Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cardiovascular effects of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibition or angiotensin receptor blockade in hemodialysis: a meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Cardiovascular (CV) disease causes significant morbidity and mortality among the hemodialysis (HD) population. This meta-analysis was performed to determine whether angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) reduce fatal and nonfatal CV events and left ventricular (LV) mass in patients receiving HD. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS Studies were identified by searching electronic databases, bibliographies, and conference proceedings. Two reviewers independently selected randomized controlled trials using ACEIs or ARBs compared with control among patients receiving HD. Studies were independently assessed for inclusion, quality, and data extraction. Random-effects models were used to estimate the pooled relative risk (RR) for CV outcomes and the weighted mean difference (WMD) for pooled change-from-baseline comparisons for LV mass for ACEI or ARB treated patients compared with control. RESULTS Compared with control, the RR of CV events associated with ACEI or ARB use was 0.66 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.35 to 1.25; P = 0.20]. ACEI or ARB use resulted in a statistically significant reduction in LV mass, with a WMD of 15.4 g/m(2) (95% CI 7.4 to 23.3; P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Treatment with an ACEI or ARB reduced LV mass in patients receiving HD. However, their use was not associated with a statistically significant reduction in the risk of fatal and nonfatal CV events. Larger, high-quality trials in the HD population are required to determine if the effects of ACEI or ARB therapy on LV mass translate into decreased CV morbidity and mortality.
Cosmic Star-Formation History

Over the past two decades, an avalanche of new data from multiwavelength imaging and spectroscopic surveys has revolutionized our view of galaxy formation and evolution. Here we review the range of complementary techniques and theoretical tools that allow astronomers to map the cosmic history of star formation, heavy element production, and reionization of the Universe from the cosmic “dark ages” to the present epoch. A consistent picture is emerging, whereby the star-formation rate density peaked approximately 3.5 Gyr after the Big Bang, at z≈1.9, and declined exponentially at later times, with an e-folding timescale of 3.9 Gyr. Half of the stellar mass observed today was formed before a redshift z = 1.3. About 25% formed before the peak of the cosmic star-formation rate density, and another 25% formed after z = 0.7. Less than ∼1% of today's stars formed during the epoch of reionization. Under the assumption of a universal initial mass function, the global stellar mass density inferred at any epoch match.
Extensive Lysine Methylation in Hyperthermophilic Crenarchaea: Potential Implications for Protein Stability and Recombinant Enzymes

In eukarya and bacteria, lysine methylation is relatively rare and is catalysed by sequence-specific lysine methyltransferases that typically have only a single-protein target. Using RNA polymerase purified from the thermophilic crenarchaeum Sulfolobus solfataricus, we identified 21 methyllysines distributed across 9 subunits of the enzyme. The modified lysines were predominantly in α-helices and showed no conserved sequence context. A limited survey of the Thermoproteus tenax proteome revealed widespread modification with 52 methyllysines in 30 different proteins. These observations suggest the presence of an unusual lysine methyltransferase with relaxed specificity in the crenarchaea. Since lysine methylation is known to enhance protein thermostability, this may be an adaptation to a thermophilic lifestyle. The implications of this modification for studies and applications of recombinant crenarchaeal enzymes are discussed.
Non-helpful relationships with professionals – a literature review of the perspective of persons with severe mental illness*

Abstract Background: The relationship with professionals has proved to be important with regard to outcome for persons with severe mental illness (SMI). The understanding of non-helpful relationships is important complementary knowledge to that regarding helpful relationships. Aim: To review the available qualitative research providing knowledge of non-helpful relationships from the perspective of persons with SMI. Method: A review of qualitative studies, based on an earlier systematic search, analyzed through thematic analysis. Results: The main themes were “non-helpful professionals”, “organization versus relation” and “the consequences of non-helpful relationships with professionals”. Examples of professionals described as non-helpful were pessimistic and uncaring professionals who were paternalistic and disrespectful. Discontinuity, insufficient time and coercion were some of the contextual factors described as non-helpful. These sorts of relationships were non-helpful because they hindered helpful relationships from developing and contributed to further suffering, instilling hopelessness and hindering personal growth. Conclusions: Non-helpful relationships with professionals can be understood as impersonal relationships that contain no space for negotiation of the relationship nor of the support and treatment provided through it. It is important that organizations provide professionals with favorable conditions to negotiate the organizational framework and to treat persons with SMI as whole human beings.
Anti-DNA Antibodies Receptor Involved in Cell Penetration of Calreticulin, a Potential Cell Surface

