Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oxidative stress in hypertension: role of the kidney.

SIGNIFICANCE Renal oxidative stress can be a cause, a consequence, or more often a potentiating factor for hypertension. Increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the kidney have been reported in multiple models of hypertension and related to renal vasoconstriction and alterations of renal function. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidase is the central source of ROS in the hypertensive kidney, but a defective antioxidant system also can contribute. RECENT ADVANCES Superoxide has been identified as the principal ROS implicated for vascular and tubular dysfunction, but hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) has been implicated in diminishing preglomerular vascular reactivity, and promoting medullary blood flow and pressure natriuresis in hypertensive animals. CRITICAL ISSUES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS Increased renal ROS have been implicated in renal vasoconstriction, renin release, activation of renal afferent nerves, augmented contraction, and myogenic responses of afferent arterioles, enhanced tubuloglomerular feedback, dysfunction of glomerular cells, and proteinuria. Inhibition of ROS with antioxidants, superoxide dismutase mimetics, or blockers of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system or genetic deletion of one of the components of the signaling cascade often attenuates or delays the onset of hypertension and preserves the renal structure and function. Novel approaches are required to dampen the renal oxidative stress pathways to reduced O2(-•) rather than H2O2 selectivity and/or to enhance the endogenous antioxidant pathways to susceptible subjects to prevent the development and renal-damaging effects of hypertension.
Impact of stone density on outcomes in percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL): an analysis of the clinical research office of the endourological society (CROES) pcnl global study database

Abstract Objective. This study aimed to explore the relationship between stone density and outcomes of percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL) using the Clinical Research Office of the Endourological Society (CROES) PCNL Global Study database. Material and methods. Patients undergoing PCNL treatment were assigned to a low stone density [LSD, ≤ 1000 Hounsfield units (HU)] or high stone density (HSD, > 1000 HU) group based on the radiological density of the primary renal stone. Preoperative characteristics and outcomes were compared in the two groups. Results. Retreatment for residual stones was more frequent in the LSD group. The overall stone-free rate achieved was higher in the HSD group (79.3% vs 74.8%, p = 0.113). By univariate regression analysis, the probability of achieving a stone-free outcome peaked at approximately 1250 HU. Below or above this density resulted in lower treatment success, particularly at very low HU values. With increasing radiological stone density, operating time decreased to a minimum at approximately 1000 HU, then increased with further increase in stone density. Multivariate non-linear regression analysis showed a similar relationship between the probability of a stone-free outcome and stone density. Higher treatment success rates were found with low stone burden, pelvic stone location and use of pneumatic lithotripsy. Conclusions. Very low and high stone densities are associated with lower rates of treatment success and longer operating time in PCNL. Preoperative assessment of stone density may help in the selection of treatment modality for patients with renal stones.
An International Comparison

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K+ deficiency caused defects in renal tubular cell proliferation, oxidative stress response, tissue repair and tight junction integrity, but enhanced energy production, proteasome function and cellular K+ uptake

ABSTRACT Hypokalemia is a common electrolyte disorder in hospitalized patients and those with chronic diseases and is associated with renal tubular injury. Our recent expression proteomics study revealed changes in levels of several proteins in renal tubular cells during K+ deficiency. However, functional significance and mechanisms underlying such changes remained unclear. The present study, thus, aimed to investigate functional changes of renal tubular cells induced by K+ deficiency. MDCK cells were maintained in normal-K+ (ANK; [K+] = 5.0 mM), Low-K+ (ALK; [K+] = 2.5 mM), or K+-depleted (AKD; [K+] = 0 mM) medium. Cell count and cell death assay showed that ALK and AKD groups had marked decrease in cell proliferation without significant change in cell death. Other functional investigations revealed that AKD cells had significantly increased levels of carbonylated proteins (by OxyBlot assay), impaired tissue repair (by scratch assay), defective tight junction (by Western blotting, immunofluorescence staining and measuring transepithelial electrical resistance), increased intracellular ATP level (by ATP measurement), decreased levels of ubiquitinated proteins (by Western blotting), and increased level of Na+/K+-ATPase (by Western blotting), which was consistent with the increased cellular K+ uptake after K+ repletion. Our findings have shown that AKD caused defects in cell proliferation, oxidative stress response, tissue repair and tight junction integrity, but on the other hand, enhanced energy production, proteasome function and cellular K+ uptake. These findings may shed light onto cellular response to K+ deficiency and better understanding of both pathogenic and compensatory mechanisms in hypokalemic nephropathy.
Earnings Returns to Different Educational Careers: The Relative Importance of Type vs. Field of Education

