Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AFLPs Reveal Different Population Genetic Structure under Contrasting Environments in the Marine Snail Nucella lapillus L.

Dispersal has received growing attention in marine ecology, particularly since evidence obtained with up-to-date techniques challenged the traditional view. The dogwhelk Nucella lapillus L. , a sedentary gastropod with direct development, is a good example: dispersal was traditionally assumed to be limited until studies with microsatellites disputed this idea. To shed some light on this controversy, the genetic structure of dogwhelk populations in northwest Spain was investigated with highly polymorphic AFLP markers giving special attention to the influence of hydrodynamic stress. In agreement with the expectations for a poor disperser, our results show a significant genetic structure at regional (<200 km) and areal scales (<15 km). However, the spatial genetic structure varied with wave-exposure in the present case study: IBD was evident under sheltered conditions but absent from the exposed area where genetic differentiation was stronger. Our results provide evidence that differences in wave-exposure can exert a detectable influence on the genetic structure of coastal organisms, even in species without a planktonic larva.
Orangutan trade, confiscations, and lack of prosecutions in Indonesia

Prosecuting and sentencing law breakers punishes the offender and acts as a deterrent for future law breakers. With thousands of Sumatran and Bornean orangutans (Pongo abelii and P. pygmaeus) having entered private and government rescue centers and facilities, I evaluate the role of successful prosecution in orangutan conservation in Indonesia. Orangutans have been protected in Indonesian since 1931 and they are not allowed to be traded or to be kept as pets. In the period 1993–2016 at least 440 orangutans were formally confiscated, and many more were “donated” to law enforcement agencies. This resulted in seven (7) successful prosecutions by six different courts. Sentencing was lenient (median fine US$ 442 out of a possible US$ 7,600, median prison sentence 8 months out of a possible 5 years) and certainly too low to act as a deterrent. A paradigm shift within government authorities, conservation organizations, the judiciary, and by the general public is needed where trade in orangutans is no longer seen as a crime against an individual animal but as an economic crime that negatively affects society as a whole. Prosecuting offenders for tax evasion, corruption, endangering public health, animal cruelty, and smuggling, in addition to violating protected species laws, would allow for an increase in sentencing, resulting in a stronger deterrent, and greater public support. Conservation and welfare NGOs have a duty to become more proactive in a drive to increase enforcement; rescuing orangutans always has to coincide with prosecuting offenders and failures, and successes of these prosecutions have to be vigorously publicized. Despite numerous commitments made by Indonesia to orangutan conservation, and clear failures to deliver on almost all components, international donors have increased their funding year on year; it is time that this changes to a system where not failure is rewarded but success.
Exploring English Lexicon Knowledge for Chinese Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents a weakly-supervised method for Chinese sentiment analysis by incorporating lexical prior knowledge obtained from English sentiment lexicons through machine translation. A mechanism is introduced to incorporate the prior information about polarity bearing words obtained from existing sentiment lexicons into latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) where sentiment labels are considered as topics. Experiments on Chinese product reviews on mobile phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, and monitors demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach and show that the weakly supervised LDA model performs as well as supervised classifiers such as Naive Bayes and Support vector Machines with an average of 83% accuracy achieved over a total of 5484 review documents. Moreover, the LDA model is able to extract highly domain-salient polarity words from text.
Investigating the Generalizability of the MultiFlow ® DNA Damage Assay and Several Companion Machine Learning Models With a Set of 103 Diverse Test Chemicals

The in vitro MultiFlow DNA Damage assay multiplexes p53, γH2AX, phospho-histone H3, and polyploidization biomarkers into 1 flow cytometric analysis (Bryce, S. M., Bernacki, D. T., Bemis, J. C., and Dertinger, S. D. (2016). Genotoxic mode of action predictions from a multiplexed flow cytometric assay and a machine learning approach. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 57, 171-189). The work reported herein evaluated the generalizability of the method, as well as several data analytics strategies, to a range of chemical classes not studied previously. TK6 cells were exposed to each of 103 diverse chemicals, 86 of which were supplied by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) and selected based upon responses in genetic damage assays conducted under the Tox21 program. Exposures occurred for 24 h over a range of concentrations, and cell aliquots were removed at 4 and 24 h for analysis. Multiplexed response data were evaluated using 3 machine learning models designed to predict genotoxic mode of action based on data from a training set of 85 previously studied chemicals. Of 54 chemicals with sufficient information to make an a priori call on genotoxic potential, the prediction models' accuracies were 79.6% (random forest), 88.9% (logistic regression), and 90.7% (artificial neural network). A majority vote ensemble of the 3 models provided 92.6% accuracy. Forty-nine NTP chemicals were not adequately tested (maximum concentration did not approach assay's cytotoxicity limit) and/or had insufficient conventional genotoxicity data to allow their genotoxic potential to be defined. For these chemicals MultiFlow data will be useful in future research and hypothesis testing. Collectively, the results suggest the MultiFlow assay and associated data analysis strategies are broadly generalizable, demonstrating high predictability when applied to new chemicals and classes of compounds.
Protecting web applications from DDoS attacks by an active distributed defense system

