Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Guidance and robust generalized inversion based attitude control of Satellite Launch Vehicle

This paper presents the robustified form of generalized dynamic inversion control and its application to attitude control for satellite launch vehicle. In proposed control law, dynamic constraint is prescribed in the form of asymptotically stable differential equation that encapsulate the control objectives. The constraint differential equation is evaluated along the vehicle's attitude trajectories and is inverted to solve for the control variables using the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse based Greville formula for under determined algebraic systems. For singularity avoidance and stable attitude tracking, a dynamic scale factor is augmented in the involved Moore-Penrose generalized inverse. An additional sliding mode control loop is augmented to make generalized dynamic inversion control robust against model uncertainties and external disturbances. The stability of the control system is ensured by using positive definite lyapunov energy function, for stable attitude tracking. An external guidance loop is applied which reshapes the reference pitch and yaw attitude profiles online based on the normal and lateral positional errors respectively, to achieve desired orbital parameters. To analyse ascent flight trajectory, a detail six degree of freedom mathematical model of four stage satellite launch vehicle is developed in Simulink/Matlab. The effectiveness of the proposed control and guidance scheme is evaluated on satellite launch vehicle simulator, in the presence of parametric variations and external disturbances.
Overcoming Hypothetical Bias in Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation Studies : Some Preliminary Results

Contingent Valuation studies, in which respondents are presented with a hypothetical choice, can be prone to hypothetical bias as respondents could overstate their willingness to pay. The purpose of this paper is to present a method to detect hypothetical bias in the single bound dichotomous choice model. The method borrows the tools from the stochastic frontier model, as in the case of Hofler and List (2004) for open ended auctions, and applies them to the dichotomous choice case. The cumulative distribution function of the resulting composed error term is approximated using the results of Tsay et. al.,(2013). Some preliminary simulation results are presented and the method is applied to a study of willingness to accept (WTA) for the establishment of a wind park in South Rethymno, Crete.
Developing Computational Thinking in Compulsory Education - Implications for policy and practice

In the past decade, Computational Thinking (CT) and related concepts (e.g. coding, programing, algorithmic thinking) have received increasing attention in the educational field. This has given rise to a large amount of academic and grey literature, and also numerous public and private implementation initiatives. Despite this widespread interest, successful CT integration in compulsory education still faces unresolved issues and challenges. This report provides a comprehensive overview of CT skills for schoolchildren, encompassing recent research findings and initiatives at grassroots and policy levels. It also offers a better understanding of the core concepts and attributes of CT and its potential for compulsory education. The study adopts a mostly qualitative approach that comprises extensive desk research, a survey of Ministries of Education and semi-structured interviews, which provide insights from experts, practitioners and policy makers. The report discusses the most significant CT developments for compulsory education in Europe and provides a comprehensive synthesis of evidence, including implications for policy and practice.
Pre‐conditions for eliminating mitochondrial dysfunction and maintaining liver function after hepatic ischaemia reperfusion

The liver, the largest organ with multiple synthesis and secretion functions in mammals, consists of hepatocytes and Kupffer, stem, endothelial, stellate and other parenchymal cells. Because of early and extensive contact with the external environment, hepatic ischaemia reperfusion (IR) may result in mitochondrial dysfunction, autophagy and apoptosis of cells and tissues under various pathological conditions. Because the liver requires a high oxygen supply to maintain normal detoxification and synthesis functions, it is extremely susceptible to ischaemia and subsequent reperfusion with blood. Consequently, hepatic IR leads to acute or chronic liver failure and significantly increases the total rate of morbidity and mortality through multiple regulatory mechanisms. An increasing number of studies indicate that mitochondrial structure and function are impaired after hepatic IR, but that the health of liver tissues or liver grafts can be effectively rescued by attenuation of mitochondrial dysfunction. In this review, we mainly focus on the subsequent therapeutic interventions related to the conservation of mitochondrial function involved in mitigating hepatic IR injury and the potential mechanisms of protection. Because mitochondria are abundant in liver tissue, clarification of the regulatory mechanisms between mitochondrial dysfunction and hepatic IR should shed light on clinical therapies for alleviating hepatic IR‐induced injury.
Deep Stacked Autoencoders for Spoken Language Understanding

The automatic transcription process of spoken document results in several word errors, especially when very noisy conditions are encountered. Document representations based on neural embedding frameworks have recently shown significant improvements in different Spoken and Natural Language Understanding tasks such as denoising and filtering. Nonetheless, these methods mainly need clean representations, failing to properly remove noise contained in noisy representations. This paper proposes to study the impact of residual noise contained into automatic transcripts of spoken dialogues in highly abstract spaces from deep neural networks. The paper makes the assumption that the noise learned from “clean” manual transcripts of spoken documents moves down dramatically the performance of theme identification systems in noisy conditions. The proposed deep neural network takes, as input and output, highly imperfect transcripts from spoken dialogues to improve the robustness of the document representation in a noisy environment. Results obtained on the DECODA theme classification task of dialogues reach an accuracy of 82% with a significant gain of about 5%.
Issues of validity in actigraphic sleep assessment.

