Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activation and homologous desensitization of human endothelial cells by CD40 ligand, tumor necrosis factor, and interleukin 1

We have reported previously that activation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) through CD40, using a recombinant soluble form of trimerized CD40 ligand, leads to induction of E-selectin, vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1), and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1). Here, we compare the effects of CD40 ligand with those of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and interleukin 1 (IL-1). All three ligands induce transient increases in E-selectin (peak 4 h) and VCAM-1 (peak 8-24 h), as well as sustained increases in ICAM-1 (plateau 24 h). Quantitatively, TNF is more potent than IL-1, which is much more potent than CD40 ligand. The same hierarchy is observed for transcriptional activation of an E-selectin promoter reporter gene construct in transiently transfected HUVECs. TNF and CD40 ligand each induced activation of the transcription factors NF-kappa B, IRF-1, and ATF-2/c-Jun, measured by electrophoretic mobility shift assays, but this response appeared quantitatively similar. All three agents transiently (peak 30 min) activated Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK), which has been implicated in transcription of E-selectin through its actions on ATF-2/c-Jun. Activation of JNK again showed a hierarchy of potency (TNF > IL-1 >> CD40 ligand), although the time course of induction was similar for all three agents. After 44 h of pretreatment, TNF, IL-1, and CD40 ligand each display homologous desensitization for reinduction of surface expression of E-selectin. A similar pattern of homologous desensitization for reactivation of JNK was observed. We conclude that TNF, IL-1, and CD40 ligand all activate similar responses in ECs, and that homologous desensitization of JNK may explain the inability of individual cytokines to reinduce E-selectin expression.
Membership in Constant Time and Almost-Minimum Space

This paper deals with the problem of storing a subset of elements from the bounded universe $\mathcal{M} = \{0, \ldots, M-1\}$ so that membership queries can be performed efficiently. In particular, we introduce a data structure to represent a subset of $N$ elements of $\mathcal{M}$ in a number of bits close to the information-theoretic minimum, $B = \left\lceil \lg {M\choose N} \right\rceil$, and use the structure to answer membership queries in constant time.
Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis. ]
Emotional Workgroup Performance and Group Effectiveness Egyptian Context

This study is an exploratory study that aims to examine the impact of workgroup emotional climates on group effectiveness in Egypt. The paper contains a review of literature on the concept of workgroup emotional climate. The study findings reveal that workgroup emotional climate is correlated with group effectiveness. These findings open up new questions to be explored by future research.
METHYL JASMONATE INHIBITS ANTHOCYANIN SYNTHESIS IN SEEDLINGS OF COMMON BUCKWHEAT (FAGOPYRUM ESCULENTUM MOENCH)

Anthocyanins are one of the most widespread classes of pigments in higher plants. They are important secondary metabolites produced through the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway in various plant organs (WinkelShirley, 2001). The anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway is controlled by environmental factors (light and temperature) and internal factors: plant hormones, other secondary metabolites and nutrients (Mol et al., 1996). Light acts as an essential stimulus and as a factor modulating the intensity of the pigment by affecting the regulatory and structural genes of anthocyanin biosynthesis. Although photoinduction of anthocyanin has been extensively studied in a variety of plants, the photoreceptors responsible have not been clearly defined (Sheoran et al., 2006). Anthocyanin synthesis involves many steps, from the primary precursor (phenylalanine) to the final products – glycosides of anthocyanidines. Phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) is the first enzyme to catalyze the elimination of NH3 from L-phenylalanine to give trans-cinnamate (Hanson and Havir, 1981). Trans-cinnamate can be a precursor of other secondary plant metabolites besides anthocyanins: phenolic acids, flavonols, lignins, proanthocyanidines, stilbenes, etc. PAL activity has been reported to positively correlate with anthocyanin synthesis in grapes (Kataoka et al., 1983), strawberries (Given et al., 1988) and apples (Tan, 1979), but its role in regulating anthocyanin formation remains unclear. According to Wang et al. (2000), PAL is not the only factor regulating anthocyanin accumulation in apple fruit; they found that anthocyanin accumulation decreased when apples ripened, even though PAL activity was relatively high. Anthocyanins play an important role in attracting insects or animals for pollination and seed dispersal. They also play a role as anti-oxidants and in protecting DNA and the photosynthetic apparatus from high radiation fluxes (Gould, 2004). Other possible functions of anthocyanins, such as protecting against cold stress or providing drought resistance, are likely to be associated with activities restricted to particular classes of plants (Chalker-Scott, 1999).
100 PRISONERS AND A LIGHT BULB

