Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SM2PIA: A Model to Support the Development of Pragmatic Interoperability Requirements

Companies have increasingly distributed their teams to increase productivity and quality, and to reduce their costs in software development processes. This scenario has brought new challenges to effective collaboration and to enhance communication across peers. Pragmatic interoperability has been considered as one of the key requirements to tackle these challenges. However, there is lack of research investigating how to support development of pragmatic interoperability across globally dispersed groups. This paper proposes a model to support pragmatic interoperability in software projects to foster collaboration in distributed environments. The proposed model was implemented and evaluated in a collaborative architecture which supports collaborative scientific experiments development.
The Role of Peptides in T Cell Alloreactivity Is Determined by Self–Major Histocompatibility Complex Molecules

By analyzing T cell responses against foreign major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules loaded with peptide libraries and defined self- and viral peptides, we demonstrate a profound influence of self-MHC molecules on the repertoire of alloreactive T cells: the closer the foreign MHC molecule is related to the T cell's MHC, the higher is the proportion of peptide-specific, alloreactive (“allorestricted”) T cells versus T cells recognizing the foreign MHC molecule without regard to the peptide in the groove. Thus, the peptide repertoire of alloreactive T cells must be influenced by self-MHC molecules during positive or negative thymic selection or peripheral survival, much like the repertoire of the self-restricted T cells. In consequence, allorestricted, peptide-specific T cells (that are of interest for clinical applications) are easier to obtain if T cells and target cells express related MHC molecules.
Geometry of the cholesteric phase

We propose a construction of a cholesteric pitch axis for an arbitrary nematic director field as an eigenvalue problem. Our definition leads to a Frenet-Serret description of an orthonormal triad determined by this axis, the director, and the mutually perpendicular direction. With this tool, we are able to compare defect structures in cholesterics, biaxial nematics, and smectics. Though they all have similar ground state manifolds, the defect structures are different and cannot, in general, be translated from one phase to the other.
Smithells metals reference book

General physical and chemical constants X-ray analysis of metallic material Crystallography Crystal chemistry Metallurgically important minerals Thermochemical data Physical properties of molton salts Metallography Equilibrium diagrams Gas-metal systems Diffusion in metals General physical properties Elastic properties, damping capacity and shape memory alloys Temperature measurement and thermoelectric properties Radiating properties of metals Electron emission Electrical properties Magnetic materials and their properties Mechanical testing Mechanical properties of metals and alloys Sintered materials Lubricants Friction and wear Casting alloys and foundry data Engineering ceramics and refractory materials Fuels Heat treatment Metal cutting and forming Corrosion Electroplating and metal finishing Welding Soldering and brazing Vapour deposited coatings and thermal spraying Superplasticity Metal-matrix composites Non-conventional and emerging metallic minerals modelling and simulation supporting technologies for the processing of metals and alloys.
OsELF3-1, an Ortholog of Arabidopsis EARLY FLOWERING 3, Regulates Rice Circadian Rhythm and Photoperiodic Flowering

Arabidopsis thaliana EARLY FLOWERING 3 (ELF3) as a zeitnehmer (time taker) is responsible for generation of circadian rhythm and regulation of photoperiodic flowering. There are two orthologs (OsELF3-1 and OsELF3-2) of ELF3 in rice (Oryza sativa), but their roles have not yet been fully identified. Here, we performed a functional characterization of OsELF3-1 and revealed it plays a more predominant role than OsELF3-2 in rice heading. Our results suggest OsELF3-1 can affect rice circadian systems via positive regulation of OsLHY expression and negative regulation of OsPRR1, OsPRR37, OsPRR73 and OsPRR95 expression. In addition, OsELF3-1 is involved in blue light signaling by activating EARLY HEADING DATE 1 (Ehd1) expression to promote rice flowering under short-day (SD) conditions. Moreover, OsELF3-1 suppresses a flowering repressor GRAIN NUMBER, PLANT HEIGHT AND HEADING DATE 7 (Ghd7) to indirectly accelerate flowering under long-day (LD) conditions. Taken together, our results indicate OsELF3-1 is essential for circadian regulation and photoperiodic flowering in rice.
Delayed and Accelerated Aging Share Common Longevity Assurance Mechanisms

