Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microfluidic Fabrication of Hydrocortisone Nanocrystals Coated with Polymeric Stabilisers

Hydrocortisone (HC) nanocrystals intended for parenteral administration of HC were produced by anti-solvent crystallisation within coaxial assemblies of pulled borosilicate glass capillaries using either co-current flow of aqueous and organic phases or counter-current flow focusing. The organic phase was composed of 7 mg/mL of HC in a 60:40 (v/v) mixture of ethanol and water and the anti-solvent was milli-Q water. The microfluidic mixers were fabricated with an orifice diameter of the inner capillary ranging from 50 µm to 400 µm and operated at the aqueous to organic phase flow rate ratio ranging from 5 to 25. The size of the nanocrystals decreased with increasing aqueous to organic flow rate ratio. The counter-current flow microfluidic mixers provided smaller nanocrystals than the co-current flow devices under the same conditions and for the same geometry, due to smaller diameter of the organic phase stream in the mixing zone. The Z-average particle size of the drug nanocrystals increased from 210–280 nm to 320–400 nm after coating the nanocrystals with 0.2 wt % aqueous solution of hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) in a stirred vial. The differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) analyses carried out on the dried nanocrystals stabilized with HPMC, polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP), and sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) were investigated and reported. The degree of crystallinity for the processed sample was lowest for the sample stabilised with HPMC and the highest for the raw HC powder.
An IPv6 Prefix for Overlay Routable Cryptographic Hash Identifiers (ORCHID)

This document introduces Overlay Routable Cryptographic Hash Identifiers (ORCHID) as a new, experimental class of IPv6-address- like identifiers. These identifiers are intended to be used as endpoint identifiers at applications and Application Programming Interfaces (API) and not as identifiers for network location at the IP layer, i.e., locators. They are designed to appear as application layer entities and at the existing IPv6 APIs, but they should not appear in actual IPv6 headers. To make them more like vanilla IPv6 addresses, they are expected to be routable at an overlay level. Consequently, while they are considered non-routable addresses from the IPv6 layer point-of-view, all existing IPv6 applications are expected to be able to use them in a manner compatible with current IPv6 addresses. This document requests IANA to allocate a temporary prefix out of the IPv6 addressing space for Overlay Routable Cryptographic Hash Identifiers. By default, the prefix will be returned to IANA in 2014, with continued use requiring IETF consensus. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
The Problem of the Lack of Benefit of a Document to Its Producer (PotLoBoaDtiP)

The paper lists some of the quotations gathered during interviews and focus groups during a consulting engagement to help the client company improve its requirements engineering (RE) process. The paper describes in detail one of the phenomena observed, namely that of the problem of the lack of benefit of a document to its producer (PotLoBoaDtiP). It goes on to report other manifestations, including building and maintaining traces, of the PotLoBoaDtiP reported in the literature. It concludes by suggesting that the PotLoBoaDtiP cannot be solved with only technology, but that the motivational issue must be addressed.
LOST-find: A spectral-space-time direct blind geolocalization algorithm

In the literature of direct blind geolocalization algorithms, two algorithms are mainly concurrent: DPD and LOST. The first one appears to be very sensitive to the spectral contents and the second, although presenting wide scope of scenarii with better performance than DPD, does not exploit the TDoA. This last algorithm could therefore be again improved. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new algorithm LOST-FIND which exploits (for non monochromatic sources) the structured TDoA between stations thanks to a spectral estimation of sources. The proposed algorithm is an iterative extension of LOST algorithm initially designed for monochromatic sources. Simulations confirm the expected improvements versus DPD and LOST.
Weak Genetic Explanation 20 Years Later

Plomin, DeFries, Knopik, and Neiderhiser (2016, this issue) are correct in their assertion that many discoveries of behavior genetics have proven to be robust and replicable. I note, in contrast, that more specific assertions about the role of genetics in the development of behavior have failed to replicate. Reflecting on why more general findings replicate better than specific ones sheds light on the difficulties of studying complex human development and on the role played by genes in determining its course.
Exploring statistical properties for semantic annotation: sparse distributed and convergent assumptions for keywords

Does there exist a compact set of visual topics in form of keyword clusters capable to represent all images visual content within an acceptable error? In this paper, we answer this question by analyzing distribution laws for keywords from image descriptions and comparing with traditional techniques in NLP, thereby propose three assumptions: Sparse Distribution Attribute, Local Convergent Assumption and Global Convergent Conjecture. They are essential for keywords selection and image content understanding to overcome the semantic gap. Experiments are performed on a 60,000 web crawled images, and the correctness is validated by the performance.
pH-Regulated Gene Expression of the Gastric Pathogen Helicobacter pylori