We present a variety of different protocols for solving the “100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb” riddle, including explicit computations of average runtimes. This is an updated and corrected version of the original unpublished document released on December 5, 2002 at http://www.ocf. berkeley.edu/~wwu/. The protocols presented here should be attributed to many members of [wu::forums], an online forum of mathematical riddles at wuriddles.com. Our quest to optimize the 100 prisoners problem is never ending, and there are many clever algorithms that have yet to be incorporated in this article.
Speed adaptive probabilistic flooding in cooperative emergency warning

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are emerging as the preferred network design for intelligent transportation systems and are envisioned to be useful in road safety and commercial applications. A significant issue in VANETs is the design of an effective broadcast scheme which can facilitate the fast and reliable dissemination of critical safety messages to neighbouring vehicles in case of an unexpected event, such as a traffic accident. Towards this goal, we propose a novel Speed Adaptive Probabilistic Flooding algorithm (SAPF). Its decision to rebroadcast a message is based on a probability, evaluated using the speed of the vehicle. The algorithm enjoys a number of benefits relative to other approaches: it is simple to implement and does not introduce additional communication burden as it requires local information only, it does not rely on the existence of a positioning system which may not always be available and above all, mitigates the effect of the broadcast storm problem, typical when utilizing blind flooding. Our results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms blind flooding, especially in cases of heavy congestion. The SAPF algorithm achieves high reachability and unlike blind flooding, it also maintains low latency as the density of vehicles in the road network increases.
The Prevalence of at Least One-Time Substance Abuse among Kerman Pre-university Male Students

Background Substance abuse is one of the main health problems in Iran andawareness about its spread and procedure of spread in the society,particularly the susceptible society of students, is very important withregard to the population pyramid of Iran. Methods This study was performed by cross-sectional method. The sampling sizewas 610 male students in pre-university grade by a probabilistic clustersampling. Our research instrument was the WHO questionnaire. Findings The experience of smoking cigarettes was seen in 34.6% of thestudents, 51.5% used hookah, 37.7% drank alcohol, 40.7% used nonprescribedtranquilizers, 10.2% used high-dosage painkillers, 6.6% usedecstasy, 6.7% hashish, 4.9% heroin, 8.7% opium and 9.7% used Pam orchewable tobacco. The first age of experiencing smoking cigarette was 14.0, hookah 13.9,alcohol 14.6, tranquilizers 13.1, high-dosage painkillers 15.3, ecstasy17.0, hashish 16.7, heroin 16.7, opium 16.7 and using chewable tobacco15.3 years. The improper use of ecstasy pills, opium, heroin andchewable tobacco was more in governmental schools compared withnon-profit school centers. There was a relationship between the low educational level of the fatherand consuming alcohol, strong intoxicants, heroin, opium, pam andexcessive use of cigarettes. On the other hand, there was a relationship between the low educationallevel of the mother with using cigarettes, hookah, alcohol, tranquilizers,strong painkillers, ecstasy, heroin, opium, pam and excessive usage of cigarettes. Conclusion According to this study, in spite of the fact that drug abuse is at awarning rate, the tendency toward hookah, tranquilizers and alcohol is noticeable.
Retinal Microaneurysms Detection Using Gradient Vector Analysis and Class Imbalance Classification

Retinal microaneurysms (MAs) are the earliest clinically observable lesions of diabetic retinopathy. Reliable automated MAs detection is thus critical for early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy. This paper proposes a novel method for the automated MAs detection in color fundus images based on gradient vector analysis and class imbalance classification, which is composed of two stages, i.e. candidate MAs extraction and classification. In the first stage, a candidate MAs extraction algorithm is devised by analyzing the gradient field of the image, in which a multi-scale log condition number map is computed based on the gradient vectors for vessel removal, and then the candidate MAs are localized according to the second order directional derivatives computed in different directions. Due to the complexity of fundus image, besides a small number of true MAs, there are also a large amount of non-MAs in the extracted candidates. Classifying the true MAs and the non-MAs is an extremely class imbalanced classification problem. Therefore, in the second stage, several types of features including geometry, contrast, intensity, edge, texture, region descriptors and other features are extracted from the candidate MAs and a class imbalance classifier, i.e., RUSBoost, is trained for the MAs classification. With the Retinopathy Online Challenge (ROC) criterion, the proposed method achieves an average sensitivity of 0.433 at 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4 and 8 false positives per image on the ROC database, which is comparable with the state-of-the-art approaches, and 0.321 on the DiaRetDB1 V2.1 database, which outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.
HLDB: location-based services in databases

