Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Multifunctional Element in the Mouse Igκ Locus That Specifies Repertoire and Ig Loci Subnuclear Location

Nonbiased V gene usage for V(D)J joining is essential for providing an optimal immune system, but no cis-acting sequence with this function has been uncovered. We previously identified a recombination silencer and heterochromatin targeting element in the Vκ-Jκ intervening sequence of germline Igκ transgenes, which we termed Sis. We now have generated Sis knockout mice in the endogenous locus. Intriguingly, Sis−/− mice exhibit a skewed Igκ repertoire with markedly decreased distal and enhanced proximal Vκ gene usage for primary rearrangement, which is associated with reduced occupancy of Ikaros and CCCTC-binding factor in the Vκ-Jκ intervening sequence in pre-B cells, proteins believed to be responsible for dampening the recombination of nearby Vκ genes and altering higher-order chromatin looping. Furthermore, monoallelic heterochromatin localization is significantly reduced in Sis−/− mice for Igκ in cis and IgH loci in trans in pre-B cells. Because Sis−/− mice still allelically excluded Igκ and IgH loci and still exhibited IgL isotype exclusion, we concluded that stable localization at pericentromeric heterochromatin is neither necessary nor sufficient for the establishment or maintenance of allelic exclusion. Hence, Sis is a novel multifunctional element that specifies repertoire and heterochromatin localization to Ig genes.
On the effects of programming and testing skills on external quality and productivity in a test-driven development context

Background: In previous studies, a model was proposed that investigated how the developers' unit testing effort impacted their productivity as well as the external quality of the software they developed. Goal: The aim of this study is to enhance the proposed model by considering two additional factors related to the expertise of developers: programming and unit testing skills. The possibility of including such skills in a model that represents the relationship that testing effort has with the developer's productivity and the product's external quality was investigated. Method: Data collected from a test-first development task in academic setting was used in order to gauge the relationship between testing effort, external quality, and productivity. Furthermore, Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was utilized to check the impact of developers' skills on productivity and quality. Result: The results obtained in previous studies were confirmed: there exists a positive effect of testing effort on productivity, but not on quality. Moreover, the developers' skills have an impact on productivity but none on external quality. Conclusion: Productivity improves with testing effort, a result consistent across previous, similar studies. The role of existing skills is a relevant factor in studying the effects of developers' unit testing effort on productivity. Nevertheless, more investigations are needed regarding the relationship between unit testing effort and external quality.
Evaluasi Pelaksanaan Program Pendidikan Inklusi di SMP Negeri

This study aims to evaluate the design, installation, process, and products of the inclusive education program implementation in a Salatiga Public Middle School. This type of research is program evaluation with a discrepancy evaluation model. Information sources in this study are the Principal, Local Content Teacher, Counseling Guidance Teacher who also acts as Special Facilitators Teacher (GPK). Data collection technique include interviews, observation and document study. Data analysis technique include data collection, data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. Data validation through technical and source triangulation. The results: (1) the design evaluation showed the general curriculum and assessment plans have not been modified, educators do not yet have adequate competence, facilities and infrastructure do not yet support the needs of special needs student (ABK); (2) the installation evaluation showed there is no entrance test, the learning design and assessment have not considered the existence of ABK, funding is taken from BOS funds and support from some ABK parents; (3) the process evaluation showed the ABK have difficulty following learning, the support from the community and agencies has not been maximized; and (4) the product evaluation showed that student learning outcomes, namely the assessment of student ID cards are still equated with normal students. Based on the results of the evaluation, the researchers gave the following recommendations: 1) Teachers and GPK collaborated in developing curriculum and competencies, 2) Principals and teachers collaborated in designing models and technical instructions to handle ABK, as well as increasing collaboration with several agencies, and 3) The education office needs to pay attention to the implementation of inclusive education programs and provide assistance in the form of costs, training, seminars, and fulfillment of facilities and infrastructure.
The First Report on Cryptococcus Profiles of Isolates from Patients Attending Dr George Mukhari Academic Hospital, South Africa

Introduction Cryptococcosis is a fungal opportunistic infection that is vastly diagnosed among immune-compromised patients. Reduced susceptibility on commonly used antifungals is of concern. In the communities served by Dr. George Mukhari Tertiary (DGMT-Laboratory) Laboratory is not available. Methodology E-test method was used to determine if isolates with reduced susceptibility to antifungals fluconazole, voriconazole and amphotericin-B had emerged. A multiplex Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) method was used to further identify serotypes that are circulating at Dr. George Mukhari Tertiary (DGMT-Hospital) Hospital. Results E-test strips were interpreted as resistance, intermediate or susceptible in relation to each serotype identified. Of the 50 incident isolates tested, 100% were inhibited by both voriconazole and amphotericin-B. Fluconazole was resistance to 50% of incident isolates. Conclusion C. neoformans serotype A is the predominant serotype in the area served by DGMT-Laboratory, accounting for 96% of the isolates. It is important for public health to continuously monitor resistance emergence.
Flower Development of Tristerix Confirms Irregular Calyx Formation and Obhaplostemony as Plesiomorphies in New World Loranthaceae (Santalales)