Mutant dwarf and calorie-restricted mice benefit from healthy aging and unusually long lifespan. In contrast, mouse models for DNA repair-deficient progeroid syndromes age and die prematurely. To identify mechanisms that regulate mammalian longevity, we quantified the parallels between the genome-wide liver expression profiles of mice with those two extremes of lifespan. Contrary to expectation, we find significant, genome-wide expression associations between the progeroid and long-lived mice. Subsequent analysis of significantly over-represented biological processes revealed suppression of the endocrine and energy pathways with increased stress responses in both delayed and premature aging. To test the relevance of these processes in natural aging, we compared the transcriptomes of liver, lung, kidney, and spleen over the entire murine adult lifespan and subsequently confirmed these findings on an independent aging cohort. The majority of genes showed similar expression changes in all four organs, indicating a systemic transcriptional response with aging. This systemic response included the same biological processes that are triggered in progeroid and long-lived mice. However, on a genome-wide scale, transcriptomes of naturally aged mice showed a strong association to progeroid but not to long-lived mice. Thus, endocrine and metabolic changes are indicative of “survival” responses to genotoxic stress or starvation, whereas genome-wide associations in gene expression with natural aging are indicative of biological age, which may thus delineate pro- and anti-aging effects of treatments aimed at health-span extension.
Measuring the Distance Between Finite Markov Decision Processes

Markov decision processes (MDPs) have been studied for many decades. Recent research in using transfer learning methods to solve MDPs has shown that knowledge learned from one MDP may be used to solve a similar MDP better. In this paper, we propose two metrics for measuring the distance between finite MDPs. Our metrics are based on the Hausdorff metric which measures the distance between two subsets of a metric space and the Kantorovich metric for measuring the distance between probabilistic distributions. Our metrics can be used to compute the distance between reinforcement learning tasks that are modeled as MDPs. The second contribution of this paper is that we apply the metrics to direct transfer learning by finding the similar source tasks. Our third contribution is that we propose two knowledge transfer methods which transfer value functions of the selected source tasks to the target task. Extensive experimental results show that our metrics are effective in finding similar tasks and significantly improve the performance of transfer learning with the transfer methods.
A Rule-based Approach for Infrastructure Providers' Interoperability

Cloud Computing is a new computing paradigm where a large amount of computing capacity is offered on demand and only paying for what you use. Several Infrastructure Providers have adopted this approach offering resources which are easily managed by means of web-based APIs. However, if a user wants to use different providers, the resource management becomes tedious because providers define different API requiring a special implementation for interacting with each of them. In this paper, we present a methodology for making the provider interoperability easier. In this methodology, each provider's API is modeled by an ontology. Equivalences between these ontologies are modeled by rules, and messages used in a provider's API are converted in calls to another provider's API applying these rules. With our approach, users interact with Infrastructure Providers using their most familiar API and the translation to the other APIs is automatically done by the system.
Does it always feel good to get what you want? Young children differentiate between material and wicked desires.

One line of research on children's attributions of guilt suggests that 3-year-olds attribute negative emotion to self-serving victimizers, slightly older children attribute happiness, and with increasing age, attributions become negative again (i.e., a three-step model; Yuill et al., 1996, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 14, 457). Another line of research provides reason to expect that 3-year-olds may be predisposed to view self-serving moral transgression as leading to positive emotion; this is a linear developmental model in which emotion attributions to transgressors become increasingly negative over the course of childhood (e.g., Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988, Child Dev., 59, 1323). However, key differences in methodology make it difficult to compare across these findings. The present study was designed to address this problem. We asked how 3- to 9-year-old children (n = 111) reason about transgression scenarios that involve satisfying wicked desires (wanting to cause harm and doing so successfully) versus material desires (wanting an object and getting it successfully via harmful behaviour). Three-year-old children reasoned differently about desire and emotion across these two types of transgressions, attributing negative emotion in the case of wicked desires and positive emotion in the case of material desires. This pattern of emotion attribution by young children provides new information about how young children process information about desires and emotions in the moral domain, and it bridges a gap in the existing literature on this topic.
Dynamic Resource Management for Cognitive Radios Using Limited-Rate Feedback

Tailored for the emerging class of cognitive radio networks comprising primary and secondary wireless users, the present paper deals with dynamic allocation of subcarriers, rate and power resources based on channel state information (CSI) for orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Users rely on adaptive modulation, coding and power modes that they select in accordance with the limited-rate feedback they receive from the access point. The access point uses CSI to maximize a generic concave utility of the average rates in the network while adhering to rate and power constraints imposed on the primary and secondary users to respect cognitive radio related hierarchies. When the channel distribution is available, optimum dual prices are found to optimally allocate resources across users dynamically per channel realization. In addition, a simple yet optimal online algorithm that does not require knowledge of the channel distribution and iteratively computes the dual prices per channel realization is developed using a stochastic dual approach. Analysis of the computational and feedback overhead along with simulations assessing the performance of the novel algorithms are also provided.
Toward the development of effective transmission-blocking vaccines for malaria

