Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Point Substitution in the Central Hydrophobic Cluster of a Human β-Amyloid Congener Disrupts Peptide Folding and Abolishes Plaque Competence†

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is pathologically characterized by the presence of numerous insoluble amyloid plaques in the brain composed primarily of a 40−43 amino acid peptide, the human β-amyloid peptide (Aβ). The process of Aβ deposition can be modeled in vitro by deposition of physiological concentrations of radiolabeled Aβ onto preexisting amyloid in preparations of unfixed AD cerebral cortex. Using this model system, it has been shown that Aβ deposition is biochemically distinct from Aβ aggregation and occurs readily at physiological Aβ concentrations, but which regions and conformations of Aβ are essential to Aβ deposition is poorly understood. We report here that an active congener, Aβ(10−35)-NH2, displays time dependence, pH−activity profile, and kinetic order of deposition similar to Aβ(1−40), and is sufficiently soluble for NMR spectroscopy in water under conditions where it actively deposits. To examine the importance of the central hydrophobic cluster of Aβ (LVFFA, residues 17−21) for in vitro Aβ.
Cramer-Rao bounds for estimation of pure-tone signals' azimuth-elevation arrival angles & polarization parameters & frequencies using a dipole-triad or a loop-triad

This work derives new nonasymptotic and asymptotic Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRB) for the estimation of multiple pure-tone incident signals' amplitudes, azimuth-elevation arrival-angles, polarization parameters, and frequencies, based on data observed from one dipole triad (composed of three spatially collocated but orthogonally oriented electrically short dipoles) or one loop-triad (composed of three spatially collocated but orthogonally oriented magnetically small loops). The incident sources are pure-tones at distinct frequencies, in contrast to the existing electromagnetic antenna-array signal-estimation CRB literature's modeling of all sources to be at the same carrier-frequency.
From integrated library systems to library management services: time for change?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to inform librarians about the advanced features of the next generation library systems called library management services. It is time to ask if and when a library should move on to the new system.Design/methodology/approach – The author looked into each new system for evaluation and analysis.Findings – The next generation library systems include Alma from Ex Libris, Intota from Serials Solutions, Kuali OLE from the Kuali Foundation, Sierra from Innovative Interfaces, and Worldshare from OCLC. The new systems are designed with many advanced features such as electronic resources management, license management, user driven acquisitions, trial database management, statistic reporting, and more.Originality/value – A search for relevant literature from the past three years has yielded no publications or data on the evaluation and analysis of the new library systems. Therefore, the information in this article is original.
A scheme for acquiring very high resolution images using multiple cameras

A signal processing-based scheme for acquiring high-resolution pictures with sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by processing multiple charge-coupled device (CCD) images is presented. The method integrates multiple low-resolution images into a high-resolution image. Compared to a CCD imaging device with equivalent resolution, it may be less sensitive to shot noise which becomes more dominant as the pixel size of an imager is further reduced. Preliminary experiments using a camera model have shown clear improvements in the high frequencies and image details. A strategy to further improve resolution is also described. <<ETX>>
Lexical patterns in the reading comprehension section of the toefl test

The TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) is currently one of the most widely accepted English language proficiency tests. Designed by the ETS (Educational Testing Service), the main purpose of the TOEFL is to determine whether the English language skills of a student applying to a North American college or university are adequate for enrollment into the selected program of study. This study will focus upon the third section of the TOEFL, Reading Comprehension, which consists of several passages followed by questions with different testing purposes. An adaptation of Hoey's (1991) analytical system for the analysis of lexical cohesion in authentic texts will be used to identify bonds connecting reading comprehension questions on the test to key excerpts in the passages they are related to. A number of sample reading comprehension questions taken from practice tests produced by the ETS will be analyzed. The analysis will focus on the relationship between the testing purpose of each question and the type(s) of lexical link involved in the identification of the correct answer.
Graph Models of Infrastructures and the Robustness of Power Grids

Technical infrastructures such as the electric power grid can be described as networks. From a mathematical perspective, a network can be modeled as a set of vertices connected with a set of edges. The recent advances in computer technology have launched an extensive research on the properties of large, complex networks. We review the most widely used measures for characterizing networks, and the most influential network models for capturing and explaining these characteristics. For infrastructure networks, the ability to maintain a designated function when parts of the system are damaged, so-called robustness, is very important. We review some of the recent studies of network robustness, and as an application we compare the robustness of the power grids of the Nordic countries and western USA. With our network representations, the western USA power grid is found to be the most robust of the two. We also study how an augmentation of new power lines affects the robustness of the Nordic grid. Within our network model, we find that the improvements are small. The thesis concludes with a discussion on how the network model and the robustness measures can be adjusted to better fit the properties of power grids and other infrastructures.
Molecular and agronomic characterization of Trichoderma spp natives of northeastern Mexico

