Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
E-government adoption in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: Factors from social perspectives

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan provides an example of a nation improving global competitiveness through development of strong Information Communication Technology (ICT) with the aim of becoming a knowledge based country and a regional Information Technology (IT) centre. E-government is an important part of this strategy, however there appears to be a lack of understanding of the social factors that may influence citizens' intention to use e-government. This paper makes a contribution in examining these factors through a literature search and questionnaire and data collected from 400 Jordanian participants. The research explores four different social factors: trust in terms of the security and privacy and trust in government, attitudes and beliefs, education, and accessibility. This research uses exploratory factor analysis to identify the main factors that may influence e-government adoption in Jordan.
Trust in close relationships.

A theoretical model describing interpersonal trust in close relationships is presented. Three dimensions of trust are identified, based on the type of attributions drawn about a partner's motives. These dimensions are also characterized by a developmental progression in the relationship. The validity of this theoretical perspective was examined through evidence obtained from a survey of a heterogeneous sample of established couples. An analysis of the Trust Scale in this sample was consistent with the notion that the predictability, dependability, and faith components represent distinct and coherent dimensions. A scale to measure interpersonal motives was also developed. The perception of intrinsic motives in a partner emerged as a dimension, as did instrumental and extrinsic motives. As expected, love and happiness were closely tied to feelings of faith and the attribution of intrinsic motivation to both self and partner. Women appeared to have more integrated, complex views of their relationships than men: All three forms of trust were strongly related and attributions of instrumental motives in their partners seemed to be self-affirming. Finally, there was a tendency for people to view their own motives as less self-centered and more exclusively intrinsic in flavor than their partner's motives.
Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Does Not Directly Stimulate Luteinizing Hormone Biosynthesis in Male African Catfish1

Abstract Besides gonadotropin release, GnRH stimulates gonadotropin subunit gene transcription and translation in gonadotrophs. In the African catfish, Clarias gariepinus, chicken GnRH-II (cGnRH-II: [His5,Trp7,Tyr8]-GnRH) and catfish GnRH (cfGnRH: [His5,Asn8]-GnRH) are two endogenous forms of GnRH. Studying their effects on LH subunit steady-state mRNA levels, LH de novo synthesis, and LH release in primary pituitary cell cultures of adult males, we found that cGnRH-II hardly influenced the steady-state levels of LH subunit mRNAs or LH de novo synthesis, although it stimulated LH release. Although cfGnRH stimulated LH secretion as well, high concentrations—although apparently still within the physiologic range—reduced LH transcript levels and de novo synthesis in primary pituitary cell cultures. In vivo experiments demonstrated a biphasic response of LH subunit transcript levels after a single GnRH injection: a decrease after 2 h was followed by an increase at 8 h. When the testes were removed before GnRH treatment, however, LH transcript levels remained depressed at 8 h after GnRH injection, indicating that the secondary increase in LH transcript levels depends on the presence of the testes. We conclude that the up-regulation of LH production subsequent to GnRH stimulation in adult male African catfish is mediated by factors originating from the testis. Previous work suggests that aromatizable androgens may play an important role in this context. Under the present experimental conditions, however, GnRHs had no, or an inhibitory, direct effect on LH production in catfish gonadotrophs.
First-principle studies on the influence of anisotropic pressure on the physical properties of aluminum nitride

In this work, we performed extensive first-principle studies to discuss the effect of uniaxial and biaxial mechanical pressure on the structural and physical properties of AlN piezoelectric material, including the longitudinal elastic constant (C33), piezoelectric constant (e33), static dielectric constant (ε33), and mass density (ρ). In particular, we give the relationship between the paramters mentioned above and the longitudinal acoustic wave velocity (V) under anisotropic pressure. Our results show that the applied uniaxial or biaxial pressure in the basal plane has a more obvious influence on physical properties of AlN than the uniaxial pressure along hexagonal axis. The pressure-induced variations of C33, e33 and ρ significantly change the V value, whereas the effect of ε33 on V is negligible. Our theoretical results provide useful information for the performance predictions of electro-acoustic mechanics sensors, such as FBAR mechanical sensors, based on the intrinsic properties of piezoelectric materials.
Measuring pulse rate with a webcam — A non-contact method for evaluating cardiac activity

