Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synthetic Double-Stranded RNAs Are Adjuvants for the Induction of T Helper 1 and Humoral Immune Responses to Human Papillomavirus in Rhesus Macaques

Toll-like receptor (TLR) ligands are being considered as adjuvants for the induction of antigen-specific immune responses, as in the design of vaccines. Polyriboinosinic-polyribocytoidylic acid (poly I:C), a synthetic double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), is recognized by TLR3 and other intracellular receptors. Poly ICLC is a poly I:C analogue, which has been stabilized against the serum nucleases that are present in the plasma of primates. Poly I:C12U, another analogue, is less toxic but also less stable in vivo than poly I:C, and TLR3 is essential for its recognition. To study the effects of these compounds on the induction of protein-specific immune responses in an animal model relevant to humans, rhesus macaques were immunized subcutaneously (s.c.) with keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH) or human papillomavirus (HPV)16 capsomeres with or without dsRNA or a control adjuvant, the TLR9 ligand CpG-C. All dsRNA compounds served as adjuvants for KLH-specific cellular immune responses, with the highest proliferative responses being observed with 2 mg/animal poly ICLC (p = 0.002) or 6 mg/animal poly I:C12U (p = 0.001) when compared with immunization with KLH alone. Notably, poly ICLC—but not CpG-C given at the same dose—also helped to induce HPV16-specific Th1 immune responses while both adjuvants supported the induction of strong anti-HPV16 L1 antibody responses as determined by ELISA and neutralization assay. In contrast, control animals injected with HPV16 capsomeres alone did not develop substantial HPV16-specific immune responses. Injection of dsRNA led to increased numbers of cells producing the T cell–activating chemokines CXCL9 and CXCL10 as detected by in situ hybridization in draining lymph nodes 18 hours after injections, and to increased serum levels of CXCL10 (p = 0.01). This was paralleled by the reduced production of the homeostatic T cell–attracting chemokine CCL21. Thus, synthetic dsRNAs induce an innate chemokine response and act as adjuvants for virus-specific Th1 and humoral immune responses in nonhuman primates.
Emerging Technologies for Interactive Learning in the ICT Age

Based on the review of educational technology research, this chapter describes and discusses how emerging technologies are integrated into the teaching and learning process to facilitate the learner-content, learner-learner, learner-instructor, and learner-interface interactions, as well as the new opportunities and challenges brought by them. Technologies discussed in this chapter are categorized into four types based on their distinct interactive features. Guidelines for applying them to facilitate interactive learning are proposed at the end of the chapter, based on the case studies of four interactive learning systems selected from the literature.
Global SAXS data analysis for multilamellar vesicles: Evolution of the scattering density profile (SDP) model

We adapted the highly successful scattering density profile (SDP) model, which is used to jointly analyze small angle x-ray and neutron scattering data from unilamellar vesicles, for use with data from fully hydrated, liquid crystalline multilamellar vesicles (MLVs). By using a genetic algorithm, this new method is capable of providing high resolution structural information, as well as determining bilayer elastic bending fluctuations from standalone x-ray data. Important structural parameters, such as bilayer thickness and area per lipid were determined for a series of saturated and unsaturated lipids, as well as binary mixtures with cholesterol. Results are in good agreement with previously reported SDP data, which used both neutron and x-ray data. The addition of deuterated and non-deuterated MLV neutron data to the analysis improved lipid backbone information, but did not improve, within experimental uncertainties, the structural information regarding bilayer thickness and area per lipid.
DSM and the death of phenomenology in america: an example of unintended consequences.

During the 19th century and early 20th century, American psychiatry shared many intellectual traditions and values with Great Britain and Europe. These include principles derived from the Enlightenment concerning the dignity of the individual and the value of careful observation. During the 20th century, however, American psychiatry began to diverge, initially due to a much stronger emphasis on psychoanalytic principles, particularly in comparison with Great Britain. By the 1960s and 1970s, studies such as the US-UK study and the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia demonstrated that the psychodynamic emphasis had gone too far, leading to diagnostic imprecision and inadequate evaluation of traditional evaluations of signs and symptoms of psychopathology. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III) was developed in this context, under the leadership of representatives from institutions that had retained the more traditional British-European approaches (eg, Washington University, Iowa). The goal of DSM-III was to create a comprehensive system for diagnosing and evaluating psychiatric patients that would be more reliable, more valid, and more consistent with international approaches. This goal was realized in many respects, but unfortunately it also had many unintended consequences. Although the original creators realized that DSM represented a "best effort" rather than a definitive "ground truth," DSM began to be given total authority in training programs and health care delivery systems. Since the publication of DSM-III in 1980, there has been a steady decline in the teaching of careful clinical evaluation that is targeted to the individual person's problems and social context and that is enriched by a good general knowledge of psychopathology. Students are taught to memorize DSM rather than to learn complexities from the great psychopathologists of the past. By 2005, the decline has become so severe that it could be referred to as "the death of phenomenology in the United States. "
Automated Effectiveness Evaluation of Moving Target Defenses: Metrics for Missions and Attacks

