Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A critical evaluation of diagnostic methods used to identify dairy cows with acute post-partum metritis in the current literature

The overall objective of this study was to investigate how relevant research publications address the validity of diagnostic methods for acute puerperal metritis (APM) in dairy cows, a disease commonly treated with antibiotic drugs. Therefore, a literature search was conducted in Journal of Dairy Science, Theriogenology, Animal Reproduction Science and The Veterinary Journal utilizing the ScienceDirect database. The search revealed 259 articles addressing APM. After applying exclusion criteria, a total of 48 trials remained. It was determined whether the author gave a clear definition of APM, the time of diagnosis relative to calving, and the person who performed the diagnosis. Studies were checked for the presence of definitions of possible findings, thresholds, and test characteristics of the methods used. Overall 9 different diagnostic methods were employed. On average 2·5 ± 1·75 diagnostic methods were used in a study. References to support the use of the diagnostic methods were provided in 10 of 48 articles (20·8%). Vaginal discharge, transrectal palpation and rectal temperature were examined in 39, 22, and 21 of the studies, respectively. Thresholds for diagnostic tests and test characteristics were mentioned in 6 and 3 of the 48 articles, respectively. Based on this systematic review of 48 research papers the evidence supporting the use of the diagnostic methods to identify cows with APM has either been not reported or is weak. In conclusion, the reporting of the diagnostic methods to identify cows with APM needs to be improved and further high-quality research is necessary to improve diagnostic performance of the methods employed.
The Study of Correction Method for Soil-Water Characteristic Curve of Swelling-Shrinking Soil

The swelling-shrinking soil embodies the features of expanding when absorbing water and shrinking when drying out; its engineering properties are sensitive to water fluctuation. Mainstream test instruments of SWCC cannot accurately get its relationship between matric suction and water volume fraction. So a correction method based on the results of shrinkage test is carried out. The method is accomplished by using the volume deformation which is obtained in shrinkage test to calculate its real water volume fraction and then combining the results of SWCC test and finally constructing the relationship between matric suction and water volume fraction. Through real application, this method is proved to be feasible and essential.
Advances in Hydrogen, Carbon Dioxide, and Hydrocarbon Gas Sensor Technology Using GaN and ZnO-Based Devices

In this paper, we review our recent results in developing gas sensors for hydrogen using various device structures, including ZnO nanowires and GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs). ZnO nanowires are particularly interesting because they have a large surface area to volume ratio, which will improve sensitivity, and because they operate at low current levels, will have low power requirements in a sensor module. GaN-based devices offer the advantage of the HEMT structure, high temperature operation, and simple integration with existing fabrication technology and sensing systems. Improvements in sensitivity, recoverability, and reliability are presented. Also reported are demonstrations of detection of other gases, including CO2 and C2H4 using functionalized GaN HEMTs. This is critical for the development of lab-on-a-chip type systems and can provide a significant advance towards a market-ready sensor application.
Einstein: physicist or vegetarian? summarizing semantic type graphs for knowledge discovery

The Web and, in particular, knowledge-sharing communities such as Wikipedia contain a huge amount of information encompassing disparate and diverse fields. Knowledge bases such as DBpedia or Yago represent the data in a concise and more structured way bearing the potential of bringing database tools to Web Search. The wealth of data, however, poses the challenge of how to retrieve important and valuable information, which is often intertwined with trivial and less important details. This calls for an efficient and automatic summarization method. In this demonstration proposal, we consider the novel problem of summarizing the information related to a given entity, like a person or an organization. To this end, we utilize the rich type graph that knowledge bases provide for each entity, and define the problem of selecting the best cost-restricted subset of types as summary with good coverage of salient properties. We propose a demonstration of our system which allows the user to specify the entity to summarize, an upper bound on the cost of the resulting summary, as well as to browse the knowledge base in a more simple and intuitive manner.
Interest of functional foods for low-income countries

Purpose of reviewTo understand the interest of functional food in low-income countries by analyzing various necessary factors. Recent findingsBeing on a low income would appear to relate most often to an unbalanced diet, both qualitatively and quantitatively, which may be damaging to health in the long term. Most chronic diseases of concern today are multifactorial in origin. For control, an approach in which medicines and nutrition are considered together and complement each other may produce most successful and cost-effective management of health risk factors and chronic diseases. Functional food may become an important player at the interface between pharma and nutrition, and merit attention from both public health and a marketing perspective. SummaryIn general, the health benefit of functional food is well established and the attitude both to functional food and to their low socioeconomic consumers is positive.
Fast screening of protein surfaces using geometric invariant fingerprints

