquerading tactic. In a related work [7], we outlined a wireless forensic monitoring system (SMoWF), which aims to establish a forensic database based on encrypted (or hashed) wireless trace digests, and to answer the critical investigation questions: which wireless device appeared at where during what time. To answer these questions, we need to accomplish two challenging tasks successfully, namely Device Identification and Device Localization. In this paper, we explore the challenges of device localization schemes through a measurement study conducted in a metropolitan area of New York City. We gathered frame level wireless traces by using three different equipment settings over four different time periods, and initiated the research by exploring the WiFi deployment characteristics in a densely populated urban neighborhood. The signal strength information from the gathered traces is then used for a particular device to perform localization. We also evaluated the performance of two localization schemes the K-Nearest-Neighbors (KNN) approach and the Log-distance Path Loss Modeling approach. Our experiment and evaluation results show that it is a challenging task to offset the inconsistency between a signal strength fingerprinting database and the real position coordinates caused by measurement time and device differences. Further, we observe that for the KNN approach, when k = 3, with k being the number of Access Points used in the localization algorithm, an optimal tradeoff between “the number of APs” and “the location variance” is most likely to achieve.
Aggravating Impact of Nanoparticles on Immune-Mediated Pulmonary Inflammation

Although the adverse health effects of nanoparticles have been proposed and are being clarified, their aggravating effects on pre-existing pathological conditions have not been fully investigated. In this review, we provide insights into the immunotoxicity of both airborne and engineered nanoparticles as an exacerbating factor on hypersusceptible subjects, especially those with immune-mediated pulmonary inflammation, using our in vivo experimental model. First, we exhibit the effects of nanoparticles on pulmonary inflammation induced by bacterial endotoxin (lipopolysaccharide: LPS) as a disease model in innate immunity, and demonstrate that nanoparticles instilled through both an intratracheal tube and an inhalation system can exacerbate the lung inflammation. Second, we introduce the effects of nanoparticles on allergic pulmonary inflammation as a disease model in adaptive immunity, and show that repetitive pulmonary exposure to nanoparticles has aggravating effects on allergic inflammation, including adjuvant effects on Th2-milieu. Third, we show that very small nanoparticle exposure exacerbates emphysematous pulmonary inflammation, which is concomitant with enhanced lung expression of proinflammatory molecules (including those that are innate immunity related). Taken together, nanoparticle exposure may synergistically facilitate pathological pulmonary inflammation via both innate and adaptive immunological impairment.
Annotating WSDL by CIDOC CRM

The processing of heterogeneous data is needed in a distributed data-integrating environment. Based on the normal functions of the web services, this paper proposes a feasible way that annotates the meaning of the data received from a web service by the semantic annotation for integrating digital information. The web services users who understand better the meanings of web data criteria by the additional semantic information described by the CIDOC CRM can operate the received data correctly in their application.
The extracellular regulation of bone morphogenetic protein signaling

In many cases, the level, positioning and timing of signaling through the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) pathway are regulated by molecules that bind BMP ligands in the extracellular space. Whereas many BMP-binding proteins inhibit signaling by sequestering BMPs from their receptors, other BMP-binding proteins cause remarkably context-specific gains or losses in signaling. Here, we review recent findings and hypotheses on the complex mechanisms that lead to these effects, with data from developing systems, biochemical analyses and mathematical modeling.
Frequency of successful intra-articular puncture of the sternoclavicular joint: a cadaver study

of TNFRII is unknown. It was noted that this polymorphic site lies in the membrane-proximal extracellular domain of the TNFRII protein and might have an effect on ligand binding. In conclusion, we have found a significant association between AS and the TNFRII exon 6 196(T/G) polymorphism, but not in TNFRI. Further studies are needed on different ethnic populations to assess the significance of the current observations.
Association and Colocalization of Eps15 with Adaptor Protein-2 and Clathrin

Eps15 has been identified as a substrate of the EGF receptor tyrosine kinase. In this report, we show that activation of the EGF receptor by either EGF or TGF-α results in phosphorylation of Eps15. Stimulation of cells with PDGF or insulin did not lead to Eps15 phosphorylation, suggesting that phosphorylation of Eps15 is a receptor-specific process. We demonstrate that Eps15 is constitutively associated with both α-adaptin and clathrin. Upon EGF stimulation, Eps15 and α-adaptin are recruited to the EGF receptor. Using a truncated EGF receptor mutant, we demonstrate that the regulatory domain of the cytoplasmic tail of the EGF receptor is essential for the binding of Eps15. Fractionation studies reveal that Eps15 is present in cell fractions enriched for plasma membrane and endosomal membranes. Immunofluorescence studies show that Eps15 colocalizes with adaptor protein-2 (AP-2) and partially with clathrin. No colocalization of Eps15 was observed with the early endosomal markers rab4 and rab5. These observations indicate that Eps15 is present in coated pits and coated vesicles of the clathrin-mediated endocytic pathway, but not in early endosomes. Neither AP-2 nor clathrin are required for the binding of Eps15 to coated pits or coated vesicles, since in membranes lacking AP-2 and clathrin, Eps15 still shows the same staining pattern. These findings suggest that Eps15 may play a critical role in the recruitment of active EGF receptors into coated pit regions before endocytosis of ligand-occupied EGF receptors.
An ACTH- and ATP-regulated Background K+ Channel in Adrenocortical Cells Is TREK-1*

Bovine adrenal zona fasciculata (AZF) cells express a background K+channel (IAC) that sets the resting potential and acts pivotally in ACTH-stimulated cortisol secretion. We have cloned a bTREK-1 (KCNK2) tandem-pore K+ channel cDNA from AZF cells with properties that identify it as the native IAC. The bTREK-1 cDNA is expressed robustly in AZF cells and includes transcripts of 4.9, 3.6, and 2.8 kb. In patch clamp recordings made from transiently transfected cells, bTREK-1 displayed distinctive properties of IAC in AZF cells. Specifically, bTREK-1 currents were outwardly rectifying with a large instantaneous and smaller time-dependent component. Similar to IAC, bTREK-1 increased spontaneously in amplitude over many minutes of whole cell recording and was blocked potently by Ca2+ antagonists including penfluridol and mibefradil and by 8-(4-chlorophenylthio)-cAMP. Unitary TREK-1 and IAC currents were nearly identical in amplitude. The native IAC current, in turn, displayed properties that together are specific to TREK-1 K+ channels. These include activation by intracellular acidification, enhancement by the neuroprotective agent riluzole, and outward rectification. bTREK-1 current differed from native K+ current only in its lack of ATP dependence. In contrast to IAC, the current density of bTREK-1 in human embryonic kidney-293 cells was not increased by raising pipette ATP from 0.1 to 5 mm. Further, the enhancement of IAC current in AZF cells by low pH and riluzole was facilitated by, and dependent on, ATP at millimolar concentrations in the pipette solution. Overall, these results establish the identity of IAC K+ channels, demonstrate the expression of bTREK-1 in a specific endocrine cell, identify potent new TREK-1 antagonists, and assign a pivotal role for these tandem-pore channels in the physiology of cortisol secretion. The activation of IAC by ATP indicates that native bTREK-1 channels may function as sensors that couple the metabolic state of the cell to membrane potential, perhaps through an associated ATP-binding protein.