A 50-kDa protein was puriﬁed as a potential receptor, using an afﬁnity matrix containing biotinylated F14.6 or H9.3 anti-DNA mAbs derived from autoimmune (New Zealand Black 3 New Zealand White)F 1 mouse and membrane extracts from cells. This protein was identiﬁed as calreticulin (CRT) by microsequencing. Confocal microscopy and FACS analysis showed that CRT was present on the surface of various cells. CRT protein was recognized by a panel of anti-DNA mAbs in ELISA. The binding of F14.6 to lymphocytes and Chinese hamster ovary cells was inhibited by soluble CRT or SPA-600. Thus, the anti-DNA mAbs used in this study bound to CRT, suggesting that CRT may mediate their penetration into the cells and play an important role in lupus pathogenesis. The Journal of Immunology, 2001, 166: 6423–6429.
Assessing the Evolution of Google+ in Its First Two Years

In the era when Facebook and Twitter dominate the market for social media, Google has introduced Google+ (G+) and reported a significant growth in its size while others called it a ghost town. This begs the question of whether G+ can really attract a significant number of connected and active users despite the dominance of Facebook and Twitter. This paper presents a detailed longitudinal characterization of G+ based on large-scale measurements. We identify the main components of G+ structure and characterize the key feature of their users and their evolution over time. We then conduct detailed analysis on the evolution of connectivity and activity among users in the largest connected component (LCC) of G+ structure, and compare their characteristics to other major online social networks (OSNs). We show that despite the dramatic growth in the size of G+, the relative size of the LCC has been decreasing and its connectivity has become less clustered. While the aggregate user activity has gradually increased, only a very small fraction of users exhibit any type of activity, and an even smaller fraction of these users attracts any reaction. The identity of users with most followers and reactions reveal that most of them are related to high-tech industry. To our knowledge, this study offers the most comprehensive characterization of G+ based on the largest collected datasets.
Al-Bayan: An Arabic Question Answering System for the Holy Quran

Recently, Question Answering (QA) has been one of the main focus of natural language processing research. However, Arabic Question Answering is still not in the mainstream. The challenges of the Arabic language and the lack of resources have made it difficult to provide Arabic QA systems with high accuracy. While low accuracies may be accepted for general purpose systems, it is critical in some fields such as religious affairs. Therefore, there is a need for specialized accurate systems that target these critical fields. In this paper, we propose Al-Bayan, a new Arabic QA system specialized for the Holy Quran. The system accepts an Arabic question about the Quran, retrieves the most relevant Quran verses, then extracts the passage that contains the answer from the Quran and its interpretation books (Tafseer). Evaluation results on a collected dataset show that the overall system can achieve 85% accuracy using the top-3 results.
Learning the Structure of Causal Models with Relational and Temporal Dependence

Many real-world domains are inherently relational and temporal—they consist of heterogeneous entities that interact with each other over time. Effective reasoning about causality in such domains requires representations that explicitly model relational and temporal dependence. In this work, we provide a formalization of temporal relational models. We define temporal extensions to abstract ground graphs—a lifted representation that abstracts paths of dependence over all possible ground graphs. Temporal abstract ground graphs enable a sound and complete method for answering d-separation queries on temporal relational models. These methods provide the foundation for a constraint-based algorithm, TRCD, that learns causal models from temporal relational data. We provide experimental evidence that demonstrates the need to explicitly represent time when inferring causal dependence. We also demonstrate the expressive gain of TRCD compared to earlier algorithms that do not explicitly represent time.
What Is My Next Job: Predicting the Company Size and Position in Career Changes

Job mobility is common in modern society, especially in the industry of information and communication technology. Job mobility prediction is valuable both for employees and employers. For the sake of lacking appropriate and sufficient records of job mobility, the traditional methods meet a significant challenge in job mobility prediction. Fortunately, the emerging professional social network provides a large amount of users' career histories, which can alleviate this problem. In this paper, we collect relevant data from LinkedIn, and analyze the temporal and spatial characteristics to model the job mobility pattern. We propose an approach to predict the company size and position for the next job by using various features, such as the position, duration, and size of previous companies, education degree, etc. The experimental results verify the proposed approach with the accuracy up to 72% and 74% in terms of next company size prediction and next position prediction respectively.
Antioxidant Bioactivity of Samsum Ant (Pachycondyla sennaarensis) Venom Protects against CCL4-Induced Nephrotoxicity in Mice

