Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Drug Targets and Mechanisms of Resistance in the Anaerobic Protozoa

SUMMARY The anaerobic protozoa Giardia duodenalis, Trichomonas vaginalis, and Entamoeba histolytica infect up to a billion people each year. G. duodenalis and E. histolytica are primarily pathogens of the intestinal tract, although E. histolytica can form abscesses and invade other organs, where it can be fatal if left untreated. T. vaginalis infection is a sexually transmitted infection causing vaginitis and acute inflammatory disease of the genital mucosa. T. vaginalis has also been reported in the urinary tract, fallopian tubes, and pelvis and can cause pneumonia, bronchitis, and oral lesions. Respiratory infections can be acquired perinatally. T. vaginalis infections have been associated with preterm delivery, low birth weight, and increased mortality as well as predisposing to human immunodeficiency virus infection, AIDS, and cervical cancer. All three organisms lack mitochondria and are susceptible to the nitroimidazole metronidazole because of similar low-redox-potential anaerobic metabolic pathways. Resistance to metronidazole and other drugs has been observed clinically and in the laboratory. Laboratory studies have identified the enzyme that activates metronidazole, pyruvate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase, to its nitroso form and distinct mechanisms of decreasing drug susceptibility that are induced in each organism. Although the nitroimidazoles have been the drug family of choice for treating the anaerobic protozoa, G. duodenalis is less susceptible to other antiparasitic drugs, such as furazolidone, albendazole, and quinacrine. Resistance has been demonstrated for each agent, and the mechanism of resistance has been investigated. Metronidazole resistance in T. vaginalis is well documented, and the principal mechanisms have been defined. Bypass metabolism, such as alternative oxidoreductases, have been discovered in both organisms. Aerobic versus anaerobic resistance in T. vaginalis is discussed. Mechanisms of metronidazole resistance in E. histolytica have recently been investigated using laboratory-induced resistant isolates. Instead of downregulation of the pyruvate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase and ferredoxin pathway as seen in G. duodenalis and T. vaginalis, E. histolytica induces oxidative stress mechanisms, including superoxide dismutase and peroxiredoxin. The review examines the value of investigating both clinical and laboratory-induced syngeneic drug-resistant isolates and dissection of the complementary data obtained. Comparison of resistance mechanisms in anaerobic bacteria and the parasitic protozoa is discussed as well as the value of studies of the epidemiology of resistance.
The Dynamics of Population Growth, Differential Fertility, and Inequality

This paper analyzes the effects of income differentials in fertility on Lorenz curves and standard inequality measures. The role of intergenerational mobility is examined and incorporated into counterfactual simulations based on Brazilian data. Two standard inequality measures move in opposite directions in both the steady state and the transition in response to the elimination of fertility differentials. The counterfactuals confirm the theoretical predictions of misleading intertemporal inequality comparisons in the presence of differential fertility. Copyright 1986 by American Economic Association.
Illusory contour figures are perceived as occluding surfaces by 8‐month‐old infants

Infants have been demonstrated to be able to perceive illusory contours in Kanizsa figures. This study tested whether they also perceive these illusory figures as having the properties of real objects, such as depth and capability of occluding other objects. Eight- and five-month-old infants were presented with scenes that included a Kanizsa square and further depth cues provided by the deletion and accretion pattern of a moving duck. The 8-month-old infants looked significantly longer at the scene when the two types of occlusion cues were inconsistent than when they were consistent with each other, which provides evidence that they interpreted the Kanizsa square as a depth cue. In contrast, 5-month-olds did not show this difference. This finding demonstrates that 8-month-olds perceive the figure formed by the illusory contours as having properties of a real object that can act as an occluder.
Msc in Speech and Language Processing Dissertation : Automatic Summarising Based on Sentence Extraction: a Statistical Approach

The present dissertation and project describes a system for automatic summarising of texts. Instead of generating abstracts, a hard NLP task of questionable e ectiveness, the system tries to identify the most important sentences of the original text, thus producing an extract. The proposed, corpus-based and statistical approach exploits several heuristics to determine the summary-worthiness of sentences. It actually uses statistical appearances of words, word-pairs and noun phrases to calculate sentence weights and then extract the highest scoring sentences. The statistical model used in the scoring function is a slight variation of the Term-Frequency Inverse-Document-Frequency (TFIDF) term weighting formula. The results obtained by application of the system to 5 test texts, separately and cumulatively for the three afore-mentioned heuristics were subjectively judged for their quality. This evaluation showed that the noun phrases, as a separate method, produce the best extracts and that they also are parts of the best performing combinations. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Andrei Mikheev and Jim Hurford. Andrei was very helpful in the technical-programming issues as well as the general statistical NLP techniques. Jim provided the \linguistic" viewpoint and clever suggestions. I would also like to thank the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, for providing the funding, without which I would not have been able to do this MSc. 1
Neuroprotective Effect of Arctigenin via Upregulation of P-CREB in Mouse Primary Neurons and Human SH-SY5Y Neuroblastoma Cells

