Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Grip Points with Human Hand

The aim of this work was to determine how an object of given shape should be grasped to maximize the grasping capacity of the human hand. To do that the model searches the optimal grip points on the object with the aim of maximizing the weight of the object lifted without slipping. The model solves both the equilibrium of the grasped object and the biomechanical constraints of the human hand, such as the stress limit of each muscle. To give some examples, grasps of three-dimensional (3D) objects of different shape and size were optimized. The results of the simulations done also allowed the identification of the parameters that further influence human grasping. Moreover, trials were done to prove the results given by the computational model.
Lsm Proteins Are Required for Normal Processing of Pre-tRNAs and Their Efficient Association with La-Homologous Protein Lhp1p

ABSTRACT Depletion of any of the five essential proteins Lsm2p to Lsm5p and Lsm8p leads to strong accumulation of all tested unspliced pre-tRNA species, as well as accumulation of 5′ and 3′ unprocessed species. Aberrant 3′-extended pre-tRNAs were detected, presumably due to stabilization of transcripts that fail to undergo correct transcription termination, and the accumulation of truncated tRNA fragments was also observed. Tandem affinity purification-tagged Lsm3p was associated with pre-tRNA primary transcripts and, less efficiently, with other unspliced pre-tRNA intermediates but not mature tRNAs. Association of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae La homologue Lhp1p with pre-tRNAs was reduced approximately threefold on depletion of Lsm3p or Lsm5p. The association of Lhp1p with larger RNA polymerase III transcripts, pre-RNase P RNA and the signal recognition particle RNA (scR1), was more drastically reduced. The impaired pre-tRNA processing seen on Lsm depletion is not, however, due solely to reduced Lhp1p association as evidenced by analysis of lhp1-Δ strains depleted of Lsm3p or Lsm5p. These data are consistent with roles for an Lsm complex as a chaperone that facilitates the efficient association of pre-tRNA processing factors with their substrates.
A study of ticks and tick-borne livestock pathogens in Pakistan

Background As obligate blood-feeding arthropods, ticks transmit pathogens to humans and domestic animals more often than other arthropod vectors. Livestock farming plays a vital role in the rural economy of Pakistan, and tick infestation causes serious problems with it. However, research on tick species diversity and tick-borne pathogens has rarely been conducted in Pakistan. In this study, a systematic investigation of the tick species infesting livestock in different ecological regions of Pakistan was conducted to determine the microbiome and pathobiome diversity in the indigenous ticks. Methodology/Principal findings A total of 3,866 tick specimens were morphologically identified as 19 different tick species representing three important hard ticks, Rhipicephalus, Haemaphysalis and Hyalomma, and two soft ticks, Ornithodorus and Argas. The bacterial diversity across these tick species was assessed by bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequencing using a 454-sequencing platform on 10 of the different tick species infesting livestock. The notable genera detected include Ralstonia, Clostridium, Staphylococcus, Rickettsia, Lactococcus, Lactobacillus, Corynebacterium, Enterobacter, and Enterococcus. A survey of Spotted fever group rickettsia from 514 samples from the 13 different tick species generated rickettsial-specific amplicons in 10% (54) of total ticks tested. Only three tick species Rhipicephalus microplus, Hyalomma anatolicum, and H. dromedarii had evidence of infection with “Candidatus Rickettsia amblyommii” a result further verified using a rompB gene-specific quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay. The Hyalomma ticks also tested positive for the piroplasm, Theileria annulata, using a qPCR assay. Conclusions/Significance This study provides information about tick diversity in Pakistan, and pathogenic bacteria in different tick species. Our results showed evidence for Candidatus R. amblyommii infection in Rhipicephalus microplus, H. anatolicum, and H. dromedarii ticks, which also carried T. annulata.
On-Line Digital Computer System for Measurementof Partial Discharges in Insulation Structures

An outline is given of the nature of partial dischargesoccurring in insulation structures, in particular in oil impregnatedconfigurations. It is suggested that conventional discharge measuringsystems are not always able to assess significant parameters becausemuch of the available information is inevitably discarded during thehigh-voltage tests. A mobile computer-based data-acquisition system hasbeen developed for recording and storing, in digital form, the statisticalinformation present. The equipment described is capable of recordingand analyzing the small disturbances produced by partial dischargesunder practical conditions. The computer programs enable the time ofoccurrence and the magnitude and polarity of the pulses to be recorded;in addition, digital transient-event recorders can be programmed toaccept slow partial discharge shapes or ultrasonic transducer outputsfor storage in the computer system. A wide range of playback programsare described and possible methods of presenting the results are discussedusing examples obtained from a 50-kV high-voltage test arrangement.The problems of hardware development are outlined, including thoseof interfacing and operation in hostile environments. The economics ofsuch a system are mentioned and methods of effecting cost reductionsare suggested.Finally, this paper suggests that if on-line characterization of partialdischarges becomes possible then the results of discharge measurementswill have greater significance than at present, especially in those borderlinecases where interpretation of results is difficult.
Birth order in multiple sclerosis