Trichoderma sp is a fungus often used in agricultural activities, because it acts as an antagonist of several species of plant pathogenic fungi. In this study four strains of Trichoderma sp was isolated from the northeastern Mexico, which were identified by sequencing the ITS 1. We also evaluated its ability antagonistic against phytopathogenic fungi Macrophomina phaseolina and Fusarium oxysporum this fungi are reported affecting severely maize, sorghum and beans crops in northeastern Mexico. The identification was made according to the degree of consistency with reported sequences and the data show that the isolates belong to the species T. hammatum (HK701), T. koningiopsis (HK702), T. asperellum (HK703) and Trichoderma sp (HK704). Antagonism tests showed that the isolated, HK701, HK703 and HK704 inhibited the growth by competition to M phaseolina and F. oxysporum, while the HK702 has the ability to hyperparasites these pathogens. Finally was evaluated in maize (Pioneer 30P49®) We measured the dry weight and biomass production. The results show that at intermediate concentrations have the greatest increase in plant height and dry height of root and foliage.
Effects of vesicular‐arbuscular mycorrhizal infection and phosphate on Plantago major ssp. pleiosperma in relation to internal cytokinin concentrations

Two experiments were carried out to study physiological effects of vesicular-arbuseular mycorrhizal infection on Plantago major L. , ssp. pleiosperma (Pilger). In the first experiment, infection by the Glomus fasciculatum (Thaxt. sensu Gerdemann) Gerdemann and Trappe increased growth, shoot to root ratio, P concentrations in both shoot and roots and total uptake of P per plant. The percentages of dry matter in both shoot and roots were lower in mycorrhizal plants. In the second experiment different P treatments were applied to both mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal P. major plants to separate any effects of mycorrhizal infection from increased uptake of P. In addition to the effects found in the first experiment, mycorrhizal, P, and mycorrhizal x P interaction effects were found on root respiration rate and the concentration of soluble sugars in the roots. No clear effects on total dry weight, N and starch concentrations in shoot and roots and sugar concentraion in the shoot were found. Irrespective of the mycorrhizal treatment, increased P concentration in the shoot correlated with an increased shoot to root ratio and root respiration rate, and a decreased percentage dry matter and sugar concentration in the roots. However, the root respiration rate and the P concentration in the roots of mycorrhizal plants were enhanced more than expected from the increased P concentrations in the shoots of these plants.
Aloe vera as a Functional Ingredient in Foods

The main scientific discoveries on Aloe vera published mainly in the last three decades are presented in this work. After describing Aloe from a botanical point of view, the papers related with the chemical composition of different parts of the leaf of Aloe, particularly those in which the gel is described and are presented in a synthetic manner. The chemical analyses reveal that Aloe gel contains mannose polymers with some glucose and other sugars, among which the most important is Acemannan. Besides these, other components such as glycoproteins, enzymes, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are described. Different factors also affecting the chemical composition of the gel, such as species and variety, climatic and soil conditions, cultivation methods, processing and preservation, are enumerated and discussed. On the other hand, the main therapeutic applications have been revised and the possible damaging effects of Aloe are also commented upon. A special emphasis is placed on the biologically active compounds or groups of compounds responsible for the therapeutic applications and which are their action mechanisms. The paper concludes that more research is needed to confirm the therapeutic and beneficial effects and to definitively clarify the myth surrounding Aloe vera. A general view on the problem of the commercialization and establishment of the quality and safety of Aloe products in the food industry has been offered here. The main points and European regulations that need to be considered regarding the quality control of prepared Aloe products are presented in this paper.
A model for cooperative interactive plan explanation

The Interactive Discourse Planner (IDP) is designed to describe and justify domain plans interactively. The text plan that IDP incrementally formulates and executes is represented uniformly in the same knowledge base with the domain plans that are under discussion. In this way, the text plan and the domain plans are both accessible for analyzing the user's feedback. IDP can interpret vaguely articulated feedback, generate concise replies and metacomments, and detect when the user's feedback initiates a digression. As a testbed for my model, I am implementing IDP to interactively give driving directions and route advice. <<ETX>>
Time lagged recurrent neural network for temporal gene expression classification