ABSTRACT Colonization by the gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori has been shown to be intricately linked to the development of gastritis, ulcers, and gastric malignancy. Little is known about mechanisms employed by the bacterium that help it adapt to the hostile environment of the human stomach. In an effort to extend our knowledge of these mechanisms, we utilized spotted-DNA microarrays to characterize the response of H. pylori to low pH. Expression of approximately 7% of the bacterial genome was reproducibly altered by shift to low pH. Analysis of the differentially expressed genes led to the discovery that acid exposure leads to profound changes in motility of H. pylori, as a larger percentage of acid-exposed bacterial cells displayed motility and moved at significantly higher speeds. In contrast to previous publications, we found that expression of the bacterial virulence gene cagA was strongly repressed by acid exposure. Furthermore, this transcriptional repression was reflected at the level of protein accumulation in the H. pylori cell.
Implementation and Evaluation of SSBT for High-Performance Web Servers

Most of the researches have been concentrated on how to avoid and dissolve the network congestion, and only a few discussions on the performance improvement of the endhosts are recently made. We have already proposed a new architecture, which is called Scalable Socket Buffer Tuning (SSBT), to provide high performance and fair service for many TCP connections at the Internet endhosts. In this paper, we evaluate an effectiveness of our proposed algorithm through various kinds of implementation experiments. In the experiments, we confirm the behavior and effectiveness of the SSBT through both transport-layer benchmark results and application-layer benchmark results. In the transport-layer tests, we use the native TCP data transfer to evaluate SSBT performance. In the application-layer tests, we use HTTP data transfer from the Web server which transfer the data by TCP, considering the Web traffic on the Internet. Keyword TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), WWW (World Wide Web), Socket Buffer, Fairness, Scalability
De novo Sequencing of the Leaf Transcriptome Reveals Complex Light-Responsive Regulatory Networks in Camellia sinensis cv. Baijiguan

Tea plants (Camellia sinensis L.) possess high genetic diversity that is important for breeding. One cultivar, Baijiguan, exhibits a yellow leaf phenotype, reduced chlorophyll (Chl) content, and aberrant chloroplast structures under high light intensity. In contrast, under low light intensity, the flush shoot from Baijiguan becomes green, the Chl content increases significantly, and the chloroplasts exhibit normal structures. To understand the underlying molecular mechanisms for these observations, we performed de novo transcriptome sequencing and digital gene expression (DGE) profiling using Illumina sequencing technology. De novo transcriptome assembly identified 88,788 unigenes, including 1652 transcription factors from 25 families. In total, 1993 and 2576 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in Baijiguan plants treated with 3 and 6 days of shade, respectively. Gene Ontology (GO) and pathway enrichment analyses indicated that the DEGs are predominantly involved in the ROS scavenging system, chloroplast development, photosynthetic pigment synthesis, secondary metabolism, and circadian systems. The light-responsive gene POR (protochlorophyllide oxidoreductase) and transcription factor HY5 were identified. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis of 20 selected DEGs confirmed the RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) results. Overall, these findings suggest that high light intensity inhibits the expression of photosystem II 10-kDa protein (PsbR) in Baijiguan, thus affecting PSII stability, chloroplast development and chlorophyll biosynthesis.
Why Isn't the Doha Development Agenda More Poverty Friendly?

The breakdown of the WTO negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda has inspired critics to highlight the lack of effort on the part of rich countries to reform their agricultural policies. In this paper, we focus instead the poverty impacts of developing country tariff cuts – particularly those in agriculture. We argue that the Doha Development Agenda is fundamentally less poverty-friendly than it could be -- in large part due to the absence of tariff cuts on staple food products in developing countries. Such cuts would give the poor access to food at world prices, thereby reducing the cost of living at the poverty line. We also explore the contention that such tariff cuts will hurt the poor working in agriculture. Based on our analysis of the impacts of multilateral trade policy reforms on a sample of fifteen developing countries, we find there is some evidence of poverty increases in agriculture. However, such effects are minimized by ensuring that agricultural tariffs are cut in all developing countries. Overall, the poverty-reducing impact of lower food prices dominates; we conclude that the Doha Development Agenda would be more poverty friendly if it were to include deeper cuts in developing country agricultural tariffs. This contrasts sharply with calls for special products exemptions by many developing country advocates.
Technical Vocational Education: As a Veritable Tool for Eradicating Youth Unemployment.

