Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validation of SCIAMACHY AMC-DOAS water vapour columns

Abstract. A first validation of water vapour total column amounts derived from measurements of the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY (SCIAMACHY) in the visible spectral region has been performed. For this purpose, SCIAMACHY water vapour data have been determined for the year 2003 using an extended version of the Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) method, called Air Mass Corrected (AMC-DOAS). The SCIAMACHY results are compared with corresponding water vapour measurements by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) and with model data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In confirmation of previous results it could be shown that SCIAMACHY derived water vapour columns are typically slightly lower than both SSM/I and ECMWF data, especially over ocean areas. However, these deviations are much smaller than the observed scatter of the data which is caused by the different temporal and spatial sampling and resolution of the data sets. For example, the overall difference with ECMWF data is only -0.05 g/cm2 whereas the typical scatter is in the order of 0.5 g/cm2. Both values show almost no variation over the year. In addition, first monthly means of SCIAMACHY water vapour data have been computed. The quality of these monthly means is currently limited by the availability of calibrated SCIAMACHY spectra. Nevertheless, first comparisons with ECMWF data show that SCIAMACHY (and similar instruments) are able to provide a new independent global water vapour data set.
The Effectiveness of Pregnancy Training Class towards the Childbirth Preparation in Kendal Regency

The mortality number of women (AKI) is one of the indicators which shows the maternal health degree. In Kendal Regency, this class has been socialized and conducted since the late 2009, but the decrease of AKI has not been significant yet. This study was aimed at analyzing the effectiveness of a childbirth preparation training in pregnant women class. By such objective, this study belongs to quasi-experiment with non-randomized control group pretest-posttest design. This design used purposive sampling and involved 60 pregnant women in trimester III who were divided into three groups as the sample, namely: two as experimental groups, and one as control group. Their data were analyzed by using one way ANOVA and Tamhane’s Post Hoc test. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the improvement of childbirth preparation of pregnant women viewed from the post-test and pre-test of the experimental group of A, B and control group showed by the result of one way ANOVA test with the p value of (0.000) 0.71.
Prevalence and Molecular Epidemiological Data on Dirofilaria immitis in Dogs from Northeastern States of India

The aim of the present study was to determine the prevalence of Dirofilaria immitis in stray, pet, and working dogs (n = 413, 266, and 103, resp.) from Guwahati (Assam) and Aizawl (Mizoram), areas located in two Northeastern States of India. Diagnostic methods applied were microscopy (wet film and Knott's concentration technique), immunological test (Ag ELISA by SNAP 4Dx ELISA kit), and molecular tools (polymerase chain reaction and sequencing), which evidenced 11.38, 18.03, and 13.93% of positive animals, respectively. No significant differences were observed by area (18.23% versus 17.68%) nor by sex (18.1% versus 17.9%), whereas stray dogs proved more infected than other groups (P < 0.05). ELISA test evidenced an overall 22.69% of occult infections, mainly in working dogs (60%), and molecular techniques detected Dirofilaria (Nochtiella) repens in 4 stray dogs from Guwahati. Characterization of D. immitis isolates for ITS-2 region showed close identity with South Asian isolates.
Developmental Exposure to Second-Hand Smoke Increases Adult Atherogenesis and Alters Mitochondrial DNA Copy Number and Deletions in apoE−/− Mice

Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States. While many studies have focused upon the effects of adult second-hand smoke exposure on cardiovascular disease development, disease development occurs over decades and is likely influenced by childhood exposure. The impacts of in utero versus neonatal second-hand smoke exposure on adult atherosclerotic disease development are not known. The objective of the current study was to determine the effects of in utero versus neonatal exposure to a low dose (1 mg/m3 total suspended particulate) of second-hand smoke on adult atherosclerotic lesion development using the apolipoprotein E null mouse model. Consequently, apolipoprotein E null mice were exposed to either filtered air or second-hand smoke: (i) in utero from gestation days 1–19, or (ii) from birth until 3 weeks of age (neonatal). Subsequently, all animals were exposed to filtered air and sacrificed at 12–14 weeks of age. Oil red-O staining of whole aortas, measures of mitochondrial damage, and oxidative stress were performed. Results show that both in utero and neonatal second-hand smoke exposure significantly increased adult atherogenesis in mice compared to filtered air controls. These changes were associated with changes in aconitase and mitochondrial superoxide dismutase activities consistent with increased oxidative stress in the aorta, changes in mitochondrial DNA copy number and deletion levels. These studies show that in utero or neonatal exposure to second-hand smoke significantly influences adult atherosclerotic lesion development and results in significant alterations to the mitochondrion and its genome that may contribute to atherogenesis.
“I didn’t just want a degree”: Students’ perceptions about benefits from participation in student leadership programmes

Increasingly, universities are involved in providing leadership development opportunities that support students’ academic endeavours and their personal and professional development, including employability and citizenship skills. Leadership experiences are beneficial not only for students, but also for universities, the wider community, and future employers. To develop a greater understanding of students’ perceived benefits of their involvement in peer leadership activities, a group of Australasian universities participated in a pilot survey based on the United States National Survey of Peer Leadership. Overall, the results suggest students believe they benefit from peer leadership experiences across a range of key outcomes areas, most prominently creative problem solving, appreciation of diversity, and a sense of belonging and contributing to the university community.
Nucleosynthesis in dynamical and torus ejecta of compact binary mergers

We present a comprehensive study of r-process element nucleosynthesis in the ejecta of compact binary mergers (CBMs) and their relic black-hole (BH)-torus systems. The evolution of the BH-accretion tori is simulated for seconds with a Newtonian hydrodynamics code including viscosity effects, pseudo-Newtonian gravity for rotating BHs, and an energy-dependent two-moment closure scheme for the transport of electron neutrinos and antineutrinos. The investigated cases are guided by relativistic double neutron star (NS-NS) and NS-BH merger models, producing ~3-6 Msun BHs with rotation parameters of A~0.8 and tori of 0.03-0.3 Msun. Our nucleosynthesis analysis includes the dynamical (prompt) ejecta expelled during the CBM phase and the neutrino and viscously driven outflows of the relic BH-torus systems. While typically ~20-25% of the initial accretion-torus mass are lost by viscously driven outflows, neutrino-powered winds contribute at most another ~1%, but neutrino heating enhances the viscous ejecta significantly. Since BH-torus ejecta possess a wide distribution of electron fractions (0.1-0.6) and entropies, they produce heavy elements from A~80 up to the actinides, with relative contributions of A>130 nuclei being subdominant and sensitively dependent on BH and torus masses and the exact treatment of shear viscosity. The combined ejecta of CBM and BH-torus phases can reproduce the solar abundances amazingly well for A>90. Varying contributions of the torus ejecta might account for observed variations of lighter elements with 40<Z<56 relative to heavier ones, and a considerable reduction of the prompt ejecta compared to the torus ejecta, e.g. in highly asymmetric NS-BH mergers, might explain the composition of heavy-element deficient stars.
The influence of topic involvement on mail survey response behavior

This study experimentally investigated the influence of topic involvement on mail survey response rate and speed. The results show that response rates were higher for topics that are generally considered as high involvement than for topics that are generally considered as low involvement. Moreover, we observed an interesting interaction effect. On the one hand, a positive and significant relationship existed between topic involvement and response rate for topics that on average are viewed as high involvement, leading to a non-response bias. On the other hand, no significant relationship was found between topic involvement and response rate for topics that on average are viewed as low involvement. Finally, we were not able to observe a relationship between topic involvement and response speed for topics that are, on average, either high or low involvement.
Learning Automated Product Recommendations Without Observable Features: An Initial Investigation.

