Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biological Role of Paenilarvins, Iturin-Like Lipopeptide Secondary Metabolites Produced by the Honey Bee Pathogen Paenibacillus larvae

The Gram-positive bacterium Paenibacillus larvae (P. larvae) is the causative agent of a deadly honey bee brood disease called American Foulbrood (AFB). AFB is a notifiable epizootic in most countries and, hence, P. larvae is of considerable relevance for veterinarians and apiculturists alike. Over the last decade, much progress has been made in the understanding of the (patho)biology of P. larvae. Recently, several non-ribosomally produced peptides (NRP) and peptide/polyketide (NRP/PK) hybrids produced by P. larvae were identified. Among these NRPs were iturin-like lipopeptides, the paenilarvins A-C. Iturins are known to exhibit strong anti-fungal activity; for some iturins, cytotoxic activity towards mammalian erythrocytes and human cancer cell lines are described. We here present our results on the analysis of the natural function of the paenilarvins during pathogenesis of P. larvae infections. We demonstrated production of paenilarvins in infected larvae. However, we could neither demonstrate cytotoxicity of paenilarvins towards cultured insect cells nor towards larvae in feeding assays. Accordingly, exposure bioassays performed with larvae infected by wild-type P. larvae and a knockout mutant of P. larvae lacking production of paenilarvins did not substantiate a role for the paenilarvins as virulence factor. Further experiments are necessary to analyze the relevance of the paenilarvins’ anti-fungal activity for P. larvae infections in the presence of fungal competitors in the larval midgut or cadaver.
Enhancing the capabilities of Student Result Prediction System

In the age of information and communication technology, technology is being used in every domain. Education is the integral part of our society consisting of the teaching, learning and evaluation process. Information and communication technologies are being used for the purpose of e --learning, measuring student's learning, course design, student performance evaluation e.t. c. Using machine learning techniques performance of the students has been studied and useful results have been derived. Predicting the performance of a student accurately in the upcoming exam is of extreme significance. Every machine learning tool heavily depends upon the input data. Studying and implementing the elaborate feature set for students has improved the accuracy of the prediction system. Further use of preprocessing techniques along with classification algorithms has significantly improved the results of the prediction system.
Automatic Enhancement of LTAG Treebank

The Treebanks as the sets of syntactically annotated sentences, are the most widely used language resource in the application of Natural Language Processing. The occurrence of errors in the automatically created Treebanks is one of the main obstacles limiting the using of these resources in the real world applications. This paper aims to introduce an statistical method for diminishing the amount of errors occurred in a specific English LTAG-Treebank proposed in Basirat and Faili (2013). The problem has been formulated as a classification problem and has been tackled by using several classifiers. The experiments show that by using this approach, about 95% of the errors could be detected and more than 77% of them could successfully be corrected in the case of using Adaboost classifier. In addition, it has been shown that the new treebank could reach a high of 76% F-measure which is 8% higher than the original treebank.
Effects of variability of practice in music: a pilot study on fast goal-directed movements in pianists

Variability of Practice (VOP) refers to the acquisition of a particular target movement by practicing a range of varying targets rather than by focusing on fixed repetitions of the target only. VOP has been demonstrated to have beneficial effects on transfer to a novel task and on skill consolidation. This study extends the line of research to musical practice. In a task resembling a barrier-knockdown paradigm, 36 music students trained to perform a wide left-hand interval leap on the piano. Performance at the target distance was tested before and after a 30-min standardized training session. The high-variability group (VAR) practiced four different intervals including the target. Another group (FIX) practiced the target interval only. A third group (SPA) performed spaced practice on the target only, interweaving with periods of not playing. Transfer was tested by introducing an interval novel to either group. After a 24-h period with no further exposure to the instrument, performance was retested. All groups performed at comparable error levels before training, after training, and after the retention (RET) interval. At transfer, however, the FIX group, unlike the other groups, committed significantly more errors than in the target task. After the RET period, the effect was washed out for the FIX group but then was present for VAR. Thus, the results provide only partial support for the VOP hypothesis for the given setting. Additional exploratory observations suggest tentative benefits of VOP regarding execution speed, loudness, and performance confidence. We derive specific hypotheses and specific recommendations regarding sample selection and intervention duration for future investigations. Furthermore, the proposed leap task measurement is shown to be (a) robust enough to serve as a standard framework for studies in the music domain, yet (b) versatile enough to allow for a wide range of designs not previously investigated for music on a standardized basis.
Enforcing Mobile Application Security Through Probabilistic Contracts

