Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Probiotic Gut Microbiota Isolate Interacts with Dendritic Cells via Glycosylated Heterotrimeric Pili

Mapping of the microbial molecules underlying microbiota-host interactions is key to understand how microbiota preserve mucosal homeostasis. A pivotal family of such bacterial molecules are pili. Pili are proteinaceous cell wall appendages with a well-documented role in adhesion, whilst their role in immune interaction with the host is less established. Gram-positive pili are often posttranslationally modified by sortase-specific cleavage reactions and the formation of intramolecular peptide bonds. Here we report glycosylation as a new level of posttranslational modification of sortase-dependent pili of a beneficial microbiota species and its role in immune modulation. We focused on the SpaCBA pili of the model probiotic and beneficial human gut microbiota isolate Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG. A unique combination of molecular techniques, nanoscale mechanical and immunological approaches led to the identification of mannose and fucose residues on the SpaCBA pili. These glycans on the pili are recognized by human dendritic cells via the C-type lectin receptor DC-SIGN, a key carbohydrate-dependent immune tailoring pattern recognition receptor. This specific lectin-sugar interaction is moreover of functional importance and modulated the cytokine response of dendritic cells. This provides insight into the direct role bacterial glycoproteins can play in the immunomodulation of the host. Modification of the complex heterotrimeric pili of a model probiotic and microbiota isolate with mannose and fucose is of importance for the functional interaction with the host immune lectin receptor DC-SIGN on human dendritic cells. Our findings shed light on the yet underappreciated role of glycoconjugates in bacteria-host interactions.
A Large Sample Independence Test for Finite Mean Processes

We use the sample covariation to develop asymptotic tests for independence for data in the normal domain of attraction of a stable law. The tests can be used for finite or infinite variance processes. In a simulation study we compare the finite sample performance of the proposed tests to the Portmanteau test commonly used in time series modeling. The null convergence of the test statistics to their asymptotic distribution seems to be faster than that of the Portmanteau statistic, especially when the data is fat-tailed. In the finite variance case, the proposed tests have the same asymptotic power properties as the Portmanteau test and have similar small sample empirical power. Simulations indicate the covariation test has a higher power for small sample sizes when the process is symmetric stable with tail decay parameter .
A Novel One-Armed Anti-c-Met Antibody Inhibits Glioblastoma Growth In vivo

Purpose: Expression of the receptor tyrosine kinase c-Met and its ligand scatter factor/hepatocyte growth factor (SF/HGF) are strongly increased in glioblastomas, where they promote tumor proliferation, migration, invasion, and angiogenesis. We used a novel one-armed anti-c-Met antibody to inhibit glioblastoma growth in vivo. Experimental Design: U87 glioblastoma cells (c-Met and SF/HGF positive) or G55 glioblastoma cells (c-Met positive and SF/HGF negative) were used to generate intracranial orthotopic xenografts in nude mice. The one-armed 5D5 (OA-5D5) anti-c-Met antibody was infused intratumorally using osmotic minipumps. Following treatment, tumor volumes were measured and tumors were analyzed histologically for extracellular matrix (ECM) components and proteases relevant to tumor invasion. Microarray analyses were done to determine the effect of the antibody on invasion-related genes. Results: U87 tumor growth, strongly driven by SF/HGF, was inhibited >95% with OA-5D5 treatment. In contrast, G55 tumors, which are not SF/HGF driven, did not respond to OA-5D5, suggesting that the antibody can have efficacy in SF/HGF-activated tumors. In OA-5D5-treated U87 tumors, cell proliferation was reduced >75%, microvessel density was reduced >90%, and apoptosis was increased >60%. Furthermore, OA-5D5 treatment decreased tumor cell density >2-fold, with a consequent increase in ECM deposition and increased immunoreactivity for laminin, fibronectin, and tenascin. Microarray studies showed no incresae in these ECM factors, rather down-regulation of urokinase-type plasminogen activator and matrix metalloproteinase 16 in glioblastoma cells treated with OA-5D5. Conclusions: Local treatment with OA-5D5 can almost completely inhibit intracerebral glioblastoma growth when SF/HGF is driving tumor growth. The mechanisms of tumor inhibition include antiproliferative, antiangiogenic, and proapoptotic effects.
MULTIMEDIA IN DISTANCE LEARNING FOR TERTIARY STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Many exciting developments in computer technology offer some potential solutions to the physical needs of students with special needs. Distance learning via computer networks increases learning opportunities because it bypasses the physical difficulties some students may have in navigating around campus and the extra equipment that may need to be separately housed on campus. There is now quite an extensive range of adaptive devices that can be attached to an individual’s computer to compensate for a specific disability. Assuming that these devices are in place, so those students with special needs can physically interface with the computer, we still need to look at their actual learning environment. Typically, students with special needs suffer from lack of motivation and require much more time to complete a task in comparison with regular students. The process of coping with disabilities impacts on general energy levels resulting in early fatigue. To compensate, teaching needs to promote motivation, self-management and accommodate different timing needs. In multimedia programs, a range of prompts in different media such as visual and audio can be provided to motivate and reinforce learning. The student can be provided with options to configure the interface in accordance with their special needs. The timing of the student’s progress through the program can be tracked and adjusted to suit the individual student. This paper addresses the overall learning environment necessary for students having special needs. A general conceptual model is depicted outlining how a multimedia program can be designed for effective teaching and learning of tertiary students with mild learning difficulties.
Valuation on the Frontier: Calibrating Actual and Hypothetical Statements of Value

