Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hepatic Extracellular Signal–Regulated Kinase 2 Suppresses Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress and Protects From Oxidative Stress and Endothelial Dysfunction

Background Insulin signaling comprises 2 major cascades: the insulin receptor substrate/phosphatidylinositol 3′‐kinase/protein kinase B and Ras/Raf/mitogen‐activated protein kinase/kinase/ERK pathways. While many studies on the tissue‐specific effects of the insulin receptor substrate/phosphatidylinositol 3′ ‐kinase/protein kinase B pathway have been conducted, the role of the other cascade in tissue‐specific insulin resistance has not been investigated. High glucose/fatty acid toxicity, inflammation, and oxidative stress, all of which are associated with insulin resistance, can activate ERK. The liver plays a central role in metabolism, and hepatosteatosis is associated with vascular diseases. The aim of study was to elucidate the role of hepatic ERK2 in hepatosteatosis, metabolic remodeling, and endothelial dysfunction. Methods and Results We created liver‐specific ERK2 knockout mice and fed them with a high‐fat/high‐sucrose diet for 20 weeks. The high‐fat/high‐sucrose diet–fed liver‐specific ERK2 knockout mice exhibited a marked deterioration in hepatosteatosis and metabolic remodeling represented by impairment of glucose tolerance and decreased insulin sensitivity without changes in body weight, blood pressure, and serum cholesterol/triglyceride levels. In the mice, endoplasmic reticulum stress was induced together with decreased mRNA and protein expressions of hepatic sarco/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+‐ATPase 2. In a hepatoma cell line, inhibition of ERK activation– induced endoplasmic reticulum stress only in the presence of palmitate. Vascular reactive oxygen species were elevated with upregulation of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidase1 (Nox1) and Nox4 and decreased phosphorylation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase, which resulted in the remarkable endothelial dysfunction in high‐fat/high‐sucrose diet–fed liver‐specific ERK2 knockout mice. Conclusions Hepatic ERK2 suppresses endoplasmic reticulum stress and hepatosteatosis in vivo, which results in protection from vascular oxidative stress and endothelial dysfunction. These findings demonstrate a novel role of hepatic ERK2 in obese‐induced insulin resistance in the protection from hepatovascular metabolic remodeling and vascular diseases.
Randomized lattice decoding: Bridging the gap between lattice reduction and sphere decoding

Sphere decoding achieves maximum-likelihood (ML) performance at the cost of exponential complexity; lattice reduction-aided decoding significantly reduces the decoding complexity, but exhibits a widening gap to ML performance as the dimension increases. To bridge the gap between them, this paper presents randomized lattice decoding based on Klein's randomized algorithm, which is a randomized version of Babai's nearest plane algorithm. The technical contribution of this paper is two-fold: we analyze and optimize the performance of randomized lattice decoding resulting in reduced decoding complexity, and propose a very efficient implementation of random rounding. Simulation results demonstrate near-ML performance achieved by a moderate number of calls, when the dimension is not too large.
Bit-depth scalable video coding using inter-layer prediction from high bit-depth layer

Scalable video coding (SVC) is currently developed as an extension of H.264/AVC video coding standard. In this paper, we propose three H.264/AVC compliant bit-depth scalable video coding schemes, named LH mode (Low Bit-depth to High Bit-depth), HL mode (High Bit-depth to Low Bit-depth) and combined LH-HL mode for different applications. All these schemes efficiently exploit the high correlation between the high bit-depth layer and the low bit-depth layer on Macroblock level. Experimental results indicate that the HL mode outperforms the other two schemes and it achieves up to 7 dB improvement over the simulcast where the high bit-depth video and low bit-depth representations are 12-bit and 8-bit, respectively.
Look who's talking: A Motivational Interviewing based observation study of one-on-one conversations between residential care workers and adolescents

