Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Existence, uniqueness and stability of solutions of generalized Tikhonov-Phillips functionals

The Tikhonov-Phillips method is widely used for regularizing ill-posed inverse problems mainly due to the simplicity of its formulation as an optimization problem. The use of different penalizers in the functionals associated to the corresponding optimization problems has originated a variety other methods which can be considered as "variants" of the traditional Tikhonov-Phillips method of order zero. Such is the case for instance of the Tikhonov-Phillips method of order one, the total variation regularization method, etc. In this article we find sufficient conditions on the penalizers in generalized Tikhonov-Phillips functionals which guarantee existence and uniqueness and stability of the minimizers. The particular cases in which the penalizers are given by the bounded variation norm, by powers of seminorms and by linear combinations of powers of seminorms associated to closed operators, are studied. Several examples are presented and a few results on image restoration are shown.
Identification of an Upstream Sequence Element Required for Vesicular Stomatitis Virus mRNA Transcription

ABSTRACT Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), the prototypic rhabdovirus, has a nonsegmented negative-sense RNA genome with five genes flanked by 3′ leader and 5′ trailer sequences. Transcription of VSV mRNAs is obligatorily sequential, starting from a single 3′ polymerase entry site, and termination of an upstream mRNA is essential for transcription of a downstream gene. cis-acting signals for transcription of VSV mRNAs are present within the leader region, at the leader-N junction, and at the internal gene junctions. The gene junctions of VSV consist of a conserved 23-nucleotide region that includes the gene end sequence of the upstream gene, 3′-AUACU7-5′, a nontranscribed intergenic dinucleotide, 3′-G/CA-5′, and the gene start sequence, 3′-UUGUCNNUAG-5′, at the beginning of the gene immediately downstream. Previous work has shown that the gene end sequence and intergenic region are sufficient to signal polyadenylation and termination of VSV transcripts. Mutagenesis of the gene start sequence has determined the importance of this region in the processes of initiation and 5′-end modification of mRNAs. However, because the gene end sequence is positioned directly upstream of the gene start sequence in the gene junction, and because of the requirement for termination of the upstream gene prior to transcription of the downstream gene, it has not been possible to investigate whether the gene end sequence contributes to transcription of the downstream gene. In this study, we inserted an additional gene end sequence upstream of the gene junction in a subgenomic replicon of VSV, which extended the intergenic region from 2 to 88 nucleotides. This duplication of termination signals allowed us to separate the signals required for termination from those required for initiation. We investigated the effect that the upstream gene end sequences had on downstream mRNA transcription. Our data show that the U7 tract of the upstream gene end sequence is necessary for optimal transcription of the downstream gene, independent of its role in termination of the upstream gene. Altering the sequence or changing the length of the U tract directly upstream of the gene start sequence significantly decreased transcription of the downstream gene. These results show that the U tract is a multifunctional region that is required not only for polyadenylation and termination of the upstream mRNA but also for efficient transcription of the downstream gene.
Immunostimulatory CpG treatment for genital HSV-2 infections.

887 .
Evaluation of late cerebral vascular complications in cranially irradiated pediatric cancer patients with magnetic resonance angiography

Background: We aimed to establish the early diagnosis of cerebral vascular complications by using cerebral magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) in patients who were treated with cranial RT in childhood as part of their cancer treatment. Procedure: Patients who had received cranial RT before the age of 18 and had been in remission for at least 1 year were enrolled in the study. A data form including demographic and clinical characteristics and findings of cerebral MRA was filled in for each patient. Results: Cerebral MRA examination was performed between November 2013 and October 2015 in 53 patients who met the inclusion criteria. Abnormalities were found in 7 patients (13.2%). All patients were asymptomatic at the time of examination. There was a significant difference between patients in the abnormality-positive and abnormality-negative groups related to cranial radiation dose (p = 0.013) and age at the time of examination (p = 0.015) in univariate analysis. In multivariate analysis, cranial radiation dose was found to have an impact on developing cerebral vascular abnormalities (p = 0.045). Conclusions: Cerebral MRA is a noninvasive method of follow-up for late cerebral vascular complications in surviving pediatric oncology patients who were treated with cranial RT as part of their cancer treatment.
Premature Birth as a Factor in Autism Spectrum Disorder

iv INTRODUCTION . 1 AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS . 3 History . 3 Autism . 3 Asperger’s Syndrome . 6 Diagnosis . 8 Prevalence . 14 Core Features . 15 Socialization . 15 Communication . 16 Repetitive Behaviors and Restricted Interests . 18 Assessment . 19 Early Detection and Intervention . 23 Etiology . 25 SEVERITY OF SPECTRUM . 28 Socialization . 28 Communication . 29 Repetitive Behaviors and Restricted Interests . 30 Predictors of Severity . 31 PREMATURE BIRTH . 33 Gestational Development . 34 Prematurity and Developmental Delays . 36 Prematurity and ASD . 37 PURPOSE . 40 Hypothesis 1 . 41 Hypothesis 2 . 41
Sensor-based neural navigation

