Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stochastic models of the binding kinetics of VEGF-A to VEGFR1 and VEGFR2 in endothelial cells

Vascular endothelial growth factor receptors (VEGFRs) are receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) that regulate proliferation, migration, angiogenesis and vascular permeability of endothelial cells. VEGFR1 and VEGFR2 bind vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGFs), inducing receptor dimerisation and activation, characterised by phosphorylation of tyrosine residues in their cytoplasmic domain. Although experimental evidence suggests that RTK signalling occurs both on the plasma membrane and intra-cellularly, and reveals the role of endocytosis in RTK signal transduction, we still lack knowledge of VEGFR phosphorylation-site use and of the spatiotemporal regulation of VEGFR signalling. In this paper, we introduce four stochastic mathematical models to study the binding kinetics of vascular endothelial growth factor VEGF-A to VEGFR1 and VEGFR2, and phosphorylation. The formation of phosphorylated dimers on the cell surface is a two-step process: diffusive transport and binding. The first two of our models only consider VEGFR2, which allows us to introduce new stochastic descriptors making use of a matrix-analytic approach. The two remaining models describe the competition of VEGFR1 and VEGFR2 for ligand availability, and are analysed making use of Gillespie simulations and the van Kampen approximation. Under the hypothesis that bound phosphorylated receptor dimers are the signalling units, we study the time to reach a threshold number of such complexes. Our results indicate that the presence of VEGFR1 does not only affect the timescale to reach a given signalling threshold, but it also affects the maximum attainable threshold. This result is consistent with the conjectured role of VEGFR1 as a decoy receptor, that prevents VEGF-A binding to VEGFR2, and thus, VEGFR2 attaining suitable phosphorylation levels. We identify an optimum range of ligand concentration for sustained dimer phosphorylation.
T lymphocytes export proteasomes by way of microparticles: a possible mechanism for generation of extracellular proteasomes

The 20S proteasome is almost exclusively localized within cells. High levels of extracellular proteasomes are also found circulating in the blood plasma of patients suffering from a variety of inflammatory, autoimmune and neoplastic diseases. However, the origin of these proteasomes remained enigmatic. Since the proteome of microparticles, small membrane enclosed vesicles released from cells, was shown to contain proteasomal subunits, we studied whether intact proteasomes are actively released into the extracellular space. Using human primary T lymphocytes stimulated with CaCl2 and the calcium ionophore A23187 to induce membrane blebbing we demonstrate that microparticles contain proteolytically active 20S proteasomes as well as the proteasome activator PA28 and subunits of the 19S proteasome regulator. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that incubation of in vitro generated T lymphocyte‐microparticles with sphingomyelinase results in the hydrolysis of the microparticle membranes and subsequent release of proteasomes from the vesicles. Thus, we here show for the first time that functional proteasomes can be exported from activated immune cells by way of microparticles, the dissolution of which may finally lead to the generation of extracellular proteasomes.
Barriers to learning online experienced by students with a mental health disability

Abstract Online education is widely regarded as increasing accessibility to higher education to individuals with disadvantage and disability, including those with a mental health disability. However, the learning challenges these students experience within the online learning environment are not well understood. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to better understand the barriers to learning that these students face in this environment. A qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 students revealed three major learning barriers: (a) impact of impairment, (b) personal and situational circumstances, and (c) learning environment. These barriers were found to have wide-ranging consequences for the students’ ability to fully engage in study and their overall wellbeing. The findings lend insight into the low retention rates for this cohort of students and the learning barriers that need to be addressed by online education providers to better enhance the educational experience of these students.
Executive Dysfunction in Depression

Executive dysfunction is common in Major depression and includes problems with planning, organizing, sequencing, shifting, information processing speed, and maintaining information in working memory [1,2]. The relationship is complex and adds to the disability [3]. The test commonly used for executive function in psychiatric disorders is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) [4]. Studies have shown that WCST scores may be affected even with relatively mild depression [5] and executive dysfunction may vary as a function of the severity of depression [6]. However, some studies found no such relationship between severity of depression and the overall cognitive performance [7]. Moreover, only a few studied executive dysfunctions in young depressives [8]. In the present study we compared the executive functions in depression with healthy controls and attempted to see whether there is any difference in executive function in depressives and non depressed matched healthy controls. Also we wanted to see whether the first time depressed differ from the depressed who have recurrent depression. The effect of severity of depression on the executive functions was also assessed.
The Operator Manifold Formalism. II. Physical Applications

Within the operator manifold approach (part I, hep-th/9812181) we derive the Gell-Mann-Nishijima relation and flavour group, whereas the leptons are particles with integer electric and leptonic charges and free of confinement, while quarks carry fractional electric and baryonic charges and imply the confinement. We consider the unified electroweak interactions with small number of free parameters, exploit the background of the local expanded symmetry $SU(2)\otimes U(1)$ and P-violation. The Weinberg mixing angle is shown to have fixed value at $30^{o}$. The Higgs bosons arise on an analogy of the Cooper pairs in superconductivity. Within the present microscopic approach we predict the Kobayashi-Maskawa quark flavour mixing; the appearance of the CP-violation phase; derive the mass-spectrum of leptons and quarks, as well as other emerging particles, and also some useful relations between their masses.
Comparing Colored and White-Black Visual Evoked Potentials in Multiple Sclerosis Patients.