In this paper, we describe the results of several experiments designed to test two dynamic network moving target defenses against a propagating data exfiltration attack. We designed a collection of metrics to assess the costs to mission activities and the benefits in the face of attacks and evaluated the impacts of the moving target defenses in both areas. Experiments leveraged Siege's Cyber-Quantification Framework to automatically provision the networks used in the experiment, install the two moving target defenses, collect data, and analyze the results. We identify areas in which the costs and benefits of the two moving target defenses differ, and note some of their unique performance characteristics.
Clonal selection algorithm with binary representation of solutions for non-stationary optimization tasks

Non-stationary optimization with the immune based algorithms is studied in this paper. The algorithm works with a binary representation of solutions. A set of different types of binary mutation is proposed and experimentally verified. The mutations differ in the way of calculation of the number of bits to be mutated. Obtained results allow to indicate the leading formulas of calculation.
Children Use Temporal Cues to Learn Causal Directionality

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real-world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments.
A predicate-aware modulo scheduling for improving resource efficiency of coarse grained reconfigurable architectures

A coarse-grain reconfigurable architecture is an important technology for exploiting the parallelism of a program without compromise of the flexibility and has been adopted for high-performance embedded systems. However, the utilization of hardware resources may be limited by a large number of conditional executed operations. This paper represents a predicate-aware modulo scheduling which may map disjoint operations into the same processing element to reduce the requirements of hardware resources. Moreover, a weighted mapping decision algorithm has also been proposed to improve the execution performance for reconfigurable architecture. Our experimental results indicate that the initiation interval of a loop of the selected benchmarks may be reduced by 12% to 25.2% compared with a related work.
Prune Diseased Branches to Get Healthy Trees ! How to Find Erroneous Local Trees in a Treebank and Why It Matters

Annotated corpora are essential for training and testing algorithms in natural language processing (NLP), but even so-called gold-standard corpora contain a significant number of annotation errors (cf. Dickinson 2005, and references therein). For part-of-speech annotation, these errors have been shown to be problematic for both training and evaluation of NLP technology (van Halteren 2000; Padro and Marquez 1998; van Halteren et al. 2001; Květǒn and Oliva 2002). But only little work has been done on detecting errors in syntactic annotation (Ule and Simov 2004; Dickinson and Meurers 2003b, 2005), and the effect of the errors detected on the uses of such corpora has not been systematically explored. In this paper, we describe a new method for finding errors in treebanks and demonstrate the effect of such errors on NLP technology. Similar to the work in Dickinson and Meurers (2003b, 2005)—where multiple occurrences of the same string in identical contexts are found with varying labels—the approach presented here is based on the detection of inconsistencies; but instead of focusing on the consistent assignment of a label to a string, we here investigate the consistency of labeling within local trees. In section 2, we describe the new method, and we show the results of applying it to the Wall Street Journal corpus in section 3. After discussing ways to automatically identify individual erroneous rules in section 4, we show in section 5 that eliminating the detected errors from the training data of a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG) parser improves its performance.
Identified Teacher Supports for Inclusive Practice.

Thi s study investigated inclusive practices in Prince Edward Island (PEI) elemen-tary schools in terms of the supports teachers consider as important for inclusion. Twenty teachers were randomly selected to complete a survey, and 5 teachers were randomly selected to participate in an interview about inclusion supports. The survey in this study adapted The S chool and the Education of All Students Scale. Participants identifie d and ranked several supports that they deemed im-portant for successful inclusion. The r esults indicated that elementary teachers in PEI consider certain supports as important when planning an inclusive class-room, such as class size, curriculum and planning time, training, and other incentives. In light of PEI’s continued transition in Special Education services, such results provided insight into specific r ecommendations. The identifie d teach-er supports necessitate acknowledgement and understanding by teachers, parents, school boards, government, and teacher-training programs to ensure inclusive practices are implemented effe ctively in the PEI school system. ISSN 1918-5227 Pages 82- 94 Follow this and additional works at: htt p://ir.lib. uwo.ca/eei
"To Get Help, Please Press X" The Rise of the Assistance Paradigm in Video Game Design

