Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analytical modeling of P2PTV network

To provide a live and on demand video services over the internet due scalability issue, P2P technology which proved to be more scalable is widely used today. Since most of the video streams presented in P2P live video streaming systems are television channels all over the world, we therefore referred them as P2PTV systems. The behavior of single user is presented in terms of exponential closed queuing network. Based on the model we construct a behavioral model of multiple users in P2PTV-network with multiple channels. The stationary probability distribution of P2PTV-network model is obtained in a product form in terms of the number of channels and the number of users present in the network. Given the popularity of television channels we obtained formulas for the analysis of some QoE parameter in P2PTV-network with finite and infinite number of viewers.
Cross-Species Transmission of a Novel Adenovirus Associated with a Fulminant Pneumonia Outbreak in a New World Monkey Colony

Adenoviruses are DNA viruses that naturally infect many vertebrates, including humans and monkeys, and cause a wide range of clinical illnesses in humans. Infection from individual strains has conventionally been thought to be species-specific. Here we applied the Virochip, a pan-viral microarray, to identify a novel adenovirus (TMAdV, titi monkey adenovirus) as the cause of a deadly outbreak in a closed colony of New World monkeys (titi monkeys; Callicebus cupreus) at the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC). Among 65 titi monkeys housed in a building, 23 (34%) developed upper respiratory symptoms that progressed to fulminant pneumonia and hepatitis, and 19 of 23 monkeys, or 83% of those infected, died or were humanely euthanized. Whole-genome sequencing of TMAdV revealed that this adenovirus is a new species and highly divergent, sharing <57% pairwise nucleotide identity with other adenoviruses. Cultivation of TMAdV was successful in a human A549 lung adenocarcinoma cell line, but not in primary or established monkey kidney cells. At the onset of the outbreak, the researcher in closest contact with the monkeys developed an acute respiratory illness, with symptoms persisting for 4 weeks, and had a convalescent serum sample seropositive for TMAdV. A clinically ill family member, despite having no contact with the CNPRC, also tested positive, and screening of a set of 81 random adult blood donors from the Western United States detected TMAdV-specific neutralizing antibodies in 2 individuals (2/81, or 2.5%). These findings raise the possibility of zoonotic infection by TMAdV and human-to-human transmission of the virus in the population. Given the unusually high case fatality rate from the outbreak (83%), it is unlikely that titi monkeys are the native host species for TMAdV, and the natural reservoir of the virus is still unknown. The discovery of TMAdV, a novel adenovirus with the capacity to infect both monkeys and humans, suggests that adenoviruses should be monitored closely as potential causes of cross-species outbreaks.
Seroprevalence Study of Leptospirosis Among Rice Farmers in Khuzestan Province, South West Iran, 2012

Background: Leptospirosis as an emerging infectious disease is considered as an important public health problem worldwide. Objectives: The current study aimed to identify potential risks for leptospirosis among rice farmers in Khuzestan province, Iran. Patients and Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out in Khuzestan, South west Iran, from October to December, 2012. Randomly selected participants were placed in two groups: Rice farmers as cases, and non-farmers as controls. Blood samples obtained from the participants were tested for IgM anti-leptospira antibodies using Serion ELISA classic ESR 125M. The assays were performed and interpreted according to the manufacturer’s instructions. A questionnaire including variables related to Leptospira spp. exposure was administered to each participant. SPSS software version 16 was employed; Chi square and Fisher’s exact tests were used to analyze data. Results: Of the total 288 samples, 65 (22.5%) were positive for IgM anti-leptospira antibodies. Among the positive samples, 52 (36.1%) were from the case (rice farmer) and 14 (9.7%) from the control groups. There was a significant difference between the case and control groups regarding leptospiral infection (P < 0.0001). Mean age in male and female in the case and control groups were 44.2, 41.9 and 43.5, 41.2 years, respectively (P > 0.05). In the case group, males and those more than 35 years were at a higher risk of infection. Conclusions: Rice farmers are significantly infected with leptospirosis, and infection prevalence is highly affected by gender (male) and age (above 35 years). Rice farming parts of Khuzestan, Iran may be considered as endemic for leptospirosis.
Algorithms for Audiovisual Speaker Localisation in Reverberant Acoustic Environments

