Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Atrogin-1 ubiquitin ligase is upregulated by doxorubicin via p38-MAP kinase in cardiac myocytes.

AIMS Doxorubicin (DOX) is one of the most effective anti-neoplastic agents; however, its clinical use is limited by drug-induced cardiomyopathy. The molecular mechanisms responsible for this toxicity remain to be fully addressed. In the present study, we investigated the involvement of atrogin-1, one of the muscle-specific ubiquitin ligases, in DOX-induced cardiotoxicity. METHODS AND RESULTS This method involved intraperitoneal administration of DOX-induced atrogin-1 in the hearts and skeletal muscles of C57BL/6 mice. Consistently, atrogin-1 mRNA was upregulated with DOX treatment in cultured rat neonatal cardiomyocytes. Adenoviral transfer of atrogin-1 induced a reduction in cell size that was ameliorated by the ubiquitin proteasome inhibitor, MG-132. The transduction of constitutively active Akt (caAkt), a serine/threonine protein kinase, inhibited the DOX-mediated induction of atrogin-1. The phosphorylation status of Akt and its downstream target, FOXO, was not affected by DOX. DOX treatment did not activate the atrogin-1 promoter that contains FOXO-binding sites, suggesting that DOX induced atrogin-1 without modulating the Akt/FOXO pathway; importantly, DOX activated p38-mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK). Furthermore, pharmacological inhibition of p38-MAPK, but not JNK, abrogated DOX-mediated induction of atrogin-1. Finally, adenoviral transfer of caAkt inhibited the DOX-induced p38-MAPK activation. CONCLUSIONS DOX induces atrogin-1 through a p38-MAPK-dependent pathway in cardiac myocytes. Constitutive activation of Akt negatively regulates DOX-mediated atrogin-1 induction by inhibiting p38-MAPK activity as a novel mechanism.
AGN dust tori: the X-ray-infrared connection

We have combined the well-studied CLASXS Chandra survey in Lockman with the Spitzer SWIRE survey data to study the X-ray-infrared connection for active galactic nuclei (AGN). The sample consists of 401 X-ray-sources, of which 306 are detected by Spitzer, and a further 257 AGN candidates detected through their dust torus, but not by Chandra. We have used spectroscopic redshifts and classifications from the literature, where available, and photometric redshifts for the remainder. For X-ray sources, the X-ray hardness ratio has been modelled in terms of a power law (Γ= 1.9) with absorption N(H). The optical and infrared data have been modelled in terms of our well-established optical galaxy and quasi-stellar object templates, and infrared templates based on radiative transfer models. This type of analysis gives better insight into the infrared spectral energy distributions, and a better separation of the contribution of starbursts and AGN dust tori, than a simple comparison of 24 μm to optical or X-ray fluxes. We also believe this gives more insight than using a library of fixed ultraviolet-infrared templates. Our estimate of the N(H) distribution is consistent with other studies, but we do find a higher proportion of low absorption objects at z 0.5. While we find only one X-ray AGN with N(H) > 1024 cm−2, we argue that 10 objects with torus luminosity apparently exceeding the bolometric X-ray to 3 μm luminosity are strong candidates for being heavily absorbed in X-rays. We also estimate that at least half of the infrared-detected AGN dust tori, which are undetected in X-rays, are likely to be Compton thick. Our estimate of the total number of Compton-thick objects in the 0.4 deg2 area is ≥130, corresponding to ≥20 per cent of the combined SWIRE-CLASXS sample (and with an upper limit of 39 per cent). We find no evidence for AGN with no dust tori, and none with a covering factor <1 per cent but there are clear examples of AGN with covering factors of only a few percent and these, though rare, do not fit easily with a unified picture for AGN. The range of dust covering factors is 1–100 per cent, with a mean of 40 per cent, that is a Type 2 fraction of 40 per cent. Measured by the ratio of dust torus luminosity to X-ray or (for Type 1 objects) optical luminosity, the covering factor appears to decrease towards intermediate AGN luminosity, in contradiction to estimates based on ratios of narrow-line and broad-line spectra, but may increase again at low AGN luminosity. We find 7–10 candidate X-ray starbursts in the SWIRE-CLASXS sample, with X-ray luminosities ranging up to LXh= 1044 erg s−1. This is a considerable extension of the luminosity range of X-ray starbursts previously reported, but is consistent with the an extrapolation of the X-ray-infrared relation for starbursts into the realm of hyperluminous infrared galaxies.
Protein geranylgeranylation is critical for the regulation of survival and proliferation of lymphoma tumor cells.

