Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recombinant Dengue 2 Virus NS3 Helicase Protein Enhances Antibody and T-Cell Response of Purified Inactivated Vaccine

Dengue virus purified inactivated vaccines (PIV) are highly immunogenic and protective over the short term, but may be poor at inducing cell-mediated immune responses and long-term protection. The dengue nonstructural protein 3 (NS3) is considered the main target for T-cell responses during viral infection. The amino (N)-terminal protease and the carboxy (C)-terminal helicase domains of DENV-2 NS3 were expressed in E. coli and analyzed for their immune-potentiating capacity. Mice were immunized with DENV-2 PIV with and without recombinant NS3 protease or NS3 helicase proteins, and NS3 proteins alone on days 0, 14 and 28. The NS3 helicase but not the NS3 protease was effective in inducing T-cell responses quantified by IFN-γ ELISPOT. In addition, markedly increased total IgG antibody titer against virus antigen was seen in mice immunized with the PIV/NS3 helicase combination in the ELISA, as well as increased neutralizing antibody titer measured by the plaque reduction neutralization test. These results indicate the potential immunogenic properties of the NS3 helicase protein and its use in a dengue vaccine formulation.
Control of coronavirus infection through plasmacytoid dendritic-cell–derived type I interferon

Abstract This study demonstrates a unique and crucial role of plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) and pDC-derived type I interferons (IFNs) in the pathogenesis of mouse coronavirus infection. pDCs controlled the fast replicating mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) through the immediate production of type I IFNs. Recognition of MHV by pDCs was mediated via TLR7 ensuring a swift IFN-α production following encounter with this cytopathic RNA virus. Furthermore, the particular type I IFN response pattern was not restricted to the murine coronavirus, but was also found in infection with the highly cytopathic human severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus. Taken together, our results suggest that rapid production of type I IFNs by pDCs is essential for the control of potentially lethal coronavirus infections.
Defective Cytochrome c-dependent Caspase Activation in Ovarian Cancer Cell Lines due to Diminished or Absent Apoptotic Protease Activating Factor-1 Activity*

Apoptosis via the mitochondrial pathway requires release of cytochrome c into the cytosol to initiate formation of an oligomeric apoptotic protease-activating factor-1 (APAF-1) apoptosome. The apoptosome recruits and activates caspase-9, which in turn activates caspase-3 and -7, which then kill the cell by proteolysis. Because inactivation of this pathway may promote oncogenesis, we examined 10 ovarian cancer cell lines for resistance to cytochrome c-dependent caspase activation using a cell-free system. Strikingly, we found that cytosolic extracts from all cell lines had diminished cytochromec-dependent caspase activation compared with normal ovarian epithelium extracts. The resistant cell lines expressed APAF-1 and caspase-9, -3, and -7; however, each demonstrated diminished APAF-1 activity relative to the normal ovarian epithelium cell lines. A competitive APAF-1 inhibitor may account for the diminished APAF-1 activity because we did not detect dominant APAF-1 inhibitors, altered APAF-1 isoform expression, or APAF-1 deletion, degradation, or mutation. Lack of APAF-1 activity correlated in some but not all cell lines with resistance to apoptosis. These data suggest that regulation of APAF-1 activity may be important for apoptosis regulation in some ovarian cancers.
Single-Scan Stem Reconstruction Using Low-Resolution Terrestrial Laser Scanner Data

Despite the active research, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has remained underutilized for forest structure assessment due to reliance of processing algorithms on high-resolution data, which may be costly and time-consuming to collect. Operational inventories, however, necessitate maximizing sample size while minimizing time and cost. The objective of this study was to assess the performance of a novel technique that enables stem reconstruction from low-resolution, single-scan TLS data in an effort to satisfy performance criteria against operational acquisition constraints. Instead of utilizing the curvature of the tree stem, e.g., by circle or cylinder fitting, we take advantage of the sensor-object geometry and reduce the dimensionality of the modeling to a series of one-dimensional (1-D) line fits. This allowed robust recovery of tree stem structure in a range of New England forest types, for tree stems which subtended at least an angular width of 15 mrad- the beam divergence of our system. Assessment was performed by projecting the three-dimensional (3-D) data onto two-dimensional (2-D) images and evaluating the per-point classification accuracies using manually digitized truth maps. Manual forest inventory measurements were also collected for each 20 × 20 m plot and compared to measurements derived automatically. Good retrievals of stem location (R2 = 0.99, RMSE = 0.16 m) and diameter at breast height (DBH) (R2 = 0.80, RMSE = 6.0 cm) were achieved. This study demonstrates that low-resolution sensors may be effective in providing data for operational forest inventories constrained by sample size, time, and cost.
The neoteric feature extraction method of epilepsy EEG based on the vertex strength distribution of weighted complex network