To assess whether SAV could influence the effects of carbon tetrachloride (CCL4) exposure, mice were treated with SAV in doses of 100, 200, 300 and 400 μg/kg body weight and the effects on oxidative status and kidney function were studied. Serum levels of creatinine, malondialdehyde (MDA), and blood urea, together with renal and hepatic levels of MDA, glutathione (GSH), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and catalase (CAT) were quantified in order to evaluate antioxidant activity. Results showed that the group injected with CCL4 exhibited significantly higher levels of oxidative stress markers, MDA, and significantly lower concentrations of GSH, SOD and catalase. SAV was found to significantly improve these oxidative markers, occasionally, in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, treatment with SAV was associated with the same behaviour in respect to kidney functions which had previously been impaired by CCL4. Histopathological examination demonstrated that SAV, in different groups, improved the renal tissue damage induced by CCL4 and histological scores confirmed that significant improvements were obtained after treatment with SAV, particularly with the lowest dose (100 μg/kg body weight). In conclusion, SAV has the potential capability to restore oxidative stability and to improve kidney functions after CCL4 acute injury.
Network-Aware QoS Prediction for Service Composition Using Geolocation

QoS-aware web service composition intends to maximize the global QoS of a composite service with local and global QoS constraints while selecting the independent candidate services from different providers. With the increasing number of candidate services emerging from the Internet, the network delays often greatly affect the performance of the composite service, which are usually difficult to be collected beforehand. One remedy is to predict them for the composition. However, there are some new issues in network delay predictions for the composition, including prediction accuracy, on-demand measures to new services and runtime overhead. In this paper, we try to tackle these critical challenges by taking advantage of the geolocations of candidate services. We first describe a network-aware service composition problem. Then, we present a novel geolocation-based NQoS prediction and reprediction approach for service composition. Furthermore, a geolocation-based service selection algorithm is presented to make use of our NQoS prediction approach for the composition. We have conducted extensive experiments on the real-world data set collected from PlanetLab. Comparative experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves the prediction accuracy and predictability of the NQoS and reduces the runtime overheads in predicting the composition.
Effects of shape and direction of osteocyte lacunae on stress distribution of osteon

Scanning electron microscope (SEM) observations show that lacunae are non-uniform distribution and mainly located in the interface of thick lamellae and thin lamellae. These lacunae are elliptical and are along the circumferential direction of the osteon, which can be called as circumferential elliptical lacunae (CE). The observations also show that there are many circumferential microcracks in the osteons and these microcracks are initiated from two endpoints of the major axis of the CE. Nanoindentation technique is used to test the elastic modulus of the different circumferential lamella of the osteons. The test results shown that the average elastic modulus of the osteon wavily changes along its radial direction and that the average elastic modulus of the thick lamella is larger than that of the thin lamella. To learn the influence of the shape and direction of osteocyte lacunae on the stress distribution and understand the advantage of CE, three different osteon models, respectively with CE, radially elliptical lacunae (RE) and circular lacunae (CL), are created. The results show that the stress concentration factor of osteon with RE is maximal, that of CE is middle and CL is minimal. The crack-propagated route is along the circumferential direction of the osteon in CE model, which makes that the osteon possesses high facture toughness.
Renegotiating performance: the role of performance pay in renegotiating the effort bargain

Much of the academic and policy literature on performance related pay focuses on its role as an incentive system. Its role as means for renegotiating performance norms has been largely neglected. The introduction of performance related pay, based mostly on appraisals by line managers, in the British public services in the 1990s can be considered as a large-scale social experiment in the change from a seniority - to a performance-based payment system. When reviewing academic research and management inside information on the schemes, a recent government report concluded that they had failed to motivate staff and their operation had been divisive. Nevertheless, other information suggests that productivity rose. This article seeks to resolve the paradox by showing that performance pay was the instrument of a major renegotiation of productivity norms, and that this rather than motivation was the key story. It concludes that when analysing incentive systems, more attention needs to be given to contract theory, and in particular to the articulation of different levels of principal-agent relationships within organisations. The key to the rise in productivity in the British public services lay in how the appraisal activities by line managers were articulated with incentives and goal setting for the different levels of organisational performance in order to secure the passage to different performance norms.
of Geophysical Research : Solid Earth Multiple Phase Changes in the Mantle Transition Zone Beneath Northeast Asia : Constraints From Teleseismic Reflected and Converted BodyWaves

