Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification and Validation of Housekeeping Genes for Gene Expression Analysis of Cancer Stem Cells

The characterization of cancer stem cell (CSC) subpopulation, through the comparison of the gene expression signature in respect to the native cancer cells, is particularly important for the identification of novel and more effective anticancer strategies. However, CSC have peculiar characteristics in terms of adhesion, growth, and metabolism that possibly implies a different modulation of the expression of the most commonly used housekeeping genes (HKG), like b-actin (ACTB). Although it is crucial to identify which are the most stable HKG genes to normalize the data derived from quantitative Real-Time PCR analysis to obtain robust and consistent results, an exhaustive validation of reference genes in CSC is still missing. Here, we isolated CSC spheres from different musculoskeletal sarcomas and carcinomas as a model to investigate on the stability of the mRNA expression of 15 commonly used HKG, in respect to the native cells. The selected genes were analysed for the variation coefficient and compared using the popular algorithms NormFinder and geNorm to evaluate stability ranking. As a result, we found that: 1) Tata Binding Protein (TBP), Tyrosine 3-monooxygenase/tryptophan 5-monooxygenase activation protein zeta polypeptide (YWHAZ), Peptidylprolyl isomerase A (PPIA), and Hydroxymethylbilane synthase (HMBS) are the most stable HKG for the comparison between CSC and native cells; 2) at least four reference genes should be considered for robust results; 3) the use of ACTB should not be recommended, 4) specific HKG should be considered for studies that are focused only on a specific tumor type, like sarcoma or carcinoma. Our results should be taken in consideration for all the studies of gene expression analysis of CSC, and will substantially contribute for future investigations aimed to identify novel anticancer therapy based on CSC targeting.
Blind image deblurring based on sparse prior of dictionary pair

Blind image deblurring, aiming at obtaining the sharp image from blurred one, is a widely existing problem in image processing. Traditional image deblurring methods always use the deconvolution method to remove the blur kernel's effect, however, deconvolution is so sensitive to noise that inevitable artifacts always exist in the deblurring results, even though regularity terms are introduced as constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel blind image deblurring method based on the sparse prior of dictionary pair, estimating the sparse coefficient, sharp image and blur kernel alternately. The proposed method could avoid the deconvolution problem which is an ill-posed problem, and obtain the result with fewer artifacts. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could obtain better performance.
Do Web 2.0 social media impact transnational social advocacy? : a study of South African civil society and Greenpeace.

This study focuses on how civil society organisations deploy Web 2.0 technologies for transnational social advocacy, the context of this technology use, and the effect of this adoption in achieving organisational goals. It analyses the effectiveness of these technologies in an attempt to understand the strategic intent in deploying these social media services. The reciprocal impact of this technology adoption on civil society organisations’ roles, structure, and orientation was also investigated. The technologies targeted for study are those commonly described as Web 2.0 social media including social networking sites, blogs, podcasts and wikis amongst others. While the literature points to many studies relating to the use of the Internet for advocacy it also suggests that emerging technologies have not been studied in any detail. In particular there are no recent studies that investigate Web 2.0 technologies. These studies have the potential to provide new perspectives to current theoretical frameworks. This study is designed as part case study and part exploratory. The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach using both qualitative and quantitative methods. A survey of South African civil society organisations painted a picture of the extent of adoption of Web 2.0 social services across South African civil society, and detailed the reasons, and the benefits both perceived and actual of such adoption. The global environmental justice organisation, Greenpeace is used as a case study. The organisation’s major goal is to advocate for changes in environmental policy and behaviour, has been at the forefront of environmental issues since its inception, and has used the mass media as an effective campaigning tool. The key findings that emerged in the South African context was that of a sector that has a lowlevel of knowledge of social media services and an accompanying low level of adoption. This is partly explained by factors at a national level including macro-economic policies, and a low level of Internet penetration and ICT readiness. Using Greenpeace as a case study revealed that while social media-led activism is increasingly being seen as strategic, there is a level of organisational introspection that is required to precisely determine how traditional CSOs can exploit social media while maintaining their core values and traditions. Social media is not a panacea for the issues confronting activism in an increasingly connected world, but rather is seen as complementing traditional advocacy with its ability to coordinate, synchronise and document campaigns.
Influence of stress on snack consumption in middle school girls