PURPOSE Prenylation is essential for membrane localization and participation of proteins in various signaling pathways. The following study was conducted to examine the importance of protein farnesylation and geranylgeranylation for the regulation of lymphoma cell survival and proliferation. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Lymphoma cells were treated with the beta-hydroxy-beta-methylglutaryl-CoA reductase inhibitor lovastatin, which inhibits protein farnesylation and geranylgeranylation by the depletion of intracellular pools of farnesylpyrophosphate and geranylgeranylpyrophosphate. In addition, farnesyl transferase and geranylgeranyl transferase activities were specifically inhibited by FTI-277 and GGTI-298, respectively. RESULTS Only inhibition of geranylgeranylation by lovastatin led to reduction of cell viability in lymphoma cell lines and purified tumor cells from lymphoma patients in a time- and dose-dependent way. Reduction in the number of viable cells was mediated by both induction of apoptosis and inhibition of proliferation. In addition, GGTI-298 was more effective in induction of apoptosis and inhibition of proliferation than FTI-277. Apoptosis induced by inhibition of protein geranylgeranylation was associated with a reduction of Mcl-1 protein levels, collapse of the mitochondrial transmembrane potential, and caspase-3 activation. Inhibition of proliferation resulted from the induction of G(1) arrest. Furthermore, lovastatin at low concentrations sensitized lymphoma cells to dexamethasone, including cells resistant to this drug. CONCLUSION These results indicate that protein geranylgeranylation is critical for the regulation of lymphoma tumor cell survival and proliferation and that pharmacological agents such as lovastatin or geranylgeranyl transferase inhibitors, alone or in combination with other drugs, may be useful in the treatment of lymphoma.
Teachers' Perceptions of Professional Development: What do Teachers Really Want That Makes Them Willing to Change Professional Practice?

MCFARLAND, EDWARD SHAWYNE. Teachers’ Perceptions of Professional Development: What do Teachers Really Want That Makes Them Willing to Change Professional Practice? (Under the direction of Dr. Matthew Militello). Professional development is an essential tool for supporting and improving the work of teaching in our schools. The current study sought to understand which elements of professional development teachers perceive to be most important, and what specific characteristics about professional development influence their willingness to make changes in their professional practices. Q-Methodology was utilized to investigate the subjective opinions of public school teachers at one selected high school in North Carolina. Data analysis indicated four statistically significant factors: Individual Teacher Needs; Student and Teacher Learning; Collaboration; Supportive Structures and Environment. In addition, data emerged explaining how teachers view effective professional development and what it is about that professional development that encourages them to make changes in their teaching pedagogy. The findings from the study provide vital information about effective professional development for teachers, and also offer useful information to educational professionals, policy makers, and researchers about an important topic. © Copyright 2014 by Edward Shawyne McFarland All Rights Reserved Teachers’ Perceptions of Professional Development: What do Teachers Really Want That Makes Them Willing to Change Professional Practice? by Edward Shawyne McFarland A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education Educational Administration and Supervision Raleigh, North Carolina
Validation of Numerical Schemes and Turbulence Models Combinations for Transient Flow Around Airfoil