Abstract : It is appealing to imagine software packages that provide personally tailored product recommendations to a consumer. One way to predict the rating of a particular product by a particular consumer is through inference from a database of previous ratings by many consumers of many products. Such a database consists of triplets of the forms: (product-identifier, consumer-identifier, rating). Generally such databases will be sparse, but nevertheless we may hope to derive considerable predictive information from them. A number of groups have begun developing distributed systems to collect and predict consumer preferences. Some have put significant effort into implementation issues to do with user interfaces, and the gathering and communicating of data via Internet and Usenet. Rather that launching into the development of a distributed system to address a particular consumer preference domain, our goal is to first understand the computational and statistical nature of e general problem. In this paper we develop two algorithms for is purpose and also relate them to a nearest-neighbor based algorithm of Resnick et al., 1994. We then examine eir predictive performance and quality of recommendations on a number of synthetic and real-world databases. The real-world results suggest that a significant improvement can be obtained over simply recommending the most popular product in some but not all domains. At the end of the paper we discuss computational expense on large databases, the use of explicit features, and our ideas for improved inference algorithms.
Prostate cancer cells (LNCaP) generated after long-term interleukin 6 (IL-6) treatment express IL-6 and acquire an IL-6 partially resistant phenotype.

PURPOSE The levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) are frequently elevated in sera from patients with advanced prostate carcinoma. Our main objective was to investigate changes in responsiveness to IL-6 and/or androgen that occur in LNCaP cells after long-term treatment with IL-6. This in vitro model could be of clinical relevance because of its similarity with late-stage prostate carcinoma. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN LNCaP human prostate cancer cells were treated with IL-6 at a concentration of 5 ng/ml. After 20 passages, the new subline LNCaP-IL-6+ has been established. Passages 20-40 are referred to as low passages (LP) and passages 41-73 as high passages (HP). LNCaP cells passaged at the same time in the absence of IL-6 were used as controls (LNCaP-IL-6-). Cells were counted after treatment with either IL-6 or the synthetic androgen methyltrienolone (R1881), and cell cycle analysis was performed. Binding of IL-6 or R1881 was assessed by radioligand binding assays. Reporter gene activity was measured by chloramphenicol acetyltransferase assay. Prostate-specific antigen in LNCaP-IL-6+ supernatants was measured by an enzyme immunoassay. Expression of IL-6 mRNA and protein was assessed by reverse transcription-PCR and ELISA, respectively. RESULTS The basal proliferation rate in HP LNCaP-IL-6+ cells was higher than that in LNCaP-IL-6- cells. IL-6 inhibited proliferation of LNCaP-IL-6- cells but not that of either LP or HP of LNCaP-IL-6+ cells. This inability to elicit a growth-inhibitory response was associated with lack of effect on cell cycle distribution in the LNCaP-IL-6+ subline. In parallel, IL-6 binding decreased gradually during long-term IL-6 treatment and, in HP, reached only 33% of the levels measured in controls. Binding of radiolabeled androgen increased 2-fold in HP LNCaP-IL-6+ cells. Reporter gene assays revealed that R1881, at nanomolar concentrations, was a more potent androgen receptor activator in LNCaP-IL-6+ than in LNCaP-IL-6- cells. However, androgen- and IL-6-induced prostate-specific antigen secretion decreased in long-term IL-6-treated cells. IL-6 cDNA fragments were detected by reverse transcription-PCR in HP LNCaP-IL-6+ cells but not in controls or LP. IL-6 protein was first detected in passage 36 of LNCaP-IL-6+ cells, and it increased in HP. CONCLUSIONS Long-term treatment of LNCaP human prostate cancer cells with IL-6 leads to abolishment of inhibitory growth response. In contrast to control cells, the LNCaP-IL-6+ subline expresses IL-6 mRNA and protein.
Host load prediction in a Google compute cloud with a Bayesian model

Prediction of host load in Cloud systems is critical for achieving service-level agreements. However, accurate prediction of host load in Clouds is extremely challenging because it fluctuates drastically at small timescales. We design a prediction method based on Bayes model to predict the mean load over a long-term time interval, as well as the mean load in consecutive future time intervals. We identify novel predictive features of host load that capture the expectation, predictability, trends and patterns of host load. We also determine the most effective combinations of these features for prediction. We evaluate our method using a detailed one-month trace of a Google data center with thousands of machines. Experiments show that the Bayes method achieves high accuracy with a mean squared error of 0.0014. Moreover, the Bayes method improves the load prediction accuracy by 5.6 -- 50% compared to other state-of-the-art methods based on moving averages, auto-regression, and/or noise filters.
Universal regularization prescription for Lovelock AdS gravity

