Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cyclophosphamide Attenuates Fibrosis in Lupus Nephritis by Regulating Mesangial Cell Cycle Progression

Objectives Most patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) develop lupus nephritis (LN) with severe kidney manifestations. Renal fibrosis can be primarily attributed to overproliferation of mesangial cells (MCs), which are subject to drug treatment. Nevertheless, the detailed mechanisms remain elusive. We sought to identify the effect of cyclophosphamide (CTX), a drug commonly used for LN treatment, on MC proliferation and explore its underlying mechanisms. Material/Methods. Cell proliferation and fibrosis in mouse kidney tissues were determined by histopathology staining techniques. Flow cytometry was used for cell cycle analysis. Cell cycle regulators were examined in vitro following treatment of immortalized human MCs with platelet-derived growth factor subunit B (PDGF-B). Quantitative real-time PCR and western blot analyses were used to measure the mRNA and protein levels of candidate cell cycle regulators, respectively. Results CTX inhibited cell overproliferation induced by platelet-derived growth factor subunit B in vitro and in vivo. CTX (40 mg/l) was sufficient to induce G0/G1 phase cell cycle arrest. CTX treatment downregulated many critical cell cycle regulators including cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases but upregulated cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors. Additionally, CTX-treated samples showed significantly reduced fibrosis, as indicated by lower expression of interleukin-1β and α-smooth muscle actin. Conclusion CTX inhibits proliferation of MCs by modulating cell cycle regulator and therefore arresting them at G1 phase. CTX treatment significantly alleviates the severity of renal fibrosis. These findings provide novel insights into the mechanisms by which CTX affects LN.
Scientific Analysis of Correlation between Natural Factors and Annual Festivals Around the Globe

Annual festivals are part of numerous cultures throughout the world. The occurrence of the festivals in a given culture varies with the type of calendar followed in that tradition. While some of the American holidays are celebrated based on the Gregorian calendar, many other traditions, including Indian traditions follow lunar calendar. Since traditions are long-lasting by definition, and are associated with cycle in the natural conditions (weather, crop, etc.), we decided to analyze several natural parameters (temperature, day length, moon light length, etc.) examine a correlation between annual festivals and natural factors. Results suggest significant correlation between selective natural parameters and annual festivals.
THREE-DIMENSIONAL NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF OPERATION PROCESS IN ROTATING DETONATION ENGINE

The aim of this work was to create an e©cient tool for transient threedimensional (3D) numerical simulation of the operation process in a Rotating DetonationEngine (RDE) with the particularemphasis to the design issues of the combustion chamber and isolators, thermal management and operation control. The governing equations are unsteady Reynolds-Averaged NavierStokes (URANS) equations coupled with a turbulence model and with the continuity and energy equations for a multicomponent reactive mixture. The algorithm used is the combinationofFiniteVolumeMethodandParticleMethodrecentlydevelopedat ICPtotreatsimultaneouslyfrontalandvolumetriccombustion. ThecapabilitiesofthenewnumericaltoolhavebeendemonstratedfortheannularcylindricalRDEoperatingonhomogeneousstoichiometrichydrogen air mixture with a detonation rotationfrequency of about 126,000rpm. The calculations revealed considerable temperature and pressure pulsations at RDE inlet and outlet; however,special design adaptations were shown to allow their reduction.
DDDT_A_335870 4665..4674

1Department of Radiation and Medical Oncology, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China; 2Hubei Key Laboratory of Tumor Biological Behaviors, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China; 3Hubei Cancer Clinical Study Center, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China Background: Anlotinib is an oral anti-angiogenesis inhibitor targeting vascular endothelial growth factor receptors (VEGFRs), platelet-derived growth factor receptors, fibroblast growth factor receptors, etc., and its clinical value in cervical cancer is rarely reported. We designed a retrospective study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of anlotinib in patients with persistent, metastatic, or recurrent cervical cancer who have failed first-line therapy, and compare the efficacy of anlotinib with that of apatinib which targets only VEGFR2 and has shown efficacy in recent studies. Methods: Fifty-two patients with persistent, metastatic, or recurrent cervical cancer who failed first-line therapy and administrated anlotinib or apatinib as monotherapy or combination with chemo-, radioor immunotherapy were included in this study. Among the 52 patients, 20 patients who received anlotinib from January 2019 to August 2020 were defined as anlotinib group, whereas 32 patients who received apatinib from our previous study were selected as apatinib group. The safety, objective response rate (ORR), disease control rate (DCR), progression-free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS) were reviewed and recorded. Results: The ORR and DCR in patients receiving anlotinib were 25% and 80%, respectively. The median PFS and OS in anlotinib group were significantly longer than those in apatinib group, respectively (PFS: 5 months vs 3 months, p=0.015; OS: 10 months vs 5 months, p=0.008). Moreover, the patients treated with anlotinib had better survival with a significantly lower cumulative incidence of cancer-related death than those treated with apatinib (HR=0.31, 95% CI: 0.13–0.77, p=0.012). The most common adverse effects in the patients treated with anlotinib were hypertension (20%), fatigue (20%), and nausea (15%). No drug-related death occurred. Conclusion: Anlotinib showed beneficial efficacy and safety and can be a treatment option for patients with persistent, metastatic, or recurrent cervical cancer who have failed the firstline therapy.
ENERGY CONSERVATION THROUGH ENHANCED TRAFFIC SIGNAL RESPONSIVENESS

