Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overexpression of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Protects Large Retinal Ganglion Cells After Optic Nerve Crush in Mice

Abstract Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a neurotrophin essential for neuron survival and function, plays an important role in neuroprotection during neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, we examined whether a modest increase of retinal BDNF promotes retinal ganglion cell (RGC) survival after acute injury of the optic nerve in mice. We adopted an inducible Cre-recombinase transgenic system to up-regulate BDNF in the mouse retina and then examined RGC survival after optic nerve crush by in vivo imaging. We focused on one subtype of RGC with large soma expressing yellow fluorescent protein transgene that accounts for ∼11% of the total SMI-32–positive RGCs. The median survival time of this subgroup of SMI-32 cells was 1 week after nerve injury in control mice but 2 weeks when BDNF was up-regulated. Interestingly, we found that the survival time for RGCs taken as a whole was 2 weeks, suggesting that these large-soma RGCs are especially vulnerable to optic nerve crush injury. We also studied changes in axon number using confocal imaging, confirming first the progressive loss reported previously for wild-type mice and demonstrating that BDNF up-regulation extended axon survival. Together, our results demonstrate that the time course of RGC loss induced by optic nerve injury is type specific and that overexpression of BDNF prolongs the survival of one subgroup of SMI-32–positive RGCs.
Recent Stem Cell Advances: Cord Blood and Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell for Cardiac Regeneration- a Review

Stem cells are primitive self renewing undifferentiated cell that can be differentiated into various types of specialized cells like nerve cell, skin cells, muscle cells, intestinal tissue, and blood cells. Stem cells live in bone marrow where they divide to make new blood cells and produces peripheral stem cells in circulation. Under proper environment and in presence of signaling molecules stem cells begin to develop into specialized tissues and organs. These unique characteristics make them very promising entities for regeneration of damaged tissue. Day by day increase in incidence of heart diseases including left ventricular dysfunction, ischemic heart disease (IHD), congestive heart failure (CHF) are the major cause of morbidity and mortality. However infracted tissue cannot regenerate into healthy tissue. Heart transplantation is only the treatment for such patient. Due to limitation of availability of donor for organ transplantation, a focus is made for alternative and effective therapy to treat such condition. In this review we have discussed the new advances in stem cells such as use of cord stem cells and iPSC technology in cardiac repair. Future approach of CB cells was found to be used in tissue repair which is specifically observed for improvement of left ventricular function and myocardial infarction. Here we have also focused on how iPSC technology is used for regeneration of cardiomyocytes and intiating neovascularization in myocardial infarction and also for study of pathophysiology of various degenerative diseases and genetic disease in research field.
Anti-TNF Treatment Response in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Is Associated with Genetic Variation in the NLRP3-Inflammasome

Objective Many patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) benefit from tumor necrosis factor-α blocking treatment (anti-TNF), but about one third do not respond. The objective of this study was to replicate and extend previously found associations between anti-TNF treatment response and genetic variation in the TNF-, NF-κB- and pattern recognition receptor signalling pathways. Methods Forty-one single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), including 34 functional, in 28 genes involved in inflammatory pathways were assessed in 538 anti-TNF naive Danish RA patients with clinical data. Multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to test associations between genotypes and treatment response at 3–6 months using the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) response criterion. American College of Rheumatology treatment response (ACR50) and relative change in 28-joint disease activity score (relDAS28) were used as secondary outcomes. Subgroup analyses were stratified according to smoking status, type of anti-TNF drug and IgM-Rheumatoid Factor (IgM-RF) status. False discovery rate (FDR) controlling was used to adjust for multiple testing. Results Statistically significant associations with EULAR response were found for two SNPs in NLRP3(rs4612666) (OR (odds ratio) for good/moderate response = 0.64 (95% confidence interval: 0.44–0.95), p = 0.025, q = 0.95) and INFG(rs2430561) (OR = 0.40 (0.21–0.76), p = 0.005, q = 0.18) and among IgM-RF positive patients for TNFRS1A(rs4149570) (0.59 (0.36–0.98), p = 0.040, q = 0.76). Current smokers who carried the NLRP3(rs4612666) variant allele were less likely to benefit from anti-TNF treatment (OR = 0.24 (0.10–0.56), p = 0.001, q = 0.04). Conclusions In a population of Danish RA patients, we confirm the NLRP3 gene as associated with EULAR anti-TNF response as previously reported. The NLRP3 variant (T) allele is associated with lower treatment response, in particular among current smokers. Furthermore, we find that a functional polymorphism in the interferon-γ gene is associated with anti-TNF response. All findings should be tested by replication in independent validation cohorts and augmented by assessing cytokine levels and activities of the relevant gene products.
Contemplating Corporate Disclosure Obligations Arising from Cybersecurity Breaches

