Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing quality and functionality of DNA from fresh and archival dried blood spots and recommendations for quality control guidelines.

BACKGROUND Dried blood spots (DBS) are a convenient and inexpensive method for biobanking. Although many countries have established population-based DBS biobanks from neonatal screening programs, the quality and usefulness of DNA from DBS have not been extensively assessed. METHODS We compared 4 common DNA extraction methods (Qiagen, EZNA, Chelex 100, and alkaline lysis) in a pilot study using fresh DBS with known lymphocyte count. We assessed suitability for multiple displacement amplification (MDA) and subsequent single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analyses. We selected the EZNA method for DNA extraction from archival samples up to 27 years old, stored at room temperature or -20 degrees C, and SNP analyses were performed after MDA. RESULTS Extraction using alkaline lysis failed in most tests, and Chelex 100 was unsuccessful in real-time PCR, whereas the EZNA and Qiagen methods were successful by all evaluated quality indices. DNA extraction by EZNA, MDA, and SNP analyses were successful for the archival samples stored at -20 degrees C. CONCLUSION Routine protocols for evaluation of the quality and functional integrity of DNA based on DNA yield, DNA size, and quantification of amplifiable DNA allow use of sufficient template for MDA and successful SNP analyses from both primary DBS extract and MDA product. A single 3-mm disc can yield sufficient DNA for several thousand SNP analyses. DNA from DBS is thus suitable for genetic epidemiology studies.
The Ran Pathway in Drosophila melanogaster Mitosis

Over the last two decades, the small GTPase Ran has emerged as a central regulator of both mitosis and meiosis, particularly in the generation, maintenance, and regulation of the microtubule (MT)-based bipolar spindle. Ran-regulated pathways in mitosis bear many similarities to the well-characterized functions of Ran in nuclear transport and, as with transport, the majority of these mitotic effects are mediated through affecting the physical interaction between karyopherins and Spindle Assembly Factors (SAFs)—a loose term describing proteins or protein complexes involved in spindle assembly through promoting nucleation, stabilization, and/or depolymerization of MTs, through anchoring MTs to specific structures such as centrosomes, chromatin or kinetochores, or through sliding MTs along each other to generate the force required to achieve bipolarity. As such, the Ran-mediated pathway represents a crucial functional module within the wider spindle assembly landscape. Research into mitosis using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster has contributed substantially to our understanding of centrosome and spindle function. However, in comparison to mammalian systems, very little is known about the contribution of Ran-mediated pathways in Drosophila mitosis. This article sets out to summarize our understanding of the roles of the Ran pathway components in Drosophila mitosis, focusing on the syncytial blastoderm embryo, arguing that it can provide important insights into the conserved functions on Ran during spindle formation.
A novel control scheme for maximum power operation of synchronous reluctance motors including maximum torque per flux control

This paper proposes a novel control scheme for maximum power operation of synchronous reluctance motors. The proposed scheme consists of a combination of maximum torque per ampere control, maximum torque per flux control, flux-weakening control and torque limiting. The first three control methods are based on a mathematical model in a rotating reference frame that is synchronized with the stator flux-linkage. The final method utilizes a reactive torque calculated as the inner product of the flux and current vectors. The proposed control scheme is suitable for direct torque control or flux-oriented control. In this paper, the scheme is applied to a direct-torque-control-based motor drive system. The validity of the control scheme is verified by simulation and experimental results.
Discovery of a 3.6 hr Eclipsing Luminous X-Ray Binary in the Galaxy NGC 4214