Despite its relevance and effectiveness in adjoining fields, still surprisingly little attention has been paid to Motivational Interviewing (MI) in the context of residential youth care. This study aims to analyse observed interactions between adolescents and group care workers during one-on-one conversations from a MI perspective. We specifically focused on the MI adherent and MI non-adherent behaviours of care workers on the one hand, and motivation for change in terms of ‘change talk’ and ‘sustain talk’ by adolescents on the other. Audio recordings of 27 conversations show that care workers most often use the MI non-adherent behaviours ‘persuasion without permission’ and ‘confronting’ when they try to change adolescents’ attitudes or behaviours. MI adherent behaviours, i.e. ‘being affirming’, ‘seeking collaboration’ with and ‘emphasizing autonomy’ of the adolescent, are rarely used during the conversations. In terms of motivation for change, adolescents equally use ‘change talk’ and ‘sustain talk’ and often respond ‘neutrally’ to care workers. ‘Change talk’ and ‘sustain talk’ by the adolescent does not consistently follow MI adherent and non-adherent behaviours of care workers, and vice versa. The results suggest that MI training of care workers and more research on MI in residential youth care is wanted.
DBSCAN: Past, present and future

Data Mining is all about data analysis techniques. It is useful for extracting hidden and interesting patterns from large datasets. Clustering techniques are important when it comes to extracting knowledge from large amount of spatial data collected from various applications including GIS, satellite images, X-ray crystallography, remote sensing and environmental assessment and planning etc. To extract useful pattern from these complex data sources several popular spatial data clustering techniques have been proposed. DBSCAN (Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) is a pioneer density based algorithm. It can discover clusters of any arbitrary shape and size in databases containing even noise and outliers. DBSCAN however are known to have a number of problems such as: (a) it requires user's input to specify parameter values for executing the algorithm; (b) it is prone to dilemma in deciding meaningful clusters from datasets with varying densities; (c) and it incurs certain computational complexity. Many researchers attempted to enhance the basic DBSCAN algorithm, in order to overcome these drawbacks, such as VDBSCAN, FDBSCAN, DD_DBSCAN, and IDBSCAN. In this study, we survey over different variations of DBSCAN algorithms that were proposed so far. These variations are critically evaluated and their limitations are also listed.
Empirical research of two-factor Vasicek model based on copulas

It analyzes the non-linear term structure of interest rates of Treasury in Shanghai Stock Exchange, using two-factor Vasicek model and Kalman filter in the state-space framework. The observation errors of one-year and 20-year interest rates are extracted and estimated applying the Archimedean copulas and mixture copula by maximum likelihood estimation. It has shown that the Gumbel copula and mixture copula could be more proper to capture their dependence structure. It is also found that Gumbel copula is superior over Gaussian copula, Frank copula, Clayton copula and mixture copula to test the VaR of Treasury portfolio by Monte Carlo simulation, for the latter four categories of copulas would underestimate the risks of portfolio.
INFLUENTIAL MARKETING: A NEW DIRECT MARKETING STRATEGY ADDRESSING THE EXISTENCE OF VOLUNTARY BUYERS

The traditional direct marketing paradigm implicitly assumes that there is no possibility of a customer purchasing the product unless he receives the direct promotion. In real business environments, however, there are "voluntary buyers" who will make the purchase even without marketing contact. While no direct promotion is needed for voluntary buyers, the traditional response-driven paradigm tends to target such customers. In this thesis, the traditional paradigm is examined in detail. We argue that it cannot maximize the net profit. Therefore, we introduce a new direct marketing strategy, called "influential marketing. " To achieve the maximum net profit, influential marketing targets only the customers who can be positively influenced by the campaign. Nevertheless, targeting such customers is not a trivial task. We present a novel and practical solution to this problem which requires no major changes to standard practices. The evaluation of our approach on real data provides promising results.
Endogenous Timing in a Mixed Duopoly: The Managerial Delegation Case