Heterogeneous gene expressions provide insight into the biological role of gene interaction with the environment, disease development and drug effect at the molecular level. We propose Time Lagged Recurrent Neural Network with trajectory learning for identifying and classifying gene functional patterns from the heterogeneous nonlinear time series microarray experiments. The proposed procedures identify gene functional patterns from the dynamics of a state-trajectory learned in the heterogeneous time series and the gradient information over time. Trajectory learning with Back-propagation through time algorithm can recognise gene expression patterns vary over time. This reveals more information about the regulatory network underlying gene expressions.
Learning Attitude and Its Effect on Applying Cloud Computing Service to IT Education

Computer Classrooms are always the major place where the education of information technology (IT) is executed in school. However, there exists a major problem that students were unable to practice after school with the same environment and there was no appropriate space to save their files for students, so it was not convenient for students’ learning attitude of computer. The service of private cloud computing was adopted in this paper to establish the education environment of IT for resolving these problems. The quasi-experimental method was applied to the study of 110 fifth grade students who were selected from Tunglo Elementary School in Miaoli County, Taiwan. The technology acceptance model was adopted as the theoretical basis of research framework in this paper. The experiment results showed that students’ acceptance for the environment of IT educational of cloud computing in elementary school was much better after the teaching. Besides, there was a positive correlation between user behavior and learning achievement for cloud computing service.
FMAC: a highly flexible multiple-access protocol for wireless communications systems

Due to the limited bandwidth of wireless networks, an efficient medium-access control protocol is essential to meet the growing demand of wireless access. Most multiple-access protocols require contentions (collisions) in the process of acquiring the transmission medium. While collisions cannot be avoided, successive collisions that consist of the same group of active stations are totally unnecessary. Successive collisions not only waste bandwidth, but also raise the concern of saturation in the channel. In this paper, we solve the problem of repetitive contentions involving the same set of stations by using the theory of finite projective planes. Due to the property of single-point intersection for an arbitrary pair of sets in the finite projective plane, we can minimize the number of unnecessary collisions. Protocol finite projective plane-based medium access control (FMAC) is highly flexible and has many features including adaptation for a mobile environment, support for priority assignment and handoffs in cellular networks, and extension of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) services to mobile users. A performance evaluation shows that the throughput of the system is higher than that of slotted ALOHA. By dynamically adjusting the retransmission probability and the order of the finite projective plane, protocol FMAC can be stabilized.
Theses Submitted by Doctoral Students of Physical Research Laboratory, India

Abstract The most reliable way to know the contribution of research to the world knowledgebase is through publication and citation data. The research papers and doctoral theses are the instruments through which results of the research are communicated to the outside world. Both these scholarly publications conclude with the list of references. The study of these references (citations) gives an idea about the development of any research topic or a researcher and also indicates the kind of literature referred by the researchers. In today's world of ever escalating cost of serials, citation analysis is also being used to determine which titles to purchase and which ones to discontinue. The present study aims to better understand and manage the library resources by examining the resources used (cited) by the doctoral students of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) during 1997–2006. It was found that electronic format was preferred to the printed format from 2001 through 2006. Journal articles are used (cited) the most, followed by books and other documents like proceedings and reports. With more and more availability of online resources, use of non-subscribed content was also on the rise from 1997 through 2006. This study also confirms the Bradford's law that a set of core journals in a subject field satisfy more than 50% of the total number of journal citations. Table 2 Use of documents: electronic vs. print during 1997–2000.Documents1997199819992000Total%Electronic160175922.16Print11481752782476415897. 84
Are herbivore‐induced plant volatiles reliable indicators of herbivore identity to foraging carnivorous arthropods?

Plants that are damaged by herbivorous arthropods provide carnivorous enemies of the herbivores with important information. They emit an induced volatile blend that is highly detectable to the carnivores from a distance. Such detectable signals that indicate herbivore presence are important for the carnivores because herbivores themselves are under strong selection not to expose themselves. In addition, carnivores would benefit from a specificity of the induced plant volatiles. Whether herbivore‐induced plant volatiles are reliable indicators of herbivore identity, however, has not been resolved unambiguously. Some studies support the reliability of herbivore‐induced plant volatiles, while others do not. Different approaches have been used such as chemical analysis, behavioural analysis or a combination of the two. Based on the total of chemical studies one might conclude that in most cases herbivore‐induced plant volatiles are not very specific for the herbivore that damages the plant. However, arthropod chemosensors are much more sensitive than the detectors of analytical instruments. Therefore, chemical analyses are not suitable to demonstrate whether or not herbivore‐induced plant volatiles are reliable indicators of herbivore identity to carnivores. Behavioural studies should provide this information. In analysing carnivore behaviour it should be realised, however, that arthropod behaviour can be highly variable. Arthropod foraging decisions are affected by external and internal factors such as (a) abiotic environmental factors, (b) presence of competitors or enemies, (c) deprivation of food or oviposition sites, (d) specific deprivation of certain nutrients or (e) learning. In this paper their effect on discrimination of carnivores between volatile blends emitted by plants infested by different herbivores is reviewed. This provides testable hypotheses of why discrimination was not found in some studies. The ability of carnivores to discriminate is likely to be more common than is clear to date, which should invoke functional studies of the conditions that influence the occurrence of this discrimination.
Empirically Evaluated Improvements To Genotypic Spatial Distance Measurement Approaches For The Genetic Algorithm