Traditional traffic system management objectives are based on operational efficiency, including capacity, delay reduction, and safety. Generally, criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of signalized intersections are: minimization of total or stopped delay and numbers of stops, minimizing fuel consumption, cost-efficiency, and trade-offs of these factors. Fuel consumption is an important traffic control criterion. A new fuel consumption model called the Analytical Fuel Consumption Model is proposed in this research based on queuing model concepts and different vehicle operational states. The model, aiming to include the impact of traffic characteristics, fuel consumption rates, and control variables, includes different vehicle opeational states describing operations on three intersection elements: inbound approach, intersection itself, and outbound approach. For each element, vehicle operational states are described in three signal cycle stages. Numerical experiments are conducted to calibrate fuel consumption rates of the new model for different traffic volumes and cycle lengths. Results show consistency with those of the TEXAS simulation model. Results for both fuel consumption and delay minimization show that short cycle time lengths are preferred in low volume cases, and likewise, long cycle lengths are preferred in high volume cases.
Posterior sampling strategies based on discretized stochastic differential equations for machine learning applications

With the advent of GPU-assisted hardware and maturing high-eﬃciency software platforms such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, Bayesian posterior sampling for neural networks becomes plausible. In this article we discuss Bayesian parametrization in machine learning based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, speciﬁcally discretized stochastic diﬀerential equations such as Langevin dynamics and extended system methods in which an ensemble of walkers is employed to enhance sampling. We provide a glimpse of the potential of the sampling-intensive approach by studying (and visualizing) the loss landscape of a neural network applied to the MNIST data set. Moreover, we investigate how the sampling eﬃciency itself can be signiﬁcantly enhanced through an ensemble quasi-Newton preconditioning method. This article accompanies the release of a new TensorFlow software package, the Thermodynamic Analytics ToolkIt, which is used in the computational experiments.
The Application of Function Models In Software Design: A Survey Within the Software Community

Numerous function modelling approaches exist for software design. However, there is little empirical evidence on how these approaches are used in the early stages of software design. This article presents the results of an online survey on the application of function models in the academic and industrial software development community. The results show that more than 90% of the 75 respondents agreed with the statement that software projects that use function modelling techniques have a higher chance of success than other projects. UML is the most widely accepted and used modelling approach among the respondents, but only a handful of UML diagrams appear to be prominently addressed during the early software design stages. Asked for reasons for selecting or rejecting UML models the majority of respondents mentioned using function models to understand software requirements and communicate these with clients and technical teams, whereas lack of familiarity, the time-consuming nature of some models and data redundancy are widely mentioned reasons for not or seldomly using certain models. The study also shows a strong relationship between model usage and respondents ’ professio ns. We conclude that improvements are required to ensure the benefits of the various available models and the links between the models can be fully exploited to support individual designers, to improve communication and collaboration, and to increase project success. A short discussion on the chosen solution direction - a simplified function modelling approach – closes the paper.
Publication Bias in Empirical Sociological Research: Do Arbitrary Significance Levels Distort Published Results?

Despite great attention to the quality of research methods in individual studies, if publication decisions of journals are a function of the statistical significance of research findings, the published literature as a whole may not produce accurate measures of true effects. This article examines the two most prominent sociology journals (the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology) and another important though less influential journal (The Sociological Quarterly) for evidence of publication bias. The effect of the . 05 significance level on the pattern of published findings is examined using a ‘‘caliper’’ test, and the hypothesis of no publication bias can be rejected at approximately the 1 in 10 million level. Findings suggest that some of the results reported in leading sociology journals may be misleading and inaccurate due to publication bias. Some reasons for publication bias and proposed reforms to reduce its impact on research are also discussed.
Stock identification of the Reba carp, Cirrhinus reba: Insight into conventional and truss network-based morphometrics

