Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bariatric Surgery Induces Disruption in Inflammatory Signaling Pathways Mediated by Immune Cells in Adipose Tissue: A RNA-Seq Study

Background Bariatric surgery is associated to improvements in obesity-associated comorbidities thought to be mediated by a decrease of adipose inflammation. However, the molecular mechanisms behind these beneficial effects are poorly understood. Methodology/Principal Findings We analyzed RNA-seq expression profiles in adipose tissue from 22 obese women before and 3 months after surgery. Of 15,972 detected genes, 1214 were differentially expressed after surgery at a 5% false discovery rate. Upregulated genes were mostly involved in the basal cellular machinery. Downregulated genes were enriched in metabolic functions of adipose tissue. At baseline, 26 modules of coexpressed genes were identified. The four most stable modules reflected the innate and adaptive immune responses of adipose tissue. A first module reflecting a non-specific signature of innate immune cells, mainly macrophages, was highly conserved after surgery with the exception of DUSP2 and CD300C. A second module reflected the adaptive immune response elicited by T lymphocytes; after surgery, a disconnection was observed between genes involved in T-cell signaling and mediators of the signal transduction such as CXCR1, CXCR2, GPR97, CCR7 and IL7R. A third module reflected neutrophil-mediated inflammation; after surgery, several genes were dissociated from the module, including S100A8, S100A12, CD300E, VNN2, TUBB1 and FAM65B. We also identified a dense network of 19 genes involved in the interferon-signaling pathway which was strongly preserved after surgery, with the exception of DDX60, an antiviral factor involved in RIG-I-mediated interferon signaling. A similar loss of connection was observed in lean mice compared to their obese counterparts. Conclusions/Significance These results suggest that improvements of the inflammatory state following surgery might be explained by a disruption of immuno-inflammatory cascades involving a few crucial molecules which could serve as potential therapeutic targets.
An In vivo Platform for Translational Drug Development in Pancreatic Cancer

Effective development of targeted anticancer agents includes the definition of the optimal biological dose and biomarkers of drug activity. Currently available preclinical models are not optimal to this end. We aimed at generating a model for translational drug development using pancreatic cancer as a prototype. Resected pancreatic cancers from 14 patients were xenografted and expanded in successive groups of nude mice to develop cohorts of tumor-bearing mice suitable for drug therapy in simulated early clinical trials. The xenografted tumors maintain their fundamental genotypic features despite serial passages and recapitulate the genetic heterogeneity of pancreatic cancer. The in vivo platform is useful for integrating drug screening with biomarker discovery. Passages of tumors in successive cohorts of mice do not change their susceptibility to anticancer agents and represent a perpetual live bank, facilitating the application of new technologies that will result in the creation of an integrated stable database of tumor-drug response data and biomarkers.
The search for internal and external fit in teams

In his essay commemorating the famous Hawthorne studies, Harold Leavitt (1975) suggested that people and organizations would be “better off” if groups, not individuals, were the basic building blocks of organizations (Hackman, 1987). Since his prophetic essay, the use of groups and teams in organizations has greatly expanded. As the focus of organizations shifted toward quality, innovation, and accountability, an emphasis on the use of work teams emerged (Kozlowski, Gully, Salas, & CannonBowers, 1996). As a result, organizations have restructured and are continuing to restructure work around teams rather than individual jobs (Ilgen, 1994). In parallel, the need and demand for theoretical and empirical research on team functioning have intensified. Past reviews of the literature on small groups and teams indicated considerable growth in the volume of team research over this same time horizon (Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; McGrath, Arrow, & Berdahl, 2000). The increased focus on team research has helped develop convergence on many conceptual developments in the team literature. A recent example is the consensus that has developed regarding teams as complex systems (McGrath et al., 2000). Teams perform over time and within context, creating an environment that introduces a level of complexity not accounted for within traditional cause and effect perspectives on team functioning. For
Case Studies of E-commerce Adoption in Indonesian SMEs: The Evaluation of Strategic Use