In the last a few years a number of highly publicized incidents of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against high‐profile government and commercial websites have made people aware of the importance of providing data and services security to users. A DDoS attack is an availability attack, which is characterized by an explicit attempt from an attacker to prevent legitimate users of a service from using the desired resources. This paper introduces the vulnerability of web applications to DDoS attacks, and presents an active distributed defense system that has a deployment mixture of sub‐systems to protect web applications from DDoS attacks. According to the simulation experiments, this system is effective in that it is able to defend web applications against attacks. It can avoid overall network congestion and provide more resources to legitimate web users.
Dissolution and absorption researches of curcumin in solid dispersions with the polymers PVP

Aim Curcumin, a natural pigment extracted from the plant Curcuma longa, had wide range of pharmacological activities. However, low dissolution and oral absorption restricted its application. Polyvinylpyrrolidione K30 (PVP K30) was applied to improve dissolution and oral absorption of curcumin. Curcumin-PVP K30 solid dispersions (SDs) in different ratios were prepared by co-evaporation in ethanol solution. The best ratios of curcumin to PVP K30 was ensured as 1:8 (m:m) by dissolution rate of cucumin in vitro test. The solubility and the dissolution rate in vitro of curcumin were significantly raised, compared with curcumin, the solubility of solid dispersion increased at least 880 folds. Methods A sensitive HPLC method was developed to determine pharmacokinetics of curcumin in rat plasma after oral administration of curcumin-PVP-K30 SDs, Physical mixture (PM) (the ratio of curcumin in PVP K30 was 1:8) and curcumin-CMC-Na suspension, each sample was administered three level of dosages which contained curcumin 100, 200 and 400 mg·kg -1 , respectively. The results showed that curcumin concentration of rat plasma administration of curcumin-PVP K30 PM and curcumin-CMC-Na suspension were under the limited of detection even 4 h after oral administration. Results On the contrary, the absorption of curcumin-PVP-k30 SD was enhanced and the concentration-time data was best fit for two-compartment model. The peak levels in blood for three level dosages were 74.558,110.174 and 193.665ng·mL -1 at about 45min respectively, and the bioavaibility was 514.646, 609.111 and 1028.627 ng·mL -1 ·h respectively. Conclusion PVP could improve dissolution and oral absorption of curcumin in SDs.
Whole-genome sequencing is more powerful than whole-exome sequencing for detecting exome variants

Significance Whole-exome sequencing (WES) is gradually being optimized to identify mutations in increasing proportions of the protein-coding exome, but whole-genome sequencing (WGS) is becoming an attractive alternative. WGS is currently more expensive than WES, but its cost should decrease more rapidly than that of WES. We compared WES and WGS on six unrelated individuals. The distribution of quality parameters for single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) and insertions/deletions (indels) was more uniform for WGS than for WES. The vast majority of SNVs and indels were identified by both techniques, but an estimated 650 high-quality coding SNVs (∼3% of coding variants) were detected by WGS and missed by WES. WGS is therefore slightly more efficient than WES for detecting mutations in the targeted exome. We compared whole-exome sequencing (WES) and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) in six unrelated individuals. In the regions targeted by WES capture (81.5% of the consensus coding genome), the mean numbers of single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) and small insertions/deletions (indels) detected per sample were 84,192 and 13,325, respectively, for WES, and 84,968 and 12,702, respectively, for WGS. For both SNVs and indels, the distributions of coverage depth, genotype quality, and minor read ratio were more uniform for WGS than for WES. After filtering, a mean of 74,398 (95.3%) high-quality (HQ) SNVs and 9,033 (70.6%) HQ indels were called by both platforms. A mean of 105 coding HQ SNVs and 32 indels was identified exclusively by WES whereas 692 HQ SNVs and 105 indels were identified exclusively by WGS. We Sanger-sequenced a random selection of these exclusive variants. For SNVs, the proportion of false-positive variants was higher for WES (78%) than for WGS (17%). The estimated mean number of real coding SNVs (656 variants, ∼3% of all coding HQ SNVs) identified by WGS and missed by WES was greater than the number of SNVs identified by WES and missed by WGS (26 variants). For indels, the proportions of false-positive variants were similar for WES (44%) and WGS (46%). Finally, WES was not reliable for the detection of copy-number variations, almost all of which extended beyond the targeted regions. Although currently more expensive, WGS is more powerful than WES for detecting potential disease-causing mutations within WES regions, particularly those due to SNVs.
Biometrie presentation attack detection using gaze alignment