Arctigenin (Arc) has been shown to act on scopolamine-induced memory deficit mice and to provide a neuroprotective effect on cultured cortical neurons from glutamate-induced neurodegeneration through mechanisms not completely defined. Here, we investigated the neuroprotective effect of Arc on H89-induced cell damage and its potential mechanisms in mouse cortical neurons and human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells. We found that Arc prevented cell viability loss induced by H89 in human SH-SY5Y cells. Moreover, Arc reduced intracellular beta amyloid (Aβ) production induced by H89 in neurons and human SH-SY5Y cells, and Arc also inhibited the presenilin 1(PS1) protein level in neurons. In addition, neural apoptosis in both types of cells, inhibition of neurite outgrowth in human SH-SY5Y cells and reduction of synaptic marker synaptophysin (SYN) expression in neurons were also observed after H89 exposure. All these effects induced by H89 were markedly reversed by Arc treatment. Arc also significantly attenuated downregulation of the phosphorylation of CREB (p-CREB) induced by H89, which may contribute to the neuroprotective effects of Arc. These results demonstrated that Arc exerted the ability to protect neurons and SH-SY5Y cells against H89-induced cell injury via upregulation of p-CREB.
The effect of ethical values on transformational leadership and ethical climate in organisations

Ethical leaders are ultimately responsible for developing a strong and sustainable ethical climate in organisations. Ethical values and the ability to influence followers to internalise these values have become prerequisites for effective leadership in modern organisations. Although ethics, leadership, and values have received much attention, there has been little coordinated effort to integrate transformational leadership with ethical climate and ethical values. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a theoretical model to explain the structural relationships between these variables in the South African business context. The results revealed that altruism influences transformational leadership positively, and that transformational leadership in turn has a positive effect on ethical climate. Some support was also found for the proposition that integrity moderates the effect of transformational leadership on ethical climate.
Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order

Until recently, to be in a "public place" meant to feel safe. That has changed, especially in cities. Urban dwellers sense the need to quickly react to gestural cues from persons in their immediate presence in order to establish their relationship to each other. Through this communication they hope to detect potential danger before it is too late for self-defense or flight. The ability to read accurately the "informing signs" by which strangers indicate their relationship to one another in public or semi-public places without speaking, has become as important as understanding the official written and spoken language of the country. In Relations in Public, Erving Goff man provides a grammar of the unspoken language used in public places. He shows that the way strangers relate in public is part of a design by which friends and acquaintances manage their relationship in the presence of bystanders. He argues that, taken together, this forms part of a new domain of inquiry into the rules for co-mingling, or public order. Most people give little thought to how elaborate and complex our everyday behavior in public actually is. For example, we adhere to the rules of pedestrian traffic on a busy thoroughfare, accept the usual ways of acting in a crowded elevator or subway car, grasp the delicate nuances of conversational behavior, and respond to the rich vocabulary of body gestures. We behave differently at weddings, at meals, in crowds, in couples, and when alone. Such everyday behavior, though generally below the level of awareness, embodies unspoken codes of social understandings necessary for the orderly conduct of society.
Fast Fragment Assemblage Using Boundary Line and Surface Matching

In the recent past, fragment matching has been treated in two different approaches, one using curve matching methods and one that compares whole surfaces or volumes, depending on the nature of the broken artefacts. Presented here is a fast, unified method that combines curve matching techniques with a surface matching algorithm to estimate the positioning and respective matching error for the joining of three-dimensional fragmented objects. Combining both aspects of fragment matching, essentially eliminates most of the ambiguities present in each one of the matching problem categories and helps provide more accurate results with low computational cost.
Managerial diseconomies of scale: Literature survey and hypotheses anchored in transaction cost economics

This working paper tests Oliver Williamson’s proposition that transaction cost economics can explain the limits of firm size. A review of the relevant literature corroborates Williamson’s theoretical framework and five hypotheses are formulated: (1) Bureaucratic failure, in the form of atmospheric consequences, bureaucratic insularity, incentive limits and communication distortion, increases with firm size; (2) Large firms exhibit economies of scale; (3) Diseconomies of scale from bureaucratic failure have a negative impact on firm performance; (4) Economies of scale increase the relative profitability of large firms over smaller firms; and (5) Diseconomies of scale are moderated by two transaction cost-related factors: organisation form and asset specificity. (The working paper is the foundation for the doctoral thesis “Bureaucratic Limits of Firm Size: Empirical Analysis Using Transaction Cost Economics” (Canback 2002) available at http://canback.com/henley.htm, the British Library, and UMI. The thesis contains a full statistical analysis of the hypotheses described in this paper, based on a sample of 784 U.S. manufacturing firms. )
CRM Scorecard Measurement: The Case for the Banking Sector in Saudi Arabia

