Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microbial competition between Escherichia coli and Candida albicans reveals a soluble fungicidal factor

Localized and systemic fungal infections caused by Candida albicans can lead to significant mortality and morbidity. However, severe C. albicans infections are relatively rare, occurring mostly in the very young, the very old, and immunocompromised individuals. The fact that these infections are rare is interesting because as much as 80 percent of the population is asymptomatically colonized with C. albicans. It is thought that members of the human microbiota and the immune system work in concert to reduce C. albicans overgrowth through competition and modification of the growth environment. Here, we report that Escherichia coli (strain MG1655) outcompetes and kills C. albicans (strain SC5314) in vitro. We find that E. coli produces a soluble factor that kills C. albicans in a magnesium-dependent fashion such that depletion of available magnesium is essential for toxicity.
Seismic triggering of eruptions in the far field

An underwater missile homing system, comprising: two pairs of test thermocouple (TC) junctions, means for mounting one pair of TC junctions on the missile so that they extend laterally therefrom in opposite directions, and means for mounting the other pair of TC junstions on the missile so that they extend vertically therefrom in opposite directions. Guidance means are provided on the missile for guiding the missile in a horizontal direction and in a vertical direction. Means are also provided responsive to signals obtained from the TC junctions for controlling the guidance means, whereby said missile will home in on a sea-going vehicle, in azimuth and elevation, which emits heat in its wake.
PILOT SYMBOL ASSISTED TCM CODED SYSTEM WITH TRANSMIT DIVERSITY

In this paper, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system based on concatenated inner space-time block code (STBC) and outer multidimensional trellis coded modulation (TCM) encoder is designed over slow time-varying Rayleigh fading channels. We develop here a novel MIMO channel estimation algorithm that exploits a pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) which has been proven to be effective for fading channels. The proposed concatenated scheme takes advantage of both the high coding gain from its outer-coder and the ease of the channel estimation from the use of PSAM technique. Simulation results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed MIMO scheme against the perfect coherent counterpart for the same spatial diversity.
Interaction between a Human and an Anthropomorphized Object

Present-day home appliances have more functions, are more complicated, and are expected to process information together as more home networks and protocols are developed. This situation makes many users feel uneasy as they need to understand more complex information. They cannot intuitively understand what functions objects have and it has become more difficult to accept information from them in these situations. Therefore engineers are faced with a massive challenge to improve their interfaces and design products that facilitate easier use. However, it is difficult to improve the designs and interfaces of all objects. Instead of improving the designs or the interfaces of objects, we preferred to provide information via anthropomorphic and communicative agents such as though a humanoid robot (Kanda et al., 2003) or a virtual agent (Mukawa et al., 2003), which seemed to be more useful and user friendly. We propose a “display robot” as one agent system. It transforms an object into an by using anthropomorphization, which makes the interaction between humans and the object more intuitive. Users can understand the functions of objects more intuitively using the display robot and can accept information from them. We also think that the display robot can solve problems with impediments where users accept the agents themselves as “obstacles” to acquisition (Fukayama et al., 2003) (Fig. 1 top). The display robot does not use additional agents that are not related to an object, but it makes the object as additional agent that interacts with users (Fig. 1 bottom). As this situation does not create any additional agents in the field of interaction, users are not encumbered by additional information. It is also possible to identify the object's segments such as its “head” or “stomach” if it is anthropomorphized and has an imaginary body image. It can also use metaphorical and intuitive expressions for functions, such as “Something is wrong with my stomach” using the virtual body image. We have already conducted an experiment to evaluate the anthropomorphization of an object (Osawa et al. 2006) and its virtual body image (Osawa et al. 2007). We used three anthropomorphized refrigerators in these experiments, the first was anthropomorphized by eye-like parts attached to its top, the second was anthropomorphized by the parts attached to its bottom, and the third was anthropomorphized by voice only. The study found that
Effects of female diet and age on offspring sex ratio of the solitary parasitoid Pachycrepoideus vindemmiae (Rondani) (Hymenoptera, Pteromalidae)

Effects of female diet and age on offspring sex ratio of the solitary parasitoid Pachycrepoideus vindemmiae (Rondani) (Hymenoptera, Pteromalidae). Theories predict that females of parasitoid wasps would adjust the offspring sex ratio to environmental conditions in the oviposition patch, but the diet and age of females would also affect the sex ratio adjustment. Our focus was to test the effects of female diet and age on offspring sex ratio of the solitary parasitoid wasp, Pachycrepoideus vindemmiae (Rondani, 1875). Our results showed that females fed with honey had significantly less female biased offspring sex ratio than those fed only with water. Offspring sex ratio (male percentage) decreased with female age or female longevity at the beginning of oviposition but increased at the end. There should be a sperm limitation in P. vindemmiae females at the end of oviposition, and a higher frequency of unfertilized eggs were laid then. Females also laid more unfertilized eggs at the beginning of oviposition, which would be necessary to insure the mating among offspring. Male offspring developed faster and emerged earlier, which would also reduce the risk of virginity in offspring with female-biased sex ratio.
A quantitative evaluation of physical and digital approaches to centre of mass estimation