The first generation of video games are known to be tremendously challenging. On top of the classic “easy to learn, hard to master” arcade games, the development of the domestic market saw the rise of more expansive and varied game worlds, in computer RPGs or adventure games. This added complexity is often synonym with a more steep difficulty curve due to the amount of information to assimilate early on. In this paper, we will try to understand how game designers have organised the challenge and complexity of their games through the development of assistance systems: tutorials, check points, adjustable difficulty, etc. The historical evolution of these systems supposes a major change in the way players are addressed by the medium, from the highly competitive environment of early days to the seemingly more cooperative attitude of contemporary games.
Home Literacy Environment and Reading Achievement: A Model for Determining the Relationship between Socio-Economic Status, Home Literacy Environment and Reading Achievement

Numerous studies have examined the importance of the home literacy environment (HLE) for the development of children’s reading achievement and the relationship between a family’s socio-economic status (SES) and the HLE. Furthermore, research has shown that there is a strong correlation between SES and children’s school achievement. In this paper, we ask whether HLE can explain the relationship between SES and school achievement. In other words: to what extent does the intensity of HLE in families with diverse SES account for the higher academic achievement of students from high-SES families? Using PIRLS 2006 data for 29 countries and applying the Rasch model, we constructed an index to quantify students’ HLE. In this index different variables of the PIRLS 2006 home questionnaire are considered, including certain early home literacy activities, parental attitudes, and the involvement of families in supporting their children’s reading in school. We also conducted path analyses to examine the relationship between SES, HLE and reading achievement in the participating countries.
Robust Estimation in High Noise and Highly Dimensional Data Sets with Applications to Machine Vision

Robust estimation, the problem of providing an effective parameter estimation in the presence of outlying data, is central to the discipline of machine vision. This report examines current robust estimation methods and demonstrates their inadequacy in high noise and high dimensionality due to reliance on naive hypothesis selection. Subsequently, clustering algorithms are discussed and how ideas from this area may be introduced into modern robust estimators to increase their efficacy is hypothesised. A preliminary algorithm using enhanced data sampling, NAPSAC, is described and shown to be superior in both high noise and higher dimensions. Based on this success, possibilities for further work are introduced along with some conclusions.
Evaluation of digital speckle filters for ultrasound images

Ultrasound (US) images are inherently corrupted by speckle noise causing inaccuracy of medical diagnosis using this technique. Hence, numerous despeckling filters are used to denoise US images. However most of the despeckling techniques cause blurring to the US images. In this work, four filters namely Lee, Wavelet Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE), Speckle-reduction Anisotropic Diffusion (SRAD) and Non-local-means (NLM) filters are evaluated in terms of their ability in noise removal. This is done through calculating four performance metrics Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Ultrasound Despeckling Assessment Index (USDSAI), Normalized Variance and Mean Preservation. The experiments were conducted on three different types of images which is simulated noise images, computer generated image and real US images. The evaluation in terms of PSNR, USDSAI, Normalized Variance and Mean Preservation shows that NLM filter is the best filter in all scenarios considering both speckle noise suppression and image restoration however with quite slow processing time. It may not be the best option of filter if speed is the priority during the image processing. Wavelet LMMSE filter is the next best performing filter after NLM filter with faster speed.
Identification of a novel transcript isoform of the TTLL12 gene in human cancers

Tubulin tyrosine ligase like 12 (TTLL12), a member of the tubulin tyrosine ligase (TTLL) family, has not been completely characterized to date. It is reported that histone methylation, tubulin modifications, mitotic duration and chromosome ploidy play crucial roles in a variety of cancers, and are related to tumorigenesis and cancer progression. A recent study showed that TTLL12 may be a pseudo-enzyme which has a SET-like domain and a TTL-like domain. In the present study, we first used 3′-rapid amplification of cDNA ends (3′-RACE) to amplify the transcripts of the TTLL12 gene from a human lung cancer cell line H1299, and unexpectedly discovered a new transcript isoform characterized with an additional 108-bp nucleotide sequence inserted at the location from 902 to 903 bases of the TTLL12 coding sequence (CDS), where it also locates between exons 5 and 6. Next, utilizing RT-PCR and Sanger sequencing, we further confirmed the existence of such a new transcript isoform of TTLL12 in more human cancer cells including lung cancer cells and other cancer cells. Moreover, several lung cancer cell lines were found to display a much higher proportion of the new isoform compared with TTLL12 wild-type transcript. These results suggest that the new TTLL12 isoform may be of importance for proper maintenance of lung cancer cells. Therefore, the new isoform of TTLL12, with the inserted sequences probably acting as a disordered region, provides a novel perspective regarding TTLL12 functions in human cancers including lung cancer.
A CD2-Green Fluorescence Protein-Transgenic Mouse Reveals Very Late Antigen-4-Dependent CD8+ Lymphocyte Rolling in Inflamed Venules1

