Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An arsenic(III)‐oxidizing bacterial population: selection, characterization, and performance in reactors

Aims: To select an autotrophic arsenic(III)‐oxidizing population, named CASO1, and to evaluate the performance of the selected bacteria in reactors. Methods and Results: An As(III)‐containing medium without organic substrate was used to select CASO1 from a mining environment. As(III) oxidation was studied under batch and continuous conditions. The main organisms present in CASO1 were identified with molecular biology tools. CASO1 exhibited significant As(III)‐oxidizing activity between pH 3 and 8. The optimum temperature was 25°C. As(III) oxidation was still observed in the presence of 1000 mg l−1 As(III). In continuous culture mode, the As(III) oxidation rate reached 160 mg l−1 h−1. The CASO1 consortium contains at least two organisms – strain b3, which is phylogenetically close to Ralstonia picketii, and strain b6, which is related to the genus Thiomonas. The divergence in 16S rDNA sequences between b6 and the closest related organism was 5·9%, suggesting that b6 may be a new species. Conclusions: High As(III)‐oxidizing activity can be obtained without organic nutrient supply, using a bacterial population from a mining environment. Significance and Impact of the Study: The biological oxidation of arsenite by the CASO1 population is of particular interest for decontamination of arsenic‐contaminated waste or groundwater.
Advances in the Study of the Antiatherogenic Function and Novel Therapies for HDL

The hypothesis that raising high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels could improve the risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) is facing challenges. There is multitudinous clear clinical evidence that the latest failures of HDL-C-raising drugs show no clear association with risks for CVD. At the genetic level, recent research indicates that steady-state HDL-C concentrations may provide limited information regarding the potential antiatherogenic functions of HDL. It is evident that the newer strategies may replace therapeutic approaches to simply raise plasma HDL-C levels. There is an urgent need to identify an efficient biomarker that accurately predicts the increased risk of atherosclerosis (AS) in patients and that may be used for exploring newer therapeutic targets. Studies from recent decades show that the composition, structure and function of circulating HDL are closely associated with high cardiovascular risk. A vast amount of data demonstrates that the most important mechanism through which HDL antagonizes AS involves the reverse cholesterol transport (RCT) process. Clinical trials of drugs that specifically target HDL have so far proven disappointing, so it is necessary to carry out review on the HDL therapeutics.
Tropical Skin Diseases in Children: A Review— Part I

Because of travel and migration patterns, tropical skin diseases are now seen all around the world, not just in tropical or developing countries. Nutrition, housing, and environmental factors play an important role in these infectious diseases, so when they appear out of their normal environments, their classic presentation may vary. Tropical diseases can also present differently in childhood, making their recognition, diagnosis, and management a clinical challenge. Health care providers in developed countries need to be familiar with tropical skin diseases and be able to diagnose them in returning travelers or immigrants in order to optimize care. This article aims to review the epidemiologic, clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic aspects of some of the most common tropical dermatologic conditions in children.
Join-distinct aggregate estimation over update streams

There is growing interest in algorithms for processing and querying continuous data streams (i.e., data that is seen only once in a fixed order) with limited memory resources. Providing (perhaps approximate) answers to queries over such streams is a crucial requirement for many application environments; examples include large IP network installations where performance data from different parts of the network needs to be continuously collected and analyzed. The ability to estimate the number of distinct (sub)tuples in the result of a join operation correlating two data streams (i.e., the cardinality of a projection with duplicate elimination over a join) is an important requirement for several data-analysis scenarios. For instance, to enable real-time traffic analysis and load balancing, a network-monitoring application may need to estimate the number of distinct (source, destination) IP-address pairs occurring in the stream of IP packets observed by router R1, where the source address is also seen in packets routed through a different router R2. Earlier work has presented solutions to the individual problems of distinct counting and join-size estimation (without duplicate elimination) over streams. These solutions, however, are fundamentally different and extending or combining them to handle our more complex "Join-Distinct" estimation problem is far from obvious. In this paper, we propose the first space-efficient algorithmic solution to the general Join-Distinct estimation problem over continuous data streams (our techniques can actually handle general update streams comprising tuple deletions as well as insertions). Our estimators are probabilistic in nature and rely on novel algorithms for building and combining a new class of hash-based synopses (termed "JD sketches") for individual update streams. We demonstrate that our algorithms can provide low error, high-confidence Join-Distinct estimates using only small space and small processing time per update. In fact, we present lower bounds showing that the space usage of our estimators is within small factors of the best possible for the Join-Distinct problem. Preliminary experimental results verify the effectiveness of our approach.
Prognostic significance of human epidermal growth factor-2 (HER2) in advanced gastric cancer: A U.S. and European international collaborative analysis.

