Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcriptomic analysis of fruit stored under cold conditions using controlled atmosphere in Prunus persica cv. “Red Pearl”

Cold storage (CS) can induce a physiological disorder known as chilling injury (CI) in nectarine fruits. The main symptom is mealiness that is perceived as non-juicy fruit by consumers. Postharvest treatments such as controlled atmosphere (CA; a high CO2 concentration and low O2) have been used under cold conditions to avoid this disorder. With the objective of exploring the mechanisms involved in the CA effect on mealiness prevention, we analyzed transcriptomic changes under six conditions of “Red Pearl” nectarines by RNA-Seq. Our analysis included just harvested nectarines, juicy non-stored fruits, fruits affected for CI after CS and fruits stored in a combination of CA plus CS without CI phenotype. Nectarines stored in cold conditions combined with CA treatment resulted in less mealiness; we obtained 21.6% of juice content compared with just CS fruits (7.7%; mealy flesh). RNA-Seq data analyses were carried out to study the gene expression for different conditions assayed. During ripening, we detected that nectarines exposed to CA treatment expressed a similar number of genes compared with fruits that were not exposed to cold conditions. Firm fruits have more differentially expressed genes than soft fruits, which suggest that most important changes occur during CS. On the other hand, gene ontology analysis revealed enrichment mainly in metabolic and cellular processes. Differentially expressed genes analysis showed that low O2 concentrations combined with cold conditions slows the metabolic processes more than just the cold storage, resulting mainly in the suppression of primary metabolism and cold stress response. This is a significant step toward unraveling the molecular mechanism that explains the effectiveness of CA as a tool to prevent CI development on fruits.
Does The Sensory Order Have a Useful Economic Future ?

F.A. Hayek’s theoretical psychology was developed in his 1952 book, The Sensory Order. Because economists have increasingly become interested in cognition and psychology, this work has valuable implications for economic science. Nevertheless, these implications have sometimes been obscured by bogus interpretations of the book. We address down such interpretations of Hayek and suggest some ways in which the message of The Sensory Order matters for economic research today.
A Theory of Intervalence Band Stark Effects

The response of an intervalence band to an applied electric field, called an intervalence band Stark effect, is considered in detail. Because the application of an electric field to a symmetric mixed-valence complex will break its symmetry in a way that depends on the strength of the field and the orientation of the complex in the field, it is necessary to identify the most general treatment of the asymmetric vibronic coupling problem for the calculation of intervalence band Stark effects. For this reason three previous treatments of the asymmetric vibronic coupling problem are reviewed. Each treatment is found to be less appropriate for the calculation of intervalence band Stark effects than a fourth that we introduce. It is also shown that a common choice of vibrational basis in these treatments can lead to inaccurate calculations for some mixed-valence complexes; an alternative is recommended. Particular attention is paid to the effects of the field on the line shapes of intervalence bands and the site.
Boosting Logical Attack Graph for Efficient Security Control

This paper reports an approach, which is termed AG-HMM, to achieve cost-effective security control by exploring logical attack graph to represent network observations, and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to estimate attack states. One advantage of our approach is to construct a probabilistic mapping between network observations and attack states, potentially revealing the most significant vulnerabilities and allowing security administrators (SA) to efficiently deal with them through cost-benefit analysis. A preliminary experiment is conducted to evaluate our approach in a typical enterprise network.
Enhancement of security mechanism for confidential data using AES-128, 192 and 256bit encryption in cloud

T Cloud computing is facing several issues regarding security. To provide security major companies are using Advance Encryption Standard (AES) encryption technology. AES is using mainly 3 types of encryption keys: 128bit key encryption, 192bit key encryption and 256bit key encryption which are using 10, 12 and 14 iterations respectively. All these are using the plain text block of size 128bit. In proposed architecture, the cloud user will be facilitated with all the 3 encryption techniques 128, 192 and 256bits to choose and based on the size of the data the encryption process can be done. By that they can make easy to store their data by using this three encryption techniques.
Trends in the Social Responsibility Expenditures of Small and Medium Enterprises from Oradea

In the context of corporate social responsibility studies there is a gap in understanding these actions at small and medium enterprises (SME). The processes stimulating social expenditures and the motivations in doing so at this level would provide useful information in explaining this phenomenon. At large corporations CSR is part of strategies, there are employees dealing with it managing CSR budgets. However only in smaller enterprises we can understand the decisions to invest in social actions, the domains of such actions and their perceived impact. Our analysis investigates the social expenditures in the form of donations and sponsorship registered by SMEs reporting profit in Oradea. The data was extracted from the National Agency of Fiscal Administration regarding expenditures of small and medium enterprises in 2013. There are 20% of all SMEs that declare such costs, a percentage that we consider is significant for this phenomenon. In this paper, we explore the extent to which these investments vary depending on the size of the enterprise (measured as business rate and number of employees), profit and domain. As expected the bigger the firm, the higher are the chances to donate money and also the amount donated is higher. Future studies should focus on qualitative data mostly motivations of such expenditures. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n2s5p212
Housing Need and the Need for Housing