Zilber et al. (1) report a significantly low mean birth order in Israeli-born cases of multiple sclerosis (MS). The result held whether analysis was made by a casecontrol method or by comparison of “expected” with observed birth orders within sibships of given sizes based on the test of Greenwood and Yule (2). Zilber et al. (1) also reported a significantly high mean birth order in foreign-born Israeli MS cases using the comparison of expected and observed birth orders. I should like to suggest that bias of 2 kinds may have produced this latter result.
Intrauterine Growth Retardation - A Review Article

Intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) is defined as fetal growth less than the normal growth potential of a specific infant because of genetic or environmental factors. The terms IUGR and Small for Gestational Age (SGA) are often used alternatively to describe the same problem, although there exists subtle differences between the two. The burden of IUGR is concentrated mainly in Asia which accounts for nearly 75% of all affected infants. Various maternal, placental, neonatal, environmental and genetic factors are contributing to the preponderance of IUGR infants in Asia. These newborns are unique because of their peculiar and increased risk of immediate and long term complications in comparison with the appropriate gestational age born infants. In this review we would like to present the types of IUGR infants; possible etiology related to maternal, fetal and placental causes; short term and long term neurodevelopmental outcomes, and evidence based preventive interventions effective in reducing the IUGR burden. This review also highlights the genetic contribution of the mother to the fetus and the placenta in the genesis of unexplained or idiopathic intrauterine growth restriction.
The Relation between Neuroendocrine Reactivity and Recovery from Different Natures of Work, Subjective need for Recovery, and Health Status

A field study was performed to assess the relations between nature of work and work characteristics, neuroendocrine reactivity and recovery, and health status. The urinary excretion of adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol was examined in fifty-nine male workers between 25 and 55 years of age during five consecutive days; three working days and two days off-work. The workers differed in the nature of their main work demands, i.e. mental, mental/physical, and physical work. Personal information and subjective perception of work characteristics, need for recovery, and health status were assessed by self-report through validated scales in a questionnaire. Multi-level analyses and hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to assess aforementioned relations. A main effect of nature of work was found in the neuroendocrine reactivity during and recovery from work in which the combined mental/physical group showed the least favourable reactions. Overall, half of the variation in subjective need for recovery and 54% of the variation in the level of health complaints was explained by a model with job demands, social relations at work, BMI, age, as well as by neuroendocrine measures of adrenaline and cortisol.
Evidence of canine distemper virus infection in skunks negative for antibody against rabies virus.

Between January 1981 and October 1985, brain tissue specimens from 192 skunks that were negative for antibodies against rabies virus were obtained from 2 Illinois Public Health laboratories (A and B). Brain lesions were detected microscopically in specimens from 17 of the 91 (18.7%) skunks from laboratory B and in specimens from 30 of the 101 (29.7%) skunks from laboratory A. Lesions in 3 skunks (1 from laboratory A, 2 from B) were caused by cerebral parasitism. Lesions in the remaining 44 skunks were characterized by perivascular, nonsuppurative, mononuclear cell infiltrates and foci of glial cells of differing severity. The similarity of lesions and the finding of inclusions diagnostic of canine distemper virus (CDV) in some skunks indicated that CDV may be the main cause of neurologic disease in nonrabid skunks. Seventeen of 36 (47.2%) skunks evaluated for antibody against CDV, using an unlabeled antibody-enzyme method, were positive for CDV. Findings in skunks from the 2 laboratories indicated similar annual prevalences of brain lesions in 1982, 1983, and 1984. The highest percentage (40.5%) of nonrabid skunks with encephalitis was found in skunks submitted to laboratory B in 1981, which was concurrent with a rabies epizootic among skunks in Illinois in 1981. The number of skunks from both laboratories with CDV infection peaked during winter-spring. Importance of CDV in skunk population dynamics remains to be elucidated; however, infection with CDV appears to be enzootic and occasionally epizootic in skunks. Because enzootic/epizootic CDV may bias rabies surveillance data, caution in interpretation of surveillance data is necessary. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
A second signal for autophagic cell death?