EMPIRICALLY EVALUATED IMPROVEMENTS TO GENOTYPIC SPATIAL DISTANCE MEASUREMENT APPROACHES FOR THE GENETIC ALGORITHM Robert Collier Advisor: University of Guelph, 2012 Professor M. Wineberg The ability to visualize a solution space can be very beneficial, and it is generally accepted that the objective of visualization is to aid researchers in gathering insight. However, insight cannot be gathered effectively if the source data is misrepresented. This dissertation begins by demonstrating that the adaptive landscape visualization in widespread usage frequently misrepresents the neighborhood structure of genotypic space and, consequently, will mislead users about the manner in which solution space is traversed by the genetic algorithm. Bernhard Riemann, the father of topology, explicitly noted that a measurement of the distance between entities should represent the manner in which one can be brought towards the other. Thus, the commonly used Hamming distance, for example, is not representative of traversals of genotypic space by the genetic algorithm – a representative measure must include consideration for both mutation and recombination. This dissertation separately explores the properties that mutational and recombinational distances should have, and ultimately establishes a measure that is representative of the traversals made by both operators simultaneously. It follows that these measures can be used to enhance the adaptive landscape, by minimizing the discrepancy between the interpoint distances in genotypic space and the interpoint distances in the two-dimensional representation from which the landscape is extruded. This research also establishes a methodology for evaluating measures defining neighbourhood structures that are purportedly representative of traversals of genotypic space, by comparing them against an empirically generated norm. Through this approach it is conclusively demonstrated that the Hamming distance between genotypes is less representative than the proposed measures, and should not be used to define the neighbourhood structure from which visualizations would be constructed. While the proposed measures do not distort the data or otherwise mislead the user, they do require a significant computational expense. Fortunately, the choice to use these measures is always made at the discretion of the user, with additional costs incurred when accuracy and representativity are of paramount importance. These measures will ultimately find further application in population diversity measurement, cluster analysis, and any other task where the representativity of the neighborhood structure of the genotypic space is vital.
Proposal for Minimal Standards for Descriptions of New Species and Biotypes of the Genus Brucella

Following the introduction of new statutes agreed at the Xth International Congress for Microbiology held in Mexico City in 1972, the International Committee for Systematic Bacteriology has requested subcommittees on taxonomy to propose minimal standards for the descriptions of new taxa. Consequently a proposal for minimal standards for the descriptions of new species and biotypes of the genus Brucella Meyer and Shaw (22) has been prepared. As procedures recommended by the Subcommittee on Taxonomy of the Genus Brucella (34) for subdivision within the genus have been employed successfully for a number of years, present emphasis has been placed on the minimal standards for recognition of an organism as a member of the genus. This aspect is particularly important as it is now recognized that a number of genetically unrelated gram-negative organisms bear a superficial resemblance to members of the genus Brucella. To avoid confusion and misidentification it is essential that a comprehensive system for identification at the generic level should be adopted. Recommendations for this are contained in the present proposal along with suggestions for minimal requirements for subdivision within the genus. Comments will be welcomed so that eventually this paper can be used as a basis for preparing a document covering full details of techniques and procedures.
Pathological mechanisms in Huntington's disease and other polyglutamine expansion diseases

Since 1991, nine monogenic neurodegenerative diseases have been shown to be caused by moderate expansion of a CAG repeat coding for a polyglutamine stretch in specific target proteins. These disorders include Huntington’s disease (HD) and various spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs), and their pathogenic mechanism has been the object of intense recent studies. While it is clear that the mutations confer a gain of toxic property to the target proteins, correlated with appearance of a common pathologic epitope and of self aggregation properties, much remains to be learned concerning how these elongated polyglutamines cause neuronal dysfunction and death, and what features can account for the selectivity with which various neuronal populations are affected. Important observations have recently been made, notably by use of cellular or transgenic animal models, that give new insight into the mechanisms of polyglutamine diseases and raise hopes for therapies.