Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Astrocytes and energy metabolism

Astrocytes are glial cells, which play a significant role in a number of processes, including the brain energy metabolism. Their anatomical position between blood vessels and neurons make them an interface for effective glucose uptake from blood. After entering astrocytes, glucose can be involved in different metabolic pathways, e.g. in glycogen production. Glycogen in the brain is localized mainly in astrocytes and is an important energy source in hypoxic conditions and normal brain functioning. The portion of glucose metabolized into glycogen molecules in astrocytes is as high as 40%. It is thought that the release of gliotransmitters (such as glutamate, neuroactive peptides and ATP) into the extracellular space by regulated exocytosis supports a significant part of communication between astrocytes and neurons. On the other hand, neurotransmitter action on astrocytes has a significant role in brain energy metabolism. Therefore, understanding the astrocytes energy metabolism may help understanding neuron-astrocyte interactions.
Factors Affecting E-Banking Adoption by Greek Consumers.

Internet banking is a fairly new innovation. In general, e-banking is a form of new technological application and its use by the public follows, as with anything innovative, certain stages. Since their introduction in 1995, electronic banking services have been used by the banks themselves for internal communication and information exchange. Then, with the development of the internet, electronic banking services began to be used to promote and promote banking products to citizens and businesses. Today, banks can expect several benefits from the use of internet banking since they can minimize their expenses and at the same time, attract more customers. However, there are several factors that can affect consumers’ intention to use e-banking services and their investigation is of great importance. Base on that, the current research aims to identify the factors that can affect Greek consumers intention to use internet banking. The research was conducted with the use of a questionnaire which was fulfilled by 141 bank customers and the results showed that the intention to use e-banking is positively connected with perceived enjoyment and perceived ease of use, while on the contrary intention to use e-banking is negatively related with perceived risk.
Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality: A Critical Review of the Literature and Research Implications for the Hospitality Industry

There is a desperate need for new research that will advance customer satisfaction (CS) and service quality (SO) methodologies in the hospitality industry. This comprehensive review of the theories and methodologies reported in CS and SQ studies cited in the hospitality literature provides suggestions for future CS and SQ research in the hospitality field. First, the theoretical and methodological issues are critically reviewed. Next, major developments in CS and SQ research methodologies are discussed. The concept of importance and its role in behavioral models are included as they have been recently applied in hospitality CS and SQ research. The final section of this study is devoted to developing and proposing new directions for future CS and SQ research in the hospitality industry.
Observationis by Electron Microscopy on Pig Muscle Inoculated and Incubated with Pseudomonas fragil

Myofibrils from pig muscle inoculated and incubated with Pseudomonas fragi showed an extremely disrupted appearance as compared to uninoculated controls. There was an almost complete absence of material in the H zone, marked disruption of the A band (probably myosin), and some loss of dense material from the Z line. These changes indicated that marked proteolysis had occurred. Bacteria observed in spoiled muscle tissue exhibited protrusions or blebs on the outer surface of the cell walls. The blebs appeared to form detached globules that migrated into the muscle mass. Bacteria grown in non-muscle-containing media did not produce blebs, which indicates the blebs were induced by growth on muscle tissue. The possibility that the blebs and globules may contain a proteolytic enzyme responsible for myofibrillar disruption is discussed.
The Effect of Virtual Brand Community Experience on Customers' Participation in Innovation

Virtual brand community has become an important channel for consumers to make their own demands and participate in enterprise innovation, and can meet the psychological needs of consumers better in addition to material needs. However, there is no empirical study of whether the virtual brand community experience will effectively affect the customer's participation in innovation and how it affects it. The article based on the existing research and SOR theory to explore how the virtual brand community entertainment experience through customer psychological impact of customer participation in innovation. The association self-construction is used as the adjustment variable, and the empirical research is carried out through the questionnaire. The research shows that the virtual brand community entertainment experience will promote the participation of customers in innovation, and the customer's psychological authorization will serve as the intermediary role, and the association self-construction will play a negative regulating role.
A Simple Stereotactic Method for Frameless Deep Brain Stimulation

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is widely used to treat advanced Parkinson’s disease, other movement and psychiatric disorders. DBS implantation requires application of a stereotactic frame throughout a lengthy procedure, making it uncomfortable and tiring. We designed a stereotactic cube to stage the operation, perform frameless microelectrode recording (MER) and fix the DBS. Methods: The 15-mm cube is implanted in a burr hole using bone cement. It contains 5 parallel trajectories (central + 4 around). It is aligned by stereotactic frame so that central trajectory reaches the target. Frameless MER is performed by attaching a micro-driver to the cube using 2–5 cannulae (4 cm). The DBS is fixed to the cube by a mini-plate and 1 screw. Ninety-six cubes were compared with 43 Bennet spheres (BS). Results: No cube moved compared to 2 (5%) BS (p < 0.05). The final trajectory was central in 64.4% of cubes compared to 47.5% of BS, and the final target was >2 mm out in no cubes compared to 12.5% of BS (p < 0.01). Infection and haemorrhage were observed in 2.5% and 3.3% of cubes, respectively, while 5% of BS developed infection, 5% haemorrhage and 7.5% skin erosion. Conclusions: This method is simple and effective in staging DBS procedures, performing frameless MER and DBS implantation, fixation and revision.
A testbed implementation of secure and lightweight privacy preservation mechanism using scrambled Fibonacci and XOR for ZigBee