The continued global burden of malaria can in part be attributed to a complex lifecycle, with both human hosts and mosquito vectors serving as transmission reservoirs. In preclinical models of vaccine-induced immunity, antibodies to parasite sexual-stage antigens, ingested in the mosquito blood meal, can inhibit parasite survival in the insect midgut as judged by ex vivo functional studies such as the membrane feeding assay. In an era of renewed political momentum for malaria elimination and eradication campaigns, such observations have fueled support for the development and implementation of so-called transmission-blocking vaccines. While leading candidates are being evaluated using a variety of promising vaccine platforms, the field is also beginning to capitalize on global ‘-omics’ data for the rational genome-based selection and unbiased characterization of parasite and mosquito proteins to expand the candidate list. This review covers the progress and prospects of these recent developments.
On the use of the notion of suitable weak solutions in CFD

The notion of suitable weak solutions for the three‐dimensional incompressible Navier–Stokes equations together with some standard regularization techniques for constructing these solutions is reviewed. The novel result presented in this paper is that Faedo–Galerkin weak solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations are suitable provided they are constructed using finite‐dimensional spaces having a discrete commutator property and satisfying a proper inf–sup condition. Low‐order mixed finite element spaces appear to be acceptable for this purpose. Connections between the notion of suitable solutions and LES modeling are investigated. A proposal for a large eddy scale model based on the notion of suitable solutions is made and numerically illustrated. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Control of an unstable, nonminimum phase hypersonic vehicle model

In this work, a control law for an unstable, non-minimum phase model of a hypersonic vehicle is developed. The control problem is difficult due to the locations of the plant poles and zeros. For an unstable system, feedback is required to stabilize the plant. However, one cannot make the loop gains arbitrarily large without driving one or more of the closed-loop poles into the right-half of the s-plane, since the system is nonminimum phase. Thus, there is a limited range of feedback gain that results in a stable system. The nonminimum phase behavior also places restrictions on the closed-loop bandwidth. For the hypersonic vehicle control problem, low frequency control is desired and a rule of thumb is that the closed-loop bandwidth must be less than one-half the right-half plane zero location. A right-half plane zero located in the region of the desired gain-crossover frequency makes it impossible to achieve the desired level of tracking performance. The achievable closed-loop bandwidth might be so small that adequate control of the system is not achieved. Direct cancellation of the right-half plane zero with an unstable pole in the controller is not an option. In this work, a modified dynamic inversion controller is developed for a linear, time-invariant model of a hypersonic vehicle. This modified dynamic inversion controller differs from the standard dynamic inversion approach in that it does not attempt to cancel the right-half plane zero with a pole, instead, it retains right-half plane zeros in the closed-loop transfer functions and uses an additional feedback loop to stabilize the zero dynamics
E cient Parallel Classi cation Using Dimensional AggregatesSanjay

Multidimensional aggregates are frequently computed to improve query performance in Online Analytical Processing applications. We present a new method for decision tree based classiication trees using the aggregates computed in the multidimensional data model. The structure imposed on data in a explicit multidimensional storage mechanism leads to eecient dimensional operations. Decision tree based classiication algorithms perform computations to nd the best split point at each node of the tree. EEcient computation of the split in the decision tree can be done by using the one-dimensional aggregates if the cell values are the class-id values, and counts are maintained for each class. This is used repeatedly at the nodes of the decision tree to calculate splits and manage data. Previous parallel approaches for decision-tree based classiication use sorted attribute lists and hash tables to compute the split point and split the data appropriately. The amount of data communicated is proportional to the product of number of records in the training set, and the number of dimensions, at each level of the tree, in the worst case. Parallel formulation of our approach uses data communication proportional to the product of the sum of cardinality of all dimensions and the number of non-classiied nodes at each level of the tree. Communication volume is greatly reduced in our approach and is done in one phase of communication at each level of the tree, by coalescing messages. Preliminary results from our experiments on a coarse-grained, distributed memory parallel machine (IBM-SP2) show good performance.
Estrogen and progesterone together expand murine endometrial epithelial progenitor cells

Synchronous with massive shifts in reproductive hormones, the uterus and its lining the endometrium expand to accommodate a growing fetus during pregnancy. In the absence of an embryo the endometrium, composed of epithelium and stroma, undergoes numerous hormonally regulated cycles of breakdown and regeneration. The hormonally mediated regenerative capacity of the endometrium suggests that signals that govern the growth of endometrial progenitors must be regulated by estrogen and progesterone. Here, we report an antigenic profile for isolation of mouse endometrial epithelial progenitors. These cells are EpCAM+CD44+ITGA6hiThy1−PECAM1−PTPRC−Ter119−, comprise a minor subpopulation of total endometrial epithelia and possess a gene expression profile that is unique and different from other cells of the endometrium. The epithelial progenitors of the endometrium could regenerate in vivo, undergo multilineage differentiation and proliferate. We show that the number of endometrial epithelial progenitors is regulated by reproductive hormones. Coadministration of estrogen and progesterone dramatically expanded the endometrial epithelial progenitor cell pool. This effect was not observed when estrogen or progesterone was administered alone. Despite the remarkable sensitivity to hormonal signals, endometrial epithelial progenitors do not express estrogen or progesterone receptors. Therefore, their hormonal regulation must be mediated through paracrine signals resulting from binding of steroid hormones to the progenitor cell niche. Discovery of signaling defects in endometrial epithelial progenitors or their niche can lead to development of better therapies in diseases of the endometrium. STEM CELLS 2013;31:808–822
Simplified thermo-elastoplastic numerical modelling techniques applied to friction stir welding of mild steel