Customer relationship management (CRM) has become one of the leading business strategies in the new millennium. Companies have invested or are planning to invest huge amounts to implement CRM strategies, tools and infrastructure in order to attract and retain profitable customers in today’s increasingly competitive markets. For that, they are recommended to have a measurement system to manage and assess the effectiveness of CRM initiatives. One of the effective performance measurement methods is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). In this paper we proposed a CRM Scorecard for the evaluation and enhancement of CRM systems of the Saudi Arabian Banks to improve the customer satisfactions and loyalty. The purpose of this research has been to identifying the variations made on BSC to become suitable to measure the performance of CRM.
MIMO System Multiuser Detection Based on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system optimum detection (MOD) based on the maximum likelihood sequence estimate (MLSE) rule is proposed in this paper. The MIMO detections based on binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) algorithm are discussed, followed by a detailed process on how to apply the MIMO BPSO detection (MBPSOD) on a MIMO system. Simulations show that the increase of data rates and the improvement of BER performance are significant by using the MBPSOD
Assessing the Learning Level of Students through Bloom’s Taxonomy in Higher Education in Punjab

Education is essential component for development and growth in any society. Evaluation is very important factor in education. An educational professional must be able to effectively evaluate and assess the students’academic development and knowledge of the subjects being taught.The present study focuses on assessment methods in learning. Bloom’s taxonomy was used as assessment tool to gauge students’ level of learning in three public sector universities of Punjab, Pakistan. A total of 300 respondents were chosen as sample for this study. Cognitive Domain of Bloom’s taxonomy was applied to assess level of learning. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014. v4n3p83
The managerial issues associated with global account management

The increase in cooperative global arrangements between suppliers and customers has grown precipitously in the last five years. These global account management (GAM) programs are frequently brought about owing to the initiative of the global customers, requiring their suppliers to service their total global needs. Suppliers in turn perceive GAM programs as a means to develop long‐term relationships with key global customers in order to hinder competitive inroads. The managerial issues in implementing GAM strategies/programs and developing GAM teams are the focus of this paper. Based on the bargaining framework of relational contracting theory, a step‐by‐step process for management to follow when implementing a GAM program is proposed.
Paucibacterial Microbiome and Resident DNA Virome of the Healthy Conjunctiva

Purpose To characterize the ocular surface microbiome of healthy volunteers using a combination of microbial culture and high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques. Methods Conjunctival swab samples from 107 healthy volunteers were analyzed by bacterial culture, 16S rDNA gene deep sequencing (n = 89), and biome representational in silico karyotyping (BRiSK; n = 80). Swab samples of the facial skin (n = 42), buccal mucosa (n = 50), and environmental controls (n = 27) were processed in parallel. 16S rDNA gene quantitative PCR was used to calculate the bacterial load in each site. Bacteria were characterized by site using principal coordinate analysis of metagenomics data. BRiSK data were analyzed for presence of fungi and viruses. Results Corynebacteria, Propionibacteria, and coagulase-negative Staphylococci were the predominant organisms identified by all three techniques. Quantitative 16S PCR demonstrated approximately 0.1 bacterial 16S rDNA/human actin copy on the ocular surface compared with greater than 10 16S rDNA/human actin copy for facial skin or the buccal mucosa. The conjunctival bacterial community structure is distinct compared with the facial skin (R = 0.474, analysis of similarities P = 0.0001), the buccal mucosa (R = 0.893, P = 0.0001), and environmental control samples (R = 0.536, P = 0.0001). 16S metagenomics revealed substantially more bacterial diversity on the ocular surface than other techniques, which appears to be artifactual. BRiSK revealed presence of torque teno virus (TTV) on the healthy ocular surface, which was confirmed by direct PCR to be present in 65% of all conjunctiva samples tested. Conclusions Relative to adjacent skin or other mucosa, healthy ocular surface microbiome is paucibacterial. Its flora are distinct from adjacent skin. Torque teno virus is a frequent constituent of the ocular surface microbiome. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT02298881.)
Copositive relaxation for general quadratic programming Report 97-50

Copies of these reports may be obtained from the bureau of the Faculty of Technical Math-A selection of these reports is available in PostScript form at the Faculty's anonymous ftp-Abstract We consider general, typically nonconvex, Quadratic Programming Problems. The Semi-deenite relaxation proposed by Shor provides bounds on the optimal solution, but it does not always provide suuciently strong bounds if linear constraints are also involved. To get rid of the linear side-constraints, another, stronger convex relaxation is derived. This relaxation uses copositive matrices. Special cases are discussed for which both relax-ations are equal. At the end of the paper, the complexity and solvability of the relaxations are discussed.
A multi-view two-level classification method for generalized multi-instance problems