The two choices that students in many Western European countries must make during their educational career are the type of education (vocational vs. academic) and the subject area (the specific field of education). However, most studies on the effect of education on earnings consider only one of these two factors. In addition, most of these studies focus exclusively on average returns and neglect the variance of the returns, thus overlooking important aspects of the nature of the returns to education such as the risk in human capital investments. In this study, we consider both factors type of education and subject area at the same time to estimate earning returns and to examine how much these two factors contribute to the variance of earnings in later careers. We use the Swiss Adult Education Survey from 2011 and construct a sample of individuals with tertiary level educational degree, estimating earnings regressions and decomposing the variance in earnings for type of education and subject area. Decomposition results show that field of education, relative to subject area, explains double the variation in earnings. Given our findings that earnings relate more to subject area than to type of education, the question of which type of education—academic or vocational—an individual chooses is less relevant than the question of which field he or she chooses to specialize in.
Data encryption performance based on Blowfish

Some of the important parameters of the blowfish encryption algorithm are being analyzed and examined to see how these parameters may affect the performance of the algorithm. The performance indices here are the security and speed of the algorithm. This study is applied to different types of data; text, sound and image. For each case the encryption/decryption key length has been changed and its effect on the performance was noticed. Moreover, the file size is changed and its affect on the performance of the algorithm was noticed. This has shown that changing the key length has no effect on the encryption or decryption time whereas changing the plaintext file size is directly reflected on the processing time. The results obtained here have been converted into modules of equations of high orders thus the future performance of the algorithm may be predicted from these equations
Transcatheter embolization in management of hemorrhage from duodenal ulcer: long-term results and complications.

Effectiveness of transcatheter embolization for treatment of bleeding duodenal ulcers was evaluated in 57 patients followed up for at least 5 years. Terminal muscular branch vessel embolization was effective for initial control of bleeding in 27 of 28 cases, and gastroduodenal artery embolization was effective in 25 of 29 (P = .371). Terminal vessel embolization was more effective in attaining long-term control of bleeding (15 of 28 patients) than was gastroduodenal artery embolization (eight of 29) (P = .084). Occlusion of terminal vessels with 6-cyanoacrylate resulted in long-term control of bleeding in nine of 10 patients. With selective embolization of terminal vessels, late complications of duodenal stenosis occurred in seven of 28 patients; when occlusion was at the level of the gastroduodenal artery (P = .131), this developed in only two of 29. Occlusion of the proximal gastroduodenal artery by means of epsilon-aminocaproic acid-induced autologous clot was the most innocuous technique. Retrograde perfusion via the superior mesenteric and inferior pancreaticoduodenal artery (though at a reduced flow rate and pressure gradient) and reconstitution of flow after clot lysis are the theoretical advantages of this technique.
And who gets the job? Narratives, dialogical perspectives and practices on implementing positive discrimination in financial institutions

The high unemployment rate amongst nationals in United Arab Emirates (UAE) has generated the development of the 'Emiratisation policy', a drive to nationalise the UAE workforce. This quota-based mandate is considered a ‘positive discrimination' policy since ethnicity markers are applied. The process of 'Emiratization' has generated a heated public debate as organisations attempt to develop best practices across industries. This research explores the process of implementing Emiratization in two financial organizations in the UAE. The extant literature on implementing positive discrimination policies is however very limited, with an individualistic, quantitative and experimental focus. When a more social and organizational approach has been taken, it has been to look into stereotyping and similarity-attraction paradigms to explain work-related outcomes. Such research takes the policy as a given, concerned with its output and rarely considers the process through which the policy is understood, co-constructed and implemented over time and its impact on working practices. A more practice-based perspective is therefore required to explore the working practices and the practical and ‘hidden’ knowledge that supports them to better understand policy implementation processes. This research aims to address this gap by exploring the common practical (mis)understandings on Emiratisation developed over time among different stakeholders -employees of two financial organizations in the UAE as well as public actors- and their impact on the ‘mediated array of human activity centrally organised around [them]’ (Schatzki, 2001:2). The research was designed as a longitudinal qualitative study conducted over a period of three years. The data corpus consists of 54 in-depth interviews, more than 30 hours of observations, 2 Emiratisation conferences, 4 consultancy reports, 6 annual reports and online resources. The thematic, narrative and dialogical analysis of the data corpus illustrates the ongoing interaction between public narratives, intersubjective (mis)understandings between national and non-national employees and organizational working practices when implementing the policy. In public narratives, Emiratisation is portrayed both as an employment opportunity as well as a strategy to replace expatriates. This tension and the (mis) understandings it generates is reproduced at organisational and intersubjective levels and informs the development of distinct working practices in both organizations. The study provides new insights into the process of implementing positive discrimination policies in organizations through the practice lens, highlighting the emergent nature of policy implementation, grounding it in everyday knowledge and action. It also offers a rare opportunity to capture in situ how Emiratisation ‘becomes’ a practice.
Impaired therapeutic vasculogenesis by transplantation of OxLDL-treated endothelial progenitor cells Published, JLR Papers in Press, December 24, 2006.

