Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance analysis of MIMO space diversity technique for wireless communications

Space diversity technique is an attractive solution for improving quality in wireless links. The objectives of this paper are to investigate the impact of bit error rate on the number of users and the SNR for space time block coded MIMO Rayleigh fading channels. Diversity is a technique used to combat multipath-fading. Space Diversity is a technique in which multiple numbers of antennas are used at transmitter and receiver side. As far as detection techniques are concerned, we have used two detection techniques (a) joint minimum mean square error (JMMSE) (b) maximal receive ratio combining (MRRC). Furthermore, the usage of higher order diversity schemes not only provides the superior performance over lower order schemes, but also offers an opportunity for the service provider to accommodate more number of users. Simulation results are included.
Privacy Preserving Sequential Pattern Mining Based on Secure Multi-party Computation

Privacy-preserving data mining in distributed or grid environment is an important hot research topic in recent years. We focus on the privacy-preserving sequential pattern mining in the following situation: multiple parties, each having a private data set, wish to collaboratively discover sequential patterns on the union of the their private data sets respectively without disclosing their private data to any other party. Therefore, we put forward a novel approach to discover privacy-preserving sequential patterns based on secure multi-party computation using homomorphic encryption technology
Inhibitor of Apoptosis Proteins: Promising Targets for Cancer Therapy

Cancer is a disease in which normal physiological processes are imbalanced, leading to tumour formation, metastasis and eventually death. Recent biological advances have led to the advent of targeted therapies to complement traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, a major problem still facing modern medicine is resistance to therapies, whether targeted or traditional. Therefore, to increase the survival rates of cancer patients, it is critical that we continue to identify molecular targets for therapeutic intervention. The Inhibitor of Apoptosis (IAP) proteins act downstream of a broad range of stimuli, such as cytokines and extracellular matrix interactions, to regulate cell survival, proliferation and migration. These processes are dysregulated during tumourigenesis and are critical to the metastatic spread of the disease. IAPs are commonly upregulated in cancer and have therefore become the focus of much research as both biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Here we discuss the roles that IAPs may play in cancer, and the potential benefits and pitfalls that targeting IAPs could have in the clinic.
The maturity structure of household financial assets and liabilities

In this article, the author examines the maturity structure of the household sector's balance sheet and the degree of interest rate variability of household loans and financial assets. The bulk of households' interest-bearing assets and financial liabilities consists of medium- and long-term, fixed-rate instruments. The pattern of personal consumption is therefore influenced more by the wealth effects of interest rate changes than by their income effects, and the full impact of a permnent shift in interest rates on consumption will become apparent only after a lag.
The Calcium-Dependent Protein Kinase 3 of Toxoplasma Influences Basal Calcium Levels and Functions beyond Egress as Revealed by Quantitative Phosphoproteome Analysis

Calcium-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs) are conserved in plants and apicomplexan parasites. In Toxoplasma gondii, TgCDPK3 regulates parasite egress from the host cell in the presence of a calcium-ionophore. The targets and the pathways that the kinase controls, however, are not known. To identify pathways regulated by TgCDPK3, we measured relative phosphorylation site usage in wild type and TgCDPK3 mutant and knock-out parasites by quantitative mass-spectrometry using stable isotope-labeling with amino acids in cell culture (SILAC). This revealed known and novel phosphorylation events on proteins predicted to play a role in host-cell egress, but also a novel function of TgCDPK3 as an upstream regulator of other calcium-dependent signaling pathways, as we also identified proteins that are differentially phosphorylated prior to egress, including proteins important for ion-homeostasis and metabolism. This observation is supported by the observation that basal calcium levels are increased in parasites where TgCDPK3 has been inactivated. Most of the differential phosphorylation observed in CDPK3 mutants is rescued by complementation of the mutants with a wild type copy of TgCDPK3. Lastly, the TgCDPK3 mutants showed hyperphosphorylation of two targets of a related calcium-dependent kinase (TgCDPK1), as well as TgCDPK1 itself, indicating that this latter kinase appears to play a role downstream of TgCDPK3 function. Overexpression of TgCDPK1 partially rescues the egress phenotype of the TgCDPK3 mutants, reinforcing this conclusion. These results show that TgCDPK3 plays a pivotal role in regulating tachyzoite functions including, but not limited to, egress.
Blind estimation of multiple digital signals transmitted over multipath channels

