Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Galectin-1 Impairs the Generation of Anti-Parasitic Th1 Cell Responses in the Liver during Experimental Visceral Leishmaniasis

Many infectious diseases are characterized by the development of immunoregulatory pathways that contribute to pathogen persistence and associated disease symptoms. In diseases caused by intracellular parasites, such as visceral leishmaniasis (VL), various immune modulators have the capacity to negatively impact protective CD4+ T cell functions. Galectin-1 is widely expressed on immune cells and has previously been shown to suppress inflammatory responses and promote the development of CD4+ T cells with immunoregulatory characteristics. Here, we investigated the role of galectin-1 in experimental VL caused by infection of C57BL/6 mice with Leishmania donovani. Mice lacking galectin-1 expression exhibited enhanced tissue-specific control of parasite growth in the liver, associated with an augmented Th1 cell response. However, unlike reports in other experimental models, we found little role for galectin-1 in the generation of IL-10-producing Th1 (Tr1) cells, and instead report that galectin-1 suppressed hepatic Th1 cell development. Furthermore, we found relatively early effects of galectin-1 deficiency on parasite growth, suggesting involvement of innate immune cells. However, experiments investigating the impact of galectin-1 deficiency on dendritic cells indicated that they were not responsible for the phenotypes observed in galectin-1-deficient mice. Instead, studies examining galectin-1 expression by CD4+ T cells supported a T cell intrinsic role for galectin-1 in the suppression of hepatic Th1 cell development during experimental VL. Together, our findings provide new information on the roles of galectin-1 during parasitic infection and indicate an important role for this molecule in tissue-specific Th1 cell development, but not CD4+ T cell IL-10 production.
A constant-factor approximation for wireless capacity maximization with power control in the SINR model

In modern wireless networks devices are able to set the power for each transmission carried out. Experimental but also theoretical results indicate that such power control can improve the network capacity significantly. We study this problem in the physical interference model using SINR constraints. In the SINR capacity maximization problem, we are given n pairs of senders and receivers, located in a metric space (usually a so-called fading metric). The algorithm shall select a subset of these pairs and choose a power level for each of them with the objective of maximizing the number of simultaneous communications. This is, the selected pairs have to satisfy the SINR constraints with respect to the chosen powers. We present the first algorithm achieving a constant-factor approximation in fading metrics. The best previous results depend on further network parameters such as the ratio of the maximum and the minimum distance between a sender and its receiver. Expressed only in terms of n, they are (trivial) Ω(n) approximations. Our algorithm still achieves an O(log n) approximation if we only assume to have a general metric space rather than a fading metric. Furthermore, existing approaches work well together with the algorithm allowing it to be used in singlehop and multi-hop scheduling scenarios. Here, we also get polylog n approximations.
Glucose Mediated Regulation of Beta Cell Proliferation

The pancreatic beta cell, as the sole source of circulating insulin, is indispensible for normal glucose metabolism. All forms of diabetes are characterized by insufficient insulin to meet metabolic needs, and inadequate beta cell mass is present in most forms of diabetes. Beta cell regenerative therapies provide one potential avenue for the prevention or cure of diabetes. Study of the pathways and mechanisms involved in endogenous beta cell proliferation can provide important clues to how regeneration occurs. Glucose is one important regulator of beta cell replication. Here we review the published literature investigating the effect of glucose on beta cell proliferation, and then describe the data supporting various known mechanisms of action. First, in vitro studies on fetal and adult beta cells from rodents and humans are reviewed. Next, we review evidence that circulating blood glucose regulates beta cell proliferation in living animals. These studies encompass a variety of in vivo models, including dietary manipulation, partial pancreatectomy, intravenous infusion of glucose, islet transplantation, and studies on diabetic hyperglycemia. Finally, mechanistic studies, both in vitro and in vivo, point to several different mitogenic pathways activated by glucose. Especially prominent are insulin signaling pathway members, glucose metabolism, and glucose impact on signaling by other growth factors. Multiple unanswered questions remain, and are highlighted throughout. With today's technologies we can now address questions first raised in the early 1900s, and hopefully develop new approaches to assuage the devastation of clinical diabetes.
Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History

What is "sensory history," why is it important, and what are some of the promises and pitfalls of the "habit" of inquiry? This article addresses these issues in an effort to initiate sustained dialogue among historians on how to investigate the history of the sensate, how to present it, and how to go beyond current conventions.
New Insight into Immunity and Immunopathology of Rickettsial Diseases