Introduction We compared white-black (WB), white-red (WR), and black-red (BR) checkerboard stimulated visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and aimed to evaluate if redcolored VEP is more sensitive than WB VEP for the diagnosis of optic neuritis (ON). Methods Twenty-nine MS patients (21 females [72.4%]) and 35 healthy control subjects (24 females [68.6%]) were included in the study. Neurological and ophthalmological examinations were conducted for all subjects and VEP and optical coherence tomography (OCT) investigations were performed. Results A significant difference was found between MS patients and the control group for WB, WR, BR stimulated VEP P100 latencies and retinal nerve fiber length (RNFL) and ganglion cell complex (GCC) thicknesses, but there was no difference for WB, WR, and rb stimulated VEP amplitude values between the groups. There was no significant pathological difference between the eyes with an ON history in MS and eyes without an ON history in MS and control subjects after WB, WR, and BR stimulation (p=). Conclusions The WB checkerboard stimulated VEP is an ample test for routine use; further studies are necessary regarding the utility of rb stimulated VEP in detecting subclinical ON.
Sampling on the Sierpinski Gasket

We study regular and irregular sampling for functions defined on the Sierpinski Gasket (SG), where we interpret “bandlimited” to mean the function has a finite expansion in the first dm Dirichlet eigenfunctions of the Laplacian as defined by Kigami, and dm is the cardinality of the sampling set. In the regular case, we take the sampling set to be the nonboundary vertices of the level m graph approximating SG. We prove that regular sampling is always possible, and we give an algorithm to compute the sampling functions, based on an extension of the spectral decimation method of Fukushima and Shima to include inner products. We give experimental evidence that the sampling functions decay rapidly away from the sampling point, in striking contrast to the classical theory on the line where the sinc function exhibits excruciatingly slow decay. Similar behavior appears to hold for certain Dirichlet kernels. We show by example that the sampling formula provides an appealing method of approximating functions that are not necessarily bandlimited, and so might be useful for numerical analysis. We give experimental evidence that reasonable perturbations of one of the regular sampling sets remains a sampling set. In contrast to what happens on the unit interval, it is not true that all sets of the correct cardinality are sampling sets.
A framework for ubiquitously capturing users’ work and life patterns

The field of user modeling is concerned with the construction of computational models that describe various aspects of people’s lives. While user modeling has witnessed its greatest successes in recommendation systems of online retailers and content providers which amass thousands of opinions from customers, less focus has been paid on individual, personal user modeling. Models of a single user, gathered by observing the user’s interactions on all of their digital devices collectively, has the potential to capture the user’s activities more completely and with greater fidelity than would be possible by, for example, examining the user’s interactions with a single web site. Second, these models, taken over a longer term, such as over weeks, months, or years, has the potential to be able to identify time-dependent characteristics of the user, and may potentially open up a way to help identify different moods, situations or tasks in which the user may be engaged.
GALAXY GROUPS IN THE SDSS DR4. III. THE LUMINOSITY AND STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS

Using a large galaxy group catalog constructed from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4 (SDSS DR4) with an adaptive halo-based group finder, we investigate the luminosity and stellar mass functions for different populations of galaxies (central versus satellite, red versus blue, and galaxies in groups of different masses) and for groups themselves. The conditional stellar mass function (CSMF), which describes the stellar distribution of galaxies in halos of a given mass for central and satellite galaxies can be well modeled with a log-normal distribution and a modified Schechter form, respectively. On average, there are about three times as many central galaxies as satellites. Among the satellite population, there are in general more red galaxies than blue ones. For the central population, the luminosity function is dominated by red galaxies at the massive end, and by blue galaxies at the low-mass end. At the very low mass end (M* ≲ 109 h−2 M☉), however, there is a marked increase in the number of red centrals. We speculate that these galaxies are located close to large halos so that their star formation is truncated by the large-scale environments. The stellar mass function of galaxy groups is well described by a double power law, with a characteristic stellar mass at ∼4 × 1010 h−2 M☉. Finally, we use the observed stellar mass function of central galaxies to constrain the stellar mass–halo mass relation for low-mass halos, and obtain M*,c ∝ M4.9h for Mh ≪ 1011 h−1 M☉.
Testosterone, Social Class, and Antisocial Behavior in a Sample of 4,462 Men