Innovative and future human-machine interfaces or video conference systems require knowledge of the speaker’s position for automatic beamformerand camera-steering purposes. To determine this position, acoustical as well as visual localisation techniques can be applied, and the aim of this project was to develop suitable algorithms for such an audiovisual speaker localisation. Furthermore, an experimental setup had to be developed in order to test these algorithms under realistic conditions. Since both, acoustical and visual localisation techniques have specific advantages and disadvantages, depending on the situation, their location estimates were combined, thus forming a robust overall joint location estimate of the speaking person.
Stochastic Discriminant Analysis

In this paper, we consider a linear supervised dimension reduction method for classification settings: Stochastic Discriminant Analysis. This method matches point similarities in the projection space with those in a response space. These similarities are represented by t-distributed joint pairwise probabilities. The matching is done by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the two probability distributions. The performance of the algorithm is compared against state-of-the-art methods in supervised dimension reduction. We found that the performance of SDA is comparable to (and sometimes better than) state-of-the-art methods in supervised linear dimension reduction. In the presence of multiple classes, low-dimensional SDA projections led to higher classification accuracies.
Some Taxonomical Characteristics of Tadarida teniotis (Mammalia: Chiroptera) in Turkey

Bu araştırma 1977 ve 2012 yılları arasında yapılan arazi çalışmaları sırasında Tadarida teniotis’le ilgili bazı kayıt ve gözlemlere dayanmaktadır. Bu türün diagnostik karakteri, habitatı, kürk rengi, ölçüleri, karyolojisi ve örneklerin kayıt yerleri verilmiştir. Örnekler genç ve ergin olmak üzere iki yaş grubuna ayrılmıştır. İstatistiki veriler ve kürk rengi bakımından literatürle karşılaştırılmış ve örneklerin nominatif form, T.t. teniotis’i temsil ettiği sonucuna varılmıştır.
A Statistical Approach for Estimating Language Model Reliability with Effective Smoothing Technique

Model smoothing is an imperative technology which deals with unseen test data by re-evaluating some zero- probability n-grams and assign them bare minimum non-zero values. There is an assortment of smoothing techniques employed to trim down tiny amount of probability from the probable grams and share out to zero probable grams within a Language Model. Kneser Ney and Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm are two probable techniques used for proficient smoothing. In this paper, a scheme is proposed for effective smoothing by combining Kneser Ney and Latent Dirichlet Allocation approaches. Moreover, another scheme is proposed to measure the reliability of a Language Model and determine the association between entropy and perplexity. These schemes are demonstrated by appropriate examples.
Advances in biochemical and functional roles of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 and angiotensin-(1–7) in regulation of cardiovascular function

Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is the first human homologue of ACE to be described. ACE2 is a type I integral membrane protein that functions as a carboxypeptidase, cleaving a single hydrophobic/basic residue from the COOH-terminus of its substrates. Because ACE2 efficiently hydrolyzes the potent vasoconstrictor angiotensin II to angiotensin (1–7), this has changed our overall perspective about the classical view of the renin angiotensin system in the regulation of hypertension and heart and renal function, because it represents the first example of a feedforward mechanism directed toward mitigation of the actions of angiotensin II. This paper reviews the new data regarding the biochemistry of angiotensin-(1–7)-forming enzymes and discusses key findings such as the elucidation of the regulatory mechanisms participating in the expression of ACE2 and angiotensin-(1–7) in the control of the circulation.
Protection against yellow fever in monkeys by immunization with yellow fever virus nonstructural protein NS1