This paper introduces HLDB, the first practical system that can answer exact spatial queries on continental road networks entirely within a database. HLDB is based on hub labels (HL), the fastest point-to-point algorithm for road networks, and its queries are implemented (quite naturally) in standard SQL. Within the database, HLDB answers exact distance queries and retrieves full shortest-path descriptions in real time, even on networks with tens of millions of vertices. The basic algorithm can be extended in a natural way (still in SQL) to answer much more sophisticated queries, such as finding the ten closest fast-food restaurants. We also introduce efficient new HL-based algorithms for even harder problems, such as best via point, ride sharing, and point of interest prediction. The HLDB framework makes it easy to implement these algorithms in SQL, enabling interactive applications on continental road networks.
Regional Colonic Transit Pattern Does Not Conclusively Identify Evacuation Disorders in Constipated Patients with Delayed Colonic Transit

Background/Aims After exclusion of structural diseases, chronic constipation may be associated with normal or slow transit or rectal evacuation disorders. We evaluated: (1) clinical features and anorectal function, (2) difference of regional colonic transit according to the presence or absence of evacuation disorders, and (3) association of colonic transit with gender in patients with objectively slow colonic transit. Methods We reviewed electronic medical records of 1553 patients with constipation seen by one gastroenterologist from 1994–2015 at a tertiary medical center. We identified patients with slow colonic transit using scintigraphy. Evacuation disorders were identified on clinical examination or anorectal manometry. Colonic compliance and tone were measured in 29 patients. Statistical analysis was by the Mann-Whitney rank sum test. Results Of the 207 patients (155 females, mean age 41.3 ± 15.3 [SD] years), 113 had evacuation disorders (ED+ve) and 94 did not (ED−ve). There were no significant differences in colonic transit or gastric emptying between ED+ve or ED−ve; similarly, colonic compliance, tone and responses to neostigmine were not different in ED+ve and ED−ve. Conversely, there were significant differences by gender in patients with slow colonic transit: colonic transit, small bowel transit, and gastric emptying (all P < 0.005). Conclusions Delayed colonic transit does not exclude evacuation disorders in chronic constipation. In chronic constipation and objectively slow colonic transit, females had slower gastric, small bowel, and colonic transit than males.
Assessment of genetic susceptibility to ethanol intoxication in mice

Increased use of gene manipulation in mice (e.g., targeted or random mutagenesis) has been accompanied by increased reliance on a very few rapid and simple behavioral assays, each of which aspires to model a human behavioral domain. Yet, each assay comprises multiple traits, influenced by multiple genetic factors. Motor incoordination (ataxia), a common characteristic of many neurological disorders, may reflect disordered balance, muscle strength, proprioception, and/or patterned gait. Impaired motor performance can confound interpretation of behavioral assays of learning and memory, exploration, motivation, and sensory competence. The rotarod is one of the most commonly used tests to measure coordination in mice. We show here that exactly how the rotarod test is performed can markedly alter the apparent patterns of genetic influence both in undrugged performance and sensitivity to ethanol intoxication. However, when tested with well chosen parameters, the accelerating rotarod test showed very high inter- and intralaboratory reliability. Depending on test conditions, ethanol can either disrupt or enhance performance in some strains. Genetic contribution to performance on the accelerating versus the fixed-speed rotarod assay can be completely dissociated under some test conditions, and multiple test parameters are needed to assess the range of genetic influence adequately.
Operating Mechanism and Molecular Dynamics of Pheromone-Binding Protein ASP1 as Influenced by pH

Odorant binding protein (OBP) is a vital component of the olfactory sensation system. It performs the specific role of ferrying odorant molecules to odorant receptors. OBP helps insects and types of animal to sense and transport stimuli molecules. However, the molecular details about how OBPs bind or release its odorant ligands are unclear. For some OBPs, the systems' pH level is reported to impact on the ligands' binding or unbinding capability. In this work we investigated the operating mechanism and molecular dynamics in bee antennal pheromone-binding protein ASP1 under varying pH conditions. We found that conformational flexibility is the key factor for regulating the interaction of ASP1 and its ligands, and the odorant binds to ASP1 at low pH conditions. Dynamics, once triggered by pH changes, play the key roles in coupling the global conformational changes with the odorant release. In ASP1, the C-terminus, the N-terminus, helix α2 and the region ranging from helices α4 to α5 form a cavity with a novel ‘entrance’ of binding. These are the major regions that respond to pH change and regulate the ligand release. Clearly there are processes of dynamics and hydrogen bond network propagation in ASP1 in response to pH stimuli. These findings lead to an understanding of the mechanism and dynamics of odorant-OBP interaction in OBP, and will benefit chemsensory-related biotech and agriculture research and development.
An empirical test of the DeLone-McLean model of information system success