Abstract In the present study, combinations of turbulence models and numerical schemes are evaluated in terms of accuracy and computational cost for the prediction of transient flow at fixed points around the non-symmetrical ONERA-A airfoil for pre- and stall conditions using a finite volume method. The computed results were validated by experimental data. The purpose is to investigate whether TVD discretization schemes, developed initially for compressible flows, can help computation of incompressible flows when accuracy and low computational cost are important considerations, as in the case of aeroelastic calculations. The TVD discretization schemes are applied to the convection terms of the momentum equations and they are compared to central difference, upwind, hybrid and QUICK discretization schemes for several turbulence models. From the parametric studies, it comes out that TVD schemes can be a promising tool for aeroelastic calculations.
Metals and Histopathological Alterations in the Kidneys of Schizothorax niger, Heckel from the Dal Lake of Kashmir Valley

The study was conducted to evaluate the metal induced abnormalities in the kidneys of Schizothorax niger, Heckel from Dal lake seasonally for a period of two years. The varied seasonal metal concentrations for copper (64.61 ± 3.10 to 78.90 ± 3.42 ppm), zinc (88.77 ± 3.52 to 101.99 ± 4.03 ppm), iron (200.99 ± 5.04 to 292.61 ± 4.25 ppm) and manganese (0.84 ± 0.06 to 06.95 ± 0.93 ppm) were observed during the entire period of study. The highest concentration of metals was observed in the summer seasons and the lowest concentrations in the winter seasons during the study period. Further, histochemical analysis demonstrated high levels of metal ion (Cu, Fe and Zn) in the kidneys of the fish in summer seasons during the study period. Analysis of these levels demonstrated by wet digestion-based Atomic Absorption and combined with histochemical methods, showed probable relationship between these high metallic levels and gill pathology. The general changes in the kidneys of the host included atrophy of the glomerulus with hypercellularity and hyperplasia. The other changes in the kidneys included mild congestion during winter seasons to severe tubular degeneration during summer seasons. The accumulation of different metals in the kidneys of the host can be attributed to the water pollution of Dal Lake by various metals and the subsequent histological abnormalities can be speculated to be due to the higher sensitivity of the host to different contaminants. From the present study it was concluded that the metals in the environment are polluting the water bodies and their subsequent deleterious effects harm the aquatic fauna particularly the native fish Schizothorax niger which would be one of the reasons for its decline from fresh water resources of the Kashmir Valley.
Integral field spectroscopy of four lensed quasars: analysis of their neighborhood and evidence for microlensing

Context. Gravitationally lensed quasars constitute an independent tool to derive the Hubble constant through the time-delays of their different images; they offer as well the opportunity to study the mass distribution and interstellar medium of their lensing galaxies and, through microlensing due to stars in their lensing galaxy, they also allow one to study details of the emitting source. Aims. For such studies, one needs to have an excellent knowledge of the close environment of the lensed images in order to model the lensing potential: this means, ideally, observational data over a large field-of-view and spectroscopy at high spatial resolution. Methods. We present VIMOS integral field observations of 27 �� × 27 �� fields of view around four lensed quasars: HE 0230-2130, RX J0911.4 + 0551, H 1413 + 117 and B 1359 + 154. Using the low, medium and high resolution modes, we study the quasar images and the quasar environments. Because of the complexity of the reduction of integral field datasets, we provide a detailed report of the data reduction. Results. Comparison between the quasar spectra of the different images reveals differences for HE 0230–2130, RX J0911.4 + 0551 and H 1413+117: flux ratios between the images of the same quasar are different when measured in the emission lines and in the continuum. We have also measured the redshifts of galaxies in the neighborhood of HE 0230–2130 and RX J0911.4 + 0551 which possibly contribute to the total lensing potential, given their close proximity to the line-of-sight toward the quasars. Conclusions. A careful analysis reveals that microlensing is the most natural explanation for the (de)magnification of the continuum emitting region of the background sources. In HE 0230-2130, image D is likely to be affected by microlensing magnification; in RX J0911.4+0551, images A1 and A3 are likely to be modified by microlensing de-magnification and in H 1413+117 at least image Di s affected by microlensing. We have not been able to recover any microlensing information or galaxies close to the line-of-sight in the neighborhood of B 1359+154.
Capacity of a class of multi-source relay networks