A definite form for the boundary term that produces the finiteness of both the conserved quantities and Euclidean action for any Lovelock gravity with AdS asymptotics is presented. This prescription merely tells even from odd bulk dimensions, regardless the particular theory considered, what is valid even for Einstein-Hilbert and Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet AdS gravity. The boundary term is a given polynomial of the boundary extrinsic and intrinsic curvatures (also referred to as Kounterterms series). Only the coupling constant of the boundary term changes accordingly, such that it always preserves a well-posed variational principle for boundary conditions suitable for asymptotically AdS spaces. The background-independent conserved charges associated to asymptotic symmetries are found. In odd bulk dimensions, this regularization produces a generalized formula for the vacuum energy in Lovelock AdS gravity. The standard entropy for asymptotically AdS black holes is recovered directly from the regularization of the Euclidean action, and not only from the first law of thermodynamics associated to the conserved quantities.
Dose-response relationships for edrophonium and neostigmine antagonism of mivacurium-induced neuromuscular block.

We have studied the dose-response relationships for neostigmine and edrophonium during antagonism of neuromuscular block induced by mivacurium chloride. Sixty-four ASA group I or II adults were given mivacurium 0.15 mg kg-1 during fentanyl-thiopentone-nitrous oxide-isoflurane anaesthesia. Train-of-four stimulation (TOF) was applied to the ulnar nerve every 10 s, and the force of contraction of the adductor pollicis muscle was recorded. When spontaneous recovery of first twitch height reached 10% of its initial control value, edrophonium 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, or 1 mg kg-1 or neostigmine 0.005, 0.01, 0.02, or 0.05 mg kg-1 was administered by random allocation. Neuromuscular function in another 16 subjects was allowed to recover spontaneously. Spontaneous recovery from 90% mivacurium block to 95% twitch height and TOF ratio 0.75 occurred within 15 min. This study demonstrated that the dose-response curves for these two drugs for antagonism of neuromuscular block (first twitch and train-of-four ratio) were parallel. The doses of neostigmine required to achieve 50% (ED50) and 70% (ED70) recovery of the first twitch after 10 min were 2 (1.5-2.5) micrograms kg-1 and 4.7 (4.1-5.4) micrograms kg-1 (mean (95% confidence intervals)), respectively. Corresponding ED50 and ED70 values for edrophonium were 2.8 (0.75-10.2) micrograms kg-1 and 9.2 (3.6-23.6) micrograms kg-1, respectively. These values corresponded to neostigmine:edrophonium potency ratios of 1.4 (0.4-2.4) and 1.95 (0.9-2.9) for first twitch ED50 and ED70 height, respectively. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
House Price Forecasts, Forecaster Herding, and the Recent Crisis

We used the Wall Street Journal survey data for the period 2006–2012 to analyze whether forecasts of house prices and housing starts provide evidence of (anti-)herding of forecasters. Forecasts are consistent with herding (anti-herding) of forecasters if forecasts are biased towards (away from) the consensus forecast. We found that anti-herding is prevalent among forecasters of house prices. We also report that, following the recent crisis, the prevalence of forecaster anti-herding seems to have changed over time.
An Efficient (t, n)-Threshold Multi-Secret Sharing Scheme

An efficient (t, n) threshold multi-secret sharing scheme is proposed in this paper. This scheme has the same power as Yang et al.’s scheme, in which there are secrets to be shared among n participants according to (t, n)-threshold access structure. But it uses the fixed ( )th degree Lagrange interpolation polynomial whenever p ) 1 ( > p 1 − t t p ≤ or t p > while Yang et al.’ scheme employs the ( 1 − t ), ( )th degree Lagrange interpolation polynomial when , 1 − p t p ≤ t p > , respectively. Thus, the computing time and the storage cost of this scheme is less than that of Yang et al.’s scheme.
CANGAROO III Observations of the Supernova Remnant RX J0852.0–4622

