Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparaison de distances et noyaux classiques par degré d'équivalence des ordres induits

Le choix d'une mesure pour comparer les donnees est au coeur des tâches de recherche d'information et d'apprentissage automatique. Nous considerons ici ce probleme dans le cas ou seul l'ordre induit par la mesure importe, et non les valeurs numeriques qu'elle fournit : cette situation est caracteristique des moteurs de recherche de documents par exemple. Nous etudions dans ce cadre les mesures de comparaison classiques pour donnees numeriques, telles que les distances et les noyaux les plus courants. Nous identifions les mesures equivalentes, qui induisent toujours le meme ordre ; pour les mesures non equivalentes, nous quantifions leur desaccord par des degres d'equivalence bases sur le coefficient de Kendall generalise. Nous etudions les equivalences et quasi-equivalences a la fois sur les plans theorique et experimental.
Tracking control of parallel manipulator with 3-DOF

A parallel three degrees of freedom (3-DOF) manipulator known as Maryland manipulator is considered in this paper. The manipulator model considered in this paper is more practical because the offset lengths are not taken zero. The trajectory tracking control of the Maryland manipulator is done using linear–quadratic regulator (LQR) based proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller. Three sequential trajectories are used to provide complete dynamic analysis of the manipulator. The manipulator considered here is more practical because the offset lengths are not taken zero unlike previous research articles. The motivation behind using PID controller is its simplicity and effectiveness. The manipulator is a highly coupled and nonlinear system so the correct determination of control signal is very important to achieve good tracking performance. The process for selecting the PID parameters is discussed in detail and the simulations results are used to show the efficacy of the controller.
Excitotoxic lesions in the central nucleus of the amygdala attenuate stress-induced anxiety behavior

The extended amygdala, composed by the amygdaloid nuclei and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), plays a critical role in anxiety behavior. In particular, the link between the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) and the BNST seems to be critical to the formation of anxiety-like behavior. Chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) exposure is recognized as a validated animal model of anxiety and is known to trigger significant morphofunctional changes in the extended amygdala. Quite surprisingly, no study has ever analyzed the role of the CeA in the onset of stress-induced anxiety and fear conditioning behaviors; thus, in the present study we induced a bilateral excitotoxic lesion in the CeA of rats that were subsequently exposed to a chronic stress protocol. Data shows that the lesion in the CeA induces different results in anxiety and fear-behaviors. More specifically, lesioned animals display attenuation of the stress response and of stress-induced anxiety-like behavior measured in the elevated-plus maze (EPM) when compared with stressed animals with sham lesions. This attenuation was paralleled by a decrease of stress-induced corticosterone levels. In contrast, we did not observe any significant effect of the lesion in the acoustic startle paradigm. As expected, lesion of the CeA precluded the appearance of fear behavior in a fear-potentiated startle paradigm in both non-stressed and stressed rats. These results confirm the implication of the CeA in fear conditioning behavior and unravel the relevance of this brain region in the regulation of the HPA axis activity and in the onset of anxiety behavior triggered by stress.
Chinese Students’ Perceptions of the Teaching in an Australian Accounting Programme – An Exploratory Study

ABSTRACT This exploratory study is designed to elicit and understand the views of Mainland Chinese students concerning their learning experience in an Australian accounting education programme. The article contributes to the literature by investigating the issues and implications associated with international students’ perceptions of teaching, as little research has been undertaken in this context. Data were obtained from focus group interviews at two Australian universities, comprising students who had no prior experience of Western education. Based on an adaptation of Ramsden's 2003 model [Learning to teach in higher education (2nd ed.). London: Routledge], the data show that the students’ educational experience in China has a direct and negative influence on their perceptions of the teaching and learning experience in Australia. The negativity is particularly strong for entry-level students but dissipates to some extent with time. Issues concerning teachers’ enthusiasm, commitment, delivery skills and students’ expectations also emerged as important factors affecting student perceptions.
Stability and electronic properties of SiGe-based 2 D layered structures

The structural and electronic properties of the in-plane hybrids consisting of siligene (SiGe), and its derivatives in bothmono and bilayer forms are investigatedwithin density functional theory. Among several pristine and hydrogenated configurations, the so-called chair conformation is energetically favorable formonolayers. On the other hand, the bilayer siligane (HSiGeH) prefers AB-stacked chair conformation and bilayer siligone (HSiGe) prefers AA-stacked buckled conformation. In SiGe, the Dirac-cone character is predicted to be retained.HSiGe is amagnetic semiconductor with a band gap of∼0.6 eV. The electronic properties show tunability undermechanical strain and transverse electric field; (i) the energy gap opens up in the SiGe bilayer, (ii) a direct-to-indirect gap transition is predicted by the applied strain in theHSiGeHbilayer, and (iii) a semiconductor-to-metal transition is predicted forHSiGe andHSiGeHbilayers under the application of strain and electricfield, thus suggesting SiGe and its derivatives to be a potential candidate for electronic devices at nanoscale.
Estrogen receptor alpha gene polymorphisms and risk of myocardial infarction.

