Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interaction of Neisseria meningitidis Group X N-acetylglucosamine-1-phosphotransferase with its donor substrate

Neisseria meningitidis Group X is an emerging cause of bacterial meningitis in Sub-Saharan Africa. The capsular polysaccharide of Group X is a homopolymer of N-acetylglucosamine α(1-4) phosphate and is a vaccine target for prevention of disease associated with this meningococcal serogroup. We have demonstrated previously that the formation of the polymer is catalyzed by a phosphotransferase which transfers N-acetylglucosamine-1-phosphate from UDP-N-acetylglucosamine to the 4-hydroxyl of the N-acetylglucosamine on the nonreducing end of the growing chain. In this study, we use substrate analogs of UDP-GlcNAc to define the enzyme/donor substrate interactions critical for catalysis. Our kinetic analysis of the phosphotransferase reaction is consistent with a sequential mechanism of substrate addition and product release. The use of novel uracil modified analogs designed by Wagner et al. enabled us to assess whether the CsxA-catalyzed reaction is consistent with a donor dependent conformational change. As expected with this model for glycosyltransferases, UDP-GlcNAc analogs with bulky uracil modifications are not substrates but are inhibitors. An analog with a smaller iodo uracil substitution is a substrate and a less potent inhibitor. Moreover, our survey of analogs with modifications on the N-acetylglucosamine residue of the sugar nucleotide donor highlights the importance of substituents at C2 and C4 of the sugar residue. The hydroxyl group at C4 and the structure of the acyl group at C2 are very important for specificity and substrate interactions during the polymerization reaction. While most analogs modified at C2 were inhibitors, acetamido analogs were also substrates suggesting the importance of the carbonyl group.
Immigrant Women Organize For Justice: A Listening Project

Over nineteen million immigrant women live in the United States. Each one of those nineteen million women carries with her a powerful history. Immigrant Women Organize for Justice: A Listening Project is an attempt to capture a breath of those histories, in particular the histories of four mujeres luchadoras: immigrant women who are organizing communities surrounding them and devoting much of their life and their work to the lucha (struggle or fight) for a more just and equal society. Immigrant Women Organize for Justice: A Listening Project is a two-part project. The first section is devoted entirely to remembering the voices and struggles of immigrant women organizers throughout U.S. history and providing a much deserved space to three new voices into our collective history. The second part encompasses an in depth analysis of the listening project from a trainer practitioner lens, following a Listening Project guidelines learned during the Training for Social Action class at SIT Graduate Institute.
Outcomes of interventions for nurse leaders’ well‐being at work: A quantitative systematic review

AIMS The aim of this study was to gather, assess and synthesize current research knowledge on interventions that aimed to improve nurse leaders' well-being at work. BACKGROUND The research evidence on interventions for nurse leaders' well-being at work has been sporadic and there are a lack of evidence-based recommendations for effective interventions that inform practice, future studies and education. DESIGN A quantitative systematic review, in accordance with the Cochrane Collaboration procedures and the reporting guidance in the PRISMA statement. METHODS CINAHL, Cochrane, EBSCO, PubMed, PsycInfo and Scopus databases were searched from 2009 - December 2016. The final data consisted of five studies, which were assessed with the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool. The data were summarized narratively. RESULTS The interventions were mainly concerned with stress management and were targeted at individuals. Four of the five interventions examined produced statistically significant outcomes on well-being at work. CONCLUSIONS Stress management interventions that included mental exercises were the most successful. Interventions primarily reduced the stress experienced by participants, but the evidence on the stability of these outcomes was poor because of the short follow-up periods. The certainty of evidence was low, indicating that the use of these interventions among nurse leaders might be beneficial. Further studies are needed to provide more reliable recommendations for their use. As the performance of nurse leaders influences organizations, through interpersonal relationships, it is important to pay more attention in the future to the development of organization- and person-directed interventions and their combinations. A structural empowerment approach should also be considered.
Local Taxes and Local Expenditures: Strengthening the Wicksellian Connection

One way to design a local tax system is to determine the desired size and nature of local expenditures and then put in place a tax (and transfer) system providing incentives that lead local decision-makers to choose to finance that expenditure package. In practice, however, there are seldom clear links between local taxes and local expenditures and accountability at the local level is often both confused and confusing. This paper discusses how the Wicksellian connection between local services and revenues might be strengthened by changing the ‘package’ of local services, by altering the ‘package’ of local revenues, and by altering the way in which the two packages are tied together, although it considers in depth only the second of these points. The potential importance of this issue is illustrated by a brief review of an on-going discussion about how to finance the regional public transit system in Toronto, Canada. We conclude that, although advances in technology may make an economically more rational local finance system achievable, it is unclear that people (or politicians) are willing to face the economic realities of local finance.
Cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator in human muscle: Dysfunction causes abnormal metabolic recovery in exercise