We report the discovery of an eclipsing X-ray binary with a 3.62 hr period within 24'' of the center of the dwarf starburst galaxy NGC 4214. The orbital period places interesting constraints on the nature of the binary and allows for a few very different interpretations. The most likely possibility is that the source lies within NGC 4214 and has an X-ray luminosity, LX, of up to 7 × 1038 ergs s-1. In this case, the binary may well be comprised of a naked He-burning donor star with a neutron star accretor, although a stellar-mass black hole accretor cannot be completely excluded. There is no obvious evidence for a strong stellar wind in the X-ray orbital light curve that would be expected from a massive He star; thus, the mass of the He star should be ≲3-4 M☉. If correct, this would represent a new class of very luminous X-ray binary—perhaps related to Cyg X-3. Other, less likely possibilities include a conventional low-mass X-ray binary that somehow manages to produce such a high X-ray luminosity and is apparently persistent over an interval of years; or a foreground AM Her binary of much lower luminosity that fortuitously lies in the direction of NGC 4214. Any model for this system must accommodate the lack of an optical counterpart down to a limiting magnitude of 22.6 in the visible.
The ReFuGe 2020 Consortium—using “omics” approaches to explore the adaptability and resilience of coral holobionts to environmental change

Human-induced environmental changes have been linked directly with loss of biodiversity. Coral reefs, which have been severely impacted by anthropogenic activities over the last few decades, exemplify this global problem and provide an opportunity to develop research addressing key knowledge gaps through ‘omics’-based approaches. While many stressors, e.g. global warming, ocean acidification, overfishing and coastal development have been identified, there is an urgent need to understand how corals function at a basic level in order to conceive strategies for mitigating future reef loss. In this regard, availability of fully sequenced genomes has been immensely valuable in providing answers to questions of organismal biology. Given that corals are metaorganisms comprised of the coral animal host, its intracellular photosynthetic algae, and associated microbiota (i.e. bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses), these efforts must focus on entire coral holobionts. The Reef Future Genomics 2020 (ReFuGe 2020) consortium has formed to sequence hologenomes of ten coral species representing different physiological or functional groups to provide foundation data for coral reef adaptation research that is freely available to the research community.
A new perspective on resource interactions in IT/IS project portfolio selection

Adequately considering interactions among IT/IS projects in the process of constructing an IT/IS project portfolio is an important requirement for IT/IS project portfolio selection. Especially interactions caused by the simultaneous utilization of scarce resources are very common and of high relevance for IT/IS project portfolio selection problems. In the literature, resource interactions are already incorporated into technically sophisticated optimization models, but it is assumed that the necessary input data are entirely available to the planner. The identification and assessment of resource interactions are not supported sufficiently and thus, the applicability of these optimization models in business practice is severely aggravated. In this article we extend the prevailing definitions of resource interactions in the literature by introducing allocation, performance, and sourcing interactions. Using these three types of interactions, we present a structured identification process for resource interactions among IT/IS projects, which is the main contribution of this article. Further, we present a tailored mathematical decision model that accounts for the identified interactions.
The quantitative risks of mesothelioma and lung cancer in relation to asbestos exposure.

Mortality reports on asbestos exposed cohorts which gave information on exposure levels from which (as a minimum) a cohort average cumulative exposure could be estimated were reviewed. At exposure levels seen in occupational cohorts it is concluded that the exposure specific risk of mesothelioma from the three principal commercial asbestos types is broadly in the ratio 1:100:500 for chrysotile, amosite and crocidolite respectively. For lung cancer the conclusions are less clear cut. Cohorts exposed only to crocidolite or amosite record similar exposure specific risk levels (around 5% excess lung cancer per f/ml.yr); but chrysotile exposed cohorts show a less consistent picture, with a clear discrepancy between the mortality experience of a cohort of xhrysotile textile workers in Carolina and the Quebec miners cohort. Taking account of the excess risk recorded by cohorts with mixed fibre exposures (generally<1%), the Carolina experience looks uptypically high. It is suggested that a best estimate lung cancer risk for chrysotile alone would be 0.1%, with a highest reasonable estimate of 0.5%. The risk differential between chrysotile and the two amphibole fibres for lunc cancer is thus between 1:10 and 1:50. Examination of the inter-study dose response relationship for the amphibole fibres suggests a non-linear relationship for all three cancer endpoints (pleural and peritoneal mesotheliomas, and lung cancer). The peritoneal mesothelioma risk is proportional to the square of cumulative exposure, lung cancer risk lies between a linear and square relationship and pleural mesothelioma seems to rise less than linearly with cumulative dose. Although these non-linear relationships provide a best fit ot the data, statistical and other uncertainties mean that a linear relationship remains arguable for pleural and lung tumours (but not or peritoneal tumours). Based on these considerations, and a discussion fo the associated uncertainties, a series of quantified risk summary statements for different elvels of cumulative exposure are presented.
Measuring Sustainability of the “Pay as You Go” Public Pension System in the Republic of Macedonia