Previous in vitro studies have revealed that oxidized low density lipoprotein (OxLDL) has negative effects on the proliferation and activity of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs). Here, we evaluated the effect of OxLDL on the therapeutic potential of EPCs in ischemia-induced neovascularization. EPCs derived from mobilized human peripheral blood mononuclear cells were cultured without or with OxLDL before transplantation. Hindlimb ischemia models were surgically induced in athymic nude mice, which then received an intracardiac injection of 3 × 105 EPCs. By laser Doppler perfusion image and ischemia damage score, we found that blood perfusion and ischemia damage were less well recovered in the OxLDL-treated EPC transplantation group than in controls. Histological examination showed fewer transplanted EPCs and lower capillary density in ischemic tissue. Local delivery of Stromal cell-derived factor (SDF-1) restored this defect and improved blood perfusion by recruiting OxLDL-treated EPCs to the ischemic area and increasing host capillary density. These results provide for the first time direct evidence that OxLDL impaired the therapeutic potential of EPCs in ischemia-induced neovascularization through an inhibitory effect on the migration, adhesion, and incorporation of EPCs into vasculature and/or entrapment in the perivascular region in vivo. A therapeutic strategy based on SDF-1 administration ameliorated such defects and improved postischemic neovascularization.
Using Consensus-Shape Clustering To Identify Promiscuous Ligands and Protein Targets and To Choose the Right Query for Shape-Based Virtual Screening

Ligand-based shape matching approaches have become established as important and popular virtual screening (VS) techniques. However, despite their relative success, many authors have discussed how best to choose the initial query compounds and which of their conformations should be used. Furthermore, it is increasingly the case that pharmaceutical companies have multiple ligands for a given target and these may bind in different ways to the same pocket. Conversely, a given ligand can sometimes bind to multiple targets, and this is clearly of great importance when considering drug side-effects. We recently introduced the notion of spherical harmonic-based "consensus shapes" to help deal with these questions. Here, we apply a consensus shape clustering approach to the 40 protein-ligand targets in the DUD data set using PARASURF/PARAFIT. Results from clustering show that in some cases the ligands for a given target are split into two subgroups which could suggest they bind to different subsites of the same target. In other cases, our clustering approach sometimes groups together ligands from different targets, and this suggests that those ligands could bind to the same targets. Hence spherical harmonic-based clustering can rapidly give cross-docking information while avoiding the expense of performing all-against-all docking calculations. We also report on the effect of the query conformation on the performance of shape-based screening of the DUD data set and the potential gain in screening performance by using consensus shapes calculated in different ways. We provide details of our analysis of shape-based screening using both PARASURF/PARAFIT and ROCS, and we compare the results obtained with shape-based and conventional docking approaches using MSSH/SHEF and GOLD. The utility of each type of query is analyzed using commonly reported statistics such as enrichment factors (EF) and receiver-operator-characteristic (ROC) plots as well as other early performance metrics.
SENHANCE: A Semantic Web framework for integrating social and hardware sensors in e-Health

Self-reported data are very important in Healthcare, especially when combined with data from sensors. Social Networking Sites, such as Facebook, are a promising source of not only self-reported data but also social data, which are otherwise difficult to obtain. Due to their unstructured nature, providing information that is meaningful to health professionals from this source is a daunting task. To this end, we employ Social Network Applications as Social Sensors that gather structured data and use Semantic Web technologies to fuse them with hardware sensor data, effectively integrating both sources. We show that this combination of social and hardware sensor observations creates a novel space that can be used for a variety of feature-rich e-Health applications. We present the design of our prototype framework, SENHANCE, and our findings from its pilot application in the NutriHeAl project, where a Facebook app is integrated with Fitbit digital pedometers for Lifestyle monitoring.
Strategic behavior in financial markets