Multi-instance (MI) learning is different than standard propositional classification, as it uses a set of bags containing many instances as input. While the instances in each bag are not labeled, the bags themselves are, as positive or negative. In this paper, we present a novel multi-view, two-level classification framework to address the generalized multi-instance problems. We first apply supervised and unsupervised learning methods to transform a MI dataset into a multi-view, single meta-instance dataset. Then we develop a multi-view learning approach that can integrate the information acquired by individual view learners on the meta-instance dataset from the previous step, and construct a final model. Our empirical studies show that the proposed method performs well compared to other popular MI learning methods.
Modeling EMI Problems Associated with DC-DC Converters

Abstract —This work presents the analysis of radiated EMI problems associated with DC-DC buck converters and the solutions for minimize the reverse recovery of the Drain-Bulk diode of the synchronous switching MOSFET. The DC-DC buck converter topology is used in computers and telecom applications because of its high power efficiency and multiple DC levels. For reducing the reverse recovery and its related EMI radiation is used a technique with monolithically integrated Schottky diodes. I. I NTRODUCTION With the increase of switching frequency of electronic switches, power converters have raised more and more electromagnetic energy pollution to the local environment. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) norms applied to power converters have objective to reduce conducted and radiated perturbances. Radiated EMI appears in the form of electromagnetic waves directly from the circuitry. The circuitry and its interface can influence themselves or the transmitting antenna for this radiated EMI emission. This emission is generally measured at much higher frequencies than their conducted counterparts, namely beyond 30 MHz up to several GHz [2]. The new generations of microprocessors are powered by local low voltages but high currents power supplies. Due to connector and power loss issues, power cannot be delivered by a remote power supply at the desired DC voltage. In addition, the fast transient current demand requires the power source being located close to the microprocessors. The most commonly used voltage regulator design is based on the synchronous buck topology. The input power supply voltage is stepped down to the operating voltage needed by the microprocessor. DC-DC converters operate at switching frequencies up to a few MHz. The potential EMI problem has been well covered in the literatures [3], [4]. By operating a DC-DC converter with the soft switching scheme without disturbing its averaged duty cycle, it is possible to eliminate predominant harmonics present in the input current to reduce overall peak amplitude of the frequency spectrum. The spreading spectrum concept has been applied successfully for the mitigation of conducted harmonic interference of the DC-DC buck converters [5]. Using of high switching frequencies in DC-DC converters allows magnetic components to be minimized but also enhanced the spectrum of EMI caused by interaction of the active components. II. P
An Agent-based System to Strength the Relationships of the Elders and their Families Living Abroad

The aging of the population is a phenomenon faced by most nations. Growing old is often accompanied by the loss of close companionship which has been shown may aggravate the cognitive impairment of elders. From a qualitative study, key issues emerged regarding unmet needs of elder’s communication that we propose to address with an agentbased communication system. This is a family newspaper through which seniors and their relatives not only maintain close social ties by sharing information, personal reminiscences and cultural stories, but enable them to exercise their minds through its entertainment section that can help to delay the cognitive decline that elders experience as they become older. The system provides elders with a richer form of communication with their relatives and facilitates their integration into the networks that currently connect members of their families who use email and IM systems to keep in touch with each other. To facilitate the information capture, several autonomous agents help the user to interact with the system which can be accessed by any electronic display with a touch screen, such as a Tablet PC. By means of autonomous agents we have incorporated a reminder mechanism to enable elders and their relatives to preserve and strengthen their relationships. In this paper, we present the study that motivated the development of the electronic family newspaper, and describe its functionality.
Critically Subsampled Filterbanks for SISO Reed&#8211;Solomon Decoding

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in soft decoding techniques. These techniques are used in the context of concatenated codes, with Turbo codes as the main example, but are almost never applied to existing classical codes. In this paper, the family of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes is considered, and the complexity problem of soft-in soft-out (SISO) RS decoding is tackled by breaking RS codes into several smaller subcodes. Finally, the decoders of these subcodes work together in a Turbo-like fashion (Gallager's algorithm) to find an approximate maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution. The decomposition that is presented here is based on critically subsampled filterbanks, with one subcode in each subband. A critically subsampled filterbank allows us to define a number of parallel independent subcodes. Furthermore, noncritically subsampled filterbanks have a larger number of subband variables than the codeword length, causing a message passing decoder (Gallager's algorithm) to fail. This paper focuses on the construction of such filterbanks, starting from noncritically subsampled filterbanks, it gradually evolves towards a critically subsampled filterbank