Housing is a basic human need. In an essentially prosperous country such as Britain, most people have access to housing. Perversely, this has led to more problems than existed when, in the fifties for example, there seemed to be a clear imperative to build more houses. Much of the existing stock is either in the wrong place, or of the wrong type and there remains a strong demand and need for new housing. This book seeks to address the lack of clear principles and practice in the process of adding to the existing stock. This is analyzed, and suggestions are made for a more coherent approach.
Asset Pricing in the Presence of Social Interaction

What is the mechanism that determines market prices of financial assets? The literature of modern finance theory brought out models in order to propose an answer to this question. These models presume that all market participants act strictly rationally. With this very restrictive assumption, modern finance models fail to explain short term phenomena, like temporary deviations of the asset price from the fundamental value of the asset, e.g. speculative bubbles, referred as the equity puzzle in this paper. The upcoming literature of behavioural finance theory loosens the restrictive assumptions of modern finance theory in favour of the acceptance of an investor’s irrationality. Many efforts have been undertaken so far to solve the equity puzzle by the aid of the various aspects from behavioural finance. The purpose of this paper is also attempting to explain the phenomena of the equity puzzle, however the integrated asset pricing model provided here is quite different compared to former approaches. The aspects from behavioural finance can be differentiated into psychological and sociological aspects. Special attention is dedicated to the behavioural aspects from sociology, as social interaction between the investors is a mechanism that can either reduce or amplify the likelihood of the occurrence of abnormal phenomena in the sense of modern finance theory.
Telling a Story on a Tag: The Importance of Markers' Visual Design for Real World Applications

Tag recognition can be a convenient and quick information access method for mobile applications. Tags act like URLs allowing users to leave and retrieve digital information associated to physical objects or locations. Visual tag can be recognized using standard digital cameras, now common on commercial mobile phones. This paper demonstrates an application of d-touch, a visual tag recognition system running on Symbian OS phones that leaves considerable freedom in the graphic design of the tags. The design process for visual tags to be used in a urban Ubicomp project is presented, highlighting the importance of the graphic design of tags for real-world applications.
The Electoral Advantage to Incumbency and Voters&Apos; Valuation of Politicians&Apos; Experience: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Elections to the U.S..

Using data on elections to the United States House of Representatives (1946-1998), this paper exploits a quasi-experiment generated by the electoral system in order to determine if political incumbency provides an electoral advantage - an implicit first-order prediction of principal-agent theories of politician and voter behavior. Candidates who just barely won an election (barely became the incumbent) are likely to be ex ante comparable in all other ways to candidates who barely lost, and so their differential electoral outcomes in the next election should represent a true incumbency advantage. The regression discontinuity analysis provides striking evidence that incumbency has a significant causal effect of raising the probability of subsequent electoral success - by about 0.40 to 0.45. Simulations - using estimates from a structural model of individual voting behavior - imply that about two-thirds of the apparent electoral success of incumbents can be attributed to voters' valuation of politicians' experience. The quasi-experimental analysis also suggest that heuristic 'fixed effects' and 'instrumental variable' modeling approaches would have led to misleading inferences in this context.
Influenza and Memory T Cells: How to Awake the Force

Annual influenza vaccination is an effective way to prevent human influenza. Current vaccines are mainly focused on eliciting a strain-matched humoral immune response, requiring yearly updates, and do not provide protection for all vaccinated individuals. The past few years, the importance of cellular immunity, and especially memory T cells, in long-lived protection against influenza virus has become clear. To overcome the shortcomings of current influenza vaccines, eliciting both humoral and cellular immunity is imperative. Today, several new vaccines such as infection-permissive and recombinant T cell inducing vaccines, are being developed and show promising results. These vaccines will allow us to stay several steps ahead of the constantly evolving influenza virus.
An ultra-wide band based ad hoc networking scheme for personnel tracking in emergencies

This paper describes an ultra wideband (UWB) based ad hoc networking scheme which enables a control center to track all emergency personnel deployed in buildings in an incident area, and also enables communication of other types of data directed from emergency personnel, including status information and alarm in particular. In this network, GPS-enabled vehicles form a coordination reference framework. They also serve as egress points to collect data generated by emergency personnel. Additional dropped terminals are used to expand the network coverage. A Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based medium access protocol is used by terminals to access the radio channel. An anycast routing protocol is proposed and designed. This protocol enables each ad hoc device attached to emergency personnel to discover a communication path to one of the egress points. The network management related information is included in packet headers. Thus terminals can select free time slots and construct routes by overhearing neighborpsilas transmissions. Taking the advantage of the periodically nature of position calculation and reporting, each terminal is maintained with up-to-date network status.
MapReduce over the Hybrid Cloud: A Novel Infrastructure Management Policy