Stress has been known to change dietary behaviors and food intakes in individuals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of stress level on the frequency and the amount of snack consumption. The high stress group (HS) showed significantly higher frequency of consumption for bread, chips, cookies, ramyeon, and frozen snacks (p<0.05) compared to low stress group (LS) with higher frequency of snack consumption (p<0.01), and increased intakes of energy, carbohydrates, and sodium from snacks (p<0.01) than LS. As the stress level became higher, the proportions of students with irregular meals, overeating, and night snacking increased (p<0.01). Also, 33.0% of the subjects answered that they consumed an increased amount of snacks when they were feeling stressed. Our results indicated that stress has negative influence on snack consumption in middle school girls.
Central V4 Receptive Fields Are Scaled by the V1 Cortical Magnification and Correspond to a Constant-Sized Sampling of the V1 Surface

The mapping of the topographic representation of the visual field onto cortical areas changes throughout the hierarchy of cortical visual areas. The changes are believed to reflect the establishment of modules with different spatial processing emphasis. The receptive fields (RFs) of neurons within these modules, however, may not be governed by the same spatial topographic map parameters. Here it is shown that the RFs of area V4 neurons (centered 1–12° in eccentricity) are based on a circularly symmetric sampling of the primary visual cortical retinotopic map. No eccentricity dependent magnification beyond that observed in V1 is apparent in the V4 neurons. The size and shape of V4 RFs can be explained by a simple, constant sized, two-dimensional Gaussian sample of visual input from the retinotopic map laid out across the surface of V1. Inferences about the spatial scale of interactions within the receptive fields of neurons cannot be based on a visual area's apparent cortical magnification derived from topographic mapping.
Institute for International Integration Studies Is Gold a Safe Haven? International Evidence Is Gold a Safe Haven? International Evidence Is Gold a Safe Haven? International Evidence

Disclaimer Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the IIIS. All works posted here are owned and copyrighted by the author(s). Papers may only be downloaded for personal use only. Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine the role of gold in the global financial system. We test the hypothesis that gold represents a safe haven against stocks of major emerging and developing countries. A descriptive and econometric analysis for a sample spanning a 30 year period from 1979-2009 shows that gold is both a hedge and a safe haven for major European stock markets and the US but not for Australia, Canada, Japan and large emerging markets such as the BRIC countries. We also distinguish between a weak and strong form of the safe haven and argue that gold may act as a stabilizing force for the financial system by reducing losses in the face of extreme negative market shocks. Looking at specific crisis periods, we find that gold was a strong safe haven for most developed markets during the peak of the recent financial crisis.
The Trade-Off between Cash Flow and Net Present Value

In a world of asymmetric information, it is shown that firms need to convey information to the market about the qualit y of their earnings streams. This effort to mitigate the adverse selection problem in financial markets results in a bias in project selection that has a myopic characteristic. The result is developed. in a simple model. It is contrasted with alternative explanations of short-termism that invoke earnings distortion by management to misle ad a market perceived to be myopic. The robustness of the result to the introduction of partially informative cash flows and alternative mechanisms for conveying information is also discussed. Copyright 1993 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
Autophagy plays an essential role in the clearance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa by alveolar macrophages

Intracellular bacteria have been shown to cause autophagy, which impacts infectious outcomes, whereas extracellular bacteria have not been reported to activate autophagy. Here, we demonstrate that Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a Gram-negative extracellular bacterium, activates autophagy with considerably increased LC3 punctation in both an alveolar macrophage cell line (MH-S) and primary alveolar macrophages. Using the LC3 Gly120 mutant, we successfully demonstrated a hallmark of autophagy, conjugation of LC3 to phosphatidylethanolamine (PE). The accumulation of typical autophagosomes with double membranes was identified morphologically by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Furthermore, the increase of PE-conjugated LC3 was indeed induced by infection rather than inhibition of lysosome degradation. P. aeruginosa induced autophagy through the classical beclin-1–Atg7–Atg5 pathway as determined by specific siRNA analysis. Rapamycin and IFN-γ (autophagy inducers) augmented bacterial clearance, whereas beclin-1 and Atg5 knockdown reduced intracellular bacteria. Thus, P. aeruginosa-induced autophagy represents a host protective mechanism, providing new insight into the pathogenesis of this infection.
andStructuralChange in l^stern Europe

Unemployment is a major concern for the transforming economies of Central and Eastern Europe. The "flow approach" to labor markets suggests that unemployment is an important complement to the trans formation process and that labor market institutions will help determine the long run rate of unemployment in these economies. Considerable cross-country variation can be observed in Eastern Europe with respect to unemployment benefits, collective bargaining structures and active labor market policies. An aggregate matching function is successfully estimated with monthly gross flow data from Czech and Slovak employment office districts, indicating that the new labor markets of the East function in a similar way to their Western counterparts. The conclusion of a controltheoretic analysis supports a "mixed bang" approach to the transformation; big-bang and benign neglect policies are generally suboptimal. Cross country evidence from OECD countries confirm the role of collective bar gaining institutions, unemployment benefit generosity and active employ ment programs in determining equilibrium unemployment and long run unemployment. With the possible exception of the Czech Republic, high rates of unemployment are likely to characterize the economic landscape of Eastern and Central Europe in the coming years.
Score tests for familial correlation in genotyped‐proband designs

