Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Th2 cytokine interleukin-31 signature in a case of sporadic lichen amyloidosis.

© 2015 The Authors. doi: 10.2340/00015555-1829 Journal Compilation © 2015 Acta Dermato-Venereologica. ISSN 0001-5555 Lichen amyloidosis (LA), a variant form of primary localised cutaneous amyloidosis (PLCA), is a chronic itching skin disease, caused by the extracellular deposition of amyloid proteins in the dermis (1). This entity is clinically characterised by grouped hyperkeratotic papules with itchy lesions usually situated primarily on the shins. The upper back, forearms and thighs can also be involved. While the pathomechanism of PCLA still remains unclear, recent studies have identified in familial PLCA mutations in both the oncostatin M receptor (OSMR) gene, which encodes the OSMRβ (2) and in the interleukin (IL)-31RA gene (3), which encodes the IL-31 receptor α subunit. These 2 subunits constitute the functional receptor for IL-31, a recently discovered cytokine belonging to the IL-6 cytokine family (4). In combination with gp130, OSMRβ is a component shared with the receptor for OSM, another IL-6 family related cytokine. OSMRβ and IL-31RA are widely expressed in keratinocytes, fibroblasts and cutaneous nerves. Based on these new data it has been suggested that OSMRβ or IL-31RA mutants, when stimulated by their ligands OSM or IL-31, trigger signalling abnormalities leading to keratinocyte apoptosis and pruritus (5). Moreover, IL-31 is associated with itchy conditions and overexpression of this cytokine is observed in prurigo and atopic dermatitis (6). Whether expression of IL-31 and/or its receptor is altered in LA is still unknown. Here, we performed an analysis of the OSMR gene and cutaneous expression patterns of cytokines and anti-microbial peptides (AMP) in a 42-year-old woman with a sporadic case of LA.
Platelet-Rich Plasma and Skeletal Muscle Healing: A Molecular Analysis of the Early Phases of the Regeneration Process in an Experimental Animal Model

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) has received increasing interest in applied medicine, being widely used in clinical practice with the aim of stimulating tissue healing. Despite the reported clinical success, there is still a lack of knowledge when considering the biological mechanisms at the base of the activity of PRP during the process of muscle healing. The aim of the present study was to verify whether the local delivery of PRP modulates specific molecular events involved in the early stages of the muscle regeneration process. The right flexor sublimis muscle of anesthetized Wistar rats was mechanically injured and either treated with PRP or received no treatment. At day 2 and 5 after surgery, the animals were sacrificed and the muscle samples evaluated at molecular levels. PRP treatment increased significantly the mRNA level of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β, and TGF-β1. This phenomenon induced an increased expression at mRNA and/or protein levels of several myogenic regulatory factors such as MyoD1, Myf5 and Pax7, as well as the muscular isoform of insulin-like growth factor1 (IGF-1Eb). No effect was detected with respect to VEGF-A expression. In addition, PRP application modulated the expression of miR-133a together with its known target serum response factor (SRF); increased the phosphorylation of αB-cristallin, with a significant improvement in several apoptotic parameters (NF-κB-p65 and caspase 3), indexes of augmented cell survival. The results of the present study indicates that the effect of PRP in skeletal muscle injury repair is due both to the modulation of the molecular mediators of the inflammatory and myogenic pathways, and to the control of secondary pathways such as those regulated by myomiRNAs and heat shock proteins, which contribute to proper and effective tissue regeneration.
Performance Testing of Unitary Split-System Heat Pump with an Energy Recovery Expansion Device

Due to the rising demand of using energy resources more efficiently, the HVAC&R industry is constantly facing the challenge of meeting stricter energy consumption requirements. The goal of this research is to present a study that focuses on developing a device that can improve the efficiency of a residential split-system vapor compression heat pump using R410A as the refrigerant. Currently, the industry standard for the expansion process of a heat pump is to use either an electronic expansion valve (EXV) or thermostatic expansion valve (TXV). Both of these are passive expansion devices that do not recover the potential energy from the high pressure refrigerant. As a result, there is a meaningful potential for efficiency improvements by replacing the passive expansion valve with a work-generating device – the Viper Energy Recovery Expander. The Viper Expander has been designed by Regal Beloit Corporation in conjunction with Purdue University’s Ray W. Herrick Laboratories. The expander functions by using a nozzle to convert the pressure energy of the refrigerant at the condenser outlet into a high speed flow. The nozzle is designed to ensure refrigerant phase change and accelerate the flow into the impeller of a micro-turbine. The rotating turbine impeller is connected to an internal generator which generates electrical energy. This electrical energy is used in the system to augment the power into the air conditioner’s indoor fan motor. The expander enables the realization of decreased power consumption and increased evaporator cooling capacity. The expander has been implemented into a 5-ton split system heat pump and tested in both heating and cooling modes. Experimental testing has shown that the expander can generate up to 30% of the required fan motor power. Results have led to suggestions for optimizing the design of the device to achieve higher efficiencies.
Influence of trust in the spreading of information

