Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
p38 Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase/Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription-3 Pathway Signaling Regulates Expression of Inhibitory Molecules in T Cells Activated by HIV-1-Exposed Dendritic Cells

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection enhances the expression of inhibitory molecules on T cells, leading to T-cell impairment. The signaling pathways underlying the regulation of inhibitory molecules and subsequent onset of T-cell impairment remain elusive. We showed that both autologous and allogeneic T cells exposed to HIV-pulsed dendritic cells (DCs) upregulated cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen (CTLA-4), tumor-necrosis factor (TNF)-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL), lymphocyte-activation gene-3 (LAG3), T-cell immunoglobulin mucin-3 (TIM-3), CD160 and certain suppression-associated transcription factors, such as B-lymphocyte induced maturation protein-1 (BLIMP-1), deltex homolog 1 protein (DTX1) and forkhead box P3 (FOXP3), leading to T-cell suppression. This induction was regulated by p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (P38MAPK/STAT3) pathways, because their blockade significantly abrogated expression of all the inhibitory molecules studied and a subsequent recovery in T-cell proliferation. Neither interleukin-6 (IL-6) nor IL-10 nor growth factors known to activate STAT3 signaling events were responsible for STAT3 activation. Involvement of the P38MAPK/STAT3 pathways was evident because these proteins had a higher level of phosphorylation in the HIV-1-primed cells. Furthermore, blockade of viral CD4 binding and fusion significantly reduced the negative effects DCs imposed on primed T cells. In conclusion, HIV-1 interaction with DCs modulated their functionality, causing them to trigger the activation of the P38MAPK/STAT3 pathway in T cells, which was responsible for the upregulation of inhibitory molecules.
The Efficacy of Coaching Interventions forUndergraduates to Increase Positive Coping Behavior: A Quantitative Quasi-Experiment

ii List of Tables . vii Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 Background, Context, History, and Conceptual Framework for the Problem . 1 Statement of the Problem . 3 Purpose of the Study . 4 Research Questions . 5 Rationale, Relevance, and Significance of the Study . 6 Definitions of Terms . 8 Assumptions, Delimitations, and Limitations . 8 Summary . 10 Chapter 2: Literature Review . 1
The G305 star-forming complex: radio continuum and molecular line observations

We present 109–115 GHz (3 mm) wide-field spectral line observations of 12CO, 13CO and C18O J = 1–0 molecular emission and 5.5 and 8.8 GHz (6 and 3 cm) radio continuum emission towards the high-mass star-forming complex known as G305. The morphology of G305 is dominated by a large evacuated cavity at the centre of the complex driven by clusters of O stars surrounded by molecular gas. Our goals are to determine the physical properties of the molecular environment and reveal the relationship between the molecular and ionized gas and star formation in G305. This is in an effort to characterize the star-forming environment and constrain the star formation history in an attempt to evaluate the impact of high-mass stars on the evolution of the G305 complex. Analysis of CO emission in G305 reveals 156 molecular clumps with the following physical characteristics; excitation temperatures ranging from 7 to 25 K, optical depths of 0.2–0.9, H2 column densities of 0.1–4.0 × 1022 cm−2, clump masses ranging from 102 to 104 M⊙ and a total molecular mass of >3.5 × 105 M⊙. The 5.5 and 8.8 GHz radio continuum emission reveals an extended low surface brightness ionized environment within which we identify 15 large-scale features with a further eight smaller sources projected within these features. By comparing to mid-infrared emission and archival data, we identify nine H II regions, seven compact H II regions, one UC H II region and four extended regions. The total integrated flux of the radio continuum emission at 5.5 GHz is ∼180 Jy corresponding to a Lyman continuum output of 2.4 × 1050 photons s−1. We compare the ionized and molecular environment with optically identified high-mass stars and ongoing star formation, identified from the literature. Analysis of this data set reveals a star formation rate of 0.008–0.016 M⊙yr−1 and efficiency of 7–12 per cent, allows us to probe the star formation history of the region and discuss the impact of high-mass stars on the evolution of G305.
From face to interface recognition: a differential geometric approach to distinguish DNA from RNA binding surfaces