The analysis of the demographical data indicates that currently the main challenge for the sustainability of the pay-as-you-go public pension system in Macedonia is not the aging population. The revenues from contributions as a percentage of total pension system’s revenues are decreasing due to low labour activity, low wages and slow job-creation. The larger deficits of the fund call for an analysis and possible reform action. The paper provides simulations under proposed assumptions until 2030. In our simulations, the pension fund starts to generate surpluses after 2025-26. They are higher or lower depending on the policy to be chosen. The sensitivity of the pension system is the highest to the GDP growth, which points to the need to find mechanisms to accelerate growth.
Semantic Tagging

It is possible to work with semantics on at least three different levels: words, sentences or discourse. The different levels will be shortly described and discussed here. The focus will however be on different ways to tag words semantically. I will start by describing what semantic tagging is, some of the entities that can be tagged and some of the semantic categories that can be used. I will finish this paper by describing two different studies of semantic tagging; one is using unsupervised methods and one is using a combination of supervised and unsupervised methods.
Colour Doppler ultrasonography to detect pannus in knee joint synovitis.

OBJECTIVE To determine if colour Doppler ultrasonography can characterise the nature of intraarticular echogenic structures and synovial villi more precisely than conventional ultrasonography. METHODS This is a prospective study on 20 patients--10 with rheumatoid arthritis and 10 with osteoarthritis. Colour Doppler ultrasonography of the knee joints was performed prior to total prosthetic replacement. Two independent, trained physician ultrasonographers examined the knee to be replaced with different ultrasound equipment using colour Doppler and power Doppler ultrasonography. The existence and extent of pannus were then assessed surgically and histologically. RESULTS All 9 patients with histologically detected pannus had perfused, echogenic, intraarticular structures (ultrasonographer 2; ultrasonographer 1: 8 out of 9 patients). Sparse perfusion was detected in 1 patient (investigator 1) and in 5 patients (investigator 2) with extensive non-destructive synovial proliferation. Colour Doppler and power Doppler ultrasonography were equivalent in detecting small intraarticular vessels. CONCLUSION Colour Doppler ultrasonography improves the differentiation of intraarticular structures compared to conventional ultrasonography.
Biochemical differences between products of the Adh locus in Drosophila.

An analysis of the molecular properties of the major alcohol dehydrogenase (E.C.1.1.1.1.) allozyme variants found segregating in natural populations of D. melanogaster is presented. Our results indicate: (1) ADH-S enzyme has generally lower Michaelis-Menten constants than those of ADH-F; (2) ADH-S and ADH-F enzymes display opposite interactions for both co-factor and substrate; and (3) higher levels of ADH are associated with the Adh-fast genotype. The possible adaptive significance of these findings is discussed.
The Selection of Natural Scales in 2D Images Using Adaptive Gabor Filtering

This paper analyzes how the natural scales of the shapes in 2D images can be extracted. Spatial information is analyzed by multiple units sensitive to both spatial and spatial-frequency variables. Scale estimates of the relevant shapes are constructed only from strongly responding detectors. The meaningful structures in the response of a detector (computed through 2D Gabor filtering) are, at their natural level of resolution, relatively sharp and have well-defined boundaries. A natural scale is so defined as a level producing local minimum of a function that returns the relative sharpness of the detector response filtered over a range of scales. In a second stage, to improve a first crude estimate of the local scale, the criterion is also rewritten to directly select scales at locations of significant features of each activated detector.
Using Artificial Immune System and Fuzzy Logic for Alert Correlation