Many researchers have studied how animals perform navigational tasks. Trullier et al. (1996) showed that insects often use guidance for navigation. Guidance proceeds by returning to an invisible goal in an environment containing prominent objects or features, called landmarks. Lambrinos et al. (1998) proposed a navigation model capable of performing guidance tasks. Their model, the average landmark vector model or ALV model, performs guidance using a mathematical model involving a center-of-gravity calculation with respect to the landmarks. The ALV model assumes that the directions of the landmarks are known and therefore does not state how landmark positions should be extracted from the sensor data. Because land mark extraction is not an easy task, errors are inevitable. This problem is augmented by the dynamic nature of real world environments. Therefore, a guidance model should be able to handle errors in the extraction of the landmarks. This thesis presents a neural guidance model, the Sensor-based Neural Navigation (SNN) model that is designed for robust navigation from raw sensor data. A robot using the SNN model is able to reach a goal position in an environment of landmarks after being trained on examples of that environment. Each example consists of a sensor vector, i.e., a snapshot taken at a random position, and the associated goal vector. The backpropagation algorithm (Parker, 1985; Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams, 1986) is used to learn to associate the snapshots with their goal vectors. The research question addressed in this thesis reads: To what extent is the SNN model capable to perform the guidance task using raw sensor data? In order to answer this question, the performance of the SNN model is evaluated and compared to a sensor-based version of the ALV model. The experimental studies yielded the following three results. First, the performance of the ALV model critically relies on the performance of the landmark detector. Second, the SNN model i s capable of performing the guidance task using raw sensor data. In a dynamic environment, the SNN model outperforms the sensor-based ALV model, although in a static world, the sensor-based ALV model performs better. Third, an extended version of the SNN model is not capable of performing the guidance task in multiple environments. Therefore, it is concluded that the SNN model is capable of performing the guidance task.
Extremely intense (SML l–2500 nT) substorms: isolated events that are externally triggered?

Abstract. We examine particularly intense substorms (SML l–2500 nT), hereafter called "supersubstorms" or SSS events, to identify their nature and their magnetic storm dependences. It is found that these intense substorms are typically isolated events and are only loosely related to magnetic storms. SSS events can occur during super (Dst l–250 nT) and intense (−100 nT g Dst >–250) magnetic storms. SSS events can also occur during nonstorm (Dst g–50 nT) intervals. SSSs are important because the strongest ionospheric currents will flow during these events, potentially causing power outages on Earth. Several SSS examples are shown. SSS events appear to be externally triggered by small regions of very high density (~30 to 50 cm−3) solar wind plasma parcels (PPs) impinging upon the magnetosphere. Precursor southward interplanetary magnetic fields are detected prior to the PPs hitting the magnetosphere. Our hypothesis is that these southward fields input energy into the magnetosphere/magnetotail and the PPs trigger the release of the stored energy.
Statistical Integration of Microarrays

4 Example: Breast cancer 3 4.1 Data sets . 3 4.2 Assembling the data . 4 4.3 Applying the model . 5 4.4 Plotting and tabulating the P-values . 6 4.5 Visualizing association patterns . 8 4.6 Prioritizing candidate regions and genes . 10
Mindfulness-Based Strategic Awareness Training: A Complete Program for Leaders and Individuals

and Individuals, First Edition. Juan Humberto Young. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Companion website: www.wiley. com/go/humbertoyoung/mbsat ABC model/sequence (of cognitive therapy) 128, 143–4, 150 abdomen rising and falling in three‐minute breathing space 250, 267, 273, 277, 321 acceptance 102–3, 159–71 defining 162–3 responding with 86, 159–71 acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) 45–6 accomplishment (in PERMA model) 16–17, 26–7 Achilles 199 action(s) positive see SOPA values in (VIA) 22–4, 136, 157, 165, 208, 219, 261, 283, 305, 307–9, 330 action quadrants, mindful positive, 216–17, 333 action‐oriented biases 10, 334–5 action‐oriented intervention 77–8, 99 active communication 206 constructive see constructive communication destructive 206, 330 active constructive responding 204–6, 317, 329–30 activities cognitive 8, 127–8 daily, integration into 236–7 inventory/list of (exercise) 208, 216, 319, 326, 330 routine see routines A–C (ambition–contentment) curve 294, 296 adaptive attachment 224, 340 adaptive aversion 224, 340 adaptive challenges, 41, 160 adaptive function of envy 177 see also maladaptive response adjustment, insufficient 10, 335 adversity/difficulty 168 in directing friendliness meditation to oneself 317 Irimi meditation on 42, 89, 161, 167–70, 274–6, 279–83, 287 Aetna, Mark Bertolini (CEO) 183, 200 affective forecasting/prediction 29–30, 62 Aikido 34, 89, 101, 107–8, 139, 168, 169, 213, 279, 284 ambition, glorifying 199 ambition–contentment (A–C) curve 294, 296 amusement 20 ancestral and modern environments, biosocial mismatch between 7, 8, 337 anchoring 10, 335 Index
Isochrony in Old English Poetry: Two Performances of Cædmon's Hymn