We reassess the mantle transition zone structure below the northeast Asia margin in the context of subduction of the Pacific plate below the Eurasian continent. We use two independent approaches of teleseismic imaging, namely, compressional-to-shear converted waves (receiver functions) and shear wave underside reflections (SS precursors), and compare them within their statistical uncertainties. We find localized complexity in the interfaces marking solid phase changes in mantle minerals, in terms of both apparent topography and reflectivity. The 660-km discontinuity is doubled, with ∼80-km maximum vertical distance between the interfaces, over an 890 × 350 km2 region between 36–44∘N and 130–133∘E at the tip of the subducted Pacific plate. A similar complexity exists on the 410-km discontinuity, coinciding with the presence of a deep cluster of seismicity below the Japan Sea. Both methods suggest the presence of low-velocity zones atop the 410, within the mantle transition zone, and below the 660. This complex seismic signature is related to the Pacific plate and interpreted in light of the subduction thermal regime and phase equilibria for a pyrolitic mantle composition. Phase changes manifest themselves as broad zones of velocity gradients with localized doubled or multiple first-order discontinuities, associated with transitions in the olivine, pyroxene, and garnet systems. An average pyrolitic composition and local temperatures of 1000–1300 K can explain the observed velocity gradients and multiple discontinuities. We show that the dissolution of stishovite, a high-pressure polymorph of SiO2, into the higher-pressure perovskite mineral, is a possible explanation for the low-velocity zones at the top of the lower mantle. Plain Language Summary In the early 1990s, the idea emerged that the study of seismic discontinuities near 410and 660-km depths could inform us about the vertical circulation of material in the mantle. These two discontinuities were assigned to solid phase changes of a silicate mineral rich in magnesium (90%) and iron (10%), olivine. Advances in the field of mineralogy and high-pressure physics suggested, however, that other minerals, garnet and pyroxenes, should contribute to the general seismic signature. Due to the limited imaging capability of seismological methods and station deployments, however, a one-to-one correspondence between observed seismic structure and mineralogy has remained elusive, at best controversial. We provide here from two independent approaches compelling evidence for localized complexity in the seismic structure near 410and 660-km depths, which we relate, through mineralogical modeling, to phase changes in olivine, garnet, pyroxene, and silica systems. This work provides the observational basis for assessing the viability of geodynamic and thermochemical models of the mantle beneath the northeast Asia margin.
Implementation and evaluation of scalable and robust scheme for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

With the development of low-cost microsensor equipment having the capability of wireless communications, sensor network technology has attracted the attention of many researchers and developers. By deploying a large number of sensors in a monitored region and composing a sensor network of them, one can remotely obtain information on behavior, condition, and position of elements in the region. In [1], we have proposed a novel and efficient scheme for data gathering in sensor networks where a large number of sensor nodes were deployed. In such networks, nodes are randomly introduced, occasionally die or get removed, and sometimes change their locations. We considered an application that periodically collected sensor information from distributed sensor nodes to a base station. In our scheme, sensor information periodically propagates without any centralized control from the edge of a sensor network to a base station as the propagation forms a concentric circle. By observing the radio signals emitted by sensor nodes in its vicinity, a sensor node independently determines the cycle
Liposomes containing lipid A: an effective, safe, generic adjuvant system for synthetic vaccines

Liposomes containing monophosphoryl lipid A (MPLA) have previously exhibited considerable potency and safety in human trials with a variety of candidate vaccines, including vaccines to malaria, HIV-1 and several different types of cancer. The long history of research and development of MPLA and liposomal MPLA as vaccine adjuvants reveals that there are numerous opportunities for creation and development of generic (nonproprietary) adjuvant system formulations with these materials that are not only highly potent and safe, but also readily available as native materials or as synthetic compounds. They are easily manufactured as potentially inexpensive and easy to use adjuvant systems and might be effective even with synthetic peptides as antigens.
Biogeochemical implications of biodiversity and community structure across multiple coastal ecosystems

Small-scale experiments and theory suggest that ecological functions provided by communities become more stable with increased species richness. Whether these patterns manifest at regional spatial scales and within species-rich communities (e.g., coral reefs) is largely unknown. We quantified five biogeochemical processes, and an aggregate measure of multifunctionality, in species-rich coastal fish communities to test three questions: (1) Do previously predicted biodiversity-ecosystem-function relationships hold across large spatial scales and in highly diverse communities? (2) Can additional covariates of community structure improve these relationships? (3) What is the role of community biomass and functional group diversity in maintaining biogeochemical processes under various scenarios of species loss across ecosystem types? These questions were tested across a large regional gradient of coral reef, mangrove and seagrass ecosystems. Statistical models demonstrated that species richness and the mean maximum body size per species strongly predicted biogeochemical processes in all ecosystem types, but functional group diversity was only a weak predictor. Simulating three scenarios of species loss demonstrated that conserving community biomass alone increased the ability for communities to maintain ecosystem processes. Multifunctionality of biogeochemical processes was maintained least in simulations that conserved biomass and community structure, underscoring the relative lack of importance of community structure in maintaining multiple simultaneous ecosystem functions in this system. Findings suggest that conserving community biomass alone may be sufficient to sustain certain biogeochemical processes, but when considering conservation of multiple simultaneous biogeochemical processes, management efforts should focus first on species richness.