OBJECTIVES The Standards of Practice Committee of the American Sleep Disorders Association has supported the use of actigraphy in the assessment of sleep disorders. Pollak et al disagree. The objective of this paper is to identify and critically evaluate several theoretic and methodologic issues that are central to these divergent views regarding the valid use of actigraphy for sleep assessment. DESIGN Critical review, analysis, and comment. SETTING N/A. PATIENTS/PARTICIPANTS N/A. INTERVENTIONS N/A. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS N/A. CONCLUSIONS (1) Coefficients of the validity of actigraphy exceed those associated with common medical tests and the best psychological tests. (2) Reasons why actigraphy should be held to a substantially higher empirical standard than common medical tests and the best psychological tests have yet to be advanced. (3) Differences between actigraphy and polysomnography are not random and can be reduced. (3a) Sleep onset is a gradual rather than a discrete process. Actigraphy keys on an earlier phase of the sleep-onset process than does polysomnography, resulting in systematic rather than random differences. (3b) A sleep switch device can be used to substantially increase the accuracy of sleep-onset times. (3c) The residual unreliability of polysomnographic data explains a portion of the differences between actigraphy and polysomnography. Actigraphy cannot be expected to agree more completely with polysomnography than polysomnography does with itself. (4) Complete agreement between actigraphy and polysomnography has been presumed, but achieving such a limit is theoretically impossible. Some lower maximum agreement limit should be identified. (5) Conclusions that actigraphy is not an accurate sleep-wake indicator and that it is inappropriate to infer sleep from actigraphy data are not supported by the findings. Conclusions reached, including caveats, by the Standards of Practice Committee remain supported.
Repressor for the sn-glycerol 3-phosphate regulon of Escherichia coli K-12: primary structure and identification of the DNA-binding domain

The nucleotide sequence of the glpEGR operon of Escherichia coli was determined. The translational reading frame at the beginning, middle, and end of each gene was verified. The glpE gene encodes an acidic, cytoplasmic protein of 108 amino acids with a molecular weight of 12,082. The glpG gene encodes a basic, cytoplasmic membrane-associated protein of 276 amino acids with a molecular weight of 31,278. The functions of GlpE and GlpG are unknown. The glpR gene encodes the repressor for the glycerol 3-phosphate regulon, a protein predicted to contain 252 amino acids with a calculated molecular weight of 28,048. The amino acid sequence of the glp repressor was similar to several repressors of carbohydrate catabolic systems, including those of the glucitol (GutR), fucose (FucR), and deoxyribonucleoside (DeoR) systems of E. coli, as well as those of the lactose (LacR) and inositol (IolR) systems of gram-positive bacteria and agrocinopine (AccR) system of Agrobacterium tumefaciens. These repressors constitute a family of related proteins, all of which contain approximately 250 amino acids, possess a helix-turn-helix DNA-binding motif near the amino terminus, and bind a sugar phosphate molecule as the inducing signal. The DNA recognition helix of the glp repressor and the nucleotide sequence of the glp operator were very similar to those of the deo system. The presumptive recognition helix of the glp repressor was changed by site-directed mutagenesis to match that of the deo repressor or, in a separate construct, to abolish DNA binding. Neither altered form of the glp repressor recognized the glp or deo operator, either in vivo or in vitro. However, both altered forms of the glp repressor were negatively dominant to the wild-type glp repressor, indicating that the inability to bind DNA with high affinity was due to alteration of the DNA-binding domain, not to an inability to oligomerize or instability of the altered repressors. For the first time, analysis of repressors with altered DNA-binding domains has verified the assignment of the helix-turn-helix motif of the transcriptional regulators in the deoR family.
Oral Escherichia coli Colonization Factor Antigen I Fimbriae Ameliorate Arthritis via IL-35, Not IL-27