In this paper the simple and robust method of measuring the pulse rate is presented. Elaborated algorithm allows for efficient pulse rate registration directly from face image captured from webcam. The desired signal was obtained by proper channel selection and principal component analysis. A developed non-contact method of heart rate monitoring is shown in the paper. The proposed technique may have a great value in monitoring person at home after adequate enhancements are introduced.
Mitogen-activated protein kinases mediate peroxynitrite-induced cell death in human bronchial epithelial cells.

Peroxynitrite, formed by the reaction of nitric oxide (NO. ) with superoxide anions (O(2)(-). ), may play a role in the pathophysiology of inflammation. The effects of 3-morpholinosydnonimine (SIN-1), a peroxynitrite generator, on the human bronchial epithelial cell line BEAS-2B, were examined. SIN-1 exposure resulted in cell death in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Depletion of intracellular glutathione increased the vulnerability of the cells. Pretreatment with Mn(III)tetrakis(N-methyl-4'-pyridyl)porphyrin (MnTMPyP) or hydroxocobalamin (HC), O(2)(-). and NO. scavengers, respectively, reduced significantly SIN-1-induced cell death (18.66 +/- 3.57 vs. 77.01 +/- 14.07 or 82.20 +/- 9.64, % cell viability SIN-1 vs. MnTMPyP or HC). Moreover, the mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) p44/42 (ERK), p38, and p54/46 (JNK) were also activated in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. PD-98059 and SB-239063, specific inhibitors of ERK and p38 MAPK pathways, failed to protect cells against 1 mM SIN-1. However, PD-98059 partially inhibited (60% cell survival) SIN-1 effects at < or =0.25 mM, and this was increased with the inclusion of SB-239063. Therefore, MAPKs may mediate signal transduction pathways induced by peroxynitrite in lung epithelial cells leading to cell death.
Conversation, Gaze Coordination, and Beliefs About Visual Context

Conversation is supported by the beliefs that people have in common and the perceptual experience that they share. The visual context of a conversation has two aspects: the information that is available to each conversant, and their beliefs about what is present for each other. In our experiment, we separated these factors for the first time and examined their impact on a spontaneous conversation. We manipulated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and the belief that a visual scene was shared or not. Participants watched videos of actors talking about a controversial topic, then discussed their own views while looking at either a blank screen or the actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We recorded conversants' eye movements, quantified how they were coordinated, and analyzed their speech patterns. Gaze coordination has been shown to be causally related to the knowledge people share before a conversation, and the information they later recall. Here, we found that both the presence of the visual scene, and beliefs about its presence for another, influenced language use and gaze coordination.
Carbon-ion beams induce production of an immune mediator protein, high mobility group box 1, at levels comparable with X-ray irradiation

X-ray radiotherapy activates tumor antigen-specific T-cell responses, and increases in the serum levels of high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) induced by X-ray irradiation play a pivotal role in activating anti-tumor immunity. Here, we examined whether carbon-ion beams, as well as X-rays, can induce HMGB1 release from human cancer cell lines. The study examined five human cancer cell lines: TE2, KYSE70, A549, NCI-H460 and WiDr. The proportion of cells surviving X- or carbon-ion beam irradiation was assessed in a clonogenic assay. The D10, the dose at which 10% of cells survive, was calculated using a linear–quadratic model. HMGB1 levels in the culture supernatants were assessed by an ELISA. The D10 dose for X-rays in TE2, KYSE70, A549, NCI-H460 and WiDr cells was 2.1, 6.7, 8.0, 4.8 and 7.1 Gy, respectively, whereas that for carbon-ion beams was 0.9, 2.5, 2.7, 1.8 and 3.5 Gy, respectively. X-rays and carbon-ion beams significantly increased HMGB1 levels in the culture supernatants of A549, NCI-H460 and WiDr cells at 72 h post-irradiation with a D10 dose. Furthermore, irradiation with X-rays or carbon-ion beams significantly increased HMGB1 levels in the culture supernatants of all five cell lines at 96 h post-irradiation. There was no significant difference in the amount of HMGB1 induced by X-rays and carbon-ion beams at any time-point (except at 96 h for NCI-H460 cells); thus we conclude that comparable levels of HMGB1 were detected after irradiation with iso-survival doses of X-rays and carbon-ion beams.
Denial-of-Service Attacks : Real Vulnerabilities and Practical Solutions

