Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional Analysis of PTPN3 associated with Immune-Mediated Rheumatic Disease in Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers

This study investigates whether risk haplotypes of highly associated regions in PTPN3 gene in dogs suffering from immune mediated rheumatic disease, might affect the regulatory potential and expression levels of this gene influencing the phenotype. The overall aim of this thesis is to identify causative mutations that may alter PTPN3 gene expression in NSDTRs with risk for IMRD. Risk haplotypes are associated with dogs expressing ANA positivity and phenotypic signs of illness. It was previously shown that dogs from the breed Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever (NSDTR) reveal a high degree of susceptibility to autoimmune rheumatic diseases. Specific aims: 1. Bioinformatics analysis of 3’UTR and the associated region located in intron 18 of PTPN3 gene and DNA sequencing analysis of regions of interest. 2. Determine functional differences between risk and protective haplotype variants of 3´UTR and intron 18 regions of PTPN3 gene in NSDTRs, using recombinant DNA techniques, molecular cloning, transient transfection of Jurkat T-cells and MDCK cells, reporter gene assays and RNA degradation analysis will be performed to develop this study.
Update on Fungal Disease: From Establish Infection to Clinical Manifestation

Fungal diseases have emerged as an important cause of morbidity and mortality, especially among immunocompromised patients. Pathogenic fungi have evolved an array of virulence factors to survive within the host and to outwit immune defenses. Fungi may cause a wide range of diseases in humans that range in extent from superficial to disseminated infections. Generally, the site of infections classifies the type of fungal disease, which can be divided into superficial, cutaneous, subcutaneous and systemic. In addition, the fungal virulence factors determine whether the infection will become established in the host. A primary pathogen may infect an immunologically normal host, whereas, an opportunistic pathogen requires some compromise of the host immune defenses in order for the infection to become established. This article covers the main fungi that are responsible for the increase of the fungal infections.
Finite-sample identification-robust inference for unobservable zero-beta rates and portfolio efficiency with non-Gaussian distributions ⁄

We propose exact simulation-based procedures for testing mean-variance efficiency when the zerobeta rate (gamma) is unknown and for building confidence intervals on gamma. On observing that gamma may be weakly identified – even though, stricto sensu, the problem is not a weak instrument problem – we propose LR-type procedures which are robust to weak identification and allow for non-Gaussian distributions. A multivariate extension of the classic Fieller method is proposed in order to build confidence sets for gamma. The exact distribution of LR-type statistics for testing efficiency is studied under both the null and alternative hypotheses. The relevant nuisance parameter structure is established and finite-sample bound procedures are proposed, which extend and improve earlier Gaussian-specific bounds. Empirical results on NYSE returns show that exact confidence sets are very different from the asymptotic ones, and allowing for non-Gaussian distributions substantially decreases the number of efficiency rejections.
HYPOGLYCEMIC EFFECT AND IN VITRO ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY OF THE DICHLOROMETHANE FRACTION FROM THE LEAVES OF FICUS ODORATA (BLANCO) MERR. (MORACEAE)

This study aimed to evaluate the hypoglycemic and antioxidant activity of the leaves of Ficus odorata. The methanolic crude extract was fractionated by liquid-liquid partitioning using organic solvents with increasing polarity. Four fractions were obtained such as, hexane, dichloromethane (DCM), ethyl acetate and water. Of the four fractions tested, DCM fraction yielded the highest amount of flavonoid content at 335.63 mg QE/g sample. TLC and HPLC analyses of DCM fraction revealed that quercetin may be present in the fraction. In acute oral toxicity test, zero mortality rate was observed after 14 days of treatment. Gross necropsies of selected rat organs were normal. Histopathological analyses of liver and kidneys were unremarkable. In hypoglycemic study, induction of diabetes was successfully completed in 28 days using single dose of streptozotocin (30 mg/kg body weight) and high fat diet (Srinivasan et al., 2005). Daily oral administration of DCM fraction showed that at a dose of 50 mg/kg (p<0.001) and 200 mg/Kg (p=0.002) produced significant decrease in their mean blood sugar after the 14-day treatment. The same effect was observed with the positive control at 10 mg/kg of glyburide (p<0.001). On the other hand, the results in the in vitro antioxidant activity showed that DCM fraction exhibited scavenging activity against hydroxyl radical and hydrogen peroxide with an IC50 value of 0.275 mg/mL and 4.954 mg/mL, respectively. The results indicate that DCM fraction from the leaves of Ficus odorata has potential hypoglycemic and antioxidant properties. It is non-toxic up to 2000 mg/Kg.
IT contribution in the consolidation of organizational competences - A case study on a hotel group

