Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial requirements between haptenic and carrier determinants for T- dependent antibody responses

To gauge the proximity between cooperating T and B cells required for effective triggering of antibody production, guinea pigs were immunized with bifunctional antigens in which the haptenic and carrier determinants were separated by rigid spacers of varied dimension. These took the form 2,4-dinitrophenol-(proline)n-L-tyrosine-p- azobenzenearsonate, where n varied from 1 to 40 proline residues. Animals immunized with n = 10 and n = 22 compounds made strong anti-DNP antibody responses, whereas animals immunized with bifunctional compounds containing longer spacers did not make antibody detectable by precipitation. It can be calculated on the basis of very strong physicochemical evidence for the rigidity and axial translation of poly- L-proline chains in solution that the cut-off point for effective interaction between T and B cells lies between 69 and 97 A U.
Distinct Functions of Specialized Dendritic Cell Subsets in Atherosclerosis and the Road Ahead

Atherosclerotic vascular disease is modulated by immune mechanisms. Dendritic cells (DCs) and T cells are present within atherosclerotic lesions and function as central players in the initiation and modulation of adaptive immune responses. In previous years, we have studied the functional contribution of distinct DC subsets in disease development, namely, that of CCL17-expressing DCs as well as that of plasmacytoid DCs that play specialized roles in disease development. This review focuses on important findings gathered in these studies and dissects the multifaceted contribution of CCL17-expressing DCs and pDCs to the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. Furthermore, an outlook on future challenges faced when studying DCs in this detrimental disease are provided, and hurdles that will need to be overcome in order to enable a better understanding of the contribution of DCs to atherogenesis are discussed, a prerequisite for their therapeutic targeting in atherosclerosis.
Dihydroartemisinin Exerts Its Anticancer Activity through Depleting Cellular Iron via Transferrin Receptor-1

Artemisinin and its main active metabolite dihydroartemisinin, clinically used antimalarial agents with low host toxicity, have recently shown potent anticancer activities in a variety of human cancer models. Although iron mediated oxidative damage is involved, the mechanisms underlying these activities remain unclear. In the current study, we found that dihydroartemisinin caused cellular iron depletion in time- and concentration-dependent manners. It decreased iron uptake and disturbed iron homeostasis in cancer cells, which were independent of oxidative damage. Moreover, dihydroartemisinin reduced the level of transferrin receptor-1 associated with cell membrane. The regulation of dihydroartemisinin to transferrin receptor-1 could be reversed by nystatin, a cholesterol-sequestering agent but not the inhibitor of clathrin-dependent endocytosis. Dihydroartemisinin also induced transferrin receptor-1 palmitoylation and colocalization with caveolin-1, suggesting a lipid rafts mediated internalization pathway was involved in the process. Also, nystatin reversed the influences of dihydroartemisinin on cell cycle and apoptosis related genes and the siRNA induced downregulation of transferrin receptor-1 decreased the sensitivity to dihydroartemisinin efficiently in the cells. These results indicate that dihydroartemisinin can counteract cancer through regulating cell-surface transferrin receptor-1 in a non-classical endocytic pathway, which may be a new action mechanism of DHA independently of oxidative damage.
The Copied Item Injection Attack

In many web communities, users are assigned a reputation based on ratings on their past contributions, and this reputation in turn influences the recommendation level of their future contributions. In this type of system, there is potentially an incentive for authors to copy highly-rated content in order to boost their reputation and influence within the system. We describe this strategy as a copied-item injection attack. We conduct an empirical study of this attack on the online news discussion forum Slashdot. We find evidence of its use and demonstrate its effectiveness in eliciting high ratings. We explore variants of this attack in other domains and discuss potential countermeasures.
Impact of Age on Clinicopathological Features and Survival of Patients with Noncardia Gastric Adenocarcinoma

