Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND CORPORATE FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE FROM A DEVELOPING COUNTRY

We investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP) in a developing country context using annual report data from a sample of 131 firms over a 5 year period (2008-2012). Legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory underpin the study. We find a positive and significant relationship between CSR and CFP when using accounting measures of return on assets and equity, but an insignificant relationship when using the market based Tobin’s Q. The moderating effect of organisational governance on measures of workplace and environmental reporting is found to be important in a less developed economy.
Composition of agarose substrate affects behavioral output of Drosophila larvae

In the last decade the Drosophila larva has evolved into a simple model organism offering the opportunity to integrate molecular genetics with systems neuroscience. This led to a detailed understanding of the neuronal networks for a number of sensory functions and behaviors including olfaction, vision, gustation and learning and memory. Typically, behavioral assays in use exploit simple Petri dish setups with either agarose or agar as a substrate. However, neither the quality nor the concentration of the substrate is generally standardized across these experiments and there is no data available on how larval behavior is affected by such different substrates. Here, we have investigated the effects of different agarose concentrations on several larval behaviors. We demonstrate that agarose concentration is an important parameter, which affects all behaviors tested: preference, feeding, learning and locomotion. Larvae can discriminate between different agarose concentrations, they feed differently on them, they can learn to associate an agarose concentration with an odor stimulus and change locomotion on a substrate of higher agarose concentration. Additionally, we have investigated the effect of agarose concentration on three quinine based behaviors: preference, feeding and learning. We show that in all cases examined the behavioral output changes in an agarose concentration-dependent manner. Our results suggest that comparisons between experiments performed on substrates differing in agarose concentration should be done with caution. It should be taken into consideration that the agarose concentration can affect the behavioral output and thereby the experimental outcomes per se potentially due to the initiation of an escape response or changes in foraging behavior on more rigid substrates.
Cytotoxicity of Labruscol, a New Resveratrol Dimer Produced by Grapevine Cell Suspensions, on Human Skin Melanoma Cancer Cell Line HT-144

A new resveratrol dimer (1) called labruscol, has been purified by centrifugal partition chromatography of a crude ethyl acetate stilbene extract obtained from elicited grapevine cell suspensions of Vitis labrusca L. cultured in a 14-liter stirred bioreactor. One dimensional (1D) and two dimensional (2D) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analyses including 1H, 13C, heteronuclear single-quantum correlation (HSQC), heteronuclear multiple bond correlation (HMBC), and correlation spectroscopy (COSY) as well as high-resolution electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (HR-ESI-MS) were used to characterize this compound and to unambiguously identify it as a new stilbene dimer, though its relative stereochemistry remained unsolved. Labruscol was recovered as a pure compound (>93%) in sufficient amounts (41 mg) to allow assessment of its biological activity (cell viability, cell invasion and apoptotic activity) on two different cell lines, including one human skin melanoma cancer cell line HT-144 and a healthy human dermal fibroblast (HDF) line. This compound induced almost 100% of cell viability inhibition in the cancer line at a dose of 100 μM within 72 h of treatment. However, at all tested concentrations and treatment times, resveratrol displayed an inhibition of the cancer line viability higher than that of labruscol in the presence of fetal bovine serum. Both compounds also showed differential activities on healthy and cancer cell lines. Finally, labruscol at a concentration of 1.2 μM was shown to reduce cell invasion by 40%, although no similar activity was observed with resveratrol. The cytotoxic activity of this newly-identified dimer is discussed.
Privacy-Preserving Recommendation Systems for Consumer Healthcare Services

Advances in e-health bring new challenges with regard to the protection of sensitive patient data; an increasing number of applications require to share data with consumer healthcare services. Typically the providers of those services reside outside the traditional health care domain, where medical data protection laws (such as HIPAA) do not apply. Instead, technical means of protection should safeguard critical health data that is shared with third parties. In this paper, we show that cryptographic privacy- enhancing protocols are a key tool to protect the privacy of patients in upcoming consumer e-health services. In particular we focus on services offering health advice, allowing to locate specialists and supporting the formation of patient communities.
Manufacturing compromise: the emergence of exploit-as-a-service