We develop a rapid and efficient method for the comparison of protein local surface similarities using geometric invariants (fingerprints). By combining fast fingerprint comparison with explicit alignment, we successfully screen the entire Protein Data Bank for proteins that possess local surface similarities. Our method is independent of sequence and fold similarities, and has potential application to protein structure annotation and protein-protein interface design.
Development of Low Temperature Nitriding Process and its Effects on the 4-Points Bending Fatigue Properties of Commercially Pure Titanium

In order to improve both of the fatigue and tribological properties of commercially pure (CP) titanium, a low temperature nitriding process was developed. Cold rolling was introduced as pre-treatment of plasma nitriding to create fine grains which could accelerate the diffusion of nitrogen into the material. Surface microstructures of the nitrided specimens pre-treated with cold rolling were characterized using a micro-Vickers hardness tester, an optical microscope, a scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and electron backscatter diffraction technique (EBSD). Titanium-nitrides (TiN and Ti2N) were formed on the surface nitrided at the temperature greater than 600 °C. Moreover, thicker compound layer was formed in the nitrided CP titanium pre-treated with cold rolling in comparison to the only nitrided one, resulting in showing higher hardness. 4-points bending fatigue tests were performed for the specimens treated with low temperature nitriding (600 °C), which could suppress the grain-coarsening, under the stress ratio R = 0.1 at room temperature. In addition, fatigue fracture mechanism of nitrided CP titanium was discussed based on the observations of microstructure and fracture surface.
Arecibo Pulsar Survey Using ALFA. II. The Young, Highly Relativistic Binary Pulsar J1906+0746

We report the discovery of PSR J1906+0746, a young 144 ms pulsar in a highly relativistic 3.98 hr orbit with an eccentricity of 0.085 and expected gravitational wave coalescence time of ~300 Myr. The new pulsar was found during precursor survey observations with the Arecibo 1.4 GHz feed array system and retrospectively detected in the Parkes Multibeam plane pulsar survey data. From radio follow-up observations with Arecibo, Jodrell Bank, Green Bank, and Parkes, we have measured the spin-down and binary parameters of the pulsar and its basic spectral and polarization properties. We also present evidence for pulse profile evolution, which is likely due to geodetic precession, a relativistic effect caused by the misalignment of the pulsar spin and total angular momentum vectors. Our measurements show that PSR J1906+0746 is a young object with a characteristic age of 112 kyr. From the measured rate of orbital periastron advance (7.°57 ± 0.°03 yr-1), we infer a total system mass of 2.61 ± 0.02 M☉. While these parameters suggest that the PSR J1906+0746 binary system might be a younger version of the double pulsar system, intensive searches for radio pulses from the companion have so far been unsuccessful. It is therefore not known whether the companion is another neutron star or a massive white dwarf. Regardless of the nature of the companion, a simple calculation suggests that the Galactic birthrate of binaries similar to PSR J1906+0746 is ~60 Myr-1. This implies that PSR J1906+0746 will make a significant contribution to the computed cosmic inspiral rate of compact binary systems.
Comparative Anatomy, Anthropology and Archaeology as Case Studies on the Influence of Human Biases in Natural Sciences: The Origin of ‘Humans’, of ‘Behaviorally Modern Humans’ and of ‘Fully Civilized Humans’

Natural sciences are considered to be exact sciences. However, despite usually being effectively usually more 鄂objective 鈂 than for instance social sciences, they are not immune to a problem common to all sciences: the intrinsic psychological, sociological and/or historical biases of the scientists. In the present paper I will briefly discuss the influence of these biases in natural sciences, using anthropology, archaeology and comparative anatomy as case studies. I will specifically discuss how these influences have lead scientists to 鄂actively search 鈂 and s upposedly 鄂find 鈂 data to support that the first 鄂humans 鈂, the first 鄂behaviorally modern humans 鈂 and the first 鄂fully civilized or sophisticated humans 鈂 were mostly originated in Europe, in some cases to the extent of fabricating false scientific evidence.
On the Effect of I/Q Imbalance on Energy Detection and a Novel Four-Level Hypothesis Spectrum Sensing

Direct-conversion transceivers are in demand due to low implementation cost of analog front ends. However, these transmitters or receivers introduce imperfections such as in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalances. In this paper, we first investigate the effect of I/Q imbalance on the performance of primary system and show that these impairments can severely degrade the performance of cognitive radio system that are based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) multiple-access scheme. Next, we design a new four-level hypothesis blind detector for spectrum sensing in such cognitive radio system and show that the proposed detector is less vulnerable to I/Q imbalance than conventional two-level detectors.
ResearchDefective Artemis causes mild telomere dysfunction