Human rickettsial diseases comprise a variety of clinical entities caused by microorganisms belonging to the genera Rickettsia, Orientia, Ehrlichia, and Anaplasma. These microorganisms are characterized by a strictly intracellular location which has, for long, impaired their detailed study. In this paper, the critical steps taken by these microorganisms to play their pathogenic roles are discussed in detail on the basis of recent advances in our understanding of molecular Rickettsia-host interactions, preferential target cells, virulence mechanisms, three-dimensional structures of bacteria effector proteins, upstream signalling pathways and signal transduction systems, and modulation of gene expression. The roles of innate and adaptive immune responses are discussed, and potential new targets for therapies to block host-pathogen interactions and pathogen virulence mechanisms are considered.
Experience with Using the Sensewear BMS Sensor System in the Context of a Health and Wellbeing Application

An assessment of a sensor designed for monitoring energy expenditure, activity, and sleep was conducted in the context of a research project which develops a weight management application. The overall goal of this project is to affect sustainable behavioural change with respect to diet and exercise in order to improve health and wellbeing. This paper reports results of a pretrial in which three volunteers wore the sensor for a total of 11 days. The aim was to gain experience with the sensor and determine if it would be suitable for incorporation into the ICT system developed by the project to be trialled later on a larger population. In this paper we focus mainly on activity monitoring and user experience. Data and results including visualizations and reports are presented and discussed. User experience proved positive in most respects. Exercise levels and sleep patterns correspond to user logs relating to exercise sessions and sleep patterns. Issues raised relate to accuracy, one source of possible interference, the desirability of enhancing the system with real-time data transmission, and analysis to enable real-time feedback. It is argued that automatic activity classification is needed to properly analyse and interpret physical activity data captured by accelerometry.
On the Nature of Supreme Court Decision Making

How does the U.S. Supreme Court reach decisions? Since the 1940s, scholars have focused on two distinct explanations. The legal model suggests that the rule of law (stare decisis) is the key determinant. The extralegal model posits that an array of sociological, psychological, and political factors produce judicial outcomes. To determine which model better accounted for judicial decisions, we used Supreme Court cases involving the imposition of the death penalty since 1972 and estimated and evaluated the models' success in accounting for decisional outcomes. Although both models performed quite satisfactorily, they possessed disturbing weaknesses. The legal perspective overpredicted liberal outcomes, the extralegal model conservative ones. Given these results, we tested another proposition, namely that extralegal and legal frameworks present codependent, not mutually exclusive, explanations of decision making. Based on these results, we offer an integrated model of Supreme Court decision making that contemplates a range of political and environmental forces and doctrinal constraints.
Leisure Education and Later-Life Planning: A Conceptual Framework

Older adults with intellectual disability represent a growing segment of the elderly population in developed and, to some extent, in developing nations worldwide. A considerable body of research has addressed this burgeoning demographic over the past 20 years. Although some variations appear within etiological subgroups, the biological processes of aging and related concerns (e.g., changes in health status) are similar for people independent of whether a person has an intellectual disability. The unique life experiences of individuals with intellectual disabilities, however, introduce social and environmental factors and practices that affect healthy aging and life quality, but are less well understood. As such, later-life planning is an accepted, although not always practiced, mechanism used and directed by adults without disabilities to plan for their futures in later life. Planning for this life stage among older adults with intellectual disabilities, if it is done at all, typically is a parent/family-driven process with a limited scope of focus (e.g., guardianship, financial security). Drawing on previous research in the areas of later-life planning and leisure education, the authors present a conceptual rationale for melding these two processes and propose principles and content elements that could facilitate the use of leisure education as a framework for holistically exploring later-life options and issues.
Diagnostic Clinical and Laboratory Findings in Response to Predetermining Bacterial Pathogen: Data from the Meningitis Registry

