Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mutations at palmitylation sites of the influenza virus hemagglutinin affect virus formation

The carboxy terminus of the hemagglutinin (HA) of influenza A viruses contains three cysteine residues which are highly conserved among HA subtypes. It has previously been shown for the H2, H3, and H7 subtypes of HA that these cysteine residues are modified by the covalent attachment of palmitic acid. In order to study the role of the acylated cysteines in the formation of infectious influenza viruses, we introduced mutations into the HA of influenza A/WSN/33 virus (H1 subtype) by reverse-genetics techniques. We found that the cysteine at position 563 of the cytoplasmic tail is required for infectious-particle formation. The cysteine at position 560 can be changed to alanine or tyrosine to yield virus strains that are attenuated in cell cultures. The change from cysteine at position 553 to serine or alanine does not significantly alter the phenotype of the virus. The requirement for a cysteine at position 563 suggests a functional role for palmitylation of the cytoplasmic tail. This interpretation is further supported by experiments in which two or more of the cysteine residues were mutated, eliminating potential palmitylation sites. None of these double or triple mutations resulted in infectious virus. Selection of revertants of the attenuated cysteine-to-tyrosine mutant (mutation at position 560) always resulted in reversion to cysteine rather than to other amino acids. Although our data indicate a biological role for the conserved cysteine residues in the cytoplasmic tail of the HA of influenza viruses, we cannot exclude the possibility that structural constraints in the cytoplasmic tail of the HA--rather than altered palmitylation--are the determining factors for infectious-particle formation.
Why Sugar Free Products on the Menu? A Chef’s Perspective

Food is a vital element of living. So many researchers have exposed associations between chronic diseases and food patterns. A food pattern rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grain is beneficial to health, while a food high in sugar and fat is associated with increased risk of chronic diseases. Healthy catering is not just about taking off chips and cooked breakfasts from the menu. Nowadays many people prefer healthy foods but they must be made tasty and appealing. This is the main challenge of today’s hoteliers. An important commercial opportunity exists - providing guests with healthier choices that look and taste good. It is important for the hospitality industry to grasp this market opportunity by offering healthier choices in terms of sugar free recipes, which customers increasingly want to buy. This study is about the reasons if any which motivate chefs of the 5 star hotels of New Delhi to develop recipes which are sugar free. The methodology chosen for this study was survey based, conducted among the executive chefs of five star hotels in New Delhi. This study will be an attempt to identify the gaps between the demand and supply of sugar free recipes created by chefs of the 5 star hotels. In addition to collection of data through structured questionnaires, this study’s research methods consisted of conducting in-depth interviews with the executive chefs of five star hotels in New Delhi. The feelings expressed by the interviewees are examined during the discussions. Then the challenges faced by the chefs in relation to modification of recipes to make them sugar free and taste wise acceptable were also discussed. Based on the information collected from the respondents, they provided some general as well as particular suggestions with sugar free recipes offerings. This study brings out some answers to the factors defining trends followed by the chefs to make sugar free recipes in five star hotels.
Selectional restrictions in natural language sentence generation

Selectional restrictions place semantic constraints on arguments and account for the implausibility of sentences such as Colorless green ideas slept furiously. They have been used in natural language understanding for disambiguation and pronoun resolution. Not much attention has been paid to the relevance of selectional restrictions in generation. We discuss this issue in this paper. We also show how selectional restrictions can be naturally incorporated into our generation architecture and our notion of a lexicogrammatical resource.
Female, married and endorsing: integrating celebrity marital status, role congruence and credibility

Abstract In this study, we investigate the effect of marital status and perceived role congruence (RCN) of a female celebrity endorser on consumer attitudes incorporating the role of credibility in the Indian context. The research hypotheses were tested using a series of experimental designs. The main study had a 4 (Celebrity: Unmarried/Just Married/Married but Endorsing/Married and Comeback) × 2 (Product: Role Congruent/Role Incongruent) full factorial design. Non-student samples were used in this study. Major findings implied a significant effect of celebrity marital status, RCN and the interaction term on consumer attitudes. The three source credibility dimensions were found to have differential effects on consumer attitudes when they were included as moderators. This study finds evidence in support of diminishing effectiveness of female celebrities over time/marriage. In this study, we explored a new dimension of congruence (RCN) and found the same to influence consumer attitudes favourably towards the endorsed product.
The Impact of Financial Reporting Quality on Debt Contracting: Evidence from Internal Control Weakness Reports

We examine the effect of financial reporting quality on the trade-off between monitoring mechanisms used by lenders. We rely on Sarbanes-Oxley internal control reports to measure financial reporting quality. We find that when a firm experiences a material internal control weakness, lenders decrease their use of financial covenants and financial-ratio-based performance pricing provisions and substitute them with alternatives such as price and security protections and credit-rating-based performance pricing provisions. We also find that changes in debt contract design following internal control weaknesses are substantially different from those following restatements, where lenders impose tighter monitoring on managers’ actions, but do not decrease their use of financial statement numbers.
Influence of sodium fumarate addition on rumen fermentation in vitro

