Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ribonuclease P processes polycistronic tRNA transcripts in Escherichia coli independent of ribonuclease E

The first step in the current model for the processing and maturation of mono- and polycistronic tRNA precursors in Escherichia coli involves initial cleavages by RNase E 1–3 nt downstream of each chromosomally encoded CCA determinant. Subsequently, each mature 5′ terminus is generated by single RNase P cleavage, while the 3′ terminus undergoes exonucleolytic processing by a combination of 3′ → 5′ exonucleases. Here we describe for the first time a previously unidentified pathway for the maturation of tRNAs in polycistronic operons (valV valW and leuQ leuP leuV) where the processing of the primary transcripts is independent of RNase E. Rather, RNase P cleavages separate the individual tRNA precursors with the concomitant formation of their mature 5′ termini. Furthermore, both polynucleotide phosphorylase (PNPase) and RNase II are required for the removal of the 3′ Rho-dependent terminator sequences. Our data indicate that RNase P substrate recognition is more complex than previously envisioned.
Antibiotics are associated with lower relapse rates in outpatients with acute exacerbations of COPD.

BACKGROUND COPD is a complex disease with exacerbations characterized by worsening of symptoms resulting in deteriorating lung function. STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess predictive factors of relapse for patients with acute exacerbations of COPD (AECB). DESIGN Retrospective cohort analysis of visits for AECB. SETTING Veterans Affairs Medical Center. PATIENTS Three hundred sixty-two visits (173 patients) with documented COPD treated as outpatients for AECB. MEASUREMENTS Severity of underlying COPD, severity of AECB, comorbid conditions, therapy, and relapse rates (return visit within 14 days with persistent or worsening symptoms). RESULTS Each visit was analyzed individually (referred to as a patient-visit). One group received antibiotics (270 patient-visits), and the second group (92 patient-visits) did not. Both groups had similar demographics and severity of underlying COPD. The overall relapse rate was 22%. The majority of patient-visits (95%) with severe symptoms at presentation were prescribed antibiotics vs only 40% of those with mild symptoms. Twenty-nine of 92 patient-visits (32%) were followed by relapse in the group that was not given antibiotics, whereas only 50 of 270 (19%) treated with antibiotics relapsed (p < 0.001). Those treated with amoxicillin had an even higher relapse rate (20 of 37 patient-visits, or 54%) than those who did not receive antibiotics (p = 0.006). CONCLUSIONS Relapse from AECB was not related to the severity of underlying disease or to the severity of the acute exacerbation. Patients treated with antibiotics had significantly lower relapse rates than those who did not receive antibiotics. However, the specific choice of antibiotic is important because those treated with amoxicillin had the highest relapse rates of all groups.
A Rich Population of X-Ray-emitting Wolf-Rayet Stars in the Galactic Starburst Cluster Westerlund 1

Recent optical and infrared studies have revealed that the heavily reddened starburst cluster Westerlund 1 (Wd 1) contains at least 22 Wolf-Rayet (W-R) stars, constituting the richest W-R population of any Galactic cluster. We present results of a sensitive Chandra X-ray observation of Wd 1 that detected 12 of the 22 known W-R stars and the mysterious emission-line star W9. The fraction of detected WN stars is nearly identical to that of WC stars. The WN stars WR-A and WR-B, as well as W9, are exceptionally luminous in X-rays and have similar hard, heavily absorbed X-ray spectra with strong Si XIII and S XV emission lines. The luminous high-temperature X-ray emission of these three stars is characteristic of colliding-wind binary systems, but their binary status remains to be determined. Spectral fits of the X-ray-bright sources WR-A and W9 with isothermal plane-parallel shock models require high absorption column densities, log NH = 22.56 (cm-2), and yield characteristic shock temperatures kTs ≈ 3 keV (Ts ≈ 35 MK).
Bridging the Distance: The Pedagogy of Mobile Learning in Supporting Distance Learners

