Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Targeting of interferon to choroidal neovascularization by use of dextran and metal coordination.

PURPOSE Bioactive proteins such as interferon (IFN) have been reported to be combined with water-soluble polymers, such as dextran, through metal coordination, without need for complicated procedures. In the current study, the targeting and inhibitory effects of IFN combined with dextran on experimental choroidal neovascularization (CNV) were studied in vivo. METHODS Interferon (IFN)beta was conjugated to dextran, which has metal-chelating, diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (DTPA) residues. Based on metal coordination, conjugation of IFNbeta with DTPA-dextran resulted from simply mixing both substances in an aqueous solution containing Zn(2+). The effects of IFNbeta on the proliferation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) and bovine retinal pigment epithelial cells (BRPECs) were evaluated. To evaluate the activity loss of IFNbeta by conjugation, the effect of the conjugate on HUVECs was compared with that of free IFNbeta. Experimental CNV was induced by subretinal injection of gelatin microspheres containing basic fibroblast growth factor in rabbits. The rabbits with CNV were intravenously treated twice weekly with 7.5 million international units (MIU)/kg per day free IFNbeta (for 4 weeks), with IFNbeta-DTPA-dextran conjugate containing 7.5 (for 2 weeks) or 0.75 (for 4 weeks) MIU/kg per day IFNbeta, or with saline. The effects of these substances were evaluated by fluorescein angiography and histology. To observe the accumulation of conjugate, the doses of IFNbeta in CNV tissues were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS IFNbeta inhibited the growth of HUVECs and enhanced the proliferation of BRPECs. The conjugate seemed to preserve approximately 44% of IFNbeta activity. Although both doses of IFNbeta-DTPA-dextran inhibited progression of CNV in rabbits, longer term administration of a lower dose of IFNbeta-DTPA-dextran had a sustained inhibitory effect on progression of CNV (P < 0.05). Histologic studies revealed the inhibitory effect of IFNbeta-DTPA-dextran on progression of CNV. This conjugate prolonged the plasma half-life of IFNbeta and enabled IFNbeta to accumulate in the CNV in rabbits. CONCLUSIONS In this study, human IFNbeta was successfully used to target CNV, an enhanced antiangiogenic effect was achieved by combining it with dextran, based on metal coordination. This targeted delivery of IFNbeta may have potential as a treatment modality for CNV.
A New Oral Delivery System for 5‐ASA: Preliminary Clinical Findings for MMX

Background: Multi‐matrix (MMx), a new delivery system for mesalazine, seems to release 5‐aminosalicyclic acid (5‐ASA) preferentially in the sigmoid colon. This study had 2 objectives: (1) to evaluate the therapeutic response to MMx in patients with active left‐sided disease and (2) to gain additional insights as to how the therapy would compare with topical 5‐ASA. Methods: Patients received either 1.2 g of 5‐ASA MMx three times per day plus placebo enema or 4 g of 5‐ASA enema plus placebo tablets for 8 weeks. The primary endpoint was clinical remission (clinical activity index ≤4) at 8 weeks. Secondary endpoints were endoscopic and histologic remissions. Results: Seventy‐nine patients were enrolled. Clinical remission rates at 4 and 8 weeks were 57.5% and 60.0% for patients treated with MMx and 68.4% and 50.0% for patients randomized to 5‐ASA enemas, respectively (95% confidence interval for the difference at 8 weeks, −12 to +32). Endoscopic remission was achieved by 45.0% of patients on 5‐ASA MMx and by 36.8% of those on enema, whereas 15.0% and 8% of patients, respectively, showed histologic remission. Compliance was 97.0% for oral and 87.5% for topical therapy. In the enema group, compliance was 88.0% for the patients in remission and 65.5% for those with active disease. Conclusions: Preliminary studies suggest that similar rates for induction of remission can be expected from 5‐ASA enemas and MMx for patients with left‐sided ulcerative colitis.
Career success: An assessment of a gender‐specific model

