Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pre-microRNA and Mature microRNA in Human Mitochondria

Background Because of the central functions of the mitochondria in providing metabolic energy and initiating apoptosis on one hand and the role that microRNA (miRNA) play in gene expression, we hypothesized that some miRNA could be present in the mitochondria for post-transcriptomic regulation by RNA interference. We intend to identify miRNA localized in the mitochondria isolated from human skeletal primary muscular cells. Methodology/Principal Findings To investigate the potential origin of mitochondrial miRNA, we in-silico searched for microRNA candidates in the mtDNA. Twenty five human pre-miRNA and 33 miRNA aligments (E-value<0.1) were found in the reference mitochondrial sequence and some of the best candidates were chosen for a co-localization test. In situ hybridization of pre-mir-302a, pre-let-7b and mir-365, using specific labelled locked nucleic acids and confocal microscopy, demonstrated that these miRNA were localized in mitochondria of human myoblasts. Total RNA was extracted from enriched mitochondria isolated by an immunomagnetic method from a culture of human myotubes. The detection of 742 human miRNA (miRBase) were monitored by RT-qPCR at three increasing mtRNA inputs. Forty six miRNA were significantly expressed (2nd derivative method Cp>35) for the smallest RNA input concentration and 204 miRNA for the maximum RNA input concentration. In silico analysis predicted 80 putative miRNA target sites in the mitochondrial genome (E-value<0.05). Conclusions/Significance The present study experimentally demonstrated for the first time the presence of pre-miRNA and miRNA in the human mitochondria isolated from skeletal muscular cells. A set of miRNA were significantly detected in mitochondria fraction. The origin of these pre-miRNA and miRNA should be further investigate to determine if they are imported from the cytosol and/or if they are partially processed in the mitochondria.
Identifying Testing Requirements for Modified Software

Throughout its lifetime, software must be changed for many reasons, such as bug fixing, performance tuning, and code restructuring. Testing modified software is the main activity performed to gain confidence that changes behave as they are intended and do not have adverse effects on the rest of the software. A fundamental problem of testing evolving software is determining whether test suites adequately exercise changes and, if not, providing suitable guidance for generating new test inputs that target the modified behavior. Existing techniques evaluate the adequacy of test suites based only on control- and data-flow testing criteria. They do not consider the effects of changes on program states and, thus, are not sufficiently strict to guarantee that the modified behavior is exercised. Also, because of the lack of this guarantee, these techniques can provide only limited guidance for generating new test inputs. This research has developed techniques that will assist testers in testing evolving software and provide confidence in the quality of modified versions. In particular, this research has developed a technique to identify testing requirements that ensure that the test cases satisfying them will result in different program states at pre-selected parts of the software. This research has also developed supporting techniques for identifying testing requirements. Such techniques include (1) a differencing technique, which computes differences and correspondences between two software versions and (2) two dynamic-impact-analysis techniques, which identify parts of software that are likely affected by changes with respect to a set of executions.
Symptomatic imperfections David Adger, Core syntax: a Minimalist approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+424. Andrew Radford, Minimalist syntax: exploring the structure of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+512.

Minimalist syntax and Core syntax are reasonably good textbooks. They should be very helpful indeed in teaching a syntax course on current Principles and Parameters theory (P&P; Chomsky 1981) that focuses on the Minimalist Program (MP; Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005). The books present a range of syntactic phenomena, which are for the most part discussed lucidly and illustrated by considerable relevant data. Nevertheless, the books are not pedagogically faultless and the pedagogical faults are often due to underlying theoretical problems.
Formalizando la informalidad empresarial en Colombia

Este trabajo presenta un modelo de equilibrio parcial dinamico de emprendedores que escogen establecerse en el sector formal o en el informal. Esta decision es el resultado de un analisis de los costos y beneficios estaticos y dinamicos asociados a operar en cada uno de los dos sectores que incluyen los costos salariales, las tasas impositivas, los costos de crear y liquidar una empresa formal y la posibilidad de acceder al sistema financiero. El modelo es calibrado para replicar tanto el promedio como una medida de la dispersion del valor agregado relativo del sector formal versus el sector informal en Colombia para el periodo 2000-2007. Posteriormente, el trabajo investiga el impacto de diversas politicas de formalizacion sobre el tamano relativo del sector formal. Las simulaciones encuentran que reducciones en los costos asociados a operar en el sector formal pueden conducir a aumentos considerables en el tamano relativo del sector formal. El costo de montar una empresa, en especial, tiene efectos grandes sobre el tamano de la formalidad. Los resultados sugieren, entonces, que el marco legal de regulacion del sector formal en Colombia actua como una barrera importante para la formalizacion empresarial.
A Little Bit of Labeled Data Can Get You Started Helping Mobile Apps Bootstrap with Fewer Users