Purpose Gastric cancer often occurs in the elderly but is uncommon in young individuals. Whether young patients have different clinical behaviors and outcomes from those of older patients remain unclear. Materials and Methods We identified 1,366 cases of newly diagnosed noncardia gastric adenocarcinoma from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Cancer Registry between 2000 and 2010. We then compared the clinicopathological features and survival among the different age groups. Results The male : female ratio differed significantly between the younger and older patient groups (0.84 in age <50 years vs. 1.52>60 years, P<0.01). More younger patients were Hispanic (54% patients <40 years vs. 19% patients ≥70 years, P<0.0001), while more older patients were Caucasian (49% patients ≥70 years vs. 15% patients <40 years; P<0.0001). The diffuse/mixed histological type was more prevalent in younger patients (70% patients <40 years vs. 27% patients ≥70 years; P<0.0001), whereas the intestinal type was more frequent in older patients (71% in patients ≥70 years vs. 30% in patients <40 years; P<0.0001). Poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma was more common in the younger patients (80% in patients <40 years vs. 60% in patients ≥70 years; P=0.016). Survival rates at 1, 2, and 5 years gradually declined with increasing age (overall P=0.0002). Conclusions Young patients with gastric cancer had more aggressive disease but higher overall survival rates than older patients. Younger Hispanic patients and older Caucasian patients were more likely to be diagnosed with gastric cancer. These differences may be due to biological predisposition and/or environmental exposure.
PD-1/PD-L1 Blockade Enhances T-cell Activity and Antitumor Efficacy of Imatinib in Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors

Purpose: Tyrosine kinase inhibitors are effective in gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) but often are of transient benefit as resistance commonly develops. Immunotherapy, particularly blockade of the inhibitory receptor programmed death 1 (PD-1) or the ligand programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1), has shown effectiveness in a variety of cancers. The functional effects of PD-1/PD-L1 blockade are unknown in GISTs. Experimental Design: We analyzed tumor and matched blood samples from 85 patients with GISTs and determined the expression of immune checkpoint molecules using flow cytometry. We investigated the combination of imatinib with PD-1/PD-L1 blockade in KitV558Δ/+ mice that develop GISTs. Results: The inhibitory receptors PD-1, lymphocyte activation gene 3, and T-cell immunoglobulin mucin-3 were upregulated on tumor-infiltrating T cells compared with T cells from matched blood. PD-1 expression on T cells was highest in imatinib-treated human GISTs. Meanwhile, intratumoral PD-L1 expression was variable. In human GIST cell lines, treatment with imatinib abrogated the IFNγ-induced upregulation of PD-L1 via STAT1 inhibition. In KitV558Δ/+ mice, imatinib downregulated IFNγ-related genes and reduced PD-L1 expression on tumor cells. PD-1 and PD-L1 blockade in vivo each had no efficacy alone but enhanced the antitumor effects of imatinib by increasing T-cell effector function in the presence of KIT and IDO inhibition. Conclusions: PD-1/PD-L1 blockade is a promising strategy to improve the effects of targeted therapy in GISTs. Collectively, our results provide the rationale to combine these agents in human GISTs. Clin Cancer Res; 23(2); 454–65. ©2016 AACR.
Healthy habits: some thoughts on the role of public policy in healthful eating and exercise under limited rationality

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. ” – Mark Twain “The diminutive chain of habit is scarcely heavy enough to be felt till it is too strong to be broken. ” – simplification of Samuel Johnson quote used in 19th century temperance literature “The child is the Father of the Man. ” – William Wordsworth “The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half. ” – Feodor Dostoevsky “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them. ” – Confucius “My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. ” – Errol Flynn
On Minimizing the MSE in the Presence of Channel State Information Errors