The paper assesses a gender-specific model of career success, using human capital attributes, career choices, and opportunity structures as predictors. The model was evaluated in two studies using a sample of managers from a public sector organization, and a sample of British employees from the general workforce. The results demonstrated the need for gender-specific models, as the paths to career success vary between the sexes. The importance attached to specific predictors of career success varied between men and women. Job-specific attributes influenced more the career success of men; whereas women's achievements were obtained more through job-relevant merits, career-move decisions and organizational and occupational opportunities' structures. The results and their implications for future studies of career success are discussed.
A Constrained Layout Placement Approach to Enhance Pulse Quenching Effect in Large Combinational Circuits

A novel constrained layout placement approach is proposed to enhance the pulse quenching effect in combinational circuits. This constrained algorithm can enlarge the number of quenching cells and shrink the distance between these cells. Simulation results illustrate that the soft error vulnerabilities are effectively reduced by adopting this novel constrained layout placement algorithm with no area penalty.
Efficacy and safety of a herbal medicinal product containing myrrh, chamomile and coffee charcoal for the treatment of gastrointestinal disorders: a non-interventional study

Objective This prospective observational postmarketing multicentre study was performed to collect data on the clinical efficacy, safety and tolerability of a licensed herbal combination of myrrh, coffee charcoal and chamomile extracts in patients with symptoms of acute diarrhoea. Material and methods Patients aged 12 years and above with symptoms of acute diarrhoea due to acute inflammatory disorders (AID) of the gastrointestinal tract, inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were treated with the herbal preparation either as monotherapy, add-on therapy or with other therapies. The primary outcome parameter was the pre-post change of total mean symptom score. Secondary outcome parameters were changes of score of single symptoms, physician's assessment of the clinical course and efficacy, and patient's satisfaction. Results 1062 patients (mean age 43.2±17.8 years, range 12–89, 42.3% men) were included. A decrease of the overall mean total symptom score was observed in all treatment groups (monotreatment: 1.33±0.51 to 0.15±0.34, add-on treatment: 1.39±0.41 to 0.30±0.37, other therapy: 1.31±0.43 to 0.24±0.33). No significant differences between three treatment options were observed within AID and IBD groups. However, in the IBS group, monotreatment with the herbal preparation resulted in a significantly better outcome when compared to either add-on treatment (mean difference 0.140; 95% CI 0.036 to 0.245; p=0.009) or other therapy (mean difference 0.217; 95% CI 0.085 to 0.349; p=0.001). Secondary efficacy criteria showed comparable results between different treatment options in the respective disorder groups. Patient satisfaction was generally higher with monotreatment in the AID and IBS groups, while add-on treatment was preferred in the IBD group. Conclusions The combination of myrrh, coffee charcoal and chamomile flower extract is effective, well tolerated and safe for use in patients with symptoms of acute diarrhoea. The effects are comparable to conventional therapies used in routine care.
Structures of intermediate transport states of ZneA, a Zn(II)/proton antiporter

Significance Transmembrane efflux pumps belonging to the resistance–nodulation–cell division (RND) superfamily are found in all kingdoms of life, and transport substrates out of cells, powered by an electrochemical proton gradient. Here we report two X-ray crystal structures of a Zn(II) efflux pump, ZneA, that capture different intermediate states along the transport cycle. The structures show how passage of substrates through ZneA is regulated by a series of conformational changes in the efflux pump. By comparing the structures of ZneA with other RND efflux pumps, we present a coherent mechanistic model for RND-mediated substrate efflux, which ensures efficient transport of substrates out of the cell. Efflux pumps belonging to the ubiquitous resistance–nodulation–cell division (RND) superfamily transport substrates out of cells by coupling proton conduction across the membrane to a conformationally driven pumping cycle. The heavy metal-resistant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans CH34 relies notably on as many as 12 heavy metal efflux pumps of the RND superfamily. Here we show that C. metallidurans CH34 ZneA is a proton driven efflux pump specific for Zn(II), and that transport of substrates through the transmembrane domain may be electrogenic. We report two X-ray crystal structures of ZneA in intermediate transport conformations, at 3.0 and 3.7 Å resolution. The trimeric ZneA structures capture protomer conformations that differ in the spatial arrangement and Zn(II) occupancies at a proximal and a distal substrate binding site. Structural comparison shows that transport of substrates through a tunnel that links the two binding sites, toward an exit portal, is mediated by the conformation of a short 14-aa loop. Taken together, the ZneA structures presented here provide mechanistic insights into the conformational changes required for substrate efflux by RND superfamily transporters.
The Escherichia coli Proteome: Past, Present, and Future Prospects