A growing number of mobile apps are exploiting smartphone sensors to infer user behavior, activity, or context. Inference requires training using labeled ground truth data. Obtaining labeled data for new apps is a “chicken-egg” problem. Without a reasonable amount of labeled data, apps cannot provide any service. But until an app provides useful service it is not worth installing and has no opportunity to collect user data. This paper aims to address this problem. Our intuition is that even though users are different, they exhibit similar patterns on certain sensing dimensions. For instance, different users may walk and drive at different speeds, but certain speeds will indicate driving for all users. These common patterns could be used as “seeds” to model new users through semi-supervised learning. We prototype a technique to automatically extract the commonalities to seed personalized inference models for new users. We evaluate the proposed technique through example apps and real world data.
Cognitive Single-Carrier Systems: Joint Impact of Multiple Licensed Transceivers

In this paper, the impact of interference from multiple licensed transceivers on cognitive underlay single-carrier systems is examined. Specifically, the situation is considered in which the secondary network is limited by three key parameters: 1) maximum transmit power at the secondary transmitter, 2) peak interference power at the primary receivers, and 3) interference power from the primary transmitters. For this cognitive underlay single-carrier system, the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of the secondary network is obtained for transmission over frequency-selective fading channels. Based on this, a new closed-form expression for the cumulative distribution function of the SIR is evaluated, from which the outage probability and the ergodic capacity are derived. Further insights are established by analyzing the asymptotic outage probability and the asymptotic ergodic capacity in the high-transmission-power regime. In particular, it is corroborated that the asymptotic outage diversity gain is equal to the multipath gain of the frequency-selective channel in the secondary network. The asymptotic ergodic capacity also gives new insight into the additional power cost for different network parameters while maintaining a specified target ergodic capacity. Illustrative numerical examples are presented to validate the outage probability and ergodic capacity under different interference power profiles.
Youth-Driven HIV Prevention Programmes in South Africa: Social Capital, Empowerment and Conscientisation

Abstract The community-level attributes of two youth HIV prevention initiatives in a single community are examined using the concepts of social capital, empowerment and critical consciousness. The school-based peer education programme and youth-initiated public clinic ‘add-on’ facility for the treatment of adolescent sexually transmitted diseases had differing experiences in terms of implementation, community acceptance, sustainability and achieving their goals. By examining the role of conscientization, networks for accessing resources and power, and community acceptability of adolescent HIV prevention, this paper describes the differing experiences of these two programmes. The paper indicates the need for true adolescent agency in challenging the social constructions of adolescent HIV risk at the social and community levels.
Crosstalk minimization in four-layer non-Manhattan channel routing

It's well known that a non-Manhattan channel router always uses no more tracks than a Manhattan channel router. For a bubble-sorting-based non-Manhattan channel, all of the nets can be routed by bubble-sorting swap passes in an optimal bubble-sorting solution, and these bubble-sorting swap passes can be further mapped onto track-to-track-routing processes in a 4-layer routing model. However, these proposed bubble-sorting-based non-Manhattan routers do not consider crosstalk or consider less, which has become a major issue in VLSI design due to the high frequency, long interconnecting lines and small spacing between interconnects in today's integrated circuits. In this paper, we study the problem of crosstalk minimization in a bubble-sorting based non-Manhattan channel. A rerouting algorithm that combines segment-rerouting technique and layer reassignment is presented. This algorithm can decrease the wire length and modify the layout so that the crosstalk in the channel is minimized. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can reduce the crosstalk by an average of 27.9 % on a set of benchmark examples.
Cleistogamy in Scutellaria indica (Labiatae): effective mating system and population genetic structure

Scutellaria indica is a perennial herb with both chasmogamous (CH) and cleistogamous (CL) flowers on the same plant in some populations, and only CL flowers in other populations. Actual seed production by CH and CL flowers was investigated in populations of S. indica. The average seed set of CL flowers was 19 times higher than CH flowers, indicating much greater fertilization success. The CL seeds were also significantly heavier than the CH seeds. However, the resource cost of producing a CH flower was much higher than that of producing a CL flower. The CH flower was approximately seven times larger, and its pollen/ovule ratio was approximately five times higher than that of CL flowers. The level and pattern of genetic diversity at both allozyme and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) levels were consistent with a predominantly selfing system in the species. The average amount of within‐population genetic variation was extremely low (A = 1.025, P = 2.36%, HO = 0.001 and HE = 0.008 based on allozyme data, and P = 8.94% and HE = 0.03 based on RAPD data). At the species level, the estimates of total gene diversity (HT) were 0.101 based on allozyme data and 0.139 based on RAPD data. A very high level of genetic differentiation occurred between populations (allozyme GST = 0.92 and RAPD GST = 0.81). Genetic drift coupled with predominant cleistogamous selfing apparently played the major role in determining the population genetic structure in S. indica. Although the features associated with CH and CL flower and seed production seem to be sufficient for the evolution of complete cleistogamy in S. indica, random fixation of alternative alleles for dimorphic or complete cleistogamy in small populations could maintain the multiple strategy of chasmogamous and cleistogamous reproduction in the species.
Anisotropic Solvent Model of the Lipid Bilayer. 2. Energetics of Insertion of Small Molecules, Peptides, and Proteins in Membranes

