Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
S. mansoni Schistosomula Antigens Induce Th1/Proinflammatory Cytokine Responses

Larvae of Schistosoma (schistosomula) are highly susceptible to host immune responses and are attractive prophylactic vaccine targets, although cellular immune responses against schistosomula antigens in endemic human populations are not well characterized. We collected blood and stool from 54 Schistosoma mansoni -infected Ugandans, isolated peripheral blood mononuclear cells and stimulated them for 24 hours with schistosome adult worm and soluble egg antigens (AWA and SEA), along with schistosomula recombinant proteins rSmKK7, Lymphocyte Antigen 6 isoforms (rSmLy6A and rSmLy6B), tetraspanin isoforms (rSmTSP6 and rSmTSP7). Cytokines, chemokines and growth factors were measured in the culture supernatants using a multiplex luminex assay, and infection intensity was determined before and at one year after praziquantel (PZQ) treatment using the Kato Katz method. Cellular responses were grouped and the relationship between groups of correlated cellular responses and infection intensity before and after PZQ treatment investigated. AWA and SEA induced mainly Th2 responses. In contrast, rSmLy6B, rSmTSP6 and rSmTSP7 induced Th1/pro-inflammatory responses. While recombinant antigens rSmKK7 and rSmLy6A did not induce a Th1/pro-inflammatory response, they had an association with pre-treatment infection intensity after adjusting for age and sex. Testing more schistosomula antigens using this approach could provide immune-epidemiology identifiers necessary for prioritizing next generation schistosomiasis vaccine candidates. responses are consistent with a previous study in which a recombinant schistosomulum antigen, rSm14, induced significant levels of Th1/pro-inflammatory cytokines at 72 hours after stimulation (40), our study shows that these responses can be measured earlier at 24 hours. An early response to the schistosomulum is necessary due to its transient nature in the tissues including the skin. The generation of Th1 responses is associated with protective immunity to S. mansoni (44). In conclusion, our findings show that the schistosomula antigens rSmLy6B, rSmTSP6 and rSmTSP7 induce a predominantly Th1/pro-inflammatory response. The recombinant antigens SmLy6B, SmTSP6 and SmTSP7 might be good targets to investigate further as vaccine antigens against S. mansoni infection.
Chapter 3 Continuous Anything for Distributed Research Projects

International research projects involve large, distributed teams made up from multiple institutions. These teams create research artefacts that need to work together in order to demonstrate and ship the project results. Yet, in these settings the project itself is almost never in the core interest of the partners in the consortium. This leads to a weak integration incentive and consequently to last minute efforts. This in turn results in Big Bang integration that imposes huge stress on the consortium and produces only nonsustainable results. In contrast, industry has been profiting from the introduction of agile development methods backed by Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment. In this chapter, we identify shortcomings of this approach for research projects. We show how to overcome those in order to adopt all three methodologies regarding that scope. We also present a conceptual, as well as a tooling framework to realise the approach as Continuous Anything. As a result, integration becomes a core element of the project plan. It distributes and shares responsibility of integration work among all partners, while at the same time clearly holding individuals responsible for dedicated software components. Through a high degree of automation, it keeps the overall integration work low, but still provides immediate feedback on the quality of the software. Overall, we found this concept useful and beneficial in several EU-funded research projects, where it significantly lowered integration effort and improved quality of the software components while also enhancing collaboration as a whole.
Visual Attention Assessment for Expert-in-the-Loop Training in a Maritime Operation Simulator

Improving the training programs for maritime operations is beneficial to enhance the maritime safety in practice. In this article, we propose a novel approach to the assessment of visual attention in a maritime operation so as to support an expert-in-the-loop training program. Experts’ knowledge of maritime operation and experiences in the simulator are incorporated into the training program in three ways. First, through a questionnaire, information about task division, identification of critical operation, and definitions of areas of interest (AOIs) are incorporated as prior knowledge for modeling visual attention. Second, a weight scale factor that emphasizes the high importance of visual focus in critical operations is utilized to generate an operations-dependent attention map. Third, based on an expert's attention map and visual switch between AOIs, a similarity metric is designed as a comprehensive evaluation between saliency and visual transition. A case study of heavy lifting operation is performed by two groups of trainees who have received different briefings about “critical operation. ” The assessment result shows that the group with more detailed briefing obtains a 6% similarity score higher than the other group, which is consistent with the debriefing result of a superior performance of that group. The proposed approach is thus verified effective in assessing visual attention for the expert-in-the-loop training program.
Organizational Influence Process in Software Process Improvement