Premise of research. The New World Loranthaceae correspond to a polyphyletic assembly of hemiparasites that exhibit a high floral diversity in terms of size, merism, groundplan, symmetry, and pollination strategies. Homology assessment as well as evolution of floral traits and ontogenetic pathways related to calyx, corolla, and androecium in the family have been variously interpreted. The calyx has been considered absent and replaced by a calyculus of bracteolar origin, or reduced and vestigial, or fully developed and fused to the ovary. Also, the corolla and the androecium have been described either as biseriate or uniseriate. Methodology. Here we use SEM to study floral development in Tristerix, a large-flowered genus that precedes the diversification of most New World genera. Pivotal results. We found that flowers are sitting on a cupular pedicel subtended by a partially recaulescent bract, clearly distinct from the calyx. Calyx development is irregular, yet merism is conserved, as five sepals alternating to the petals are evident; five petals arise in a single whorl, as do the five epipetalous stamens. Uneven petal elongation causes sigmoidal curvature in Tristerix secundus. Conclusions. Floral groundplan fits Hofmeister’s rule between sepals and petals on one side, and stamens and carpels on the other, but such rule is disrupted between petals and stamens. Irregular calyx development, uniseriate corollas and androecia, epipetalous stamens, and actinomorphic corollas appear to be plesiomorphic in Loranthaceae.
Effects of Chronic Rosiglitazone Treatment on Renal Handling of Salt and Water in Rats With Volume-Overload Congestive Heart Failure

Background— The side effects of fluid retention and edema of the thiazolidinedione (TZD) class of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-&ggr; agonists limit their use in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF). The present study aims to explore whether chronic treatment with the TZD compound rosiglitazone (RGZ) is associated with worsening of salt and water retention in male Sprague-Dawley rats with aorto-caval fistula, an experimental model of volume-overload CHF. Methods and Results— The effects of oral RGZ (30 mg/kg per day for 4 weeks) in CHF rats on plasma volume, cumulative sodium excretion, renal expression of Na+ channels and transporters, and selected biomarkers of CHF were compared with those in CHF rats and sham-operated control rats treated with vehicle only (n=7 to 10). Additionally, the response to acute saline loading (3.5% of body weight) was evaluated after 2 weeks of treatment by renal clearance methodology. Chronic RGZ treatment caused no further increase in plasma volume compared with vehicle-treated CHF rats. Moreover, no increase in renal expression of Na+ transport-linked channels/transporters was observed in response to RGZ. Cumulative sodium excretion was enhanced in CHF rats after RGZ and by another TZD compound, pioglitazone. In response to saline loading, RGZ-treated animals displayed a higher natriuretic/diuretic response than did vehicle-treated rats. Chronic RGZ treatment was not associated with any deterioration in selected biomarkers of CHF, whereas indices of cardiac hypertrophy and blood pressure were improved. Conclusions— Chronic RGZ treatment was not associated with worsening of fluid retention or cardiac status in rats with experimental volume-overload CHF. Rather, RGZ appeared to improve renal handling of salt and water in rats with CHF.
Pan, zoom, scan — Time-coherent, trained automatic video cropping

We present a method to fully automatically fit videos in 16:9 format on 4:3 screens and vice versa. It can be applied to arbitrary aspect ratios and can be used to make videos suitable for mobile viewing devices with small and possibly uncommonly sized displays. The cropping sequence is optimised over time to create smooth transitions and thus leads to an excellent viewing experience. Current televisions have simple and often disturbing methods which either show the centre region of the image, distort the image, or pad it with black borders. The technique presented here can fully automatically find the ldquorightrdquo viewing area for each image in a video sequence. It works in real-time with only very little time-shift. We employ different low-level features and a log-linear model to learn how to find the right area. The method is able to automatically decide whether padding with black borders is necessary or whether all relevant image areas fit on screen by cropping the image. Evaluation is done on ten videos from five different types of content and the baseline methods are clearly outperformed.
Sulforaphane Inhibits HIV Infection of Macrophages through Nrf2

