Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Institutional framework, water pricing structures and costs of domestic water services in rural poor areas of the Olifants river basin, South Africa

Les systemes de tarification-subvention de l'eau domestique, l'organisation du secteur de l'eau domestique et les couts generes par les infrastructures pour ce meme service sont des facteurs cles pour l'amelioration des conditions de vie dans les pays en developpement. Des objectifs cles lies a ces systemes de tarification-subvention peuvent etre identifies. Il s'agit d'atteindre le recouvrement des couts, l'efficacite economique, l'accessibilite economique, l'equite et en ce qui concerne les subventions de justifier un besoin ainsi que d'eviter des incitations perverses et d'avoir de faibles couts administratifs. Cette etude explore dans quelle mesure les systemes de tarification-subvention utilises dans le basin de l'Olifants en Afrique du Sud repondent a ces differents objectifs. Cette etude s'interesse egalement aux couts generes par les reseaux d'eau domestique dans cette meme region. Elle presente le contexte sud-africain du secteur de l'eau domestique ainsi que le contexte socio-economique de la region d'etude. Pour expliciter ses questions de recherche, elle pose egalement le probleme et les principaux aspects des systemes de tarification-subvention dans les pays en developpement de maniere generale et en Afrique du Sud en particulier. La methodologie retenue pour repondre a ces questions de recherche sera presentee en troisieme partie. Enfin, la troisieme partie presente l'organisation du secteur de l'offre d'eau domestique dans la zone d'etude, les systemes de tarification-subvention mis en place et leur analyse et enfin une typologie des reseaux d'approvisionnement en eau domestique dans cette meme zone. (Resume d'auteur)
ESCAPING AN EVOLUTIONARY LOBSTER TRAP: DRUG RESISTANCE AND COMPENSATORY MUTATION IN A FLUCTUATING ENVIRONMENT

The fitness landscape concept aids intuition on adaptive evolution through low fitness genotypes. Evolutionary processes become complex when environments and therefore fitnesses fluctuate. Antibiotic resistance evolution in bacteria is an important example of such dynamics. Resistance bears a cost in the drug‐free environment, but compensatory mutation can lower this cost, creating a fitness valley. With the drug present, the valley becomes a hill that is easily climbed. Once a population is dominated by resistant‐compensated genotypes, reversion to sensitivity is difficult: this phenomenon has been described as an evolutionary lobster trap. With increasing frequencies of drug resistance among pathogenic bacteria, it is critical to understand how this trap can be escaped. Here, we develop stochastic models to investigate these dynamics. The residual fitness cost (the cost remaining after compensatory mutation has occurred) is a key parameter. Reversion to sensitivity is favored when the time spent in the absence of the drug relative to its presence is high compared to the residual fitness cost. Population sizes are also important: in large populations, resistant‐compensated mutants appear in resistant‐uncompensated or sensitive‐compensated genotypes without fixation of these intermediates. This stochastic tunneling effect occurs when sufficient time is allowed by the rates of environmental fluctuation.
Fumonisin- and AAL-Toxin-Induced Disruption of Sphingolipid Metabolism with Accumulation of Free Sphingoid Bases

Fumonisins (FB) and AAL-toxin are sphingoid-like compounds produced by several species of fungi associated with plant diseases. In animal cells, both fumonisins produced by Fusarium moniliforme and AAL-toxin produced by Alternaria alternata f. sp. lycopersici inhibit ceramide synthesis, an early biochemical event in the animal diseases associated with consumption of F. moniliforme-contaminated corn. In duckweed (Lemna pausicostata Heglem. 6746), tomato plants (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill), and tobacco callus (Nicotiana tabacum cv Wisconsin), pure FB1 or AAL-toxin caused a marked elevation of phytosphingosine and sphinganine, sphingoid bases normally present in low concentrations. The relative increases were quite different in the three plant systems. Nonetheless, disruption of sphingolipid metabolism was clearly a common feature in plants exposed to FB1 or AAL-toxin. Resistant varieties of tomato (Asc/Asc) were much less sensitive to toxin-induced increases in free sphinganine. Because free sphingoid bases are precursors to plant “ceramides,” their accumulation suggests that the primary biochemical lesion is inhibition of de novo ceramide synthesis and reacylation of free sphingoid bases. Thus, in plants the disease symptoms associated with A. alternata and F. moniliforme infection may be due to disruption of sphingolipid metabolism.
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND IMPLEMENTATION FOR NONBINARY QUASI-CYCLIC LDPC DECODER ARCHITECTURE