We consider a relay network having K source-destination pairs. Finding the capacity region of such a network with multiple unicast sessions is in general difficult. By focusing on a special class of such networks, we show that the capacity can be found. Namely, we consider a linear finite-field channel model, which can model interference in the network. Furthermore, we assume time-varying channels. We propose a block Markov encoding and relaying scheme that exploits such channel variations. By comparing its achievable sum-rate with the general cut-set upper bound, we show the sum capacity can be characterized for a certain class of channel distributions and network topologies
Moment equations for a piecewise deterministic PDE

We analyze a piecewise deterministic PDE consisting of the diffusion equation on a finite interval Ω with randomly switching boundary conditions and diffusion coefficient. We proceed by spatially discretizing the diffusion equation using finite differences and constructing the Chapman–Kolmogorov (CK) equation for the resulting finite-dimensional stochastic hybrid system. We show how the CK equation can be used to generate a hierarchy of equations for the r-th moments of the stochastic field, which take the form of r-dimensional parabolic PDEs on &OHgr; r ? > that couple to lower order moments at the boundaries. We explicitly solve the first and second order moment equations (r = 2). We then describe how the r-th moment of the stochastic PDE can be interpreted in terms of the splitting probability that r non-interacting Brownian particles all exit at the same boundary; although the particles are non-interacting, statistical correlations arise due to the fact that they all move in the same randomly switching environment. Hence the stochastic diffusion equation describes two levels of randomness: Brownian motion at the individual particle level and a randomly switching environment. Finally, in the limit of fast switching, we use a quasi-steady state approximation to reduce the piecewise deterministic PDE to an SPDE with multiplicative Gaussian noise in the bulk and a stochastically-driven boundary.
ALEXEY ANDRIYASHIN Non-negative bases in spectral image archiving

This thesis supposes an application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and Non-negative Tensor Factorization (NTF) for digital image archiving. It is aimed to develop new efficient methods for spectral image acquisition, compression and retrieval. It hypothesizes that the non-negative bases are more suitable for spectral archiving beside convenient orthogonal. The thesis introduces three fundamental components of the digital image archiving system. It gives an overview of the methods that were developed for the spectral image archiving recently. PCA, NMF and NTF were applied as a spectral reconstruction, a spectral reduction and feature extraction methods. It also supposes a multiresolution approach in computing NTF and subspace clustering preprocessing for compression by PCA. The experiments performed during the study shows that the non-negative methods reconstruct spectra with the same error but as the benefit they can be implemented optically. The compression method based on subspace clustering is more efficient than convenient k-means. The non-negative basis is better color feature than orthogonal one in a way of spectral image retrieval. Universal Decimal Classification: 004.93, 519.237. 7, 512.643. 12,514.743
The linkages between land degradation, poverty and social capital in Uganda

The goal of this study was two fold. First, to investigate the determinants of soil fertility management and conservation practices in Uganda, with particular interest in the role of poverty, social capital and land tenure. Secondly, to provide an understanding of the causal relationships between social capital and household poverty in Uganda. To achieve the above goals, econometric approaches were employed using a data set collected by IFPRI, the World Bank, and Uganda Bureau of Statistics from a survey that covered eight districts in Uganda. First to investigate the impact of poverty, land tenure and social capital on adoption of SFM and conservation technologies, a multinomial logit (MNL) model was used. Choice of the MNL model was motivated by the need to address the interdependent and joint nature of the adoption decision making. Secondly to understand the influence of social capital and other determinants on poverty in Uganda, a linear regression model was used while a probit model was used to capture the determinants of group participation our measure of social capital. The results show that participation in social institutions generally tends to increase the probability of adopting most SFM and conservation practices and
Authorship attribution and profiling in Spanish and English language