In the genotyped‐proband design, a proband is selected based on an observed phenotype, the genotype of the proband is observed, and then the phenotypes of all first‐degree relatives are obtained. The genotypes of these first‐degree relatives are not observed. Gail et al. [(1999) Genet Epidemiol] discuss likelihood analysis of this design under the assumption that the phenotypes are conditionally independent of one another given the observed and unobserved genotypes. Li and Thompson [(1997) Biometrics 53:282–293] give an example where this assumption is suspect, thus suggesting that it is important to develop tests for conditional independence. In this paper, we develop a score test for the conditional independence assumption in models that might include covariates or observation of genotypes for some of the first degree relatives. The problem can be cast more generally as one of score testing in the presence of missing covariates. A standard analysis would require specifying a distribution for the covariates, which is not convenient and could lead to a lack of model‐robustness. We show that by considering a natural conditional likelihood, and basing the score test on it, a simple analysis results. The methods are applied to a study of the penetrance for breast cancer of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations among Ashkenazi Jews. Genet. Epidemiol. 18:293–306, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Flexible Approach Based on the user Preferences for Schema Matching

Automating schema matching is challenging. Previous approaches focus on computing all element matches between two schemas and don't take into account the preferences of the user who can be only interested in specific elements of the schema. We propose a new approach based on the user preferences to extract subsets of schemas on which will be applied the matching process. Fuzzy sets can be used to express the user preferences in the selection criteria of a query. Thus, we introduce the notion of fuzzy set defined over a part of the schema, then its extended form that is explicitly defined over the whole schema, according to the generalization rules. This will reduce the research space and therefore contribute to optimize the schema matching process. We also propose to propagate weights to elements of a target schema according to the user preferences on a source schema and mappings found by the matcher between the two schemas. The output scores give an automatic order of the target schema elements based on the interest expressed by the user.
Opportunistic Spectrum Access by Exploiting Primary User Feedbacks in Underlay Cognitive Radio Systems: An Optimality Analysis

We consider an underlay cognitive radio (CR) communication system in which a cognitive secondary user (SU) can access multiple primary spectrum channels only when its interference to the primary users (PU) is limited. To identify and exploit instantaneous transmission opportunities, the SU probes a subset of primary channels by overhearing the primary feedback signals so as to learn the primary receiver's channel condition and the interference tolerance level, then chooses appropriate power to transmit its data. In such context, the SU cannot probe all the channels for its limited number of receiving antennas, then a crucial optimization problem faced by the SU is to probe which channel(s) in order to maximize the long-term throughput given the past probing history. In this paper, we tackle this optimization problem by casting it into a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) problem that is of fundamental importance in decision theory. Given the specific and practical constraints posed by the problem, we analyze the myopic probing policy which consists of probing the best channels based on the past observation. We perform an analytical study on the optimality of the developed myopic probing policy. Specifically, for a family of generic and practically important utility functions, we establish the closed-form conditions to guarantee the optimality of the myopic probing policy, and also illustrate our analytical results via simulations on several typical network scenarios.
Econometric testing of spatial productivity spillovers from public capital

In this paper we review two different approaches followed in the empirical literature to test for the existence of public capital spillovers. Additionally, we explore the role played by an additive aggregator of public capital in neighboring regions versus the multiplicative aggregator used previously in the literature. In the empirical application we compare the different methodologies using a panel data set of the 47 mainland Spanish provinces. We do not find evidence of the existence of spillover effects of public infrastructure.
CD44+/CD24− breast cancer cells exhibit phenotypic reversion in three-dimensional self-assembling peptide RADA16 nanofiber scaffold