Non-binary low-density parity check (NB-LDPC) codes are an extension of binary LDPC codes with significantly better performance. Although various kinds of low-complexity iterative decoding algorithms have been proposed, there is a big challenge for VLSI implementation of NBLDPC decoders due to its high complexity and long latency. In this brief, highly efficient check node processing scheme, which the processing delay greatly reduced, including Min-Max decoding algorithm and check node unit are proposed. Compare with previous works, less than 52% could be reduced for the latency of check node unit. In addition, the efficiency of the presented techniques is design to demonstrate for the (620, 310) NBQC-LDPC decoder.
Effects of Endurance Training in the Leopard Shark, Triakis semifasciata

This study is the first to examine the effects of endurance training in an elasmobranch fish. Twenty‐four leopard sharks (Triakis semifasciata) were divided randomly into three groups. Eight sharks were killed immediately, eight were forced to swim continuously for 6 wk against a current of 35 cm s−1 (60%–65% of maximal sustainable swimming speed), and eight were held for 6 wk in a tank without induced current. There were no changes due to training in maximal sustainable speed, oxygen consumption rates, percentage of the myotome composed of red and white muscle fibers, blood oxygen‐carrying capacity, liver mass, liver lipid, glycogen, and protein concentrations, white muscle protein content, heart ventricle mass, or the specific activities of the enzymes citrate synthase, pyruvate kinase, and lactate dehydrogenase in the heart ventricle. In red myoto‐mal muscle, citrate synthase activity increased 17% as a result of training, but there was no change in muscle fiber diameter. The greatest effects occurred in white myotomal muscle, in which a 34% increase in fiber diameter and a 36% increase in the activities of citrate synthase and lactate dehydrogenase occurred as a result of training. The conditioned fish also had significantly higher growth rates. The observed effects within the myotomal muscle may reflect the higher growth rates of the trained leopard sharks, or they may be a specific response to the increased energetic demands of the training activity, indicating characteristics that limit swimming performance in leopard sharks.
Composability in quantum cryptography

If we combine two secure cryptographic systems, is the resulting system still secure? Answering this question is highly nontrivial and has recently sparked a considerable research effort, in particular, in the area of classical cryptography. A central insight was that the answer to the question is yes, but only within a well-specified composability framework and for carefully chosen security definitions. In this article, we review several aspects of composability in the context of quantum cryptography. The first part is devoted to key distribution. We discuss the security criteria that a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol must fulfill to allow its safe use within a larger security application (e.g. for secure message transmission); and we demonstrate—by an explicit example—what can go wrong if conventional (non-composable) security definitions are used. Finally, to illustrate the practical use of composability, we show how to generate a continuous key stream by sequentially composing rounds of a QKD protocol. In the second part, we take a more general point of view, which is necessary for the study of cryptographic situations involving, for example, mutually distrustful parties. We explain the universal composability (UC) framework and state the composition theorem that guarantees that secure protocols can securely be composed to larger applications. We focus on the secure composition of quantum protocols into unconditionally secure classical protocols. However, the resulting security definition is so strict that some tasks become impossible without additional security assumptions. Quantum bit commitment is impossible in the UC framework even with mere computational security. Similar problems arise in the quantum bounded storage model and we observe a trade-off between the UC and the use of the weakest possible security assumptions.
Reduction of halogenated ethanes by green rust