Security for mobile devices is a problem of capital importance, especially due to new threats coming from malicious applications. Though several security solutions have already been proposed, security requirements have been always considered as binary: allow or deny. We argue that a more realistic vision of security can be given using probabilistic and quantitative requirements. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic description of the behavior of an application that a user is going to execute. We also allow the definition of finer grained user security requirements, by introducing probabilistic clause modifiers. Later, we present a probabilistic version of the Security-by-Contract framework to guarantee probabilistic security requirements.
Robustness Analysis of Hottopixx, a Linear Programming Model for Factoring Nonnegative Matrices

Although nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is NP-hard in general, it has been shown very recently that it is tractable under the assumption that the input nonnegative data matrix is close to being separable. (Separability requires that all columns of the input matrix belong to the cone spanned by a small subset of these columns.) Since then, several algorithms have been designed to handle this subclass of NMF problems. In particular, Bittorf et al. [Adv. Neural Inform. Process. Syst. , 25 (2012), pp. 1223--1231] proposed a linear programming model, referred to as Hottopixx. In this paper, we provide a new and more general robustness analysis of their method. In particular, we design a provably more robust variant using a postprocessing strategy which allows us to deal with duplicates and near duplicates in the data set.
Bendings of radio jets in BL Lacertae objects - I. EVN and MERLIN observations

Several blazars, and BL Lac objects in particular, show a misalignment between the jet orientation on parsec and kiloparsec scales. Some authors (i.e. Conway & Murphy, 1993) have attempted to explain this behaviour invoking helical jets for misalignment angles around 90$\degr$, showing how in this case there are interesting implications for the understanding of the medium into which the jet is expanding. By comparing sensitive VLA observations (Cassaro et al., 1999) with images available in the literature for the BL Lac objects from the 1-Jy Sample (Stickel et al., 1991), it is clear that there is a wide range of misalignments between the initial jet direction and the kpc-scale jet, when detected. We have carried out VLBI observations of these BL Lac objects, in order to investigate the spatial evolution of the radio jets from few tens to hundreds of mas, and to search for helical jets in this class of sources. We present here the first dataset obtained from EVN+MERLIN observations at 5 GHz for seven objects. From these observations we never have a clear detection of helical jets, we only have a possible signature of their presence in 2 objects. In only one of the sources with a misalignment angle around 90$\degr$ the presence of helical jets can be ruled out. This implies that it is not possible to invoke helical jets to explain the morphology of all the sources showing a misalignment of about 90$\degr$ between the parsec and the kiloparsec scale jets.
Extracting lines of maximal depth from MR images of the human brain

This paper describes a new approach to the automatic detection of the bottom lines of the main cortical sulci using MR images of the human brain. The principle idea is to extract lines of maximal depth as measured from the smoothed brain surface. The main advantage of our approach over existing methods is that it is not based on curvature estimation. It is therefore much more robust and easier to implement.
Soluble α-Synuclein Is a Novel Modulator of Alzheimer's Disease Pathophysiology

Recent evidence has emphasized soluble species of amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau as pathogenic effectors in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Despite the fact that Aβ, tau, and α-synuclein (αSyn) can promote each other's aggregation, the potential contribution of soluble αSyn to AD pathogenesis is unknown. Here, we found an approximate twofold increase over controls in soluble αSyn levels in AD brains in the absence of Lewy body cytopathology. Importantly, soluble αSyn levels were a quantitatively stronger correlate of cognitive impairment than soluble Aβ and tau levels. To examine a putative role for αSyn in modulating cognitive function, we used the Barnes circular maze to assess spatial reference memory in transgenic mice overexpressing human wild-type αSyn. The results revealed that an approximate threefold elevation of αSyn in vivo induced memory deficits similar to those observed in AD mouse models. The neurobiological changes associated with this elevation of soluble αSyn included decreases in selected synaptic vesicle proteins and an alteration of the protein composition of synaptic vesicles. Finally, a synergism between Aβ/APP and human tau seems to be responsible for the abnormal elevation of soluble αSyn in transgenic mice. Altogether, our data reveal an unexpected role for soluble, intraneuronal αSyn in AD pathophysiology.
An efficient hybrid explicit/implicit solvent method for biomolecular simulations

We present a new hybrid explicit/implicit solvent method for dynamics simulations of macromolecular systems. The method models explicitly the hydration of the solute by either a layer or sphere of water molecules, and the generalized Born (GB) theory is used to treat the bulk continuum solvent outside the explicit simulation volume. To reduce the computational cost, we implemented a multigrid method for evaluating the pairwise electrostatic and GB terms. It is shown that for typical ion and protein simulations our method achieves similar equilibrium and dynamical observables as the conventional particle mesh Ewald (PME) method. Simulation timings are reported, which indicate that the hybrid method is much faster than PME, primarily due to a significant reduction in the number of explicit water molecules required to model hydration effects. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 25: 1967–1978, 2004
Estimation of Iron Losses in Induction Motors: Calculation Method, Results, and Analysis