The authorship attribution is the practice of inferring the author of a given text based on the analysis of her/his writing style. It has been largely used in literature work disputes but it has other interesting applications such as forensics and plagiarism detection. The purpose of this project is to experiment and present a solution that can identify the authors of a given corpora. We have two corpora to analyse: Spanish literature of the 19th century and blogs written in English and Spanish. We aim to identify the author given a list of candidates or infer its gender or age range. We propose to use the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD), an information-based measure of disparity among models. In order to validate the proposal we use as baseline the näıve Bayes classifier whose performance is generally accepted for this kind of problem. The results show a significative improvement with the proposed method over the baseline when there is enough text size to train, and they were really promising when detecting the gender and age in the blogs in English language. The performance using few data training could improve with some input conditions identified and described in this report that could be a precedent for future work.
Bundling and Vertical Relationships in Multichannel Television ∗ ( Job Market Paper )

I examine how banning the bundling of television channels would affect social welfare. The central innovation in this paper is accounting for the renegotiation of supply contracts between content providers, such as ESPN and CNN, and distributors, such as Comcast and DirecTV. I find that banning the bundling of television channels for sale to consumers causes wholesale input costs to rise. While consumers continue to receive the channels they value highly and pay a lower monthly bill, higher input costs foreclose consumers’ access to some channels of moderate value. To generate these predictions, I use an industry model of viewership, demand, downstream pricing and bundling, and input market bargaining. I estimate the model’s parameters using data on purchases, prices, ratings, and aggregate input costs. Next, I solve the model when downstream firms may not bundle channels, but instead must set prices for sizes of bundles and offer a few channels à la carte. Consumers may pick the exact channels they receive. Banning bundling changes the marginal surpluses generated by pairs of channels and distributors so that equilibrium input costs rise. I predict total welfare decreases by 2.02%, mean consumer surplus decreases by 0.96%, and industry profits decrease by 3.03%. By contrast, assuming input costs do not re-equilibrate to the policy change would predict mean consumer surplus to increase by 6.05% and total industry profits to decrease by 6.86%. ∗This project benefitted enormously from the guidance of my dissertation advisors Ariel Pakes, Luis Cabral, John Asker, and Allan Collard-Wexler. I thank Heski Bar-Isaac, Adam Brandenburger, Gregory S. Crawford, Ignacio Esponda, Matt Grennan, Michael Katz, Robin Lee, Alessandro Lizzeri, Hong Luo, David Pearce, Vasiliki Skreta, Tracy Waldon, and the Stern micro workshop. Derek Baine of Kagan Research provided institutional detail on the multichannel television industry. I acknowledge the funding from the NYU Stern EMT department doctoral dissertation grant. I thank Norman White and the Stern Center for Research Computing for their help with the distributed computing infrastructure.
The Impact of Nebular Emission on the Broadband Fluxes of High-Redshift Galaxies

A substantial fraction of the light emitted from young or star-forming galaxies at ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths comes from the ionized interstellar medium in the form of emission lines and a nebular continuum. At high redshifts, star formation rates are on average higher and stellar populations younger than in the local universe. Both of these effects act to boost the impact of nebular emission on the overall spectrum of galaxies. Even so, the broadband fluxes and colors of high-redshift galaxies are routinely analyzed under the assumption that the light observed originates directly from stars. Here we assess the impact of nebular emission on broadband fluxes in Johnson/Cousins BVRIJHK, Sloan Digital Sky Survey griz and Spitzer IRAC/MIPS filters as a function of observed redshift (up to z = 15) for galaxies with different star formation histories. We find that nebular emission may account for a nonnegligible fraction of the light received from high-redshift galaxies. The ages and masses inferred for such objects through the use of spectral evolutionary models that omit the nebular contribution are therefore likely to contain systematic errors. We argue that a careful treatment of the nebular component will be essential for the interpretation of the rest-frame ultraviolet-to-infrared properties of the first galaxies formed, like the ones expected to be detected with the James Webb Space Telescope.