In an argument for the development of a specifically oral poetics, the anthropologist and ethnopoeticist Dennis Tedlock concludes that “oral poetry begins with the voice and an oral poetics returns to the voice” (1977:517). Tedlock insists that the restoration of ancient oral poetry must be participatory: “Before the Renaissance, to ‘read’ or to ‘study’ a text meant pronouncing the words aloud, and that is what philologists must now do with ancient . texts” (516). 1 This stress on the centrality of oral performance as the touchstone of critical discourse about oral literature, that is, that an ancient text “must be judged not on the basis of its acceptability as silent written literature, but on the basis of how it sounds when read aloud . ” (516), has important implications for students of Old English prosody (among many others, and including folklorists, classicists, and anthropologists). Tedlock’s position is supported by the folklorist Richard Bauman
Performance Measurement and Managerial Thinking

T he accountability argument for performance measurement is powerful and persuasive. How can a government be truly accountable if it only tracks the dollars moving through its system and barely mentions the services rendered through the use of these resources? Many governments have supplemented traditional evidence of financial stewardship with facts and figures on services to demonstrate the scope and magnitude of their offerings. Few would argue that accountability has not been enhanced as a result. Although logical, the argument for performance measurement as a tool of service improvement is more easily challenged. Performance measurement proponents enthusiastically contend that better information will lead to better decisions, that measures can influence the beneficial redirection of resources, and that the practice of measurement will generate improvements in performance. These arguments sell well among favorably predisposed audiences. Tougher skeptics, however, are not buying. Performance measurement skeptics say that meaningful measures for their functions are difficult or impossible to develop, that they can ill afford to divert scarce resources from service delivery to performance measurement, that their antiquated computer systems make performance measurement impractical, or that they have tried performance measurement and did not see the promised benefits. Unless performance measurement proponents and researchers can provide tangible evidence that measurement is practical for their function and that the service improvement value of measurement outweighs its cost-and can provide plenty of such evidence-these skeptics are unlikely to be swayed.
Broadcasting peace: radio a tool for recovery

Mega FM’s broadcasts may not reach far outside northern Uganda. But in an area that has been brutalized by decades of insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), it is having an impact. Oryema, a former LRA child soldier who later returned home, explains why. “I did not feel anything bad about killing,” he says. “Not until I started listening to Radio Mega. … I actually heard over the radio how.we burnt homes. … And I started to think, ‘Are we really fighting a normal war? ’ That is when I started realizing that maybe there is something better than being here in the bush. ”
Increased Prevalence of HTLV-1 in Patients With Pulmonary Tuberculosis Coinfected With HIV, but Not in HIV-Negative Patients With Tuberculosis

Background:Few and inconclusive results have been presented regarding the influence of human T-lymphotropic virus 1 (HTLV-1) infection on the risk of acquiring tuberculosis (TB). Methods:In 1994-1997, we performed a prospective study on hospitalized adult patients with pulmonary TB in Guinea-Bissau and compared the clinical outcome in HIV-2 and HIV-negative patients. We determined the prevalence of HTLV-1 in all patients screened and diagnosed with TB in that study and compared the infection rate with a serosurvey of HTLV-1 in a population sample from a community-based study conducted at the same time and in the same city. Results:In the TB group, a total of 32 (11.4%) of 280 patients were positive for HTLV-1. This was significantly higher compared with the population-based group in which 74 (3.5%) of 2117 were HTLV-1 positive [crude odds ratio (OR) = 3.6; 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.2 to 5.6, P < 0.001]. However, in a logistic regression analysis controlling for age, gender, and HIV result, the difference was no longer significant (OR = 1.61; 95% CI 0.95 to 2.70, P = 0.074). In HIV-negative patients, no association was found between HTLV-1 and TB (OR = 1.18; 95% CI 0.48 to 2.89, P = 0.71), whereas a significant association was found in HIV-positive patients (OR = 2.41; 95% CI 1.26 to 4.61, P = 0.008). Conclusions:The immunosuppressive effect of HTLV-1 alone was not enough to increase the risk of TB in a highly endemic country, but HTLV-1 increased the risk of TB among HIV-infected individuals.
Indexable PLA for Efficient Similarity Search