The influence of sodium fumarate on rumen fermentation was investigated in vitro using batch and semi-continuous cultures of mixed rumen micro-organisms taken from three sheep receiving a basal diet of hay, barley, molasses, fish meal and a mineral–vitamin supplement (500, 299·5, 100, 91 and 9·5 g/kg DM respectively). Batch cultures consisted of 10 ml strained rumen fluid in 40 ml anaerobic buffer containing 200 mg of the same feed given to the sheep. Sodium fumarate was added to achieve a final concentration of 0, 5 or 10 mmol/l, as a result of the addition of 0, 250 or 500 μmol, equivalent to 0, 200 and 400 g/kg feed. CH4 production at 24 h (360 μmol in the control cultures) fell (P < 0·05) by 18 and 22 μmol respectively (SED 7·5). Total gas production was increased by the addition of fumarate without significant accumulation of H2. Substantial increases in acetate production (92 and 194 μmol; SED 26·7, P < 0·01) were accompanied by increases in propionate formation (212 and 396 μmol; SED 13·0, P < 0·001). Longer-term effects of fumarate supplementation on ruminal fermentation and CH4 production were investigated using the rumen simulation technique (Rusitec). Eight vessels were given 20 g basal diet/d, and half of them received a supplement of fumarate (disodium salt) over a period of 19 d. The response to the daily addition of 6·25 mmol sodium fumarate was a decrease in CH4 production of 1·2 mmol (SED 0·39, P < 0·05), equivalent to the consumption of 4·8 mmol H2, and an increase in propionate production of 4·9 mmol (from 10·4 to 15·3 (SED 1·05) mmol/d, P < 0·01). The inhibition of CH4 production did not decline during the period of time that fumarate was added to the vessels. Thus, the decrease in CH4 corresponded well to the fraction of the fumarate that was converted to propionate. Fumarate had no significant (P > 0·05) effect on total bacterial numbers or on the number of methanogenic archaea, but numbers of cellulolytic bacteria were increased (8·8 v. 23·9 (SED 2·49) × 105 per ml, P < 0·01). Fumarate also increased DM digestibility of the basal diet after 48 h incubation (0·476 v. 0·508 (SED 0·0123), P < 0·05). Thus, it was concluded that sodium fumarate may be a useful dietary additive for ruminants, because it diverts some H2 from CH4 production and because it is able to stimulate proliferation of cellulolytic bacteria and digestion of fibre.
Evaluation of software understandability based on fuzzy matrix

As programmers try to reuse codes written by other programmers, a chain of fatal faults shall be made due to misunderstanding of the original intention, this is because of poor understandability to the relevant documents in software engineering, we also call it as an adverse software understandability, however, software understandability is the mental activity of programmers, so, it is not easy to be quantized or measured. Since internal mental activity is hardly visible to us, we are obliged to determine software understandability by the external visible artifact. We reviewed factors suggested by literatures to affect software understandability. Furthermore, this paper brings forward an integrated view to determine good or bad of software understandability at that time.
An inverted suspended microstrip antenna array integrated with ratrace comparator at X-Band for monopulse tracking

In this paper, an inverted suspended microstrip antenna array with ratrace comparator at X-band for monopulse tracking radar applications has been designed and simulated using IE3D software based on method of moments (MoM). The radiating part of the monopulse antenna consists of hybrid feeding technique to achieve better side lobe level and high gain. The bandwidth of 8.6% has been achieved for VSWR < 2 from 8.96 GHz to 9.76 GHz. The maximum gain of 25.1 dB has been achieved with approximately 1 dB variations over the entire bandwidth. The sum radiation pattern shows a side lobe level of better than 17.5 dB in both azimuth as well as elevation planes. The difference radiation pattern shows a null depth of better than 28 dB. The radiation pattern is symmetric with HPBW of 6.3° and 7.1° in azimuth and elevation planes, respectively.
Is social capital a useful conceptual tool for exploring community level influences on HIV infection? An exploratory case study from South Africa