CONTEXT The role of estrogens in ischemic heart disease (IHD) is uncertain. Evidence suggests that genetic variations in the estrogen receptor alpha (ESR1) gene may influence IHD risk, but the role of common sequence variations in the ESR1 gene is unclear. OBJECTIVE To determine whether the ESR1 haplotype created by the c.454-397T>C (PvuII) and c.454-351A>G (XbaI) polymorphisms is associated with myocardial infarction (MI) and IHD risk. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In 2617 men and 3791 postmenopausal women from The Rotterdam Study (enrollment between 1989-1993 and follow-up to January 2000), a population-based, prospective cohort study of participants aged 55 years and older, ESR1 c.454-397T>C and c.454-351A>G haplotypes were determined. Detailed interviews and physical examinations were performed, blood samples were obtained, and cardiovascular risk factors were assessed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE The primary outcome was MI and IHD defined as MIs, revascularization procedures, and IHD mortality. RESULTS Approximately 29% of women and 28.2% of men were homozygous carriers of the ESR1 haplotype 1 (-397 T and -351 A) allele, 49% of women and 50% of men were heterozygous carriers, and 22% of women and 21.4% of men were noncarriers. During a mean follow-up of 7.0 years, 285 participants (115 women; 170 men) had MI, and 440 (168 women; 272 men) had an IHD event, of which 97 were fatal. After adjustment for known cardiovascular risk factors, female heterozygous carriers of haplotype 1 had an increased risk of MI (event rate, 2.8%; relative risk [RR], 2.23; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.13-4.43) compared with noncarriers (event rate, 1.3%), whereas homozygous carriers had an increased risk (event rate, 3.2%; RR, 2.48; 95% CI, 1.22-5.03). For IHD events, we observed a similar association. In women, the effect of haplotype 1 on fatal IHD was larger than on nonfatal IHD. In men, the ESR1 haplotypes were not associated with an increased risk of MI (event rate, 5.7%; RR, 0.93; 95% CI, 0.59-1.46 for heterozygous carriers; and event rate, 5.1%; RR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.49-1.38 for homozygous carriers) compared with noncarriers (event rate, 5.8%) and were not associated with an increased risk of IHD. CONCLUSIONS In this population-based, prospective cohort study, postmenopausal women who carry ESR1 haplotype 1 (c.454-397 T allele and c.454-351 A allele) have an increased risk of MI and IHD, independent of known cardiovascular risk factors. In men, no association was observed.
Legitimation of New Ventures: A Review and Research Programme

Research on how new ventures (NVs) achieve legitimacy is fragmented and rests on taken-for-granted assumptions that require problematization. Following a systematic literature review, I identify five distinct perspectives on NV legitimation: an institutional perspective, a cultural entrepreneurship perspective, an ecological perspective, an impression management perspective, and a social movement perspective. After comparing and contrasting these perspectives, I synthesize them into a generative and integrative typology. Based on this typology, I develop a new research programme. The programme widens the extant scholarship agenda by challenging its shared assumptions and contributes to further integration of the literature by building bridges between perspectives.
Cellular Metanephric Stromal Tumor in a Postmenopausal Woman

Metanephric stromal tumor (MST) of the kidney is a rare pediatric neoplasm which has rarely been reported in adults. The authors present a case of MST, cellular type, an unreported variant, in a 56-year-old postmenopausal woman. The 9.0-cm tumor was solid, unencapsulated, and well circumscribed, with a firm homogeneous cut surface. The tumor was purely stromal with dense spindle-cell proliferations displaying prominent schwannoma-like architecture, intratumoral angiodysplasia, and entrapped native renal tubules with “onion-skin” tumor collarettes. The tumor stroma expressed CD34, estrogen, and progesterone and did not express desmin, smooth muscle actin, S-100, or TLE-1. Considering the characteristic morphology and immunophenotype, a diagnosis of “metanephric stromal tumor, cellular type,” was made. This is an exceptionally rare disease manifestation in an adult patient and the first description of MST with such high stromal cellularity, making this case unique in both clinical and pathological presentation.
HOPE: Iterative and interactive database partitioning for OLTP workloads