In this paper we investigate organizational influence processes in software process improvement. We analyze an improvement effort through the lenses of organizational influence theory. Our analysis suggests that the framework can explain several significant organizational complexities in software process improvement. Further, the framework point to relevant actions for managers of software process improvement. This will have implications for the creation of effective software process improvement.
Mean Field Method for the Support Vector Machine Regression

This paper deals with two subjects. First, we will show how support vector machine (SVM) regression problem can be solved as the maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction in the Bayesian framework. The second part describes an approximation technique that is useful in performing calculations for SVMs based on the mean field algorithm which was originally proposed in Statistical Physics of disordered systems. One advantage is that it handle posterior averages for Gaussian Process (GP) which are not analytically tractable.
Optimizing Shape Particle Filters for the Detection and Segmentation of Medical Images

In recent years segmentation approaches based on sequential Monte Carlo Methods delivered promising results for the localization and delineation of anatomical structures in medical images. Also known as Shape Particle Filters, they are used for the segmentation of human vertebrae, lungs and hearts, being especially well suited to cope with the high levels of noise encountered in MR data and overlapping structures with ambiguous appearance in radiographs. Shape Particle Filters rely on a region template or map based on a shape models’ mean shape, which is defined manually in existing approaches. During search, a classification step based on appearance features yields the probabilities for each pixel to belong to a certain region within the template. This forms the basis for the actual segmentation process. This thesis aims at optimizing Shape Particle Filters in terms of computational performance as well as segmentation accuracy. Two novel approaches for the generation of the region map are proposed, namely automatic region maps and per-pixel region maps. The automatic region map approach, where the optimal distribution and number of template regions is derived from a set of training images, adapts to complex data and finds consistent features in the training examples without manual interaction. Using appearance features based on the Monogenic Signal the per-pixel region map approach eliminates both the need for the region estimation as well as the classification step, resulting in considerably faster segmentation while retaining the same level of accuracy. The proposed methods are evaluated on four different data sets, synthetic rectangles, metacarpal bone radiographs, MRI slices of the heart and CT slices of the lung. Experimental results show a major gain in computational performance as well as better or at least equal segmentation results when compared to current approaches.
The Variable Elision of Unstressed Vowels in European Portuguese: A Case Study

European varieties of Portuguese exhibit a process whereby unstressed vowels, particularly schwa, optionally undergo elision: an item such as idade ‘idea’ can be realized as [ida'd] and para Maria ‘for Maria’ may surface as [prɐmɐrí'ɐ]. While previous research in the study of phonological variation of this sort has typically focused on syntactic, morphological, functional, and segmental factors as the primary linguistic conditions for accurately characterizing variable processes (Guy 1980; Poplack & Walter 1986, among many others), less work has been done investigating the role of prosodic factors in this respect.1 Yet if one believes (along with Nespor and Vogel 1986, etc.) that prosodic structure — which includes levels of representation such as the phonological word (“mot”), the phonological phrase, and the intonational phrase — plays a significant role in the organization of phonological units, then one may reasonably argue that such structure should provide insight into phonological variation. In this paper, a preliminary analysis of data from European Portuguese is presented with the intention of demonstrating how such a position is not only tenable, but is, in fact, desirable for an accurate and insightful characterization of vowel elision. The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 2 provides a brief outline of issues in prosodic phonology pertinent to the analysis, focusing on work by Selkirk (1986, 1987) that addresses the contribution of syntax to determining prosodic structure. Section 3 presents background on the vocalic phonology of European Portuguese (EP), paying particular attention to the claim
Self-Regulation and Innovation in the Peer-to-Peer Sharing Economy

A growing fraction of the world’s economy involves digitally enabled peer-to-peer exchange. This form of exchange has expanded dramatically in recent years, moving beyond simple retailing and free file exchange to personal, human-intensive services such as hosted accommodation, urban and city-to-city transportation, neighborhood logistics, peer-to-peer lending, equity crowdfunding, and decentralized manufacturing. Such exchange, while mediated by digital platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Etsy, Funding Circle, and AngelList, frequently involves the peer-to-peer provision of familiar real-world services that are the traditional subjects of regulation. It blurs the line between personal and professional in the provision of commercial services. Further, it often involves semianonymous transactions. Each of these factors creates a variety of regulatory challenges that could impede innovation, especially the grassroots innovation made possible by new opportunities for peer-to-peer exchange. Additionally, these regulatory barriers may slow the growth of employment that involves individuals providing goods, services, labor, and capital through peer-to-peer platforms—a form of work that will in future years constitute a larger fraction of the economy than it does today. We argue that the resolution of these challenges must include self-regulatory approaches. Self-regulation is not the same as deregulation or no regulation. Rather, it is the reallocation of regulatory responsibility to parties other than the government. We explain why platforms should not be viewed as entities to be regulated but rather as actors that are a key part of the regulatory
Adaptive Fuzzy Mediation for Multimodal Control of Mobile Robots in Navigation-Based Tasks