4014 Background: HER2 is a valid therapeutic target in advanced gastric cancer, however the prognostic significance of HER2 in this disease remains unknown. This analysis was performed to evaluate the prognostic significance of HER2 gene amplification or protein overexpression (HER2+) in advanced gastric cancer. METHODS Paraffin-embedded tumor samples of gastric cancer pts from six prospective first-line therapeutic trials of chemotherapy without trastuzumab performed in the U.S. and Europe were examined for HER2 by immunohistochemistry (IHC, 4B5) and in situ hybridization ISH (FISH or HER2 Dual ISH). HER2 positive disease (HER2+) was defined as IHC 3+ or ISH+ (ISH >2.0 HER2:CEP17FISH or HER2 Dual ISH). The impact of HER2 status was correlated with pt outcome using univariate and multivariate analysis. RESULTS 338 pts were evaluated: age 64 (28-88), M/F 233/105, GEJ/gastric 132/156, PS 0-1 224, Intestinal/Diffuse 125/140. 20.4% of all pts are HER2+. There were significant differences in HER2+ rates according to histological type (intestinal/mixed, 29%; diffuse, 8%; p<0.001), sex (M, 25%; F, 11%; p=0.012), and ECOG PS (0-1, 22%; 2-3, 10%; p<0.001). Similar rates of HER2+ tumors were found in biopsies vs. resections (22% vs. 19%) and in primary tumors vs. metastases (21% vs. 16%). Median overall survival was significantly longer in HER2+ pts (13.4 vs. 11.6 mos, HR 0.74; p=0.048) on univariate analysis. This prognostic value disappeared in multivariate analysis (p=0.3). In addition, HER2+ disease was not prognostic in subgroup analysis based on tumor histology. Factors associated with favorable survival in the multivariate analysis were intestinal type, female sex, recurrent disease, and ECOG PS 0-1. CONCLUSIONS Approximately 20% of Western patients with advanced gastric cancer are HER2+. Although on univariate analysis, HER2+ was associated with improved overall survival, this was not independent of other known prognostic variables. Unlike breast cancer where HER2+ disease carries an adverse prognostic value, HER2+ disease is not an independent prognostic factor for pt outcome in advanced gastric cancer.
Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime

It is frequently assumed that safe storage gun laws reduce accidental gun deaths and total suicides, while the possible impact on crime rates are ignored. However, given existing work on the adverse impact of other safety laws, such as safety caps for storing medicine, even the very plausible assumption of reduced accidental gun deaths cannot be taken for granted. Our paper analyzes both state and county data spanning nearly twenty years, and we find no support that safe storage laws reduce either juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides. Instead, these storage requirements appear to impair people? s ability to use guns defensively. Because accidental shooters also tend to be the ones most likely to violate the new law, safe storage laws increase violent and property crimes against low risk citizens with no observable offsetting benefit in terms of reduced accidents or suicides. During the first five full years after the passage of the safe storage laws, the group of fifteen states that adopted these laws faced an annual average increase of over 300 more murders, 3,860 more rapes, 24,650 more robberies, and over 25,000 more aggravated assaults. On average, the annual costs borne by victims averaged over $2.6 billion as a result of lost productivity, out-of-pocket expenses, medical bills, and property losses.
View Synthesis from Reference Images with Different Resolutions

