Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CHOP/GADD153 is a mediator of apoptotic death in substantia nigra dopamine neurons in an in vivo neurotoxin model of parkinsonism

There is increasing evidence that neuron death in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, is due to the activation of programmed cell death. However, the upstream mediators of cell death remain largely unknown. One approach to the identification of upstream mediators is to perform gene expression analysis in disease models. Such analyses, performed in tissue culture models induced by neurotoxins, have identified up‐regulation of CHOP/GADD153, a transcription factor implicated in apoptosis due to endoplasmic reticulum stress or oxidative injury. To evaluate the disease‐related significance of these findings, we have examined the expression of CHOP/GADD153 in neurotoxin models of parkinsonism in living animals. Nuclear expression of CHOP protein is observed in developmental and adult models of dopamine neuron death induced by intrastriatal injection of 6‐hydroxydopamine (6OHDA) and in models induced by 1‐methyl‐4‐phenyl‐1,2,3,6‐tetrahydropyridine (MPTP). CHOP is a mediator of neuron death in the adult 60HDA model because a null mutation results in a reduction in apoptosis. In the chronic MPTP model, however, while CHOP is robustly expressed, the null mutation does not protect from the loss of neurons. We conclude that the role of CHOP depends on the nature of the toxic stimulus. For 6OHDA, an oxidative metabolite of dopamine, it is a mediator of apoptotic death.
Acculturation and Substance Use: Social Influence as a Mediator among Hispanic Alternative High School Youth∗

Research suggests that acculturation increases the risk of substance use among Hispanic youth. However, this process is not well understood. This study examined associations between acculturation and several substance use indicators among a sample of 714 Hispanic youth attending alternative high schools in southern California. Peer social influence was assessed as a potential mediator. Acculturation, measured by language use, was associated with increased risk of lifetime alcohol, marijuana, and current alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and hard drug use, controlling for age, socioeconomic status, and gender. Results of mediation analyses indicate that peer social influence mediated the relationship between acculturation and lifetime alcohol, and current alcohol, cigarettes, and hard drug use. Evidence for partial mediation was observed with lifetime and current marijuana use. These results provide evidence that peer social influence is an important mediating variable that should be considered when examining the relationship between acculturation and substance use.
Effect of Genetically Modified Poplars on Soil Microbial Communities during the Phytoremediation of Waste Mine Tailings

ABSTRACT The application of transgenic plants to clean up environmental pollution caused by the wastes of heavy metal mining is a promising method for removing metal pollutants from soils. However, the effect of using genetically modified organisms for phytoremediation is a poorly researched topic in terms of microbial community structures, despite the important role of microorganisms in the health of soil. In this study, a comparative analysis of the bacterial and archaeal communities found in the rhizosphere of genetically modified (GM) versus wild-type (WT) poplar was conducted on trees at different growth stages (i.e., the rhizospheres of 1.5-, 2.5-, and 3-year-old poplars) that were cultivated on contaminated soils together with nonplanted control soil. Based on the results of DNA pyrosequencing, poplar type and growth stages were associated with directional changes in the structure of the microbial community. The rate of change was faster in GM poplars than in WT poplars, but the microbial communities were identical in the 3-year-old poplars. This phenomenon may arise because of a higher rate and greater extent of metal accumulation in GM poplars than in naturally occurring plants, which resulted in greater changes in soil environments and hence the microbial habitat.
Consumer responses to really new products: examining the impacts of learning strategies and presentation formats on product comprehension and attitude formation