A challenging signal processing problem is the blind joint space-time equalization of multiple digital signals transmitted over multipath channels. This problem is an abstraction of a PCS wireless communication scenario. A number of authors have recently proposed algorithms for the blind separation and equalization of multiple co-channel digital signals transmitted through wireless environments with long delay spreads. These algorithms compute the coefficients of a joint space-time equalizer in which the outputs of multiple antennas are oversampled and linearly combined to produce estimates of the transmitted finite alphabet symbols. We present improvements in three directions, namely (1) a more efficient way to do the inherent subspace intersections, (2) a way to solve the problem for channels with largely differing and ill-defined delay spreads, and (3) algorithm-independent lower bounds for the number of antennas and amount of oversampling to provide sufficient resolution in the case of bandlimited signals. The improved algorithm is tested on experimental data.
Joint Estimation of Correspondence and Motion Using Global Rigidity and Local Descriptors

In this paper, we impose a rigidity constraint to the motion between points and correspondence candidates obtained by extracting local descriptors from an image pair. In doing so, we are able to couple the estimation of correspondences and motion within a single optimization problem, as a minimization of a cost function over a search grid in two parameters, therefore bypassing the combinatorial explosion inherent to the correspondence problem. The resulting algorithm has polynomial complexity and optimal properties when the camera parameters are known. We demonstrate through a series of synthetic and real data experiments the robustness of our method to outliers and occlusion. We show the versatility in our algorithm’s input, by coupling it with discriminative feature selection algorithms ( e.g ., SIFT).
Slc11a1, Formerly Nramp1, Is Expressed in Dendritic Cells and Influences Major Histocompatibility Complex Class II Expression and Antigen-Presenting Cell Function

ABSTRACT Solute carrier family 11 member a1 (Slc11a1; formerly Nramp1) encodes a late endosomal/lysosomal protein/divalent cation transporter that regulates iron homeostasis in macrophages. During macrophage activation, Slc11a1 has multiple pleiotropic effects on gene regulation and function, including gamma interferon-induced class II expression and antigen-presenting cell function. The wild-type allele at Slc11a1 has been associated with a bias in Th1 cell function in vivo, which is beneficial in resistance to infection against intracellular macrophage pathogens but detrimental in contributing to development of type 1 diabetes. The extent to which this depends on macrophage versus dendritic cell (DC) function is not known. Here we show that Slc11a1 is expressed in late endosomes and/or lysosomes of CD11c+ DCs. DCs from mutant and congenic wild-type mice upregulate interleukin-12 (IL-12) and IL-10 mRNA in response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation, but the ratio of IL-10 to IL-12 is higher in unstimulated DCs and DCs stimulated for 15 h with LPS from mutant mice than from wild-type mice. DCs from wild-type mice upregulate major histocompatibility complex class II in response to LPS more efficiently than DCs from mutant mice. Unstimulated DCs from wild-type and mutant mice present ovalbumin (OVA) peptide with an efficiency equivalent to that of an OVA-specific CD4 T-cell line, but DCs from wild-type mice are more efficient at processing and presenting OVA or Leishmania activator of cell kinase (LACK) protein to OVA- and LACK-specific T cells. These data indicate that wild-type Slc11a1 expressed in DCs may play a role both in determining resistance to infectious disease and in susceptibility to autoimmune disease such as type 1 diabetes.
Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Casablanca, a Moroccan City with High Incidence of Tuberculosis

ABSTRACT Although lower-resource countries have by far the highest burden of tuberculosis, knowledge of Mycobacterium tuberculosis population structure and genetic diversity in these regions remains almost nonexistent. In this paper, 150 Moroccan M. tuberculosis isolates circulating in Casablanca were genotyped by random amplified polymorphic DNA analysis using 10 different primers and by mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeats typing at 12 loci. The population genetic tests revealed a basically clonal structure for this population, without excluding rare genetic exchanges. Genetic analysis also showed a notable genetic polymorphism for the species M. tuberculosis, a weak cluster individualization, and an unexpected genetic diversity for a population in such a high-incidence community. Phylogenetic analyses of this Moroccan sample also supported that these isolates are genetically heterogeneous.
Private Power and Global Authority: Index

Transnational merchant law, which is mistakenly regarded in purely technical and apolitical terms, is a central mediator of domestic and global political/legal orders. By engaging with literature in international law, international relations and international political economy, this book develops the conceptual and theoretical foundations for analyzing the political significance of international economic law. In doing so, it illustrates the private nature of the interests that this evolving legal order has served over time. The book makes a sustained and comprehensive analysis of transnational merchant law and offers a radical critique of global capitalism.
Ubiquitous Widgets: Designing Interactions Architecture for Adaptive Mobile Applications

Modern mobile devices spreading introduce a new way of using and designing software applications. These pervasive systems are now part of our lives. More and more connected objects provide us more and more software capabilities. In this environment we have to rethink the way we traditionally consider our interactions with this software. These interactions are now potentially spread over multiple devices with different interacting modalities. We propose, in this paper, a software container component based architecture to design such interactions and a software platform to manage their dynamic life-cycle.
Joint power optimization through VM placement and flow scheduling in data centers