This paper demonstrates HOPE, an efficient and effective database partitioning system that is designed for OLTP workloads. HOPE is built on top of a novel tuple-group based database partitioning model, which is able to minimize the number of distributed transactions as well as the extent of partition and workload skews during the workload execution. HOPE conducts the partitioning in an iterative manner in order to achieve better partitioning quality, save the user's time spent on partitioning design and increase its application scenes. HOPE is also highly interactive, as it provides rich opportunities for the user to help it further improve the partitioning quality by passing expertise and indirect domain knowledge.
Psychometric properties of the Thai versions of State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children and Child Medical Fear Scale.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Thai versions of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC) and the Child Medical Fear Scale (CMFS) in Thai school age children. Subjects were 419 Thai students in grades 3-6 in three schools in Bangkok. Classrooms of students were randomly selected, and students within each classroom were divided into two groups to test the two instruments. Data were collected from students in the classrooms twice, 2 weeks apart. Content Validity Indices of the Thai STAIC and the CMFS were between 90-95%. Internal consistencies were > . 80. Test-retest reliability coefficient for the Thai CMFS was . 80, and coefficients for the STAIC were . 62 for A-State scale and . 68 for A-Trait scale. Both instruments seem to be promising anxiety/fear measures for Thai school age children; however, the Thai version of STAIC needs modification to enhance reliability and validity.
Synaptic scaffolding protein SYD-2 clusters and activates kinesin-3 UNC-104 in C. elegans

Kinesin-3 motor UNC-104/KIF1A is essential for transporting synaptic precursors to synapses. Although the mechanism of cargo binding is well understood, little is known how motor activity is regulated. We mapped functional interaction domains between SYD-2 and UNC-104 by using yeast 2-hybrid and pull-down assays and by using FRET/fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy to image the binding of SYD-2 to UNC-104 in living Caenorhabditis elegans. We found that UNC-104 forms SYD-2-dependent axonal clusters (appearing during the transition from L2 to L3 larval stages), which behave in FRAP experiments as dynamic aggregates. High-resolution microscopy reveals that these clusters contain UNC-104 and synaptic precursors (synaptobrevin-1). Analysis of motor motility indicates bi-directional movement of UNC-104, whereas in syd-2 mutants, loss of SYD-2 binding reduces net anterograde movement and velocity (similar after deleting UNC-104's liprin-binding domain), switching to retrograde transport characteristics when no role of SYD-2 on dynein and conventional kinesin UNC-116 motility was found. These data present a kinesin scaffolding protein that controls both motor clustering along axons and motor motility, resulting in reduced cargo transport efficiency upon loss of interaction.
Advanced configuration system for cost-effective integration of distributed energy systems

The transition from the classical energy grid to a smart grid implies the introduction of information and communication technologies. In recent years, research and industry worked on enabling smart grids by developing solutions to connect and integrate distributed energy systems. Even though these efforts have made significant progress, a main issue relates to the costs of additional technical solutions needed in a smart grid. In this work, we present a gateway which enables the connection and integration of distributed energy systems into a control system. The gateway hardware is based on a market ready industrial controller by Siemens. The main contribution of this work is a sophisticated software application which supports the integration phase of the gateway. Since the integration is one of the main cost drivers of distributed energy systems, our solution reduces the integration costs significantly and enables new business models.
Cloning and Mutagenesis of the Murine Gammaherpesvirus 68 Genome as an Infectious Bacterial Artificial Chromosome

ABSTRACT Gammaherpesviruses cause important infections of humans, in particular in immunocompromised patients. Recently, murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (MHV-68) infection of mice has been developed as a small animal model of gammaherpesvirus pathogenesis. Efficient generation of mutants of MHV-68 would significantly contribute to the understanding of viral gene functions in virus-host interaction, thereby further enhancing the potential of this model. To this end, we cloned the MHV-68 genome as a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) inEscherichia coli. During propagation in E. coli, spontaneous recombination events within the internal and terminal repeats of the cloned MHV-68 genome, affecting the copy number of the repeats, were occasionally observed. The gene for the green fluorescent protein was incorporated into the cloned BAC for identification of infected cells. BAC vector sequences were flanked byloxP sites to allow the excision of these sequences using recombinase Cre and to allow the generation of recombinant viruses with wild-type genome properties. Infectious virus was reconstituted from the BAC-cloned MHV-68. Growth of the BAC-derived virus in cell culture was indistinguishable from that of wild-type MHV-68. To assess the feasibility of mutagenesis of the cloned MHV-68 genome, a mutant virus with a deletion of open reading frame 4 was generated. Genetically modified MHV-68 can now be analyzed in functionally modified mouse strains to assess the role of gammaherpesvirus genes in virus-host interaction and pathogenesis.
Natural Language Question Answering in Open Domains

