Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functionalized Positive Nanoparticles Reduce Mucin Swelling and Dispersion

Multi-functionalized nanoparticles (NPs) have been extensively investigated for their potential in household and commercial products, and biomedical applications. Previous reports have confirmed the cellular nanotoxicity and adverse inflammatory effects on pulmonary systems induced by NPs. However, possible health hazards resulting from mucus rheological disturbances induced by NPs are underexplored. Accumulation of viscous, poorly dispersed, and less transportable mucus leading to improper mucus rheology and dysfunctional mucociliary clearance are typically found to associate with many respiratory diseases such as asthma, cystic fibrosis (CF), and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). Whether functionalized NPs can alter mucus rheology and its operational mechanisms have not been resolved. Herein, we report that positively charged functionalized NPs can hinder mucin gel hydration and effectively induce mucin aggregation. The positively charged NPs can significantly reduce the rate of mucin matrix swelling by a maximum of 7.5 folds. These NPs significantly increase the size of aggregated mucin by approximately 30 times within 24 hrs. EGTA chelation of indigenous mucin crosslinkers (Ca2+ ions) was unable to effectively disperse NP-induced aggregated mucins. Our results have demonstrated that positively charged functionalized NPs can impede mucin gel swelling by crosslinking the matrix. This report also highlights the unexpected health risk of NP-induced change in mucus rheological properties resulting in possible mucociliary transport impairment on epithelial mucosa and related health problems. In addition, our data can serve as a prospective guideline for designing nanocarriers for airway drug delivery applications.
Treatment of Primary Pleomorphic Soft Tissue Sarcoma of the Extremities

Background: Pleomorphic Sarcoma is the most common histologic subtype of high grade soft tissue sarcoma involving the extremities. Methods: This retrospective study analyzed 135 patients presenting with primary Pleomorphic Sarcomas which were treated at a single referral institute between 1980 and 2006. Data was collected from an institutional database and univariate and multivariate analysis was conducted regarding significant risk factors which influence outcome. 125 (93%) patients underwent wide limb sparing resection, primary amputation was necessary in 10 (7%) patients. 52 patients (39%) received post-operative radiation therapy alone, 23 (17%) received adjuvant chemotherapy alone and 37 patients (27%) received both chemotherapy and radiation therapy. 23 patients (17%) received no adjuvant therapy. Results: The 5-year disease specific survival rate was 74%±4%, metastatic rate 29% and local recurrence rate was 22%±4%. Significant prognostic factors negatively influencing survival were a local recurrence, large size, deep tumors, close margins and proximal location. Risk factors for a local recurrence were a superficial lesion, upper extremity and extra-compartmental location. Induction chemotherapy did not show a survival or a local recurrence benefit. Chemotherapy induced tumor necrosis rates did not correlate with a survival benefit.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: An Empirical Analysis on Greek Companies

This paper is an attempt to explore the relationship of CSR and firms’ financial performance in Greek firms. Based on stakeholder theory and mainly on the theory of “good management”, we try to find out if an improvement in CSR actions results in higher stock returns. Our empirical analysis will test whether there is an impact of CSR performance on stock returns, using voluntary disclosures, based on a sample of Greek listed companies. The findings show that there is a positive correlation among stock returns and CSR performance in Greek companies. In operational level, these results aim at persuading managers to implement CSR actions in a greater extent in order to enhance firm market efficiency.
National Labour Markets, International Factor Mobility and Macroeconomic Instability

We analyze how global economic integration of factor markets affects the stability of the macroeconomy, with respect to expectations-driven fluctuations, when countries differ in their labor market institutions. It is shown that, due to the occurrence of equilibrium indeterminacy, liberalization of capital movements is likely to be accompanied by persistent fluctuations at the world level, while allowing also for labor movements may bring macroeconomic stability. Whether this also implies higher welfare in the long run depends on differentials in average firm size across countries. If the average firm size in a country operating under perfect competition and full employment is small relative to a country with rigid wages and unemployment, then free migration reduces unemployment, narrows wage differentials and expands world output.
Sexual Dimorphic Regulation of Body Weight Dynamics and Adipose Tissue Lipolysis