We consider the uplink of a multiuser multiple input multiple output (MU MIMO) system, in which the base station acquires channel state information (CSI) for which the estimation error depends on the resources assigned to the uplink pilot symbols. For this system, we first derive the receiver that minimizes the mean square error (MSE) of the uplink detected data symbols, as opposed to the naïve receiver that does not minimize the MSE in the presence of CSI errors. We then derive a closed form expression for the MSE as a function of the employed pilot-to-data power ratio, number of antennas and the MU MIMO interference power. This expression allows us to gain the insight that the gain of using the actual MMSE receiver as opposed to the naïve receiver becomes particularly important when the number of BS antennas is large.
The Relationship between Islamic Religiosity, Islamic Work Ethics and Job Performance

The efforts in sustaining the excellence level of job performance have been widely discussed, either by researchers or organizations itself. However, the practitioners still confronts difficulties in sustaining job performance, especially in Muslim countries. This due to human's complex behavior and many other factors such as job stress and dissatisfaction. Whereas, as a Muslim, the employee’s should be self-control, patient, resilience, tolerance, and make a complete resignation to Allah’s will. Furthermore, a Muslim should believe that Allah is All Wise, and that there is great wisdom behind everything that Allah does. Thus, along with these Islamic religiosity awareness, each individual will be compelled to behave ethically. Although there are numerous studies on ethics have been conducted, either in Islamic perspective or general perspective. There is a lack of study that investigate the impact Islamic religiosity awareness in workplace. Thus, in response to the impact of both Islamic religiosity and Islamic work ethics in enhancing as well as sustaining job performance, this paper presented, discussed, and investigated empirically for possible implications between Islamic religiosity, Islamic work ethics and job performance. SmartPLS have been used as analysis tool. Future researchers are expected to expand the study on job performance from Islamic perspective.
Semi-Supervised Training for the Averaged Perceptron POS Tagger

This paper describes POS tagging experiments with semi-supervised training as an extension to the (supervised) averaged perceptron algorithm, first introduced for this task by (Collins, 2002). Experiments with an iterative training on standard-sized supervised (manually annotated) dataset (106 tokens) combined with a relatively modest (in the order of 108 tokens) unsupervised (plain) data in a bagging-like fashion showed significant improvement of the POS classification task on typologically different languages, yielding better than state-of-the-art results for English and Czech (4.12 % and 4.86 % relative error reduction, respectively; absolute accuracies being 97.44 % and 95.89 %).
BMI and WHR Are Reflected in Female Facial Shape and Texture: A Geometric Morphometric Image Analysis

Facial markers of body composition are frequently studied in evolutionary psychology and are important in computational and forensic face recognition. We assessed the association of body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) with facial shape and texture (color pattern) in a sample of young Middle European women by a combination of geometric morphometrics and image analysis. Faces of women with high BMI had a wider and rounder facial outline relative to the size of the eyes and lips, and relatively lower eyebrows. Furthermore, women with high BMI had a brighter and more reddish skin color than women with lower BMI. The same facial features were associated with WHR, even though BMI and WHR were only moderately correlated. Yet BMI was better predictable than WHR from facial attributes. After leave-one-out cross-validation, we were able to predict 25% of variation in BMI and 10% of variation in WHR by facial shape. Facial texture predicted only about 3–10% of variation in BMI and WHR. This indicates that facial shape primarily reflects total fat proportion, rather than the distribution of fat within the body. The association of reddish facial texture in high-BMI women may be mediated by increased blood pressure and superficial blood flow as well as diet. Our study elucidates how geometric morphometric image analysis serves to quantify the effect of biological factors such as BMI and WHR to facial shape and color, which in turn contributes to social perception.
Epigenetic Enhancement of BDNF Signaling Rescues Synaptic Plasticity in Aging