Sub-TeV gamma-ray emission from the northwest rim of the supernova remnant RX J0852.0-4622 was detected with the CANGAROO II telescope and recently confirmed by the HESS group. In addition, the HESS data revealed a very wide (up to 2° in diameter), shell-like profile of the gamma-ray emission. We carried out CANGAROO III observations in 2005 January and February with three telescopes and show here the results of threefold coincidence data. We confirm the HESS results about the morphology and the energy spectrum and find that the energy spectrum in the NW rim is consistent with that of the whole remnant.
Bacterial taxa–area and distance–decay relationships in marine environments

The taxa–area relationship (TAR) and the distance–decay relationship (DDR) both describe spatial turnover of taxa and are central patterns of biodiversity. Here, we compared TAR and DDR of bacterial communities across different marine realms and ecosystems at the global scale. To obtain reliable global estimates for both relationships, we quantified the poorly assessed effects of sequencing depth, rare taxa removal and number of sampling sites. Slope coefficients of bacterial TARs were within the range of those of plants and animals, whereas slope coefficients of bacterial DDR were much lower. Slope coefficients were mostly affected by removing rare taxa and by the number of sampling sites considered in the calculations. TAR and DDR slope coefficients were overestimated at sequencing depth <4000 sequences per sample. Noticeably, bacterial TAR and DDR patterns did not correlate with each other both within and across ecosystem types, suggesting that (i) TAR cannot be directly derived from DDR and (ii) TAR and DDR may be influenced by different ecological factors. Nevertheless, we found marine bacterial TAR and DDR to be steeper in ecosystems associated with high environmental heterogeneity or spatial isolation, namely marine sediments and coastal environments compared with pelagic ecosystems. Hence, our study provides information on macroecological patterns of marine bacteria, as well as methodological and conceptual insights, at a time when biodiversity surveys increasingly make use of high‐throughput sequencing technologies.
Pituitary tumor-transforming gene regulates multiple downstream angiogenic genes in thyroid cancer.

CONTEXT Pituitary tumor-transforming gene (PTTG) is a multifunctional protein involved in several tumorigenic mechanisms, including angiogenesis. PTTG has been shown to promote angiogenesis, a key rate-limiting step in tumor progression, by up-regulation of fibroblast growth factor-2 and vascular endothelial growth factor. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether PTTG regulates other angiogenic genes in thyroid cells, we performed angiogenesis-specific cDNA arrays after PTTG transfection. Two of the genes [inhibitor of DNA binding-3 (ID3) and thrombospondin-1 (TSP-1)] which showed differential expression in primary thyroid cells were validated in vitro and in vivo. RESULTS TSP-1 showed a 2.5-fold reduction and ID3 showed a 3.5-fold induction in expression in response to PTTG overexpression in vitro. Conversely, suppression of PTTG with small interfering RNA was associated with a 2-fold induction of TSP-1 and a 2.2-fold reduction in ID3 expression. When we examined TSP-1 and ID3 expression in 34 differentiated thyroid cancers, ID3 was significantly increased in tumors compared with normal thyroid tissue. Furthermore, ID3 expression was significantly higher in follicular thyroid tumors than in papillary tumors. Although mean TSP-1 expression was not altered in cancers compared with normal thyroids, we observed a significant independent association between TSP-1 expression and early tumor recurrence, with recurrent tumors demonstrating 4.2-fold lower TSP-1 expression than normal thyroid tissues. CONCLUSION We have identified ID3 and TSP-1 as two new downstream targets of PTTG in thyroid cancer. We propose that PTTG may promote angiogenesis by regulating the expression of multiple genes with both pro- and antiangiogenic properties and may thus be a key gene in triggering the angiogenic switch in thyroid tumorigenesis.