Centre of mass is a fundamental anatomical and biomechanical parameter. Knowledge of centre of mass is essential to inform studies investigating locomotion and other behaviours, through its implications for segment movements, and on whole body factors such as posture. Previous studies have estimated centre of mass position for a range of organisms, using various methodologies. However, few studies assess the accuracy of the methods that they employ, and often provide only brief details on their methodologies. As such, no rigorous, detailed comparisons of accuracy and repeatability within and between methods currently exist. This paper therefore seeks to apply three methods common in the literature (suspension, scales and digital modelling) to three ‘calibration objects’ in the form of bricks, as well as three birds to determine centre of mass position. Application to bricks enables conclusions to be drawn on the absolute accuracy of each method, in addition to comparing these results to assess the relative value of these methodologies. Application to birds provided insights into the logistical challenges of applying these methods to biological specimens. For bricks, we found that, provided appropriate repeats were conducted, the scales method yielded the most accurate predictions of centre of mass (within 1.49 mm), closely followed by digital modelling (within 2.39 mm), with results from suspension being the most distant (within 38.5 mm). Scales and digital methods both also displayed low variability between centre of mass estimates, suggesting they can accurately and consistently predict centre of mass position. Our suspension method resulted not only in high margins of error, but also substantial variability, highlighting problems with this method.
Flatness-Based Active Vibration Control for Piezoelectric Actuators

The accuracy and resolution of metrological devices (coordinate measuring machines -CMM-, interferometers, etc.) are greatly affected by their robustness to external vibrations. This is especially important in the case of micrometric and nanometric microscopes, such as atomic force microscopes (AFM). In such cases, active vibration control strategies are frequently used, requiring actuators capable of fast and accurate responses. Piezoelectric actuators meet these requirements but they suffer from two major drawbacks, hysteresis, and rate dependence, which must be taken into consideration in the design of the control strategy. The present work proposes a novel active vibration control strategy using piezoelectric actuators for metrological devices affected by low external loads. The control strategy combines a classical sky-hook feedback with a feedforward control. The effect of hysteresis is minimized by compensating the senstivity variations of the actuator in oscillatory movements. For the design of the feedforward law, the present work demonstrates that a stack piezoelectric actuator working as a damper admits a mathematical description fulfilling differential flatness. It also proposes a formulation of the active vibration damping problem in terms of a trajectory tracking command perfectly fitted to the flatness-based control law. This strategy obtains damping improvements in the entire frequency range of operation without the instability problems derived from high feedback gains.
Positive Unlabeled Learning to Discover Relevant Documents Using Topic Models for Feature Selection

Search by Multiple Examples (SbME) is a new search paradigm proposed recently to overcome the shortcomings of the keyword-based search. It allows users to provide multiple positive documents to express their information needs. Traditionally, documents are treated as vectors, of which the features are keywords in the collections. Such a term-vector based document representation brings high dimensionality problems when the collection is large. In this research, we propose a framework of using PU learning for SbME using latent topics identified by a topic model for feature dimension reduction. Specifically, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to reduce the feature dimension of document vectors to a lower dimension of topic vectors. Then the procedure of discovering relevant documents using a PU learning method is conducted in the topic space. Using Mean Average Precision (MAP) and precision at 10 (P@10) measures, experiments on two benchmark datasets indicate that the topic based method has comparable retrieval performances with the term based method in terms of MAP; more importantly, the former outperforms the latter significantly in term of P@10, when the size of positive examples is small. Given that the LDA method has a significantly smaller dimension than the term based method, it is more practical in a SbME setting, where computational efficiency is crucial in providing real time update of search results per the user’s query documents.
Tuberculosis series

1. Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, – UFRGS – Porto Alegre (RS) Brasil. 2. Instituto de Doenças do Tórax, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ – Rio de Janeiro (RJ) Brasil. 3. Programa Acadêmico de Tuberculose, Hospital Universitário Clementino Fraga Filho, Instituto de Doenças do Tórax – HUCFF-IDT – Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro (RJ) Brasil. 4. Centro de Referência Hélio Fraga, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro (RJ) Brasil. 5. Division of Infection and Immunity, University College London and NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, UCL Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom. 6. WHO Collaborating Centre for TB and Lung Diseases, Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico – IRCCS – Tradate, Italia. a. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0230-2734; b. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3250-6738; c. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5900-6007; d. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6820-1082; e. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5111-5735; f. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2597-574X Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, ranking above HIV/AIDS. An estimated 10.4 million people fell ill with tuberculosis in 2016, 6.3 million new cases of tuberculosis having been reported. In that same year, there were an estimated 1.3 million tuberculosis deaths among non-HIV-infected individuals and an estimated 374,000 tuberculosis deaths among HIVinfected individuals. The World Health Organization (WHO) End TB Strategy established targets for the 2016-2035 period, including a 90% reduction in tuberculosis-related deaths and an 80% reduction in tuberculosis incidence (new cases per year) by 2030. Globally, the tuberculosis incidence and mortality rates are falling; however, the disease continues to be an important public health issue. (1)
A Quantitative and Theoretical Analysis of Ghana’s Internal Migration, Economic Growth and poverty Reduction: A Disaggregated Approach, from 1980 to 2012*

The study here was meant to examine the consequence of Ghanai¯s government spending on economic growth, internal migration and poverty reduction in Ghana using a disaggregated approach. It reveals that intensifying government outflow has not yielded any meaningful development in Ghana. Many researches had been conducted on the actual link connecting government expenditure, internal migration, economic growth and poverty reduction. Many of the studies until today have used the aggregate approach which has not yielded the desired results hence there is the need to vary the methodology. This study made use of the data for the period (1980 - 2012). The findings from the study shows that Government total capital expenses (GTE), total recurrent outflows (GOF), Government cost on education (GCE) and power (POW) on the contrary, impacts negatively on economic growth and was significant. On the other hand, increasing Government spending on transport and communication (GCTC), and health (GDH) leads to an increase in economic growth. From the results above, the authors advised that there should be public private participation in critical sectors of the Ghanaian economy in the areas of power and transport in order to accelerate the rate of development in Ghana. In addition to this recommendation, government should be more transparent and accountable in her spending.
TWO-POINT OSCILLATIONS IN SECOND-ORDER LINEAR DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

A second-order linear differential equation (P): y �� + f(x)y = 0, x ∈ I ,w hereI = (0,1) and f ∈ C(I), is said to be two-point oscillatory on I, if all its nontrivial solutions y ∈ C(I ) ∩C 2 (I), oscillate both at x = 0a ndx = 1, i.e. having sequences of infinite zeros converging to x = 0a ndx = 1. It necessarily implies that all solutions y(x) of (P) must satisfy the Dirichlet boundary conditions and that f(x) must be singular at both end points of I.W e first describe a class of two-point oscillatory equations of (P). Secondly, we prove that (P) is two-point oscillatory if f(x) satisfies certain Hartman-Wintner type asymptotic conditions. Furthermore, we study the arclength of the graph G(y) of solutions curve y(x) on I. Two-point oscillatory equation (P) is said to be two-point rectifiable (unrectifiable) oscillatory if the ar- clengths of all solutions are finite (infinite). We give conditions on f(x) which imply (P) is two-point rectifiable (unrectifiable) oscillatory. When (P) is two-point unrectifiable oscillatory, we determine the fractal dimension of its solution curves for a special class of f(x) similar to the Euler type equations when f(x) is only singular at one end point of I. Finally, the preceding results motivate a study on two-sided oscillations of (P) at an interior point of I.
Reciprocal expressions and the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis

In two experiments, we study the effects of verb concepts on the interpretation of reciprocal expressions in Dutch and Hebrew. One experiment studies Hebrew to test a previous account, the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis, which suggests that listeners resolve ambiguity in reciprocal sentences using the logically strongest meaning that is consistent with the context. The results challenge this proposal, as participants often adopt a weaker meaning than what the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis expects. We propose that these results reflect the sensitivity of reciprocal quantifiers to verb concepts, which is modelled by a new principle, the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis (MTH). For any given reciprocal sentence, the MTH specifies a core situation: the maximal situation that is also maximally typical for the verb concept. The MTH predicts reciprocal sentences to be maximally acceptable in the core situation and, under certain conditions, in situations that contain it, but substantially less acceptable in other situations. To test this prediction, we conducted a two-part experiment among Dutch speakers: (a) a membership test that ranks typicality preferences with different verbs; (b) a truth-value judgement test with reciprocal sentences containing these verbs. The results show that the typical number of patients per agent varies between verbs, with a significant effect of these preferences on reciprocal quantification: the stronger the verb concept’s bias is for one-patient situations, the weaker is the interpretation of reciprocal sentences containing it. These results support the MTH as a basis for a general theory of reciprocal quantification.
On a Mobile Phone Contact List Based on Social Relations

