Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Overall Conformation of Conventional Kinesins Studied by Small Angle X-ray and Neutron Scattering*

The quaternary structures of several monomeric and dimeric kinesin constructs from Homo sapiens andDrosophila melanogaster were analyzed using small angle x-ray and neutron scattering. The experimental scattering curves of these proteins were compared with simulated scattering curves calculated from available crystallographic coordinates. These comparisons indicate that the overall conformations of the solution structures of D. melanogaster and H. sapienskinesin heavy chain dimers are compatible with the crystal structure of dimeric kinesin from Rattus norvegicus. This suggests that the unusual asymmetric conformation of dimeric kinesin in the microtubule-independent ADP state is likely to be a general feature of the kinesin heavy chain subfamily. An intermediate lengthDrosophila construct (365 residues) is mostly monomeric at low protein concentration whereas at higher concentrations it is dimeric with a tendency to form higher oligomers.
Achieving QoS in NoC-based MPSoCs through Dynamic Frequency Scaling

The management of Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints in NoC-based MPSoCs, with dozens of tasks running simultaneously, is still a challenge. Techniques applied at design or run-time to address this issue adopts different QoS metrics. Designers include in their systems monitoring techniques, adapting at run-time the QoS parameters to cope with the required constraints. In order words, MPSoC are able to self-adapt themselves, while executing a given set of applications. Self-adaptation capability is a key feature to meet applications' requirements in dynamic systems. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is an adaptation technique frequently used to reduce the overall energy consumption, not coupled to QoS constraints, as throughput or latency. Another example of adaptation technique is task migration, which focus on throughput or latency optimization. The self-adaptation technique proposed in this paper adopts Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS) trading-off power consumption and QoS constraints. Each processor running the applications' tasks initially reaches a steady state leading each task to a frequency level that optimizes the communication with neighbor tasks. The goal of the initial state is to reach a trade-off between power consumption and communication throughput. Next, the application performance is monitored to adjust the frequency level of each task according to the QoS parameters. Results show that the proposed self-adaptability scheme can meet the required QoS constraints, by changing the frequency of the PEs running the application tasks.
In vitro activity of piperacillin, ticarcillin, and mezlocillin alone and in combination with aminoglycosides against Pseudomonas aeruginosa

A total of 103 isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa were studied to compare the in vitro effectiveness of three beta-lactam antibiotics (piperacillin, ticarcillin, and mezlocillin) when used alone and in combination with four aminoglycosides (tobramycin, gentamicin, amikacin, and netilmicin). All drugs were tested as single agents against a standard inoculum (5 X 10(5) CFU/ml). The three antipseudomonal penicillins were also tested against the isolates at a higher inoculum concentration (10(7) CFU/ml). Synergy testing was performed by the two-dimensional checkerboard method and was defined by a fractional bactericidal index of less than or equal to 0.5 and bacterial killing accomplished at antibiotic concentrations no greater than those achievable in serum. All combinations were assessed for synergy. The degree of synergy was further analyzed by dividing the isolates into groups based on their susceptibility and resistance to the individual agents in the combination. The overall effectiveness of the various aminoglycoside-antipseudomonal penicillin combinations was assessed regarding their ability to kill the isolates either as single agents or through synergy. Piperacillin was the most active antipseudomonal penicillin, and tobramycin and amikacin were the most active aminoglycosides when used as single agents. When tested against isolates at a higher inoculum concentration, ticarcillin was significantly more active than the other beta-lactams. The highest degree of overall synergy was noted with gentamicin-ticarcillin (78.2% of strains) and amikacin-piperacillin (77% of strains). When assessed for overall effectiveness, all combinations containing amikacin were the most active. The combination of amikacin-piperacillin was the most effective, with activity against 96% of all isolates.
Processing Recommender Top-N Queries in Relational Databases

According to the feedback information from a user in the result sets of initial or previous queries, we present in this paper a framework for processing recommender top-N queries in relational databases. Based on the techniques and ranking strategies of keyword search, this framework returns top-N results for an initial query given by the user. As soon as he or she selects some of the top-N results, the framework will find out related keywords from the result(s) selected by the user, calculate and modify corresponding weights of the related keywords. By using the weights, our framework determines new query words associated with the previous query to construct a recommender query. A knowledge base is created to store the related information of the tuples in the underlying database for evaluating the recommender query. The experimental results based on real datasets show the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework.
Relative biological effectiveness for photons: implication of complex DNA double-strand breaks as critical lesions