We introduce managerial delegation into Pal's (1998) model and examine the impact of the introduction of managerial delegation on endogenous timing in a mixed duopolistic model for differentiated goods. We show that a public firm and a private firm choose quantities sequentially in the equilibrium of our model. Thus, we find that the Pal''s (1998) results are robust against managerial delegation.
A proposal of a new local improvement mechanism for genetic algorithm and a creative thinking support

The genetic algorithm (GA) is one of the basic models of evolution and is one of the eifective tools for constructing evolvable/adaptive complex systems. This paper presents a new local improvement mechanism for the GA which is very efficient in local improvement. This paper describes a creative thinking support using the proposed method. The evolution of the arm morphology and the throwing motion for throwing a ball under limited link torques is simulated.
Efficient Object Indexing and Retrieval Using Partial Dominant Orientation Descriptor

This paper describes a method for object indexing and retrieval using a new feature descriptor called Partial Dominant Orientation Descriptor (PDOD). The extraction process of the PDOD starts by sampling the object into a set of stable and informative key locations using Difference of Gaussian (DoG), so that the retrieval can proceed successfully despite changes in object viewpoint, scale, illumination, and distortion. The proposed descriptor at feature point takes into account the position and partially computes the dominant orientations of other key locations relative to this point, thus, offering a global distinctive and discriminative characterization. The extracted object descriptors are then indexed using Vocabulary Tree, which provides a robust object retrieval system across a substantial range of rotation variance, change in textures and colors, and object deformation. The extensive experiments on KONKLAB public dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms other benchmarks such as SIFT, PCA-SIFT and SURF indexing algorithms.
Network service provider selection and security bootstrapping using PANA

With the increasing number of mobile users, there has been a demand for a unified solution not only for authenticating, authorizing and providing content to mobile users but also for selecting an ISP (Internet service provider) or a content provider. Rather than using different solutions for different deployment scenarios, we propose the use of PANA (protocol for carrying authentication for network access) as a generic mechanism for authentication, authorization and network selection that works across different access networks
Discourse and Coherence : Revisiting Specific Conventions of the Centering Theory

This paper discusses a corpus-based study whose aim is to evaluate specific conventions of the centering theory and to establish whether they should be revisited. In particular, the study explores the relation between discourse coherence and several parameters such as the definition of an utterance, the varieties of anaphora considered, the forms of the discourse entities and the type of genre.
Generating Performance Improvement Suggestions by using Cross-Organizational Process Mining

Process mining is a relatively young and developing research area with the main idea of discovering, monitoring and improving processes by extracting information from event logs. With the increase of cloud computing and shared infrastructures, event logs of multiple organizations are available for analysis where cross-organizational process mining stands with the opportunity for organizations learning from each other. The approach proposed in this study mines process models of organizations and calculates performance indicators; followed by clustering of organizations based on performance indicators and finally spots mismatches between the process models to generate recommendations. This approach is implemented as an extensible and configurable plug-in set in ProM framework and tested by synthetic and real life logs where successful and suitable results are achieved with defined evaluation metrics. Generated recommendation results indicate that the use of this approach can help users to focus on the parts of process models with potential performance improvement, which are difficult to spot manually and visually.
Gesture Recognition : Hand Pose Estimation

In this report, different vision-based approaches to solve the problem of hand pose estimation are reviewed. The first three methods presented utilize random forest, whereas the last tackles the problem of pose estimation of two strongly interacting hands. Lastly, an outlook at the future of the field is given. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Graphical user interfaces. General terms: Algorithms, Human Factors.
The Physical Church-Turing Thesis and the Principles of Quantum Theory

Notoriously, quantum computation shatters complexity theory, but is innocuous to computability theory. Yet several works have shown how quantum theory as it stands could breach the physical Church-Turing thesis. We draw a clear line as to when this is the case, in a way that is inspired by Gandy. Gandy formulates postulates about physics, such as homogeneity of space and time, bounded density and velocity of information --- and proves that the physical Church-Turing thesis is a consequence of these postulates. We provide a quantum version of the theorem. Thus this approach exhibits a formal non-trivial interplay between theoretical physics symmetries and computability assumptions.
17ß-Estradiol Regulates mTORC2 Sensitivity to Rapamycin in Adaptive Cardiac Remodeling