An image-based rendering (IBR) approach to synthesizing new views for virtual viewpoint from two reference images is proposed in this paper. The one reference image with a low-resolution was taken at far-viewpoint and the other with a high-resolution at near-viewpoint for the same or similar scene. The processes of synthesizing new views at arbitrary virtual viewpoint between far-and near-viewpoint comprises determining the region in the low-resolution image that have corresponding points in the high-resolution image based on scale-space representation of the high-resolution image and the comparison between them and low-resolution image using contour phase correlation algorithms, recovering the corresponding relations of epipolar geometry and matching all the source epipolar lines in the common region, and synthesizing the new view through interpolating two source epipolar lines into new epipolar line in the new view and treating the region without corresponding points. Some synthesis examples show that image quality is good and the synthesis approach is feasible
Structure and Function of the Laminin‐Nidogen Complex

Laminin has been characterized over the past decade as a major basement membrane protein with a variety of biological functions. ' These functions include the stable integration of laminin into the basement membrane matrix and the expression of several cell-binding sites that allow cells to adhere to basement membranes and to respond to this attachment in various ways (TABLE 1). This diversity of function is correlated with the distinct multidomain structure of laminin. After rotary shadowing or negative staining, laminin appears'5 as an asymmetric cross composed of several rodlike and globular domains. This structure is formed from three constituent polypeptides-the B1 and B2 chains, each of about 220 kDa, and the 400-kDa A chain-which are connected to each other by several disulfide bonds. This type of structure is commonly observed in tissue extracts and cell culture material. Additionally, however, evidence exists for isoforms of laminin that differ in their polypeptide chain composition and hence may also have different shapes. ' It was also observed that laminin is very often noncovalently associated with a 150-kDa polypeptide variously referred to as nidogen, entactin, or C chain. When extracted from tissues with chelating agents, the laminin-nidogen complex was shown to contain both components in a 1:l molar ratio: The shape of nidogen was found to correspond to a dumbbell, in which two globular domains of unequal size are connected by a small rodlike
On the Hardness of Satisfiability with Bounded Occurrences in the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy

$ \newcommand{\eps}{\epsilon} \newcommand{\NP}{\mathsf{NP}} \newcommand{\YES}{\mathsf{YES}} \newcommand{\NO}{\mathsf{NO}} \newcommand{\myminus}{\text{-}}\newcommand{\Bsat}{\mathsf{B}} \newcommand{\threesat}{\rm{3}\myminus\mathsf{SAT}} \newcommand{\gapthreesat}{\mathsf{\forall\exists}\myminus{\rm{3}}\myminus\mathsf{SAT}} $In 1991, Papadimitriou and Yannakakis gave a reduction implying the $\NP$-hardness of approximating the problem $\threesat$ with bounded occurrences. Their reduction is based on expander graphs. We present an analogue of this result for the second level of the polynomial-time hierarchy based on superconcentrator graphs. This resolves an open question of Ko and Lin (1995) and should be useful in deriving inapproximability results in the polynomial-time hierarchy. More precisely, we show that given an instance of $\gapthreesat$ in which every variable occurs at most $\Bsat$ times (for some absolute constant $\Bsat$), it is $\Pi_2$-hard to distinguish between the following two cases: $\YES$ instances, in which for any assignment to the universal variables there exists an assignment to the existential variables that satisfies all the clauses, and $\NO$ instances in which there exists an assignment to the universal variables such that any assignment to the existential variables satisfies at most a $1-\eps$ fraction of the clauses. We also generalize this result to any level of the polynomial-time hierarchy.
Fabrication of micro/nano-structures using focused ion beam implantation and XeF2 gas-assisted etching