The information economy is based on the net appliance, which decreases the intermediary's participation in the activities of purchase and sale of products and services.The tourism sector has its activities based on information in which its products are considered low touch, where the purchaser acquires a service without a physical approaching with it.However, it can be noticed that there is still a trade off between embracing and wealth, but day-by-day it is reduced by the increasing use of Information Technology and communication through its information system.The advancement of IT allied to business' strategic can establish new models of business to observe in a more efficient way the sectors innovation that works intensively with information, contributing with the competence consolidation aiming the client and connected network attendance.This paper analyses, through a case study in a big Hotel network, some aspects that are related to IT's application for competitiveness increasing. Such aspects are related to the entrepreneur's strategic articulation as the general configuration of Front Office and Back Office, client's communication improvement, the use of web, client fidelity, disintermediation of activities and cultural activities adaptation on the services offering.
3 Directed and Non-directed Scale-Free Networks

Scale-free networks are networks with a scale-free degree distribution, i.e., where the distribution of the number of links per node is a power-law, p(k) = ck−λ. We review results for the properties of such networks, emphasizing the structural properties of these networks. We begin with normal random scale-free networks and present their percolation properties. We also review results for directed scale-free networks and their percolation properties. Finally we present a study of the possibility of embedding scalefree networks in a lattice. 3.1 Random Scale-Free Networks The study of random network models began with Erdős and Rényi [1, 2, 3]. They studied models of networks with randomly distributed links. Those models lead to Poisson degree distributions [4]. Due to the development of computers, allowing the analysis of large amounts of data, and the formation of large scale networks, such as the Internet and WWW, some analysis of real world networks has been done in the last decade [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. This research lead to the conclusion that real world networks are not described correctly by the ER model. The main difference found was that the degree distribution of real world networks studied was found to be very broad rather than the narrow Poisson distribution. Many of the networks studied can be fitted with a scale-free degree distribution. In this chapter we will elaborate on the properties of scale free networks. A scale free network is a network having a degree distribution: P (k) = ck−λ, (3.1) where λ is the exponent and c is an appropriate normalization factor. The distribution is limited by the lower and upper cutoffs, which we will denote by m and K, respectively. The unique properties of this distribution stem from the fact that all moments with n ≥ λ−1 diverge with K (which is usually increasing with the size of the network). 3.1. 1 Percolation Threshold Percolation theory deals with the cluster structure of networks when a fraction of the sites or bonds is removed. A spanning cluster (or a “giant component” R. Pastor-Satorras, M. Rubi, A. Diaz-Guilera (Eds.): LNP 625, pp. 23–45, 2003. c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003
Use of Helical Transport Channels for Bunch Recombination

Cooling scenarios for a high-luminosity Muon Collider require bunch recombination for optimal luminosity. In this report we note that the tunable chronicity property of a helical transport channel (HTC) makes it a desirable component of a bunch recombiner. A large chronicity HTC is desirable for the bunch recombining transport, while more isochronous transport may be preferred for rf manipulations. Scenarios for bunch recombination are presented, with initial 1-D simulations, in order to set the stage for future 3-D simulation and optimization. HTC transports may enable a very compact bunch recombiner.
Audio-Video Detection and Fusion of Broad Casting Information

In the last few decade of multimedia information systems, audio-video data has become an glowing part in many digital computer applications. Audio-video classification has been becoming a focus in the research of audio-video processing and pattern recognition. Automatic audio-video classification is very useful to audio-video indexing, content-based audio-video retrieval and on-line audio-video distribution such as online audio-video shopping, but it is a challenge to extract the most similar and salient themes from huge data of audio-video. In this paper, we propose effective algorithms to automatically segmentation and classify audio-video clips into one of Six classes: advertisement, cartoon, songs, serial, movie and news. For these categories a number of acoustic and visual features that include Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Color Histogram are extracted to characterize the audio and video data. The autoassociative neural network model (AANN) is used to capture the distribution of the acoustic and visual feature vectors. The AANN model captures the distribution of the acoustic and visual features of a class, and the back propagation learning algorithm is used to adjust the weights of the network to minimize the mean square error for each feature vector. Key w ords: - Audio and Video detection, Audio and Video fusion, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient, Color Histogram, Autoassociative Neural Network Model(AANN)
Effects of Drought and Flooding Stresses on Growth and Photosynthetic Activity of Mungbean,Vigna radiata (L.) Wilczek,Cultivars