Protein nucleic acid interactions play a critical role in all steps of the gene expression pathway. Nucleic acid (NA) binding proteins interact with their partners, DNA or RNA, via distinct regions on their surface that are characterized by an ensemble of chemical, physical and geometrical properties. In this study, we introduce a novel methodology based on differential geometry, commonly used in face recognition, to characterize and predict NA binding surfaces on proteins. Applying the method on experimentally solved three-dimensional structures of proteins we successfully classify double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) from single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) binding proteins, with 83% accuracy. We show that the method is insensitive to conformational changes that occur upon binding and can be applicable for de novo protein-function prediction. Remarkably, when concentrating on the zinc finger motif, we distinguish successfully between RNA and DNA binding interfaces possessing the same binding motif even within the same protein, as demonstrated for the RNA polymerase transcription-factor, TFIIIA. In conclusion, we present a novel methodology to characterize protein surfaces, which can accurately tell apart dsDNA from an ssRNA binding interfaces. The strength of our method in recognizing fine-tuned differences on NA binding interfaces make it applicable for many other molecular recognition problems, with potential implications for drug design.
A Descriptive Analysis of a Large-Scale Collection of App Management Activities

Smartphone users adopt an increasing number of mobile applications (a.k.a., apps) in the recent years. Investigating how people manage mobile apps in their everyday lives creates a unique opportunity to understand the behaviors and preferences of mobile users. Existing literature provides very limited understanding about app management activities, due to the lack of user behavioral data at scale. This paper analyzes a very large collection of app management log of the users of a leading Android app marketplace in China. The data set covers one month of detailed activities of how users download, update, and uninstall the apps on their smart devices, involving 8,306,181 anonymized users and 394,661 apps. We characterize how these users manage the apps on their devices and identify behavioral patterns that correlate with users' online ratings of the apps.
Status of Knowledge Based Economy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: An Analysis

This paper highlights on the emerging issues that compelled Saudi Arabia in transforming its economy to a knowledge-based one. It discusses the pillars of a knowledge-based economy i.e. the institutional model; education; research and development (RD and information and communication technology (ICT) adopted by the World Bank Institute framework to analyze the status of a knowledge-based economy in Saudi Arabia. The primary objective of this article is to understand the status of the knowledgebased economy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Secondary data was collected for writing the paper. The nine developmental plans of Saudi Arabia (Ministry of Economy and Planning), Ministry of Education reports, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology reports, and Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) reports are some of the important sources of data. The government of Saudi Arabia has laid the foundation for transforming its economy to a knowledge-based one but more is required especially in the field of human resource development and innovation to expedite the easiness of the transforming process.
DOUBLE-DIFFUSIVE INSTABILITIES OF A SHEAR-GENERATED MAGNETIC LAYER

Previous theoretical work has speculated about the existence of double-diffusive magnetic buoyancy instabilities of a dynamically evolving horizontal magnetic layer generated by the interaction of forced vertically sheared velocity and a background vertical magnetic field. Here, we confirm numerically that if the ratio of the magnetic to thermal diffusivities is sufficiently low then such instabilities can indeed exist, even for high Richardson number shear flows. Magnetic buoyancy may therefore occur via this mechanism for parameters that are likely to be relevant to the solar tachocline, where regular magnetic buoyancy instabilities are unlikely.
Non-rigid shape correspondence in the spectral domain

Finding correspondence between non-rigid shapes is at the heart of three-dimensional shape processing. It has been extensively addressed over the last decade, but efficient and accurate correspondence detection still remains a challenging task. Generalized Multidimensional Scaling (GMDS) is an approach that finds correspondence by mapping one shape into another, while attempting to preserve distances between pairs of corresponding points on the two shapes. A different approach consists in detecting correspondence between shapes by matching their pointwise surface descriptors. Recently, the Spectral GMDS (SGMDS) approach was introduced, according to which the GMDS was re-formulated in the natural spectral domain of the shapes. Here, we propose a method that combines matching based on geodesic distances and pointwise surface descriptors. Following SGMDS, in the proposed solution the entire problem is translated into the spectral domain, resulting in efficient correspondence computation. Efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated by comparing it to state-of-the-art approaches, using a standard correspondence benchmark.
Overview of Factors for Internet Banking Adoption

The study presents the major factors for Internet banking adoption and compares the levels of adoption across countries, in order to identify more easily what factors to consider most while providing banking services over the Internet. Based on prior studies, web security, Internet usage, economy status, high branch intensity, competition, government prioritization regulations, and literacy level were identified as the major factors affecting Internet banking adoption. This study uses fuzzy inference systems (FIS) to define the adoption rate. Our experimental results show that security is the most important factor because no matter how high government prioritization, literacy level, Internet users, and competition among Internet service providers are, as long as there are low security levels, the adoption rate will be at the lowest level. We conclude that, overall, the banks-specific factors are the main drivers for Internet banking adoption.
Student and staff perceptions of the effectiveness of plagiarism detection software