Immunization of monkeys with yellow fever virus-specified nonstructural protein NS1 resulted in protection against fatal hepatitis as well as marked reduction in the magnitude of viremia after subcutaneous challenge with yellow fever virus. The results may be relevant to the design of possible subunit or recombinant flavivirus vaccines.
Cetacean monitoring in the Mariana Islands Range Complex, 2015

Broadly distributed species often exhibit genetic structure caused by habitat preferences or social structure. Here we examine regional and local genetic structure in Pacific short-finned pilot whales using a combination of mtDNA haplotypes and SNP genotypes of samples from the Mariana Islands, Hawaiian Islands and the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP). Preliminary analyses indicate a lack of maleor female-mediated gene flow between these three regions, and suggest a greater degree of population structure within island associated populations than pelagic populations. Within the Mariana Islands, mitochondrial differentiation was found between Saipan and Guam/Rota, but no nuclear differentiation was found between any region, suggesting that gene flow is driven by males of the species. High relatedness within social groups suggests the possibility of socially-mediated population structure, which will be a topic of future research and analysis. Introduction Ocean basins have few barriers to distribution, and indeed many marine vertebrates have migration routes that cover entire basins over the course of a year. Most odontocetes, however, exhibit genetic structure due to localized habitat use throughout the range of their distribution. In the case of an apparent lack of physical barriers, cryptic genetic structure is often driven by less obvious mechanisms, such as environmental preferences (e.g., sea surface temperature (SST), thermocline depth), dietary specialization, or social structure. Moreover, different habitats, such as coastal or island-associated and pelagic marine habitats, can facilitate different patterns of genetic structure within and among populations of the same species. Short-finned pilot whales are distributed throughout the Pacific Ocean in tropical and temperate waters. Although they are most often observed along shelf breaks, over depths of 1500 m, they are known to occupy pelagic waters in areas such as the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) (Baird et al. 2013; Hamilton et al. 2009). Two morphologically and genetically distinct types have been described, with spatio-temporally non-overlapping distributions (Kasuya et al. 1988; Oremus et al. 2009, Van Cise et al. in review). Mitogenomic data indicate that a third genetically distinct clade overlaps the distributions of the first two (Morin et al. 2015), although there are no morphological data to support or refute this hypothesis. The Naisa type shortSubmitted in Support of the U.S. Navy's 2015 Annual Marine Species Monitoring Report for the Pacific
Efficient distributed low-cost backbone formation for wireless networks

Backbone has been used extensively in various aspects (e.g., routing, route maintenance, broadcast, scheduling) for wireless ad hoc or sensor networks recently. Previous methods are mostly designed to minimize the size of the backbone. However, in many applications, it is desirable to construct a backbone with small cost when each wireless node has a cost of being in the backbone. In this paper, we first show that previous methods specifically designed to minimize the backbone size may produce a backbone with large cost. Then, an efficient distributed method to construct a weighted backbone with low cost is proposed. We prove that the total cost of the constructed backbone is within a small constant factor of the optimum for homogeneous networks when either the nodes' costs are smooth (i.e., the maximum ratio of costs of adjacent nodes is bounded) or the network maximum node degree is bounded. We also show that, with a small modification, the backbone is efficient for unicast: the total cost (or hop) of the least cost (or hop) path connecting any two nodes using backbone is no more than three (or four) times the least cost (or hop) path in the original communication graph. Our theoretical. results are corroborated by our simulation studies. Finally, we discuss several possible ad hoc network applications of our proposed backbone formation algorithms
The Molecular Disk in the Cloverleaf Quasar

We propose a new interpretation for the CO-emitting region of the Cloverleaf (H1413+1143), a gravitationally lensed quasi-stellar object. We fitted a two-galaxy lensing model directly to the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique CO (7-6) data rather than to the optical Hubble Space Telescope image, and from the fit we infer that the CO (7-6) source is a disklike structure with a characteristic radius of 785 pc, a size similar to that of the CO-emitting regions present in nearby starburst ultraluminous infrared galaxies. We therefore suggest that the Cloverleaf contains both an extended rotating molecular starburst disk and a central quasar.
Autonomic Resource Management Handling Delayed Configuration Effects