Background Successful reduction of body weight (BW) is often followed by recidivism to obesity. BW-changes including BW-loss and -regain is associated with marked alterations in energy expenditure (EE) and adipose tissue (AT) metabolism. Since these processes are sex-specifically controlled, we investigated sexual dimorphisms in metabolic processes during BW-dynamics (gain-loss-regain). Research Design Obesity was induced in C57BL/6J male (m) and female (f) mice by 15 weeks high-fat diet (HFD) feeding. Subsequently BW was reduced (-20%) by caloric restriction (CR) followed by adaptive feeding, and a regain-phase. Measurement of EE, body composition, blood/organ sampling were performed after each feeding period. Lipolysis was analyzed ex-vivo in gonadal AT. Results Male mice exhibited accelerated BW-gain compared to females (relative BW-gain m:140.5±3.2%; f:103.7±6.5%; p<0.001). In consonance, lean mass-specific EE was significantly higher in females compared to males during BW-gain. Under CR female mice reached their target-BW significantly faster than male mice (m:12.2 days; f:7.6 days; p<0.001) accompanied by a sustained sex-difference in EE. In addition, female mice predominantly downsized gonadal AT whereas the relation between gonadal and total body fat was not altered in males. Accordingly, only females exhibited an increased rate of forskolin-stimulated lipolysis in AT associated with significantly higher glycerol concentrations, lower RER-values, and increased AT expression of adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL) and hormone sensitive lipase (HSL). Analysis of AT lipolysis in estrogen receptor alpha (ERα)–deficient mice revealed a reduced lipolytic rate in the absence of ERα exclusively in females. Finally, re-feeding caused BW-regain faster in males than in females. Conclusion The present study shows sex-specific dynamics during BW-gain-loss-regain. Female mice responded to CR with an increase in lipolytic activity, and augmented lipid-oxidation leading to more efficient weight loss. These processes likely involve ERα-dependent signaling in AT and sexual dimorphic regulation of genes involved in lipid metabolism.
Adenovirus-mediated wild-type p53 expression induces apoptosis and suppresses tumorigenesis of prostatic tumor cells.

The use of replication-deficient adenoviral vectors in gene therapy may become a powerful method to achieve efficient but safe transfer of anti-tumor agents. Introduction of the wild-type p53 gene into tumor cells has, in general, been associated with growth suppression. In this study, infection of androgen-independent human prostate Tsu-pr1 cells lacking functional p53 alleles resulted in high levels of p53 protein within 10-15 h. Cells infected with AdCMV.p53 detached from the substratum, condensed, and exhibited fragmentation of nuclear DNA into nucleosomal units consistent with the process of apoptosis. These effects were evident within 24 h after infection, and the majority of cells had undergone apoptosis by 48 h, whereas cells infected with AdCMV.NLS beta Gal continued to proliferate. Uninfected or AdCMV.NLS beta Gal-infected Tsu-pr1 cells formed tumors in nude mice within 3 weeks after implantation, whereas AdCMV.p53-infected cells failed to form tumors during this period. Therefore, adenoviral-mediated antitumor therapy using the p53 gene is an efficient method to inhibit prostate tumor growth, and agents that target the cellular programmed cell death pathway may be useful in clinical applications.
"I'll poke you. You'll poke me!" Self-disclosure, social attraction, predictability and trust as important predictors of Facebook relationships

The purpose of this research was to test how social attraction on Facebook influences self-disclosure, predictability, and trust in another individual. Results of a survey of 243 students showed that we tell our personal secrets on Facebook to those that we like. Although many nonverbal cues are absent on Facebook, its users still perceive a high predictability of their Facebook friends’ behavior. Facebook users have very little uncertainty about the behavior of the person to whom they intimately self-disclose to. Our findings support Uncertainty Reduction Theory – the more Facebook users talk, the less uncertainty they experience (Axiom 1) and are able to like each other more. The more certain they are about their behavior, the more they trust them, and the more they trust them, the more they disclose to them.
A universal infant rotavirus vaccine program in two delivery models: Effectiveness and adverse events following immunization