The convenience of 802.11-based wireless access networks has led to widespread deployment in the consumer, industrial and military sectors. However, this use is predicated on an implicit assumption of confidentiality and availability. While the security flaws in 802.11’s basic confidentially mechanisms have been widely publicized, the threats to network availability are far less widely appreciated. In fact, it has been suggested that 802.11 is highly susceptible to malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attacks targeting its management and media access protocols. This paper provides an experimental analysis of such 802.11-specific attacks – their practicality, their efficacy and potential low-overhead implementation changes to mitigate the underlying vulnerabilities.
MUSIZ: a generic framework for music resizing with stretching and cropping

Content-aware music adaption, i.e. music resizing, in temporal constraints starts drawing attention from multimedia communities because of the need of real-world scenarios, e.g. animation production and radio advertisement production. The goal of music resizing is to change the length of a music track to a user preferred length using a series of basic operations, e.g. compression, prolonging, cropping and repeating. The only existing music resizing approach so far, called LyDAR, suffers from some limitations. For example, it cannot support prolonging a music track and cannot compress music pieces with very small stretch rates. In this paper, we propose MUSIZ, a generic framework for MUsic reSIZing. Observing the diversity of quality degradation for different segments, we propose the concept of stretch-resistance to measure the degree of quality degradation after a segment is stretched. MUSIZ stretches high stretch-resistance segments intensively and relieves low stretch-resistance segments to reduce the negative impact on the stretched music piece. For short length resizing requests, we develop a contiguity-preservative cropping algorithm to remove segments before stretching, while smoothing the abrupt change at the joint between two segments. Comprehensive experimental results show that MUSIZ is superior to the existing approaches.
Cyclizing Clusters via Zeta Function of a Graph

Detecting underlying clusters from large-scale data plays a central role in machine learning research. In this paper, we tackle the problem of clustering complex data of multiple distributions and multiple scales. To this end, we develop an algorithm named Zeta l-links (Zell) which consists of two parts: Zeta merging with a similarity graph and an initial set of small clusters derived from local l-links of samples. More specifically, we propose to structurize a cluster using cycles in the associated subgraph. A new mathematical tool, Zeta function of a graph, is introduced for the integration of all cycles, leading to a structural descriptor of a cluster in determinantal form. The popularity character of a cluster is conceptualized as the global fusion of variations of such a structural descriptor by means of the leave-one-out strategy in the cluster. Zeta merging proceeds, in the hierarchical agglomerative fashion, according to the maximum incremental popularity among all pairwise clusters. Experiments on toy data clustering, imagery pattern clustering, and image segmentation show the competitive performance of Zell. The 98.1% accuracy, in the sense of the normalized mutual information (NMI), is obtained on the FRGC face data of 16028 samples and 466 facial clusters.
Perspectives for positron emission tomography with RPCs $

In this study, we address the feasibility and main properties of a positron emission tomograph (PET) based on RPCs. The concept, making use of the converter-plate principle, takes advantage of the intrinsic layered structure of RPCs and its simple and economic construction. The extremely good time and position resolutions of RPCs also allow the TOFPET imaging technique to be considered. Monte-Carlo simulations, supported by experimental data, are presented and the main advantages and drawbacks for applications of potential interest are discussed. r 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
FIDDLE: Federated Infrastructure Discovery and Description Language