In open water fishery manage m nt and sustainable uses of fish species for human welfare, stock identification is critical ( Kalhoro et al., 2015). Insufficient knowledge regarding fishery management could lead to sudden alterations in phenotypic characters (morphological characters) ( Turan et al., 2004). Numerous methods have effectively been established for stock identification of a fish species. Among all the methods regarding stock identification, morphological analysis is a state -of-art strategy with many inclinations concerning qu ick and supportive in regards to phenotypic varieties of fishes ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article History: Received: May. 23, 2021 Accepted: July 29, 2021 Online: Oct. 16, 2021 _______________
Heterogeneous Risk Exposure and the Dynamics of Wealth Inequality

In this paper I argue that the dynamics of wealth inequality are largely driven by heterogeneous exposure to aggregate risk in asset returns. I propose a quantitative model of households’ optimal portfolio choice that builds on evidence that housing is a necessary good. The model replicates households’ portfolio heterogeneity along the wealth distribution: just like in the data, as households get wealthier they shift their portfolios away from safe assets, first towards housing, and then towards equity. Because households in different parts of the wealth distribution are exposed to different sources of aggregate risk, the model has strong implications for the evolution of inequality. In particular, temporary shocks in equity returns have large and persistent effects on top wealth shares. A key implication is that the observed rise in U.S. wealth inequality was mostly due to abnormal equity returns and it is therefore expected to revert back to lower levels. JEL: D14, D31, E21, E44, E32, G11, G51 *Contact: rcioffi@princeton.edu †I am incredibly thankful to my advisors Gianluca Violante, Richard Rogerson, Moritz Lenel, and Benjamin Moll for their continued guidance and support. I would also like to thank Andrea Ajello, Stefano Baratuche, Alberto Bisin, Andreas Fagereng, Martin Holm, Jonathan Payne, Elisa Rubbo, George Sorg-Langhans, Francisco Vazquez-Grande, Maximilian Vogler, and Christian Wolf for their thoughtful comments and discussions, as well as seminar participants at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Princeton University, and Statistics Norway.
Coordination of active steering, driveline, and braking for integrated vehicle dynamics control

Abstract An integrated vehicle dynamics control system which aims to improve vehicle handling and stability by coordinating active front steering (AFS) and dynamic stability control (DSC) subsystems is developed in this paper. The DSC subsystem includes driveline-based, brake-based, and driveline plus brake-based DSC subsystems. The influence of varying forward speed and lateral acceleration on the lateral vehicle dynamics is investigated first. The AFS controller, which is used to improve vehicle steerability in the low to mid-range lateral acceleration, and the DSC controller, which manages to maintain vehicle stability during extreme driving situations, are then designed by using the sliding mode control (SMC) technique and phase plane method respectively. Based on the two independently developed controllers, a rule-based integration scheme is proposed to optimize the overall vehicle performance by minimizing interactions between the two subsystems and extending functionalities of individual subsystems. Computer simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control system and the overall improvements in vehicle handling and stability.
Interannual SAM Modulation of Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Does Not Account for Its Long‐Term Trends, Pointing to a Limited Role for Ozone Depletion

The expansion of Antarctic sea ice since 1979 in the presence of increasing greenhouse gases remains one of the most puzzling features of current climate change. Some studies have proposed that the formation of the ozone hole, via the Southern Annular Mode, might explain that expansion, and a recent paper highlighted a robust causal link between summertime Southern Annular Mode (SAM) anomalies and sea ice anomalies in the subsequent autumn. Here we show that many models are able to capture this relationship between the SAM and sea ice, but also emphasize that the SAM only explains a small fraction of the year‐to‐year variability. Finally, examining multidecadal trends, in models and in observations, we confirm the findings of several previous studies and conclude that the SAM–and thus the ozone hole–are not the primary drivers of the sea ice expansion around Antarctica in recent decades.
Ultrawide-band/high-frequency photodetectors

The two main trends in the progress of ultrawide-band/high-frequency photodetectors (PD's), improving the bandwidth-efficiency product and obtaining a high saturation current, are reviewed. With respect to achieving large bandwidth-efficiency, the limiting factors and potentials of edge-coupled (waveguide, waveguide-fed, traveling-wave, periodic-traveling-wave), resonant-cavity, and refracting-facet photodiodes, as well as the avalanche photodiode are discussed. Regarding high-saturation current, the author estimated how much the space-charge effect limits the saturation current and two ways to reduce the space-charge effect are outlined. One way is to distribute the photocarriers along the edge-coupled PD's and the other is to increase the carrier velocity using a uni-traveling carrier structure. The waveguide-photodiode-based technologies that we have developed are also presented; namely the design and fabrication of a 100-GHz waveguide photodiode (WGPD), uni-traveling carrier WGPD, 60-GHz packaging, and a 20-GHz large-core WGPD for planar lightwave circuit integration. A 50-Gb/s receiver opto-electronic integrated circuit technology based on the WGPD is also presented.
Pyramid Point Cloud Transformer for Large-Scale Place Recognition