Two hypotheses have been offered to explain the relation between testosterone and antisocial behavior in delinquent and criminal populations. One is that testosterone leads directly to antisocial behavior. The other is that a constellation of dominance, competitiveness, and sensation seeking associated with testosterone leads to either antisocial or prosocial behavior, depending upon an individual's resources and background. Analysis of archival data from 4,462 U.S. military veterans supported the first hypothesis: Testosterone was correlated with a variety of antisocial behaviors among all individuals. However, socioeconomic status (SES) proved to be a moderating variable, with weaker testosterone-behavior relationships among high SES subjects.
On the reliability and intuitiveness of aggregated search metrics

Aggregating search results from a variety of diverse verticals such as news, images, videos and Wikipedia into a single interface is a popular web search presentation paradigm. Although several aggregated search (AS) metrics have been proposed to evaluate AS result pages, their properties remain poorly understood. In this paper, we compare the properties of existing AS metrics under the assumptions that (1) queries may have multiple preferred verticals; (2) the likelihood of each vertical preference is available; and (3) the topical relevance assessments of results returned from each vertical is available. We compare a wide range of AS metrics on two test collections. Our main criteria of comparison are (1) discriminative power, which represents the reliability of a metric in comparing the performance of systems, and (2) intuitiveness, which represents how well a metric captures the various key aspects to be measured (i.e. various aspects of a user's perception of AS result pages). Our study shows that the AS metrics that capture key AS components (e.g., vertical selection) have several advantages over other metrics. This work sheds new lights on the further developments and applications of AS metrics.
Socio-Political Conflict and Economic Performance in Bolivia

We examine how socio-political conflict in Bolivia has affected its economic performance since the 1970s. Such conflict includes strikes, demonstrations, road blockades, and conventional rent-seeking. Since conflict has costs, it diverts resources away from production, tends to reduce investment and could therefore reduce economic growth. We first review the characteristics of conflict in Bolivia using a unique data set. We then provide estimates of the direct costs of conflict and examine the relationship with economic performance using hypotheses derived from a simple model. In particular, we make a distinction between economic growth that is due to external factors like changes in income due to movements in the terms of trade and economic growth that is due to productive investment. Growth due to external factors tends to be positively related to conflict, whereas growth due to productive investment should be negatively related to conflict. Finally, we discuss how levels of conflict, economic performance, and governance might be related in Bolivia’s recent history.
Household Income Sharing, Joint Consumption and the Expenditure Patterns of Australian Retired Couples and Single People

What level of household income is required so that a household member will have the same level of consumption as when living alone? The answer to this question depends on the extent to which household income is directed towards the consumption needs of the particular person, together with the extent to which there is shared consumption of household goods. This paper proposes a framework which permits data and assumptions obtained from several sources to be used together to identify these different relationships. This framework is applied to estimate the intra-household distribution of income and the economies of sharing for Australian married couples over retirement age. The main clusions of the paper are that income is shared relatively evenly (and the hypothesis of equal sharing cannot be rejected), and that on average couples require about one and a half times the income of singles to reach the same living standard. This suggests that current Australian pension payments to singles are relatively too low.
Optimizing End-to-End Big Data Transfers over Terabits Network Infrastructure

While future terabit networks hold the promise of significantly improving big-data motion among geographically distributed data centers, significant challenges must be overcome even on today's 100 gigabit networks to realize end-to-end performance. Multiple bottlenecks exist along the end-to-end path from source to sink, for instance, the data storage infrastructure at both the source and sink and its interplay with the wide-area network are increasingly the bottleneck to achieving high performance. In this paper, we identify the issues that lead to congestion on the path of an end-to-end data transfer in the terabit network environment, and we present a new bulk data movement framework for terabit networks, called LADS. LADS exploits the underlying storage layout at each endpoint to maximize throughput without negatively impacting the performance of shared storage resources for other users. LADS also uses the Common Communication Interface (CCI) in lieu of the sockets interface to benefit from hardware-level zero-copy, and operating system bypass capabilities when available. It can further improve data transfer performance under congestion on the end systems using buffering at the source using flash storage. With our evaluations, we show that LADS can avoid congested storage elements within the shared storage resource, improving input/output bandwidth, and data transfer rates across the high speed networks. We also investigate the performance degradation problems of LADS due to I/O contention on the parallel file system (PFS), when multiple LADS tools share the PFS. We design and evaluate a meta-scheduler to coordinate multiple I/O streams while sharing the PFS, to minimize the I/O contention on the PFS. With our evaluations, we observe that LADS with meta-scheduling can further improve the performance by up to 14 percent relative to LADS without meta-scheduling.
On the Mechanism of the Relaxing Effect of Fragmented Sarcoplasmic Reticulum