This paper tests the model of information system success proposed by DeLone and McLean using a field study of a mandatory information system. The results show that perceived system quality and perceived information quality are significant predictors of user satisfaction with the system, but not of system use. Perceived system quality was also a significant predictor of system use. User satisfaction was found to be a strong predictor of individual impact, whereas the influence of system use on individual impact was insignificant.
Monotonicity and Concavity Properties of The Spectral Shift Function

Let $H_0$ and $V(s)$ be self-adjoint, $V,V'$ continuously differentiable in trace norm with $V''(s)\geq 0$ for $s\in (s_1,s_2)$, and denote by $\{E_{H(s)}(\lambda)\}_{\lambda\in\bbR}$ the family of spectral projections of $H(s)=H_0+V(s)$. Then we prove for given $\mu\in\bbR$, that $s\longmapsto \tr\big (V'(s)E_{H(s)}((-\infty, \mu))\big) $ is a nonincreasing function with respect to $s$, extending a result of Birman and Solomyak. Moreover, denoting by $\zeta (\mu,s)=\int_{-\infty}^\mu d\lambda \xi(\lambda,H_0,H(s))$ the integrated spectral shift function for the pair $(H_0,H(s))$, we prove concavity of $\zeta (\mu,s)$ with respect to $s$, extending previous results by Geisler, Kostrykin, and Schrader. Our proofs employ operator-valued Herglotz functions and establish the latter as an effective tool in this context.
CYP19A1 fine-mapping and Mendelian randomization: estradiol is causal for endometrial cancer

Candidate gene studies have reported CYP19A1 variants to be associated with endometrial cancer and with estradiol (E2) concentrations. We analyzed 2937 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 6608 endometrial cancer cases and 37 925 controls and report the first genome wide-significant association between endometrial cancer and a CYP19A1 SNP (rs727479 in intron 2, P=4.8×10−11). SNP rs727479 was also among those most strongly associated with circulating E2 concentrations in 2767 post-menopausal controls (P=7.4×10−8). The observed endometrial cancer odds ratio per rs727479 A-allele (1.15, CI=1.11–1.21) is compatible with that predicted by the observed effect on E2 concentrations (1.09, CI=1.03–1.21), consistent with the hypothesis that endometrial cancer risk is driven by E2. From 28 candidate-causal SNPs, 12 co-located with three putative gene-regulatory elements and their risk alleles associated with higher CYP19A1 expression in bioinformatical analyses. For both phenotypes, the associations with rs727479 were stronger among women with a higher BMI (Pinteraction=0.034 and 0.066 respectively), suggesting a biologically plausible gene-environment interaction.
The Significance of Perfusion Defect at Myocardial Perfusion MR Imaging in a Cat Model of Acute Reperfused Myocardial Infarction

Objective To determine whether the size of a perfusion defect seen at myocardial perfusion MR imaging represents the extent of irreversibly damaged myocardium in acute reperfused myocardial infarction. Materials and Methods In nine cats, reperfused myocardial infarction was induced by occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery for 90 minutes and subsequent reperfusion for 90 minutes. At single-slice myocardial perfusion MR imaging at the midventricular level using a turbo-FLASH sequence, 60 short-axis images were sequentially obtained with every heart beat after bolus injection of gadomer-17. The size of the perfusion defect was measured and compared with both the corresponding unstained area seen at triphenyl tetrazolium chloride (TTC) staining and the hyperenhanced area seen at gadophrin-2-enhanced MR imaging performed in the same cat six hours after myocardial perfusion MR imaging. Results The sizes of perfusion defects seen at gadomer-17-enhanced perfusion MR imaging, unstained areas at TTC staining, and hyperenhanced areas at gadophrin-2-enhanced MR imaging were 20.4 ± 4.3%, 29.0 ± 9.7%, and 30.7 ± 10.6% of the left ventricular myocardium, respectively. The perfusion defects seen at myocardial perfusion MR imaging were significantly smaller than the unstained areas at TTC staining and hyperenhanced areas at gadophrin-2-enhanced MR imaging (p < .01). The sizes of both the perfusion defect at myocardial perfusion MR imaging and the hyperenhanced area at gadophrin-2-enhanced MR imaging correlated well with the sizes of unstained areas at TTC staining (r = .64, p = .062 and r = .70, p = .035, respectively). Conclusion In this cat model, the perfusion defect revealed by myocardial perfusion MR imaging underestimated the true size of acute reperfused myocardial infarction. The defect may represent a more severely damaged area of infarction and probably has prognostic significance.