Abstract This paper reports on an exploratory study investigating links between sexual health and social capital in a South African mining community. In this study, social capital is defined in terms of people's membership of voluntary community organizations (e.g. church, residents' associations, youth groups). Using biomedical and social survey data from a stratified random sample of 1,211 Carletonville residents, we tested the hypothesis that organizational members were less likely to have HIV. Multivariate analysis of variance sought to identify significant associations between nine organizational memberships and HIV infection, as well as three risk factors for infection (casual partners, condom use with casual partners and alcohol consumption). Analysis yielded a range of significant results, but findings varied across age and gender, and were not all in the hypothesized direction. For example, young men and young women who belonged to sports clubs were less likely to be HIV-positive, and young women who belonged to sports clubs were more likely to use condoms with casual partners than non-members. Amongst members of stokvels (voluntary savings clubs accompanied by social festivities), however, young men were more likely to be HIV-positive, women of all ages were more likely to have a casual partner, and both young men and young women were more likely to drink alcohol than non-members. While our exploratory study has produced sufficient evidence to justify the need for further research in this area, it also highlights that the interface between HIV infection and social capital is a complex area that defies easy generalization.
Self-Controlling Cache for High Speed Autonomic Provisioning

Autonomic provisioning is a technique for dynamic optimization of IT systems by continuously monitoring and automatically reconfiguring the target IT systems. In this paper, we propose a Self-Controlling Cache to speed up the autonomic provisioning. Self-Controlling Cache is a mechanism to cache the information of systems and keep the cache optimal for every state of the autonomic provisioning. From the results of the performance evaluation, we concluded that our approach speeded up the provisioning by 70%.
Manifold Estimation in View-based Feature Space for Face Synthesis Across Pose Paper 27

This paper presents a new approach to synthesize face images under different pose changes from a single input image. The approach is based on two observations: 1. face images from a single person under different poses could be mapped to a smooth manifold in a unified feature space. 2. the manifolds from different faces are separated from each other by their similarities. The new manifold estimation is formulated as a minimization problem with smoothness constraints. The experiments show that face images under different poses can be robustly synthesized from one input image, even with large pose changes.
The Immediate and Delayed Effects of TV: Impacts of Gender and Processed-Food Intake History

Eating while watching TV has generally been found to increase both immediate and delayed energy intake. Here we examine two factors – gender and habitual processed-food intake – that may moderate these effects. Participants [n = 153; 95 women, 58 men; Mage = 19.7 (SD = 2.9); MBMI = 22.4 (SD = 3.1)] ate an ad libitum snack either with or without TV, followed around 1 h later by lunch. There was an interaction between TV and gender for both meals. Women tended to consume more snack food in the TV condition, with men consuming more in the no-TV condition. Participants who habitually consumed more processed food also ate more snacks, independent of any other variable, including rated liking. At lunch, men who had earlier snacked with TV ate more than men who had snacked without TV, but this effect was not evident in women. On memory recall, all participants underestimated how much snack food they had eaten, and this was a function of how much they had actually consumed, with greater error only predicted by greater consumption. The results indicate that the effects of TV on eating can vary with gender and that processed-food history can predict snack food intake. While previous findings suggest memory of prior-intake may be impaired by eating while watching TV, the current results suggest this is not necessarily because of TV per se, but because people sometimes consume more food under such conditions.
Anti-Apoptotic and Pro-Survival Effect of Alpinate Oxyphyllae Fructus (AOF) in a d-Galactose-Induced Aging Heart

Aging, a natural biological/physiological phenomenon, is accelerated by reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation and identified by a progressive decrease in physiological function. Several studies have shown a positive relationship between aging and chronic heart failure (HF). Cardiac apoptosis was found in age-related diseases. We used a traditional Chinese medicine, Alpinate Oxyphyllae Fructus (AOF), to evaluate its effect on cardiac anti-apoptosis and pro-survival. Male eight-week-old Sprague–Dawley (SD) rats were segregated into five groups: normal control group (NC), d-Galactose-Induced aging group (Aging), and AOF of 50 (AL (AOF low)), 100 (AM (AOF medium)), 150 (AH (AOF high)) mg/kg/day. After eight weeks, hearts were measured by an Hematoxylin–Eosin (H&E) stain, Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL)-assays and Western blotting. The experimental results show that the cardiomyocyte apoptotic pathway protein expression increased in the d-Galactose-Induced aging groups, with dose-dependent inhibition in the AOF treatment group (AL, AM, and AH). Moreover, the expression of the pro-survival p-Akt (protein kinase B (Akt)), Bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma 2), anti-apoptotic protein (Bcl-xL) protein decreased significantly in the d-Galactose-induced aging group, with increased performance in the AOF treatment group with levels of p-IGFIR and p-PI3K (Phosphatidylinositol-3′ kinase (PI3K)) to increase by dosage and compensatory performance. On the other hand, the protein of the Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) pathway expression decreased in the aging groups and showed improvement in the AOF treatment group. Our results suggest that AOF strongly works against ROS-induced aging heart problems.
Systematic Maintenance of Corporate Experience Repositories