Green rusts, mixed FeII/FeIII hydroxide minerals present in many suboxic environments, have been shown to reduce a number of organic and inorganic contaminants. The reduction of halogenated ethanes was examined in aqueous suspensions of green rust, both alone and with the addition of AgI (AgGR) and CuII (CuGR). Hexachloroethane (HCA), pentachloroethane (PCA), 1,1,1,2‐tetrachloroethane (1,1,1,2‐TeCA), 1,1,2,2‐tetrachloroethane (1,1,2,2‐TeCA), 1,1,1‐trichloroethane (1,1,1‐TCA), 1,1,2‐trichloroethane (1,1,2‐TCA), 1,1‐dichloroethane (1,1‐DCA), and 1,2‐dibromoethane were reduced in the presence of green rust alone, AgGR, or CuGR; only 1,2‐dichloroethane and chloroethane were nonreactive. The reduction was generally more rapid for more highly substituted ethanes than for ethanes having fewer halogen groups (HCA > PCA > 1,1,1,2‐TeCA > 1,1,1‐TCA > 1,1,2,2‐TeCA > 1,1,2‐TCA > 1,1‐DCA), and isomers with the more asymmetric distributions of halogen groups were more rapidly reduced than the isomer with greater symmetry (e.g., 1,1,1‐TCA > 1,1,2‐TCA). The addition of AgI or CuII to green rust suspensions resulted in a substantial increase in the rate of halogenated ethane reduction as well as significant differences in the product distributions with respect to green rust alone.
A cost-effective substantial-impact-filter based method to tolerate voltage emergencies

Supply voltage fluctuation caused by inductive noises has become a critical problem in microprocessor design. A voltage emergency occurs when supply voltage variation exceeds the acceptable voltage margin, jeopardizing the microprocessor reliability. Existing techniques assume all voltage emergencies would definitely lead to incorrect program execution and prudently activate rollbacks or flushes to recover, and consequently incur high performance overhead. We observe that not all voltage emergencies result in external visible errors, which can be exploited to avoid unnecessary protection. In this paper, we propose a substantial-impact-filter based method to tolerate voltage emergencies, including three key techniques: 1) Analyze the architecture-level masking of voltage emergencies during program execution; 2) Propose a metric intermittent vulnerability factor for intermittent timing faults (IV Fitf) to quantitatively estimate the vulnerability of microprocessor structures (load/store queue and register file) to voltage emergencies; 3) Propose a substantial-impact-filter based method to handle voltage emergencies. Experimental results demonstrate our approach gains back nearly 57% of the performance loss compared with the once-occur-then-rollback approach.
Semantic Relationship Extraction and Ontology Building using Wikipedia: A Comprehensive Survey

Semantic web as a vision of Tim Berners-Lee is highly dependable upon the availability of machine readable information. Ontologies are one of the different machine readable formats that have been widely investigated. Several studies focus on how to extract concepts and semantic relations in order to build ontologies. Wikipedia is considered as one of the important knowledge sources that have been used to extract semantic relations due to its characteristics as a semi-structured knowledge source that would facilitate such a challenge. In this paper we will focus on the current state of this challenging field by discussing some of the recent studies about Wikipedia and semantic extraction and highlighting their main contributions and results.
Suppression of the Interferon-Mediated Innate Immune Response by Pseudorabies Virus

ABSTRACT Pseudorabies virus (PRV) is an alphaherpesvirus related to the human pathogens herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and varicella-zoster virus. PRV is capable of infecting and killing a wide variety of mammals. How it avoids innate immune defenses in so many hosts is not understood. While the anti-interferon (IFN) strategies of HSV-1 have been studied, little is known about how PRV evades the IFN-mediated immune response. In this study, we determined if wild-type PRV infection can overcome the establishment of a beta interferon (IFN-β)-induced antiviral state in primary rat fibroblasts. Using microarray technology, we found that the expression of a subset of genes normally induced by IFN-β in these cells was not induced when the cells were simultaneously infected with a wild-type PRV strain. Expression of transcripts associated with major histocompatibility complex class I antigen presentation and NK cell activation was reduced, while transcripts associated with inflammation either were unaffected or were induced by viral infection. This suppression of IFN-stimulated gene expression occurred because IFN signal transduction, in particular the phosphorylation of STAT1, became less effective in PRV-infected cells. At least one virion-associated protein is involved in inhibition of STAT1 tyrosine phosphorylation. This ability to disarm the IFN-β response offers an explanation for the uniform lethality of virulent PRV infection of nonnatural hosts.
Lipoxin A4 Attenuates Constitutive and TGF-β1–Dependent Profibrotic Activity in Human Lung Myofibroblasts