Security is a key element to support data transmission in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). ZigBee is one of the leading communication protocols in the WSN that is now the industry's concern for monitoring and control applications. The security method used in the ZigBee protocol requires a large memory capacity and computing time. This limits the security protocol to meet the real-time requirement for some medical and industrial applications, especially for resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we proposed a secure and lightweight privacy preservation mechanism with a new key generation algorithm using the modified Fibonacci and combination of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. We have conducted a testbed implementation of the proposed method and also measured and analyzed the processing time, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), throughput, delay, and the use of the dynamic memory.
Trust and Partner-Enhancing Attributions in Close Relationships

A cross-lagged panel design was used to examine the links between trust and attributional processes in a sample of 75 married couples throughout a period of 2 years. During the first phase of the study, participants completed a measure of marital trust, engaged in a laboratory problem-solving discussion of a recurrent conflict-related issue, and then rated their partner’s behavior and motives. Approximately 2 years later, 54 couples were again contacted and measures of trust were obtained. Forty of these couples also viewed a videotape of their laboratory problem-solving discussion from 2 years previously and rated their partner’s behavior and motives. Results suggested a reciprocal causal pattern by which partner-enhancing attributions predict changes in trust and trust predicts changes in partner-enhancing attributions.
Applications Of The Byod Conception – Benefits, Risks And Approaches

Mobile devices have dramatically changed perceptions regarding the work of employees and the dimensions of modern business. The popularity of the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is due to one of the essential features of business from the past few years - the mobility of managers and employees. The possibility of their continued participation in work processes and the availability of alternative options for data access at any time, from any device and from any location is acquiring exclusive actuality. At the same time, a reasonable balance between convenience and security is required, based on a better understanding of the specifics of the BYOD environment and the effective protection of mobile devices in the corporate network. The article analyses the nature and main characteristics of BYOD, and the benefits and safety risks that arise the use of personal mobile devices to solve business problems. Also an approach is proposed based on the idea of 'BYOD in six steps'
A Weighted Multi-attribute Method for Personalized Recommendation in MOOCs

In recent years, with the rapid development of MOOC (massive open online course), more and more people get knowledge from the Internet. The big data analysis for MOOC has become a new research direction and it has been a focus that how to recommend individually personalized videos for MOOC users. To date, the most widely used personalized recommendation technology is collaborative filtering (CF) technology. In this paper, we propose a personalized recommendation algorithm---multi-attribute weight algorithm (MAWA) based on CF. Firstly, MAWA calculates separately the weights of the attributes and attribute values of the resources for the target user. Secondly, the two weights of a video are used to get a recommendation value. Finally, the resources with N highest recommendation values are recommended for the target users. The MAWA in this paper makes up for the shortcomings of traditional CF algorithm and it can be shown from the experiment in this paper that the recall rate of MAWA is 28.3% higher than CF, which means that the recommendation results of MAWA is more accurate than those of CF. The contribution of this paper is to weight the attributes and attribute values respectively, which can reflect the users' preferences in both coarse granularity and fine granularity.
Méthodes volumes finis sur maillages non structurés pour la simulation numérique des écoulements incompressibles monophasiques et diphasiques