Aging-related cognitive declines are well documented in humans and animal models. Yet the synaptic and molecular mechanisms responsible for cognitive aging are not well understood. Here we demonstrated age-dependent deficits in long-term synaptic plasticity and loss of dendritic spines in the hippocampus of aged Fisher 344 rats, which were closely associated with reduced histone acetylation, upregulation of histone deacetylase (HDAC) 2, and decreased expression of a histone acetyltransferase. Further analysis showed that one of the key genes affected by such changes was the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (Bdnf) gene. Age-dependent reductions in H3 and H4 acetylation were detected within multiple promoter regions of the Bdnf gene, leading to a significant decrease in BDNF expression and impairment of downstream signaling in the aged hippocampus. These synaptic and signaling deficits could be rescued by enhancing BDNF and trkB expression via HDAC inhibition or by directly activating trkB receptors with 7,8-dihydroxyflavone, a newly identified, selective agonist for trkB. Together, our findings suggest that age-dependent declines in chromatin histone acetylation and the resulting changes in BDNF expression and signaling are key mechanisms underlying the deterioration of synaptic function and structure in the aging brain. Furthermore, epigenetic or pharmacological enhancement of BDNF–trkB signaling could be a promising strategy for reversing cognitive aging.
Concord Grape Juice Polyphenols and Cardiovascular Risk Factors: Dose-Response Relationships

Pure fruit juices provide nutritional value with evidence suggesting some of their benefits on biomarkers of cardiovascular disease risk may be derived from their constituent polyphenols, particularly flavonoids. However, few data from clinical trials are available on the dose-response relationship of fruit juice flavonoids to these outcomes. Utilizing the results of clinical trials testing single doses, we have analyzed data from studies of 100% Concord grape juice by placing its flavonoid content in the context of results from randomized clinical trials of other polyphenol-rich foods and beverages describing the same outcomes but covering a broader range of intake. We selected established biomarkers determined by similar methods for measuring flow-mediated vasodilation (FMD), blood pressure, platelet aggregation, and the resistance of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL) to oxidation. Despite differences among the clinical trials in the treatment, subjects, and duration, correlations were observed between the dose and FMD. Inverse dose-response relationships, albeit with lower correlation coefficients, were also noted for the other outcomes. These results suggest a clear relationship between consumption of even modest serving sizes of Concord grape juice, flavonoid intake, and effects on risk factors for cardiovascular disease. This approach to dose-response relationships may prove useful for testing other individual foods and beverages.
In Vitro Antimicrobial Bioassays, DPPH Radical Scavenging Activity, and FTIR Spectroscopy Analysis of Heliotropium bacciferum

The present study deals with the antimicrobial, antioxidant, and functional group analysis of Heliotropium bacciferum extracts. Disc diffusion susceptibility method was followed for antimicrobial assessment. Noteworthy antimicrobial activities were recorded by various plant extracts against antibiotic resistant microorganisms. Plant flower extracts antioxidant activity was investigated against 2, 2-diphenyl-1-picryl hydrazyl radical by ultraviolet spectrophotometer (517 nm). Plant extracts displayed noteworthy radical scavenging activities at all concentrations (25–225 μg/mL). Notable activities were recorded by crude, chloroform and ethyl acetate extracts up to 88.27% at 225 μg/mL concentration. Compounds functional groups were examined by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic studies. Alkanes, alkenes, alkyl halides, amines, carboxylic acids, amides, esters, alcohols, phenols, nitrocompounds, and aromatic compounds were identified by FTIR analysis. Thin layer chromatography bioautography was carried out for all plant extracts. Different bands were separated by various solvent systems. The results of the current study justify the use of Heliotropium bacciferum in traditional remedial herbal medicines.
Assorted Processing of Synthetic Trans-Acting siRNAs and Its Activity in Antiviral Resistance