With the ever-growing volume of information on the web, the traditional search engines, returning hundreds or thousands of documents per query, become more and more demanding on the user patience in satisfying his/her information needs. Question Answering in Open Domains is a top research and development topic in current language technology. Unlike the standard search engines, based on the latest Information Retrieval (IR) methods, open domain question-answering systems are expected to deliver not a list of documents that might be relevant for the user’s query, but a sentence or a paragraph answering the question asked in natural language. This paper reports on the construction and testing of a Question Answering (QA) system which builds on several web services developed at the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ICIA/RACAI). The evaluation of the system has been independently done by the organizers of the ResPubliQA 2009 exercise and has been rated the best performing system with the highest improvement due to the natural language processing technology over a baseline state-of-the-art IR system. The system was trained on a specific corpus, but its functionality is independent on the linguistic register of the training data.
SNMP-driven active measurements in DiffServ networks

Active network monitoring techniques have been traditionally used in network management frameworks for OAM operations. They can also provide vital end-to-end network status information which can be exploited for application optimization (Network-Aware Applications). The paper proposes a novel, standards-compliant management framework for conducting active measurements on DiffServ networks, solely based on SNMP as control protocol. A specialized SNMP agent (SNMP for Active Measurements - SAM) is introduced for this purpose, accompanied with a custom MIB, which utilizes the standardized OWAMP (One-Way Active Measurement Protocol) for establishing active measurement sessions. A proof-of-concept implementation deployed on a laboratory testbed shows that the proposed framework exhibits satisfactory accuracy and scalability, while at the same time being compatible with off-the-shelf SNMP-based network managers. The SAM framework has been released as open-source for Linux-based routers.
Secure Relay and Jammer Selection for Physical Layer Security

Secure relay and jammer selection for physical-layer security is studied in a wireless network with multiple intermediate nodes and eavesdroppers, where each intermediate node either helps to forward messages as a relay, or broadcasts noise as a jammer. We derive a closed-form expression for the secrecy outage probability (SOP), and we develop two relay and jammer selection methods for SOP minimization. In both methods a selection vector and a corresponding threshold are designed and broadcast by the destination to ensure each intermediate node knows its own role while knowledge of the relay and jammer set is kept secret from all eavesdroppers. Simulation results show the SOP of the proposed methods are very close to that obtained by an exhaustive search, and that maintaining the privacy of the selection result greatly improves the SOP performance.
Novel Receptor Specificity of Avian Gammacoronaviruses That Cause Enteritis

ABSTRACT Viruses exploit molecules on the target membrane as receptors for attachment and entry into host cells. Thus, receptor expression patterns can define viral tissue tropism and might to some extent predict the susceptibility of a host to a particular virus. Previously, others and we have shown that respiratory pathogens of the genus Gammacoronavirus, including chicken infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), require specific α2,3-linked sialylated glycans for attachment and entry. Here, we studied determinants of binding of enterotropic avian gammacoronaviruses, including turkey coronavirus (TCoV), guineafowl coronavirus (GfCoV), and quail coronavirus (QCoV), which are evolutionarily distant from respiratory avian coronaviruses based on the viral attachment protein spike (S1). We profiled the binding of recombinantly expressed S1 proteins of TCoV, GfCoV, and QCoV to tissues of their respective hosts. Protein histochemistry showed that the tissue binding specificity of S1 proteins of turkey, quail, and guineafowl CoVs was limited to intestinal tissues of each particular host, in accordance with the reported pathogenicity of these viruses in vivo. Glycan array analyses revealed that, in contrast to the S1 protein of IBV, S1 proteins of enteric gammacoronaviruses recognize a unique set of nonsialylated type 2 poly-N-acetyl-lactosamines. Lectin histochemistry as well as tissue binding patterns of TCoV S1 further indicated that these complex N-glycans are prominently expressed on the intestinal tract of various avian species. In conclusion, our data demonstrate not only that enteric gammacoronaviruses recognize a novel glycan receptor but also that enterotropism may be correlated with the high specificity of spike proteins for such glycans expressed in the intestines of the avian host. IMPORTANCE Avian coronaviruses are economically important viruses for the poultry industry. While infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), a respiratory pathogen of chickens, is rather well known, other viruses of the genus Gammacoronavirus, including those causing enteric disease, are hardly studied. In turkey, guineafowl, and quail, coronaviruses have been reported to be the major causative agent of enteric diseases. Specifically, turkey coronavirus outbreaks have been reported in North America, Europe, and Australia for several decades. Recently, a gammacoronavirus was isolated from guineafowl with fulminating disease. To date, it is not clear why these avian coronaviruses are enteropathogenic, whereas other closely related avian coronaviruses like IBV cause respiratory disease. A comprehensive understanding of the tropism and pathogenicity of these viruses explained by their receptor specificity and receptor expression on tissues was therefore needed. Here, we identify a novel glycan receptor for enteric avian coronaviruses, which will further support the development of vaccines.