Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adhesion G Protein–Coupled Receptors: From In Vitro Pharmacology to In Vivo Mechanisms

The adhesion family of G protein–coupled receptors (aGPCRs) comprises 33 members in humans. aGPCRs are characterized by their enormous size and complex modular structures. While the physiologic importance of many aGPCRs has been clearly demonstrated in recent years, the underlying molecular functions have only recently begun to be elucidated. In this minireview, we present an overview of our current knowledge on aGPCR activation and signal transduction with a focus on the latest findings regarding the interplay between ligand binding, mechanical force, and the tethered agonistic Stachel sequence, as well as implications on translational approaches that may derive from understanding aGPCR pharmacology.
Cholesterol is a significant risk factor for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis

Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is characterized by hepatic lipid accumulation (steatosis) and inflammation (steatohepatitis). Currently, the exact underlying mechanisms leading to hepatic inflammation remain incompletely understood and therefore therapy options are poor. Analogous to the predominant metabolic risk factor for the metabolic syndrome, NASH patients often display diet-induced dyslipidemia and are therefore also at high risk for cardiovascular disease. Higher lipid levels, in general, are also widely associated with the production of reactive oxygen species during oxidation. However, the exact contribution of the specific type of lipids to hepatic inflammation still remains unclear. In this editorial, we aim to show that cholesterol, in addition to triglycerides and free fatty acids, is an important risk factor in NASH disease pathogenesis. Developing a better understanding of the contribution of lipids underlying NASH pathogenesis is essential for creating effective therapies against this prevalent disease.
Delay Minimization for Relay-Based Cooperative Data Exchange With Network Coding

We study the Relay-based Cooperative Data Exchange (RCDE) problem, where initially each client has access to a subset of a set of n original packets, referred to as their side information, and wants to retrieve all other original packets via cooperation. Unlike traditional Cooperative Data Exchange (CDE), in our proposed relay-based model, clients can only cooperate via a relay. The data exchange is completed over two phases, namely Uploading Phase and Downloading Phase. In the Uploading Phase, the clients will encode the original packets and transmit the coded packets to the relay. In the Downloading Phase, the relay will reencode the received packets and multicast the reencoded packets, each to a subgroup of clients. The coded packets in the two phases are carefully selected so that each client can retrieve all n original packets with minimum total transmission delay, based on its initial side information and on the coded packets it receives from the relay. In addition, we assume that the bandwidths between the relay and different clients are different, and that the upload/download bandwidths between the relay and the same client are also different. We establish a coding scheme that has the minimum total delay and show that it can be found in polynomial time, for sufficiently large underlying fields. We also design a heuristic algorithm that has a low complexity with binary field size. Our simulations show that the performance of the binary solution is very close to that of the optimal solution. All coding schemes considered in this work are scalar.
Potent in vitro Activity of the Albumin Fusion Type 1 Interferons (Albumin-Interferon-Alpha and Albumin-Interferon-Beta) against RNA Viral Agents of Bioterrorism and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Virus

Background: The type 1 interferons (INF-α and INF-β) are potent antiviral agents. Albumin-INF-α and albumin-INF-β are novel recombinant proteins consisting of IFN-α or IFN-β genetically fused to human albumin. Methods: The in vitro antiviral activity of albumin-IFN-α was evaluated against representative bioterrorism viral agents and the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus. Antiviral activity was assessed using inhibition of cytopathic effect and neutral red staining. Results: EC50 values for albumin-IFN-α ranged from <0.1 ng/ml for Punta Toro virus to 65 ng/ml for Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus in the neutral red assay. Albumin-IFN-β showed 75- and 360-fold greater in vitro activity than albumin-IFN-α against Ebola virus and severe acute respiratory syndrome, respectively. Conclusion: Further evaluation of these long-acting albumin-IFN fusion proteins as prophylactic or therapeutic agents against these viral agents of bioterrorism in relevant primate models is warranted.
Influence of clouds and diffuse radiation on ecosystem-atmosphere CO 2 and CO 18 O