The study of epilepsy detection has great clinical significance. The focus of this study is feature extraction method, which has significant impacts on the performance of epilepsy detection. Recently, the statistic properties of complex network show ability to describe the dynamics of nonlinear time series. In this paper, a feature extraction method of epileptic EEG, based on statistical properties of weighted complex network, is proposed. The weighted network of epileptic EEG is first constructed and the vertex strength distribution of the converted network is studied. Then the weighted mean value of the vertex strength distribution is defined and extracted as the classification feature. Experimental results indicate that the extracted feature can clearly reflect the difference between ictal EEGs and interictal EEGs and the single feature classification based on extracted feature gets higher classification accuracy up to 95.50%.
A novel DCC mutation and genetic heterogeneity in congenital mirror movements

Objective: DCC is the receptor for netrin, a protein that guides axon migration of developing neurons across the body's midline. Mutations in the DCC gene were recently identified in 2 families with congenital mirror movements (MM). The objective was to study clinical and genetic characteristics of 3 European families with MM and to test whether this disorder is genetically homogeneous. Methods: We studied 3 MM families with a total of 13 affected subjects. Each patient had a standardized interview and neurologic examination, focusing on the phenomenology and course of the MM. The severity of MM was also assessed. Molecular analysis of DCC was performed in the index cases. In addition, linkage analysis of the DCC locus was performed in a large French family. Results: The clinical expression and course of MM were very similar in all the affected subjects, regardless of DCC mutational status. However, slight intersubject variability in the severity of MM was noted within each family. Onset always occurred in infancy or early childhood, and MM did not deteriorate over time. Motor disability due to MM was mild and restricted to activities that require independent movements of the 2 hands. We found a novel mutation in the DCC gene in an Italian family with MM associated with abnormal ipsilateral corticospinal projection. The DCC locus was excluded in the French family. Conclusion: DCC has a crucial role in the development of corticospinal tracts in humans. Congenital MM is genetically heterogeneous, despite its clinical homogeneity.
Deterministic learning and fault diagnosis for nonlinear robotic manipulators

The diagnosis of faults is one of the important tasks in the operation of robotic manipulators. In this paper, a rapid fault diagnosis scheme is proposed for nonlinear robotic systems. Firstly, the system uncertainty and unknown fault dynamics are identified through deterministic learning. The knowledge on uncertainty and fault dynamics is stored in a bank of neural networks (NNs). Secondly, a mechanism for rapid fault detection and isolation (FDI) is presented, by which a fault occurred can be detected and isolated by smallest residual principle. Simulation studies are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
The active client: The boundary-spanning roles of internal consultants as gatekeepers, brokers and partners of their external counterparts

This article examines the active client of management consultancy as a key agent in managing and mediating knowledge flows across organizational boundaries. From a qualitative study of a particular case of active clients—internal consultants managing their external counterparts—three boundary-spanning roles are identified. Active clients can act as a gatekeeper, broker and partner with respect to both consultants and the knowledge they bring. These roles are shown to vary according to a client’s expertise, formal project responsibilities and personal reputation, as well as the different phases of consulting projects. They not only elucidate an otherwise neglected or static dimension of management consultancy—client activity—but highlight the dynamic and essentially political character of serving as knowledge barriers and/or bridges in the intermediation and co-production of management knowledge across organizational boundaries.
Image Region Duplication Forgery Detection Based on Angular Radial Partitioning and Harris Key-Points

Region duplication forgery where a part of the image itself is copied and pasted onto a different part of the same image grid is becoming more popular in image manipulation. The forgers often apply geometric transformations such as rotation and scaling operations to make the forgery imperceptible. In this study, an image region duplication forgery detection algorithm is proposed based on the angular radial partitioning and Harris key-points. Two standard databases have been used: image data manipulation and MICC-F220 (Media Integration and Communication Center– of the University of Florence) for experimentation. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed technique can detect rotated regions in multiples of 30 degrees and can detect region duplication with different scaling factors from 0.8, to 1.2. More experimental results are presented to confirm the effectiveness of detecting region duplication that has undergone other changes, such as Gaussian noise, and JPEG compression.
Water, waste, and well-being: a multicountry study.