The challenge of the University of South Africa (UNISA), as the largest distance education institution in Africa, is to come up with innovative ways of supporting students who are not only geographically isolated from their teachers as sources of information, but also separated from their peers as sources of support. The effects of such isolation on distance learners can inhibit any possibility for engagement with teachers, study material and peers1. In distance education, the educational process is usually reduced from a dialogue to a monologue where a teacher sends out study material to the students. The assumption is that distance learners, do not need mediation or support as they go through their study material. Thorpe2 argued that “course materials prepared in advance of study, however learnercentred and interactive they may be, cannot respond to a known learner”. One of the main barriers of learning in distance education is the absence of interaction with other human beings in a learning environment. For these students, learning is most successful when people interact with each other through interrogating and sharing their description of the world3. Mediated Interaction is central to any educational experience irrespective of whether the students are studying through distance or not4. The problem arises when interaction between a lecturer and a student is not as constant as that which exists in a conventional face-to-face situation. The incorporation of mobile technologies, such as cell phones, in education can address this need because they can enable interaction between a student and the lecturer, as well as between a student and her or his peers.
Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean

A summary is presented of the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) project, with a focus on the field experiment that was conducted from October 1997 to October 1998. The primary objective of the field work was to collect ocean, ice, and atmospheric datasets over a full annual cycle that could be used to understand the processes controlling surface heat exchanges—in particular, the ice–albedo feedback and cloud–radiation feedback. This information is being used to improve formulations of arctic ice–ocean–atmosphere processes in climate models and thereby improve simulations of present and future arctic climate. The experiment was deployed from an ice breaker that was frozen into the ice pack and allowed to drift for the duration of the experiment. This research platform allowed the use of an extensive suite of instruments that directly measured ocean, atmosphere, and ice properties from both the ship and the ice pack in the immediate vicinity of the ship. This summary describes the project goal.
Interactive Panorama Video Viewer with Head Tracking Algorithms

This paper presents new interaction method to control panorama video using head tracking technique. The panorama video viewer includes head tracking module which controls the rotation and forward/backward of the viewpoint. We applied this interaction technique to panorama video, which has omnidirectional gaze, to maximize realistic and immersive feelings. The proposed panorama video system was applied to the baseball broadcasting to show the feasibility of the suggested interaction technique.
Parameter optimization of fish robot’s smooth gaiting using Hill Climbing - Genetic Algorithm

Recently, the underwater robotics research field has been developed quickly in some kinds of robot such as: ROV (remotely operated vehicle), AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) or UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) and etc. These types of underwater robot mostly use propeller or thruster to generate the propulsion force in order to create the movement for robot. However, the research about one kind of autonomous robot called fish robot still remain at low level of technology and there are many thing need to be done in this robot type. Fish robot usually uses its bodypsilas oscillation or its finspsila oscillation to create the movement for it self in underwater environment. In this paper, a model of 3-joint (4 links) fish robot type is presented. This fish robotpsilas smooth gait or smooth motion is optimized by using the combination of hill climbing algorithm (HCA) and genetic algorithm (GA). HCA is used to generate the good initial population for GA and then GA is used to find the optimal parameters set that make fish robot has a smooth gait or smooth motion. Finally, some simulation results are presented to prove this application.
The Probability of Default Implied by Binary Option Prices

The maximum entropy method which is one of non-parametric methods is used to estimate the probability of default. From binary option prices as the constraints, we explicitly find it while Capuano(2008) suggests numerical computation from European call option prices. Mathematics Subject Classification: 49N30, 91G20, 94A17
Mining of Association Relations in Text