SUMMARY Proteomics has emerged as an indispensable methodology for large-scale protein analysis in functional genomics. The Escherichia coli proteome has been extensively studied and is well defined in terms of biochemical, biological, and biotechnological data. Even before the entire E. coli proteome was fully elucidated, the largest available data set had been integrated to decipher regulatory circuits and metabolic pathways, providing valuable insights into global cellular physiology and the development of metabolic and cellular engineering strategies. With the recent advent of advanced proteomic technologies, the E. coli proteome has been used for the validation of new technologies and methodologies such as sample prefractionation, protein enrichment, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, protein detection, mass spectrometry (MS), combinatorial assays with n-dimensional chromatographies and MS, and image analysis software. These important technologies will not only provide a great amount of additional information on the E. coli proteome but also synergistically contribute to other proteomic studies. Here, we review the past development and current status of E. coli proteome research in terms of its biological, biotechnological, and methodological significance and suggest future prospects.
Combining Multi-Engine Translations with Moses

We present a simple method for generating translations with the Moses toolkit (Koehn et al., 2007) from existing hypotheses produced by other translation engines. As the structures underlying these translation engines are not known, an evaluation-based strategy is applied to select systems for combination. The experiments show promising improvements in terms of BLEU.
An empirical typology of suicide

Abstract Ten typologies of suicide previously proposed by suicidologists were applied to a large sample (N -404) of completed suicide cases and classified by judges as descriptive or not descriptive of each case. Classifications showed a high degree of interrater reliability, and the typologies were able to classify from 61 % to 86% of the cases. Considerable overlap was found among typology subtypes. Cross-tabulations between classifications revealed five clusters of subtypes which described 86% of all cases: Escapist. Confused. Aggressive. Alienated. and Depressive/Low Self-Esteem. These five clusters appear distinct from each other as described by their characteristics. Discussion focuses on implications for the development of risk assessment and type-specific treatments.
Dynamic Spectrum Management: When is FDMA Sum-Rate Optimal?

Consider a multiuser communication system in a frequency selective environment whereby users share a common spectrum and can interfere with each other. Assuming Gaussian signaling and treating interference as noise, we study optimal spectrum sharing strategies for the maximization of weighted sum-rate. In this work, we show that, if the normalized crosstalk gains are larger than a given threshold (roughly equal to 1/2), then the optimal spectrum sharing strategy is frequency division multiple access (FDMA). We also propose several simple distributed spectrum allocation algorithms that can approximately maximize weighted sum-rates. Numerical simulation of DSL applications shows that these algorithms are efficient and can achieve substantially larger weighted sumrates than those obtained by the existing iterative waterfilling algorithm.
Bandwidth Management VMs Live Migration in Wireless Fog Computing for 5G Networks

Live virtual machine migration aims at enabling the dynamic balanced use of the networking/computing physical resources of virtualized data-centers, so to lead to reduced energy consumption. Here, we analytically characterize, prototype in software and test an optimal bandwidth manager for live migration of VMs in wireless channel. In this paper we present the optimal tunable-complexity bandwidth manager (TCBM) for the QoS live migration of VMs under a wireless channel from smartphone to access point. The goal is the minimization of the migration-induced communication energy under service level agreement (SLA)-induced hard constrains on the total migration time, downtime and overall available bandwidth.
The Role of Social Media in Green Infrastructure Planning: A Case Study of Neighborhood Participation in Park Siting