Current knowledge in radiobiology ascribes the adverse biological effects of ionizing radiation primarily to the induction of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs), which is supposed to be potentially lethal and may be converted to lethal damage due to misrepair. Soft and ultrasoft x-rays have been found to bear elevated biological effectiveness for cell killing compared with conventional x-rays or 60Co γ-rays. This phenomenon is qualitatively interpreted as the increased level of DSB induction for low energy photons, however, a thorough quantitative reasoning is lacking. Here, we systematically compared the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) with relative DSB induction for photons from several hundreds of eV up to MeV. Although there is an approximate two-fold increase in the yields of DSB for low energy photons found in our calculation and a large number of experimental measurements, it is far from enough to account for the three- to four-fold increase in RBE. Further theoretical investigations show that DSB complexity (additional single-strand breaks and base damage within 10 base pairs) increases notably for low energy photons, which largely reconciles the discrepancy between RBE and DSB induction. Our theoretical results are in line with accumulating experimental evidence that complex DSBs are refractory to repair machinery and may contribute predominantly to the formation of lethal damage.
Aerospace parts suppliers’ reaction to online reverse auctions

Presents the results of a survey conducted among aerospace part and sub‐assembly suppliers to quantitatively assess their reaction to online reverse auctions and its impact on their business policies and practices. Findings are compared to the qualitative benefits identified for suppliers by third party online reverse auction service providers. Determines that incumbent suppliers do not realize the benefits suggested by online reverse auction service providers. Identifies new sources of costs which accrue to buyers and are not accounted for in so‐called “total cost” request for quotes, including retaliatory pricing practices, less cooperative relationships, and sourcing work back to the original supplier. Concludes that both buyers and sellers participating in online reverse auctions will likely encounter unfavorable outcomes, thus questioning the effectiveness of this new purchasing tool as a means of reducing the unit price of buyer‐designed engineered components.
SafeNet of Unsafe Devices - Extending the Robot Safety in Collaborative Workspaces

Collaborative workspaces represent the benchmark scenario of contemporary and future industrial robotics, where hybrid production systems and multimodal interactions among human operators and robots in cooperative tasks can foster the flexibility of robotic systems. Physical interactions together with dynamic workspacesharing represent some reference applications in ISO 10218-2, where restrictive conditions for safety are posed at system level, eventually limiting the robot execution speed. With the aim of extending the use of industrial robots in shared environments and allowing the use of generically unsafe sensory and computational components for advanced applications, a methodology called SafeNet is presented. It considers the system as a device at large and applies the concept of functional safety (ISO 13489-1) with a set of architectural procedures and implementations. The safety aspects of structure, reliability and monitoring are addressed by a redundant system of computational nodes distributed over a network. SafeNet systems can be upgraded to candidate for safe Performance Levels.
Bsmboost for imbalanced pattern classification problems

Numbers of samples in different classes are in nature imbalanced in many machine learning problems. Single classifier-based methods are subject to high variance. Therefore, ensemble-based methods are more suitable for dealing with imbalanced pattern classification problems. In this work, we propose a boosting-based method: BSMBoost which creates an ensemble of classifiers using samples selected by both the stochastic sensitivity measure (SSM) and the AdaBoost algorithm to yield higher and more robust performances. Experimental results show that the BSMBoost yields better and more robust performances in comparison to other state-of-the-art boosting-based imbalanced classification methods.
Sickle cell beta thalassaemia in Jamaica.

Abstract An analysis of the radiological appearances in a skeletal survey of 47 patients in Jamaica with sickle cell s thalassaemia is presented. The appearances are similar to those in homozygous sickle cell disease and SC disease and a confident distinction between the conditions on radiological grounds alone is unlikely. The appearances are of bone-marrow expansion and of bone infarction. There is a lack of correlation between the extent of radiological change and clinical severity.
A Key Role for Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase Unit in Modulating Human Embryonic Stem Cell Proliferation, Cell Cycle Dynamics, and In Vitro Differentiation