On presente dans ce memoire le travail de recherche qui a ete effectue dans le cadre de la Maitrise en Ingenierie de l'Universite du Quebec a Chicoutimi. Ce travail a ete commande par Electricite de France, en collaboration avec le Professeur SYLVAIN BOIVIN et le Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Elements Finis de l'Universite Laval, dirige par le Professeur MICHEL FORTIN. Ce travail a tente de contribuer a la recherche sur les methodes de volumes finis sur maillages non structures, encore peu utilisees malgre leurs qualites intrinseques, comme la conservation numerique locale des quantites conservatives, et la capacite a traiter des geometries complexes. En ce qui concerne la discretisation en espace, un schema recent pour la diffusion a ete teste et a confirme, au cours des nombreuses simulations effectuees, ses excellentes qualites de precision, de facilite de mise en oeuvre et de faible cout de calcul, qui en font un candidat extremement interessant pour les applications industrielles. Les tests effectues d'autre part sur les schemas pour la convection, sur un systeme inconditionnellement hyperbolique de type Euler isentropique, ont montre l'extreme robustesse du schema de RuSANOV. Ce schema constitue donc une alternative aux schemas classiques (GODUNOV et ROE) et au plus recent schema de VFROE [27], en particulier pour les applications industrielles ou ils ne peuvent etre mis en oeuvre ou lorsque la robustesse est le facteur limitant. Ces schemas ont ete testes ici dans un cadre bidimensionnel, mais la generalisation au cadre tridimensionnel est possible, et cette extension est d'ailleurs en cours a l'U.Q. A.C. en ce qui concerne les calculs monophasiques. Concernant la discretisation en temps, une methode de prediction-correction a ete utilisee et s'est montree parfaitement adaptee a la resolution des systemes physiques consideres ici, qui modelisent des ecoulements monophasiques et diphasiques ou apparait une contrainte stationnaire du fait des hypotheses d'incompressibilite. La flexibilite de cette methode a permis de traiter avec succes de nombreux problemes physiques monophasiques, des ecoulements incompressibles d'un fluide visqueux au transport de polluant, en passant par la convection naturelle d'un fluide de BOUSSINESQ, etc. Enfin, concernant la physique des ecoulements diphasiques, les effets de compactage maximal ont ete obtenus dans le systeme continu par l'utilisation d'une loi de pression granulaire presentant une asymptote verticale au taux de compactage maximal. Cette propriete permet la simulation de configurations industrielles du type lits fluidises denses, ou le taux de presence des particules varie d'une valeur quasi-nulle (au sein de bulles) aux alentours du taux de compactage maximal. Une telle simulation n'a pu etre menee a terme dans le cadre de ce travail, mais chaque composante de la methode a ete testee et un test complet de compactage a ete effectue, demontrant la faisabilite de ce calcul.
Automatically Extracting Variant-Normalization Pairs for Japanese Text Normalization

Social media texts, such as tweets from Twitter, contain many types of non-standard tokens, and the number of normalization approaches for handling such noisy text has been increasing. We present a method for automatically extracting pairs of a variant word and its normal form from unsegmented text on the basis of a pair-wise similarity approach. We incorporated the acquired variant-normalization pairs into Japanese morphological analysis. The experimental results show that our method can extract widely covered variants from large Twitter data and improve the recall of normalization without degrading the overall accuracy of Japanese morphological analysis.
Synthesis and characterization of a new structure of gas hydrate

Atoms and molecules <0.9 nm in diameter can be incorporated in the cages formed by hydrogen-bonded water molecules making up the crystalline solid clathrate hydrates. For these materials crystallographic structures generally fall into 3 categories, which are 2 cubic forms and a hexagonal form. A unique clathrate hydrate structure, previously known only hypothetically, has been synthesized at high pressure and recovered at 77 K and ambient pressure in these experiments. These samples contain Xe as a guest atom and the details of this previously unobserved structure are described here, most notably the host-guest ratio is similar to the cubic Xe clathrate starting material. After pressure quench recovery to 1 atmosphere the structure shows considerable metastability with increasing temperature (T <160 K) before reverting back to the cubic form. This evidence of structural complexity in compositionally similar clathrate compounds indicates that the reaction path may be an important determinant of the structure, and impacts upon the structures that might be encountered in nature.
Velocity-aided attitude estimation for accelerated rigid bodies

Two nonlinear observers for velocity-aided attitude estimation, relying on gyrometers, accelerometers, magnetometers, and velocity measured in the body-fixed frame, are proposed. As opposed to state-of-the-art body-fixed velocity-aided attitude observers endowed with local properties, both observers are (almost) globally asymptotically stable, with very simple and flexible tuning. Moreover, the roll and pitch estimates are globally decoupled from magnetometer measurements.
Superior Reliability of Junctionless pFinFETs by Reduced Oxide Electric Field

Superior reliability of junctionless (JL) compared with inversion-mode field-effect transistors (FETs) is experimentally demonstrated on bulk FinFET wafers. The reduced negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) of JL pFETs outperforms the previously reported best NBTI reliability data obtained with Si channel devices and guarantees 10-year lifetime at typical operating voltages and high temperature. This behavior is understood through the reduced oxide electric field and lessened interaction between charge carriers and oxide traps during device operation. These findings encourage the investigation of JL devices with alternative channels as a promising alternative for 7-nm technology nodes meeting reliability targets.
Independent mechanisms for macrophage binding and macrophage phagocytosis of damaged erythrocytes. Evidence of receptor cooperativity.