This paper intends to develop a more accurate approach for determining the no-load iron losses in pulse width modulation (PWM) inverter fed induction motors. The proposed method is validated by means of a prototype motor with a plastic rotor cage. The iron losses have been computed by the time-stepping finite element method, both with sinusoidal and PWM supply. The iron losses have then been estimated by adding up the contribution generated by orthogonal components of the flux density, as if the iron losses generated by these components were independent phenomena. The rotational hysteresis losses, as well as excess ones, have been calculated applying a correction factor based on experimental data. These factors are a function of the peak flux density and ellipticity of the B vector loci. Experimental validations are provided for several frequency and magnetic saturation values. In addition, this paper demonstrates the necessity to consider the harmonics initial phase in order to increase the accuracy in the iron loss prediction.
User-Centered Video: transmitting video images based on the user's interest

Many applications, such as video conference systems and remotely controlled systems, need to transmit multiple video images through narrow band networks. However, high quality transmission of the video images is not possible within the network bandwidth. This paper describes a technique, User-Centered Video (UCV), which transmits multiple video images through a network by changing quality of the video images based on a user's interest. The UCV assigns a network data rate to each video image in proportion to the user's interest. The UCV transmits video images of interest with high quality, while degrading the remaining video images. The video images are degraded in the space and time domains (e.g., spatial resolution, frame rate) to fit them into the assigned data rates. The UCV evaluates the degree of the user's interest based on the window layouts. The user thereby obtains both the video images of interest, in detail, and the global context of video images, even through a narrow band network.
Vingt ans de trajectoire après un licenciement collectif. Ouvrières et ouvriers

Adapted from life stories and phone interviews, the study is interested in the way that male and female workers have come during twenty years as made redundanted in the beginning of 1980 at Schirmeck, a small town located at forty five kilometers from Strasbourg. In the majority of women, there is long-term professional destabilization. There are numerous instable ways. Retreats of professional life one the one hand permanent for the olderes, on the other hand temporary for mothers with young children, are the rule. In an economic deteriorated context sociodemographic features influence the return to a paid-job but also “the choice” of very little linked to the technical competences new jobs. On the contrary the men are less disadvantage by the economic conjonture and less submited to the private life constraint. They follow mainly professional determinated ways. The level of salaires has nevertheless often been called into question. Cherching for better remuneration generates an inter-companies mobility which for the women is more consequently precarious employment.
Profiling domestic violence: a multi-country study.

This study uses household and individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program to examine the prevalence and correlates of domestic violence and the health consequences of domestic violence for women and their children. Nationally representative data from nine countries—Cambodia (2000) Colombia (2000) the Dominican Republic (2002) Egypt (1995) Haiti (2000) India (1998- 1999) Nicaragua (1998) Peru (2000) and Zambia (2001-2002)—are analyzed within a comparative framework to provide a multifaceted analysis of the phenomenon of domestic violence. Scientific investigation of the problem of domestic violence is a relatively recent endeavor. It is only within the past 30 years that violence against women has been acknowledged internationally as a threat to the health and rights of women as well as to national development. With the recognition of violence against women as a global problem came the need for the development of methodologies to collect data on violence ethically and in a manner that maximizes the validity and reliability of the data. To this end the DHS program began to collect information on the prevalence of domestic violence against women within the context of the household in the early 1990s. However it was not until the late 1990s that the DHS program developed a standard module of questions in consultation with experts on domestic violence measurement gender and survey research. The module and its implementation conform to the recommendations of the World Health Organization for ethical collection of data on domestic violence. (excerpt)
International Conference on Solid Waste 2011 Moving Towards Sustainable Resource Management Special Waste Treatment