We investigate the emergence of the exploit-as-a-service model for driveby browser compromise. In this regime, attackers pay for an exploit kit or service to do the "dirty work" of exploiting a victim's browser, decoupling the complexities of browser and plugin vulnerabilities from the challenges of generating traffic to a website under the attacker's control. Upon a successful exploit, these kits load and execute a binary provided by the attacker, effectively transferring control of a victim's machine to the attacker. In order to understand the impact of the exploit-as-a-service paradigm on the malware ecosystem, we perform a detailed analysis of the prevalence of exploit kits, the families of malware installed upon a successful exploit, and the volume of traffic that malicious web sites receive. To carry out this study, we analyze 77,000 malicious URLs received from Google Safe Browsing, along with a crowd-sourced feed of blacklisted URLs known to direct to exploit kits. These URLs led to over 10,000 distinct binaries, which we ran in a contained environment. Our results show that many of the most prominent families of malware now propagate through driveby downloads--32 families in all. Their activities are supported by a handful of exploit kits, with Blackhole accounting for 29% of all malicious URLs in our data, followed in popularity by Incognito. We use DNS traffic from real networks to provide a unique perspective on the popularity of malware families based on the frequency that their binaries are installed by drivebys, as well as the lifetime and popularity of domains funneling users to exploits.
Atherogenic dyslipidemia in HIV-infected individuals treated with protease inhibitors. The Swiss HIV Cohort Study.

BACKGROUND Administration of protease inhibitors (PIs) to HIV-infected individuals has been associated with hyperlipidemia. In this study, we characterized the lipoprotein profile in subjects receiving ritonavir, indinavir, or nelfinavir, alone or in combination with saquinavir. METHODS AND RESULTS Plasma lipoprotein levels were quantified in 93 HIV-infected adults receiving PIs. Comparison was done with pretreatment values and with 28 nonPI-treated HIV-infected subjects. An elevation in plasma cholesterol levels was observed in all PI-treated groups but was more pronounced for ritonavir (2.0+/-0.3 mmol/L [mean+/-SEM], n=46, versus 0.1+/-0.2 mmol/L in nonPI treated group, P<0.001) than for indinavir (0.8+/-0.2 mmol/L, n=26, P=0.03) or nelfinavir (1.2+/-0.2 mmol/L, n=21, P=0.01). Administration of ritonavir, but not indinavir or nelfinavir, was associated with a marked elevation in plasma triglyceride levels (1.83+/-0.46 mmol/L, P=0.002). Plasma HDL-cholesterol levels remained unchanged. Combination of ritonavir or nelfinavir with saquinavir did not further elevate plasma lipid levels. A 48% increase in plasma levels of lipoprotein(a) was detected in PI-treated subjects with pretreatment Lp(a) values >20 mg/dL. Similar changes in plasma lipid levels were observed in 6 children receiving ritonavir. CONCLUSIONS Administration of PIs to HIV-infected individuals is associated with a marked, compound-specific dyslipidemia. The risk of pancreatitis and premature atherosclerosis due to PI-associated dyslipidemia remains to be established.
Learning a better representation of speech soundwaves using restricted boltzmann machines

State of the art speech recognition systems rely on preprocessed speech features such as Mel cepstrum or linear predictive coding coefficients that collapse high dimensional speech sound waves into low dimensional encodings. While these have been successfully applied in speech recognition systems, such low dimensional encodings may lose some relevant information and express other information in a way that makes it difficult to use for discrimination. Higher dimensional encodings could both improve performance in recognition tasks, and also be applied to speech synthesis by better modeling the statistical structure of the sound waves. In this paper we present a novel approach for modeling speech sound waves using a Restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) with a novel type of hidden variable and we report initial results demonstrating phoneme recognition performance better than the current state-of-the-art for methods based on Mel cepstrum coefficients.
Reinventing the Wheel

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Utilization of the Plant Hormone Indole-3-Acetic Acid for Growth by Pseudomonas putida Strain 1290

ABSTRACT We have isolated from plant surfaces several bacteria with the ability to catabolize indole-3-acetic acid (IAA). One of them, isolate 1290, was able to utilize IAA as a sole source of carbon, nitrogen, and energy. The strain was identified by its 16S rRNA sequence as Pseudomonas putida. Activity of the enzyme catechol 1,2-dioxygenase was induced during growth on IAA, suggesting that catechol is an intermediate of the IAA catabolic pathway. This was in agreement with the observation that the oxygen uptake by IAA-grown P. putida 1290 cells was elevated in response to the addition of catechol. The inability of a catR mutant of P. putida 1290 to grow at the expense of IAA also suggests a central role for catechol as an intermediate in IAA metabolism. Besides being able to destroy IAA, strain 1290 was also capable of producing IAA in media supplemented with tryptophan. In root elongation assays, P. putida strain 1290 completely abolished the inhibitory effect of exogenous IAA on the elongation of radish roots. In fact, coinoculation of roots with P. putida 1290 and 1 mM concentration of IAA had a positive effect on root development. In coinoculation experiments on radish roots, strain 1290 was only partially able to alleviate the inhibitory effect of bacteria that in culture overproduce IAA. Our findings imply a biological role for strain 1290 as a sink or recycler of IAA in its association with plants and plant-associated bacteria.
Structural basis for the mutual antagonism of cAMP and TRIP8b in regulating HCN channel function