Background Self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffolds have been shown to be a permissive biological material for tissue repair, cell proliferation, differentiation, etc. Recently, a subpopulation (CD44+/CD24−) of breast cancer cells has been reported to have stem/progenitor cell properties. The aim of this study was to investigate whether this subpopulation of cancer cells have different phenotypes in self-assembling COCH3-RADARADARADARADA-CONH2 (RADA16) peptide nanofiber scaffold compared with Matrigel® (BD Biosciences, Two Oak Park, Bedford, MA, USA) and collagen I. Methods CD44 and CD24 expression was determined by flow cytometry. Cell proliferation was measured by 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine assay and DNA content measurement. Immunostaining was used to indicate the morphologies of cells in three-dimensional (3D) cultures of different scaffolds and the localization of β-catenin in the colonies. Western blot was used to determine the expression of signaling proteins. In vitro migration assay and inoculation into nude mice were used to evaluate invasion and tumorigenesis in vivo. Results The breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-435S contained a high percentage (>99%) of CD44+/CD24− cells, which exhibited phenotypic reversion in 3D RADA16 nanofiber scaffold compared with collagen I and Matrigel. The newly formed reverted acini-like colonies reassembled a basement membrane and reorganized their cytoskeletons. At the same time, cells cultured and embedded in RADA16 peptide scaffold exhibited growth arrest. Also, they exhibited different migration potential, which links their migration ability with their cellular morphology. Consistent with studies in vitro, the in vivo tumor formation assay further supported of the functional changes caused by the reversion in 3D RADA16 culture. Expression levels of intercellular surface adhesion molecule-1 were upregulated in cells cultured in RADA16 scaffolds, and the NF-kappa B inhibitor pyrrolidine dithiocarbamate could inhibit RADA16-induced upregulation of intercellular surface adhesion molecule-1 and the phenotype reversion of MDA-MB-453S cells. Conclusion Culturing a CD44+/CD24−-enriched breast cancer cell population in 3D RADA16 peptide nanofiber scaffold led to a significant phenotypic reversion compared with Matrigel and collagen I.
Political (In)Stability of Social Security Reform

In this paper we consider an economy populated by overlapping generations, who vote on abolishing the funded system and replacing it with the pay-as-you-go scheme (i.e. unprivatizing the pension system). We compare politically stable and politically unstable reforms and show that even if the funded system is overall welfare enhancing, the cohort distribution of benefits along the transition path turns unprivatizing social security politically favorable.
Neocortical Networks Entrain Neuronal Circuits in Cerebellar Cortex

Activity in neocortex is often characterized by synchronized oscillations of neurons and networks, resulting in the generation of a local field potential (LFP) and electroencephalogram. Do the neuronal networks of the cerebellum also generate synchronized oscillations and are they under the influence of those in the neocortex? Here we show that, in the absence of any overt external stimulus, the cerebellar cortex generates a slow oscillation that is correlated with that of the neocortex. Disruption of the neocortical slow oscillation abolishes the cerebellar slow oscillation, whereas blocking cerebellar activity has no overt effect on the neocortex. We provide evidence that the cerebellar slow oscillation results in part from the activation of granule, Golgi, and Purkinje neurons. In particular, we show that granule and Golgi cells discharge trains of single spikes, and Purkinje cells generate complex spikes, during the “up” state of the slow oscillation. Purkinje cell simple spiking is weakly related to the cerebellar and neocortical slow oscillation in a minority of cells. Our results indicate that the cerebellum generates rhythmic network activity that can be recorded as an LFP in the anesthetized animal, which is driven by synchronized oscillations of the neocortex. Furthermore, we show that correlations between neocortical and cerebellar LFPs persist in the awake animal, indicating that neocortical circuits modulate cerebellar neurons in a similar manner in natural behavioral states. Thus, the projection neurons of the neocortex collectively exert a driving and modulatory influence on cerebellar network activity.
Population genetic analyses of Hypoplectrus coral reef fishes provide evidence that local processes are operating during the early stages of marine adaptive radiations

Large‐scale, spatially explicit models of adaptive radiation suggest that the spatial genetic structure within a species sampled early in the evolutionary history of an adaptive radiation might be higher than the genetic differentiation between different species formed during the same radiation over all locations. Here we test this hypothesis with a spatial population genetic analysis of Hypoplectrus coral reef fishes (Serranidae), one of the few potential cases of a recent adaptive radiation documented in the marine realm. Microsatellite analyses of Hypoplectrus puella (barred hamlet) and Hypoplectrus nigricans (black hamlet) from Belize, Panama and Barbados validate the population genetic predictions at the regional scale for H. nigricans despite the potential for high levels of gene flow between populations resulting from the 3‐week planktonic larval phase of Hypoplectrus. The results are different for H. puella, which is characterized by significantly lower levels of spatial genetic structure than H. nigricans. An extensive field survey of Hypoplectrus population densities complemented by individual‐based simulations shows that the higher abundance and more continuous distribution of H. puella could account for the reduced spatial genetic structure within this species. The genetic and demographic data are also consistent with the hypothesis that H. puella might represent the ancestral form of the Hypoplectrus radiation, and that H. nigricans might have evolved repeatedly from H. puella through ecological speciation. Altogether, spatial genetic analysis within and between Hypoplectrus species indicate that local processes can operate at a regional scale within recent marine adaptive radiations.