Two important components that consume the majority of IT power in data centers are the servers and the Data Center Network (DCN). Existing works fail to fully utilize power management techniques on the servers and in the DCN at the same time. In this paper, we jointly consider VM placement on servers with scalable frequencies and flow scheduling in the DCN, to minimize the overall system's power consumption. Due to the convex relation between a server's power consumption and its operating frequency, we prove that, given the number of servers to be used, computation workloads should be allocated to severs in a balanced way, to minimize the power consumption on servers. To reduce the power consumption of the DCN, we further consider the flow requirements among the VMs during VM allocation and assignment. Also, after VM placement, flow consolidation is conducted to reduce the number of active switches and ports. We notice that, choosing the minimum number of servers to accommodate the VMs may result in high power consumption on servers, due to servers' increased operating frequencies. Choosing the optimal number of servers purely based on servers' power consumption leads to reduced power consumption on servers, but may increase power consumption of the DCN. We propose to choose the optimal number of servers to be used, based on the overall system's power consumption. Simulations show that, our joint power optimization method helps to reduce the overall power consumption significantly, and outperforms various existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of reducing the overall system's power consumption.
LmTDRM Database: A Comprehensive Database on Thiol Metabolic Gene/Gene Products in Listeria monocytogenes EGDe

There are a number of databases on the Listeria species and about their genome. However, these databases do not specifically address a set of network that is important in defence mechanism of the bacteria. Listeria monocytogenes EGDe is a well-established intracellular model organism to study host pathogenicity because of its versatility in the host environment. Here, we have focused on thiol disulphide redox metabolic network proteins, specifically in L. monocytogenes EGDe. The thiol redox metabolism is involved in oxidative stress mechanism and is found in all living cells. It functions to maintain the thiol disulphide balance required for protein folding by providing reducing power. Nevertheless, they are involved in the reversible oxidation of thiol groups in biomolecules by creating disulphide bonds; therefore, the term thiol disulphide redox metabolism (TDRM). TDRM network genes play an important role in oxidative stress mechanism and during host–pathogen interaction. Therefore, it is essential to have detailed information on these proteins with regard to other bacteria and its genome analysis to understand the presence of tRNA, transposons, and insertion elements for horizontal gene transfer. LmTDRM database is a new comprehensive web-based database on thiol proteins and their functions. It includes: Description, Search, TDRM analysis, and genome viewer. The quality of these data has been evaluated before they were aggregated to produce a final representation. The web interface allows for various queries to understand the protein function and their annotation with respect to their relationship with other bacteria. LmTDRM is a major step towards the development of databases on thiol disulphide redox proteins; it would definitely help researchers to understand the mechanism of these proteins and their interaction. Database URL: www.lmtdrm. com.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology

In this paper, the personalized service on the basis of lack of semantic and the strengths and weaknesses of the existing user model update mechanism, combined with keyword-based user interest ontology semantic information-rich features, design a classification knowledge base, combined with keywords and user interest ontology concept representation. The model of the user's interest is divided into short-term interests and long-term interest, and the two interested in using different establishment and update mechanism. By constantly updating and optimization model, the model can accurately reflect the characteristics of the user's interest. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified by experiments, experiments show that the model can improve the performance of user interest modeling.
Fertilizer markets and their interplay with commodity and food prices

This study analyses the drivers behind the recent price evolution of fertilizers and their interplay with energy and food commodity market prices. First, evidence of speculative behaviour on fertilizer markets is found. However, speculation on derivative markets can hardly be considered as the cause. The recent rapid expansion of this new derivative market might be due to the growing volatility of international fertilizer prices, especially urea, and it is probable that most of the fertilizer derivative products may be used as hedging tools and not as speculative ones. Indeed, the peak in fertilizer prices first occurred on the physical market due to the uncertainty of the grain and fertilizer markets (high volatility). Second, the prices of food commodities have influenced the fertilizer market and not vice versa. The results show that there is substantial co-movement between fertilizers' and food prices, but that the food prices are among the causes of the fertilizer price movements. In addition, higher food prices induced a higher demand for fertilizers, again boosting prices to higher levels. Third, the energy sector triggered the increase in fertilizer prices through the input cost channel. Energy represents a key input in the production of fertilizers. Rising oil and natural gas prices provoked a spark for the nitrogen nutrients whose production depends heavily on energy inputs for production and transport. The same occurred to phosphate and potash, where energy input is less important in their respective production cost structures. Fourth, given the oligopolistic fertilizer supply chain and the inelasticity of the supply of fertilizers (there is a 5 to 10 year delay before new production plants can be put into the supply chain), this created an upward adjustment of the expectations in the fertilizer market causing an upward spiral effect of the price. This eventually might have provoked a price peak in 2007 due to the uncertainty surrounding the low levels of global fertilizer stocks (nitrogen and phosphate). Over the previous 15 years, the excess nitrogen supply has nearly vanished while phosphate and potash have remained at marginal levels, meaning that no buffer could protect the market when an adverse shock occurred in 2007. Fifth, the volatility of energy, food and fertilizer prices move closely together in an environment of rising energy prices. In the opposite scenario, food and fertilizer volatility do not move together with the volatility of energy prices in an environment of decreasing energy prices. Consistent with other studies, the volatility of fertilizer, energy and food prices was lower during the commodity price peak of 2007/08 than during the 1973/74 oil price shock.
Application of the Hybrid SVM-KNN Model for Credit Scoring