Significance cAMP regulation of ion channels controls higher brain functions, such as sleep, memory, and cognition. Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are activated by the direct binding of cAMP to their cytoplasmic tail and inhibited by the neuronal β-subunit tetratricopeptide repeat-containing Rab8b interacting protein (TRIP8b), which prevents cAMP binding. Understanding the molecular mechanisms of regulation of this family of ion channels is critical because it pertains to the physiological processes and diseases associated with dysfunctions in the HCN current. Here, we explain the dual regulatory system of HCN2 channels in atomic detail. cAMP and TRIP8b do not compete for the same binding site on the HCN2 cytoplasmic tail; rather, they exert their mutual competition by promoting and stabilizing two different conformational states of the protein. cAMP signaling in the brain mediates several higher order neural processes. Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels directly bind cAMP through their cytoplasmic cyclic nucleotide binding domain (CNBD), thus playing a unique role in brain function. Neuronal HCN channels are also regulated by tetratricopeptide repeat-containing Rab8b interacting protein (TRIP8b), an auxiliary subunit that antagonizes the effects of cAMP by interacting with the channel CNBD. To unravel the molecular mechanisms underlying the dual regulation of HCN channel activity by cAMP/TRIP8b, we determined the NMR solution structure of the HCN2 channel CNBD in the cAMP-free form and mapped on it the TRIP8b interaction site. We reconstruct here the full conformational changes induced by cAMP binding to the HCN channel CNBD. Our results show that TRIP8b does not compete with cAMP for the same binding region; rather, it exerts its inhibitory action through an allosteric mechanism, preventing the cAMP-induced conformational changes in the HCN channel CNBD.
Decelerating Flows in TeV Blazars: A Resolution to the BL Lacertae-FR I Unification Problem

TeV emission from BL Lacertae (BL) objects is commonly modeled as synchrotron self-Compton radiation from relativistically moving homogeneous plasma blobs. In the context of these models, the blob Lorentz factors needed to reproduce the TeV emission corrected for absorption by the diffuse infrared background are large (δ ≳ 50). The main reason for this is that stronger beaming eases the problem of the lack of ~IR-UV synchrotron seed photons needed to produce the deabsorbed ~few TeV peak of the spectral energy distribution. However, such high Doppler factors are in strong disagreement with the unified scheme, according to which BLs are FR I radio galaxies with their jets closely aligned to the line of sight. Here, motivated by the detection of subluminal velocities in the subparsec-scale jets of the best studied TeV blazars, Mrk 421 and Mrk 501, we examine the possibility that the relativistic flows in the TeV BLs decelerate. In this case, the problem of the missing seed photons is solved because of upstream Compton scattering, a process in which the upstream energetic electrons from the fast base of the flow "see" the synchrotron seed photons produced in the slow part of the flow relativistically beamed. Modest Lorentz factors (Γ ~ 15), decelerating down to values compatible with the recent radio interferometric observations, reproduce the ~few TeV peak energy of these sources. Furthermore, such decelerating flows are shown to be in agreement with the BL-FR I unification, naturally reproducing the observed BL/FR I broadband luminosity ratios.
Health Savings Accounts: Implications for Health Spending

Enrollment in Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and the high deductible health insurance plans that go with them is increasing rapidly. The accounts benefit from favorable tax status, and President Bush has proposed further expanding tax incentives that favor HSAs. The goal of these policies is to encourage more efficient use of health care resources by improving consumer incentives. This could result in lower health expenditures and lower health insurance premiums. Much has been written in the popular press about HSAs recently, but unfortunately many have incorrectly interpreted the underlying economics. This paper clarifies the incentive and spending effects of HSAs both conceptually and through simulation modeling. We find that switching an average risk pool from a traditional Preferred Provider Organization plan to a typical HS A plan would decrease their spending by five percent.
Hematopoietic effects of recombinant human interleukin-3 and interleukin-6

Recombinant human IL-6 (rhIL-6) is a pleiotropic cytokine with stimulatory actions on the hematopoietic system, the immune system and hepatocytes. Clinical interest in the use of this cytokine was raised because of its thrombopoietic properties and also because of its anti-tumor activity, which was shown in vitro and in the preclinical setting. Various studies showed that doses up to 10 m g/kg/d rhIL-6 before and after chemotherapy are tolerable and the most frequent side-effects encountered consist of ﬂu-like symptoms. Furthermore, a consistent decrease in hemoglobin was reported during rhIL-6 treatment. This was probably due to hemodilution, although a change in ferrokinetics, may also at least partly, explain the anemia. An evident increase of platelets has been observed in various studies. After chemotherapy, rhIL-6 seemed to hasten platelet recovery, without affecting platelet nadir. Preliminary data from studies investigating the value of rhIL-6 as an anti-tumor agent in renal cell carcinoma and melanoma reported low response rates, between 8 and 14%. The results of rhIL-6 in ameliorating chemotherapy induced bone-marrow depression, and especially thrombocytopenia, are promising and merit further phase-III-studies.
Gold nanorods/mesoporous silica-based nanocomposite as theranostic agents for targeting near-infrared imaging and photothermal therapy induced with laser