A micro/nano-structure fabrication method is developed using focused ion beam implantation (FIBI) and FIB XeF2 gas-assisted etching (FIB-GAE). Firstly, the FIB parameters' influence on the FIBI depth is studied by SEM observation of the FIBI cross-section cutting by FIB. Nanoparticles with 10–15 nm diameter are found to be evenly distributed in the FIBI layer, which can serve as a XeF2-assisted etching mask when the ion dose is larger than 1.4 × 1017 ions cm−2. The FIBI layers being used as the etching mask for the subsequent FIB-GAE process are explored to create different micro/nano-structures such as nano-gratings, nano-electrode and sinusoidal microstructures. It is found that the method of combining FIBI with subsequent FIB-GAE is efficient and flexible in micro/nano-structuring, and it can effectively remove the redeposition effect compared with the FIB milling method.
From flipped classroom theory to the personalized design of learning experiences in MOOCs

The frequent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) represent an opportunity to rethink teaching and learning in the context of virtual education. In this perspective, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been promoting research in the technological and educational areas, since they serve as an emerging and powerful knowledge-building platform for anyone, anytime and anywhere. However, limitations in the current development of MOOCs have required the search for strategies to support their personalization in order to enhance the users' learning and others skills, such as the ability to self-regulate and to work in a collaborative way, and not just to replicate the content already taught in the traditional classroom, through videos or other passive learning activities. Considering the need for changes in the MOOC's pedagogical model, this research aimed to investigate and promote a reflection about the possibility of using Flipped Classroom Teaching Model principles to design this type of virtual and massive environment. The paper starts with a description of MOOCs, Flipped Classroom and some related works used to support personalized learning in MOOCs. As a result of this investigation, we present some conceptual strategies for educators to design MOOCs from FC ideas and principles. We envisage that adaptation and incorporation of concepts of Flipped Classroom, already applied in face-to-face classroom, can also act as an effective intervention to support personalized learning in MOOCs, helping students to take the active role in their own process acquisition of skills and knowledge construction.
Leaching of concrete : the leaching process and its effects

The present report presents an experimental study of leaching of concrete caused by water percolating through the concrete, or by diffusion from concrete to external water in contact. An apparatus was designed and constructed in which de-ionised water could be forced, by external pressure, through a number of concrete specimens of differing characteristics. It was found that, whereas the initial water flow was normally low and uniform, most specimens showed a rapid increase in water flow after a certain period of time. This was probably due to formation of certain distinct percolation channels. The solid material around these channels was leached, the concrete becoming disintegrated, and almost no continuous cementitious material being left to maintain strength and tightness of the concrete. The chemical composition of the percolated water was analysed, making it possible to calculate the amount of leaching and consequently to theoretically assess the increase in porosity and reduction of strength Changes in the structure of concrete caused by leaching were also investigated experimentally by measurements of porosity, pore size distribution and strength. ESEM-EDX-studies were made in order to find out the morphology of leached concrete. Results from all these experimental studies are presented in the report. A theoretical model of the leaching process and its effects on the material and on the structural stability of real structures was developed. The model is applied to the experimental data.
Speaker-aware Multi-Task Learning for automatic speech recognition

Overfitting is a commonly met issue in automatic speech recognition and is especially impacting when the amount of training data is limited. In order to address this problem, this article investigates acoustic modeling through Multi-Task Learning, with two speaker-related auxiliary tasks. Multi-Task Learning is a regularization method which aims at improving the network's generalization ability, by training a unique model to solve several different, but related tasks. In this article, two auxiliary tasks are jointly examined. On the one hand, we consider speaker classification as an auxiliary task by training the acoustic model to recognize the speaker, or find the closest one inside the training set. On the other hand, the acoustic model is also trained to extract i-vectors from the standard acoustic features. I-Vectors are efficiently applied in the speaker identification community in order to characterize a speaker and its acoustic environment. The core idea of using these auxiliary tasks is to give the network an additional inter-speaker awareness, and thus, reduce overfitting.We investigate this Multi-Task Learning setup on the TIMIT database, while the acoustic modeling is performed using a Recurrent Neural Network with Long Short-Term Memory cells.
Factors Governing Print Quality in Color Prints