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a common, progressive, and invariably lethal interstitial lung disease with no effective therapy. The key cell driving the development of fibrosis is the myofibroblast. Lipoxin A4 (LXA4) is an anti-inflammatory lipid, important in the resolution of inflammation, and it has potential antifibrotic activity. However, the effects of LXA4 on primary human lung myofibroblasts (HLMFs) have not previously been investigated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the effects of LXA4 on TGF-β1–dependent responses in IPF- and nonfibrotic control (NFC)–derived HLMFs. HLMFs were isolated from IPF and NFC patients and grown in vitro. The effects of LXA4 on HLMF proliferation, collagen secretion, α-smooth muscle actin (αSMA) expression, and Smad2/3 activation were examined constitutively and following TGF-β1 stimulation. The LXA4 receptor (ALXR) was expressed in both NFC- and IPF-derived HLMFs. LXA4 (10−10 and 10−8 mol) reduced constitutive αSMA expression, actin stress fiber formation, contraction, and nuclear Smad2/3, indicating regression from a myofibroblast to fibroblast phenotype. LXA4 also significantly inhibited FBS-dependent proliferation and TGF-β1–dependent collagen secretion, αSMA expression, and Smad2/3 nuclear translocation in IPF-derived HLMFs. LXA4 did not inhibit Smad2/3 phosphorylation. In summary, LXA4 attenuated profibrotic HLMF activity and promoted HLMF regression to a quiescent fibroblast phenotype. LXA4 or its stable analogs delivered by aerosol may offer a novel approach to the treatment of IPF.
Lung injury following pulmonary resection in the isolated, blood-perfused rat lung.

Lung resection may be complicated by postpneumonectomy pulmonary oedema. Oxidant generation following surgery-induced ischaemia-reperfusion may be responsible. This hypothesis was tested utilizing isolated, in situ, blood perfused rodent lungs subjected to continuous perfusion (control subjects); one lung ventilation followed by pneumonectomy (group 1); or one lung ventilation followed by reinflation of the collapsed lung (group 2). In control subjects, no significant changes in markers of oxidant damage, oxygenation, pulmonary artery pressure or extravascular albumin extravasation were detected. In group 1 lungs, hydroxyl radical-like damage was detected in association with impaired oxygenation (p<0.05), and increased pulmonary artery pressure and extravascular albumin accumulation in both lungs. In group 2, there was evidence of hydroxyl radical-like damage, and a fall in oxygenation (p<0.05) occurred during one lung ventilation. There was a transient rise in pulmonary artery pressure following lung reinflation and extra vascular albumin accumulation was significantly increased in both lungs (right>left, p<0.05). Both changes were attenuated (p<0.05) following treatment with the reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenger superoxide dismutase (group 2a) and the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor N(G)-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (group 2b). Hydroxyl radical-like damage was undetectable following nitric oxide synthase inhibition. Oxidant stress may contribute to the pathologies seen in this model of lung injury.
FP-Tree Based Algorithms Analysis : FP-Growth , COFI-Tree and CT-PRO

Mining frequent itemsets from the large transactional database is a very critical and important task. Many algorithms have been proposed from past many years, But FP-tree like algorithms are considered as very effective algorithms for efficiently mine frequent item sets. These algorithms considered as efficient because of their compact structure and also for less generation of candidates itemsets compare to Apriori and Apriori like algorithms. Therefore this paper aims to presents a basic Concepts of some of the algorithms (FP-Growth, COFI-Tree, CT-PRO) based upon the FPTree like structure for mining the frequent item sets along with their capabilities and comparisons.
Force fluctuations and polymerization dynamics of intracellular microtubules