We present a method that adopts ideas from association rule mining in database (DB) systems to facilitate reuse of organizational knowledge captured in textual form. Many organizations possess large collections of textual reports representing the episodic memory of an organization, e.g. medical patient records, industrial accident reports, lawsuit records and investigation reports. Effective (re)use of expert knowledge contained in these reports may increase the productivity of the organizations. Our method may support employees in discovering information in textual reports that can be useful for dealing with a new situation or writing a new report. Association rule mining is used in DB systems to discover associations between items in database records. We set out with the hypothesis that a similar approach may be used to discover implicit relations between text units in textual reports. We developed the SmoothApriori algorithm that finds association relations between sentences which may correspond to a cause-effect type of relation or have a more implicit nature. We evaluated the ability of SmoothApriori to restore sentences that were removed, for test purpose, from air investigation reports. SmoothApriori restored significantly more information than any of our baselines.
Improvement of PCR sequencing by formamide.

Direct sequencing of PCR products by T7 DNA polymerase is prone to problems in GC-rich regions, due to the stability of secondary structure and rapid reannealing of the heat-separated complementary strands of DNA. To overcome these difficulties, we examined the effect of adding formamide to the sequencing reaction. Formamide weakens the hydrogen bonding between nucleotides (1, 2), and is, therefore, of great advantage in the sequencing of PCR products of p53 gene, which contains two GC-rich (62 %) regions. The sequencing ladders of the two GC-rich regions of p53 obtained in the presence of increasing percentages of formamide is shown in Figure 1. In both cases, inclusion of formamide dramatically increased the intensity of specific bands, dissolved several local secondary structures, and eliminated the presence of most bands which crossed over all four lanes, especially at the regions close to the annealing of the sequencing primers (Figures 1A and IB, arrowheads). The percentage of formamide required to generate the improvement of sequencing depends on the percentage of GC nucleotides in the target sequence. It is, therefore, often necessary to empirically determine the amount of formamide needed to resolve secondary structures completely. A useful formula can be used for determination of the amount of formamide needed: Formamide% = 0.7 (GC% — 50). With this percentage of formamide, the Tm of the DNA duplex is equivalent to that of DNA duplex with 50% GC nucleotides (1, 2). We also noticed that some nonspecific bands of secondary structure were not totally abolished (Figure 1A, arrow), even when we increased the percentage of formamide to 30% (data not shown). Under these conditions, the signal intensity of the sequencing ladder became weaker due to the decreased efficiency of template to primer binding. The insensitivity of T7 DNA polymerase to formamide is not unusual. Formamide has also been shown to improve the specific amplification of GC rich sequence in PCR reaction driven by Taq DNA polymerase (3).
A General Approach to Real-Time Workflow Monitoring

Scientific workflow systems support different workflow representations, operational modes and configurations. However, independent of the system used, end users need to track the status of their workflows in real time, be notified of execution anomalies and failures automatically, perform troubleshooting and automate the analysis of the workflow to help categorize and qualify the results. In this paper, we describe how the Stampede monitoring infrastructure, which was previously integrated in the Pegasus Workflow Management System, was employed in Triana in order to add generic real time monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities across both systems. Stampede is an infrastructure that attempts to address interoperable monitoring needs by providing a three-layer model: a common data model to describe workflow and job executions; high-performance tools to load workflow logs conforming to the data model into a data store, and a querying interface for extracting information from the data store in a standard fashion. The resulting integration demonstrates the generic nature of the Stampede monitoring infrastructure that has the potential to provide a common platform for monitoring across scientific workflow engines.
Estimating human rabies mortality in the United Republic of Tanzania from dog bite injuries.