Today, cloud providers offer customers access to complex applications running on virtualized hardware. Nevertheless, big virtualized data centers become stochastic environments with performance fluctuations. The growing number of cloud services makes a manual steering impossible. An automatism on the provider side is needed. In this paper, we present a software solution located in the Software as a Service layer with autonomous agents that handle user requests. The agents allocate resources and configure applications to compensate performance fluctuations. They use a combination of Support Vector Machines and Model-Predictive Control to predict and plan future configurations. This allows them to handle configuration delays for requesting new virtual machines and to guarantee time-dependent service level objectives (SLOs). We evaluated our approach on a real cloud system with a high-performance software and a three-tier e-commerce application. The experiments show that the agents accurately configure the application and plan horizontal scalings to enforce SLO fulfillments even in the presence of noise.
Nonspecific suppressive effect of bovine herpesvirus type 1 on bovine leukocyte functions

The effect of bovine herpesvirus type 1 on the specific and nonspecific immune response of calves was examined. Animals with or without prior aerosol exposure to Pasteurella haemolytica serotype A1 were aerosol challenged with 10(8) PFU of virus. Blood and serum samples were taken before and after virus challenge for determining cell-mediated, humoral, and neutrophil responses. A significant depression of the blastogenic responses to phytohemagglutinin, P. haemolytica, and Pasteurella multocida and of neutrophil chemotactic response was observed 4 to 7 days after challenge. However, the antibacterial activity of neutrophils was not significantly affected by virus exposure. Anti-bovine herpesvirus type 1 antibody responses were detected 11 days postchallenge. A significant elevation of the anti-P. haemolytica antibody response (day 0 versus day +11) was detected in animals previously exposed to P. haemolytica.
Lymphocyte E rosette inhibitory factor: a regulatory serum lipoprotein

Rosette inhibitory factor, RIF, previously described in serum from patients with hepatitis B virus infection, has been isolated and identified as a minor species of beta-lipoprotein of the low-density (LDL) class. It is unrelated to hepatitis B virus proteins or particles. Although discrete by reference to charge and density (1.050 +/- 0.004 g/cm3), RIF appears to be a complex macromolecular structure containing apolipoproteins A, B, and C. Greater than 400% recovery is achieved upon 300,000-fold purification from RIF+ sera suggesting activation of a precursor form that is not present in normal serum. RIF inhibits E rosette function of T lymphocytes in vitro with a lag period of approximately 4 h and maximal effect at 24 h consistent with a metabolically-induced event. RIF is functionally active at concentrations of 1 X 10(-12) M or greater, rapidly binds to lymphocytes, and has a functionally effective half-life of approximately 1.5 h. Approximately 2,900 receptors for RIF appear to be present per cell and a high mutual affinity is apparent (k approximately to 9 X 10(10) liters/mol). RIF has no detectable effect on mitogen (PHA) responsiveness of lymphocytes, but inhibits the capacity of lymphocytes to respond to histoincompatible cells in vitro at concentrations greater than 10(-8) M. Equivalent RIF- lipoprotein fractions from normal serum are equally inhibitory in the mixed lymphocyte reaction suggesting that this effect is not directly attributable to RIF activity. These data indicate that RIF is a unique and functionally specific species of LDL that represents either an association complex of lipoproteins or a hybrid molecule of unusual composition. The association of this factor with viral-induced hepatocellular injury underscores the need to elucidate its structure and function in greater detail.
The relationship between autonomous motivation and autonomy support in medical students’ academic achievement