The understanding and prediction of information diffusion processes on networks is a major challenge in network theory with many implications in social sciences. Many theoretical advances occurred due to stochastic spreading models. Nevertheless, these stochastic models overlooked the influence of rational decisions on the outcome of the process. For instance, different levels of trust in acquaintances do play a role in information spreading, and actors may change their spreading decisions during the information diffusion process accordingly. Here, we study an information-spreading model in which the decision to transmit or not is based on trust. We explore the interplay between the propagation of information and the trust dynamics happening on a two-layer multiplex network. Actors' trustable or untrustable states are defined as accumulated cooperation or defection behaviors, respectively, in a Prisoner's Dilemma setup, and they are controlled by a memory span. The propagation of information is abstracted as a threshold model on the information-spreading layer, where the threshold depends on the trustability of agents. The analysis of the model is performed using a tree approximation and validated on homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. The results show that the memory of previous actions has a significant effect on the spreading of information. For example, the less memory that is considered, the higher is the diffusion. Information is highly promoted by the emergence of trustable acquaintances. These results provide insight into the effect of plausible biases on spreading dynamics in a multilevel networked system.
Fighting, mating and networking: pillars of poeciliid sociality

Poeciliid fishes such as green swordtails Xiphophorus helleri and guppies Poecilia reticulata aggregate in social groups called shoals. In addition to reducing predation risk and increasing foraging efficiency (e.g. Magurran & Pitcher, 1987; Ranta & Juvonen, 1993), fish shoals promote the transfer of social information within the group. For instance, information about foraging routes is transmitted from trained individuals to naive fish in guppy shoals (Laland & Williams, 1997; Swaney et al., 2001; Brown & Laland, 2002). The type of information transfer demonstrated in the social learning and foraging literature involves the transmission of signals from one or more individuals to the remaining group members. Investigations of social foraging and anti-predator behaviour have demonstrated that poeciliids attend to a variety of cues emitted by both conspecifics and heterospecifics (e.g. predators: Brown & Godin, 1999; Mirza et al., 2001; Brosnan et al. 2003). Although social learning and anti-predator responses constitute important aspects of group living in poeciliids, this chapter focuses more on how individuals gain information from observing interactions that occur in their social environment. Indeed, the concept of communication networks was founded on the premise that the information exchanged during social interactions (e.g. agonistic or courtship displays) may be available not only to the participants but also to bystanders within signal detection range (McGregor, 1993; McGregor et al., 2000).
Two roads to effectiveness: CEO feedback seeking, vision articulation, and firm performance

Summary Humble leadership is attracting increased scholarly attention, but little is known about its effects when used in conjunction with less humble leadership behaviors that rely on a perception of the leader as confident and charismatic. This study contrasts the effects on top management team (TMT) potency and organizational performance of a more humble (feedback seeking) and a less humble (vision) CEO leader behavior. We hypothesize that CEO feedback seeking increases TMT potency and firm performance by communicating to TMT members that the organization values their input and encouraging their own feedback seeking, whereas CEO vision articulation influences these outcomes by fostering greater clarity about the firm's direction, and an enhanced ability to coordinate efforts within the TMT. CEOs who have not developed a vision can achieve a similar positive impact on TMT potency and firm performance by seeking feedback. In a sample of CEOs and TMT members from 65 firms, both CEO feedback seeking and vision articulation exhibit positive direct relationships with firm performance. However, only feedback seeking displays an indirect effect on performance via TMT potency. Finally, CEO feedback seeking has its strongest effects on firm performance and TMT potency for CEOs who are not seen as having a vision.
Writing groups as transformative spaces