Data collected in the late 1980s from eight countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Burundi, Ghana, Togo, and Uganda), Asia/North Africa (Sri Lanka and Morocco), and the Americas (Bolivia and Guatemala) were combined and analyzed to test whether incremental health effects regarding diarrhea and nutritional status result from incremental improvements in water and sanitation conditions. Rural (n = 11,992) and urban (n = 4,888) samples were analyzed separately. Optimal (i.e., on the premises) and intermediate (improved public water) water supplies were compared with unimproved water conditions. Optimal (flush toilets or water-seal-latrines) and intermediate (latrines) sanitation levels were compared with unimproved sanitation. Nationally representative (random) samples of ever-married women age 15-49 years, with or without children, were interviewed in all countries, and children aged 3-36 months with available weight and height data were included in the analyses. Multiple linear regression controlled for household, maternal, and child-level variables; in addition, dummy variables were included for each country. Improvements in sanitation resulted in less diarrhea and in taller and heavier children with each of the three levels of water supply. Incremental benefits in sanitation were associated with less diarrhea and with additional increases in the weights and heights of children. The effects of improved sanitation were greater among urban dwellers than among rural dwellers. Health benefits from improved water were less pronounced than those for sanitation. Benefits from improved water occurred only when sanitation was improved and only when optimal water was present. These findings suggest that public health intervention should balance epidemiologic data with the cost of services and the demand for water. There should be efforts to develop compatible technologies so that incremental improvements in service can be made.
Navigation functions in Conformal Geometric Algebra

Conformal Geometric Algebra (CGA) can greatly improve controllers by simplifying the necessary equations and by its ability to apply geometric operations to more complicated geometric entities. In this paper we extend a singularity free CGA-based angular and linear velocity controller with navigation functions. The first navigation function ensures that the object being tracked is always within the camera's field of view. The second navigation function is the ability of the controller to avoid collisions with other objects. These navigation functions can be easily added to the CGA-based controller, experimentally ensured the desired goals and proven stable by Lyapunov.
Interactive Visualization of Volumetric Vector Fields Using Texture Based Particles

This paper introduces a new approach to the visualization of volumetric vector fields with an adaptive distribution of animated particles that show properties of the underlying steady flow. The shape of the particles illustrates the direction of the vector field in a natural way. The particles are transported along streamlines and their velocity reflects the local magnitude of the vector field. Further physical quantities of the underlying flow can be mapped to the emissive color, the transparency and the length of the particles. A major effort has been made to achieve interactive frame rates for the animation of a large number of particles while minimizing the error of the computed streamlines. There are three main advantages of the new method. Firstly, the animation of the particles diminishes the inherent occlusion problem of volumetric vector field visualization, as the human eye can trace an animated particle even if it is highly occluded. The second advantage is the variable resolution of the visualization method. More particles are distributed in regions of interest. We present a method to automatically adjust the resolution to features of the vector field. Finally, our method is scalable to the computational and rasterization power of the visualization system by simply adjusting the number of visualized particles.
Estimating the Number of Near-Duplicate Document Pairs for Massive Data Sets using Small Space

Detecting similar or near-duplicate pairs in a large collection is an important problem with wide-spread applications; the problem has been studied for different data types (e.g. textual documents, spatial points and relational records) and under different settings. A more recent manifestation of the problem is efficiently finding near-duplicate Web pages, which is particularly challenging in a Web-scale because of the huge data volume and the high dimensionality of documents. More precisely, finding Web pages that are almost, but not exactly the same for billions of documents, is a very time-consuming task. In practice, the task can easily take days (if not weeks depending on the data set size), even with powerful distributed computing infrastructures and after trading accuracy for efficiency (e.g. by reducing document dimensionality). Under such circumstances, we believe that it would be of great help if one can quickly predict the running time and the result set size, both of which rely on an important statistics (i.e. the number of near-duplicate pairs), using an inexpensive method before starting the slow near-duplicate detection operation. In this paper, we propose an efficient and elegant probabilistic algorithm to approximate the number of near-duplicate pairs. By scanning the input data set once, our algorithm gives a provably accurate estimate with high probability using only small constant space, independent of the number of objects in the data set. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation on real and synthetic data show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the alternative randomsampling method (which is the only competitor to ours), when the dimensionality is reasonably small. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is fully parallelizable, and is wellsuited in practical distributed computing environments of search engines (such as Google) because of its small space cost which in turn results in reduced communication traffic.
Meaning and Happiness

What is the relationship between meaning in life and happiness? In psychological research, subjective meaning and happiness are often contrasted with each other. I argue that while the objective meaningfulness of a life is distinct from happiness, subjective or felt meaning is a key constituent of happiness, which is best understood as a multidimensional affective condition. Measures of felt meaning should consequently be included in empirical studies of the causes and correlates of happiness.
An event-based dialogue model and its implementation in multidial2