Marburg virus, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Dengue virus all activate, and benefit from, expression of the transcription regulator nuclear erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2). The impact of Nrf2 activation on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection has not been tested. Sulforaphane (SFN), produced in cruciferous vegetables after mechanical damage, mobilizes Nrf2 to potently reprogram cellular gene expression. Here we show for the first time that SFN blocks HIV infection in primary macrophages but not in primary T cells. Similarly SFN blocks infection in PMA-differentiated promonocytic cell lines, but not in other cell lines tested. siRNA-mediated depletion of Nrf2 boosted HIV infectivity in primary macrophages and reduced the anti-viral effects of SFN treatment. This supports a model in which anti-viral activity is mediated through Nrf2 after it is mobilized by SFN. We further found that, like the type I interferon-induced cellular anti-viral proteins SAMHD1 and MX2, SFN treatment blocks infection after entry, but before formation of 2-LTR circles. Interestingly however, neither SAMHD1 nor MX2 were upregulated. This shows for the first time that Nrf2 action can potently block HIV infection and highlights a novel way to trigger this inhibition.
The migration of gymnastics coaches from the Former Soviet Union to New Zealand: an actor–network theory perspective

ABSTRACT This article uses actor–network theory (ANT) to examine factors that influenced highly skilled gymnastics coaches from the gymnastics stronghold of the Former Soviet Union to migrate to the geographically and culturally distant nation of New Zealand. Our research diverges from the emphasis on the professional sports labour market that has dominated sports migration research and extends upon the network-orientated approaches that have recently been utilised in sport. The article is informed by the stories of 10 migrant gymnastics coaches obtained through qualitative interviews. We demonstrate how the ANT approach helps reveal how multiple micro- and macro-factors assembled together to motivate and facilitate the coaches’ migration. While economic factors can be identified, we draw attention to a unique facet that has received little previous attention in the sports migration literature: the non-human. We show how the coaches’ migration was facilitated by non-humans such as a disease, Skype, leotards and work visas and that these non-humans played a role in enabling or disrupting migration.
EXTENDING UTAUT TO EXPLAIN SOCIAL MEDIA ADOPTION BY MICROBUSINESSES

This paper extends the use of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explain social media adoption by microbusinesses. A canonical action research method is used to study social media adoption in microbusiness, and a post positivist approach is used to report the results based on a predetermined premise. It is found that the major constructs of performance and effort expectancy played an insignificant role, and social influence and facilitating conditions did not influence the behavioral and adoption intentions of social media by microbusiness owners. Owner characteristics and codification effort dominated the use behavior. The goal of microbusiness owners in gaining additional customers leads to behavioral modification resulting in replacing of behavioral intention with goals as a superior method of predicting adoption behavior within the context of microbusinesses.
Differentiating ERAN and MMN: An ERP study

In the present study, the early right-anterior negativity (ERAN) elicited by harmonically inappropriate chords during listening to music was compared to the frequency mismatch negativity (MMN) and the abstract-feature MMN. Results revealed that the amplitude of the ERAN, in contrast to the MMN, is specifically dependent on the degree of harmonic appropriateness. Thus, the ERAN is correlated with the cognitive processing of complex rule-based information, i.e. with the application of music–syntactic rules. Moreover, results showed that the ERAN, compared to the abstract-feature MMN, had both a longer latency, and a larger amplitude. The combined findings indicate that ERAN and MMN reflect different mechanisms of pre-attentive irregularity detection, and that, although both components have several features in common, the ERAN does not easily fit into the classical MMN framework. The present ERPs thus provide evidence for a differentiation of cognitive processes underlying the fast and pre-attentive processing of auditory information.
On System Time Analysis for BitTorrent with Sharing Ratio Enforcement

BitTorrent's built-in mechanism can effectively encourage peers to upload while they are downloading, but it lacks a mechanism to incentivize peers to continually upload to benefit others after they have completed downloading. As such, many private BitTorrent sites have enforced a {sharing ratio} on their members to demand the minimum amount a peer must upload with respect to the amount it has downloaded. In this paper we study how sharing ratio enforcement affects download time by addressing the following problem: {Given a flash crowd of peers downloading a file, what is the time required for the last peer to finish downloading? } We propose two models to estimate the download time. The first model is simpler in the sense that it does not need to know peers' actual download rates during the downloading process. However, it needs to assume that every peer can fully utilize its uplink capacity. This assumption may not hold when there are much more peers to upload than to download, a scenario that is not uncommon in a system with sharing ratio enforcement. The second model lifts the assumption by extending an existing model for estimating peers' actual download rates in a system with no sharing ratio enforcement. However, estimating peers' actual download rates becomes very complex when the number of peers of different bandwidths increases.
Family firms and audit risks: The role of audit committee financial expertise