Friction stir welding is a relatively new advanced joining technique that requires minimal power input, ultimately leading to less inherent residual stresses and distortion. The process involves a spinning tool which first plunges into the surface of the, to be welded assembly and then traverses along the joint. Frictional heat is generated, softening the material at temperatures significantly below the melting temperature of the parent material. As the tool traverses along the joint at a predetermined speed, the assembly is joined by means of a plastic straining process. This advanced welding technology has been validated for various aluminium alloys but it is only recently, due to advances in tool technology, that the possibility of joining mild steel using friction stir welding has become a viable option. This study looks into friction stir welding of mild steel and develops simplified numerical methods for the prediction of thermal gradients, residual stresses and deformation. In principle the process modelling requires a multi-disciplinary approach involving coupled thermo-fluid, microstructural-structural modelling process. Much of the latest thermo-mechanical studies of friction stir welding rely on a number of over simplifications particularly related to the heat flux distribution across the tool shoulder, and also on the backing plate boundary conditions. The objective of this paper is to scrutinise the effects of modelling in more detail and establish the most important factors leading to accurate yet computationally efficient prediction of thermal gradients and inherent residual stresses. The results show that both the heat input and heat loss modelling, due to heat dissipation to the surroundings, are crucial for the determination of the final inherent welding residual stresses. The heat generated is modelled through a predefined linear heat flux variation across the tool shoulder. However if a more precise and localized residual stress information is sought, a full thermo-fluid-structural analysis is required. This is time consuming and probably does not give significant information on manufacturing optimization. On the other hand, simplified global solutions offer the possibility to optimise friction stir welding parameters and boundary conditions during the preliminary stages of the development of the fabrication procedures, at relatively minimal time and processing power. This work is financed under the European Commission in Call FP7-SST-2012-RTD-1 High Integrity Low Distortion Assembly (HILDA) project.Copyright © 2013 by ASME
Intralysosomal Cystine Accumulation in Mice Lacking Cystinosin, the Protein Defective in Cystinosis

ABSTRACT Cystinosis is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by an accumulation of intralysosomal cystine. The causative gene, CTNS, encodes cystinosin, a seven-transmembrane-domain protein, which we recently showed to be a lysosomal cystine transporter. The most severe and frequent form of cystinosis, the infantile form, appears around 6 to 12 months, with a proximal tubulopathy (de Toni-Debré-Fanconi syndrome) and ocular damage. End-stage renal failure is reached by 10 years of age. Accumulation of cystine in all tissues eventually leads to multisystemic disease. Treatment with cysteamine, which reduces the concentration of intracellular cystine, delays disease progression but has undesirable side effects. We report the first Ctns knockout mouse model generated using a promoter trap approach. We replaced the last four Ctns exons by an internal ribosome entry site-βgal-neo cassette and showed that the truncated protein was mislocalized and nonfunctional. Ctns −/− mice accumulated cystine in all organs tested, and cystine crystals, pathognomonic of cystinosis, were observed. Ctns −/− mice developed ocular changes similar to those observed in affected individuals, bone defects and behavioral anomalies. Interestingly, Ctns −/− mice did not develop signs of a proximal tubulopathy, or renal failure. A preliminary therapeutic trial using an oral administration of cysteamine was carried out and demonstrated the efficiency of this treatment for cystine clearance in Ctns −/− mice. This animal model will prove an invaluable and unique tool for testing emerging therapeutics for cystinosis.
Malaria Prophylaxis: A Comprehensive Review

The flow of international travellers to and from malaria-endemic areas, especially Africa, has increased in recent years. Apart from the very high morbidity and mortality burden imposed on malaria-endemic areas, imported malaria is the main cause of fever possibly causing severe disease and death in travellers coming from tropical and subtropical areas, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. The importance of behavioural preventive measures (bed nets, repellents, etc.), adequate chemoprophylaxis and, in selected circumstances, stand-by emergency treatment may not be overemphasized. However, no prophylactic regimen may offer complete protection. Expert advice is needed to tailor prophylactic advice according to traveller (age, baseline clinical conditions, etc.) and travel (destination, season, etc.) characteristics in order to reduce malaria risk.