Intravital microscopy allows detailed analysis of leukocyte trafficking in vivo, but fails to identify the nature of leukocytes investigated. Here, we describe the development of a CD2-enhanced green fluorescence protein (EGFP)-transgenic mouse to characterize lymphocyte trafficking during inflammation in vivo. A CD2-EGFP plasmid construct including the CD2 promoter, the EGFP transgene, and the CD2 locus control region was injected into B6CBA/F1 pronuclei. EGFP+ offspring were backcrossed into C57BL/6 mice for six generations. Flow cytometry demonstrated that all peripheral blood EGFP+ cells were positive for CD2 and negative for the granulocyte Ag Ly 6-G (GR-1). EGFPhigh cells stained positive for CD2, CD3, CD8, TCR β-chain, and NK1.1 but did not express the B cell and monocyte markers CD45RA, CD19, and CD11b. In vitro stimulation assays revealed no difference in lymphocyte proliferation and IL-2 secretion between EGFP+ and EGFP− mice. Intravital microscopy of untreated or TNF-α-treated cremaster muscle venules showed EGFP+ cells in vivo, but these cells did not roll or adhere to the vessel wall. In cremaster muscle venules treated with both TNF-α and IFN-γ, EGFPhigh cells rolled, adhered, and transmigrated at a rolling velocity slightly higher (11 μm/s) than that of neutrophils (10 μm/s). Blocking α4 integrin with a mAb increased rolling velocity to 24 μm/s. These findings show that CD8+ T cells roll in TNF-α/IFN-γ-pretreated vessels in vivo via an α4 integrin-dependent pathway.
Validity of the Eikonal Approximation

We summarize results on the reliability of the eikonal approximation in obtaining the high energy behavior of a two particle forward scattering amplitude. Reliability depends on the spin of the exchanged field. For scalar fields the eikonal fails at eighth order in perturbation theory, when it misses the leading behavior of the exchange-type diagrams. In a vector theory the eikonal gets the exchange diagrams correctly, but fails by ignoring certain non-exchange graphs which dominate the asymptotic behavior of the full amplitude. For spin--2 tensor fields the eikonal captures the leading behavior of each order in perturbation theory, but the sum of eikonal terms is subdominant to graphs neglected by the approximation. We also comment on the eikonal for Yang-Mills vector exchange, where the additional complexities of the non-abelian theory may be absorbed into Regge-type modifications of the gauge boson propagators.
Research on control and management system of solar cell laminators based on network platform

As for large-scale solar cell laminators, a new type of control and management based on the network was produced. Firstly, an acquisition and control system was established upon the IPC and FP21 controller. And then, using Brower/Server (B/S) structure, the OPC technology and real-time database technology, a measurement and control system with integration of detecting was designed, which could make an integration of solar cell laminating, real-time monitoring and production management. On the condition of large-scale laminators, using network to control and manage the lamination has a broad prospect of development.
Clinical Evaluation of Acupuncture as Treatment for Complications of Cerebrovascular Accidents: A Randomized, Sham-Controlled, Subject- and Assessor-Blind Trial

Background and Purpose. The effect of acupuncture as treatment for poststroke complications is questionable. We performed a randomized, sham-controlled double-blind study to investigate it. Methods. Patients with first-time acute stroke were randomized to receive 24 sessions of either real or sham acupuncture during an eight-week period. The primary outcome measure was change in National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score. Secondary outcome measures included changes in Barthel Index (BI), Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL), Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D), and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for pain scores. Results. Of the 52 patients who were randomized to receive acupuncture (n = 28) or placebo (n = 24), 10 patients in the acupuncture group and 9 patients in the placebo group failed to complete the treatment. In total, 18 patients in the acupuncture group and 15 patients in the control group completed the treatment course. Reduction in pain was significantly greater in the acupuncture group than in the control group (p value = 0.04). There were no significant differences in the other measures between the two groups. Conclusions. Acupuncture provided more effective poststroke pain relief than sham acupuncture treatment. However, acupuncture had no better effect on neurological, functional, and psychological improvement.
Complexity of winner determination and strategic manipulation in judgment aggregation

Judgment aggregation is an area of social choice theory that analyses procedures for aggregating the judgments of a group of agents regarding a set of interdependent propositions (modelled as formulas in propositional logic). The judgment aggregation framework gives rise to a number of algorithmic problems, including (1) computing a collective judgment from a profile of individual judgments (the winner determination problem), and (2) deciding whether a given agent can influence the outcome of a judgment aggregation procedure in her favour by reporting insincere judgments (the manipulation problem). We study the computational complexity of both these problems for two concrete judgment aggregation procedures that are complete and consistent and that have been argued to be useful in practice: the premise-based procedure and (a new variant of) distance-based merging. Our results suggest that manipulating these procedures is significantly harder than solving the corresponding winner determination problem.