Dictyostelium cells in monolayers in vitro lend themselves well to a study of autophagic cell death (ACD). There is no apoptosis machinery in the protist Dictyostelium, no caspase nor Bcl-2 family members (except a paracaspase whose inactivation does not alter cell death), thus there is no apoptosis that could interfere with, or substitute for, non-apoptotic cell death. Also, Dictyostelium, a eukaryote, has a haploid genome, which facilitates random insertional mutagenesis.
Thermal and pH Stability of Adenovirus Types 12, 14 and 18

Summary Adenovirus types 12, 14 and 18 are relatively quite stable when exposed to 4° and 37°C. At S6°C types 12 and 18 are completely inactivated and type 14 more than 99% inactivated after 8 minutes. No inactivation occurs with type 14 after 15 freeze-thaw cycles, and types 12 and 18 after 30 cycles. The 3 types studied show maximal stability at pH 6.0. Infectious virus is rapidly inactivated on the alkaline side of neutrality. Types 14 and 18 demonstrate greater stability than type 12 at all pH values studied.
Interpreter aided salt boundary segmentation using SVM regression shape deformation technique

Problem Introduction For the seismic imaging project in offshore oil and gas exploration, a good velocity model is a must in order to achieve the best seismic image quality. Accurate salt body geometry extraction is a key component in the velocity model building workflow. However, salt-body boundary picking is a very human-intensive procedure even with the help of currently available automatic picking tools. It is very unlikely that there can be a super algorithm that can fully automates the boundary extraction procedure without sacrificing the result quality. Therefore this report addresses the problem of automatically and accurately segmenting the salt body in a series of neighboring seismic slices given only the accurate salt segmentation result on one single reference slice. This is achieved with a landmark based shape deformation technique plus SVM style regression. In this way, we can achieve the optimum trade-off between the amount of manpower and the quality of segmentation result. Due to the large noise in seismic data, simple image processing filter plus local boundary tracker algorithm gives very poor result or fails easily; very often some parts of the salt boundary are just missing due to poor illumination or miscellaneous source of noise (see Fig 1). Human interpreter's inputs at these trouble regions are essential (Halpert, 2011). However as today's seismic imaging practices evolve to 3-dimensions (think that the 2-D images now becomes 3-D volume), it would be too time-consuming for the human to manually take care every single slice. Therefore the idea of manually segmenting only a small amount of “key” slices and then intelligently propagating these results to the entire volume comes into play. Here I use a land-mark based shapedeformation technique to propagate a single slice of manual segmentation result into its neighboring slices, thus yielding much better segmentation result than simply applying automatic methods. The design goal for such intelligent boundary propagation consists of two parts: • First, I ask the new boundary to honor the available boundary information that can be extracted from the image. • Secondly, the new boundary should preserve the shape information known from the manual segmentation input, such that the boundary will deform reasonably where we don’t have well-defined boundaries.
In Vitro Detection of Apoptosis in Monocytes/Macrophages Infected with Human Coronavirus

ABSTRACT Human coronavirus (HCoV) strain 229E infection, but not HCoV strain OC43 infection, of monocytes/macrophages from healthy donors and patients with multiple sclerosis in remission resulted in increased apoptosis, as measured by DNA changes and annexin V staining. Apoptosis correlated with the differential release of infectious virus. HCoV strain 229E titers were 103.5 to 106 50% tissue culture-infective doses (TCID50)/ml, and HCoV strain OC43 titers were only 101.2 to 102.7 TCID50/ml.
IT Infrastructure Capabilities and Business Process Improvements: Association with IT Governance Characteristics

It has been widely discussed in the management information systems (MIS) literature that the outcomes of information technologies (IT) and systems may be subject to the influence of the characteristics of the organization, including those of the IT and business leadership. This study was conducted to examine the relationships that may exist between IT infrastructure capabilities (ITC), business process improvements (BPI), and such IT governance-related constructs as the reporting relationship between the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief information officer (CIO), and senior management support of IT and BPI projects. Using a sample of 243 multinational and Hong Kong-listed firms operating in Greater China, this study yielded empirical support for the perceived achievement of capabilities in some dimensions of the IT infrastructure in the companies under study. It was found that the BPI construct was related to the reporting relationship between the CEO and CIO (CEO-CIO distance), and to the levels of senior management support. The dimensions of the ITC construct were also investigated and identified by an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Associations were found between the selected organizational constructs and the ITC dimensions, except in two hypothesized relationships. Those between CEO-CIO distance and the ITC dimensions of data integration and training were not supported at the significance level of 0.05.
Improving Human Decision Making through Case-Based Decision Aiding