The proliferation of the color printers in the computer world today introduced a huge numbers of prints available for everyone with good quality/cost performance ratio. With every new introduced model, it becomes more and more difficult to keep track of the differences between models and between performances, even if the comparison looks to a narrow price range. The printers are spread in a huge range in terms of price/quality area. On one side there are the ink jet printers, at a low cost but with a very high dynamic of the print quality in the recent years grouped at the “low end” users side, and on the other hand there are the costly and high quality offset printers required by the “high end” users side. In between, there are various color reproduction configurations at different cost/quality performance. Looking for the optimum print quality, the visual differences are first encountered, then the time performance, services available, etc. This paper emphasize the most important factors governing the print quality in color prints. These parameters are grouped an discussed in the next sections as follows: in section one the influence of the reproduction technology is discussed, followed by the colorant media interaction in section 2, geometric resolution in section 3, color resolution in section 4, color separation with black generation mechanism in section 5, and concluded with tone reproduction in section 6. Each section is illustrated with examples.
Notch Signalling Synchronizes the Zebrafish Segmentation Clock but Is Not Needed To Create Somite Boundaries

Somite segmentation depends on a gene expression oscillator or clock in the posterior presomitic mesoderm (PSM) and on read-out machinery in the anterior PSM to convert the pattern of clock phases into a somite pattern. Notch pathway mutations disrupt somitogenesis, and previous studies have suggested that Notch signalling is required both for the oscillations and for the read-out mechanism. By blocking or overactivating the Notch pathway abruptly at different times, we show that Notch signalling has no essential function in the anterior PSM and is required only in the posterior PSM, where it keeps the oscillations of neighbouring cells synchronized. Using a GFP reporter for the oscillator gene her1, we measure the influence of Notch signalling on her1 expression and show by mathematical modelling that this is sufficient for synchronization. Our model, in which intracellular oscillations are generated by delayed autoinhibition of her1 and her7 and synchronized by Notch signalling, explains the observations fully, showing that there are no grounds to invoke any additional role for the Notch pathway in the patterning of somite boundaries in zebrafish.
Joint Deployment of Small Cells and Wireless Backhaul Links in Next-Generation Networks

In this letter, a novel approach for optimizing the joint deployment of small cell base stations and wireless backhaul links is proposed. This joint deployment scenario is cast as a multiobjective optimization problem under the constraints of limited backhaul capacity and outage probability. To address the problem, a novel adaptive algorithm that integrates E-method, Lagrangian relaxation, and tabu search is proposed to obtain the Pareto optimal solution set. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is quite effective in finding the optimal solutions. The proposed joint deployment model can be used for planning small cell networks.
Mth: Codesigned Hardware/Software Support for Fine Grain Threads

Multi-core processors are ubiquitous in all market segments from embedded to high performance computing, but only few applications can efficiently utilize them. Existing parallel frameworks aim to support thread-level parallelism in applications, but the imposed overhead prevents their usage for small problem instances. This work presents Micro-threads (Mth) a hardware-software proposal focused on a shared thread management model enabling the use of parallel resources in applications that have small chunks of parallel code or small problem inputs by a combination of software and hardware: delegation of the resource control to the application, an improved mechanism to store and fill processor's context, and an efficient synchronization system. Four sample applications are used to test our proposal: HSL filter (trivially parallel), FFT Radix2 (recursive algorithm), LU decomposition (barrier every cycle) and Dantzig algorithm (graph based, matrix manipulation). The results encourage the use of Mth and could smooth the use of multiple cores for applications that currently can not take advantage of the proliferation of the available parallel resources in each chip.