The purpose of this study is to examine whether ownership structure, i.e. family firms, influences firms' audit risks, and whether the presence of a high proportion of financial experts on the audit committee of family firms would reduce the perceived inherent risk of auditors. In this study, the sample consists of balance panel data of 2,165 firm-year observations of Malaysian non-financial publicly listed firms during the year 2006 to 2010. The ordinary least square regression is used to estimate the hypothesised relationships. In this study, a firm is identified as a family firm when more than two family members are present on the board, while audit risks are measured based on statutory audit fees charged by external auditors as reported in the corporate reports. The findings show that family firms are associated with higher audit risks, as shown by higher audit fees. This relationship is significantly weaker when the firms have a high proportion of financial experts on their audit committee. These results imply that auditors, in their assessment of a firm's inherent risk, consider that the audit committee's financial expertise could moderate the dominant influence of family members on the board.
SIMULTANEOUS ANALYSIS OF LASSO AND DANTZIG

We exhibit an approximate equivalence between the Lasso es-timator and Dantzig selector. For both methods we derive parallel oracle inequalities for the prediction risk in the general nonparamet-ric regression model, as well as bounds on the p estimation loss for 1 ≤ p ≤ 2 in the linear model when the number of variables can be much larger than the sample size.
Does gamification increase engagement with online programs? A systematic review

Background Engagement in online programs is difficult to maintain. Gamification is the recent trend that offers to increase engagement through the inclusion of game-like features like points and badges, in non-game contexts. This review will answer the following question, ‘Are gamification strategies effective in increasing engagement in online programs? ’ Method Eight databases (Web of Science, PsycINFO, Medline, INSPEC, ERIC, Cochrane Library, Business Source Complete and ACM Digital Library) were searched from 2010 to the 28th of October 2015 using a comprehensive search strategy. Eligibility criteria was based on the PICOS format, where “population” included adults, “intervention” involved an online program or smart phone application that included at least one gamification feature. “Comparator” was a control group, “outcomes” included engagement and “downstream” outcomes which occurred as a result of engagement; and “study design” included experimental studies from peer-reviewed sources. Effect sizes (Cohens d and 95% confidence intervals) were also calculated. Results 1017 studies were identified from database searches following the removal of duplicates, of which 15 met the inclusion criteria. The studies involved a total of 10,499 participants, and were commonly undertaken in tertiary education contexts. Engagement metrics included time spent (n = 5), volume of contributions (n = 11) and occasions visited to the software (n = 4); as well as downstream behaviours such as performance (n = 4) and healthy behaviours (n = 1). Effect sizes typically ranged from medium to large in direct engagement and downstream behaviours, with 12 out of 15 studies finding positive significant effects in favour of gamification. Conclusion Gamification is effective in increasing engagement in online programs. Key recommendations for future research into gamification are provided. In particular, rigorous study designs are required to fully examine gamification’s effects and determine how to best achieve sustained engagement.
Enhanced Insulin Sensitivity Associated with Provision of Mono and Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids in Skeletal Muscle Cells Involves Counter Modulation of PP2A

Aims/Hypothesis Reduced skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity is a feature associated with sustained exposure to excess saturated fatty acids (SFA), whereas mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids (MUFA and PUFA) not only improve insulin sensitivity but blunt SFA-induced insulin resistance. The mechanisms by which MUFAs and PUFAs institute these favourable changes remain unclear, but may involve stimulating insulin signalling by counter-modulation/repression of protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A). This study investigated the effects of oleic acid (OA; a MUFA), linoleic acid (LOA; a PUFA) and palmitate (PA; a SFA) in cultured myotubes and determined whether changes in insulin signalling can be attributed to PP2A regulation. Principal Findings We treated cultured skeletal myotubes with unsaturated and saturated fatty acids and evaluated insulin signalling, phosphorylation and methylation status of the catalytic subunit of PP2A. Unlike PA, sustained incubation of rat or human myotubes with OA or LOA significantly enhanced Akt- and ERK1/2-directed insulin signalling. This was not due to heightened upstream IRS1 or PI3K signalling nor to changes in expression of proteins involved in proximal insulin signalling, but was associated with reduced dephosphorylation/inactivation of Akt and ERK1/2. Consistent with this, PA reduced PP2Ac demethylation and tyrosine307phosphorylation - events associated with PP2A activation. In contrast, OA and LOA strongly opposed these PA-induced changes in PP2Ac thus exerting a repressive effect on PP2A. Conclusions/Interpretation Beneficial gains in insulin sensitivity and the ability of unsaturated fatty acids to oppose palmitate-induced insulin resistance in muscle cells may partly be accounted for by counter-modulation of PP2A.