The use of e-commerce in small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has become an important topic in information systems research. At present, there is a large number of well-documented benefits derived from e-commerce for small-medium enterprises (SMEs) both in theoretical and practical literature. Despite the enormous attention given to encourage SMEs to adopt e-commerce both by academics as well as governments, little research has been carried out in identifying strategies of e-commerce adoption for SMEs in developing countries, especially Indonesia. It is, therefore, the aim of this paper to understand the factors and combinations of factors that SMEs need to be considered before embracing e-commerce into their business by providing a closer look at actual experience of Indonesian SMEs. Case study research was carried out to analyse and explain the underlying factors that are likely to determine the varying extent of e-commerce adoption in SMEs, especially the service sector. The findings of the case studies have further extended into the development of proposed practical framework to illustrate how e-commerce adoption should be carried out from a strategic perspective.
Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

Much like cognitive abilities, emotional skills can have major effects on perfor mance and economic outcomes. This paper studies the behavior of professional subjects involved in a dynamic competition in their own natural environment. The setting is a penalty shoot-out in soccer where two teams compete in a tournament framework taking turns in a sequence of five penalty kicks each. As the kicking order is determined by the random outcome of a coin flip, the treatment and control groups are determined via explicit randomization. Therefore, absent any psychological effects, both teams should have the same probability of winning regardless of the kicking order. Yet, we find a systematic first-kicker advantage. Using data on 2,731 penalty kicks from 262 shoot-outs for a three decade period, we find that teams kicking first win the penalty shoot-out 60.5% of the time. A dynamic panel data analysis shows that the psychological mechanism underlying this result arises from the asymmetry in the partial score. As most kicks are scored, kicking first typically means having the opportunity to lead in the partial score, whereas kicking second typically means lagging in the score and having the opportunity to, at most, get even. Having a worse prospect than the opponent hinders subjects' performance. Further, we also find that professionals are self-aware of their own psychological effects. When a recent change in regulations gives winners of the coin toss the chance to choose the kicking order, they rationally react to it by systematically choosing to kick first. A survey of professional players reveals that when asked to explain why they prefer to kick first, they precisely identify the psychological mechanism for which we find empirical support in the data: they want “to lead in the score in order to put pressure on the opponent. ”
Exploring the Effect of Traffic Differentiation on Interconnection Cost Sharing

This paper addresses the inter-provider costs sharing issue by exploring the effect of the traffic differentiation on the interconnection payments. In particular, we determine an original initiator of a transmission by means of traffic differentiation into two types, referred to as native and stranger. Unlike the existing financial settlement, under which the interconnection payments are made based on the net traffic flow, the proposed model governs cost compensations according to the differentiated traffic flows. Analytical studies were provided using Nash bargaining solution to explore how the determination of a transmission initiator affects intercarrier compensation. For this analysis we considered reciprocal and non-reciprocal access charges.
Cerebral Mechanisms of Hypnotic Induction and Suggestion