A Salmonella therapeutic expressing enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli colonization factor Ag I (CFA/I) fimbriae protects against collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) by eliciting two regulatory T cell (Treg) subsets: TGF-β–producing Foxp3−CD39+CD4+ T cells and IL-10–producing Foxp3+CD39+CD4+ T cells. However, it is unclear whether CFA/I fimbriae alone are protective and whether other regulatory cytokines are involved, especially in the context for the EBI3-sharing cytokines, Treg-derived IL-35 and APC-derived IL-27, both capable of suppressing Th17 cells and regulating autoimmune diseases. Subsequent evaluation revealed that a single oral dose of purified, soluble CFA/I fimbriae protected against CIA as effectively as did Salmonella-CFA/I and found that Foxp3+CD39+CD4+ T cells were the source of secreted IL-35, whereas IL-27 production by CD11c+ cells was inhibited. Inquiring into their relevance, CFA/I fimbriae–treated IL-27R–deficient (WSX-1−/−) mice were equally protected against CIA as were wild-type mice, suggesting a limited role for IL-27. In contrast, CFA/I fimbriae–mediated protection was abated in EBI3−/− mice, accompanied by the loss of TGF-β– and IL-10–producing Tregs. Adoptive transfer of C57BL/6 CD39+CD4+ T cells to EBI3−/− mice with concurrent CFA/I plus IL-35 treatment effectively stimulated Tregs suppressing proinflammatory collagen II–specific Th cells. In contrast, recipients cotransferred with C57BL/6 and EBI3−/− CD39+CD4+ T cells and treated with CFA/I plus IL-35 were not protected, implicating the importance of endogenous IL-35 for conferring CFA/I-mediated protection. Thus, CFA/I fimbriae stimulate IL-35 required for the coinduction of TGF-β and IL-10.
The utility of weather and climate information for adaptation decision-making: current uses and future prospects in Africa and India

Developing countries share many common challenges in addressing current and future climate risks. A key barrier to managing these risks is the limited availability of accessible, reliable and relevant weather and climate information. Despite continued investments in Earth System Modelling, and the growing provision of climate services across Africa and India, there often remains a mismatch between available information and what is needed to support on-the-ground decision-making. In this paper, we outline the range of currently available information and present examples from Africa and India to demonstrate the challenges in meeting information needs in different contexts. A review of literature supplemented by interviews with experts suggests that externally provided weather and climate information has an important role in building on local knowledge to shape understanding of climate risks and guide decision-making across scales. Moreover, case studies demonstrate that successful decision-making can be achieved with currently available information. However, these successful examples predominantly use daily, weekly and seasonal climate information for decision-making over short time horizons. Despite an increasing volume of global and regional climate model simulations, there are very few clear examples of long-term climate information being used to inform decisions at sub-national scales. We argue that this is largely because the information produced and disseminated is often ill-suited to inform decision-making at the local scale, particularly for farmers, pastoralists and sub-national governments. Even decision-makers involved in long-term planning, such as national government officials, find it difficult to plan using decadal and multi-decadal climate projections because of issues around uncertainty, risk averseness and constraints in justifying funding allocations on prospective risks. Drawing on lessons learnt from recent successes and failures, a framework is proposed to help increase the utility and uptake of both current and future climate information across Africa and India.
Differentiation between Spitz nevi and malignant melanomas by interphase fluorescence in situ hybridization.

Spitz nevi are benign melanocytic neoplasias which have distinct pathological features that make the pathological differential diagnosis from malignant melanomas extremely difficult. The Spitz nevi may be misdiagnosed as malignant melanoma and vice versa. Therefore, interphase fluorescence in situ hybridization (I-FISH) was used for a possible discrimination between Spitz nevi and malignant melanomas on the basis of numerical aberrations of the chromosome complement in interphase nuclei of thin sections. Previous studies had shown changes in malignant melanomas which were not found at the same level in normal tissue or benign tumors. Thin sections of archival paraffin material from 42 Spitz nevi with different histological type and grade of anomaly were subjected to FISH-analyses using commercially available biotinylated and/or digoxigenated alphoid DNA probes of chromosomes 1, 6, 7, 9, 17 and 18, which were applied in combinations in a two- or three-color-FISH. Unaffected epithelial areas from the same sections served as. The obtained data were compared with those collected previously from thin sections of malignant melanomas prepared in the same way. Due to the sometimes limited nevus area investigated, the number of evaluable nuclei was lower than expected from previous experiences with malignant melanomas. Therefore, only 20 nevi could be reliably evaluated. The comparison of the group of Spitz nevi with the group of controls did not show any significant difference regarding chromosomes 1, 6, 7, 9 and 17 (Wilcoxon test). The method used to detect chromosomal loss or gain in the individual Spitz nevi demonstrated only two nevi (one of the spindle cell type with a low to middle grade of anomaly, the other of the epitheloid cell type with a middle grade of anomaly) with a gain of chromosome 7 and chromosome 17, respectively. So, with respect to the histological type and grade of anomaly, no numerical aberrations could be detected in Spitz nevi. The comparison of the group of Spitz nevi with subgroups of malignant melanomas (metastatic, non-metastatic, melanomas with a thickness <1.5 mm and melanomas with a thickness >2. 0 mm) and with the whole group of malignant melanomas showed significant differences concerning chromosome 9 (Mann-Whitney U test), signal indices, which were higher in the melanomas than in the Spitz nevi. Regarding chromosomes 6, 7 and 17 no significant differences could be shown, although a trend of gain in melanomas and of loss in Spitz nevi was observed of these chromosomes.
Extensive microRNA-mediated crosstalk between lncRNAs and mRNAs in mouse embryonic stem cells