A new computational approach to calculating binding energies and spatial positions of small molecules, peptides, and proteins in the lipid bilayer has been developed. The method combines an anisotropic solvent representation of the lipid bilayer and universal solvation model, which predicts transfer energies of molecules from water to an arbitrary medium with defined polarity properties. The universal solvation model accounts for hydrophobic, van der Waals, hydrogen-bonding, and electrostatic solute-solvent interactions. The lipid bilayer is represented as a fluid anisotropic environment described by profiles of dielectric constant (ε), solvatochromic dipolarity parameter (π*), and hydrogen bonding acidity and basicity parameters (α and β). The polarity profiles were calculated using published distributions of quasi-molecular segments of lipids determined by neutron and X-ray scattering for DOPC bilayer and spin-labeling data that define concentration of water in the lipid acyl chain region. The model also accounts for the preferential solvation of charges and polar groups by water and includes the effect of the hydrophobic mismatch for transmembrane proteins. The method was tested on calculations of binding energies and preferential positions in membranes for small-molecules, peptides and peripheral membrane proteins that have been experimentally studied. The new theoretical approach was implemented in a new version (2.0) of our PPM program and applied for the large-scale calculations of spatial positions in membranes of more than 1000 peripheral and integral proteins. The results of calculations are deposited in the updated OPM database ( http://opm.phar.umich.edu ).
The performance of an efficient zero-knowledge identification scheme

- Fiat and Shamir have proposed to use Zero-Knowledge interactive proofs to obtain secure identification mechanisms. Zero-Knowledge protocols are designed to address the identification service, by allowing a prover to demonstrate knowledge of a secret while revealing no information to be use by the verifier to convey the demonstration of knowledge to others. The invention of an efficient Zero-Knowledge identification scheme has provided anther public-key cryptosystem besides the renowned Fiat-Shamir scheme, for which in addition to the identification feature both key exchange and mutual identification are available. The availability of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem made the invented scheme very efficient. The purpose of this paper is to show the security level performance of our scheme and show its ability to resist the brute-force attack of an unauthorized prover.
Understanding minds and understanding communicated meanings in schizophrenia

The work reported in this paper investigated the putative functional dependence of pragmatic language skills on general mind-reading capacity by testing theory-of-mind abilities and understanding of non-literal speech in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Patients showed difficulties with inferring mental states on a false-belief picture-sequencing task and with understanding metaphors and irony on a story-comprehension task. These difficulties were independent of low verbal IQ and a more generalised problem inhibiting prepotent information. Understanding of metaphors and understanding of irony made significant and independent contributions to discriminating patients from controls, suggesting that metaphor and irony make distinct pragmatic demands.
The Economic Value of Office Clusters

This study seeks to provide supportive information for the planning of existing or new employment centers in metropolitan regions. It examines how the spatial concentration of office uses and their combination with other land uses affects the assessed value of office properties. The goal is to measure the spatial clustering of office uses and the clusters' physical characteristics to quantify their association with office property values. The characteristics of interest include cluster size, regional location and relationship to transportation infrastructure, internal land use mix, and transportation network. The study revealed that recent office development has continued to benefit economically from agglomeration. Office property values seemed to be most positively affected by, in order of importance, the intensity of office development, a central regional location, and the clustering or agglomeration of office parcels.
Human Behavior Recognition with Generic Exponential Family Duration Modeling in the Hidden Semi-Markov Model

The ability to learn and recognize human activities of daily living (ADLs) is important in building pervasive and smart environments. In this paper, we tackle this problem using the hidden semi-Markov model. We discuss the state-of-the-art duration modeling choices and then address a large class of exponential family distributions to model state durations. Inference and learning are efficiently addressed by providing a graphical representation for the model in terms of a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN). We investigate both discrete and continuous distributions from the exponential family (Poisson and inverse Gaussian respectively) for the problem of learning and recognizing ADLs. A full comparison between the exponential family duration models and other existing models including the traditional multinomial and the new Coxian are also presented. Our work thus completes a thorough investigation into the aspect of duration modeling and its application to human activities recognition in a real-world smart home surveillance scenario
"Crowd logistics": the contribution of social crowds in logistics activities