The responses to drought and nooding stresses and the recovery from stress-induced damages were compared between three mungbean cultivars, Chinese (CN), and newly released cultivars in Myanmar, VC2991-112B-1B (VC) and KPS2 (KP). Growih, gas exchange rate and chlorophyll fluorescence quenching of these cultivars were investigated. The results were as follows: (1) CN was sensitive to both drought and flooding treatments compared to the other cultivars. VC and KP were less sensitive to drought and flooding, respectively. (2) The photosynthetic rate (PN) and stomatal conductance (G.) in VC were less affected by drought, with a quick recovery by re-watering. On the other hand, both parameters in KP were strongly depressed by drought, but less by nooding. (3) VC showed a higher value for the quantum yield of photosystem H (<~.) and a lower value for the photorespiration ratio (P,? lTc) than the other cultivars in the drought treatment. KP had a higher ~)* and lower PR/Tc in the flooding treatment. (4) The stomatal behavior was closely related to the stress-tolerance of mungbean cultivars. A partial retainment of gas exchange under the stress conditions was essential to sustain electron transport in the photosystems and prevent functional damages caused by excessive accumulation of energy in leaves.
The Actuality of Agriculture Internet of Things for Applying and Popularizing in China

With the development of global economic integration and information technology, the IOT technology has wide attention from all sectors of society, as the government also attaches great importance to the research and development of the Internet of things, and now its research and development has already penetrated into the social from all walks of life. At the same time, the application of the Internet of things in agricultural production is increasingly wide. It expounds the concept, system structure and characteristics of agricultural Internet of things. And it emphatically analyses the problems that are existent in the process of application and popularizing of the agricultural IOT.
Diffusion of Ga adatoms at the surface of GaAs(001) c (4 ×4 )α and β reconstructions

Diffusion of Ga adatom at the As rich, low temperature c(4$\times$4) reconstructions of GaAs(001) surface is analyzed. We use known energy landscape for the motion of Ga adatom at two different $\alpha$ and $\beta$ surface phases to calculate diffusion tensor by means of the variational approach. Diffusion coefficient describes the character of low density adatom system motion at the surface. The resulting expressions allow to identify main paths of an adatom diffusion and to calculate an activation energy of this process. It is shown that diffusion at the $\alpha$ surface is slower and more anisotropic than this for the $\beta$ surface.
Human Germline Engineering: A Study of Attitudes among Canadian University Students and the American Public

Attitudes toward human germline engineering were assessed across four studies. Studies 1 and 2 used participant ratings to develop a coherent set of germline engineering targets. Study 3 showed that in a sample of Canadian students, approval was higher for therapeutic modifications than for enhancing modifications, and higher for modifications targeting physical traits than for those targeting psychological traits. A regression analysis showed that approval related positively to knowledge and Agreeableness, and negatively to perceived risk and female gender. Study 4 replicated the same pattern of approval based on goal and trait type with a sample of American adults, and showed that overall approval correlated positively with level of education and Agreeableness, and negatively with perceived risk, female gender, and Extraversion. These findings provide empirical support for our proposed structure of attitudes toward germline engineering and show that overall approval can be predicted from stable individual differences.
Effect of Intra-Uterine Injection of hCG on Implantation Rate in IVF Candidates

Background and Objectives: Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is the embryonic hormone and one of the most important factors for implantation. The present study aimed to evaluate effect of intra-uterine injection of hCG before embryo transfer on the pregnancy outcome in IVF. Methods: In this study, 180 infertile patients were randomly allocated into an experiment and a control group. In the experiment group, before embryo transfer, 500 IU hCG were injected into the endometrium cavity in puncture stage. Equal amount of phosphate buffer (placebo) was injected to the subjects in the control group. Pregnancy test was done two weeks after the intervention. In case of positive results, ultrasound scan was done for detecting the gestational sac and numbers of sacs. Results: Mean age of the patients was 30±3.41 years and 31±4.12 years in the experimental and control group, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference in the duration of infertility between the two groups (4.77±3.67 years vs. 4.87±3.74 years). Based on the hCG level, the pregnancy rate was 35.5% in both groups. However, based on ultrasound findings, the pregnancy rate was 35.5% and 28.8% in the experiment group and the control group, respectively (P=0.33). In addition, there was no significant difference in the pregnancy rates between different age groups. Conclusion: Our results indicate that the intra-uterine injection of β -hCG has no significant effect on the pregnancy rate in IVF.
A Survey of Face Recognition Methods

Face recognition has received much attention because of its theoretical challenges as well as applications in user identification, surveillance and human–computer interaction. As a result, numerous methods have been developed for face recognition in the last few decades. Some universally used methods are introduced in this paper. On the same face recognition database, the recognition results are analyzed and compared. Keywords-face recognition; machine learning; computer vision
Ecological implications of eddy retention in the open ocean: a Lagrangian approach