Embryonic stem cells (ESC) are a unique cell population with the ability to self‐renew and differentiate into all three germ layers. Human ESC express the telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) gene and the telomerase RNA (TR) and show telomerase activity, but TERT, TR, and telomerase are all downregulated during the differentiation process. To examine the role of telomerase in human ESC self‐renewal and differentiation, we modulated the expression of TERT. Upregulation of TERT and increased telomerase activity enhanced the proliferation and colony‐forming ability of human ESC, as well as increasing the S phase of the cell cycle at the expense of a reduced G1 phase. Upregulation of TERT expression was associated with increases in CYCLIN D1 and CDC6 expression, as well as hyperphosphorylation of RB. The differentiated progeny of control ESC showed shortening of telomeric DNA as a result of loss of telomerase activity. In contrast, the differentiated cells from TERT‐overexpressing ESC maintained high telomerase activity and accumulated lower concentrations of peroxides than wild‐type cells, implying greater resistance to oxidative stress. Although the TERT‐overexpressing human ESC are able to form teratoma composed of three germ layers in vivo, their in vitro differentiation to all primitive and embryonic lineages was suppressed. In contrast, downregulation of TERT resulted in reduced ESC proliferation, increased G1, and reduced S phase. Most importantly, downregulation of TERT caused loss of pluripotency and human ESC differentiation to extraembryonic and embryonic lineages. Our results indicate for the first time an important role for TERT in the maintenance of human ESC pluripotency, cell cycle regulation, and in vitro differentiation capacity.
The effect of CSR knowledge on customer liking, across cultures

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficacy of corporate social responsibility (CSR) knowledge on customer liking for the bank across two countries and cultural contexts.Design/methodology/approach – Three CSR variables were tested for their comparative influence on customer liking under different cultural value conditions. Surveys were completed by 204 bank consumers in Australia and 219 bank customers in Thailand. ANOVA and regression were used to test hypotheses.Findings – Perceptions of existing CSR performance and new CSR initiative had significant effects on liking for the bank. However CSR orientation had no effect. These influences varied substantially depending upon the community orientation of the target customer.Research limitations/implications – Understanding the differing roles of the two significant CSR variables provide insights into the complexities of CSR relationships. The successful introduction of a scale to measure a salient internal outcome measure, called lik.
Relative Capture in the Judiciary: Evidence from Corporate Lawsuits in China

Ever since the Federalist Papers, there has been a common view that the lower the level of government, the greater is the extent of capture by vested interests. Relying on the analytical framework of relative capture, I challenge this view by arguing that interest groups have different incentives and capacities to capture different levels of government. I test the theory by investigating how judges at different judicial levels adjudicate corporate lawsuits in China. Exploiting a quasi-experiment in which the Supreme People’s Court dramatically raised the threshold for entering higher-level courts in 2008, I report evidence that while privately owned enterprises are more likely to win in lower-level courts, state-owned enterprises are more likely to win in higher-level courts. These results are robust to a variety of tests, including considering selection bias, firms’ political connections, and using different samples. The findings challenge an underlying assumption in the decentralization literature and have important policy implications for countries that are trapped in centralization/decentralization cycles.
Diagnosis blog: checking up on health blogs in the blogosphere.

OBJECTIVES We analyzed the content and characteristics of influential health blogs and bloggers to provide a more thorough understanding of the health blogosphere than was previously available. METHODS We identified, through a purposive-snowball approach, 951 health blogs in 2007 and 2008. All blogs were US focused and updated regularly. We described their features, topics, perspectives, and blogger demographics. RESULTS Approximately half of the bloggers in our sample were employed in the health field. A majority were female, aged in their 30s, and highly educated. Two thirds posted at least weekly; one quarter accepted advertisements. Most blogs were established after 2004. They typically focused on bloggers' experiences with 1 disease or condition or on the personal experiences of health professionals. Half were written from a professional perspective, one third from a patient-consumer perspective, and a few from the perspective of an unpaid caregiver. CONCLUSIONS Data collected from health blogs could be aggregated for large-scale empirical investigations. Future research should assess the quality of the information posted and identify what blog features and elements best reflect adherence to prevailing norms of conduct.
Are the Corporate Social Responsibility Matters Based on Good Intentions or False Pretences? An Empirical Study of the Motivations Behind the Issuing of CSR Reports by UK Companies, Corporate Governance