Photothermal therapy (PTT) is widely regarded as a promising technology for cancer treatment. Gold nanorods (GNRs), as excellent PTT agent candidates, have shown high-performance photothermal conversion ability under laser irradiation, yet two major obstacles to their clinical application are the lack of selective accumulation in the target site following systemic administration and the greatly reduced photothermal conversion efficiency caused by self-aggregating in aqueous environment. Herein, we demonstrate that tLyp-1 peptide-functionalized, indocyanine green (ICG)-containing mesoporous silica-coated GNRs (I-TMSG) possessed dual-function as tumor cells-targeting near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent probe and PTT agents. The construction of the nanostructure began with synthesis of GNRs by seed-mediated growth method, followed by the coating of mesoporous silica, the chemical conjugation of PEG and tLyp-1 peptide, and the enclosure of ICG as an NIR imaging agent in the mesoporous. The as-prepared nanoparticles could shield the GNRs against their self-aggregation, improve the stability of ICG, and exhibit negligible dark cytotoxicity. More importantly, such a theranostic nanocomposite could realize the combination of GNRs-based photothermal ablation under NIR illumination, ICG-mediated fluorescent imaging, and tLyp-1-enabled more easy endocytosis into breast cancer cells. All in all, I-TMSG nanoparticles, in our opinion, possessed the strong potential to realize the effective diagnosis and PTT treatment of human mammary cancer.
Transcranial current stimulation focality using disc and ring electrode configurations: FEM analysis

We calculated the electric fields induced in the brain during transcranial current stimulation (TCS) using a finite-element concentric spheres human head model. A range of disc electrode configurations were simulated: (1) distant-bipolar; (2) adjacent-bipolar; (3) tripolar; and three ring designs, (4) belt, (5) concentric ring, and (6) double concentric ring. We compared the focality of each configuration targeting cortical structures oriented normal to the surface (‘surface-radial’ and ‘cross-section radial’), cortical structures oriented along the brain surface (‘surface-tangential’ and ‘cross-section tangential’) and non-oriented cortical surface structures (‘surface-magnitude’ and ‘cross-section magnitude’). For surface-radial fields, we further considered the ‘polarity’ of modulation (e.g. superficial cortical neuron soma hyper/depolarizing). The distant-bipolar configuration, which is comparable with commonly used TCS protocols, resulted in diffuse (un-focal) modulation with bi-directional radial modulation under each electrode and tangential modulation between electrodes. Increasing the proximity of the two electrodes (adjacent-bipolar electrode configuration) increased focality, at the cost of more surface current. At similar electrode distances, the tripolar-electrodes configuration produced comparable peak focality, but reduced radial bi-directionality. The concentric-ring configuration resulted in the highest spatial focality and uni-directional radial modulation, at the expense of increased total surface current. Changing ring dimensions, or use of two concentric rings, allow titration of this balance. The concentric-ring design may thus provide an optimized configuration for targeted modulation of superficial cortical neurons.
Beyond childhood: psychiatric comorbidities and social background of adults with Asperger syndrome.

BACKGROUND Over the past few years, our knowledge about Asperger syndrome (AS) has increased enormously. Although it used to be a syndrome mainly encountered in childhood and adolescent psychiatry, it is now increasingly recognized in adult psychiatry. Nevertheless, little is known about psychiatric comorbidities and life course of adults with AS. The current study aimed to gain an insight into comorbidities and the development of the social situation of adults with AS. SUBJECTS AND METHODS We investigated psychiatric comorbidities, psychiatric history, professional background, partnerships, and children in 50 adults with AS (34 men and 16 women) over a broad age range (20-62 years). RESULTS Seventy percent of adults with AS had at least one psychiatric comorbiditiy. Most frequent comorbidities were depression and anxiety disorders. Obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcohol abuse/dependence were also observed. Many adults had previously been treated with psychopharmacological or psychotherapeutic interventions. Although most adults had a high-level school leaving certificate and had gone on to complete training/university studies, less than half were currently in employment. Fourteen adults were living in a partnership and 10 had children. CONCLUSIONS Adults with AS often have psychiatric comorbidities, indicating lower levels of mental health. Additionally, they seem to have severe limitations concerning professional success, despite having a good school education. Their family situation is also impaired with regard to starting a family. These considerable limitations in the life of adults with AS may help to understand their specific problems, and emphasize the importance of developing specific treatments for improving their mental health and social integration.