In this paper we present and justify the design and implementation choices we have made in order to build our dialogue system MultiDial2. We propose an eventbased representation that enables us to structure the dialogue data upon several levels but within a single representation space. We show how this provides us with the necessary flexibility for a proper management of the dialogue. We describe the implementation of our model which uses the theory of Mental Representations, a formalism developed for referential resolution purposes.
An empirical study of Genetic Programming generated trading rules in computerized stock trading service system

Technical analysis is aimed at devising trading rules capable of exploiting short-term fluctuations on the financial markets. The application of genetic programming (GP) as a means to automatically generate such trading rules on the stock markets has been studied. Computational results, based on historical pricing and transaction volume data, are reported for the thirty component stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. Statistical evidence shows that for the stocks that were studied, the use of GP based trading rules ensures a positive dollar return in all market scenarios. The performance of the GP based trading rules was also evaluated against the performance of the popularly used MACD technical indicator. In general, GP based trading rules offer greater returns over the simple buy and hold approach than the MACD trading signal.
Workflow management through Cobalt

Workflow management is an important part of scientific experiments. A common pattern that scientists are using is based on repetitive job execution on a variety of different systems, and managing such job execution is necessary for large-scale scientific workflows. The workflow system should also be client-based and able to handle multiple security contexts to allow researchers to take advantage of a diverse array of systems. We have developed, based on the Java Commodity Grid Kit (CoG Kit), a sophisticated and extensible workflow system that seamlessly integrates with the queueing system Cobalt through the advanced features provided by the CoG Kit.
Exponential stability analysis of the drilling system described by a switched neutral type delay equation with nonlinear perturbations

This paper deals with the exponential stability analysis of switched neutral systems under certain state-dependent switching rules with nonlinear perturbations bounded in magnitude. The proposal of an energy functional allow us to investigate the asymptotic and exponential stability of switched neutral systems through the solution of linear matrix inequalities. The results are illustrated with the exponential stability analysis of an oilwell drilling system allowing a significant reduction of the stick slip behavior.
Efficient In Vitro Amplification of Chronic Wasting Disease PrPRES

ABSTRACT Chronic wasting disease (CWD) of cervids is associated with conversion of the normal cervid prion protein, PrPC, to a protease-resistant conformer, PrPCWD. Here we report the use of both nondenaturing amplification and protein-misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) to amplify PrPCWD in vitro. Normal brains from deer, transgenic mice expressing cervid PrPC [Tg(cerPrP)1536 mice], and ferrets supported amplification. PMCA using normal Tg(cerPrP)1536 brains as the PrPC substrate produced >6.5 × 109-fold amplification after six rounds. Highly efficient in vitro amplification of PrPCWD is a significant step toward detection of PrPCWD in the body fluids or excreta of CWD-susceptible species.
The first experimental SDR platform for inband D2D communications in 5G

Experimental setups for cellular communications have always been a rare commodity in academia. The advent of software-defined radios (SDRs) paved the way for researchers to prototype their ideas on real hardware. However, existing SDR platforms and their associated reference design codes mostly provide basic cellular functionality with limitations such as low numbers of users and computational capacity. In this demo, we demonstrate the first SDR-based testbed for inband D2D communications using LabVIEW Communications and the USRP hardware platform. Furthermore, we implement a light-weight quality-aware scheduler which adaptively switches communication links from D2D to cellular and vice versa.
The Impact of Adherence and Instillation Proficiency of Topical Glaucoma Medications on Intraocular Pressure

Background The possible sequel of poorly controlled intraocular pressure (IOP) includes treatment failure, unnecessary medication use, and economic burden on patients with glaucoma. Objective To assess the impact of adherence and instillation technique on IOP control. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted on 359 glaucoma patients in Menelik II Hospital from June 1 to July 31, 2015. After conducting a Q-Q analysis, multiple binary logistic analyses, linear regression analyses, and two-tailed paired t-test were conducted to compare IOP in the baseline versus current measurements. Results Intraocular pressure was controlled in 59.6% of the patients and was relatively well controlled during the study period (mean (M) = 17.911 mmHg, standard deviation (S) = 0.323) compared to the baseline (M = 20.866 mmHg, S = 0.383, t (358) = −6.70, p < 0.0001). A unit increase in the administration technique score resulted in a 0.272 mmHg decrease in IOP (p = 0.03). Moreover, primary angle-closure glaucoma (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 0.347, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.144–0.836) and two medications (AOR = 1.869, 95% CI: 1.259–9.379) were factors affecting IOP. Conclusion Good instillation technique of the medications was correlated with a reduction in IOP. Consequently, regular assessment of the instillation technique and IOP should be done for better management of the disease.