I. INTRODUCTION II. BACKGROUND A. EMC Corporation and the RSA SecurID Token Hack B. Magnitude of the Threat to Corporations and Their Investors C. SEC Disclosure Requirements D. Senator Rockefeller's Letter E. SEC's October 2011 Disclosure Guidelines III. ANALYSIS A. Disclosure Obligations Under the Guidelines 1. Risk Factors 2. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations (MDA in fact, for some, "security" is their business. (9) Others, though not in the security business, are considered leaders in the information technology, computer networking, and Internet business fields. (10) The resulting harms of a successful attack against such firms are not limited to information losses and mitigation expenses; the attacks may undermine the very reputations of the firms. …
Boko Haram in the Nigerian press: The politics of labelling

Labels shape and define public discourse. As condensational symbols, they can serve as political tools and instruments of policy due to the media’s tendency to use labels to create meaning and knowledge about political and social reality. This study examines the politics of labelling through a case study of the representation of Boko Haram in a selection of Nigerian national newspapers. Boko Haram, a transnational terrorist organisation responsible for the death of over 20,000 Nigerians and the displacement of more than two million people, has been a major threat to the Nigerian state for almost a decade. Although it was originally perceived to be a domestic problem, its reach across national boundaries has extended its impact beyond Nigeria and it has now been recognised as an international threat. This paper explores how labels used to frame this group in the Nigerian press echo geoethno polarities embedded in Nigerian politics. The study investigates the representations of Boko Haram to evaluate how the narrative about the sect has been constructed. It reveals that the dominant voices prefer labels such as terrorists and insurgents, which reflect popular understanding of the sect. Through a content analysis of a selection of national news stories, the study argues that the nature of Nigerian politics and media ecology plays a critical role in the media framing of Boko Haram.
OBSERVATION, ANNOTATION AND ANALYSIS OF DESIGN ACTIVITIES: HOW TO FIND AN APPROPRIATE TOOL?

Recently, design researchers have been interested in observation#analysis approach to study design activities. This is how the annotation and annotation tools have been introduced into the design research. This paper describes the annotation process as an approach in design activity studies and proposes a sequential structure for the annotation process. The research objective is to characterize an ideal annotation tool, designed and adapted for design studies; in this objective, the paper presents several design researches in the context of collaborative design and user#centred design, using video annotation tools, and explains how these tools have been employed. We describe the evaluation criteria for annotation tools and provide a functional comparison with the explained tools. We had explored the existing functionalities of different software to extract a list of desired characteristics of an ideal annotation tool for the design research and studies. Such an effort can provide a guideline in video annotation for design researchers.
Utilization of DDGS by Cattle 1

Distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), the major byproduct of ethanol production, is a good protein and energy feed for cattle. The DDGS can be fed wet or dried with animal performance usually similar when fed as wet or dried products; however, some research results favored the wet products. Cattle diets can contain DDGS as replacements for portions of both concentrates and forages, although DDGS usually replaces concentrate ingredients. Most DDGS is from corn although wheat, barley, sorghum and other grains can be used for ethanol and DDGS production. The composition of DDGS from other grains often reflects the composition of that grain minus its starch that was fermented to ethanol. Distillers grains from corn is usually >30% CP, is high in ruminally undegradable protein, and is very good energy source (NEL ~2.25 Mcal/kg of DM) for lactating cows, growing, and finishing cattle. The modest fat concentration (10% of DM) and the readily digestible fiber (39% NDF) contribute to the high energy in DDGS. Distillers solubles are often blended with distillers grains to provide DDGS, but the solubles can also be fed separately as "thin stillage" or as "condensed distillers solubles". Protein and energy values are similar for distillers grains with or without solubles but the phosphorus content is elevated when solubles are included. The recommended amount of DDGS for feeding lactating dairy cows is up to 20% of total ration dry matter; higher amounts as much as 40 to 50% of ration dry matter can be successfully fed as an energy source to finishing cattle. The fiber in DDGS, which often replaces high starch feeds, does not eliminate acidosis but minimizes its problems. Innovations in processing technology and fractionation of the distillers products will likely result in additional products for future use as livestock feeds.
Modeling Time Series Similarity with Siamese Recurrent Networks

Traditional techniques for measuring similarities between time series are based on handcrafted similarity measures, whereas more recent learning-based approaches cannot exploit external supervision. We combine ideas from time-series modeling and metric learning, and study siamese recurrent networks (SRNs) that minimize a classification loss to learn a good similarity measure between time series. Specifically, our approach learns a vectorial representation for each time series in such a way that similar time series are modeled by similar representations, and dissimilar time series by dissimilar representations. Because it is a similarity prediction models, SRNs are particularly well-suited to challenging scenarios such as signature recognition, in which each person is a separate class and very few examples per class are available. We demonstrate the potential merits of SRNs in within-domain and out-of-domain classification experiments and in one-shot learning experiments on tasks such as signature, voice, and sign language recognition.
N=1? The Anomalous 2008 Election and Lessons for Reform

The 2008 election saw a burst of interest in early voting, the rate of which increased 50% since the 2006 election and has doubled since 2000. The growth in early voting combined with problems in election administration has prompted a call in some quarters for expanded early and absentee voting nationwide. In this paper, we illustrate the anomalous nature of the 2008 election, at least insofar as early voting is concerned. The demographic and political proCile of the 2008 early voter deviates from the trajectory of early voting in the past few election cycles. Most notably, the number of African Americans who voted early increased enormously, particularly in the Southeast, a change most commonly attributed to the presence of Barack Obama on the ticket. We consider how likely it is that these voters will continue to opt for early voting in future elections, and how seriously we should consider 2008 when contemplating election reforms.
Edmund Phelps: Macroeconomist and Social Scientist

Edmund Phelps helped change the way we think about macroeconomic theory and policy, by introducing imperfect information and costly communication into the theory, and deriving their implications for the dynamics of inflation and unemployment. ' Phelps treated macroeconomics as a social science, whose subject matter is not just the choices people make but how people interact in groups. His pioneering efforts in developing a formal theory of the coordination mechanisms governing interactions led the way to a new kind of macroeconomics, one that was based on the interplay between the actions and expectations of individual actors, instead of being based on postulated relationships between macro aggregates. Mainstream macroeconomics today projects a view of the economy that differs in important respects from Phelps's original vision. Whereas he portrayed economic interactions as being problematical and uncertain, leading to outcomes that intelligent people can adapt to but not anticipate, much of macroeconomics now is about the representative agent, content to interact with only himself and nature, or perhaps at arm's length with "the market" through an unspecified agency that calculates equilibrium prices and executes preharmonized transactions. And people are typically portrayed now as understanding completely, up to stochastic error with known distribution, all economic forces. Indeed, Phelps himself has changed his view on the significance of imperfect anticipation, having adopted a structural approach to unemployment that attaches only momentary importance to disappointed expectations as a driving force. Even so, macroeconomics today has a connection with microeconomic reasoning that it never did before Phelps and a handful of others transformed the subject, and many of the concepts that Phelps himself introduced while making these contributions in the 1960s and 1970s remain in
On Two Parameters for Denoising With Non-Local Means