The paper proposes and analyses performance of a fuzzy-based mediator with showcase examples in robot navigation. The mediator receives outputs from two controllers and uses estimated collision probability for adapting the signal proportions in the final output. The approach was implemented and tested in simulation and on real robots with different footprints. The task complexity during testing varied from single obstacle avoidance to a realistic navigation in real environments. The obtained results showed that this approach is simple but effective.
Welche Wünsche und Erwartungen haben Lehrkräfte an aktuelle Forschung als Gegenstand von Fortbildungsveranstaltungen

Ziel des Fortbildungsprogramms „Transfer Wissenschaft Schule“ ist die Vorstellung aktueller Forschungsfelder und ‒methoden der Wissenschaft mit Bezugen zu naturwissenschaftlichen Fachern in Fortbildungsveranstaltungen fur Lehrkrafte. Im Vorfeld der Konzeption verschiedener Angebote wurden Lehrkrafte in Schleswig-Holstein nach ihren Erfahrungen und Entwicklung bezuglich dieses Fortbildungsinhaltes befragt. In diesem Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse der erhobenen Daten von N=273 Lehrkraften fur naturwissenschaftliche Facher aus Schleswig-Holstein mit Blick auf Unterrichtsthemen bzw. ‒kontexte sowie Aspekte der Forschungsprozesse berichtet. Dabei zeigt sich unter anderem, dass sich Lehrkrafte beispielsweise aktuelle Forschungsfragen als Gegenstand von Angeboten wunschen, die Thematisierung der Person der Forscherin bzw. des Forschers jedoch deutlich geringer gewichtet wird. Abschliesend werden in dem Beitrag Konsequenzen aus der Befragung fur das Fortbildungsprogramms „Transfer Wissenschaft Schule“ erlautert, welches derzeit in Schleswig-Holstein realisiert wird. Current research areas and methods as well as recent findings in these areas should be subject of professional development programs for science teachers. Such a program is called “transfer science school”. It aims at the integration of such topics into professional development. In preparation of the conceptualization of the program teachers were asked regarding their content related expectations. This article presents results of a survey focusing on teachers’ expectations in view of the content of professional development. The questionnaire was answered by N=273 science teachers. Apart from typical topics taken from the curriculum aspects of the nature of science were also taken into account. The results show that teachers ask for current research questions as subject of professional development but less for scientists themselves. Based on the results conclusions are drawn and consequences for the project “transfer science school” are described.
Multi-Level Environmental Governance: Exploring the economic explanations

Multi-level environmental governance has become a commonplace, yet few attempts have been made to explain in economic terms why it should have emerged. This article examines four economic explanations for multi-level environmental governance. The first explanation considers multi-level environmental governance as a solution for overcoming collective action challenges when a large number of actors are involved. The second explanation has it that multiple levels of environmental governance may be needed to minimise governance costs. Third, path dependency and economies of scope could explain multilevel environmental governance. Fourthly, ecosystem service flows generated by complex and multifunctional resource systems may have benefit catchments of different size, and multilevel governance solutions may be needed to link providers and beneficiaries. While they are to a degree complementary, the analysis suggests that the multi-functionality explanation is the most nuanced one of them and offers the best diagnostic for governance challenges that an environmental resource system poses.
Warm temperatures at bloom reduce fruit set in sweet cherry

Warm springs have often been assumed as a prelude of a good fruit set in temperate fruit tree species. However, recently, evidences have accumulated on erratic fruit set under apparently good and warm springs in Mediterranean conditions. The fact that these observations mainly occurred in sweet cherry ( Prunus avium ), a species adapted to high latitudes and cold climates raised the question of whether warm temperatures at flowering could have a detrimental effect on fruit set. To evaluate this hypothesis two different sweet cherry cultivars were subjected under field conditions to a slight increase in temperature at bloom over two different years. While the minimum temperature remained stable, the maximum temperature increased 5-7oC, resulting in a moderate increase of the average temperature of 1-3oC. This was sufficient to drastically reduce fruit set in both years and cultivars. To know the vulnerable phase to warm temperatures the process was timed back: final fruit set differences were established in the first three weeks following pollination, but the onset of fruiting – when these differences appeared – was tracked back to one week after pollination. The process from pollination to fertilization was examined under both conditions. Fertilization occurred six days after pollination. Higher temperatures accelerated pollen tube growth rate but also reduced the number of growing pollen tubes along the style. In the ovary, the warm treatment accelerated ovule degeneration. These findings alert on the potential negative effect of even slight increases in temperature during cherry blooming, which nowadays – due to global warming trends – is a plausible and realistic scenario under Mediterranean climatic conditions.
University of Groningen High-voltage-activated Ca2+ currents and the excitability of pyramidal neurons in the hippocampal CA3 subfield in rats depend on corticosterone and time of day