Microtubules are highly dynamic biopolymer filaments involved in a wide variety of biological processes including cell division, migration, and intracellular transport. Microtubules are very rigid and form a stiff structural scaffold that resists deformation. However, despite their rigidity, inside of cells they typically exhibit significant bends on all length scales. Here, we investigate the origin of these bends using a Fourier analysis approach to quantify their length and time dependence. We show that, in cultured animal cells, bending is suppressed by the surrounding elastic cytoskeleton, and even large intracellular forces only cause significant bending fluctuations on short length scales. However, these lateral bending fluctuations also naturally cause fluctuations in the orientation of the microtubule tip. During growth, these tip fluctuations lead to microtubule bends that are frozen-in by the surrounding elastic network. This results in a persistent random walk of the microtubule, with a small apparent persistence length of ≈30 μm, ≈100 times smaller than that resulting from thermal fluctuations alone. Thus, large nonthermal forces govern the growth of microtubules and can explain the highly curved shapes observed in the microtubule cytoskeleton of living cells.
Acute-phase protein response to infection in severe malnutrition

Morlese, John F. , Terrence Forrester, and Farook Jahoor. Acute-phase protein response to infection in severe malnutrition. Am. J. Physiol. 275 (Endocrinol. Metab. 38): E112–E117, 1998. —It is not known whether malnourished infants can mount a comprehensive acute-phase protein (APP) response and, if so, whether this is achieved by increasing APP synthesis rates. To address these issues, we measured 1) the plasma concentrations of five APPs (Creactive protein, a1-acid glycoprotein, a1-antitrypsin, haptoglobin, and fibrinogen) and 2) the synthesis rates of three APPs (a1-antitrypsin, haptoglobin, and fibrinogen) using a constant intragastric infusion of [H3]leucine in nine infected marasmic children at ,2 days postadmission (study 1), ,9 days postadmission when infections had cleared (study 2), and ,59 days postadmission at recovery (study 3). Except for fibrinogen, the plasma concentrations of all APPs were higher in study 1 than in studies 2 and 3. Although the rate of synthesis of haptoglobin was significantly greater in study 1 than study 2, the rates of fibrinogen and a1-antitrypsin synthesis were similar in all three studies. These results show that 1) severely malnourished children can mount an APP response to infection which does not include fibrinogen and 2) the APP response is accomplished through different mechanisms.
Self-perceived barriers to activity participation among sedentary adolescent girls.

PURPOSE Potential barriers to activity participation were surveyed among adolescent girls and corroborated with other reported information. METHODS Among 2379 black and white girls enrolled in the NHLBI Growth and Health Study since ages 9 or 10 yr, those reporting weekly activity frequency as "sometimes" or "rarely" were surveyed for three consecutive years from ages 16 or 17 yr. Barriers to activity were assessed using a 10-item questionnaire. Responses were cross-examined with other reported information. Race-specific longitudinal regression examined the impact of barrier scores on activity levels and also potential factors having an impact on barrier scores. RESULTS Approximately half of the cohort was screened as "sedentary" with a trend toward an increasing proportion with age. Lack of time was cited by 60% of sedentary girls as the leading barrier to activity participation for all 3 yr. Other frequently cited barriers to activity included "I'm too tired" and "They don't interest me. " No differences were seen in hours at work or in household chores between those who cited lack of time and those who did not. Barrier score was a significant predictor of habitual activity scores. For both races, body mass index and "would rather do other things than exercise" were significant predictors of barriers, but work, parental education, TV watching, and childbirth were not significant. CONCLUSION Self-reported barriers to activity participation among sedentary girls were shown to be primarily internal and uncorrelated with other corresponding external factors.
Negotiating Treaty Reform in the European Union: The Role of the European Commission

In this article we seek to show that treaty reform is best seen as a process, and that we are witnessing a process of constitutionalization. We challenge the distinction between day-to-day politics and the high politics of treaty reform, demonstrating that high politics approaches are unable to take the significant role of non-governmental actors into consideration. While the European Commission's impact on the Maastricht Treaty was fairly limited, particularly concerning Political Union issues, we conclude that the Commission's impact on the Amstrerdam Treaty has been considerable. In fact, such an impact is not surprising given the Commission's technical expertise and its close cooperation with both the Council Secretariat and the Presidency of the Council. It is only if the impact of non-governmental actors, such as the Commission (and the Council Secretariat), is assumed to be negligible and therefore left unexamined that our findings are surprising. In this way, the article contributes to criticism of intergovernmental approaches to European integration.