One of the most important challenges facing the intrusion detection systems (IDSs) is the huge number of generated alerts. A system administrator will be overwhelmed by these alerts in such a way that she/he cannot manage and use the alerts. The best-known solution is to correlate low-level alerts into a higher level attack and then produce a high-level alert for them. In this paper a new automated alert correlation approach is presented. It employs Fuzzy Logic and Artificial Immune System (AIS) to discover and learn the degree of correlation between two alerts and uses this knowledge to extract the attack scenarios. The proposed system doesn't need vast domain knowledge or rule definition efforts. To correlate each new alert with previous alerts, the system first tries to find the correlation probability based on its fuzzy rules. Then, if there is no matching rule with the required matching threshold, it uses the AIRS algorithm. The system is evaluated using DARPA 2000 dataset and a netForensics honeynet data. The completeness, soundness and false alert rate are calculated. The average completeness for LL-DoS1.0 and LLDoS2.0, are 0.957 and 0.745 respectively. The system generates the attack graphs with an acceptable accuracy and, the computational complexity of the probability assignment algorithm is linear.
ISGRI: The INTEGRAL soft gamma-ray imager

For the first time in the history of high energyastronomy, a large CdTe gamma-ray camera is operating in space. ISGRI is the low-energy camera of the IBIS telescope on board the INTEGRAL satellite. This paper details its design and itsin-flight behavior and performances. Having a sensitive area of 2621 cm$^2$ with a spatial resolution of 4.6 mm, a low threshold around 12 keV and an energy resolution of $\sim$ 8\% at 60 keV, ISGRI shows absolutely no signs of degradation after 9 months in orbit. All aspects of its in-flight behavior and scientific performance are fully nominal, and in particular the observedbackground level confirms the expected sensitivity of 1 milliCrab for a 10$^6$s observation.
The LOT: transform coding without blocking effects

An exact derivation of an optimal lapped orthogonal transform (LOT) is presented. The optimal LOT is related to the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in such a way that a fast algorithm for a nearly optimal LOT is derived. Compared to the DCT, the fast LOT requires about 20-30% more computations, mostly additions. An image coding example demonstrates the effectiveness of the LOT in reducing blocking effects; the LOT actually leads to slightly smaller signal reconstruction errors than does the DCT. >
EXTENDED FLOATING-CAR DATA FOR THE ACQUISITION OF TRAFFIC INFORMATION

If traffic information is to be up-to-date, a comprehensive and reliable data acquisition system is needed. However, financial constraints mean that this requirement cannot be satisfied for much of the road network. For this reason, road traffic engineers are making increasing use of intelligent vehicles as mobile sensors, so called "floating cars", to determine the traffic situation. In modern vehicles, the data available include not just vehicle speed but also a wide variety of other variables. These can be acquired in digital form from the vehicle's data buses. With their help it is possible to develop better traffic information and new telematics services which contribute to increasing road safety and driver convenience. Together with partners from industry, BMW is working within the German MoTiV research program on the realisation of a field test in which this concept can be tried out. This paper provides an overview of the concept involved and of initial results. (A*) For the covering abstract see ITRD E110327.
Reduced Airborne Transmission of Oseltamivir-Resistant Pandemic A/H1N1 Virus in Ferrets