The aim of this research was to determine student and staff perceptions of the effectiveness of plagiarism detection software. A mixed methods approach was undertaken, using a research model adapted from the literature. Eight hours of interviews were conducted with six students and six teaching staff from Curtin Business School at Curtin University of Technology, which had trialled the plagiarism detection software, EVE2 . A survey questionnaire was completed by 171 students involved in the trial. The summary indication was that students perceived that plagiarism is an important issue; detection software makes it easier for lecturers; it is fair to use detection software; students support its use; and it will have some effect in preventing plagiarism. However, students' concerns included being caught for unintentional plagiarism, teaching staff placing too much emphasis on detection results above student ability, and the accuracy of the software at detecting plagiarism. Concerns for teaching staff included the time taken for the detection process, limitation of the software to publicly based Internet sources and direct copying, and the extra workload involved with pursuing academic misconduct.
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.net Phenylalanine Hydroxylase Misfolding and Pharmacological Chaperones †

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a loss-of-function inborn error of metabolism. As many other inherited diseases the main pathologic mechanism in PKU is an enhanced tendency of the mutant phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH) to misfold and undergo ubiquitin-dependent degradation. Recent alternative approaches with therapeutic potential for PKU aim at correcting the PAH misfolding, and in this respect pharmacological chaperones are the focus of increasing interest. These compounds, which often resemble the natural ligands and show mild competitive inhibition, can rescue the misfolded proteins by stimulating their renaturation in vivo. For PKU, a few studies have proven the stabilization of PKU-mutants in vi-tro, in cells, and in mice by pharmacological chaperones, which have been found either by using the tetrahydrobiopterin (BH 4) cofactor as query structure for shape-focused virtual screening or by high-throughput screening of small compound libraries. Both approaches have revealed a number of compounds, most of which bind at the iron-binding site, competitively with respect to BH 4. Furthermore, PAH shares a number of ligands, such as BH 4 , amino acid substrates and inhibi-tors, with the other aromatic amino acid hydroxylases: the neuronal/neuroendocrine enzymes tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and the tryptophan hydroxylases (TPHs). Recent results indicate that the PAH-targeted pharmacological chaperones should also be tested on TH and the TPHs, and eventually be derivatized to avoid unwanted interactions with these other enzymes. After derivatization and validation in animal models, the PAH-chaperoning compounds represent novel possibilities in the treatment of PKU.
Image Completion Using Global Optimization

A new exemplar-based framework unifying image completion, texture synthesis and image inpainting is presented in this work. Contrary to existing greedy techniques, these tasks are posed in the form of a discrete global optimization problem with a well defined objective function. For solving this problem a novel optimization scheme, called Priority- BP, is proposed which carries two very important extensions over standard belief propagation (BP): "prioritybased message scheduling" and "dynamic label pruning". These two extensions work in cooperation to deal with the intolerable computational cost of BP caused by the huge number of existing labels. Moreover, both extensions are generic and can therefore be applied to any MRF energy function as well. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on a wide variety of image completion examples.
Threat affects risk preferences in movement decision making

Emotional states such as sadness, anger, and threat have been shown to play a critical role in decision-making processes. Here we addressed the question of whether risk preferences are influenced by postural threat and whether this influence generalizes across motor tasks. We examined risk attitudes in the context of arm-reaching (ARM) and whole-body (WB) leaning movements, expecting that increased postural threat would lead to proportionally similar changes in risk-sensitivity for each motor task. Healthy young adults were shown a series of two-alternative forced-choice lotteries, where they were asked to choose between a riskier lottery and a safer lottery on each trial. Our lotteries consisted of different monetary rewards and target sizes. Subjects performed each choice task at ground level and atop an elevated platform. In the presence of this postural threat, increased physiological arousal was correlated with decreased movement variability. To determine risk-sensitivity, we quantified the frequency with which a subject chose the riskier lottery and fit lottery responses to a choice model based on cumulative prospect theory (CPT). Subjects exhibited idiosyncratic changes in risk-sensitivity between motor tasks and between elevations. However, we found that overweighting of small probabilities increased with postural threat in the WB task, indicating a more cautious, risk-averse strategy is ascribed to the possibility of a fall. Subjects were also more risk-seeking in the WB movements than in ARM at low elevation; this behavior does not seem to derive from consistent distortions in utility or probability representations but may be explained by subjects' inaccurate estimation of their own motor variability. Overall, our findings suggest that implicit threat can modify risk attitudes in the motor domain, and the threat may induce risk-aversion in salient movement tasks.
Pricing and Hedging Equity-Linked Products under Stochastic Volatility Models