Title of dissertation: STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR IN FINANCIAL MARKETS Alvaro Pedraza, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor John Shea Professor Albert Kyle This dissertation explores the role of strategic behavior in financial markets and highlights the effects of such behavior on portfolio choice, trading behavior and asset prices. In Chapter 1 I study portfolio choice of strategic fund managers in the presence of a peer-based underperformance penalty. While the penalty generates herding behavior, correlated trading among managers is exacerbated when a strategic setting is considered. The equilibrium portfolios are driven by the least restricted manager, who may vary according to the realization of returns. I compare model predictions to evidence from the Colombian pension fund management industry, where six asset managers are in charge of portfolio allocation for the mandatory contributions of the working population. These managers are subject to a peer based underperformance penalty, known as the Minimum Return Guarantee (MRG). I study trading behavior by managers before and after a change in the strictness of the MRG in June 2007. The evidence suggests that a tighter MRG results in more trading in the direction of peers, a behavior that is more pronounced for underperforming managers. I show that these findings are consistent with the qualitative and quantitative predictions of the theoretical model. In Chapter 2 I explore the limits to the allocational role of stock prices in a strategic setting. Stock prices are thought to help firms’ managers make more efficient real investment decisions, because they aggregate information about fundamentals that is not otherwise known to managers. In this chapter I identify a limitation to this view. I show that if informed traders internalize that firms use prices as signal, stock price informativeness depends on the quality of managers’ prior information. In particular, managers with low quality information would like to learn about their own fundamental by relying on the information aggregated in the stock price. However, in this case, the profitability of trading falls for informed speculators, who therefore reduce their trading volume, reducing the informativeness of prices. As a result, stock prices are not as useful to guide capital towards the most productive use, leading to inefficient investment decisions. Using a sample of U.S. publicly traded companies between 1990-2010, I document a positive correlation between the quality of managerial information and stock price informativeness. Contrary to the conventional view that less informed managers should rely more on stock prices when making investment decisions, I find no differences in the sensitivity of investment to stock price for different levels of managerial information. The evidence suggests that while firms do learn from prices, the learning channel and its effects on real investment are limited. STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR IN FINANCIAL MARKETS
CaMKIIα 3′ Untranslated Region-Directed mRNA Translocation in Living Neurons: Visualization by GFP Linkage

The CaMKIIα mRNA extends into distal hippocampal dendrites, and the 3′ untranslated region (3′UTR) is sufficient to mediate this localization. We labeled the 3′UTR of the CaMKIIα mRNA in hippocampal cultures by using a green fluorescent protein (GFP)/MS2 bacteriophage tagging system. The CaMKIIα 3′UTR formed discrete granules throughout the dendrites of transfected cells. The identity of the fluorescent granules was verified by in situ hybridization. Over 30 min time periods these granules redistributed without a net increase in granule number; with depolarization there is a tendency toward increased numbers of granules in the dendrites. These observations suggest that finer time resolution of granule motility might reveal changes in the motility characteristics of granules after depolarization. So that motile granules could be tracked, shorter periods of observation were required. The movements of motile granules can be categorized as oscillatory, unidirectional anterograde, or unidirectional retrograde. Colocalization of CaMKIIα 3′UTR granules and synapses suggested that oscillatory movements allowed the granules to sample several local synapses. Neuronal depolarization increased the number of granules in the anterograde motile pool. Based on the time frame over which the granule number increased, the translocation of granules may serve to prepare the dendrite for mounting an adequate local translation response to future stimuli. Although the resident pool of granules can respond to signals that induce local translation, the number of granules in a dendrite might reflect its activation history.
Relationship of health and demographic characteristics to Mini-Mental State Examination score among community residents

Synopsis Mini-Mental State findings from an age 60+ random community sample (N = 1681) indicate that score is related to education, age and race (but not sex) and to functional status, but not to selected aspects of physical or mental health. Adjustment for demographic characteristics, particularly education, is recommended lest cognitive impairment be overestimated.
The September Swoon

Anomalous evidence of seasonality in stock market returns presents a serious challenge to the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Previous studies often explain anomalous monthly returns as being caused by various institutional considerations, like tax-loss selling or empirical problems tied to making inferences about market efficiency based solely on historical data — the “data snooping” problem. This paper analyzes an anomalous pattern of negative stock-market returns during the month of September. The “September Swoon” cannot be easily dismissed as a reflection of institutional consideration, time period considerations, nor differences in return measurement criteria. As such, it presents a challenge to the EMH.