Face recognition systems have been improved rapidly in re cent decades. However, their wide deployment has been hindered by their vulnerability to spoofing attacks. In this paper, we present a challenge and response method to detect attack in face recognition systems by recording the gaze of a user in response to a moving stimulus. The proposed system extracts eye centres in the capturedframes and computes features from these landmarks to ascertain whether the gaze aligns with the challenge trajectory in order to detect spoofing attacks. The system is tested using a new database simulating mobile device use with 70 subjects attempting three types of spoof attacks (projected photo, looking through a 2D mask or wearing a 3D mask). Evaluations on the collected database show that the proposed approach performs favourably when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Chitosan A novel way to intervene in enamel demineralization - An in vitro study

The oral cavity is maintained in a healthy and balanced state by homeostatic mechanisms that regulate physiologic properties such as pH, temperature, salivary flow, viscosity, microflora, etc. Any disruptions in these mechanisms will initiate pathological processes, which may lead to various diseases that destroy the hard and soft tissues in the mouth. Mature enamel is a non-living tissue, composed of mainly hydroxapatite crystals and cannot regenerate itself after substantial mineral loss (Sivapathasundaram and Raghu, 2009).
Discrete Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problems

A discrete temporal constraint satisfaction problem is a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) over the set of integers whose constraint language consists of relations that are first-order definable over the order of the integers. We prove that every discrete temporal CSP is in P or NP-complete, unless it can be formulated as a finite domain CSP, in which case the computational complexity is not known in general.
Limitations of Gene Duplication Models: Evolution of Modules in Protein Interaction Networks

It has been generally acknowledged that the module structure of protein interaction networks plays a crucial role with respect to the functional understanding of these networks. In this paper, we study evolutionary aspects of the module structure of protein interaction networks, which forms a mesoscopic level of description with respect to the architectural principles of networks. The purpose of this paper is to investigate limitations of well known gene duplication models by showing that these models are lacking crucial structural features present in protein interaction networks on a mesoscopic scale. This observation reveals our incomplete understanding of the structural evolution of protein networks on the module level.
Understanding regional context of World Wide Web using common crawl corpus

The World Wide Web has emerged as the most important and essential tool for the society. Today, people heavily rely on rich resources available in the web for communication, business, maps, and social networking etc. In addition, people seek web content in their preferred regional language besides English. The global statistics of the world wide web are well known, however, the regional context of the world wide web is poorly understood. This paper presents large scale web study using Common Crawl Corpus of December 2016. We examine 200+ terabytes of data with Amazon's Elastic MapReduce infrastructure. We analyze 2.87 billion web documents with respect to content type, domains, and content language. Furthermore, we explore multi-lingual web pages for European and Asian languages. Our results show that 97.8% of web documents present in our data are “text/html”. In addition, 57.2% of web documents contain content in the English language. Moreover, web content in Russian language has 5.7% share which is more that any other European language. Furthermore, we found that 60.6% of web documents have content exclusively in the English language. Finally, we found that Japanese and traditional Chinese language content dominate the Asian web pages with 1.89% and 1.23% share. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large scale web study to explore the language mix present in the web documents.
Determination of thermal histories of coke in blast furnace through X-ray analysis

Abstract A study has been undertaken to identify the source of coke fines sampled from the deadman area of the blast furnace. Using measurements of the coke crystallite dimension L C, it was established that some of the fines found in the deadman area of a blast furnace were not simply the degradation products of the lump coke in this area. The L C was measured using standard X-ray analysis techniques. The coke fines had a higher L C than the coke lump and therefore have experienced a higher maximum temperature than the associated coke lump. This finding has been interpreted as at least some of the coke fines found in the deadman area (lower temperature region) have been blown there from the raceway by the high velocity hot blast.
MIB-1 Is Required for Spermatogenesis and Facilitates LIN-12 and GLP-1 Activity in Caenorhabditis elegans

Covalent attachment of ubiquitin to substrate proteins changes their function or marks them for proteolysis, and the specificity of ubiquitin attachment is mediated by the numerous E3 ligases encoded by animals. Mind Bomb is an essential E3 ligase during Notch pathway signaling in insects and vertebrates. While Caenorhabditis elegans encodes a Mind Bomb homolog (mib-1), it has never been recovered in the extensive Notch suppressor/enhancer screens that have identified numerous pathway components. Here, we show that C. elegans mib-1 null mutants have a spermatogenesis-defective phenotype that results in a heterogeneous mixture of arrested spermatocytes, defective spermatids, and motility-impaired spermatozoa. mib-1 mutants also have chromosome segregation defects during meiosis, molecular null mutants are intrinsically temperature-sensitive, and many mib-1 spermatids contain large amounts of tubulin. These phenotypic features are similar to the endogenous RNA intereference (RNAi) mutants, but mib-1 mutants do not affect RNAi. MIB-1 protein is expressed throughout the germ line with peak expression in spermatocytes followed by segregation into the residual body during spermatid formation. C. elegans mib-1 expression, while upregulated during spermatogenesis, also occurs somatically, including in vulva precursor cells. Here, we show that mib-1 mutants suppress both lin-12 and glp-1 (C. elegans Notch) gain-of-function mutants, restoring anchor cell formation and a functional vulva to the former and partly restoring oocyte production to the latter. However, suppressed hermaphrodites are only observed when grown at 25°, and they are self-sterile. This probably explains why mib-1 was not previously recovered as a Notch pathway component in suppressor/enhancer selection experiments.
Physical properties of lead free solders in liquid and solid state