Adaptive cardiac remodeling is characterized by enhanced signaling of mTORC2 downstream kinase Akt. In females, 17ß-estradiol (E2), as well as Akt contribute essentially to sex-related premenopausal cardioprotection. Pharmacologic mTOR targeting with rapamycin is increasingly used for various clinical indications, yet burdened with clinical heterogeneity in therapy responses. The drug inhibits mTORC1 and less-so mTORC2. In male rodents, rapamycin decreases maladaptive cardiac hypertrophy whereas it leads to detrimental dilative cardiomyopathy in females. We hypothesized that mTOR inhibition could interfere with 17β-estradiol (E2)-mediated sexual dimorphism and adaptive cell growth and tested responses in murine female hearts and cultured female cardiomyocytes. Under physiological in vivo conditions, rapamycin compromised mTORC2 function only in female, but not in male murine hearts. In cultured female cardiomyocytes, rapamycin impaired simultaneously IGF-1 induced activation of both mTOR signaling branches, mTORC1 and mTORC2 only in presence of E2. Use of specific estrogen receptor (ER)α- and ERβ-agonists indicated involvement of both estrogen receptors (ER) in rapamycin effects on mTORC1 and mTORC2. Classical feedback mechanisms common in tumour cells with upregulation of PI3K signaling were not involved. E2 effect on Akt-pS473 downregulation by rapamycin was independent of ERK as shown by sequential mTOR and MEK-inhibition. Furthermore, regulatory mTORC2 complex defining component rictor phosphorylation at Ser1235, known to interfere with Akt-substrate binding to mTORC2, was not altered. Functionally, rapamycin significantly reduced trophic effect of E2 on cell size. In addition, cardiomyocytes with reduced Akt-pS473 under rapamycin treatment displayed decreased SERCA2A mRNA and protein expression suggesting negative functional consequences on cardiomyocyte contractility. Rictor silencing confirmed regulation of SERCA2A expression by mTORC2 in E2-cultured female cardiomyocytes. These data highlight a novel modulatory function of E2 on rapamycin effect on mTORC2 in female cardiomyocytes and regulation of SERCA2A expression by mTORC2. Conceivably, rapamycin abrogates the premenopausal “female advantage”.
Minority Stress, Community Involvement, and Mental Health Among Bisexual Women

Although the larger lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community has experienced increased visibility and acceptance in many areas of the United States, research shows that bisexual individuals continue to face negative messages about the legitimacy of their sexual orientation (Alarie & Gaudet, 2013). Using a national sample of 203 bisexual women, we ran a series of correlation, regression, and moderation models to examine (a) whether perceived binegative discrimination and internalized binegativity were correlated with self-esteem and depression and (b) whether perceived binegative discrimination and internalized bisexuality predicted self-esteem and depression. Based on findings from the regression models, we then examined whether involvement in the bisexual community reduced the impact of internalized binegativity on self-esteem and depression. A unique contribution of this study is that participants reported experiences of perceived binegative discrimination from heterosexual individuals as well as lesbians and gay men. Findings revealed that perceived binegative discrimination and internalized binegativity were statistically significantly correlated with self-esteem and depression but that only internalized binegativity predicted self-esteem and depression. Furthermore, we also found that participation in a bisexual-specific community at high levels (i.e., daily to 2 to 3 times per week) reduced the impact of internalized binegativity on depression but not self-esteem. Recommendations for future research, clinical practice, and advocacy are provided.
An MDA approach for the generation of glue code for a virtual simulation environment