The lack of robust evidence showing that hypothetical behavior directly maps into real actions remains a major concern for proponents of stated preference nonmarket valuation techniques. This article explores a new statistical approach to link actual and hypothetical statements. Using willingness-topay field data on individual bids from sealed-bid auctions for a $350 baseball card, our results are quite promising. Estimating a stochastic frontier regression model that makes use of data that any contingent valuation survey would obtain, we derive a bid function that is not statistically different from the bid function obtained from subjects in an actual auction. If other data can be calibrated similarly, this method holds significant promise since an appropriate calibration scheme, ex ante or ex post, can be invaluable to the policy maker that desires more accurate estimates of use and nonuse values for nonmarket goods and services. Benefit-cost analysis remains the dominant paradigm used throughout the public sector. Yet, a recurring issue in properly estimating the total benefits of nonmarket goods and services is whether hypothetical statements map into real behavior. Some recently published studies provide evidence that suggests important differences exist between responses from real and hypothetical valuation questions. 1 This observation triggered a search for an ex ante and ex post procedure to correct the systematic bias between intentions and actions in valuation exercises. Recent technology using ex ante procedures has produced some strong evidence that hypothetical bias can be overcome by using a “cheap talk” scheme (see, e.g., Cummings and Taylor; List). Ex post calibration has also shown some signs of promise, as work due to Blackburn, Harrison,
Where is the evidence?: a call to action for learning analytics

Where is the evidence for learning analytics? In particular, where is the evidence that it improves learning in practice? Can we rely on it? Currently, there are vigorous debates about the quality of research evidence in medicine and psychology, with particular issues around statistical good practice, the 'file drawer effect', and ways in which incentives for stakeholders in the research process reward the quantity of research produced rather than the quality. In this paper, we present the Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE) project's Evidence Hub, an effort to relate research evidence in learning analytics to four propositions about learning analytics: whether they support learning, support teaching, are deployed widely, and are used ethically. Surprisingly little evidence in this strong, specific sense was found, and very little was negative (7%, N=123), suggesting that learning analytics is not immune from the pressures in other areas. We explore the evidence in one particular area in detail (whether learning analytics improve teaching and learners support in the university sector), and set out some of the weaknesses of the evidence available. We conclude that there is considerable scope for improving the evidence base for learning analytics, and set out some suggestions of ways for various stakeholders to achieve this.
Crowdsourcing: It Matters Who the Crowd Are. The Impacts of between Group Variations in Recording Land Cover

Volunteered geographical information (VGI) and citizen science have become important sources data for much scientific research. In the domain of land cover, crowdsourcing can provide a high temporal resolution data to support different analyses of landscape processes. However, the scientists may have little control over what gets recorded by the crowd, providing a potential source of error and uncertainty. This study compared analyses of crowdsourced land cover data that were contributed by different groups, based on nationality (labelled Gondor and Non-Gondor) and on domain experience (labelled Expert and Non-Expert). The analyses used a geographically weighted model to generate maps of land cover and compared the maps generated by the different groups. The results highlight the differences between the maps how specific land cover classes were under- and over-estimated. As crowdsourced data and citizen science are increasingly used to replace data collected under the designed experiment, this paper highlights the importance of considering between group variations and their impacts on the results of analyses. Critically, differences in the way that landscape features are conceptualised by different groups of contributors need to be considered when using crowdsourced data in formal scientific analyses. The discussion considers the potential for variation in crowdsourced data, the relativist nature of land cover and suggests a number of areas for future research. The key finding is that the veracity of citizen science data is not the critical issue per se. Rather, it is important to consider the impacts of differences in the semantics, affordances and functions associated with landscape features held by different groups of crowdsourced data contributors.
3T-TFET bitcell based TFET-CMOS hybrid SRAM design for Ultra-Low Power applications