Miller, Paces and Komarek (MPK) [Trans. Metall Soc. AIME 230 (1964) 1557] observed an influence of the history of a melt on the electrical resistivity of several cadmium–antimony alloys. In this work we complete the experimental work of MPK with new accurate experiments in order to verify the existence of the phenomenon and to precise by defining the conditions where it appears. We used three important improvements on the experimental design of MPK. First we used quartz cells instead of pyrex cells used by MPK so allowing the heating of the melt well above the temperature of 530 C attained by MPK. Secondly our experimental design allows to mix mechanically the liquid alloy in order to achieve a macroscopic homogeneity of the melt. Finally we measure simultaneously the thermopower of the Cd60–Sb40 liquid alloy. The time evolution of our experiment is fully described with our conclusions. # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy for the detection and study of single molecules in biology.

The recent development of single molecule detection techniques has opened new horizons for the study of individual macromolecules under physiological conditions. Conformational subpopulations, internal dynamics and activity of single biomolecules, parameters that have so far been hidden in large ensemble averages, are now being unveiled. Herein, we review a particular attractive solution-based single molecule technique, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). This time-averaging fluctuation analysis which is usually performed in Confocal setups combines maximum sensitivity with high statistical confidence. FCS has proven to be a very versatile and powerful tool for detection and temporal investigation of biomolecules at ultralow concentrations on surfaces, in solution, and in living cells. The introduction of dual-color cross-correlation and two-photon excitation in FCS experiments is currently increasing the number of promising applications of FCS to biological research.
A National Job Analysis of Certified Diabetes Educators by the National Certification Board for Diabetes Educators

PURPOSE The job analysis described in this report was conducted by the National Certification Board for Diabetes Educators (NCBDE) to (1) provide a basis for documenting the continuing validity of the certified diabetes educator examination (CDE), (2) define areas that should be assessed in future certification examinations, and (3) ensure that the content of certification examinations is job related. METHODS A diabetes educator job task list was developed and used to create a job analysis survey. The survey was distributed randomly to 1079 CDEs throughout the United States. RESULTS Of the 1079 surveys that were distributed, 327 were suitable for analysis, with relevant demographic subgroups adequately represented. An examination matrix and detailed content outline were constructed from the survey data that will be used by the NCBDE to assemble future test forms. CONCLUSIONS Specifications for the CDE examination were developed that were directly related to the important activities that diabetes educators perform. Future forms of the CDE examination will be matched to job-related, criterion-referenced test specifications and will have strong evidence of content validity. Future forms of the exam will contain 200 items at specified cognitive levels with a representative sampling of tasks within 4 core areas from the detailed content outline.
A learning analytics tool for monitoring and improving students' learning process

A learning analytics tool that facilitates teachers in monitoring students' learning process and enables them to early recognize the signs of failure was developed. The tool was added to an e-learning system based on Moodle operated by a primary school. Two parallel classes (i.e., an experimental group and a control group) of students were involved in the research for duration of one semester. The statistical test results showed that better learning improvement occurred to the experimental group with an increase in the average marks by 5.3 (out of 100 points). The use of learning analytics has helped improve the effectiveness of the students' learning process.
Mental health literacy

Background Although the benefits of public knowledge of physical diseases are widely accepted, knowledge about mental disorders (mental health literacy) has been comparatively neglected. Aims To introduce the concept of mental health literacy to a wider audience, to bring together diverse research relevant to the topic and to identify gaps in the area. Method A narrative review within a conceptual framework. Results Many members of the public cannot recognise specific disorders or different types of psychological distress. They differ from mental health experts in their beliefs about the causes of mental disorders and the most effective treatments. Attitudes which hinder recognition and appropriate help-seeking are common. Much of the mental health information most readily available to the public is misleading. However, there is some evidence that mental health literacy can be improved. Conclusions If the public's mental health literacy is not improved, this may hinder public acceptance of evidence-based mental health care. Also, many people with common mental disorders may be denied effective self-help and may not receive appropriate support from others in the community.