Recently, deep learning based point cloud descriptors have achieved impressive results in the place recognition task. Nonetheless, due to the sparsity of point clouds, how to extract discriminative local features of point clouds to efficiently form a global descriptor is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a pyramid point cloud transformer network (PPT-Net) to learn the discriminative global descriptors from point clouds for efficient retrieval. Specifically, we first develop a pyramid point transformer module that adaptively learns the spatial relationship of the different k-NN neighboring points of point clouds, where the grouped self-attention is proposed to extract discriminative local features of the point clouds. The grouped self-attention not only enhances long-term dependencies of the point clouds, but also reduces the computational cost. In order to obtain discriminative global descriptors, we construct a pyramid VLAD module to aggregate the multi-scale feature maps of point clouds into the global descriptors. By applying VLAD pooling on multi-scale feature maps, we utilize the context gating mechanism on the multiple global descriptors to adaptively weight the multi-scale global context information into the final global descriptor. Experimental results on the Oxford dataset and three in-house datasets show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the point cloud based place recognition task. Code is available at https://github.com/fpthink/PPT-Net.
Rebelliousness and Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Discretion: Evidence From Malaysia

Street-level bureaucrats are a fundamental part of the implementation process of any policy. This study provides an examination of the factors that shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats at the frontlines of policy implementation. This study investigates how rebelliousness generates an impact on the discretion of street-level bureaucrats and to what extent client meaningfulness plays a moderating factor. It utilizes a survey questionnaire distributed among inspectors of the Department of Labor in the Ministry of Human Resources of Malaysia (n=241). The result of this study demonstrates that rebelliousness has a negative relationship with discretion, and client meaningfulness has a direct positive correlation with discretion. However, the relationship between rebelliousness and discretion is stronger with a high level of client meaningfulness. The objective of this study is to examine street-level bureaucrat behavior through the lens of Lipsky's theory which will provide an answer to the broad question of the factors that contribute to the existence of an imperfect implementation process. This study sheds light on the importance of client meaningfulness in moderating the behavior of street-level bureaucrats while interacting with inspectees. The novelty of this study is by highlighting two main constructs that are likely contributing to the implementation process by directly and indirectly impacting bureaucrats’ discretion: rebelliousness, and client meaningfulness.
Does quality of the built environment affect social cohesion

It is widely claimed in UK policy, practice and research that high quality built environments have positive social benefits for residents. This claimed association is, however, not supported by an evidence base, nor is there consensus on how high quality or social cohesion are defined. This paper aims to provide definitions of both concepts, calling on primary research conducted in six study sites in England. The findings show that features of quality of the built environment have varying influence on social activity. Residents' perceptions of quality of the neighbourhood and the level of maintenance and the character of the neighbourhood are positively associated with sense of community and place attachment, while density is negatively associated with social interaction and perceptions of trust. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications that the findings have for UK policy and practice.
THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) IN USERS' INTERACTION BETWEEN THE ACADEMIC STAFFS - SCIENTISTS/ENGINEERS IN MALAYSIA

Recent workplace studies claim that the latest advancements in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and flexible work arrangements have enabled alternative ways of working that can now provide a wider scope of interactivity across geographic distances, a scope that would have once restricted interaction among groups, if not prohibited it altogether. Such claim has challenged the conventional understanding which asserts that proximity among firms provides crucial face-to-face interaction in the inter-organisation collaboration. It is, however, debatable that the acceptance of the alternative workplace depends on the nature of the work, context, and culture of the organisation or nation. Therefore, this research examines the extent to which traditional locational assumptions and the proclaimed transformations performed in a developing country, such as Malaysia. The aim is to investigate the impact of university location – in terms of the characteristics of place and distance between places – to users’ face-to-face, and ICT interactions in the collaborations. This research analysed a structured interview conducted with 32 academic staffs in two universities, and 25 scientists and engineers in 15 research organisations. The findings showed that face-to-face interaction has strong relationship with distance, and the impact of telecommunication technology in replacing face-to-face interaction is rather small. Key words: ICT, face-to-face interactions, communication, location, distance, inter-organisation collaboration