ABSTRACT Curriculum transformation is a central concern for higher education in response to rapidly expanding technologies, globalisation and the widening diversity of the student and staff body. This is particularly true for South Africa, which is still grappling with inequalities and pressure for social redress in its universities. Early responses to supporting students took the form of add-on, ‘deficit-model’ approaches which understood poor student retention and success rates as emerging from students’ lack of neutral literacy ‘skills’. Recent initiatives have begun to adopt more socio-cultural understandings of literacy that seek to challenge traditional power structures and cultivate horizontal peer-orientated spaces for learning with a focus on practice rather than on product. Writing groups, as spaces for academic writing development, embrace this orientation and are argued to provide a transformative framework that foregrounds proactive student learning and experience, while still accommodating disciplinary learning through peer engagement. Drawing on the successful implementation of such forms of support at a research-intensive university, this paper argues that writing groups can play a critical role in both personal (student) transformation and broader curriculum transformation. Data include anonymous questionnaires and surveys with participants and coordinators of the writing groups. An inductive, constant comparative analysis indicated that students feel empowered in this space to develop not only their writing practices but also their transforming identities as scholars. Writing groups were found to provide ‘safe spaces’ where academic practices can be made explicit and where they can be challenged. The paper therefore argues that writing groups can play a small but key role in broader transformation efforts.
Groundwater Recharge from Rainfall in the Southern Border of Lake Chad in Cameroon

3 Abstract: One of the major problems in hydrogeology investigations of arid and semi-arid regions is the determination of water that contributed to the recharge of the water table. By considering the hydrodynamic characteristics of the Quaternary aquifers in the Southern sector of the Lake Chad basin, this study has permitted to obtain a quantitative evaluation of the groundwater resources available in a selected area of about 4000 km . The estimated regulating reserve ranges between 0.1 to 0.5 x 10 m /year. Monthly and yearly 2 93 estimation of the water budget, for a period of 16 years, according to the Thornthwaite-Mather method, shows that the main source of regulating reserve is the August rain. For a dry water year (like 1984), there is no effective rainfall, while in a year with a favourable rainfall, for example, we could have effective rainfall ranging between 10 and 15% that could improve the groundwater recharge.
Gesture recognition and classification for surgical skill assessment

The understanding of surgical gesture, by means of measuring apparatus, can play a key role for a possible evaluation of the surgical performance and the human factors characterizing it. To this aim a neural network classification algorithm can be helpful, since combines good generalization performances along with a parsimonious architecture when dealing with high dimensional classification problems. So, here it is presented and proposed the development of an innovation in surgical training system, as a fundamental objective support for training of novice surgeons.
Routine monitoring and analysis of ocean swell fields using a spaceborne SAR

Satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations can provide a global view of ocean swell fields when using a specific "wave mode" sampling. A methodology is presented to routinely derive integral properties of the longer wavelength (swell) portion of the wave spectrum from SAR Level 2 products, and both monitor and predict their evolution across ocean basins. SAR-derived estimates of swell height, and energy-weighted peak period and direction, are validated against buoy observations, and the peak directions are used to project the peak periods in one dimension along the corresponding great circle route, both forward and back in time, using the peak period group velocity. The resulting real time dataset of great circle-projected peak periods produces two-dimensional maps that can be used to monitor and predict the spatial extent, and temporal evolution, of individual ocean swell fields as they propagate from their source region to distant coastlines. The methodology is found to be consistent with the dispersive arrival of peak swell periods at a mid-ocean buoy. The simple great circle propagation method cannot project the swell heights in space like the peak periods, because energy evolution along a great circle is a function of the source storm characteristics and the unknown swell dissipation rate. A more general geometric optics model is thus proposed for the far field of the storms. This model is applied here to determine the attenuation over long distances. For one of the largest recorded storms, observations of 15~s period swells are consistent with a constant dissipation rate that corresponds to a 3300 km e-folding scale for the energy. In this case, swell dissipation is a significant term in the wave energy balance at global scales.
DAMAGE DETECTION IN PLATE STRUCTURES USING SPARSE ULTRASONIC TRANSDUCER ARRAYS AND ACOUSTIC WAVEFIELD IMAGING

A methodology is presented for health monitoring and subsequent inspection of critical structures. Algorithms have been developed to detect and approximately locate damaged regions by analyzing signals recorded from a permanently mounted, sparse array of transducers. Followup inspections of suspected flaw locations are performed using a dual transducer ultrasonic approach where a permanently mounted transducer is the source and an externally scanned transducer is the receiver. Scan results are presented as snapshots of the propagating ultrasonic wavefield radiating out from the attached transducers. This method, referred to here as Acoustic Wavefield Imaging (AWI), provides an excellent visual representation of the interaction of propagating ultrasonic waves with the structure. Pre‐flaw and post‐flaw ultrasonic waveforms are analyzed from an aluminum plate specimen with artificially induced damage, and the AWI results show the location and spatial extent of all of the defects.
Emotional Granularity Effects on Event-Related Brain Potentials during Affective Picture Processing