The neural mechanisms underlying hypnotic states and responses to hypnotic suggestions remain largely unknown and, to date, have been studied only with indirect methods. Here, the effects of hypnosis and suggestions to alter pain perception were investigated in hypnotizable subjects by using positron emission tomography (PET) measures of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) and electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of brain electrical activity. The experimental conditions included a restful state (Baseline) followed by hypnotic relaxation alone (Hypnosis) and by hypnotic relaxation with suggestions for altered pain unpleasantness (Hypnosis-with-Suggestion). During each scan, the left hand was immersed in neutral (35C) or painfully hot (47C) water in the first two conditions and in painfully hot water in the last condition. Hypnosis was accompanied by significant increases in both occipital rCBF and delta EEG activity, which were highly correlated with each other (r = 0.70, p < 0.0001). Peak increases in rCBF were also observed in the caudal part of the right anterior cingulate sulcus and bilaterally in the inferior frontal gyri. Hypnosis-related decreases in rCBF were found in the right inferior parietal lobule, the left precuneus, and the posterior cingulate gyrus. Hypnosis-with-suggestions produced additional widespread increases in rCBF in the frontal cortices predominantly on the left side. Moreover, the medial and lateral posterior parietal cortices showed suggestion-related increases overlapping partly with regions of hypnosis-related decreases. Results support a state theory of hypnosis in which occipital increases in rCBF and delta activity reflect the alteration of consciousness associated with decreased arousal and possible facilitation of visual imagery. Frontal increases in rCBF associated with suggestions for altered perception might reflect the verbal mediation of the suggestions, working memory, and top-down processes involved in the reinterpretation of the perceptual experience. These results provide a new description of the neurobiological basis of hypnosis, demonstrating specific patterns of cerebral activation associated with the hypnotic state and with the processing of hypnotic suggestions.
Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Inhibition Augments the Expression of MHC Class I and II Genes

Purpose: Diverse immune-related effects occur with the use of epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors (EGFRI). In addition to the cutaneous inflammation induced by EGFRIs, these agents have been associated with the exacerbation of autoimmune skin disease and contact hypersensitivity, antiviral effects, and fatal alveolar damage in the setting of lung transplantation. Because EGFR ligands can modulate MHC class I (MHCI) and II (MHCII) molecule expression, we hypothesized that some of the immune-related effects of EGFRIs are due to direct effects on the expression of MHCI and/or MHCII molecules. Experimental Design: Primary human keratinocytes and a malignant keratinocyte cell line (A431) were treated with EGFRIs alone or prior to IFN-γ, a potent inducer of MHCI and MHCII molecule expression. CIITA, MHCI, and MHCII RNA expression was measured using quantitative real-time reverse transcriptase PCR, and cell surface MHCI and MHCII protein expression was measured using flow cytometry. Skin biopsies from patients were analyzed for MHCI and MHCII protein expression before and during therapy with an EGFRI using immunohistochemistry. Results: Both EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors and ligand-blocking antibodies (cetuximab) augmented the induction of MHCI and MHCII molecules by IFN-γ in primary and malignant human keratinocytes. Unexpectedly, the increase in MHCI protein expression did not require the presence of IFN-γ. Consistent with these in vitro findings, skin biopsies from cancer patients exhibited increased epidermal MHCI protein expression during therapy with an EGFRI as well as increases in MHCI and MHCII molecule RNA. Conclusions: These studies suggest that EGFRIs may influence immune/inflammatory responses by directly modulating MHC expression. Clin Cancer Res; 17(13); 4400–13. ©2011 AACR.
Non-Fermenters in Human Infections with Special Reference to Acinetobacter Species in a Tertiary Care Hospital from North Karnataka, India

Background: Non-fermenters are a group of aerobic non-spore forming gram negative bacilli that are either incapable of utilizing carbohydrates as a source of energy or degrade them via oxidative rather than fermentative pathway. These are increasingly been reported from the cases of nosocomial infections. Aims and Objectives: This study was undertaken aiming to identify, characterize all nonfermenters and further study of Acinetobacter isolates. Materials and Methods: A total 116 non-fermenters isolated from various specimens obtained from the patients in tertiary care hospital. Gram negative bacilli which failed to produce acid on Triple Sugar Iron Agar (TSI) were identified by employing battery of tests. The Acinetobacter isolates were further speciated and antimicrobial susceptibility testing done by Kirby Bauer disc diffusion technique. Results: Non-fermenters isolated were Pseudomonas aerugionsa (69.8%), Acinetobacter species (18.9%), Stenotrophomonas maltophilia (4.3%), Burkholderia cepacia (3.4%), Alcaligenes fecalis (1.7%) and Pseudomonas fluorescens (1.7%). Most of the isolates showed susceptibility to imipenem (86.3%) whereas none of the isolates were sensitive to cephalexin and co-trimoxazole. Conclusion: This study highlights that, after Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter species is the most common non-fermenter. Majority of the isolates of Acinetobacter Species were of nosocomial origin and were multidrug resistant, which underlines the importance of proper vigilance of these infections in hospital setting.
Process integration in CASE environments