Pricing and Hedging Equity-Linked Products Under Stochastic Volatility Models Anne MacKay Equity-indexed annuities (EIAs) are becoming increasingly interesting for investors as market volatility increases. Simultaneously, they represent a higher risk for insurers, which amplifies the need for hedging strategies that perform well when index returns present unexpected changes in their volatility. In this thesis, we introduce hedging strategies that aim at reducing the risk of the financial guarantees embedded in EIAs. We first derive closed-form expressions for the price and the Greeks of a point-topoint EIA under the Heston model, which assumes stochastic volatility. To do so, we rely on the similarity between the payoff of a European call option and that of the EIA. We use the Greeks to develop dynamic hedging strategies that aim at reducing equity and volatility risk. Using Monte Carlo simulations to derive the distribution of the resulting hedging errors, we compare the performance of hedging strategies that use the Greeks derived under the Heston model to other strategies based on Greeks developed under Black-Scholes. We show that, when the market is Hestonian, the performance of hedging strategies developed in a Black-Scholes framework are significantly affected by the calibration of the model and the volatility risk premium. We further show that the performance of a simple delta hedging strategy using Heston Greeks is also reduced by the presence of a iii volatility risk premium, and that this performance can be improved by incorporating gamma or vega hedging to the strategy. We conclude by recommending the use of a delta-vega hedging strategy to reduce model calibration and volatility risk.
Competition as an element of gamification for learning: an exploratory longitudinal investigation

This paper examines the effect of gamification techniques in engaging students in a teaching context, in particular the influence of competition. We conducted a longitudinal survey study (informed by a focus group) -- in an MBA classroom that uses ERPsim, which is a gamified simulation system for teaching the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solution. Flow theory was used to understand engagement during this method of learning. We examined the effect of antecedents of Flow, such as skill and challenge, and the effect of Flow on its consequences such as satisfaction and student feelings. In line with earlier research, our results showed that losing a competition can have a detrimental effect on students' satisfaction and enjoyment; however, competition is still a key element that highly motivates students to engage in the gamification tasks.
Event-based predictive control strategy for teleoperation via Internet

The variable time delay and the packet loss degrade the performance of Internet based teleoperation system severely, even make the system unstable. Most of the previous work on Internet-based teleoperations rest on many assumptions, for example, time delay is constant or has upper bound, control is not in real-time. This paper presents a new predictive control strategy for the Internet based teleoperation system. The strategy is quite different from traditional methods. Instead of using time as motion reference for the control and sensor signals, the proposed method, called event based method, choose another motion reference which can efficiently carry the sensory information of the teleoperator. To improve the tracking control performance, a discrete-time device called path governor (PG) generates on line a suitable time-parameterization of the predictive path to be tracked by solving a look-ahead optimization problem. And then a global predictive control (GPC) controller is designed at the slave site to generate the redundant control information to diminish the influence of the packet loss and the large time delay in the internet. In this paper, analysis and design of event based method for internet-based teleoperation is described. Stability of teleoperation system is proven. And stability conditions are also given. Simulations and results demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy.
Secondary Household Transmission of 2009 Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) Virus among an Urban and Rural Population in Kenya, 2009–2010

Background In Kenya, >1,200 laboratory-confirmed 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) (pH1N1) cases occurred since June 2009. We used population-based infectious disease surveillance (PBIDS) data to assess household transmission of pH1N1 in urban Nairobi (Kibera) and rural Lwak. Methods We defined a pH1N1 patient as laboratory-confirmed pH1N1 infection among PBIDS participants during August 1, 2009–February 5, 2010, in Kibera, or August 1, 2009–January 20, 2010, in Lwak, and a case household as a household with a laboratory-confirmed pH1N1 patient. Community interviewers visited PBIDS-participating households to inquire about illnesses among household members. We randomly selected 4 comparison households per case household matched by number of children aged <5. Comparison households had a household visit 10 days before or after the matched patient symptom onset date. We defined influenza-like illnesses (ILI) as self-reported cough or sore throat, and a self-reported fever ≤8 days after the pH1N1 patient's symptom onset in case households and ≤8 days before selected household visit in comparison households. We used the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel test to compare proportions of ILIs among case and comparison households, and log binomial-model to compare that of Kibera and Lwak. Results Among household contacts of patients with confirmed pH1N1 in Kibera, 4.6% had ILI compared with 8.2% in Lwak (risk ratio [RR], 0.5; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.3–0.9). Household contacts of patients were more likely to have ILIs than comparison-household members in both Kibera (RR, 1.8; 95% CI, 1.1–2.8) and Lwak (RR, 2.6; 95% CI, 1.6–4.3). Overall, ILI was not associated with patient age. However, ILI rates among household contacts were higher among children aged <5 years than persons aged ≥5 years in Lwak, but not Kibera. Conclusions Substantial pH1N1 household transmission occurred in urban and rural Kenya. Household transmission rates were higher in the rural area.