The vesicles of fragmented sarcoplasmic reticulum, i.e. the physiological relaxing factor, remove most of the exchangeable Ca bound to actomyosin and myofibrils. The extent to which they remove Ca and the extent to which they inhibit myofibrillar activity are closely correlated. Previous work has shown that those in vitro reactions of actomyosin with ATP which are equivalent to its contraction, i.e. superprecipitation and a high ATPase activity, require the formation of a Ca-actomyosin complex, and that actomyosin after the removal of most of its bound Ca is inhibited by physiological concentrations of ATP. The evidence now suggests that the factor achieves its relaxing effect through the dissociation of the Ca-actomyosin complex and that it has no other direct influence on the biological activity of actomyosin. Experiments, showing that under similar conditions the vesicles of the factor are capable of reducing the concentration of ionized Ca in the surrounding medium to about 0.02 µM and less, suggest that the factor competes successfully with actomyosin for the available Ca through its mechanism of Ca accumulation.
Digital Image Watermarking in Frequency Domain Using ECC and Dual Encryption Technique

This study presented an algorithm to protect the copyright watermark by providing Hamming codes as error correcting technique. Watermark was embedded in frequency domain using discrete cosine transformation and discrete wavelet transformation, to enhance the susceptibility. Combinations of two techniques are used to target medium frequencies only. Randomness of the watermark is also created before embedding. Instead of embedding in the same place in every block, it is embedded adaptively which depends upon the row and column of that particular block. Results prove the effectiveness of the algorithm against various attacks like jpeg attack, filtering and addition of noises like Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise and speckle noise. ECC proved to be effective to recover the watermark after certain attacks performed.
Low expression of phosphatase and tensin homolog in clear-cell renal cell carcinoma contributes to chemoresistance through activating the Akt/HDM2 signaling pathway

Clear-cell renal cell carcinoma (CCRCC) is the most frequent primary malignancy in the adult kidney. Most patients with advanced CCRCC have poor prognosis as CCRCC remains resistant to chemotherapy. The present study explored the possible mechanism underlying CCRCC resistance to chemotherapy and found that loss of PTEN in CCRCC may be involved. Knockdown of PTEN in the CCRCC cell line ACHN blocked etoposide-induced apoptosis and etoposide-impaired cell proliferation was also inhibited. It has been demonstrated that most chemotherapy drugs exert their anti-cancer effects via p53-mediated apoptosis, and in accordance, with this, the present study showed that treatment with etoposide significantly increased p53 levels. Silencing of PTEN in ACHN inhibited the Akt/HDM2 signaling cascade and depressed p53 expression, and the interaction between HDM2 and p53 was also enhanced. This was further verified in CCRCC tissue specimens from patients The results of the present study suggested that loss of PTEN, which deactivated Akt/HDM2 signaling followed by degradation of p53, may contribute to the development of etoposide resistance in CCRCC.
What is Islamophobia?: Racism, Social Movements and the State

As anti-Muslim undercurrents in the United States and other western societies become increasingly entrenched, the phenomenon of Islamophobia--and the need to understand what perpetuates it--has never been greater. Critiquing mainstream, conservative, and notionally left arguments, What Is Islamophobia? offers an original and necessary alternative to the existing literature by analyzing what the editors call the five pillars of Islamophobia: the institutions and machinery of the state, the counter-jihad movement, the neoconservative movement, the transnational Zionist movement, and assorted liberal groups, including the pro-war left and the new atheist movement. Together, the contributors demonstrate that this emergent racism is not simply a product of ideology, but is driven by a combination of social, political, and cultural factors. What Is Islamophobia? concludes with reflections on existing strategies for tackling this growing issue and considers different approaches to countering anti-Muslim prejudice.
A Key Volume Mining Deep Framework for Action Recognition

Recently, deep learning approaches have demonstrated remarkable progresses for action recognition in videos. Most existing deep frameworks equally treat every volume i.e. spatial-temporal video clip, and directly assign a video label to all volumes sampled from it. However, within a video, discriminative actions may occur sparsely in a few key volumes, and most other volumes are irrelevant to the labeled action category. Training with a large proportion of irrelevant volumes will hurt performance. To address this issue, we propose a key volume mining deep framework to identify key volumes and conduct classification simultaneously. Specifically, our framework is trained is optimized in an alternative way integrated to the forward and backward stages of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). In the forward pass, our network mines key volumes for each action class. In the backward pass, it updates network parameters with the help of these mined key volumes. In addition, we propose "Stochastic out" to model key volumes from multi-modalities, and an effective yet simple "unsupervised key volume proposal" method for high quality volume sampling. Our experiments show that action recognition performance can be significantly improved by mining key volumes, and we achieve state-of-the-art performance on HMDB51 and UCF101 (93.1%).