The binding and phagocytosis of oxidatively damaged red blood cells (OxRBCs) by mouse peritoneal macrophages can be inhibited by oxidatively modified LDL (OxLDL), implying some commonality at their receptor-binding domains. Studies from many different laboratories support the view that OxRBC binding is due to the disruption of plasma membrane phospholipid asymmetry and the subsequent exposure of phosphatidylserine (PS) on the outer membrane leaflet. Presumably, oxidation of LDL creates a surface structure on it in some way homologous to the PS-rich domain on OxRBCs. Apoptotic cells in some instances are also recognized because of PS exposure on the outer leaflet of the membrane, and apoptotic cells are a common feature of atherosclerotic lesions. In the present studies, the mechanisms of binding and internalization of cells recognized by virtue of their membrane PS were studied using OxRBCs or vanadate-treated erythrocytes (VaRBCs) as models. Disruption of phospholipid asymmetry with vanadate produced cells that were bound by macrophages in the same divalent cation-dependent manner as OxRBCs. However, whereas OxRBCs were rapidly phagocytosed, VaRBCs were not. Stimulation of mouse macrophages with phorbol myristate acetate resulted in a concentration-dependent induction of phagocytosis of bound VaRBCs, an effect that could be prevented by the protein kinase C inhibitor staurosporine. Because phagocytosis of OxRBCs occurred unassisted, we speculated that there must be additional membrane changes induced by oxidation (over and above the disruption of phospholipid asymmetry) that contribute to phagocytosis of OxRBCs, possibly resulting in the ligation of a distinct receptor that does not necessarily contribute to adherence. This proposal is supported by the finding that ligation of macrophage Fc gamma receptors by the anti-Fc gamma RII/RIII antibody 2.4G2 triggers the phagocytosis of bound VaRBCs. Phagocytosis is also triggered by subthreshold opsonization of VaRBC, i.e., by antibody concentrations that do not by themselves cause binding and phagocytosis of native RBCs. Finally, treatment with low concentrations of glutaraldehyde, which causes membrane protein cross-linking, promotes the phagocytosis of VaRBCs, but, at the low concentration used, has little or no effect on binding and phagocytosis of native RBCs. We suggest that the internalization of damaged cells, bound because of PS exposure, requires the cooperation of a PS-binding receptor with at least one additional receptor to trigger an intracellular signaling pathway to initiate phagocytosis.
Tunneling: Evidence from Family Business Groups of Pakistan

This paper investigates a critical aspect of agency conflict between dispersed minority and majority (controlling) shareholders in firms affiliated with family business groups. Corporate governance literature indicates that majority shareholders can exploit minority shareholders through tunneling the resources for their benefit or they provide insurance through propping to group firms in distress. For years 2009-2013, the study uses a unique hand-picked data set of 290 non-financial (i.e. 177 family business group and 113 stand-alone or non-group) firms listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). The study finds that majority shareholders expropriate minority shareholders by tunneling (transferring) important resources from low cash-flow rights firms affiliated with family business group. While measuring the sensitivities of firms to the industry earnings shocks, the empirical results reveal that about 15% resources of low cash-flow rights firms are tunneled to high cash-flow rights firms in family business groups. It is also confirmed that equity held by directors representing majority shareholders has negative relationship with earnings of minority shareholders in low cash-flow rights firms affiliated with family business groups. These findings have certain policy implications for governance related regulation development, diverse shareholders and firm management.
Increased Expression of ampC in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Mutants Selected with Ciprofloxacin

ABSTRACT Two Pseudomonas aeruginosa mutants exhibiting increased expression of ampC were selected during exposure to ciprofloxacin. These mutants also exhibited significant increases in mexCD-oprJ expression, but further studies failed to show a link between the increased expression of mexCD-oprJ and ampC. Increased ampC expression was not related to mutations within ampR, the ampC-ampR intergenic region, ampD, ampDh2, or ampDh3 or to changes in the levels of expression of these amidase genes. However, ampD complementation restored wild-type levels of ampC expression and ceftazidime susceptibility, suggesting alternative mechanisms of ampC regulation.
The differentiated assessment of damage to economy of subjects of the Siberian Federal District from road and transport accident rate

The results of assessment of damage from the road accident rate in subjects of the Siberian Federal District (SFD) of the Russian Federation are presented in the article. The thesis about spatial differentiation of the Gross Regional Product (GRP) losses in different regions of the country because of people’s death and injuries in the road accidents (RA) and due to formations of property and ecological damage was chosen as a working hypothesis. The calculations, carried out for 12 subjects of the SFD, confirmed this idea. The range of calculated values of economic damage from road accident rate (in % of GRP) was from 1.3 (Tomsk region) to 12.6 (Republic of Tyva) in 2015. In article the attempt to explain the received result by heterogeneous development of economics in various Russian regions is made. The consequence of it is a heterogeneous quality of people’s life and quite various perception of life value by inhabitants of different regions that influences their life safety level.