A 90 degrees coupling circuit cascaded with a pair of hybrid mode latchable phase shifters provides polarization agility for an RF radiator module of the type typically used in a phased array. For example, such radiator modules typically may utilize an active microwave integrated circuit (MIC), a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) or a passive reciprocal hybrid mode element (RHYME) circuit. These circuits are arranged to provide duplex RF transmit/receive functions with controllable phase shifts at each radiator site in a phased array. By appropriately setting the two controllable phase shifters to different combinations of phase shifts (e.g., 0 degrees and/or 90 degrees) to a dual orthogonal mode radiator, different spatial polarizations for RF radiator transmit/receive functions can be defined. The radiator itself may include a square or circular waveguide including, in some cases, a reciprocal dielectric quarter-wave plate and a non-reciprocal ferrite quarter-wave plate. If a square waveguide is utilized, then 0 degrees, 90 degrees hybrid mode latchable phase shifters may be arranged on either side of a common ground plane with direct waveguide coupling into a septum polarizer waveguide section of the radiator element. A 90 degrees Lange hybrid coupler also may be used by itself in conjunction with an electrically rotatable ferrite quarter-wave plate radiating element to achieve a certain degree of polarization agility.
Understanding the exergame user experience: users' motivation, attitude and behaviour in a location-aware pervasive exergame for adolescent children

of the Thesis The benefits of physical activity for adolescent children are well understood. Despite this, within much of the Western World, children fail to achieve the recommended guidelines for physical activity participation, spending too much time on sedentary activities. Thanks to recent progressions in ubiquitous technologies, exergames exercise video games have emerged as a potential solution to the problem. By facilitating physical activity, and encouraging behavioural change within an enjoyable and motivating context, exergames have the potential to remove some of the barriers preventing many adolescents from sufficient physical activity participation. There are, however, few studies of exergame systems that have looked at the impact of the system over time. Additionally, many systems are not evaluated within ecologically valid contexts. The result of this is a lack of real understanding on the efficacy of exergame systems and their feasibility as a valid solution. This thesis investigates the design, development, and evaluation of a locationaware exergame for adolescent children: iFitQuest. Through analysis of two prolonged use school-based evaluations, this research provides evidence on the ability of exergames to facilitate physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour, when targeted at adolescent children within a school context. The results of two evaluations suggest that iFitQuest was enjoyable, motivating, and physically demanding, with the ability to promote physical activity of all intensities in players with a range of attitudes towards physical activity, their own physical activity abilities, and physical activity participation backgrounds. The primary contribution of this thesis is the indepth evaluation of the exergame user experience. Looking beyond the general success of the system, the experience of individual players was analysed through the lens of Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy. Through a mixed-methods case study analysis, selfefficacy was established as an accurate method to explain and understand in-game behaviour, in particular with respect to goal setting and game selection habits. By influencing and moderating the players’ motivation, attitude and in-game behaviour, self-efficacy was established as a useful tool for future exergame practitioners. Guidelines on the application of self-efficacy are provided, with respect to both analysis and design. Additionally, through a naturalistic and prolonged evaluation, a number of logistical and contextual lessons for the evaluation of exergames were established. In particular, the use of a user-centred design approach for the development of similar systems is validated through a series of design guidelines, which account for the importance and influence of the evaluation context. To my family, without whom, none of this would have been possible.
AntiJam: Efficient Medium Access despite Adaptive and Reactive Jamming

Intentional interference constitutes a major threat for communication networks operating over a shared medium where availability is imperative. Jamming attacks are often simple and cheap to implement. In particular, today's jammers can perform physical carrier sensing in order to disrupt communication more efficiently, specially in a network of simple wireless devices such as sensor nodes, which usually operate over a single frequency (or a limited frequency band) and which cannot benefit from the use of spread spectrum or other more advanced technologies. This article proposes the medium access (MAC) protocol \textsc{AntiJam} that is provably robust against a powerful reactive adversary who can jam a $(1-\epsilon)$-portion of the time steps, where $\epsilon$ is an arbitrary constant. The adversary uses carrier sensing to make informed decisions on when it is most harmful to disrupt communications; moreover, we allow the adversary to be adaptive and to have complete knowledge of the entire protocol history. Our MAC protocol is able to make efficient use of the non-jammed time periods and achieves an asymptotically optimal, $\Theta{(1)}$-competitive throughput in this harsh scenario. In addition, \textsc{AntiJam} features a low convergence time and has good fairness properties. Our simulation results validate our theoretical results and also show that our algorithm manages to guarantee constant throughput where the 802.11 MAC protocol basically fails to deliver any packets.
An Examination of the Relationship between Leisure Activity Involvement and Place Attachment among Hikers Along the Appalachian Trail