Non-local means (NLM) provides a very efficient procedure to denoise digital images. We study the influence of two important parameters on this algorithm: the size of the searching window and the weight given to the central patch. We verify numerically the common knowledge that the searching zone can be advantageously limited and we propose an efficient modification of the central weight based on the Stein's unbiased risk estimate principle.
Technical Reproducibility of Genotyping SNP Arrays Used in Genome-Wide Association Studies

During the last several years, high-density genotyping SNP arrays have facilitated genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that successfully identified common genetic variants associated with a variety of phenotypes. However, each of the identified genetic variants only explains a very small fraction of the underlying genetic contribution to the studied phenotypic trait. Moreover, discordance observed in results between independent GWAS indicates the potential for Type I and II errors. High reliability of genotyping technology is needed to have confidence in using SNP data and interpreting GWAS results. Therefore, reproducibility of two widely genotyping technology platforms from Affymetrix and Illumina was assessed by analyzing four technical replicates from each of the six individuals in five laboratories. Genotype concordance of 99.40% to 99.87% within a laboratory for the sample platform, 98.59% to 99.86% across laboratories for the same platform, and 98.80% across genotyping platforms was observed. Moreover, arrays with low quality data were detected when comparing genotyping data from technical replicates, but they could not be detected according to venders’ quality control (QC) suggestions. Our results demonstrated the technical reliability of currently available genotyping platforms but also indicated the importance of incorporating some technical replicates for genotyping QC in order to improve the reliability of GWAS results. The impact of discordant genotypes on association analysis results was simulated and could explain, at least in part, the irreproducibility of some GWAS findings when the effect size (i.e. the odds ratio) and the minor allele frequencies are low.
Perceptions of Indigenous Peoples in Canada: Modern Racism, Benefit Finding, and Moral Obligations for Descendants of Residential School Survivors

Victimization of Canada's Indigenous peoples is increasingly salient, due to more consideration of the legacy of Indian Residential Schools (IRS). Four studies investigated how this might impact Canadians' moral expectations of Indigenous peoples. Unlike previous research, participants were members of the historical perpetrator group, and the effects of the historical victimization are ongoing. After the presentation of information about the IRSs, participants completed a meaning-making task, followed by a survey assessing victim moral obligations, modern racism and benefit finding. Manipulations occurred in the group for whom meaning was to be made, the discursive framing of Indigenous peoples, or the victim group considered. These manipulations were meant to test the effects of focusing on the implications of the IRS for perpetrator or victim groups, and of the varied media discourses about Indigenous peoples. Across all studies, modern racism predicted greater moral obligations for victims, and benefit finding mediated this relationship.
Lp-norm non-negative matrix factorization and its application to singing voice enhancement

Measures of sparsity are useful in many aspects of audio signal processing including speech enhancement, audio coding and singing voice enhancement, and the well-known method for these applications is non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), which decomposes a non-negative data matrix into two non-negative matrices. Although previous studies on NMF have focused on the sparsity of the two matrices, the sparsity of reconstruction errors between a data matrix and the two matrices is also important, since designing the sparsity is equivalent to assuming the nature of the errors. We propose a new NMF technique, which we called Lp-norm NMF, that minimizes the Lp norm of the reconstruction errors, and derive a computationally efficient algorithm for Lp-norm NMF according to an auxiliary function principle. This algorithm can be generalized for the factorization of a real-valued matrix into the product of two real-valued matrices. We apply the algorithm to singing voice enhancement and show that adequately selecting p improves the enhancement.
Antitumor Immunity Immunological Synapse Defects That Impair T Cells Display + Deficient CD8 - Cutting Edge: DNAX Accessory Molecule 1