This paper presents a TFET/CMOS hybrid SRAM architecture designed to address the requirements for ULP (Ultra-Low Power) applications, like IoT (Internet of Things). A novel 3-Transistor TFET SRAM cell is used for array while CMOS for periphery. The simulation extractions for power and speed are done including wiring and device parasitic capacitance from 4Kb SRAM designed in 28nm FDSOI CMOS process using MOSFETs & Tunnel FETs (TFETs). The proposed 3T-TFET SRAM cell supports aggressive voltage scaling without impacting data stability and allows application of performance boosting techniques without impacting cell leakage. A 0.35 fA/bit memory array leakage current was achieved showing a 14x to 104x improvement compared with state-of-the-art TFET and CMOS SRAM bitcells. Minimum read and write access pulse is evaluated at 1.27ns at sub-1V supply voltage.
A Comparative Study of Administrator and Special Education Teacher Perceptions of Special Education Teacher Attrition and Retention.

This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact pdxscholar@pdx.edu. Recommended Citation Sheldrake, Danielle Angelina, "A Comparative Study of Administrator and Special Education Teacher Perceptions of Special Education Teacher Attrition and Retention" (2013). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 1499.
Document Classification Approach Leads to a Simple, Accurate, Interpretable G Protein Coupled Receptor Classifier

1 The need for accurate, automated protein classification methods continues to increase as advances in biotechnology uncovers new proteins at a fast rate. G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a particularly difficult superfamily of proteins to classify due to the extreme diversity among its members; yet, they are an important subject in pharmacological research being the target of approximately 60% of current drugs (Muller, 2000). A comparison of BLAST, k-NN, HMM and SVM with alignment-based features by Karchin et al. (2002) has suggested that classifiers at the complexity of SVM are needed to attain high accuracy in GPCR subfamily classification. Here, analogous to document classification, we applied Decision Tree and Naive Bayes classifiers with chi-square feature selection on n-gram counts to the GPCR family and subfamily classification task. Using the dataset and evaluation protocol from the previous study, we found the Naive Bayes classifier surpassing the reported accuracy of SVM by 4.8% and 6.1% in level I and II subfamily classification with an accuracy of 93.2% and 92.4% respectively. The Decision Tree, while inferior to SVM, still outperforms HMM in both level I and II subfamily classification. Moreover, the n-grams selected by chi-square feature selection show evidence of biological importance. Thus, the document classification approach has resulted in a simpler, more accurate and interpretable classifier.
High-Resolution Inkjet Printing of All-Polymer Transistor Circuits

www.sciencemag. org (this information is current as of April 13, 2009 ): The following resources related to this article are available online at http://www.sciencemag. org/cgi/content/full/290/5499/2123 version of this article at: including high-resolution figures, can be found in the online Updated information and services, http://www.sciencemag. org/cgi/content/full/290/5499/2123#otherarticles , 4 of which can be accessed for free: cites 19 articles This article 689 article(s) on the ISI Web of Science. cited by This article has been http://www.sciencemag. org/cgi/content/full/290/5499/2123#otherarticles 13 articles hosted by HighWire Press; see: cited by This article has been http://www.sciencemag. org/cgi/collection/mat_sci Materials Science : subject collections This article appears in the following http://www.sciencemag. org/about/permissions.dtl in whole or in part can be found at: this article permission to reproduce of this article or about obtaining reprints Information about obtaining
Hierarchy Schedule Sensing Protocol for CDMA Wireless Networks and Its Performance under Multiple Collision and Capture Effect

SUMMARY This paper proposes a new protocol for ad hoc based CDMA wireless local area networks, Hierarchy Schedule Sensing (HSS) protocol. It adopts hierarchical sensing to schedule transmission requests to avoid collisions. Multi-level group spreading codes are used to reduce scheduling delay. The network performance under the HSS protocol is evaluated using a two-dimensional Markov chain model in consideration of collided packets capture effect at receivers. The paper also focuses on the impacts of multiple packet collisions on the performance. A closed formula of the average collision rate is derived explicitly. The results show that the HSS protocol offers a robust performance with low hardware requirement.
Enhancing IACOR Local Search by Mtsls1-BFGS for Continuous Global Optimization

A widely known approach for continuous global optimization has been the Incremental Ant Colony Framework (IACOR). In this paper, we propose a strategy to introduce hybridization within the exploitation phase of the IACOR framework by using the Multi-Trajectory Local Search (Mtsls1) algorithm and Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) algorithms. Our approach entails making a probabilistic choice between these algorithms. In case of stagnation, we switch the algorithm being used based on the last iteration. We evaluate our approach on the Soft Computing (SOCO) benchmark functions and present results by computing the mean and median errors on the global optima achieved, as well as the iterations required. We compare our approach with competing methods on a number of benchmark functions, and show that the proposed approach achieves improved results. In particular, we obtain the global optima in terms of average value for 14 out of 19 benchmark functions, and in terms of the median value for all SOCO benchmarks. At the same time, the proposed approach uses fewer function evaluations on several benchmarks when compared with competing methods, which have been found to use 54% more function evaluations.
LIMSI @ WMT’14 Medical Translation Task