Individuals with cystic fibrosis (CF) have exercise intolerance and skeletal muscle weakness not solely attributable to physical inactivity or pulmonary function abnormalities. CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) has been demonstrated in human bronchial smooth and cardiac muscle. Using 31P‐magnetic resonance spectroscopy of skeletal muscle, we showed CF patients to have lower resting muscle adenosine triphosphate and delayed phosphocreatine recovery times after high‐intensity exercise, suggesting abnormal muscle aerobic metabolism; and higher end‐exercise pH values, suggesting altered bicarbonate transport. Our objective was to study CFTR expression in human skeletal muscle.
Improving Flash Wear-Leveling by Proactively Moving Static Data

Motivated by the strong demand for flash memory with enhanced reliability, this work attempts to achieve improved flash-memory endurance without substantially increasing overhead and without excessively modifying popular implementation designs such as the flash translation layer protocol (FTL), NAND flash translation layer protocol (NFTL), and block-level flash translation layer protocol (BL). A wear-leveling mechanism for moving data that are not updated is proposed to distribute wear-leveling actions over the entire physical address space, so that static or rarely updated data can be proactively moved and memory-space requirements can be minimized. The properties of the mechanism are then explored with various implementation considerations. A series of experiments based on a realistic trace demonstrates the significantly improved endurance of FTL, NFTL, and BL with limited system overhead.
Disparities in tobacco cessation medication orders and fills among special populations.

BACKGROUND There is considerable interest in measuring and eliminating health care disparities among various special populations, but there is limited understanding of their extent, causes, or potential remedies. To improve this for tobacco cessation, we measured differences in the frequency of receiving and filling cessation medication prescriptions by race, ethnicity, age, language preference, health insurance, and pregnancy. METHODS The relevant variables for all patients of a Minnesota medical group aged 18 years and older with clinician visits were extracted from the electronic medical records of 1 large medical group from March 2006 to February 2007. This was combined with claims data from 1 insurance plan that covered most of these individuals. Order and fill rates for cessation medications were then adjusted for each of the other variables. RESULTS There were 32,733 current users of tobacco, 18,047 of whom had both health insurance and pharmacy claims data available. After adjustment, 15.4% overall had received an order for cessation medications during this year, but only 78% had filled it. Groups receiving fewer orders than their comparison groups were aged 18-34 years or older than 65 years, men, pregnant women, Asians and Hispanics, and those with non-English-language preference, on Medicaid, or with fewer visits. The same groups were less likely to fill that prescription, except patients with non-English preference or Medicaid. DISCUSSION There are disparities in both the receipt of cessation medication orders and the likelihood of filling them for some special populations. The causes are likely to be complex, but this information provides a starting point for learning to improve this problem.
Low voltage bulk-driven CMOS inverter with lower delays

In this paper, a low voltage bulk-driven CMOS inverter capable of operating at power supplies of ±0.9V using standard CMOS technologies is proposed. The proposed inverter gives not only smoother transient response with a lower delay, but also a sharper fall from high to low than its gate-driven counterpart. The proposed bulk-driven inverter is analysed for various regions of operation and simulated results using SPICE in 0. 35μm CMOS technology are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the circuit.
Racionalidad, uso de información y decisiones financieras

The objective of this paper is to discuss the assumptions of rationality of individuals in their use and acquisition of information to make financial institutions produce information that is rationally used by individuals. The frictions associated with asymmetric information problems or lack of financial knowledge are reduced or eliminated, and the decisions of agents are optimal. Base don recent literature by Behavioral Finance, our hypothesis is that psychological aspects of the individual, such as the existence of trust in those agencies or institutions with whom they conduct financial transactions, or limited ability to process complex and abundant information, may reduce or eliminate the role of information in making financial decisions. This may explain, in part, why in the real world, financial decisions are far from rational and optimal.
Tax Competition, Elastic Labor Supply, and Growth

In this paper we investigate the effects of tax competition in a simple endogenous growth model with elastic labor supply. Our analysis focuses on two issues. First, we show that all taxes, i.e. on capital, labor, and consumption, are harmful for growth. Second, we derive the optimal tax policy. A regional government chooses an inefficiently low tax rate on mobile capital in the presence of tax competition. In contrast, the tax rates on labor income and consumption are always set in order not to distort the consumption-leisure choice.
Interaction of monocytes/macrophages with ovarian cancer cells promotes angiogenesis in vitro