Over the last few years, the context of big data has gained a significant traction due to many factors. While the public cloud model had been deeply studied to face the increasing demand for large-scale data processing capabilities, many organizations are now focusing on the hybrid cloud model, where the classic scenario is enriched with a private (company owned) cloud -- e.g., for the management of sensible data. In this work, we propose HyMR, a policy to enable autonomic cloud bursting for clusters of virtual machines operating MapReduce jobs over a hybrid cloud. This policy -- together with an infrastructure level system for resource provisioning in hybrid clouds -- can be used to face the temporary (or permanent) lack of computational resources on the private cloud, allowing cloud bursting in the context of big data applications. By means of an empirical evaluation of the system scale-up/-down performance, we show that HyMR policy allows the user to significantly reduce the data-processing time.
In-fusion expression and characterization of β-xylanase and β-1,3-1,4-glucanase in Pichia pastoris

Two chimeric genes, XynA-Bs-Glu-1 and XynA-Bs-Glu-2, encoding Aspergillus sulphureus β-xylanase (XynA, 26 kDa) and Bacillus subtilis β-1,3-1,4-glucanase (Bs-Glu, 30 kDa), were constructed via in-fusion by different linkers and expressed successfully in Pichia pastoris. The fusion protein (50 kDa) exhibited both β-xylanase and β-1,3-1,4-glucanase activities. Compared with parental enzymes, the moiety activities were decreased in fermentation supernatants. Parental XynA and Bs-Glu were superior to corresponding moieties in each fusion enzymes because of lower Kn higher kcat. Despite some variations, common optima were generally 50°C and pH 3.4 for the XynA moiety and parent, and 40°C and pH 6.4 for the Bs-Glu counterparts. Thus, the fusion enzyme XynA-Bs-Glu-1 and XynA-Bs-Glu-2 were bifunctional.
Minimum Eccentricity Multicast Trees

We consider the problem of constructing a multicast tree that connects a group of source nodes to a group of sink nodes (receivers) and minimizes the maximum end-to-end delay between any pair of source/sink nodes. This is known as the \emphminimum eccentricity multicast tree problem, and is directly related to the quality of service requirements of real multipoint applications. We deal directly with the problem in its general form, meaning that the sets of source and sink nodes need not be overlapping nor disjoint. The main contribution of this work is a polynomial algorithm for this problem on general networks which is inspired by an innovative method that uses geometric relationships on the xy-plane.
Auto-regulation of cell morphology during cell migration: Exploration using computational modeling

Cell migration plays an important role in many biological processes including development, morphogenesis and pathological conditions like cancer invasion. Cell shows drastic changes in cell morphology and cell size during directed-migration as well as random migration. While understanding the mechanism through which a cell controls its shape/size can play a significant role in improving our understanding of biological systems, the involvement of multiple length/time scales make the experimental exploration of the mechanism very difficult. In the past few decades, control theoretic approaches/tools have proven to be a great facilitator of study and development of cell biology. In this study, we present a simple spring-bead model of a cell to study it's shape and size dynamics during cell migration. The model incorporates the effect of plasma membrane tension, internal pressure and chemoattractant forces on the cell dynamics. In spite of having a significantly lesser number of model parameters, our model recapitulates many features of a real cell including cell polarization, cell cringing, steering, gradient sensing and directed migration. Present work demonstrates cell shape and size dynamics in the presence of external signals such as chemotaxis.
Evaluation of lemon fruit extract as an antioxidant agent against histopathological changes induced by cyclophosphamide in the testes of albino mice

Introduction The aim of this study was to determine the protective effects of lemon fruit extracts (LFE) against histopathological changes induced in the testes of male mice treated with cyclophosphamide (CP). Methods Thirty male mice were divided evenly into six groups: 1) group 1: the controls, 2) group 2: treated with LFE (10 ml/kg b wt.), 3) group 3: treated with CP (10 mg/kg b wt.), 4) group 4: treated with CP (20 mg/kg b wt.), 5) group 5: treated with LFE (10 ml/kg) + CP (10 mg/kg), 6) group 6: treated with LFE (10 ml/kg) + CP (20 mg/kg). Results Histological examination of the testes of mice treated with CP revealed histopathological changes, such as atrophy, degeneration, incomplete spermatogenic series in most seminiferous tubules, and spermatogenic necrosis with pyknotic nuclei. Advanced degree of improvement was seen in testes of mice treated with LFE co-administered with CP. Most of the seminiferous tubules restored their normal structure and spermatogenic layers appeared semi-normal with complete spermatogenic series. Conclusion Lemon fruit extract in conjunction with drug treatment protects the testicular tissue against CP-induced testicular injury in mice.
The Double TSP with Multiple Stacks-Formulation and Heuristic Solution Approaches