DNAX accessory molecule 1 (DNAM-1) is expressed on all CD8 + T cells and promotes their activation and effector function. DNAM-1 interacts with LFA-1, a critical molecule for immunological synapse formation between T cells and APCs, and for cytotoxic killing of target cells. Mice that lack DNAM-1 display abnormal T cell responses and antitumor activity; however, the mechanism involved is unclear. In this article, we show that DNAM-1 deﬁciency results in reduced proliferation of CD8 + T cells after Ag presentation and impaired cytotoxic activity. We also demonstrate that DNAM-1–deﬁcient T cells show reduced conjugations with tumor cells and decreased recruitment of both LFA-1 and lipid rafts to the immunological synapse, which corre-lates with reduced tumor cell killing in vitro. This synapse defect may explain why DNAM-1–deﬁcient mice cannot clear tumors in vivo, and highlights the importance of DNAM-1 and the immunological synapse in T cell–mediated antitumor immunity. The Journal of Immunology , 2014, 192: 553–557. expression on CD8 + T cells is critical for efﬁcient conjugation and killing of Ag-presenting tumor cells. immunological
TEES: An Efficient Search Scheme over Encrypted Data on Mobile Cloud

Cloud storage provides a convenient, massive, and scalable storage at low cost, but data privacy is a major concern that prevents users from storing files on the cloud trustingly. One way of enhancing privacy from data owner point of view is to encrypt the files before outsourcing them onto the cloud and decrypt the files after downloading them. However, data encryption is a heavy overhead for the mobile devices, and data retrieval process incurs a complicated communication between the data user and cloud. Normally with limited bandwidth capacity and limited battery life, these issues introduce heavy overhead to computing and communication as well as a higher power consumption for mobile device users, which makes the encrypted search over mobile cloud very challenging. In this paper, we propose traffic and energy saving encrypted search (TEES), a bandwidth and energy efficient encrypted search architecture over mobile cloud. The proposed architecture offloads the computation from mobile devices to the cloud, and we further optimize the communication between the mobile clients and the cloud. It is demonstrated that the data privacy does not degrade when the performance enhancement methods are applied. Our experiments show that TEES reduces the computation time by 23 to 46 percent and save the energy consumption by 35 to 55 percent per file retrieval, meanwhile the network traffics during the file retrievals are also significantly reduced.
Optimal Macroprudential Policy for Korean Economy

Fujimoto et al. (2014) set up a model with financial frictions through search and matching between firms and banks in the loan market. They also show that optimal policy criteria in the model include terms of credit variables. In this paper, we calibrate the model of Fujimoto et al. (2014) for South Korea and investigate the simple and optimal monetary and macroprudential policy rules that include credit variables in addition to the consumption gap and inflation rate as explanatory variables. We compare the performances of a standard Taylor rule and these optimal rules. Numerical simulations show that the simple macroprudential and monetary policy rules with credit terms can induce higher welfare than the estimated Taylor rule for the Korean economy. Simultaneously, simple macro-prudential and monetary policy rules with credit terms do not always improve welfare.
High Initial HIV/AIDS-Related Mortality and -Its Predictors among Patients on Antiretroviral Therapy in the Kagera Region of Tanzania: A Five-Year Retrospective Cohort Study

We examined mortality rates and its predictors from a five years retrospective cohort data of HIV/AIDs patients attending care and treatment clinic in Biharamulo Tanzania. Cox regression analysis was used to identify predictors of mortality. Of the 546 patient records retrieved, the mean age was 37 years with median CD4 count of 156 cells. The mortality rate was 4.32/100 person years at risk with males having three times higher mortality compared to females. Starting Antiretroviral treatment with advanced disease state, body weight below 45 kegs, WHO stage 4 disease, and CD4 cells below 50 were main predictors of mortality. Promoting early voluntary counselling and testing should be given a priority to facilitate timely start of treatment.