Experience‐based continuous learning is essential for improving products, processes, and technologies in emerging as well as established areas of business and engineering science. This can be facilitated by case‐based organizational learning through capturing relevant experience in the form of cases for reuse in a corporate experience repository. For obvious reasons, learning from experience needs to be a permanent endeavor. Thus an organization has to handle a “continuous stream of experience. ” Consequently, such an experience repository requires maintenance. This should not simply happen ad hoc but in a systematic manner. To make competent decisions about maintenance, the experience base and its usage have to be analyzed (i.e., evaluated). To improve maintenance itself, it is necessary to learn about it. For this purpose, we identify the relevant tasks for maintaining an experience repository and the responsibilities of the roles involved. Maintenance addresses not only the actual experience in the form of cases but also the conceptual model and the methods, techniques, and tools that are used for filling and updating the experience repository. To support the roles involved in the maintenance tasks, we provide a flexible, practical maintenance and evaluation framework. This framework provides guidance for the roles. The framework can be combined with other approaches from artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, and software engineering at different levels of detail. For the practical application of the framework, we describe an integrated technical solution for a corporate experience repository that is maintained using our framework. Furthermore, we discuss the empirical validation of the framework and its implementation.
Visual calibration and correction for ambient illumination

Many applications require that an image will appear the same regardless of where or how it is displayed. However, the conditions in which an image is displayed can adversely affect its appearance. Computer monitor screens not only emit light, but can also reflect extraneous light present in the viewing environment. This can cause images displayed on a monitor to appear faded by reducing their perceived contrast. Current approaches to this problem involve measuring this ambient illumination with specialized hardware and then altering the display device or changing the viewing conditions. This is not only impractical, but also costly and time consuming. For a user who does not have the equipment, expertise, or budget to control these facets, a practical alternative is sought. This paper presents a method whereby the display device itself can be used to determine the effect of ambient light on perceived contrast, thus enabling the viewers themselves to perform visual calibration. This method is grounded in established psychophysical experimentation and we present both an extensive procedure and an equivalent rapid procedure. Our work is extended by providing a novel method of contrast correction so that the contrast of an image viewed in bright conditions can be corrected to appear the same as an image viewed in a darkened room. This is verified through formal validation. These methods are easy to apply in practical settings, while accurate enough to be useful.
Infants consider both the sample and the sampling process in inductive generalization

The ability to make inductive inferences from sparse data is a critical aspect of human learning. However, the properties observed in a sample of evidence depend not only on the true extension of those properties but also on the process by which evidence is sampled. Because neither the property extension nor the sampling process is directly observable, the learner's ability to make accurate generalizations depends on what is known or can be inferred about both variables. In particular, different inferences are licensed if samples are drawn randomly from the whole population (weak sampling) than if they are drawn only from the property's extension (strong sampling). Given a few positive examples of a concept, only strong sampling supports flexible inferences about how far to generalize as a function of the size and composition of the sample. Here we present a Bayesian model of the joint dependence between observed evidence, the sampling process, and the property extension and test the model behaviorally with human infants (mean age: 15 months). Across five experiments, we show that in the absence of behavioral cues to the sampling process, infants make inferences consistent with the use of strong sampling; given explicit cues to weak or strong sampling, they constrain their inferences accordingly. Finally, consistent with quantitative predictions of the model, we provide suggestive evidence that infants’ inferences are graded with respect to the strength of the evidence they observe.
Applications of Objective Image Quality Assessment Methods [Applications Corner]

The interest in objective image quality assessment (IQA) has been growing at an accelerated pace over the past decade. The latest progress on developing automatic IQA methods that can predict subjective quality of visual signals is exhilarating. For example, a handful of objective IQA measures have been shown to significantly and consistently outperform the widely adopted mean squared error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) in terms of correlations with subjective quality evaluations [1].
Dual Function of Wnts in Human Cutaneous Melanoma

The cellular signaling pathways that respond to Wnts control numerous processes ranging from gastrulation to aging and govern cell fate determination and patterning (Clevers, 2006). Wnt signaling abnormalities often lead to developmental disorders and lethal malignancies. In melanoma aberrant activation of Wnt signaling is often observed. Wnt signaling pathway is a very complex process. Its ligands, called Wnts, can signal via several pathways referred to as the canonical Wnt signaling and two noncanonical Wnt signaling pathways. According to the modern view, the canonical Wnt signaling branch is predominately involved in control of proliferation and differentiation acting at a transcriptional level, whereas the noncanonical ones affect cell motility and cytoskeletal rearrangements. In the case of melanoma, the canonical and the noncanonical Wnt pathways can play opposite roles. The noncanonical Wnt cascade promotes metastasis. Overexpression of Wnt5a correlates with a poor prognosis for patients. The canonical Wnt cascade has long been considered as fully oncogenic. However, a lot of data confirms that it can act as a tumor suppressor by promoting cell differentiation.