This paper introduces the Double Travelling Salesman Problem with Multiple Stacks and presents three different metaheuristic approaches to its solution. The Double TSP with Multiple Stacks is concerned with determining the shortest route performing pickups and deliveries in two separated networks (one for pickups and one for deliveries) using only one container. Repacking is not allowed, instead each item can be positioned in one of several rows in the container, such that each row can be considered a LIFO stack, but no mutual constraints exist between the rows. Two different neighbourhood structures are developed for the problem and used with each of the heuristics. Finally some computational results are given along with lower bounds on the objective value.
DHEA administration in poor responders

may have been influenced by the presence of M540 bodies. M540 bodies are indeed mysterious structures. They stain positively with merocyanine, a fluorescent membrane probe normally associated with the measurement of membrane potential and disorder, and also generate signals in the TUNEL assay, even though these structures do not stain with DNA sensitive fluorochromes such as YOPRO-1 (Marchiani et al., 2007, Fig 2A). We are certainly intrigued by M540 bodies but doubt that their presence had a significant impact on the results of our paper for the following reasons: (1) Percoll centrifugation effectively removes M540 bodies from human sperm suspensions so, for all of the results reported in our paper that involved sperm preparation by discontinuous gradient centrifugation, M540 body contamination would not have been an issue. (2) While it remains theoretically possible that the presence of M540 bodies affected our analysis of 'unfractionated' semen samples, this does to seem to have been the case for our cohort of subjects. Thus, while we have recently been able to confirm the presence of M540 bodies in semen samples from our patients and donors, we found that these structures were present in insufficient numbers to influence our patient versus donor comparison. (3) This difference with Muratori's analyses may be due to the fact that our patient population comprised unselected subjects attending our local IVF clinical who possessed semen quality that was essentially normal (See Fig. 1 of our original paper). If, like Marchiani et al. (2007), we had selected patients with severe defects in their semen profile, including oligoasthenotera-tozoospermia, then M540 bodies might well have had a more significant influence on our results. Further studies with more seriously compromised semen samples will be needed to establish this point. (4) In our unfractionated samples, the threshold for discriminating abnormally high levels of TUNEL and 8-hydroxy-2 ′-deoxyguano-sine (8-OHdG) reactivity was around 40% for both criteria, in keeping with the fact that levels of TUNEL positivity and 8-OHdG formation were highly correlated (Aitken et al., 2010, Fig. 2). This correlation would not have been impacted by the presence of M540 bodies because the latter contain no detectable DNA and so should not have stained with an antibody against 8-OHdG. Again, further studies will be needed to establish this point. (5) Muratori et al. suggest that 'The percentages of TUNEL in unse-lected semen are expected to be greater than those reported by Aitken et al., (2010)'. …
Stabilizing NMPC of wheeled mobile robots using open-source real-time software

In this paper, a recently developed open-source toolkit implementing fast nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) routines has been utilized to achieve the two main control objectives of nonholonomic mobile robots, namely, point stabilization and trajectory tracking. The stability of the controller has been guaranteed by adding final state equality constraint, which generally requires, for feasibility, long optimization horizon and hence is computationally demanding. In order to use the toolkit for real experiments, a C++ code, which couples the toolkit and a wheeled mobile robot research platform's software, has been developed. Full scale experiments have been conducted showing the applicability of the stabilizing terminal equality constraint NMPC, to wheeled mobile robots' control problems, in a real-time framework.
Visual Rhythm Detection and Its Applications in Interactive Multimedia

True multimedia experience involves multimodal media and their intrinsic interactions. This article identifies rhythm as the link between physical movement, other visual stimuli, and the musical art form. It describes two example interactive multimedia applications in which visual rhythm is extracted for synchronization of music and video to allow more intuitive interaction between a user and both audio and video content, leaving the door open for many potential innovative applications.
Robust Combiner for Obfuscators

Practical software hardening schemes are heuristic and are not proven to be secure. One technique to enhance security is robust combiners. An algorithm C is a robust combiner for speci cation S, e.g., privacy, if for any two implementations X and Y , of a cryptographic scheme, the combined scheme C(X, Y ) satis es S provided either X or Y satisfy S. We present the rst robust combiner for software hardening, speci cally for obfuscation [2]. Obfuscators are software hardening techniques that are employed to protect execution of programs in remote, hostile environment. Obfuscators protect the code (and secret data) of the program that is sent to the remote host for execution. Robust combiners are particularly important for software hardening, where there is no standard whose security is established. In addition, robust combiners for software hardening are interesting from software engineering perspective since they introduce new techniques of software only fault tolerance.