Background: Repair of DNA double strand breaks by non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) requires several proteins including Ku, DNA-PKcs, Artemis, XRCC4, Ligase IV and XLF. Two of these proteins, namely Ku and DNA-PKcs, are also involved in maintenance of telomeres, chromosome end-structures. In contrast, cells defective in Ligase IV and XRCC4 do not show changes in telomere length or function suggesting that these proteins are not involved in telomere maintenance. Since a mouse study indicated that defective Artemis may cause telomere dysfunction we investigated the effects of defective Artemis on telomere maintenance in human cells. Results: We observed significantly elevated frequencies of telomeric fusions in two primary fibroblast cell lines established from Artemis defective patients relative to the control cell line. The frequencies of telomeric fusions increased after exposure of Artemis defective cells to ionizing radiation. Furthermore, we observed increased incidence of DNA damage at telomeres in Artemis defective cells that underwent more than 32 population doublings using the TIF (Telomere dysfunction Induced Foci) assay. We have also inhibited the expression levels of DNA-PKcs in Artemis defective cell lines by either using synthetic inhibitor (IC86621) or RNAi and observed their greater sensitivity to telomere dysfunction relative to control cells. Conclusion: These results suggest that defective Artemis causes a mild telomere dysfunction phenotype in human
The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood

Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the ‘historic-geographic’ school, it is possible to classify similar tales into “international types” and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs. Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recently applied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in the literature: ATU 333, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oral traditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia. However, in many of these cases, it is difficult to differentiate ATU 333 from another widespread international folktale, ATU 123, ‘The Wolf and the Kids’. To shed more light on these relationships, data on 58 folktales were analysed using cladistic, Bayesian and phylogenetic network-based methods. The results demonstrate that, contrary to the claims made by critics of the historic-geographic approach, it is possible to identify ATU 333 and ATU 123 as distinct international types. They further suggest that most of the African tales can be classified as variants of ATU 123, while the East Asian tales probably evolved by blending together elements of both ATU 333 and ATU 123. These findings demonstrate that phylogenetic methods provide a powerful set of tools for testing hypotheses about cross-cultural relationships among folktales, and point towards exciting new directions for research into the transmission and evolution of oral narratives.
Computational approaches for disease gene identification

Identifying disease genes from human genome is an important and fundamental problem in biomedical research. Despite many publications of machine learning methods applied to discover new disease genes, it still remains a challenge because of the pleiotropy of genes, the limited number of confirmed disease genes among whole genome and the genetic heterogeneity of diseases. Recent approaches have applied the concept of 'guilty by association' to investigate the association between a disease phenotype and its causative genes, which means that candidate genes with similar characteristics as known disease genes are more likely to be associated with diseases. However, due to the imbalance issues (few genes are experimentally confirmed as disease related genes within human genome) in disease gene identification, semi-supervised approaches, like label propagation approaches and positive-unlabeled learning, are used to identify candidate disease genes via making use of unknown genes for training - typically in the scenario of a small amount of confirmed disease genes (labeled data) with a large amount of unknown genome (unlabeled data). The performance of Disease gene prediction models are limited by potential bias of single learning models and incompleteness and noise of single biological data sources, therefore ensemble learning models are applied via combining multiple diverse biological sources and learning models to obtain better predictive performance. In this thesis, we propose three computational models for identifying candidate disease genes.
$\ell_{p}-\ell_{q}$ Penalty for Sparse Linear and Sparse Multiple Kernel Multitask Learning

Recently, there has been much interest around multitask learning (MTL) problem with the constraints that tasks should share a common sparsity profile. Such a problem can be addressed through a regularization framework where the regularizer induces a joint-sparsity pattern between task decision functions. We follow this principled framework and focus on ℓ<sub>p</sub>-ℓ<sub>q</sub> (with 0 ≤ <i>p</i> ≤ 1 and 1 ≤ <i>q</i> ≤ 2) mixed norms as sparsity-inducing penalties. Our motivation for addressing such a larger class of penalty is to adapt the penalty to a problem at hand leading thus to better performances and better sparsity pattern. For solving the problem in the general multiple kernel case, we first derive a variational formulation of the ℓ<sub>1</sub>-ℓ<sub>q</sub> penalty which helps us in proposing an alternate optimization algorithm. Although very simple, the latter algorithm provably converges to the global minimum of the ℓ<sub>1</sub>-ℓ<sub>q</sub> penalized problem. For the linear case, we extend existing works considering accelerated proximal gradient to this penalty. Our contribution in this context is to provide an efficient scheme for computing the ℓ<sub>1</sub>-ℓ<sub>q</sub> proximal operator. Then, for the more general case, when 0 <; <i>p</i> <; 1, we solve the resulting nonconvex problem through a majorization-minimization approach. The resulting algorithm is an iterative scheme which, at each iteration, solves a weighted ℓ<sub>1</sub>-ℓ<sub>q</sub> sparse MTL problem. Empirical evidences from toy dataset and real-word datasets dealing with brain-computer interface single-trial electroencephalogram classification and protein subcellular localization show the benefit of the proposed approaches and algorithms.
It Takes Two to Tango: A Bilingual Unsupervised Approach for Estimating Sense Distributions using Expectation Maximization