This paper describes an approach and a set of MDA toolkits to integrate software and firmware subsystems modeled with Simulink and SysML in a system-level model for the purpose of functional simulation. Automatic code generation is applied to the SysML model to produce the glue code that integrates the software code and equivalent-behavior FPGA implementations in a virtual simulation platform, allowing the verification of large real-time industrial embedded applications. Following the tenets of the Model Driven Architecture and Platform Based Design, the proposed approach provides a method for the rapid prototyping and early validation of embedded functionality. The concept is illustrated by an industrial use case of a signal processing board.
Bug Mining Model Based on Event-Component Similarity to Discover Similar and Duplicate GUI Bugs

All most all of the bugs related to Graphical User Interface (GUI) module of applications and are described in terms of events associated with GUI components. In this paper, a bug mining model for discovering duplicate and similar GUI bugs is presented and approach for detecting the similar and duplicate GUI bugs is described. Resolution of similar and duplicate bugs are almost identical, so if similar and duplicates are identified it will optimize the time for fixing reported GUI bugs and it can also help in achieving the faster development. A GUI bug can be transformed into a sequence of events, components and expected implementation requirements for each GUI event. Thi transformatien is used in this paper to discover the similar and duplicate GUI bugs. First all the GUI bugs are transformed into events, components and requirements sequence, then these sequences are pair wise matched and common subsequence is generated which will indicate the similarity for the GUI bugs.
Recombinant interleukin 12 enhances cellular immune responses to vaccination only after a period of suppression.

Adjuvant use of recombinant murine IL-12 (rmIL-12) was examined in mice vaccinated with irradiated syngeneic tumor or allogeneic cells. rmIL-12 given to A/J mice vaccinated with irradiated SCK tumor cells engineered to secrete granulocyte/macrophage-colony-stimulating factor resulted in significantly better protection from tumor challenges 28 days after vaccination but, unexpectedly, severely compromised host protection 14 days after vaccination. Immune suppression was rmIL-12 dose dependent and manifested as reduced splenic CTL activity, stimulated cytokine release and ability to reject SCK cells. Transient immune suppression was also seen with rmIL-12 given during vaccination of C3H/HeN mice with irradiated K1735 melanoma cells and of C57BL/6 mice with irradiated allogeneic HKB cells. The period of suppression coincided with transiently reduced splenic T-cell mitogenic responses to concanavalin A and IL-2, suggesting that they may be causally related. Suppression appears to be due to impaired immune effector mechanisms rather than impaired host immunization, which is actually enhanced as evidenced by the enhanced reaction to immunogens when hosts are challenged later after rmIL-12 administration. Demonstration that rmIL-12, as it is frequently used, induces a transient period of impaired immune response that can compromise host protection suggests that the unquestioned effectiveness of rmIL-12 against murine tumors is primarily due to activation of mechanisms other than antigen-specific tumor immunity (e.g., antiangiogenic effects) and that use of human IL-12 should be monitored for similar effects.
Quelle Différence?

Canada, Belgium and Switzerland are multicultural countries with several similarities including having French as a minority language. The trio also shares similar media landscapes, systems and approaches to journalism to those of other Western European and Northern American countries. These commonalities offer an opportunity to probe for the possibility of a language-based differentiation in journalists’ professional identities. Our comparative analysis of Worlds of Journalism Study data suggests that francophone journalists in our three countries have much more in common than not with their other-language peers. However, the francophone journalists seem more likely to identify with a politicized role that includes agenda-setting, citizen-motivation and scrutinizing power, and less likely to be driven by attracting and satisfying audiences. A différence francophone exists, but it is modest.
Schema and Database Evolution in the O2 Object Database System

When the schema of an object-oriented database system is modified, the database needs to be changed in such a way that the schema and the database remain consistent with each other. This paper describes the algorithm implemented in the new forthcoming release of the 02 object database for automatically bringing the database to a consistent state after a schema update has been performed. The algorithm, which uses a deferred strategy to update the database, is a revised and extended version of the screening algorithm first sketched in [7].