Abstract This paper explores the role of social media in facilitating green infrastructure planning through supporting discourses among online participants. Building on the communicative rationality theory, it adopts interpretive discourse analysis to explore ways in which online participants of a neighborhood online forum in Eugene, Oregon were able to assess and clarify the validity of each other's claims while discussing the location of a new park. The results show that this forum did not create a collaborative process, but facilitated this process through its integration with other methods. It facilitated a valid dialogue among the group members and provided valuable information for planners regarding the interests of a selected community of citizens.
On the Relationship Between Country Sex Ratios and Teen Pregnancy Rates: A Replication

The hypothesis that a low ratio of men to women both destabilizes marriages and makes it more likely that young women will reproduce early outside of marriage was supported by an analysis of 42 societies for which the United Nations published detailed information on population structure and teen childbearing. This study attempted to replicate the earlier finding using sex ratios for 0- to 14-year-olds (as a proxy for teen sex ratios) and a larger sample of 185 countries. Several measures of economic development, population density, and latitude were used as control variables in the regression analyses. Teen births were inversely related to the sex ratio, to urbanization, and to latitude. The sex ratio explained 38% of the variance in teen birth rates, thus providing a clear replication of the earlier study. Early childbearing can be seen as an adaptive response to poor marital opportunity.
Diffusing useful knowledge: the monitorial system of education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840

This paper addresses some fundamental aspects of the circulation of knowledge connected with the spread of the first global model of school management and classroom organisation in the early nineteenth century: the so‐called “monitorial system of education” or, as it was named after its “inventors”, the “Bell–Lancaster Method”. By looking at the communication of educational ideas between England and the early British possessions in India, this paper first analyses the actors involved in this process, especially their agendas and means. Inspired by the widespread belief in the powers of education to improve both society as a whole and individuals, educational activists gathered in a number of committees and organisations – among whom the “British and Foreign School Society” proved most influential. Protestant missionary societies also became active in the field of popular education. The monitorial system of education attracted social reformers, British as well as Indian, and missionaries to whom it appeared to be a technology with civilising powers, a rational instrument to morally uplift and, at the same time, subject individuals “to their respective places” in society. Second, the paper looks at the processes of hybridisation and transformation of the pedagogical knowledge that was communicated between India and England: the origins of the monitorial system in an orphanage school at Madras, its export to London, where it was developed into a standardised model, and its subsequent “re‐import” into India. Finally, reports about the implementation of the monitorial system in India again had an impact on English public discourses on education.
High-Resolution Structured Light Range Scanner with Automatic Calibration

In this work, we present a low-cost high-resolution structured light range scanner with automatic calibration, based on temporal stripe encoding. We present a novel single-step automatic active stereo calibration method, based on optimal backprojection estimation. We also present a method for estimating local fidelity of the range image and show how this information can be used to obtain sub-stripe resolution. We describe the scanner architecture and show experimental calibration and shape reconstruction results.
Yield enhancement for 3D-stacked ICs: Recent advances and challenges

Three-dimensional (3D) integrated circuits (ICs) that stack multiple dies vertically using through-silicon vias (TSVs) have gained wide interests of the semiconductor industry. The shift towards volume production of 3D-stacked ICs, however, requires their manufacturing yield to be commercially viable. Various techniques have been presented in the literature to address this important problem, including pre-bond testing techniques to tackle the “known good die” problem, TSV redundancy designs to provide defect-tolerance, and wafter/die matching solutions to improve the overall stack yield. In this paper, we survey recent advances in this filed and point out challenges to be resolved in the future.
Vanity, fashion leadership, and self-consciousness among South Korean male and female college students