Social relations are unquestionably the major provider of contacts in the mobile devices contact lists. However, they remain marginal in the literature of social software related to the contact list and are not at all integrated in its design. Inspired by African social and cultural practices, this paper is about a design of the contact list that integrates the social relationships existing between people in the real life. A desktop prototype of the proposed contact list designing allows to validate it. Illustrations of the developed application demonstrate the assets of the proposed contact list regarding issues such as contacts reminding/retrieval and homonymy resolving with respect to the real life. Additional capabilities of the proposed contact list reside in the creation of groups of contacts for group communications needs. Received on 04 December 2017; accepted on 09 January 2018; published on 12 February 2018
Assessing the Impact of China's WTO Accession on Investment

After a boom in foreign direct investment (FDI) in China in the early 1990s, FDI slowed in the late 1990s. More recently, with China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) a reality, FDI has once again picked up. This paper explores the linkage between WTO accession and investment in China. We find that investment and capital stocks increase substantially. Moreover, foreign ownership of Chinese assets doubles by 2020. Central to this increase is the expected catch-up in the productivity of the services sectors driven by reforms. These estimates are far larger than those predicted by earlier studies, which ignored the reforms affecting Chinese services sectors, and abstracted from international capital mobility. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Role of GRP 78 , CHOP and TRB 3 in cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury in rats

Objective: This study aims to observe the expression level changes of endoplasmic reticulum stress-related molecules GRP78, CHOP and TRB3 in rat brains after cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury (CIRI), and investigate its roles in CIRI. Methods: Male SD rats were randomly divided into three groups: normal group, sham operation group and CIRI group. The CIRI group was further divided into four groups: IR-2h, IR-6h, IR-24h and IR-48h groups. GRP78, CHOP and TRB3 protein and mRNA expressions in brain tissues were detected by western blot and real-time PCR, respectively; and brain cells apoptosis was detected by the TUNEL method. Results: At the 6th, 24th and 48th hour of ischemia reperfusion, the protein and mRNA expression of GRP78, CHOP and TRB3 in brain tissues significantly increased compared with in the expression in the normal and sham operation groups (P<0.01). Conclusion: Endoplasmic reticulum stress may promote brain cell apoptosis by regulating the protein expression of GRP78 downstream signaling molecules CHOP and TRB3, and participate in the occurrence and development of CIRI.
Quantitative Analysis of Formation of Active Avoidance Behavior in the Hippocampus Coagulated and Intact White Albino Rats

Unsupervised cluster analysis is proposed for analysis of active avoidance formation in three groups of albino rats: 1) intact; 2) with electrolytic lesions of neocortex over the dorsal hippocampus; and 3) with electrolytic lesions of dorsal hippocampus. The term “behavior vector” has been introduced to assess quantitatively the behavior of rats while learning. The proposed approach enables to assess active avoidance behavior in rats simultaneously by all the test parameters: 1) reaction to the light; 2) reaction to the electric irritation; and 3) inter-trial spontaneous behavior. The animals were grouped by their behavioral resemblance through the learning process. The proposed method facilitates the assessment of learning capacities in animals and paves way for getting additional information concerning correlative relationships between their learning skills and other neuroethological and neurobiological parameters.
Broadband single cell impedance spectroscopy using maximum length sequences: theoretical analysis and practical considerations

Measurements of the dielectric (or impedance) properties of cells can be used as a general characterization and diagnostic tool. In this paper, we describe a novel impedance spectroscopy technique for the analysis of single biological cells in suspension. The technique uses maximum length sequences (MLS) for periodic excitation signal in a microfluidic impedance cytometer. The method allows multi-frequency single cell impedance measurements to be made in a short time period (ms). Spectral information is obtained in the frequency domain by applying a fast M-sequence transform (FMT) and fast Fourier transform (FFT) to the time domain response. Theoretically, the impedance is determined from the transfer function of the system when the MLS is a current excitation. The order of the MLS and sampling rate of A/D conversion are two factors that determine the bandwidth and spectral accuracy of the technique. Experimentally, the applicability of the technique is demonstrated by characterizing the impedance spectrum of red blood cells (RBCs) in a microfluidic cytometer. The impedance is measured within 1 ms at 512 discrete frequencies, evenly distributed in the range from 976.56 Hz to 500 kHz. The measured spectrum shows good agreement with simulations.