There is debate about whether emotional granularity, the tendency to label emotions in a nuanced and specific manner, is merely a product of labeling abilities, or a systematic difference in the experience of emotion during emotionally evocative events. According to the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion (CAT) (Barrett, 2006), emotional granularity is due to the latter and is a product of on-going temporal differences in how individuals categorize and thus make meaning of their affective states. To address this question, the present study investigated the effects of individual differences in emotional granularity on electroencephalography-based brain activity during the experience of emotion in response to affective images. Event-related potentials (ERP) and event-related desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/ERS) analysis techniques were used. We found that ERP responses during the very early (60–90 ms), middle (270–300 ms), and later (540–570 ms) moments of stimulus presentation were associated with individuals’ level of granularity. We also observed that highly granular individuals, compared to lowly granular individuals, exhibited relatively stable desynchronization of alpha power (8–12 Hz) and synchronization of gamma power (30–50 Hz) during the 3 s of stimulus presentation. Overall, our results suggest that emotional granularity is related to differences in neural processing throughout emotional experiences and that high granularity could be associated with access to executive control resources and a more habitual processing of affective stimuli, or a kind of “emotional complexity. ” Implications for models of emotion are also discussed.
Reconceptualizing hate crime victimization through the lens of vulnerability and ‘difference’

This article suggests that the concepts of vulnerability and ‘difference’ should be focal points of hate crime scholarship if the values at the heart of the hate crime movement are not to be diluted. By stringently associating hate crime with particular strands of victims and sets of motivations through singular constructions of identity, criminologists have created a divisive and hierarchical approach to understanding hate crime. To counter these limitations, we propose that vulnerability and ‘difference’, rather than identity and group membership alone, should be central to investigations of hate crime. These concepts would allow for a more inclusive conceptual framework enabling hitherto overlooked and vulnerable victims of targeted violence to receive the recognition they urgently need.
Building a cloud-based MOG game server

To help SMEs game service provider in supporting a large-scale of multi-players online games (MOGs), a distributed game server deployed in multiple zones has been widely used. Because of the demand of MOGs is dynamically changing over time, game system in some zones may experience the server overloads. Existing load balancing algorithm has been implemented to solve this problem by transferring the workload to under-loaded servers. However, in some cases, the service can still be interrupted due to the limitation in the total numbers of servers. To address this problem, we design and implement a connection scheduling method for an elastic game server system with a load balancing capability. A public cloud will be used for deployment in combination with a private cloud. The experimental server allows the continuity in supporting an increased number of clients. Our experimental results show that our distributed server system is able to reduce the response time of game playing experience with a high level of client satisfaction.
A study of the expression of motility in the action and fantasy modes using two latency aged groups of children

3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photo­ graphed the photographer has followed a definite method in “sectioning” the material. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand comer of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again—beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete.
Comparative analysis of sentiment orientation using SVM and Naive Bayes techniques

In the recent few years several efforts were dedicated for mining opinions and sentiment automatically from natural language in online networking messages, news and business product reviews. In this paper, we have explored sentiment orientation considering the positive and negative sentiments using film user reviews. We applied the technique Naive Bayes' classifier. ). We have performed the sentiment analysis on the reviews using the algorithms like Naive Bayes, Linear SVM and Synthetic words. Our experimental results indicate that the Linear SVM has provided the best accuracy which is followed by the Synthetic words approach. The result also evaluate that the highest accuracy rate is of drama.
Entrepreneurial orientation and the job demands-resources model

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) within the framework of the job demands-resources (JD-R) model. Design/methodology/approach The sample of N=597 white-collars in the German media and IT industry is drawn via the professional network XING. Cross-sectional mediator models are used to test the hypothesis. Findings The processes proposed by the JD-R model find empirical support. Job demands primarily cause exhaustion while job resources increase job satisfaction. Besides, job demands reduce job satisfaction and job resources lead to less exhaustion. An exception is found for cognitive workload which rather acts like a job resource. EO mediates these effects in a favorable way. High job resources foster EO, which in turn reduces exhaustion and enhances job satisfaction. For job demands, EO shows a negative mediation reducing the health-impairment process and increasing job satisfaction. Research limitations/implications Future research should broach the issue of adverse effects related to extreme employee entrepreneurship and potential negative effects. Practical implications Supporting and supervising an EO may help employees to cope with modern job profiles in agile organizations. Originality/value The findings provide support for a favorable mediating role of an entrepreneurial personal resource within the JD-R model. This knowledge may be used to consider individual work orientations and to organize work in a “healthy” way.
$L^p$-generic cocycles have one-point Lyapunov spectrum

We show that the sum of the first k Lyapunov exponents of linear cocycles is an upper semicontinuous function in the Lp topologies, for any 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞ and k. This fact, together with a result from Arnold and Cong, implies that the Lyapunov exponents of the Lp-generic cocycle, p < ∞, are all equal.