Rotavirus is the most common cause of diarrhea leading to hospitalization in young children. Rotavirus vaccines are available in Canada but have not been introduced in all provinces. In a controlled trial, 2 study sites (Prince Edward Island and the Capital District Health Authority (District 9, Nova Scotia) introduced universal rotavirus vaccine programs for infants at 2 and 4 months of age beginning 1 December 2010, using public health nurse or general practitioner-delivery models, respectively. A third site (Saint John, NB) served as the non-intervention control setting. Vaccine coverage, rotavirus hospitalizations, intussusception and all-cause diarrhea were monitored. A universal rotavirus vaccine program with >90% coverage was associated with reductions in rotavirus-associated hospitalizations (from a peak of 52.8 hospitalizations/100,000 population to 0 hospitalizations) in infants < 12 months and 1 to < 2 y of age 12 months after program implementation. No apparent reduction occurred in the site with vaccine coverage of < 40%, or in the non-intervention control site. No cases of intussusception were associated with vaccine receipt, and no increase in all-cause diarrhea was observed. A universal infant rotavirus vaccine program with high coverage was associated with reductions in rotavirus and no safety signals; no reduction was observed in settings with low vaccine coverage.
Externalizing behaviors and minor unintentional injuries in toddlers: common risk factors?

OBJECTIVE To investigate predictors for externalizing behaviors and minor unintentional injuries in toddlers and to examine whether common risk factors can be identified. METHODS Linear regression models were used to investigate the contributions of predictors belonging to the domains of child characteristics and parental characteristics. Participants were 117 boys (M = 16.9 months) and their parents. RESULTS Two common risk factors for externalizing behaviors and minor injuries were identified: maternal low conscientiousness and paternal low self-control. In addition, children's inhibitory control and dispositional frustration as well as maternal externalizing symptoms contributed independently to children's externalizing behaviors. CONCLUSIONS Results supply some evidence for the interrelatedness of negative outcomes and on the existence of common risk factors. Interventions could aim to address these common risk factors in order to pursue a number of goals at the same time, instead of focusing on only one type of negative outcome.
Efficacy of a second course of immunosuppressive therapy in patients with membranous nephropathy and persistent or relapsing disease activity.

BACKGROUND A single course of immunosuppressive treatment improves renal survival in patients with idiopathic membranous nephropathy (iMN) and renal insufficiency. However, not all patients respond and relapses occur within 5 years in 30% of patients. It is unknown if a second course of immunosuppressive therapy is effective in such patients. METHODS We have prospectively studied and evaluated the clinical course in 15 patients (14 male, one female; age: 52+/-12 years) with iMN who have received a repeated course of immunosuppressive therapy because of deteriorating renal function associated with relapsing or persistent nephrotic syndrome. RESULTS The first course of immunosuppression was started 8 months (range: 0-143 months) after renal biopsy and consisted of chlorambucil (n = 8) or cyclophosphamide (n = 7); the second course consisted of cyclophosphamide in all patients. The interval between the first and second course was 40 months (range: 7-112 months). Total follow-up was 110 months (range: 46-289 months). Renal function and proteinuria improved at least temporarily in all patients after the second course. During follow-up, an additional course of therapy was given in four patients. Status at the end of follow-up was complete remission (n = 2), partial remission (n = 8), persistent proteinuria (n = 3), end-stage renal disease (n = 1) and death (n = 1, due to cardiovascular disease while nephrotic). Renal survival was 86% at 5 and 10 years of follow-up. The repeated courses of immunosuppression have resulted in a gain of dialysis-free survival time of > or =93 months (range: 43-192 months). CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate that patients with iMN who do not respond well or relapse after a first course of immunosuppressive therapy and have renal insufficiency should be offered a second course of immunosuppression. Such a strategy maintains renal function in the majority of patients.
Efficient multivariate sequence classification