Background Childhood Meningitis continues to be an important cause of mortality in many countries. The search for rapid diagnosis of acute bacterial meningitis has lead to the further exploration of prognostic factors. This study was scheduled in an attempt to analyze various clinical symptoms as well as rapid laboratory results and provide an algorithm for the prediction of specific bacterial aetiology of childhood bacterial meningitis. Methodology and Principal Findings During the 32 year period, 2477 cases of probable bacterial meningitis (BM) were collected from the Meningitis Registry (MR). Analysis was performed on a total of 1331 confirmed bacterial meningitis cases of patients aged 1 month to 14 years. Data was analysed using EPI INFO (version 3.4.3-CDC-Atlanta) and SPSS (version 15.0 - Chicago) software. Statistically significant (p<0.05) variables were included in a conditional backward logistic regression model. A total of 838 (63.0%) attributed to Neisseria meningitidis, 252 (18.9%) to Haemophilus influenzae, 186 (14.0%) to Streptococcus pneumoniae and 55 (4.1%) due to other bacteria. For the diagnosis of Meningococcal Meningitis, the most significant group of diagnostic criteria identified included haemorrhagic rash (OR 22.36), absence of seizures (OR 2.51), headache (OR 1.83) and negative gram stain result (OR 1.55) with a Positive Predictive Value (PPV) of 96.4% (95%CI 87.7–99.6). For the diagnosis of Streptococcus pneumoniae, the most significant group of diagnostic criteria identified included absence of haemorrhagic rash (OR 13.62), positive gram stain (OR 2.10), coma (OR 3.11), seizures (OR 3.81) and peripheral WBC≥15000/µL (OR 2.19) with a PPV of 77.8% (95%CI 40.0–97.2). For the diagnosis of Haemophilus influenzae, the most significant group of diagnostic criteria included, absence of haemorrhagic rash (OR 13.61), age≥1year (OR 2.04), absence of headache (OR 3.01), CSF Glu<40 mg/dL (OR 3.62) and peripheral WBC<15000/µL (OR 1.74) with a PPV of 58.5% (95%CI 42.1–73.7). Conclusions The use of clinical and laboratory predictors for the assessment of the causative bacterial pathogen rather than just for predicting outcome of mortality seems to be a useful tool in the clinical management and specific treatment of BM. These findings should be further explored and studied.
Behavior of dairy cows in response to different barn cooling systems.

Forty-two dairy cows were subdivided in three groups of 14 cows each. Each pen of cows was provided with a feeding area, a freestall area, and an external paddock. The study was conducted in an experimental barn located in the Po Valley of Italy. The cows were observed during summer 1995 for milk yield and quality and for their behavior (movements and residence time in the different areas of each pen) under different microclimatic conditions (temperature, relative humidity, light exposure, air speed). The feeding and freestall areas were arranged with: (1) fans in the first pen; (2) fans and misting in the second pen; and 3) the third pen was used as control. During the summer months (from June to September) microclimatic conditions, milk yield, and cow position (monitored with video cameras and automatic still cameras placed in different areas of the barn) were recorded. During the hottest period, lower milk yield reductions were recorded for the cows housed in pens with fans or with fans and misting. This result was consistent with the behavior of the cows inside experimental pens that spent longer periods of resting time in the feeding and freestall areas, and showed overall behavior similar to that observed during a cooler period. Some cows also lay in the wet dirty areas of the pens or crowded in a well-ventilated place. The results of this study confirm the usefulness of cooling systems for cows in a warm climate.
Dimensions of Organizational Influence and Their Effectiveness Correlates.

December 1976, volume 21 In this study participativeness, centralization, and organizational autonomy were analyzed conceptually and operationally and subsequently related to five indicators of organizational effectiveness. The criteria of effectiveness included total production, decline in production, financial loss due to errors, morale and anxiety. The individual and joint effects of the influence variables on organizational effectiveness were very strong. Participative, decentralized, and autonomous organizations are more effective. The implications of these results are discussed.
SEARCH FOR INTERSTELLAR METHOXYACETONITRILE AND CYANOETHANOL: INSIGHTS INTO COUPLING OF CYANO- TO METHANOL AND AMMONIA CHEMISTRY

As part of an effort to study gas-grain chemical models in star-forming regions as they relate to molecules containing cyanide (–C≡N) groups, we present here a search for the molecules 2-cyanoethanol (OHCH2CH2CN) and methoxyacetonitrile (CH3OCH2CN) in the galactic center region SgrB2. These species are structural isomers of each other and are targeted to investigate the cross-coupling of pathways emanating from the photolysis products of methanol and ammonia with pathways involving cyano-containing molecules. Methanol and ammonia ices are two of the main repositories of the elements C, O, and N in cold clouds and understanding their link to cyanide chemistry could give important insights into prebiotic molecular evolution. Neither species was positively detected, but the upper limits we determined allow comparison to the general patterns gleaned from chemical models. Our results indicate the need for an expansion of the model networks to better deal with cyano-chemistry, in particular with respect to pathways including products of methanol photolysis. In addition to these results, the two main observational routes for detecting new interstellar molecules are discussed. One route is by decreasing detection limits at millimeter wavelength through spatial filtering with interferometric studies at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), and the second is by searching for intense torsional states at THz frequencies using the Herschel Space Observatory. 2-cyanoethanol and methoxyacetonitrile would both be good test beds for exploring the capabilities of ALMA and Herschel in the study of complex interstellar chemistry.
A New Role of Protein Phosphatase 2A in Adenoviral E1A Protein-Mediated Sensitization to Anticancer Drug-Induced Apoptosis in Human Breast Cancer Cells