Along with the increase number of users for the credit, the screening of applicants becomes very significant. If the credit of applicants is bad, the bank will obtain a great loss. Support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most popular kinds of algorithms for the new consumer's credit approval. However, there is a disadvantage that the more close to the optimal hyper plane, the greater possibility of marking the error label of the data. In the view of the situation that the data near the optimal hyper plane may be misclassified and the probability is very high, in this paper, we employ the hybrid model SVM-KNN algorithm to improve the prediction accuracy of SVM. This way fully combines the advantages of SVM and KNN algorithms. Two group UCI datasets are chosen in our experiments. The experimental results imply that the hybrid SVM-KNN model is a promising approach for credit scoring.
Consumer Behavior and the Stickiness of Credit Card Interest Rates

During several episodes of declining or rising interest rate changes in the 1980s and 1990s, credit card rates changed little. At the same time, credit cards consistently earned higher returns than most other bank products. Ausenbel (1991) argues the reason is that the industry deviates from a perfectly competitive model because consumers do not conform to the behavioral assumptions of perfect competition. Using data from the Federal Reserve's 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors provide specific evidence about consumer behavior. The analysis suggests that the three factors cited by Ausenbel - search costs, switch costs, and adverse selection problems for individual firms who change rates - has contributed to the observed performances in the credit market. The paper advances two theoretical arguments supporting the contention that credit card issuers face adverse selection problems. The authors find that credit card indebtedness is universally related to an individual's pro-pensity to comparison shop for terms. Consumers with substantial search costs tend to have big balances. Card issuers face an adverse selection problem induced by search costs. The authors find no evidence consumers underestimate their propensity to borrow. The authors find that households with larger balances are more likely to have experienced payment problems. These findings are evidence of adverse selection induced by switch costs. Thus, the authors' empirical findings support the view that competition in the credit card market is imperfect. These findings confirm bankers' arguments that credit card rates are sticky because consumers are not responsive to rate cuts. The authors' findings cast doubt on the efficacy of Fair Credit Disclosure regulations. To the extent that imperfect competition has been due to consumers' switch costs, their unwillingness to devote time to search, and associated adverse selection problems, market performance cannot be improved through increased disclosure. The authors' findings suggest focus on policies that reduce switch costs.
Acute myocardial hypoxia increases BNP gene expression

It is well established that cardiac failure increases cardiac B‐type natriuretic peptide (BNP) expression due to myocardial stretching. However, patients with ischemic heart disease also display increased plasma BNP and proBNP concentrations despite preserved cardiac function. In this study, we examined whether acute myocardial hypoxia increases cardiac BNP expression. Surgical reduction of the blood flow to an area of the anterior ventricular wall in pigs reduced the myocardial oxygen tension from 46 ± 4 to 13 ± 5 mmHg. The tissue contents of VEGF and BNP mRNA increased 1.8‐fold and 3.5‐fold, respectively (n=10, P<0.005) in hypoxic compared with normoxic ventricular myocardium after 2.2 ± 0.2 h; the magnitude of the increase in BNP mRNA expression was positively correlated with that of VEGF in hypoxic myocardium (r=0.66, P<0.05). In support of a hypoxia‐induced increase of BNP gene transcription, the content of a premature BNP mRNA was increased in hypoxic myocardium (4.8‐fold, P<0.005) and in freshly harvested ventricular myocytes when kept in culture flasks and oxygen‐deprived for 3 h (2.2‐ fold, P=0.002). ProBNP peptide accumulated in the medium of freshly harvested ventricular myocyte cultures but was undetectable in ventricular myocardium, indicating rapid release of the newly synthesized proBNP peptide. Accordingly, the plasma proBNP concentration increased after 2 h of myocardial hypoxia (P=0.028). Cumulatively, the data suggest that acute hypoxia stimulates cardiac BNP expression.