Considerable efforts have been spent on designing architectures to manage heterogeneous resources across multiple administrative domains. Specific fields of application are federated cloud computing (Intercloud) approaches and distributed testbeds, among others. An important interoperability challenge that arises in this context is the exchange of information about the provided resources and their dependencies. Existing work usually rests upon schematic data models, which impede the discovery and management of heterogeneous resources between autonomous sites. One way of addressing this issue is to exchange semantic information models. In this paper, we exploit such approaches to formally define federations, including their infrastructures and the life-cycle of the offered resources and services. The requirements of this work have been derived from several research projects and the results are in process of being standardized by an international body. The main contribution of this work is a higher level (upper) ontology and initial integration concepts for it. These contributions form a basis for further work in the general context of distributed semantic resource management.
Neuronostatin Encoded by the Somatostatin Gene Regulates Neuronal, Cardiovascular, and Metabolic Functions*

Somatostatin is important in the regulation of diverse neuroendocrine functions. Based on bioinformatic analyses of evolutionarily conserved sequences, we predicted another peptide hormone in pro-somatostatin and named it neuronostatin. Immuno-affinity purification allowed the sequencing of an amidated neuronostatin peptide of 13 residues from porcine tissues. In vivo treatment with neuronostatin induced c-Fos expression in gastrointestinal tissues, anterior pituitary, cerebellum, and hippocampus. In vitro treatment with neuronostatin promoted the migration of cerebellar granule cells and elicited direct depolarizing actions on paraventricular neurons in hypothalamic slices. In a gastric tumor cell line, neuronostatin induced c-Fos expression, stimulated SRE reporter activity, and promoted cell proliferation. Furthermore, intracerebroventricular treatment with neuronostatin increased blood pressure but suppressed food intake and water drinking. Our findings demonstrate diverse neuronal, neuroendocrine, and cardiovascular actions of a somatostatin gene-encoded hormone and provide the basis to investigate the physiological roles of this endogenously produced brain/gut peptide.
The predictive value of exhaled nitric oxide measurements in assessing changes in asthma control.

Exhaled nitric oxide (eNO) levels are increased in untreated or unstable asthma and measurements can be made easily. Our aim was to assess the usefulness of eNO for diagnosing and predicting loss of control (LOC) in asthma following steroid withdrawal. Comparisons were made against sputum eosinophils and airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) to hypertonic saline (4.5%). Seventy-eight patients with mild/moderate asthma had their inhaled steroid therapy withdrawn until LOC occurred or for a maximum of 6 wk. Sixty (77.9%) developed LOC. There were highly significant correlations between the changes in eNO and symptoms (p < 0.0001), FEV(1) (p < 0.002), sputum eosinophils (p < 0.0002), and saline PD(15) (p < 0.0002), and there were significant differences between LOC and no LOC groups. Both single measurements and changes of eNO (10 ppb, 15 ppb, or an increase of > 60% over baseline) had positive predictive values that ranged from 80 to 90% for predicting and diagnosing LOC. These values were similar to those obtained using sputum eosinophils and saline PD(15) measurements. We conclude that eNO measurements are as useful as induced sputum analysis and AHR in assessing airway inflammation, with the advantage that they are easy to perform.
Active 3D scene segmentation and detection of unknown objects

We present an active vision system for segmentation of visual scenes based on integration of several cues. The system serves as a visual front end for generation of object hypotheses for new, previously unseen objects in natural scenes. The system combines a set of foveal and peripheral cameras where, through a stereo based fixation process, object hypotheses are generated. In addition to considering the segmentation process in 3D, the main contribution of the paper is integration of different cues in a temporal framework and improvement of initial hypotheses over time.
Atrial Fibrillation is Associated With Poor Outcomes in Thrombolyzed Patients With Acute Ischemic Stroke