The place attachment construct has been used by leisure researchers and practitioners to refine our understanding of certain leisure behaviors for over two decades. Despite the construct's importance to natural resource-based leisure, little empirical work has appeared in the leisure literature examining the construct's antecedent processes; that is, the processes that lead to recreationists'; attachment to settings. This study examined one antecedent, activity involvement, using covariance structure analysis. The authors examined a model suggesting that place attachment (i.e., place identity and place dependence) would be predicted by activity involvement (i.e., attraction, centrality, and self expression) among four groups of hikers along the Appalachian Trail (i.e., day hikers, overnight hikers, section hikers and through hikers). Using LISREL's multigroup procedure, results indicated that the place identity dimension of place attachment was best predicted by the self expression and attraction dimensions of activity involvement, whereas the only predictor of place dependence was self expression. These relations were consistent for all hikers. Type of use (i.e., day hiker, overnight hiker, section hiker and through hiker), however, was shown only to moderate the correlation between activity involvement dimensions, attraction and self expression, and place attachment's place identity and place dependence. As hikers' activity involvement and attachment grew, the correlations between these constructs declined. This result indicates that these scales' discriminant validity improves as respondents more readily identify with the attitude object used in the item wording.
ON SPECTRAL METHODS FOR VOLTERRA INTEGRAL EQUATIONS AND THE CONVERGENCE ANALYSIS

The main purpose of this work is to provide a novel numerical approach for the Volterra integral equations based on a spectral approach. A Legendre-collocation method is proposed to solve the Volterra integral equations of the second kind. We provide a rigorous error analysis for the proposed method, which indicates that the numerical errors decay exponentially provided that the kernel function and the source function are sufficiently smooth. Numerical results confirm the theoretical prediction of the exponential rate of convergence. The result in this work seems to be the first successful spectral approach (with theoretical justification) for the Volterra type equations.
A Qualitative Study: Gendered Perceptions of Bullying among Adolescents at a Boys and Girls Club.

A Qualitative Study: Gendered Perceptions of Bullying Among Adolescents at a Boys and Girls Club by Beverly Small Chandley Bullying is a form of peer violence needing extensive research to help understand the differences in gender for the prevention of such behavior. Most research has been performed in school settings and in a quantitative manner. This study was conducted by six researchers in an after-school facility with a qualitative approach. A minimum of 15 hours per researcher was spent observing behaviors and 20 interviews were performed. A grounded theory approach was used for the analysis of data which tend to show more similarities than differences in the way children bully as well as their perceptions of bullying.
SUORA: A Scalable and Uniform Data Distribution Algorithm for Heterogeneous Storage Systems

The data scale in many data centers is growing explosively with emerging applications and usages of big data technologies. Data distribution is a key issue in large-scale distributed storage systems to place petabytes of data or even beyond, among tens or hundreds of thousands of storage devices. In the meantime, heterogeneous storage systems, such as those having devices with hard disk drives (HDDs) and storage class memories (SCMs), have become increasingly popular for massive data storage due to balanced performance, capacity, and cost. Current data distribution algorithms can achieve efficient, scalable, and balanced mapping, but do not distinguish different characteristics of heterogeneous devices well. This paper presents a novel data distribution algorithm called SUORA (Scalable and Uniform storage via Optimally-adaptive and Random number Addressing), to take full advantage of heterogeneous devices. SUORA is a pseudo-random algorithm that uniformly distributes data cross a hybrid and tiered storage cluster. It divides heterogeneous devices, maps them onto different buckets and assigns them to various segments in each bucket. A pseudo-random and deterministic number sequence is generated to map data among segments and devices. Data movement is performed for achieving better read throughput while keeping load balance according to data hotness and bucket threshold. With considering distinct characteristics of heterogeneous storage devices well, the SUORA algorithm achieves a highly efficient adaptive data distribution for data centers and heterogeneous storage systems.
Recommendation Systems in the Scope of Opinion Formation: a Model

Aggregated data in real world recommender applications often feature fat-tailed distributions of the number of times individual items have been rated or favored. We propose a model to simulate such data. The model is mainly based on social interactions and opinion formation taking place on a complex network with a given topology. A threshold mechanism is used to govern the decision making process that determines whether a user is or is not interested in an item. We demonstrate the validity of the model by fitting attendance distributions from different real data sets. The model is mathematically analyzed by investigating its master equation. Our approach provides an attempt to understand recommender system's data as a social process. The model can serve as a starting point to generate artificial data sets useful for testing and evaluating recommender systems.
Reviewing Children's Books: A Content Analysis