Recently, a handful of intergenic long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been shown to compete with mRNAs for binding to miRNAs and to contribute to development and disease. Beyond these reports, little is yet known of the extent and functional consequences of miRNA-mediated regulation of mRNA levels by lncRNAs. To gain further insight into lncRNA-mRNA miRNA-mediated crosstalk, we reanalyzed transcriptome-wide changes induced by the targeted knockdown of over 100 lncRNA transcripts in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs). We predicted that, on average, almost one-fifth of the transcript level changes induced by lncRNAs are dependent on miRNAs that are highly abundant in mESCs. We validated these findings experimentally by temporally profiling transcriptome-wide changes in gene expression following the loss of miRNA biogenesis in mESCs. Following the depletion of miRNAs, we found that >50% of lncRNAs and their miRNA-dependent mRNA targets were up-regulated coordinately, consistent with their interaction being miRNA-mediated. These lncRNAs are preferentially located in the cytoplasm, and the response elements for miRNAs they share with their targets have been preserved in mammals by purifying selection. Lastly, miRNA-dependent mRNA targets of each lncRNA tended to share common biological functions. Post-transcriptional miRNA-mediated crosstalk between lncRNAs and mRNA, in mESCs, is thus surprisingly prevalent, conserved in mammals, and likely to contribute to critical developmental processes.
Expanding beyond individualism: Engaging critical perspectives on occupation

Abstract Background: Perspectives that individualize occupation are poorly aligned with socially responsive and transformative occupation-focused research, education, and practice. Their predominant use in occupational therapy risks the perpetuation, rather than resolution, of occupational inequities. Aim: In this paper, we problematize taken-for-granted individualistic analyses of occupation and illustrate how critical theoretical perspectives can reveal the ways in which structural factors beyond an individual’s immediate control and environment shape occupational possibilities and occupational engagement. Method: Using a critically reflexive approach, we draw on three distinct qualitative research studies to examine the potential of critical theorizing for expanding beyond a reliance on individualistic analyses and practices. Results: Our studies highlight the importance of addressing the socio-historical and political contexts of occupation and demonstrate the contribution of critical perspectives to socially responsive occupational therapy. Conclusion and significance: In expanding beyond individualistic analyses of occupation, critical perspectives advance research and practices towards addressing socio-political mediators of occupational engagement and equity.
Quantifying Evidence for Candidate Gene Polymorphisms: Bayesian Analysis Combining Sequence-Specific and Quantitative Trait Loci Colocation Information

We calculate posterior probabilities for candidate genes as a function of genomic location. Posterior probabilities for quantitative trait loci (QTL) presence in a small interval are calculated using a Bayesian model-selection approach based on the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and used to combine QTL colocation information with sequence-specific evidence, e.g., from differential expression and/or association studies. Our method takes into account uncertainty in estimation of number and locations of QTL and estimated map position. Posterior probabilities for QTL presence were calculated for simulated data with n = 100, 300, and 1200 QTL progeny and compared with interval mapping and composite-interval mapping. Candidate genes that mapped to QTL regions had substantially larger posterior probabilities. Among candidates with a given Bayes factor, those that map near a QTL are more promising for further investigation with association studies and functional testing or for use in marker-aided selection. The BIC is shown to correspond very closely to Bayes factors for linear models with a nearly noninformative Zellner prior for the simulated QTL data with n ≥ 100. It is shown how to modify the BIC to use a subjective prior for the QTL effects.
How Do People-Based Housing Policies Affect People (and Place)?

Abstract Assisted housing programs in the United States aim to provide decent, safe, and affordable housing for low-income households. Increasingly, policymakers have also considered how assisted housing can provide access to lower poverty, income-diverse, and higher opportunity neighborhoods. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development currently balances two strategies. First, place-based programs—immoveable subsidies linked to particular units—can both revitalize distressed neighborhoods and provide access to higher opportunity neighborhoods. Second, people-based assistance—housing vouchers for use on the private rental market—can facilitate moves out of high-poverty, low-opportunity neighborhoods. During this policy moment with fair housing priorities receiving national attention, understanding the efficacy of each approach is critically important. This article synthesizes past research on housing vouchers to identify the impact of people-based assistance on four outcomes: residents’ neighborhood attainment, education, economic outcomes, and health. I also review the scant literature examining how vouchers affect place rather than people. I conclude by identifying aspects of special voucher programs that promote positive outcomes that could potentially be scaled up.