The repartition of tracers in the ocean’s upper layer on the scale of a few tens of kilometres is largely determined by the horizontal transport induced by surface currents. Here we consider surface currents detected from satellite altimetry (Jason and Envisat missions) and we study how surface waters may be trapped by mesoscale eddies through a semi-Lagrangian diagnostic which combines the Lyapunov approach with Eulerian techniques. Such a diagnostic identifies the regions of the ocean’s upper layer with different retention times that appear to influence the behaviour of a tagged marine predator (an elephant seal) along a foraging trip. The comparison between predator trajectory and eddy retention time suggests that water trapping by mesoscale eddies, derived from satellite altimetry, may be an important factor for monitoring hotspots of trophic interactions in the open ocean. This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to ‘Lyapunov analysis: from dynamical systems theory to applications’.
Foreign Exchange Market Volatility Information: An Investigation of Real-Dollar Exchange Rate

Price distributions estimation has become a relevant subject for risk and pricing literature. Special concern resides on tail probabilities, which usually presents more severe observations than those predicted by Normal distributions. This work aims to verify whether the volatility implied in dollar-real options contains useful information about unexpected large-magnitude returns. Implied volatility is also checked as a predictor for realized volatility. Our results indicate that implied volatilities indeed provide useful information on unusual returns and also work as a good predictor for observed volatility. Finally, we implement an early-warning system and implied volatilities seem to signalize large-magnitude returns.
Verb Sense Disambiguation

This thesis addresses the problem of Verb Sense Disambiguation (VSD) in European Portuguese. Verb Sense Disambiguation is a subproblem of the Word Sense Desambiguation (WSD) problem, that tries to identify in which sense a polissemic word is used in a given sentence. Thus a sense inventory for each word (or lemma) must be used. For the VSD problem, this sense inventory consisted in a lexicon-syntactic classification of the most frequent verbs in European Portuguese (ViPEr). Two approaches to VSD were considered. The first, rule-based, approach makes use of the lexical, syntactic and semantic descriptions of the verb senses present in ViPEr to determine the meaning of a verb. The second approach uses machine learning with a set of features commonly used in the WSD problem to determine the correct meaning of the target verb. Both approaches were tested in several scenarios to determine the impact of different features and different combinations of methods. The baseline accuracy of 84%, resulting from the Most Frequent Sense (MFS) for each verb lemma, was both surprisingly high and hard to surpass. Still, both approaches provided some improvement over this value. The best combination of the three techniques yielded an accuracy of 87.2%, a gain of 3.2% above the baseline.
A General Theorem Relating the Bulk Topological Number to Edge States in Two-dimensional Insulators

We prove a general theorem on the relation between the bulk topological quantum number and the edge states in two dimensional insulators. It is shown that whenever there is a topological order in bulk, characterized by a non-vanishing Chern number, even if it is defined for a non-conserved quantity such as spin in the case of the spin Hall effect, one can always infer the existence of gapless edge states under certain twisted boundary conditions that allow tunneling between edges. This relation is robust against disorder and interactions, and it provides a unified topological classification of both the quantum (charge) Hall effect and the quantum spin Hall effect. In addition, it reconciles the apparent conflict between the stability of bulk topological order and the instability of gapless edge states in systems with open boundaries (as known happening in the spin Hall case). The consequences of time reversal invariance for bulk topological order and edge state dynamics are further studied in the present framework.
Performance Evaluation of Minimum Power Assignments Algorithms for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Energy consumption is a crucial issue in wireless ad hoc networks. Since many hosts in wireless ad hoc networks are usually powered by batteries, this makes the lifetime of a network to depend on the battery life of each individual host present. Minimizing the total energy consumption of each host is one of the major ways of improving the energy efficiency of a network. Therefore, a suitable minimum transmission power is assigned to wireless ad hoc communication station, such that single transmission of a node can be received by any node within its coverage area without affecting the performance of the system, thus reducing the total power consumed. This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of minimum power assignment Algorithms in wireless ad hoc network modeled in Matlab environment. The total power consumed by all the nodes in the network was minimized using the two min- total power assignment algorithms: greedy and Yao; and also the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) based method. The performances of the three algorithms were evaluated and compared so as to determine the algorithm with the best reducing power. The simulation results show that the spanning ratios of communication graphs induced by using greedy- based and Yao-based power assignment methods are not as large as the MST-based method. Thus, the larger spanning ratio value of MST based method makes it to be less efficient in using it to solve minimum power assignments problem. It was observed that the Greedy and Yao based power assignment methods are suitable for power assignment tasks for wireless ad hoc networks due to their ability to have a bounded spanning ratio.