AbstractThe influence of atrial fibrillation (AF) on the clinical outcomes of patients with ischemic stroke (IS) has not been completely determined. We aimed to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the relationship between AF and adverse events in patients with acute IS treated with thrombolysis.PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library were searched for relevant studies regarding the association between AF and the outcomes of patients with IS treated with thrombolysis. Random and fixed effect models were used for pooling data.Twelve cohort studies involving 14,801 patients with acute IS were included. Meta-analysis revealed that patients with AF were more likely to die within 90 days after thrombolysis (odds ratio [OR], 2.13; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.68–2.70, P < 0.001), whereas this association was not observed in hospitalized patients (OR, 1.50; 95% CI, 0.86–2.60; P = 0.150). AF was associated with a reduced incidence of favorable outcomes (modified Rankin Scale ⩽ 2) (OR, 1.95; 95% CI: 1.33–2.85, P = 0.001) and an increased risk of symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage (OR, 1.28; 95% CI: 1.08–1.52, P = 0.006). No evident publication bias was found by Begg's test or Egger's test.Comorbidity of AF may increase the risk of adverse outcomes for patients with IS undergoing thrombolysis. Further well-designed trials are warranted to confirm this association.
Coordination of ATF6-mediated Transcription and ATF6 Degradation by a Domain That Is Shared with the Viral Transcription Factor, VP16*

ATF6 is a 670-amino acid endoplasmic reticulum (ER) transmembrane protein that is cleaved in response to ER stress. The resulting N-terminal fragment of ∼400 amino acids translocates to the nucleus and activates selected ER stress-inducible genes, such asGRP-78 and sarco/endoplasmic reticulum ATPase, which are required for cell survival. In studying the mechanism of ATF6-activated transcription, we found that when HeLa cells were transfected with a plasmid encoding ATF6-(1–373), ER stress-inducible reporter gene activation was high, but ATF6-(1–373) expression was low, unless a proteasome inhibitor was added. In contrast, transfection with a plasmid encoding ATF6-(94–373) resulted in low reporter activation and high expression of ATF6-(94–373), which was independent of the proteasome inhibitor. Thus, the information responsible for transcriptional activation and proteasomal degradation must lie within the N-terminal 93 amino acids of ATF6. This portion of ATF6 was found to be homologous to the herpes simplex viral protein, VP16. One 8-amino acid domain of particular interest in this region of ATF6 is 75% identical to the VN8 region in VP16. VN8 is required for VP16-mediated transcription, as well as rapid degradation of VP16 by proteasomes. Point mutations in the VN8-like region of ATF6 caused a loss of transcription, increased expression levels, and an increase in half-life. Thus, the potent transcriptional activities and rapid degradation of ATF6 and VP16 require the VN8 domains in each protein. Homology searches indicate that ATF6 is the only eukaryotic protein known that possesses an active VN8 domain, raising questions about how this domain evolved and the functional importance underlying its appearance in only these two transcription factors.
Amy2B copy number variation reveals starch diet adaptations in ancient European dogs

Extant dog and wolf DNA indicates that dog domestication was accompanied by the selection of a series of duplications on the Amy2B gene coding for pancreatic amylase. In this study, we used a palaeogenetic approach to investigate the timing and expansion of the Amy2B gene in the ancient dog populations of Western and Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used to estimate the copy numbers of this gene for 13 ancient dog samples, dated to between 15 000 and 4000 years before present (cal. BP). This evidenced an increase of Amy2B copies in ancient dogs from as early as the 7th millennium cal. BP in Southeastern Europe. We found that the gene expansion was not fixed across all dogs within this early farming context, with ancient dogs bearing between 2 and 20 diploid copies of the gene. The results also suggested that selection for the increased Amy2B copy number started 7000 years cal. BP, at the latest. This expansion reflects a local adaptation that allowed dogs to thrive on a starch rich diet, especially within early farming societies, and suggests a biocultural coevolution of dog genes and human culture.