The purpose of this study was to compare vanity and self-consciousness between fashion leaders and fashion followers and genders among South Korean college students (280 women; 120 men; mean age=21.77) who completed scales measuring vanity, public self-consciousness, private self-consciousness and fashion innovativeness and opinion leadership. Women scored higher than men on vanity physical appearance concern, vanity physical appearance view, public self-consciousness and private self-consciousness. Fashion leaders scored higher than fashion followers on public self-consciousness, private self-consciousness and all four dimensions of vanity. Participants who scored high (vs. low) in public self-consciousness scored higher on all four dimensions of vanity. Similarly, participants who scored high (vs. low) in private self-consciousness scored higher on all four dimensions of vanity. The current research supported use of cultural values as a conceptual framework within which to investigate consumer behaviour and provided support for the cross-cultural applicability of social comparison theory.
Brief announcement: the problem based benchmark suite

This announcement describes the problem based benchmark suite (PBBS). PBBS is a set of benchmarks designed for comparing parallel algorithmic approaches, parallel programming language styles, and machine architectures across a broad set of problems. Each benchmark is defined concretely in terms of a problem specification and a set of input distributions. No requirements are made in terms of algorithmic approach, programming language, or machine architecture. The goal of the benchmarks is not only to compare runtimes, but also to be able to compare code and other aspects of an implementation (e.g., portability, robustness, determinism, and generality). As such the code for an implementation of a benchmark is as important as its runtime, and the public PBBS repository will include both code and performance results. The benchmarks are designed to make it easy for others to try their own implementations, or to add new benchmark problems. Each benchmark problem includes the problem specification, the specification of input and output file formats, default input generators, test codes that check the correctness of the output for a given input, driver code that can be linked with implementations, a baseline sequential implementation, a baseline multicore implementation, and scripts for running timings (and checks) and outputting the results in a standard format. The current suite includes the following problems: integer sort, comparison sort, remove duplicates, dictionary, breadth first search, spanning forest, minimum spanning forest, maximal independent set, maximal matching, K-nearest neighbors, Delaunay triangulation, convex hull, suffix arrays, n-body, and ray casting. For each problem, we report the performance of our baseline multicore implementation on a 40-core machine.
Functional Genomic Analysis of Variation on Beef Tenderness Induced by Acute Stress in Angus Cattle

Beef is one of the leading sources of protein, B vitamins, iron, and zinc in human food. Beef palatability is based on three general criteria: tenderness, juiciness, and flavor, of which tenderness is thought to be the most important factor. In this study, we found that beef tenderness, measured by the Warner-Bratzler shear force (WBSF), was dramatically increased by acute stress. Microarray analysis and qPCR identified a variety of genes that were differentially expressed. Pathway analysis showed that these genes were involved in immune response and regulation of metabolism process as activators or repressors. Further analysis identified that these changes may be related with CpG methylation of several genes. Therefore, the results from this study provide an enhanced understanding of the mechanisms that genetic and epigenetic regulations control meat quality and beef tenderness.
A Grounded Theory for Building Ethnically Bridging Social Capital in Voluntary Organizations

The study of diversity in nonprofit organizations is at a nascent stage. Using a grounded theory process centering on the racial composition of Girl Scout troop members and volunteers, this study proposes a two-pronged theory of diversity in voluntary organizations. Building upon Adler and Kwon’s three aspects of social capital—opportunity, motivation, and ability—the study concludes that even when sufficient opportunity and mission-based motivation exists, social capital of the bridging type will likely be insufficient to sustain interactions among diverse members. To remedy this problem, the theory suggests that a voluntary organization can first rely upon the bonding type of social capital to increase representational diversity, then structure mission-relevant interactions among diverse members to create bridging social capital, and sustain pluralistic diversity. New directions for research and practice are also discussed, with the theory indicating that many nonprofits possess characteristics favoring the creation of bridging social capital.