Purpose The paper aims to provide the necessary basis for a novel interdisciplinary research field. Various types and implementations of crowdsourcing have emerged in the market; many of them are related to logistics. While we can identify plenty of crowd logistics applications using information technology capabilities and information sharing in practice, theories behind this phenomenon have received only limited attention. This paper accounts for filling this research gap by analyzing the crowd’s contributions in logistics of goods and information. Design/methodology/approach This paper is part of an ongoing research endeavor in the field of location-based crowdsourcing. It represents conceptual work that builds on a literature review enriched with an in-depth analysis of real-world examples in the field of crowd logistics. Using a scoring method, we provide an example how a company may evaluate the alternatives of crowd logistics. The main approach is an analysis of variants of how the social crowd may be integrated in logistics processes. The work is conceptual in its core. Thereby, we use real-world examples of crowdsourcing applications to underpin the evaluated variants of crowd logistics. Findings The paper presents relevant theoretical background on crowd logistics. The authors differentiate between variants of crowd logistics with their flow of materials, goods and information. Thereby they zoom in the type, significance and process flow of the crowd’s contributions. They discuss potential advantages and challenges of logistics with the performing crowd and deeply discuss opportunities and challenges from a business and from an individual’s perspective. Finally, they highlight a route map for future research directions in this novel interdisciplinary research field. Research limitations/implications As this work is conceptual in its core, generalizations may be drawn only with great care. Still, we are in a position to propose a route map for further research in this area in this paper. Also the integration of an analysis of a scale of real-world applications allows us to highlight our research’s practical relevance and implications. Originality/value The main contribution of this paper is an in-depth analysis and consolidation of innovative crowd logistics applications to provide an overview on recent implementations. The authors propose a categorization scheme and contribute with a route map for further research in the field of crowd logistics.
The Effects of 12-Week Aerobic Exercises on Rate of Mental Health in Male Students of Ahvaz Payam Noor University

The Effects of 12-Week Aerobic Exercises on Rate of Mental Health in Male Students of Ahvaz Payam Noor UniversityPurpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of 12-week aerobic exercises on self-esteem, social desirability and rate of mental health in male students of Payam Noor University (PNU). Basic procedures. For this reason we used male college students (n = 80, age = 22 ± 2. 1) who did not do any sport. They were randomly assigned to experimental (n = 40) and control (n = 40) groups, after having been selected via stratified random sampling among students of Ahvaz Payam Noor University. Also, to collect data there were implemented the Cooper test and the general health questionnaire of Goldberg (GHQ) and social desirability questionnaire of Crowne-Marlowe. Main findings. Statistical analysis showed that training like aerobic exercises is related to a significant improvement in mental health, self-esteem and social desirability because of favorable changes in some of physiological and psychological parameters. Conclusions. This study was of a semi-experimental type (pre-test, post-test). Data analyzed by Multivariate Analysis Of Variance (MANOVA) at p value (p = 0.05) revealed that there were significant differences between experimental group and control group, in mental health, self-esteem and social desirability.
Evolution of Catkins: Inflorescence Morphology of Selected Salicaceae in an Evolutionary and Developmental Context

Poplars (Populus sp.) and willows (Salix sp.) are well known woody plants common throughout the northern hemisphere, both with fully sequenced genomes. They bear compact unisexual inflorescences known as “catkins. ” Closely related genera of the “salicoid clade” within the family Salicaceae include the Asian genera Bennettiodendron, Idesia, Itoa, Poliothyrsis, and Carrierea and the Central American genera Olmediella and Macrohasseltia. Like willow and poplar, most of these genera are dioecious, but unlike willow and poplar they generally have loosely branched panicles rather than catkins, and less highly reduced flowers. However, the early developing inflorescences of Carrierea and Idesia show similarities to catkins which suggest possible pathways by which the salicoid catkin may have evolved.
Correction of misaligned slices in multi-slice MR cardiac examinations by using slice-to-volume registration

One of the main challenges with magnetic resonance (MR) cardiac image acquisition is to account for cardiac motion due to respiration. A popular technique to reduce respiratory motion is to perform a multi-slice acquisition in which a patient holds their breath multiple times during the scan. This paper explores the feasibility of using rigid slice-to-volume registration to correct for misalignments of slice stacks in such images due to differing breath-hold positions. The experimental results indicate that slice-to-volume registration is sufficiently accurate and robust to compensate for the typical misalignments expected. We show that correction of misalignments in such data results in anatomically more correct images, as well as improved left ventricular volume measurements. It also shows that by correcting for misalignments in short axis (SA) images, one can improve the interstudy reproducibility and hence reduce the number of samples needed for cardiac MR studies to show the same statistical significance