Due to Technological advancement cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) from computer monitors and TV sets are being replaced continuously by thinner and lightweight versions like Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) or Plasma screen monitors. As regular discarding e-waste from CRTs are continuously increasing day by day and in UK alone it is projected to reach around 100,000 tonnes/year. CRT composition consists of 50-72% SiO2, 10-15% PbO, 5-7% Al2O3 and 18-35% various oxides with 00.5% of bonded plastics and carbon. From the recycling point of view this waste is categorized into two parts; (i) Organic decomposable part and; (ii) Silicate with metal oxide part. Management of CRTs involves the following steps; (i) grinding and milling; (ii) Thermal decomposition of organic part and finally; (iii) silicates with metals oxides are then subjected to thermal and/or ionic treatment in the presence of fluoride to produce molecular sieves for various applications including separation chemistry. Thermo/ ionic reactions were performed at temperature between 500-6250C and in the presence of fluoride ion in such a way that 98% of the fluoride used can be recovered finally. Silica and metal oxide (mostly heavy metals) mixture from waste CST: (i) pose serious environmental problem when landfilled due to heavy metal leaching and; (ii) the separation of heavy metals from silica is an expensive operation. It justifies the significance of Thermo/ ionic reactions for the purpose. It was found that the product from thermionic reaction have more crystalline pattern as compared with thermo reaction, as confirmed by XRD and SEM analysis.
Speci ® city of the HP 1 chromo domain for the methylated N-terminus of histone

Recent studies show that heterochromatin-associated protein-1 (HP1) recognizes a `histone code' involving methylated Lys9 (methyl-K9) in histone H3. Using in situ immuno ̄uorescence, we demonstrate that methyl-K9 H3 and HP1 co-localize to the heterochromatic regions of Drosophila polytene chromosomes. NMR spectra show that methyl-K9 binding of HP1 occurs via its chromo (chromosome organization modi®er) domain. This interaction requires methyl-K9 to reside within the proper context of H3 sequence. NMR studies indicate that the methylated H3 tail binds in a groove of HP1 consisting of conserved residues. Using ̄uorescence anisotropy and isothermal titration calorimetry, we determined that this interaction occurs with a KD of ~100 mM, with the binding enthalpically driven. A V26M mutation in HP1, which disrupts its gene silencing function, severely destabilizes the H3-binding interface, and abolishes methyl-K9 H3 tail binding. Finally, we note that sequence diversity in chromo domains may lead to diverse functions in eukaryotic gene regulation. For example, the chromo domain of the yeast histone acetyltransferase Esa1 does not interact with methylK9 H3, but instead shows preference for unmodi®ed H3 tail.
Structural Basis of Cell Wall Cleavage by a Staphylococcal Autolysin

The major autolysins (Atl) of Staphylococcus epidermidis and S. aureus play an important role in cell separation, and their mutants are also attenuated in virulence. Therefore, autolysins represent a promising target for the development of new types of antibiotics. Here, we report the high-resolution structure of the catalytically active amidase domain AmiE (amidase S. epidermidis) from the major autolysin of S. epidermidis. This is the first protein structure with an amidase-like fold from a bacterium with a gram-positive cell wall architecture. AmiE adopts a globular fold, with several α-helices surrounding a central β-sheet. Sequence comparison reveals a cluster of conserved amino acids that define a putative binding site with a buried zinc ion. Mutations of key residues in the putative active site result in loss of activity, enabling us to propose a catalytic mechanism. We also identified and synthesized muramyltripeptide, the minimal peptidoglycan fragment that can be used as a substrate by the enzyme. Molecular docking and digestion assays with muramyltripeptide derivatives allow us to identify key determinants of ligand binding. This results in a plausible model of interaction of this ligand not only for AmiE, but also for other PGN-hydrolases that share the same fold. As AmiE active-site mutations also show a severe growth defect, our findings provide an excellent platform for the design of specific inhibitors that target staphylococcal cell separation and can thereby prevent growth of this pathogen.
New Governance in European Social Policy: The Open Method of Coordination

The European Union is widely regarded as premised on an imbalance between market-making and market-correcting provisions, potentially weakening national welfare systems and the political legitimacy of the European project. However, a stronger role for the EU in social policy faces considerable difficulties. The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) represents a new governance approach to European social policy and was adopted in the late 1990s. It seeks to provide a 'middle-way' solution to the dilemma of European social policy in which the EU adopts a stronger role in coordinating member states' social policies while member states formally retain their authority in social policy. New Governance in European Social Policy explores the effectiveness and legitimacy of a new policy tool in European social policy, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). It analyses the tensions within the OMC's goals and instruments, develops an explanation of its functioning and applies a multifaceted framework for its evaluation.
Advanced compiler optimizations for sparse computations

Regular data dependence checking on sparse codes usually results in very conservative estimates of actual dependences that will occur at run-time. Clearly, this is caused by the usage of compact data structures that are necessary to exploit sparsity in order to reduce storage requirements and computational time. However, if the compiler is presented with dense code and automatically converts it into code that operates on sparse data structures, then the dependence information obtained by analysis on the original code can be used to exploit potential concurrency in the generated code. The authors present synchronization generating and manipulating techniques that are based on this concept.