Research in CASE environments has focused on two kinds of integration: tool and object. A higher level of integration, process integration, which represents development activities explicitly in a software process model to guide and coordinate development and to integrate tools and objects, is proposed. Process integration uses software process models (SPMs) a process driver, a tool set, and interfaces for both developers and managers to form the backbone of a process-driven CASE environment. The developer's interface, a working environment that lets developers enact an SPM, and the manager's interface which gives managers and analysts the tools to define, monitor, and control the SPMs that developers are working on concurrently are discussed. The Softman environment experiment, an implementation of process-driven CASE environments with existing CASE environments, is reviewed. <<ETX>>
Downlink MIMO HetNets: Modeling, Ordering Results and Performance Analysis

We develop a general downlink model for multi-antenna heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), where base stations (BSs) across tiers may differ in terms of transmit power, target signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR), deployment density, number of transmit antennas and the type of multi-antenna transmission. In particular, we consider and compare space division multiple access (SDMA), single user beamforming (SU-BF), and baseline single-input single-output (SISO) transmission. For this general model, the main contributions are: (i) ordering results for both coverage probability and per user rate in closed form for any BS distribution for the three considered techniques, using novel tools from stochastic orders, (ii) upper bounds on the coverage probability assuming a Poisson BS distribution, and (iii) a comparison of the area spectral efficiency (ASE). The analysis concretely demonstrates, for example, that for a given total number of transmit antennas in the network, it is preferable to spread them across many single-antenna BSs vs. fewer multi-antenna BSs. Another observation is that SU-BF provides higher coverage and per user data rate than SDMA, but SDMA is in some cases better in terms of ASE.
Intrathecal Ketorolac Enhances Antinociception from Clonidine

Although both &agr;2-adrenergic agonists and cyclooxygenase inhibitors produce analgesia, their exact sites of action and interaction remain unclear. A previous report demonstrated a surprising inhibition of antinociception in rats from intrathecal clonidine by co-administered ketorolac. There are no other reports of interaction between these two classes of analgesics. We therefore reexamined this interaction, determining the effect of intrathecal clonidine and ketorolac alone and in combination in normal rats. Clonidine, but not ketorolac, produced antinociception to noxious hind paw thermal stimulation. The addition of ketorolac significantly enhanced the effect of clonidine, indicating a synergistic interaction for analgesia. Although the reasons for the discrepancy between this and the previous report are unclear, these results are consistent with previous studies that indicate an antinociceptive action of intrathecal &agr;2-adrenergic agonists in the normal condition, a lack of such effect for cyclooxygenase inhibitors, and positive reinforcing effects of these two systems when co-stimulated.
A Novel Role of Vasopressin in the Brain: Modulation of Activity-Dependent Water Flux in the Neocortex

The brain contains an intrinsic vasopressin fiber system the function of which is unknown. It has been demonstrated recently that astrocytes express high levels of a water channel, aquaporin-4 (AQP4). Because vasopressin is known to regulate aquaporin expression and translocation in kidney collecting ducts and thereby control water reabsorption, we hypothesized that vasopressin might serve a similar function in the brain. By recording intrinsic optical signals in an acute cortical slice preparation we showed that evoked neuronal activity generates a radial water flux in the neocortex. The rapid onset and high capacity of this flux suggest that it is mediated through the AQP4-containing astrocytic syncytium that spans the entire thickness of the neocortical mantle. Vasopressin and vasopressin receptor V1a agonists were found to facilitate this flux. V1a antagonists blocked the facilitatory effect of vasopressin and reduced the water flux even in the absence of any exogenous agonist. V2 agonists or antagonists had no effect. These data suggest that vasopressin and V1a receptors play a crucial role in the regulation of brain water and ion homeostasis, most probably by modulating aquaporin-mediated water flux through astrocyte plasma membranes.
Survey of soft computing techniques for joint radio resource management