The level ofyouth unemployment in Nigeriaisvery high in Nigeria; with itsattendantadverse psychological, social, occupational and financial effects. This paper stresses on thecauses and consequences of youth unemployment in Nigeria. The paper also highlights on Technical Vocational Education (TVE) in Nigeria. Conclusions were drawn and recommendations made on how TVE will reduce the level of youth unemployment in Nigeria amongst which are: Graduates of the programs should be encouraged to be selfemployed by assisting them with soft loans and/or micro credit. The quality of technical and vocational educational output must be improved if the expected outcome of employment creation and poverty reduction is to be achieved. The task of TVE provision cannot be tackled by government alone. The involvement of major Nigerian stakeholders, complemented by partnerships with international agencies, NGOs, Foundations, (etc.) will be essential if the goals and potentials of Nigerians are to be realized using TVE for job creation and poverty alleviation.
Personalized video recommendation based on viewing history with the study on YouTube

With internet delivery of video content surging to an un-precedented level, video recommendation has become an important approach for helping people access interesting videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to integrate viewing history for personalized video recommendation. For a given user, our approach calculates a recommendation score for each video candidate, that composes of two parts: the interest degree of this video by the user's friends, and the taste similarities between the user and his friends. We measure the interest degree of each video by considering its textual, visual and popularity information. Meanwhile, we construct tag set for each user based on his/her viewing history to estimate the taste similarities between different users. The final recommended videos are ranked according to the accumulated recommendation scores from different recommenders. We conduct experiments with 45 users and more than 11, 000 videos, and the results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
Understanding factors that influence smoking uptake

Objective:To explore relationships between patterns of smoking uptake and social context and attitudinal variables. Design:Cross sectional survey. Setting:Public schools in Tucson, Arizona and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Participants:982 children in grades 6–9 (ages 11–15 years). Main outcome measures:Items measuring smoking history, nicotine dependence and quit attempts, susceptibility to smoking in the future, smoking norms, use of other tobacco products, attitudes toward smoking, and demographic characteristics. Results:Overall, 43% of children had smoked a cigarette and 57% had never used them. Ever smokers lived in social contexts with more smoking and where smoking was normative. Among never users, 25% are susceptible to smoking; these children have positive attitudes toward smoking, do not feel social pressure to stay off cigarettes, and had more friends who smoked. Among ever users, 36% were currently smoking in the past 30 days. Current users also lived in social context with more smoking and had positive attitudes toward smoking. Most users had tried to stop smoking. Only 9% of current users smoked daily; 29% had not smoked a whole cigarette. Greater cigarette consumption was associated with more favourable attitudes toward smoking. Most of past users were in early uptake: 95% had smoked less than 100 cigarettes but 49% were susceptible to smoking again. Conclusions:There is promise in differentiating subgroups among the never, past and current use of cigarettes. Susceptibility within each of these groups was associated with similar patterns of attitudes and social context. These patterns in smoking uptake need to be confirmed prospectively.
Green Resource Allocation to Minimize Receiving Energy in OFDMA Cellular Systems

Advanced cellular systems supporting ultra high traffic (e.g., 1 Gbps) utilize aggressive communication technologies to user equipment (UE) and thus induce high-energy consumption. To reduce UE energy consumption, we note that in OFDMA systems, transmissions to one UE can be scheduled into fewer time slots due to multiple available sub-carriers. It implies that the circuit energy of UEs can be reduced if turning off the circuits during the slots without receptions is allowed. A nonlinear integer resource optimization is thus formulated for base stations to minimize the receiving energy of UEs, with a proposed algorithm to reach optimal solution efficiently. Numerical results demonstrate that our computationally efficient algorithm can easily reduce more than 60% UE energy consumption, and thus is ready for practical systems such as 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced.
BDNF Stimulation of Protein Synthesis in Cortical Neurons Requires the MAP Kinase-Interacting Kinase MNK1

Although the MAP kinase-interacting kinases (MNKs) have been known for >15 years, their roles in the regulation of protein synthesis have remained obscure. Here, we explore the involvement of the MNKs in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)-stimulated protein synthesis in cortical neurons from mice. Using a combination of pharmacological and genetic approaches, we show that BDNF-induced upregulation of protein synthesis requires MEK/ERK signaling and the downstream kinase, MNK1, which phosphorylates eukaryotic initiation factor (eIF) 4E. Translation initiation is mediated by the interaction of eIF4E with the m7GTP cap of mRNA and with eIF4G. The latter interaction is inhibited by the interactions of eIF4E with partner proteins, such as CYFIP1, which acts as a translational repressor. We find that BDNF induces the release of CYFIP1 from eIF4E, and that this depends on MNK1. Finally, using a novel combination of BONCAT and SILAC, we identify a subset of proteins whose synthesis is upregulated by BDNF signaling via MNK1 in neurons. Interestingly, this subset of MNK1-sensitive proteins is enriched for functions involved in neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity. Additionally, we find significant overlap between our subset of proteins whose synthesis is regulated by MNK1 and those encoded by known FMRP-binding mRNAs. Together, our data implicate MNK1 as a key component of BDNF-mediated translational regulation in neurons.
Scalable Fault Tolerance Using Over-Decomposition and PGAS Models