The adenoviral type 5 E1A protein has been shown to induce sensitization to different categories of anticancer drug-induced apoptosis, partly by down-regulation of the activity of a critical oncogenic kinase Akt in both normal fibroblasts and epithelial breast cancer cells. Currently, the adenoviral E1A gene is being tested as an antitumor gene in multiple clinical trials. However, molecular mechanisms underlying E1A-mediated chemosensitization and down-regulation of Akt activity are still not completely defined. Here, we show that E1A by up-regulation of the catalytic subunit of protein phosphatase 2A [PP2A (PP2A/C)] enhanced the activity of PP2A, which results in repression of Akt activation in E1A-expressing cells. In addition, activation of PP2A/C is required for E1A-mediated sensitization to drug-induced apoptosis, because blocking PP2A/C expression using a specific small interfering RNA against PP2A/C reduced drug sensitivity in E1A-expressing cells. Deletion mutation of the conserved domain of E1A, which is required for E1A-mediated sensitization to drug-induced apoptosis, also abolished the ability of E1A to up-regulate PP2A/C. Thus, the up-regulation of PP2A may represent a novel mechanism for E1A-mediated sensitization to anticancer drug-induced apoptosis.
TruCom: Exploiting Domain-Specific Trust Networks for Multicategory Item Recommendation

Recommender systems (RSs) have become important tools for solving the problem of information overload. With the advent and popularity of online social networks, some studies on network-based recommendation have emerged, raising the concern of many researchers. Trust is one kind of important information available in social networks and is often used for performance improvement in social-network-based RSs. However, most trust-aware RSs ignore the fact that people trust different subsets of friends pertaining to different domains, such as music and movies, because people behave differently in diverse domains according to different interests. This paper proposes a novel recommendation method called TruCom. In a multicategory item recommendation domain, TruCom first generates a domain-specific trust network pertaining to each domain and then builds a unified objective function for improving recommendation accuracy by incorporating the hybrid information of direct and indirect trust into a matrix factorization recommendation model. Through relevant benchmark experiments on two real-world data sets, we show that TruCom achieves better performance than other existing recommendation methods, which demonstrates the effectiveness and reliability of TruCom.
Partnership Patterns: Addressing Emotional Needs in Early Intervention

Home visiting in early intervention is the primary model for delivering services and building partnerships with children and families. Using interviews with early interventionists and family members, this study investigated the extent to which families’ and professionals’ emotional needs were met during home visits and what factors contributed to or interfered with the formation of an emotionally supportive partnership. The findings were that the types of emotional needs experienced to one degree or another by both families and professionals included a need to have hope for the child, a sense of urgency to provide interventions, a feeling of being challenged by multiple issues, and a sense of overload. Second, the authors found that the quality of the partnership was dependent on the degree to which there was a match or mismatch in emotional needs between the family and the professional. The data highlight the need to address the emotional needs of both families and early interventionists to build a supportive family-centered partnership. Discussion focuses on the practice and research issues of these findings.
Genome-Wide Analysis of Immune Activation in Human T and B Cells Reveals Distinct Classes of Alternatively Spliced Genes

Alternative splicing of pre-mRNA is a mechanism that increases the protein diversity of a single gene by differential exon inclusion/exclusion during post-transcriptional processing. While alternative splicing is established to occur during lymphocyte activation, little is known about the role it plays during the immune response. Our study is among the first reports of a systematic genome-wide analysis of activated human T and B lymphocytes using whole exon DNA microarrays integrating alternative splicing and differential gene expression. Purified human CD2+ T or CD19+ B cells were activated using protocols to model the early events in post-transplant allograft immunity and sampled as a function of time during the process of immune activation. Here we show that 3 distinct classes of alternatively spliced and/or differentially expressed genes change in an ordered manner as a function of immune activation. We mapped our results to function-based canonical pathways and demonstrated that some are populated by only one class of genes, like integrin signaling, while other pathways, such as purine metabolism and T cell receptor signaling, are populated by all three classes of genes. Our studies augment the current view of T and B cell activation in immunity that has been based exclusively upon differential gene expression by providing evidence for a large number of molecular networks populated as a function of time and activation by alternatively spliced genes, many of which are constitutively expressed.