OBJECTIVE To make quantitative predictions about the magnitude of underreporting of human rabies deaths in the United Republic of Tanzania. METHODS Human rabies deaths were estimated by using a series of probability steps to calculate the likelihood of rabies developing after the bite of a suspected rabid dog, incorporating field data on the incidence of animal bite injuries, the accuracy of rabies recognition, the distribution of bite wounds, and post-exposure treatment. FINDINGS Predicted human rabies mortality was estimated to be (a) 1499 deaths per year (95% confidence interval 891-2238), equivalent to an annual incidence of 4.9 (2.9-7.2) deaths/100,000, when active surveillance data on bite incidence were used, and (b) 193 deaths per year (32-409), corresponding to an annual incidence of 0.62 (0.1-1.32) deaths/100,000, when national bite statistics were used. The annual mean number of rabies deaths officially recorded for the same period was 10.8 (7.7-14.0). CONCLUSION In the United Republic of Tanzania, cases of rabies in humans have been greatly underreported. Dog bite injuries are an accessible source of epidemiological data that may be used to estimate the public health burden of rabies and to monitor epidemiological trends in developing countries.
Immunomodulation in the critically ill

Immunotherapy in the critically ill is an appealing notion because of the apparent abnormal immune and inflammatory responses seen in so many patients. The administration of a medication that could alter immune responses and decrease mortality in patients with sepsis could represent a ‘magic bullet’. Various approaches have been tried over the last 20 yr: steroids; anti-endotoxin or anti-cytokine antibodies; cytokine receptor antagonists; and other agents with immune-modulating side-effects. However, in some respects, research along these lines has been unsuccessful or disappointing at best. The current state of knowledge is summarized with particular reference to sepsis and the acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Accurate controlled shape memory alloy actuator for minimally invasive surgery

With the development of minimally invasive surgery (MIS), the surgical robot has been required to offer big output with a minimized volume. Shape memory alloys (SMA) Actuator exhibits large strain and high energy density, which shows good potential to be applied in the surgical robot. This paper proposes an accurate controlled SMA actuator with one degree of freedom (DOF). The system is actuated by two SMA springs, angle feedback system is used initially. After the parameters are regulated, PID controller shows very accurate control. To meet the need of demanding miniature applications, it is better to reduce the number of additional sensing devices. Previous research shows the electric resistance of SMA has approximate linear relationship with the strain, which make accurate self sensing become possible. A self-sensing model based on the SMA rotation angle to resistance curve has been established. The curve is modeled by fitted polynomial. Self sensing control is demonstrated through step response, the small pretension stress and the bad consistency of the SMA springs reduced the precision. More modification is worth to be done in the future to improve the self control model.
Correlations between the most developed (G7) countries. A moving average window size optimisation

Different distance matrices are defined and applied to look for correlations between the gross domestic product of G7 countries. Results are illustrated through displays obtained from various graph methods. Significant similarities between results are obtained. A procedure for choosing the best distance function is proposed taking into account the size of the window in which correlation are averaged.
Impact of Duty Cycling on Opportunistic Communication

A major challenge in mobile wireless devices for opportunistic networks is to decrease the energy consumption. The decrease should not come at a cost of reduced application throughput (i.e., goodput). This work evaluates the potential performance gains for mobile nodes that adopt duty cycling in an opportunistic context. The paper presents an analytical framework for evaluating goodput and energy consumption of nodes based on a probabilistic estimation of effective contact durations, and it validates this framework on a mobility scenario. The study shows that both goodput and energy consumption depend strongly on the distribution of listening durations, and that goodput is independent of the contact rate among nodes. This work also includes extensive trace-driven simulations and demonstrates that duty cycling considerably improves the performance of opportunistic networks by decreasing the energy consumption without significantly affecting the goodput.
THE ROLE OF THE POLYMORPHIC EFFLUX TRANSPORTER P-GLYCOPROTEIN ON THE BRAIN ACCUMULATION OF d-METHYLPHENIDATE AND d-AMPHETAMINE