Background The H275Y neuraminidase mutation conferring oseltamivir resistance has been reported in several pandemic A/H1N1 (pH1N1) isolates. We sought to evaluate transmission of this mutant virus through the direct contact and the airborne (aerosol and droplet) routes in the ferret model. Methods Groups of four ferrets were infected with either wild-type (WT) or oseltamivir-resistant pH1N1 (H275Y) strains. At 24 h following viral infection, a receptive ferret was introduced in the same cage as the infected animal to assess direct contact transmission. For the airborne transmission, naive ferrets were placed in a modified separate cage adjacent to that of their respective index ferret. Results The H275Y mutant virus was as efficiently transmitted as the WT strain by direct contact, as 100% (4/4) of contact ferrets in both groups seroconverted and shed virus. Mean peak viral titres were similar in both groups (4x104 and 2.63x104 plaque-forming units/ml after WT or H275Y mutant virus transmission, respectively). Peak viral shedding occurred on day 2 post-contact for the WT group and on day 4 post-contact for the H275Y mutant group. By contrast, airborne transmission of the mutant strain was less efficient, as only 25% (1/4) of contact ferrets seroconverted and shed virus, whereas 100% (4/4) of the WT ferrets did. Peak of viral replication was delayed compared to direct contact transmission and occurred on day 4 post-contact. Conclusions Transmission of the H275Y pH1N1 mutant strain by the airborne route is somewhat compromised, which may limit its widespread dissemination.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning: Learning sub-goals and state-abstraction

In this paper we present a method that allows an agent to discover and create temporal abstractions autonomously. Our method is based on the concept that to reach the goal, the agent must pass through relevant states that we will interpret as subgoals. To detect useful subgoals, our method creates intersections between several paths leading to a goal. Our research focused on domains largely used in the study of temporal abstractions. We used several versions of the room-to-room navigation problem. We determined that, in the problems tested, an agent can learn more rapidly by automatically discovering subgoals and creating abstractions.
What Are the College Outcomes after Six Years for Tennessee's High School Class of 2007? REL 2017-231.

• Approximately 55 percent of students who graduated from a Tennessee public high school in 2007 enrolled in a twoor four-year public college within six years. • Enrollment rates by race/ethnicity varied from 37 percent among Hispanic students to 62 percent among Asian or Pacific Islander students. • Approximately 69 percent of students who enrolled in a twoor four-year public college within six years did so in fall 2007 (the first semester after high school graduation). • Approximately 16 percent of all graduates—and 38 percent of graduates who enrolled in fall 2007—completed a fouryear degree within six years.
An analysis of three depth recovery techniques

Three depth recovery methods are presented. The methods are based on focusing, zooming, and motion stereo, using a single camera. An introduction to the individual methods is given, followed by an analysis of the error functions. The analysis is used to determine whether the methods are applicable for integration into a single system, enabling recovery of exible and robust depth estimates. Experimental results are presented. The focus and zoom technique have been found to be of little use, due to restrictions within the methods. The motion stereo technique can be used as a single mean to obtain depth information , even in natural images. Using this method combined with conventional stereo will enable robust and exible depth recovery .
SYSTEM SIMULATION FOR MICROFLUIDIC DESIGN AUTOMATION OF LAB-ON-A-CHIP DEVICES

This paper introduces to the fast system simulation approach for droplet-based microfluidics and its validation. Full custom centric design means the integration and functional combination of microfluidic operation units, such as sample droplet generation, dosing or mixing to a complete Lab-on-a-Chip system. Comparable to large scale integration in EDA a fast simulation for droplet-based microfluidic systems is necessary to prevail in the face of their raising complexity by establishing microfluidic design automation. The design process can be greatly enhanced by our fast network simulation that relies on beha vioral models of the basic microfluidic operation units and their combined effect on the overall behavior.
Problem of signal contamination in interhemispheric dual‐sided subdural electrodes

Dual‐sided subdural electrodes are used in the localization and lateralization of seizure‐onset zones when the area of interest is within the interhemispheric fissure. We designed the current study to test the validity of the assumption that each side of the dual‐sided electrodes records from the hemisphere it faces. We recorded with dual‐sided strip and grid electrodes implanted in the occipital interhemispheric space in two patients with nonoccipital epilepsy during two visual stimulation tasks in which subjects were presented with visual stimuli in the ipsilateral or contralateral visual hemifields. Our findings show substantial contamination of recordings from the opposite hemisphere. Although, as expected, electrodes recording through the falx record faintly from the contralateral cortical surface, they unexpectedly pick up strong signals from the cortex behind them. Therefore, we conclude that these electrodes should not be used for lateralization of the origin of epileptic activity or evoked responses.