Case-based reasoning provides both a methodology for building systems and a cognitive model of people. It is consistent with much that psychologists have observed in the natural problem solving people do. Psychologists have also observed, however, that people have several problems in doing analogical or case-based reasoning. Although they are good at using analogs to solve new problems, they are not always good at remembering the right ones. However, computers are good at remembering. I present case-based decision aiding as a methodology for building systems in which people and machines work together to solve problems. The case-based decision-aiding system augments the person's memory by providing cases (analogs) for a person to use in solving a problem. The person does the actual decision making using these cases as guidelines. I present an overview of case-based decision aiding, some technical details about how to implement such systems, and several examples of case-based systems.
Dynamics of optomotor responses in Drosophila to perturbations in optic flow

SUMMARY For a small flying insect, correcting unplanned course perturbations is essential for navigating through the world. Visual course control relies on estimating optic flow patterns which, in flies, are encoded by interneurons of the third optic ganglion. However, the rules that translate optic flow into flight motor commands remain poorly understood. Here, we measured the temporal dynamics of optomotor responses in tethered flies to optic flow fields about three cardinal axes. For each condition, we used white noise analysis to determine the optimal linear filters linking optic flow to the sum and difference of left and right wing beat amplitudes. The estimated filters indicate that flies react very quickly to perturbations of the motion field, with pure delays in the order of ~20 ms and time-to-peak of ~100 ms. By convolution the filters also predict responses to arbitrary stimulus sequences, accounting for over half the variance in 5 of our 6 stimulus types, demonstrating the approximate linearity of the system with respect to optic flow variables. In the remaining case of yaw optic flow we improved predictability by measuring individual flies, which also allowed us to analyze the variability of optomotor responses within a population. Finally, the linear filters at least partly explain the optomotor responses to superimposed and decomposed compound flow fields.
Scientific computing using virtual high-performance computing: a case study using the Amazon elastic computing cloud

High-performance computing systems are important in scientific computing. Clusters of computer systems --- which range greatly in size --- are a common architecture for high-performance computing. Small, dedicated clusters are affordable and cost-effective, but may not be powerful enough for real applications. Larger dedicated systems are expensive in absolute terms and may be inefficient because many individual groups may not be able to provide sustained workload for the cluster. Shared systems are cost-effective, but then availability and access become a problem. An alternative model is that of a virtual cluste, as exemplified by Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). This provides customers with storage and CPU power on an ondemand basis, and allows a researcher to dynamically build their own, dedicated cluster of computers when they need it. Used by commercial web services deployers, this technology can be used in scientific computing applications. This paper presents a case study of the use of EC2 for scientific computing. The case study concludes that EC2 provides a feasible, cost-effective model in many application areas.
Empirical validation of measures for class diagram structural complexity through controlled experiments

As class diagrams constitute a key artifact in the development of object-oriented information systems (OOIS), their quality is crucial because it has a great impact on the quality of the OOIS which is ultimately implemented. For that reason, we have defined a set of measures for evaluating the structural complexity (an internal quality attribute) of class diagrams made using the unified Modeling Languages (UML). These measures could be useful to predict class diagram external quality characteristics, such as maintainability, early in the OOIS life-cycle. In order to demonstrate that those metrics serve the purpose they were defined for, we have put them under empirical validation by means of a controlled experiment. The explanation of the steps followed to do the experiment and the construction of the prediction model for the maintainability of class diagrams are the main objectives of this paper.
Dynamics of laser-induced bubble pairs

The interaction of two laser-induced bubbles in bulk water is investigated. The strength and direction of the emerging liquid jets can be controlled by adjusting the relative bubble positions, the time difference between bubble generation, and the laser pulse energies determining the bubble sizes. Experimental and numerical studies are performed for millimetre-sized bubble pairs. Taking bubbles of equal energy, a maximum jet velocity is found for close anti-phase bubbles, i.e. when the second bubble is produced at the maximum volume of the first one and the bubble walls are almost touching and not merging. Under these conditions, one bubble produces a fast jet with a peak velocity of about $150~\text{m}~\text{s}^{-1}$ that reaches a distance into the surrounding liquid of at least three times the maximum bubble radius. Collapse of the other bubble results in a slow jet of large mass that rapidly converts into a ring vortex. Correspondingly, the interaction with adjacent structures is dominated either by localized jet impact or by shear stresses extending over a larger area. Furthermore, interactions between micrometre-sized bubble pairs are investigated numerically to understand and predict how the effects of the physical parameters on bubble dynamics would change when the bubbles become smaller. The results are discussed with respect to micropumping and opto-injection.