The psychostimulant medications methylphenidate (MPH) and amphetamine (AMP), available in various ratios or enantiopure formulations of their respective active dextrorotary isomers, constitute the majority of agents used in the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Substantial interindividual variability occurs in their pharmacokinetics and tolerability. Little is known regarding the potential role of drug transporters such as P-glycoprotein (P-gp) in psychostimulant pharmacokinetics and response. Therefore, experiments were carried out in P-gp knockout (KO) mice versus wild-type (WT) mice after intraperitoneal dosing (2.5 mg/kg) of d-MPH or (3.0 mg/kg) of d-AMP. After the administration of each psychostimulant, locomotor activity was assessed at 30-min intervals for 2 h. Total brain-to-plasma drug concentration ratios were determined at 10-, 30-, and 80-min postdosing time-points. The results showed no statistically supported genotypic difference in d-AMP-induced locomotor activity stimulation or in brain-to-plasma ratio of d-AMP. As for d-MPH, the P-gp KO mice had 33% higher brain concentrations (p < 0.05) and 67.5% higher brain-to-plasma ratios (p < 0.01) than WT controls at the 10-min postdosing timepoint. However, in spite of elevated brain concentrations, d-MPH-induced locomotor activity increase was attenuated for P-gp compared with that for WT mice. These data indicate that P-gp has no apparent effect on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of d-AMP. In addition, d-MPH is a relatively weak P-gp substrate, and its entry into the brain may be limited by P-gp. Furthermore, the mechanism by which d-MPH-induced locomotor activity was attenuated in P-gp KO mice remains to be elucidated.
Benefit Estimation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for Cars Derived from Real-Life Accidents

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are today becoming increasingly common in the market. The safety potential of these systems has been evaluated using different approaches in several studies. In order to quantify the effects of ADAS on accidents described by insurers` claim files, German Insurers Accident Research has performed a comprehensive study. The database used for the study was a representative excerpt from the German Insurers' data, covering 2,025 accidents. Statistical methods were used to extrapolate these accidents up to 167,699 claims. The conclusions of the analyses are as follows: a Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) which is able to gather information from the environment, to warn the driver and to perform a partial braking maneuver autonomously (CMBS 2), could prevent up to 17.8% of all car accidents with personal injuries in the data sample. The theoretical safety potential of a Lateral Guidance System, consisting of Lane Change Assist and Lane Keeping Assist, was determined to be up to 7.3%. Hence, a car fleet equipped with CMBS 2 and Lateral Guidance could avoid up to 25.1 % of all car accidents in the data sample. This theoretical safety potential is based on the assumptions that 100% of the car fleet is equipped with these systems and the driver reacts perfectly when warned. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa. dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0317.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.
The tibial plateau fracture. The Toronto experience 1968--1975.

Patients considered in this review were those treated in the teaching units of the Department of Surgery of the University of Toronto between the years of 1968 and 1975. There were 94 fractures in 94 patients with adequate documentation to be accepted for review. There were 56 females and 38 males. The average age of the patients was 57 years with a span from 19 to 89 years. The highest incidence of patients was in the sixth and seventh decade, Fifty-three patients (56%) were treated by closed methods and 41 (44%) were treated operatively. Seventy of the 94 (77%) were examined and X-rayed at a follow-up time from 9 to 74 months, with an average of 28.1 months. The results were grouped into the simple classification of acceptable (excellent, good) and unacceptable categories (fair and poor). The evaluation and grading was done on the basis of subjective complaints, comparative examination of both knees and roentgenographic studies. In the evaluation we considered the degree of extension, the extensor lag, the range of movement, the stability of thejoint, the muscle strength and work tolerance and pain. The criteria for grading the results were similar to those outlined by Hohl and Luck" and as used by Roberts,l0 Porter8 and Dovey and Heerf~rdt. ~ Hohl and Luck4 graded a kneethatflexedto9Ooasacceptable.This, we felt, was an unacceptable result due to the need for greater than 90" flexion in normal daily activities. We have thus changed the classification accordingly, so that 90" or less of knee function was judged unacceptable. It became apparent in the course of the review that a collective approach to the tibial plateau fracture is misleading. Certain pathoanatomic factors, etiological factors as well as therapeutic features demand that certain types be grouped together. This gave rise to our classification published previously and used again in this paper. "