It has been established that macrophages and endothelial cells infiltrate peritoneum in the vicinity of tumor implants of epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). This study investigates whether the interaction of ovarian cancer cells and tumor‐associated macrophages could promote the involvement of endothelial cells in angiogenesis. Macrophage phenotypes were detected by fluorescence‐activated cell sorting, and cytokine/chemokine secretion was measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. The effect of co‐culture of ovarian cancer cells and tumor‐associated macrophage (TAM) cells on endothelial cell migration and tube formation was investigated. Signaling pathway mediators were also evaluated for their potential roles in endothelial cell activation by ovarian cancer cells co‐cultured with TAM cells. Our results showed that higher expression of interleukin‐8 (IL‐8) expression associated with 54.26 ± 34.46% of TAM infiltration of peritoneum was significantly higher than 16.58 ± 17.74% of CD3+ T‐cell by immunofluorescence co‐staining and confocal microscopy. THP‐1 cells exhibited M2‐polarized phenotype markers with high proportion of CD68+, CD206+ and CD204+ markers after phorbol 12‐myristate 13‐acetate (PMA) treatment, After co‐culturing with TAM cells in a transwell chamber system, EOC cells (SKOV3) increased their IL‐8 expression at the level of mRNA and protein. After exposure to the conditioned medium obtained by co‐culturing TAM and SKOV3 cells, the migration and tube formation of endothelial cells were enhanced significantly. Furthermore, the upregulation of IL‐8 expression in ovarian cancer cells induced by macrophages could be inhibited by pyrollidine dithiocarbamate, an inhibitor of nuclear factor (NF)‐ κB signal pathway. We suggest that the interaction of ovarian cancer cells and tumor‐associated macrophages enhances the ability of endothelial cells to promote the progression of ovarian cancer.
A critical review of readability and comprehensibility tests.

Each of the five stages listed above can involve multiple factors or design elements. For example, the first stage involves a consideration of the placement or location of the sign, while the second stage involves issues of type size and font, the type of material used to construct the sign, as well as colours and contrasts. Factors which can Abstract Many factors contribute to the effectiveness of interpretive signs and labels including placement, size, length, organisation of information, layout, and level and complexity of language used. Most authors agree that the key to success lies in keeping the visitor and their needs central to the design process. One way of examining the complexity of the language used by interpreters is to conduct a readability or comprehensibility test on interpretive text. This paper reviews the most commonly suggested tests, their origins, functions, limitations and strengths. The paper then reports on two exploratory studies comparing readability and comprehensibility measures calculated for a sample of interpretive signs in North Queensland. The results indicated that comprehensibility tests and directly asking for reader comments were much more valuable in revising text than the readability measures examined.
Novel Sonar Salient Feature Structure for Extended Kalman Filter-Based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping of Mobile Robots

Abstract Not all line or point features capable of being extracted by sonar sensors from a cluttered home environment are useful for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of a mobile robot. This is due to unfavorable conditions such as environmental ambiguity and sonar measurement uncertainty. We present a novel sonar feature structure suitable for a cluttered environment and the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM scheme. The key concept is to extract circle feature clouds on salient convex objects by sonar data association called convex saliency circling. The centroid of each circle cloud, called a sonar salient feature, is used as a natural landmark for EKF-based SLAM. By investigating the environmental inherent feature locality, cylindrical objects are augmented conveniently at the weak SLAM-able area as a natural supplementary saliency to achieve consistent SLAM performance. Experimental results demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed sonar salient feature structure for EKF-based SLAM.
Gene selection using biological knowledge and fuzzy clustering

Gene expression data being high-dimensional and redundant, dimensionality reduction is of prime concern. We employ the algorithm Fuzzy Clustering Large Applications based on RAN-domized Search (FCLARANS) for attribute clustering and dimensionality reduction based on the study of gene ontology and differential gene expressions. The use of domain knowledge helps in the automated selection of biologically meaningful partitions. The use of Gene Ontology (GO) study helps in detecting biologically enriched and statistically significant clusters. Fold-change is measured to select the differentially expressed genes as the representatives of these clusters. Tools like Eisen plot and cluster profiles of these clusters help establish their coherence. Important representative features (or genes) are extracted from each enriched gene partitions to form the reduced gene space. While the reduced gene set forms a biologically meaningful gene space it simultaneously leads to a decrease in computational burden. External validation of the reduced subspace, using various well-known classifiers, establishes the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.
On the convergence of a linear two-step finite element method for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation

We discretize the nonlinear Schrodinger equation, with Dirichlet boundary conditions, by a linearly implicit two-step finite element method which conserves the L 2 norm. We prove optimal order a priori error estimates in the L 2 and H 1 norms, under mild mesh conditions for two and three space dimensions.
Self-Regulated Learning of Important Information Under Sequential and Simultaneous Encoding Conditions

Learners make a number of decisions when attempting to study efficiently: they must choose which information to study, for how long to study it, and whether to restudy it later. The current experiments examine whether documented impairments to self-regulated learning when studying information sequentially, as opposed to simultaneously, extend to the learning of and memory for valuable information. In Experiment 1, participants studied lists of words ranging in value from 1–10 points sequentially or simultaneously at a preset presentation rate; in Experiment 2, study was self-paced and participants could choose to restudy. Although participants prioritized high-value over low-value information, irrespective of presentation, those who studied the items simultaneously demonstrated superior value-based prioritization with respect to recall, study selections, and self-pacing. The results of the present experiments support the theory that devising, maintaining, and executing efficient study agendas is inherently different under sequential formatting than simultaneous.
The Topology of VDAC as Probed by Biotin Modification*

The outer membrane of mitochondria contains channels called VDAC (mitochondrial porin), which are formed by a single 30-kDa protein. Cysteine residues introduced by site-directed mutagenesis at sites throughout Neurospora crassa VDAC (naturally devoid of cysteine) were specifically biotinylated prior to reconstitution into planar phospholipid membranes. From previous studies, binding of streptavidin to single biotinylated sites results in one of two effects: reduced single-channel conductance without blockage of voltage gating (type 1) or locking of the channels in a closed conformation (type 2). All sites react with streptavidin only from one side of the membrane. Here, we extend this approach to VDAC molecules containing two cysteines and determine the location of each biotinylated residue with respect to the other within the membrane. When a combination of a type 1 and a type 2 site was used, each site could be observed to react with streptavidin. Two sets of sites located on opposite surfaces of the membrane were identified, thereby establishing the transmembrane topology of VDAC. A revised folding pattern for VDAC, consisting of 1 α helix and 13 β strands, is proposed by combining these results with previously obtained information on which sites are lining the aqueous pore.
Sequential prediction for budgeted learning : Application to trigger design. (Prédiction séquentielle pour l'apprentissage budgété : Application à la conception de trigger)

Classification in machine learning has been extensively studied during the pastdecades. Many solutions have been proposed to output accurate classifiers and toobtain statistical grantees on the unseen observations. However, when machinelearning algorithms meet concrete industrial or scientific applications, new computationalcriteria appear to be as important to satisfy as those of classificationaccuracy. In particular, when the output classifier must comply with a computationalbudget needed to obtain the features that are evaluated at test time, wetalk about “budgeted” learning. The features can have different acquisition costsand, often, the most discriminative features are the costlier. Medical diagnosis andweb-page ranking, for instance, are typical applications of budgeted learning. Inthe former, the goal is to limit the number of medical tests evaluate for patients,and in the latter, the ranker has limited time to order documents before the usergoes away.This thesis introduces a new way of tackling classification in general and budgetedlearning problems in particular, through a novel framework lying in theintersection of supervised learning and decision theory. We cast the classificationproblem as a sequential decision making procedure and show that this frameworkyields fast and accurate classifiers. Unlike classical classification algorithms thatoutput a “one-shot” answer, we show that considering the classification as a seriesof small steps wherein the information is gathered sequentially also providesa flexible framework that allows to accommodate different types of budget constraintsin a “natural” way. In particular, we apply our method to a novel type ofbudgeted learning problems motivated by particle physics experiments. The particularityof this problem lies in atypical budget constraints and complex cost calculationschemata where the calculation of the different features depends on manyfactors. We also review similar sequential approaches that have recently known aparticular interest and provide a global perspective on this new paradigm.
Multilevel Modelling of Bilateral Trade Flows between European Union Countries

Empirical research of international trade with the use of gravity model is often estimated with the FE estimator. Indeed, this method is appropriate in the face of heterogeneity, that is typical of pairs of countries, which influence the effect of the determinants of bilateral trade. However, the disadvantage of the FE approach is that it assumes all the slopes of the variables of interest are common across all trading pairs in the sample. The use of mixed effects model in this study allows the coefficients of national incomes’ product and the common internetization rate of trading countries to vary across the pairs. In order to capture unspecified heterogeneity by allowing the intercept and slopes to have a stochastic component in their variation, the 2-level and 3-level hierarchical linear models are estimated based on the data from the period 1999–2011. The results indicate that not only typical gravity model factors, but also globalization factors as internetization rate, researchers rate, share of high-technology products’ export, energy use, foreign languages proficiency and monetary union influence the bilateral trade between EU-members.