Kernel-based approaches for sequence classification have been successfully applied to a variety of domains, including the text categorization, image classification, speech analysis, biological sequence analysis, time series and music classification, where they show some of the most accurate results. Typical kernel functions for sequences in these domains (e.g., bag-of-words, mismatch, or subsequence kernels) are restricted to {\em discrete univariate} (i.e. one-dimensional) string data, such as sequences of words in the text analysis, codeword sequences in the image analysis, or nucleotide or amino acid sequences in the DNA and protein sequence analysis. However, original sequence data are often of real-valued multivariate nature, i.e. are not univariate and discrete as required by typical $k$-mer based sequence kernel functions. In this work, we consider the problem of the {\em multivariate} sequence classification such as classification of multivariate music sequences, or multidimensional protein sequence representations. To this end, we extend {\em univariate} kernel functions typically used in sequence analysis and propose efficient {\em multivariate} similarity kernel method (MVDFQ-SK) based on (1) a direct feature quantization (DFQ) of each sequence dimension in the original {\em real-valued} multivariate sequences and (2) applying novel multivariate discrete kernel measures on these multivariate discrete DFQ sequence representations to more accurately capture similarity relationships among sequences and improve classification performance. Experiments using the proposed MVDFQ-SK kernel method show excellent classification performance on three challenging music classification tasks as well as protein sequence classification with significant 25-40% improvements over univariate kernel methods and existing state-of-the-art sequence classification methods.
Learnability of infants' center-of-gaze sequences predicts their habituation and posthabituation looking time

Our recent work, using both computer-animated and natural images, demonstrates that infants' eye movements are sequentially structured. In particular, we employ a simple recurrent network (SRN) to estimate the learnability of infants' gaze sequences. The current study directly compares this learnability metric with infants' global looking time on a trial-by-trial basis, during both an habituation display and two posthabituation test displays. The results confirmed our prediction that the relative learnability of infants' gaze sequences during the latter part of the habituation phase predicts global looking time. We also found that learnability during the later habituation trials predicts looking time to one of the two posthabituation test displays. These findings provide support for our hypothesis that infants' visual exploration is guided implicitly by the goal to generate gaze patterns that are sequentially predictable.
The Strengths of Social Ties: A Basic Premise and its Implications

In this article, we develop a basic premise regarding the strengths of social ties: specifically, the benefits of a social tie are positively associated with its strength, but only up to a point, beyond which the association becomes negative, and the costs of a social tie are positively associated with its strength. Not only does this premise integrate the seemingly conflicting arguments regarding the effects of social ties, it also provides a basis to address a central, but largely unanswered question: why do individuals keep a stronger tie with some people than with some others?
Early Prediction of the Cost of HPC Application Execution in the Cloud

Even if clouds are not fit for high-end HPC applications, they could be profitably used to bring the power of economic and scalable parallel computing to the masses. But this requires both simple development environments, able to exploit cloud scalability, and the capability to easily predict the cost of HPC application runs. This paper presents a framework built on the top of a cloud aware programming platform (mOSAIC) for the development of bag-of-tasks scientific applications. The framework integrates a cloud-based simulation environment able to predict the behavior of the developed applications. Simulations enable the developer to predict at an early development stage performance and cloud resource usage, and so the infrastructure lease cost on a public cloud. The paper sketches the framework organization and discusses the approach followed for application development. Moreover, some validation tests of prediction results are presented.
A weighted linear prediction method for near-field source localization