With nearly five thousand children's books published each year, librarians have become dependent on reviews to guide them in the purchasing of juvenile titles. The purpose of this study is to determine the adequacy of reviews of children's books in the six most utilized reviewing journals. Two coding sheets are used to gather and analyze the data in relation to the extent of the coverage and content of 599 reviews of Notable Children's Books lists during 1994-96. The findings are compared with earlier studies, with some noteworthy changes including increases in both evaluative comments and the attention paid to illustrations. School Library Journal is found to provide the most complete bibliographic and ordering information. However, great variation in the adequacy of the content of the reviews continues to exist. As in earlier studies, this research indicates that not single journal provides all the information that librarians need.
Induction By Attribute Elimination

In most data mining applications where induction is used as the primary tool for knowledge extraction from real world databases, it is difficult to precisely identify a complete set of relevant attributes. The paper introduces a novel rule induction algorithm called Rule Induction Two In One (RITIO), which eliminates attributes in the order of decreasing irrelevancy. Like ID3-like decision tree construction algorithms, RITIO makes use of the entropy measure as a means of constraining the hypothesis search space; but, unlike IDS-like algorithms, the hypotheses language is the rule structure and RITIO generates rules without constructing decision trees. The final concept description produced by RITIO is shown to be largely based on only the most relevant attributes. Experimental results confirm that, even on noisy, industrial databases, RITIO achieves high levels of predictive accuracy.
Life-history consequences of vegetative damage in scarlet gilia, a monocarpic plant

Although herbivory can occur throughout a plant’s life, little is known about relative fitness impacts of damage at different life stages. In the long-lived monocarpic wildflower, Ipomopsis aggregata (scarlet gilia), for example, the response to browsing by ungulates in the year of flowering has been studied extensively, whereas damage and its fitness consequences during the preceding years of vegetative growth remain largely unexplored. As part of a long-term demographic study of I. aggregata , we mapped 5324 individual seedlings belonging to two annual cohorts in three natural populations, and followed these plants throughout their lives. Of the 30.4% of plants that survived past seedling stage, 15.3% suffered observable damage to the apical meristem of their single rosette of leaves, usually resulting in multiple rosettes in vegetative plants and multiple flowering stalks in plants that survived to flower. Vegetative damage reduced survival to flowering by ca 30%, and slowed growth, leading to an average delay in flowering of over one yr relative to undamaged plants. On average, damaged plants were 136% larger than undamaged members of their cohort in the summer before flowering, but produced only 86% as many flowers, and achieved 78% the overall fitness compared to undamaged plants when damage effects were integrated across their life history. Previously published studies from the same sites suggested that plants suffering browsing during only the year of flowering, achieved 47% of the fitness of unbrowsed plants. Our results indicate that plants are better able to recover from vegetative damage than from loss of their initial reproductive effort, perhaps because of the longer time over which recovery is possible in the former case. These results underscore the importance of studying the consequences of damage across the entire life history.
Extension of the CEM2k and LAQGSM Codes to Describe Photo-Nuclear Reactions

The improved Cascade-Exciton Model (CEM) code CEM2k+GEM2 and the Los Alamos version of the Quark-Gluon String Model code LAQGSM are extended to describe photonuclear reactions. First, we incorporate into CEM2k+GEM2 new evaluations of elementary cross sections based on the latest experimental data and also make several improvements in the description of the de-excitation of nuclei remaining after the cascade stage of reactions induced by arbitrary projectiles. Next, for photonuclear reactions we include in CEM2k+GEM2 a normalization to evaluated experimental absorption cross sections based on the recent systematics by Kossov. Then, we extend our high-energy code LAQGSM by adding the photonuclear mode which was ignored in all its previous versions, and add to it the photonuclear part from our improved CEM2k+GEM2. In this work we present a short description of the photonuclear mode as incorporated into our codes, show several illustrative results, and point out some unresolved problems.
Homing in scale space

Local visual homing is the process of determining the direction of movement required to return an agent to a goal location by comparing the current image with an image taken at the goal, known as the snapshot image. One way of accomplishing visual homing is by computing the correspondences between features and then analyzing the resulting flow field to determine the correct direction of motion. Typically, some strong assumptions need to be posited in order to compute the home direction from the flow field. For example, it is difficult to locally distinguish translation from rotation, so many authors assume rotation to be computable by other means (e.g. magnetic compass). In this paper we present a novel approach to visual homing using scale change information from Scale Invariant Feature Transforms (SIFT) which we use to compute landmark correspondences. The method described here is able to determine the direction of the goal in the robotpsilas frame of reference, irrespective of the relative 3D orientation with the goal.