Several bilingual WSD algorithms which exploit translation correspondences between parallel corpora have been proposed. However, the availability of such parallel corpora itself is a tall task for some of the resource constrained languages of the world. We propose an unsupervised bilingual EM based algorithm which relies on the counts of translations to estimate sense distributions. No parallel or sense annotated corpora are needed. The algorithm relies on a synset-aligned bilingual dictionary and in-domain corpora from the two languages. A symmetric generalized Expectation Maximization formulation is used wherein the sense distributions of words in one language are estimated based on the raw counts of the words in the aligned synset in the target language. The overall performance of our algorithm when tested on 4 language-domain pairs is better than current state-of-the-art knowledge based and bilingual unsupervised ap
Optimization of Ultrasonic Extraction of Phenolics from Litchi Seed by Response Surface Methodology

Optimization conditions for ultrasonic extraction of phenolics from litchi seed were studied using response surface methodology. A Box–Behnken design (BBD) was applied to determine the effects of extraction temperature, methanol concentration and extraction time on yield of phenolics. Then a quadratic regression model was developed and found to be statistically significant by examining its adequacy. According to the model, the maximum yield of phenolics was obtained at the theoretical extraction conditions described as follows: extraction temperature 90°C, methanol concentration 59% and extraction time 70 min. Under this condition, the experimental value was 5.48 ± 0.03% (n = 3) with gallic acid as the equivalent, which agreed with the predicted value (5.52%) closely.
Expansion et révision privées dans KD 45 n

We study private expansion and revision operators in a multi-agent setting. More precisely, we study the changes induced by a new piece of information made available to only one agent in a KD45n model. We point out a translation of AGM expansion and revision postulates to this setting, and define specific expansion and revision operators.
The Nonlinearity of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve: The Case of Tunisia

This article seeks to check the nonlinearity of the Phillips curve in Tunisia for the 1993–2012 period, relying on a hybrid new Keynesian Phillips curve modeled via a Logistic Smooth Transition Regression (LSTR) model with endogenous variables. We estimate this model using the nonlinear instrumental variables. The empirical results corroborate the new Keynesian assumption ofprice rigidity and show that the response of inflation to the output gap tends to be significant only if the inflation rate tends to be relatively high and exceeds a certain threshold. For a low inflation rate, the price rigidity dominates. This result is particularly evident in Tunisia, especially for the years following the 2011 revolution during which the elasticity of inflation rate to an excess demand has become highly important and the inflation rate experienced record levels.
Kinetic Analysis of Secretory Protein Traffic and Characterization of Golgi to Plasma Membrane Transport Intermediates in Living Cells

Quantitative time-lapse imaging data of single cells expressing the transmembrane protein, vesicular stomatitis virus ts045 G protein fused to green fluorescent protein (VSVG–GFP), were used for kinetic modeling of protein traffic through the various compartments of the secretory pathway. A series of first order rate laws was sufficient to accurately describe VSVG–GFP transport, and provided compartment residence times and rate constants for transport into and out of the Golgi complex and delivery to the plasma membrane. For ER to Golgi transport the mean rate constant (i.e., the fraction of VSVG–GFP moved per unit of time) was 2.8% per min, for Golgi to plasma membrane transport it was 3.0% per min, and for transport from the plasma membrane to a degradative site it was 0.25% per min. Because these rate constants did not change as the concentration of VSVG–GFP in different compartments went from high (early in the experiment) to low (late in the experiment), secretory transport machinery was never saturated during the experiments. The processes of budding, translocation, and fusion of post-Golgi transport intermediates carrying VSVG– GFP to the plasma membrane were also analyzed using quantitative imaging techniques. Large pleiomorphic tubular structures, rather than small vesicles, were found to be the primary vehicles for Golgi to plasma membrane transport of VSVG–GFP. These structures budded as entire domains from the Golgi complex and underwent dynamic shape changes as they moved along microtubule tracks to the cell periphery. They carried up to 10,000 VSVG–GFP molecules and had a mean life time in COS cells of 3.8 min. In addition, they fused with the plasma membrane without intersecting other membrane transport pathways in the cell. These properties suggest that the post-Golgi intermediates represent a unique transport organelle for conveying large quantities of protein cargo from the Golgi complex directly to the plasma membrane.