This study tested the time-of-day dependence of the intrinsic postsynaptic properties of hippocampal CA3 pyramidal neurons. High-voltage-activated Ca currents and the Caand voltage-dependent afterhyperpolarizations were examined in slices of rat brains obtained at four distinct time periods. Just after onset of the dark phase, the steady-state amplitude of the Ca current (21.24 ^ 0.11 nA) was signi®cantly greater (P , 0:03) than that of the light phase (20.84 ^ 0.06 nA). Over the entire time range, the amplitude of the Ca current correlated with plasma corticosterone levels in a U-shaped function. Furthermore, depolarization-induced excitability during the dark phase exhibited an increased spike after depolarization (3.1 ^ 0.1 mV) and a slower adaptation of the ®ring frequency (146 ^ 18%). These ®ndings point to a dynamic time-of-day dependence of the CA3 neuronal properties and postsynaptic Ca currents. q 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.
Biodegradation of azo and triphenylmethanes dyes: Cytotoxicity of dyes, slime production and enzymatic activities of Staphylococcus epidermidis isolated from industrial wastewater

In view of compliance with increasingly stringent environmental legislation imposed by regional, national and supranational (for example, European Union) authorities, innovative environmental technologies for the treatment of dye-contaminated effluents are necessary in the color industry. In this study, azo (methyl orange (MO) and methyl red (MR)) and triphenylmethanes (malachite green (MG), fushin (F) and crystal violet (CV)) dyes were subjected to distinct treatment strains following an initial qualitative characterization. The effectiveness of their biodegradation using Staphylococcus epidermidis strain was compared with respect to parameters such as residual color, and toxicity on human cells. The Hep-2 cells were exposed to three azo and two triphenylmethane dyes at various concentrations. After 72 h exposure, the protein contents of the samples compared to the protein contents of non-exposed cells were measured. The level of protein content indicates the viability of the cells. The IC20 values show the limiting value of toxicity. The IC50 values before biodegradation show whether samples are clearly toxic. The IC50 value for the azo dyes (MO, MR) were 65 and 10 μg/ml, the IC20 value were 10 and 5 μg/ml. The IC50 for the triphenylmethane dyes (MG, F and CV) were 35, 25 and 30 μg/ml, the IC20 value were 5, 5 and 10 μg/ml. The viability of the cells was good, the protein content of the samples being over 80% compared to the non-exposed cells. The Hep-2 cell test indicated the toxicity of pure dyes before biodegradation; the dyes after decolorization had no adverse effect. The human keratinocyte Hep-2 cells seem to be a useful tool for the study of the purity/toxicity of dyes and other substances applied to textiles. In addition, the initial cytotoxicity of dyes was still present after the biodegradation, while it was completely removed through the bacterial treatment. Our results show that S. epidermidis was a slime-producer developing almost black colonies on Congo red agar plate. A significant increase in azoreductase, lignin peroxidase and laccase activities in the cells were obtained after complete decolorization. Key words: Azo dye, triphenylmethane dye, Staphylococcus epidermidis, cytotoxicity, slime production.
The expression of heat shock protein 70 gene with organic selenium supplementation and its effetc on productivity of broilers in tropical environment

The purpose of this experiment is to study the effect of organic selenium (Se) supplementation on the expression of heat shock protein 70 gene (HSP70), glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) enzyme activity, malondialdehyde (MDA) and productivity of broilers in tropical environment. Three kinds of environmental pens were designed in this experiment: comfortable environment pens with temperature of air conditioner adjusted at 22 o C (R0), tropical environment pens (±30 o C ) without organic Se (R1), and tropical environment pens supplemented with 0.30 ppm organic Se (R2). One hundred and twenty broiler chickens (unisex) were used in this study. There were 40 chicks per pen for each treatment. The experimental design was completely randomized with four replications for each treatment. The data were statistically analyzed using the general linear model of SAS program. Results showed that R0 and R2 groups had significantly increased (P<0.05) feed intake, body weight, body weight gain, and decreased feed conversion ratio compared to R1 groups. Meanwhile, the expression of HSP70, GSH-Px enzyme activity and MDA of R2 groups and R0 groups were significantly lower (P<0.05) than that of R1 groups. It was concluded that the broilers given 0.30 ppm organic Se in tropical environment had similar productivity and expression of HSP 70 with broilers kept in comfortable environment.