The last few years have seen a massive increase in the number of corporate entities around the world purporting to care about the environment, human rights, non-renewable resources and society in general! Have corporate entities suddenly become more moral? What factors can one recognise as contributing to these recent interests in socially responsible behaviours on the part of corporate entities? What actions are corporate entities taking to demonstrate that they are socially responsible? Are the actions taken by these entities to demonstrate responsibility based on good intentions or false pretences? The study looks at answers to these and other pertinent questions which one hopes would enrich our understanding of the motivations behind UK companies’ involvement in CSR activities and why they are very keen to publicise their actions in the area. The study reveals that large UK companies started issuing CSR reports in 2000 mainly for the following reasons: in response to an increasing number of stakeholders requesting information in the area, they believe that taking this action is good for business, they also believe that informing their stakeholders of the their CSR activities gives them some positive public relations benefits, the present UK government is requesting them to report on their environmental performance, as a result of the increased necessity for greater transparency and a few other reasons the study reveals.
Fuel-Saving Cruising Strategies for Parallel HEVs

This paper studies the fuel-optimal cruising strategies of parallel hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and their underlying mechanisms. To achieve fuel-optimal operations, a discontinuous nonlinear optimal control problem is formulated and solved using the Legendre pseudospectral method and the knotting technique. Three optimal cruising strategies in free/fixed-speed cruising scenarios are proposed: vehicle speed pulse-and-glide strategy, state-of-charge (SoC) pulse-and-glide (PnG) strategy, and constant-speed strategy. The performance and optimal behavior of the engine and the motor are presented, and their fuel-saving mechanisms are explained. Finally, two principles to compromise between fuel economy and ride comfort are proposed and studied.
Bank Performance in Transition Economies

This paper examines the performance of 515 banks in 16 transition economies for the years 1994 ? 99 based on their public financial accounts. We first examine lending behaviour and probability distribution of bank profitability to determine whether these banks exhibit behaviour and performance associated with excessive risk-taking. While we do not find evidence of excessive risk taking on average where there is significant progress in banking and related enterprise reforms, there may be a minority of poorly capitalised banks that do take excessive risks, particularly where progress in reform is less advanced. The paper then estimates cost and revenue functions based on a model of banks as multi-product firms. The results indicate that banks' performance differs significantly depending on the reform environment, as well as the competitive conditions, in which they operate. Banks with high market shares have higher costs and achieve lower margins on their loan and deposit activities. Where there has been significant progress in banking and related enterprise reforms, banks are making comfortable margins on loans and appear to be offering competitive margins on deposits, though they are still achieving overall negative returns on equity. By contrast, when substantial reforms have not been undertaken, banks have been sustaining high negative returns on loans, largely at the expense of depositors; in effect they have been able to appropriate much of the tax that inflation levies on nominal deposits, and have been using this revenue to prop up their weak loan portfolios. Overall interest margins are declining over time but are substantially higher in low reform environments. The results indicate that an appropriate policy and regulatory framework may be a necessary condition for significant progress to be made.
Distinct cellular expressions of creatine synthetic enzyme GAMT and creatine kinases uCK‐Mi and CK‐B suggest a novel neuron–glial relationship for brain energy homeostasis

The creatine/phosphocreatine shuttle system, as catalysed reversibly by creatine kinases, is thought to be essential for the storing and buffering of high phosphate‐bound energy in tissues with high energy demand. In the present study, we aimed to clarify the cellular system of creatine biosynthesis and its energy metabolism in the mouse brain by immunohistochemistry for creatine biosynthetic enzyme S‐adenosylmethionine:guanidinoacetate N‐methyltransferase (GAMT), ubiquitous mitochondrial creatine kinase (uCK‐Mi) and brain‐type cytoplasmic creatine kinase (CK‐B). GAMT was expressed highly in oligodendrocytes and olfactory ensheathing glia and moderately in astrocytes, whereas GAMT was very low in neurons and microglia. By contrast, uCK‐Mi was expressed selectively in neurons and localized in their mitochondria in dendrites, cell bodies, axons and terminals. The distinct and almost complementary distribution of GAMT and uCK‐Mi suggests that the creatine in neuronal mitochondria is derived not only from the circulation, but also from local glial cells associated with these neuronal elements. By contrast, CK‐B was selective to astrocytes among glial populations, and was exclusive to inhibitory neurons among neuronal populations. Interestingly, these cells with high CK‐B immunoreactivity are known to be highly resistant to acute energy loss, such as hypoxia and hypoglycemia. Considering that phosphocreatine generates ATP much faster than the processes of glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation, the highly regulated cellular expressions of creatine biosynthetic and metabolic enzymes suggest that the creatine/phosphocreatine shuttle system plays a role in brain energy homeostasis through a novel neuron–glial relationship.