Ever changing requirements of the mobile devices has posed significant challenges on existing cellular network systems. The Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN) will be heterogeneous which will have different Radio Access Technologies (RATs) operating together. Radio Resource Management (RRM) is one of the key challenges in NGWN. Joint Radio Resource Management (JRRM) is one of the RRM technique plays instrumental role in ensuring the desired Quality of Service (QoS) to the users working on different applications which are having the diversified nature of QoS requirements to be fulfilled by the wireless networks. Soft computing is one promising field which is strongly believed to enhance the capability of the existing methods for JRRM. The objective of this paper is to bring out the best features of soft computing techniques for JRRM in NGWN to enhance capability of existing methods, which integrates the different RRM strategies using soft computing techniques for NGWN and observe how JRRM would properly work together with soft computing techniques in heterogeneous scenario to perform better than the existing techniques.
Party status as a confound in the automatic classification of political speech by ideology

A number of recent papers have used support-vector machines with word features to classify political texts – in particular, legislative speech – by ideology. Our own work on this topic led us to hypothesize that such classifiers are sensitive not to expressions of ideology but rather to expressions of attack and defence, opposition and government. We test this hypothesis by training on one parliament and testing on another in which party roles have been interchanged, and we find that the performance of the classifier completely disintegrates. Moreover, some features that are indicative of each party “swap sides” with the change of government. And combining ideologically inconsistent opposition parties together in the classifier does not in most cases seriously degrade its performance. Our results suggest that the language of attack and defence, of government and opposition, dominates and confounds any sensitivity to ideology in these kinds of classifiers.
A ∞ -monads and Completion

Given an operad A of topological spaces, we consider A-monads in a topological category C. When A is an A ∞-operad, any A-monad K : C → C can be thought of as a monad up to coherent homotopies. We define the completion functor with respect to an A ∞-monad and prove that it is an A ∞-monad itself. In a second part, we construct a combinatorial model of an A ∞-operad which acts simplicially on the cobar resolution (not just its total space) of a simplicial set with respect to a ring R.
Follicular Adenomas Exhibit a Unique Metabolic Profile. 1H NMR Studies of Thyroid Lesions

Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy. However, more than 90% of thyroid nodules are benign. It remains unclear whether thyroid carcinoma arises from preexisting benign nodules. Metabolomics can provide valuable and comprehensive information about low molecular weight compounds present in living systems and further our understanding of the biology regulating pathological processes. Herein, we applied 1H NMR-based metabolic profiling to identify the metabolites present in aqueous tissue extracts of healthy thyroid tissue (H), non-neoplastic nodules (NN), follicular adenomas (FA) and malignant thyroid cancer (TC) as an alternative way of investigating cancer lesions. Multivariate statistical methods provided clear discrimination not only between healthy thyroid tissue and pathological thyroid tissue but also between different types of thyroid lesions. Potential biomarkers common to all thyroid lesions were identified, namely, alanine, methionine, acetone, glutamate, glycine, lactate, tyrosine, phenylalanine and hypoxanthine. Metabolic changes in thyroid cancer were mainly related to osmotic regulators (taurine and scyllo- and myo-inositol), citrate, and amino acids supplying the TCA cycle. Thyroid follicular adenomas were found to display metabolic features of benign non-neoplastic nodules and simultaneously displayed a partial metabolic profile associated with malignancy. This finding allows the discrimination of follicular adenomas from benign non-neoplastic nodules and thyroid cancer with similar accuracy. Moreover, the presented data indicate that follicular adenoma could be an individual stage of thyroid cancer development.