The use of syn-tasiRNAs has been proposed as an RNA interference technique alternative to those previously described: hairpin based, virus induced gene silencing or artificial miRNAs. In this study we engineered the TAS1c locus to impair Plum pox virus (PPV) infection by replacing the five native siRNAs with two 210-bp fragments from the CP and the 3´NCR regions of the PPV genome. Deep sequencing analysis of the small RNA species produced by both constructs in planta has shown that phased processing of the syn-tasiRNAs is construct-specific. While in syn-tasiR-CP construct the processing was as predicted 21-nt phased in register with miR173-guided cleavage, the processing of syn-tasiR-3NCR is far from what was expected. A 22-nt species from the miR173-guided cleavage was a guide of two series of phased small RNAs, one of them in an exact 21-nt register, and the other one in a mixed of 21-/22-nt frame. In addition, both constructs produced abundant PPV-derived small RNAs in the absence of miR173 as a consequence of a strong sense post-transcriptional gene silencing induction. The antiviral effect of both constructs was also evaluated in the presence or absence of miR173 and showed that the impairment of PPV infection was not significantly higher when miR173 was present. The results show that syn-tasiRNAs processing depends on construct-specific factors that should be further studied before the so-called MIGS (miRNA-induced gene silencing) technology can be used reliably.
Investigation of the Mechanisms of Electromagnetic Field Interaction with Proteins

In our earlier work we have proposed that protein activation is electromagnetic in its nature. This prediction is based on the resonant recognition model (RRM) where proteins are analyzed using digital signal processing (DSP) methods applied to the distribution of free electron energies along the protein sequence. This postulate is investigated here by applying the electromagnetic radiation to example of L-lactate dehydrogenase protein and its biological activity is measured before and after the exposures. The concepts presented would lead to the new insights into proteins susceptibility to perturbation by exposure to electromagnetic fields and possibility to program, predict, design and modify proteins and their bioactivity
Measuring literary experience: Comment on Jacobs (2016)

Jacobs (2016) raises a number of insightful and provocative points about the study of literary experience, including the importance of development, the promise of process models, and the role of quantitative methods. In the present comment, we first elaborate on one aspect of the literary experience that seems to be neglected by his introductory comments, namely, that that experience is not limited to the act of reading but can easily extend to long after the reading is completed. Based on this insight, we then offer an analysis of the types of measurements that might be used in the empirical study of literary processing. While this analysis is not necessarily incompatible with Jacob’s discussion, we believe that it offers several new insights that are not readily apparent.
Using virtual menus in a virtual environment

Virtual environment interfaces to computer programs in several diverse application areas are currently being developed. The users of virtual environments will require many different methods to interact with the environments and the objects in them. This paper reports on our use of virtual menus as a method of interacting with virtual environments. Several aspects of virtual environments make menu interactions different from interactions with conventional menus. We review the relevant aspects of conventional menus and virtual environments, in order to provide a frame of reference for the design of virtual menus. We discuss the features and interaction methodologies of two different versions of virtual menus which have been developed and used in our lab. We also examine the problems associated with our original version, and the enhancements incorporated into our current version.
Robust calibration of financial models using Bayesian estimators

We consider a general calibration problem for derivative pricing models, which we reformulate into a Bayesian framework to attain posterior distributions for model parameters. It is then shown how the posterior distribution can be used to estimate prices for exotic options. We apply the procedure to a discrete local volatility model and work in great detail through numerical examples to clarify the construction of Bayesian estimators and their robustness to the model specification, number of calibration products, noisy data and misspecification of the prior.
RapidFlow: An Experimental Testbed for Information Flows with Network Coding

Network coding refers to the capability of coding incoming information flows before transmitting to other nodes in the network, beyond the traditional capabilities of message forwarding and replication on a network node. It has been envisioned that network coding is best applied to overlay networks, in which network nodes are computers at the edge of the Internet and are sufficiently capable and flexible to perform coding operations. There exist a wide range of theoretical studies on the benefits of network coding, especially with respect to throughput improvements in the multicast case. However, there has been very little published work on the empirical analysis regarding the benefits and drawbacks of network coding in realistic overlay networks. Towards this objective, we have designed and implemented RapidFlow, a complete and easy-to-use experimental testbed for studying information flows with network coding. In RapidFlow, each node is equipped with a high-performance overlay message switch and a randomized network coding mechanism. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of RapidFlow in an emulated overlay network running on a cluster of work-stations, as well as our initial experimental observations with respect to the performance of coded information flows