This paper describes LIMSI’s submission to the first medical translation task at WMT’14. We report results for EnglishFrench on the subtask of sentence translation from summaries of medical articles. Our main submission uses a combination of NCODE (n-gram-based) and MOSES (phrase-based) output and continuous-space language models used in a post-processing step for each system. Other characteristics of our submission include: the use of sampling for building MOSES’ phrase table; the implementation of the vector space model proposed by Chen et al. (2013); adaptation of the POStagger used by NCODE to the medical domain; and a report of error analysis based on the typology of Vilar et al. (2006).
Solitary wave dynamics in time-dependent potentials

The long time dynamics of solitary wave solutions of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation in time-dependent external potentials is rigorously studied. To set the stage, the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for a generalized nonautonomous nonlinear Schrodinger equation with time-dependent nonlinearities and potential is established. Afterward, the dynamics of NLS solitary waves in time-dependent potentials is studied. It is shown that in the space-adiabatic regime where the external potential varies slowly in space compared to the size of the soliton, the dynamics of the center of the soliton is described by Hamilton’s equations, plus terms due to radiation damping. Finally, two physical applications are discussed: the first is adiabatic transportation of solitons and the second is the Mathieu instability of trapped solitons due to time-periodic perturbations.
Autonomy Oriented Computation

Examples of autonomous multi-entity systems are plentiful, both in the natural and artificial worlds. Many systems have been studied in depth and some models of these have been built in computational systems for problem solving. Central to these computational systems is the notion of autonomy. This article proposes autonomy oriented computation (AOC) as a complementary paradigm for solving hard computational problems and for characterizing the behaviors of a complex system.
Ursolic Acid Induces Neomyogenesis Through Hyperplasia and Increasing of Satellite Cells Number in Mice Skeletal Muscle

Introduction: Ursolic Acid (UA) is the main compound present in apple cuticular wax as well as in the leaves. Hypertrophic effects of UA on the skeletal muscle ventured us to investigate if UA might activate satellite cells proliferation, and also generate new muscle fibers is so-called ” hyperplasia”. Methods: To confirm this hypothesis, UA administrated twice daily for 7 days to 8 weeks old mice (C57BL/6) and then skeletal muscle tissues isolated for new muscle fibers and satellite cells determination by histochemical and immunohistochemical tests, respectively. Results: Our results demonstrated that UA contributed to skeletal muscle rejuvenation through increasing in the satellite cells number and stimulation of these edge cells to new muscle fiber generation. Conclusion: Taken together, to the best of our knowledge, current findings sharpen our understanding of UA might be as an improvement of skeletal muscle performance and suggest that UA as potential pharmacological purpose to treat the major muscular atrophy diseases such as skeletal muscle atrophy. *Corresponding author: Nuredin, Bakhtiari, Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Basic Sciences, Sanandaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran, Tel: 98 8733737048; E-mail: Nuredin.bakhtiary@modares.ac. ir Received Date: July 2, 2016 Accepted Date: July 14, 2016 Published Date: July 20, 2016
Collaborative Development of Information Integration Systems

Developing information integration systems today is largely done by hand, in a very labor intensive and error prone process. In this paper we describe MOBS, a conceptually new solution to this problem. MOBS employs mass collaboration. It asks the users of an information integration system to “pay” for using the system by answering simple questions, then uses those answers to further develop the system. This way an enormous burden of system development is lifted from the system builders and spread “thinly” over a multitude of users. We present both simulation and real-world experiments which suggest that MOBS can build systems accurately and efficiently. Finally we discuss the potential applications of MOBS beyond the information integration context.
Enhancing Male Partners’ Involvement in the Elimination of Mother-To-Child Transmission (EMTCT) of HIV in Zambia

The global community has committed itself to eliminating mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV as a public health priority. Male participation in the elimination of mother-to-child transmission (EMTCT) of HIV has been determined as one of the key factors in sub-Saharan African countries, but its realization is challenging because of male-related and institutional factors. In Zambia, most of the research on the EMTCT of HIV have focused on the role of women and have ignored male partners’ role in this regard. A careful investigation revealed a dearth of literature in this regard, which led to the following research question: what is the influence of knowledge and educational campaigns/programs on male partners’ propensity to support the EMTCT of HIV programmes? ” To address this question, a quantitative survey design was used. The population for this study comprised men living at the George Compound in Lusaka. A sample of 110 men were selected using purposive sampling approach and a 6-point Likert scale questionnaire was administered to them. The response rate was 91%. The findings indicated a positive influence of knowledge and educational campaigns/programs on male partners’ propensity to support EMTCT of HIV programmes.