Component failures in high-end systems are increasingly a norm rather than an exception. While applicationtransparent and application-aware approaches for checkpoint/restart have been proposed in the literature, they cease to scale beyond a few hundred nodes. Although, SSDs/NVRAMs alleviate the check-pointing overhead, the cost of recovery from failures is still proportional to the system size and not to the degree of failure. These properties are clearly prohibitive for the scale of the systems on the horizon. This paper is a divergence from the classical fault tolerance methods whereby the proposed approach uses a combination of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models to abstract the replication of critical data structures, and over-decomposition of computation in to smaller tasks for fine grained recovery. The proposed Scalable Fault Tolerance (SFT) approach uses the the critical data classified in read-only/read-write categories, automatically performs selective replication on these data structures, and uses a fault-tolerant meta-data store for recovery during faults. The SFT approach guarantees that cost of recovery is truly proportional to the degree of failure at the expense of very low time-space complexity. This is achieved by re-executing only the number of tasks upper bounded by the number of process failures and performing “continued execution” without re-spawning new processes. Using NWChem a highly popular computational chemistry application as a case study, the efficacy of the proposed solution is demonstrated on a commodity cluster with InfiniBand and actual process faults.
Linear Transmission of a Mixture of Gaussian Measurements over a Fading Channel under Delay Constraints

Delay constrained linear transmission (LT) strategies are considered for the transmission of a mixture of Gaussian measurements over an additive white Gaussian no ise fading channel under an average power constraint. If the channel state information (CSI) is known by both the encoder and decoder, the optimal LT scheme in terms of the average mean-square error distorti on is characterized under a strict delay constraint, and a graphical interpretation of the optimal p ower allocation strategy is presented. Then, for general delay constraints, two achievable LT strategies ar proposed based on the solution to a particular multiple measurements-parallel channels scenario. It is s hown that the distortion decreases as the delay constraint is relaxed, and when the delay constraint is comp letely removed, both strategies achieve the optimal performance under certain matching conditions. If the CSI is known only by the decoder, the optimal LT strategy is derived under a strict delay constrai n . The extension for general delay constraints is shown to be hard. As a first step towards understanding this case, it is argued that for the multiple measurements-parallel channels scenario, any LT scheme th at uses only a one-to-one linear mapping between measurements and channels is suboptimal in general . Index Terms Linear transmission, delay constraint, Gaussian mixture, fading channel, water filling, wireless sensor networks. This work was supported by the Spanish Government under proj ect TEC2013-44591-P (INTENSYV). 2
Augmenting reflective middleware with an aspect orientation support layer

Reflective middleware provides an effective way to support adaptation in distributed systems. However, as distributed systems become increasingly complex, certain drawbacks of the reflective middleware approach are becoming evident. In particular, reflective APIs are found to impose a steep learning curve, and to place too much expressive power in the hands of developers. Recently, researchers in the field of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) have argued that 'dynamic aspects' show promise in alleviating these drawbacks. In this paper, we report on work that attempts to combine the reflective middleware and AOP approaches. We build an AOP support layer on top of an underlying reflective middleware substrate in such a way that it can be dynamically deployed/undeployed where and when required, and imposes no overhead when it is not used. Our AOP approach involves aspects that can be dynamically (un)weaved across a distributed system on the basis of pointcut expressions that are inherently distributed in nature, and it supports the composition of advice that is remote from the advised joinpoint. An overall goal of the work is to effectively combine reflective middleware and AOP in a way that maximises the benefits and minimises the drawbacks of each.
Developing communication-aware service placement frameworks in the Cloud economy

In a Cloud system, a number of services are often deployed with each service being hosted by a collection of Virtual Machines (VM). The services may interact with each other and the interaction patterns may be dynamic, varying according to the system information at runtime. These impose a challenge in determining the amount of resources required to deliver a desired level of QoS for each service. In this paper, we present a method to determine the sufficient number of VMs for the interacting Cloud services. The proposed method borrows the ideas from the Leontief Open Production Model in economy. Further, this paper develops a communication-aware strategy to place the VMs to Physical Machines (PM), aiming to minimize the communication costs incurred by the service interactions. The developed communication-aware placement strategy is formalized in a way that it does not need to the specific communication pattern between individual VMs. A genetic algorithm is developed to find a VM-to-PM placement with low communication costs. Simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the developed communication-aware placement framework. The results show that compared with the placement framework aiming to use the minimal number of PMs to host VMs, the proposed communication-aware framework is able to reduce the communication cost significantly with only a very little increase in the PM usage.