Objectives This study applied self-determination theory (SDT) to investigate the relationship between students’ autonomous motivation and tutors’ autonomy support in medical students’ academic achievement. Methods This was a cross-sectional study. Out of 204 students in a fundamental medical science course, 199 participated in the study. Data was collected using two questionnaires: the Learning Self-Regulation and Learning Climate Questionnaires. The score of the course assessment was the measure of academic achievement. Data was analyzed and reported with descriptive and inferential statistics (mean, standard deviation and multiple regression analysis). Results Mean score (±standard deviation) of the autonomous motivation, tutors’ autonomy support, and academic achievement were 5.48±0.89, 5.22±0.92, and 5.22±0.92. Multiple regression results reported students’ autonomous motivation was associated with improvement of students’ academic achievement (β=15.2, p=0.004). However, augmentation of tutors’ autonomy support was not reflected in the improvement of students’ academic achievement (β = -12.6, p = 0.019). Both students’ autonomous motivation and tutors’ autonomy support had a contribution of about 4.2% students’ academic achievement (F = 4.343, p = 0.014, R2 = 0.042). Conclusions Due to the unique characteristic of our medical students’ educational background, our study shows that tutors’ autonomy support is inconsistent with students’ academic achievement. However, both autonomous motivation and support are essential to students’ academic achievement. Further study is needed to explore students’ educational background and self-regulated learning competence to improve students’ academic achievement.
Analysis and design of tubular coils for wireless inductive power transfer systems

We evaluate copper tubes as alternative of litz wire for planar coils of inductive power transfer (IPT) systems. For this purpose, a design methodology focused on maximizing the product of the magnetic coupling and the quality factor is proposed. The methodology is based on a combination of FEA simulations and analytical calculations of the skin and proximity losses in the tube. Analytical calculations are based on solutions of Maxwell's equations for a tubular geometry. These solutions are oriented to extract both skin and proximity losses in the tube. Performance of a prototype of 1.5 kW is evaluated and compared with a conventional litz-wire implementation.
Is Red Cell Distribution Width a Novel Biomarker of Breast Cancer Activity? Data From a Pilot Study

Background Red cell distribution width (RDW) is a parameter of the standard full blood count tests, measuring the size variability of erythrocytes. Recently, its elevation has been proven to reliably reflect the extent systematic inflammation, mainly in cardiometabolic diseases. Up to date, its association with solid malignancies has been scarcely investigated. Methods We performed a retrospective study, in order to examine if RDW values comparing elevation is correlated with the histopathological parameters of breast cancer (tumor size, grade, lymphatic spread, overexpression of hormonal receptors and HER2 protein), as well as to assess the existence of any differences in RDW comparing two age-matched groups of patients with benign and malignant breast lesions respectively. Results RDW was significantly higher in patients with breast cancer, when compared to the enrolled patients with fibroadenomas. Moreover, in the breast cancer group, RDW elevation was significantly correlated with larger primary tumors, higher number of infiltrated axillary lymph nodes and HER2 overexpression, while it was inversely associated with the tumor grade. Conclusions Our pilot study demonstrated tha Red cell distribution width may be a novel biomarker of the activity of breast cancer. Although our preliminary findings need to be evaluated by studies with larger samples of patients, based on commonly accepted pathophysiological principles, we presume that they will be applicable not only in breast cancer, but also in other types of solid cancers, providing a simple and cost-effective biomarker of cancer surveillance.
A multiple deformable template approach for visual speech recognition

Proposes an improved deformable template algorithm for modeling the shape of a talker's mouth. We use a two-step approach which begins by classifying mouth images into broad categories. The classification procedure yields both a set of template parameters (in effect, a unique template) and a set of initial conditions. The second step is to allow the deformable template to converge using standard techniques. The multi-model approach is significantly more flexible than single-model approaches and consistently provides better solutions. We present examples of single and multiple template solutions which support this statement. In a small recognition experiment, recognition of consonants improved from 16% to 33%, based only on visual information, when multiple templates were used.