Similarity-based search over time-series databases has been a hot research topic for a long history, which is widely used in many applications, including multimedia retrieval, data mining, web search and retrieval, and so on. However, due to high dimensionality (i.e. length) of the time series, the similarity search over directly indexed time series usually encounters a serious problem, known as the "dimensionality curse". Thus, many dimensionality reduction techniques are proposed to break such curse by reducing the dimensionality of time series. Among all the proposed methods, only Piecewise Linear Approximation (PLA) does not have indexing mechanisms to support similarity queries, which prevents it from efficiently searching over very large time-series databases. Our initial studies on the effectiveness of different reduction methods, however, show that PLA performs no worse than others. Motivated by this, in this paper, we re-investigate PLA for approximating and indexing time series. Specifically, we propose a novel distance function in the reduced PLA-space, and prove that this function indeed results in a lower bound of the Euclidean distance between the original time series, which can lead to no false dismissals during the similarity search. As a second step, we develop an effective approach to index these lower bounds to improve the search efficiency. Our extensive experiments over a wide spectrum of real and synthetic data sets have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of PLA together with the newly proposed lower bound distance, in terms of both pruning power and wall clock time, compared with two state-of-the-art reduction methods, Adaptive Piecewise Constant Approximation (APCA) and Chebyshev Polynomials (CP).
Supplementary materials for ”A statistical network analysis of the HIV/AIDS epidemics in Cuba”

5 Degree distribution 10 5.1 Covariate description . 11 5.2 Calibration of power-law distributions . 11 5.2. 1 Minization Küllback-Leibler divergence . 11 5.2. 2 Hill estimator of the power . 14 5.3 Prediction of the appearance of the giant component . 14 5.4 Isolated individuals . 15
The N-terminal Domain Allosterically Regulates Cleavage and Activation of the Epithelial Sodium Channel*

Background: Ubiquitination of intracellular N termini lysines inhibits cleavage/stimulation of α,β,γ epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) extracellular domains. Results: The N terminus of γ-ENaC attains secondary structure upon sensing membrane phospholipids. Basic residues promote ENaC cleavage. Conclusion: Ubiquitination obscures residues mediating allosteric stimulatory N-terminal structural transition that promotes ENaC cleavage/stimulation. Significance: This study presents a new mechanism of allosteric linkage between cytosolic signaling pathways and extracellular ENaC proteolysis. The epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) is activated upon endoproteolytic cleavage of specific segments in the extracellular domains of the α- and γ-subunits. Cleavage is accomplished by intracellular proteases prior to membrane insertion and by surface-expressed or extracellular soluble proteases once ENaC resides at the cell surface. These cleavage events are partially regulated by intracellular signaling through an unknown allosteric mechanism. Here, using a combination of computational and experimental techniques, we show that the intracellular N terminus of γ-ENaC undergoes secondary structural transitions upon interaction with phosphoinositides. From ab initio folding simulations of the N termini in the presence and absence of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2), we found that PIP2 increases α-helical propensity in the N terminus of γ-ENaC. Electrophysiology and mutation experiments revealed that a highly conserved cluster of lysines in the γ-ENaC N terminus regulates accessibility of extracellular cleavage sites in γ-ENaC. We also show that conditions that decrease PIP2 or enhance ubiquitination sharply limit access of the γ-ENaC extracellular domain to proteases. Further, the efficiency of allosteric control of ENaC proteolysis is dependent on Tyr370 in γ-ENaC. Our findings provide an allosteric mechanism for ENaC activation regulated by the N termini and sheds light on a potential general mechanism of channel and receptor activation.
Validation of species–climate impact models under climate change

Increasing concern over the implications of climate change for biodiversity has led to the use of species–climate envelope models to project species extinction risk under climate‐change scenarios. However, recent studies have demonstrated significant variability in model predictions and there remains a pressing need to validate models and to reduce uncertainties. Model validation is problematic as predictions are made for events that have not yet occurred. Resubstituition and data partitioning of present‐day data sets are, therefore, commonly used to test the predictive performance of models. However, these approaches suffer from the problems of spatial and temporal autocorrelation in the calibration and validation sets. Using observed distribution shifts among 116 British breeding‐bird species over the past ∼20 years, we are able to provide a first independent validation of four envelope modelling techniques under climate change. Results showed good to fair predictive performance on independent validation, although rules used to assess model performance are difficult to interpret in a decision‐planning context. We also showed that measures of performance on nonindependent data provided optimistic estimates of models' predictive ability on independent data. Artificial neural networks and generalized additive models provided generally more accurate predictions of species range shifts than generalized linear models or classification tree analysis. Data for independent model validation and replication of this study are rare and we argue that perfect validation may not in fact be conceptually possible. We also note that usefulness of models is contingent on both the questions being asked and the techniques used. Implementations of species–climate envelope models for testing hypotheses and predicting future events may prove wrong, while being potentially useful if put into appropriate context.