This paper proposes a low computational cost method for the near-field narrowband source localization problem, which does not require multidimensional search or high-order statistics. The proposed method is based on the second-order statistics (SOS) of the outputs of a uniform linear array (ULA). More precisely, the range and angle parameters are estimated through a weighted linear prediction (LP) algorithm applied to a properly chosen array output correlation sequence. Detailed performance analysis and derivation of the optimal weightings are provided. Simulation results are finally presented to validate the theoretical analysis results and to assess the performance of the proposed method.
The autoethnographic act of choreography: considering the creative process of storytelling with and on the performative dancing body and the use of Verbatim Theatre methods

Abstract This article, which takes on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion of the body as the prime means of knowing the world, starts with the understanding that we have a body, are a body and become a body. These are key concepts for those, like me, who tell stories with the body – the act of choreography. Arguing for the notion of the embodied ‘I’ and interrogating the politics of autoethnography (see, for example, Holman Jones 2005), this article offers an encounter with my own process of conceptualising and choreographing days like these (2015). Working with Verbatim Theatre (also called documentary theatre) methodologies I looked at the politics of memory and history, for a potential crossover between this theatremaking method and the choreographic process. The way I choreograph is essentially ‘verbatim’ in that I am constantly asking dancers to bring their own life experience – through their bodies – into the dance theatre we create. In looking at days like these (2015) I offer a critical analysis of my own choreography (beyond the encounter and analysis of the process of making). This is done as a feminist act of responding to the constructions and play of knowledge and power within and on the moving, dancing body: both my own body and those of the six dancers with whom I collaborated.
Phylogenetic Analysis of Rhinosporidium seeberi’s 18S Small-Subunit Ribosomal DNA Groups This Pathogen among Members of the Protoctistan Mesomycetozoa Clade

ABSTRACT For the past 100 years the phylogenetic affinities ofRhinosporidium seeberi have been controversial. Based on its morphological features, it has been classified as a protozoan or as a member of the kingdom Fungi. We have amplified and sequenced nearly a full-length 18S small-subunit (SSU) ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequence fromR. seeberi. Using phylogenetic analysis, by parsimony and distance methods, of R. seeberi’s 18S SSU rDNA and that of other eukaryotes, we found that this enigmatic pathogen of humans and animals clusters with a novel group of fish parasites referred to as the DRIP clade (Dermocystidium, rossete agent,Ichthyophonus, and Psorospermium), near the animal-fungal divergence. Our phylogenetic analyses also indicate thatR. seeberi is the sister taxon of the twoDermocystidium species used in this study. This molecular affinity is remarkable since members of the genusDermocystidium form spherical structures in infected hosts, produce endospores, have not been cultured, and possess mitochondria with flat cristae. With the addition of R. seeberi to this clade, the acronym DRIP is no longer appropriate. We propose to name this monophyletic clade Mesomycetozoa to reflect the group’s phylogenetic association within the Eucarya.
The Happy Consequences of Preservation Discipline: A Study in the Construct of and Socio-Demographic Variables of Discipline Designed to Preserve the Family

PURPOSE: The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of socio-demographic predictors (age, gender, monthly income, number of dependents, marital status, and level of education) on preservation disciplining (i.e. discipline designed to preserve the family unit as well as discipline the child) through the following six dimensions: 1. ‘child abuse became central concern’, 2. ‘rewarded for good things’, 3. ‘children should not hit each other’, 4. ‘most parents do not discipline enough’, 5. ‘need to explain the reason for avoiding an error many times’ and 6. ‘did nothing to overcome the problem’. METHOD: The research undertakes a survey based on a sample of 1751 children of 10 to 12 years of age across governorate of Assiut between May 2014 and December 2015. RESULTS: Findings show that dimensions 3, 4 and 5 have a significant influence on preservation disciplining and that these dimensions are all affected by the predictors of education, place of residence, age, and number of dependents (in the case of urban areas). CONCLUSION: If parents can be encouraged to discipline their children on the principles that children don’t hit each other in play or argument, that parents avoid physical discipline of their older children and that parents explain many times over the reasons for avoiding an error, they will be disciplining their children in a way that best develops self-discipline in their children and best preserves their family unit.