Mental simulations and analogies have been identified as powerful learning tools for RNPs. Furthermore, visuals in advertising have recently been conceptualized as meaningful sources of information as opposed to peripheral cues and thus may help consumers learn about RNPs. The study of visual attention may also contribute to understanding the links between conceptual and perceptual analyses when learning for a RNP. Two conceptual models are developed. the first model consists of causal relationships between the attributes of advertising stimuli for RNPs and consumer responses, as well as mediating influences. The second model focuses on the role of visual attention in product comprehension as a response to advertising stimuli. Two experiments are conducted: a Web-Experiment and an eye-tracking experiment. The first experiment (858 subjects) examines the effect of learning strategies (mental simulation vs. analogy vs. no analogy/no mental simulation) and presentation formats (words vs. pictures) on individual responses. The mediating role of emotions is assessed. The second experiment investigates the effect of learning strategies and presentation formats on product comprehension, along with the role of attention (17 subjects). The findings from experiment 1 indicate that learning strategies and presentation formats can either enhance or undermine the effect of advertising stimuli on individual responses. Moreover, the nature of the product (i.e. hedonic vs. utilitarian vs. hybrid) should be considered when designing communications for RNPs. The mediating role of emotions is verified. Experiment 2 suggests that an increase in attention to the message may either reflect enhanced comprehension or confusion.
Influencers in Multiplayer Online Shooters: Evidence of Social Contagion in Playtime and Social Play

In a wide range of social networks, people's behavior is influenced by social contagion: we do what our network does. Networks often feature particularly influential individuals, commonly called "influencers. " Existing work suggests that in-game social networks in online games are similar to real-life social networks in many respects. However, we do not know whether there are in-game equivalents to influencers. We therefore applied standard social network features used to identify influencers to the online multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy's The Division. Results show that network feature-defined influencers had indeed an outsized impact on playtime and social play of players joining their in-game network.
An infrastructure for formally ensuring interoperability in a heterogeneous semantic web

Because different applications and different communities require different features, the semantic web might have to face the heterogeneity of the languages for expressing knowledge. Yet, it will be necessary for many applications to use knowledge coming from different sources. In such a context, ensuring the correct understanding of imported knowledge on a semantic ground is very important. We present here an infrastructure based on the notions of transformations from one language to another and of properties satisfied by transformations. We show, in the particular context of semantic properties and description logics markup language, how it is possible (1) to define properties of transformations, (2) to express, in a form easily processed by machine, the proof of a property and (3) to construct by composition a proof of properties satisfied by compound transformations. All these functions are based on extensions of current web standard languages.
Founder Effects for ATM Gene Mutations in Italian Ataxia Telangiectasia Families

We screened ATM gene mutations in 104 Italian Ataxia‐Telangiectasia patients from 91 unrelated families (detection rate 90%) and found 21 recurrent mutations in 63 families. The majority (67%) of patients were compound heterozygotes, while 33% were homozygotes. To determine the existence of common haplotypes and potential founder effects, we analyzed five microsatellite markers within and flanking the ATM gene. Haplotype analysis was carried out in 48/63 families harbouring 16 of the 21 recurrent mutations. Forty different haplotypes were detected in the 48 A‐T families studied. We found that the majority of patients with the same recurrent mutation originated from the same geographical area. All but one recurrent mutation analyzed displayed a common haplotype suggesting a single origin that then spread to different geographical areas. The high number of different haplotypes does not allow the screening of ATM mutations by haplotype analysis alone in the Italian population. The finding of recurrent public mutations without founder effect suggests the existence of ‘mild’ hot spots of mutation located along the sequence of the ATM gene.
Cluster Ensembles A Knowledge Reuse Framework for Combining Partitionings

It is widely recognized that combining multiple classification or regression models typically provides superior results compared to using a single, well-tuned model. However, there are no well known approaches to combining multiple non-hierarchical clusterings. The idea of combining cluster labelings without accessing the original features leads us to a general knowledge reuse framework that we call cluster ensembles . Our contribution in this paper is to formally define the cluster ensemble problem as an optimization problem and to propose three effective and efficient combiners for solving it based on a hypergraph model. Results on synthetic as well as real data sets are given to show that cluster ensembles can (i) improve quality and robustness, and (ii) enable distributed clustering.
Ethics for Business: The Contribution of Discourse Ethics and Critical Realism

Until fairly recently, businesses and corporations could argue that their only real commitments were to maximize the return to their shareholders whilst staying within the law within their local nation states. However, the world has changed significantly during the last ten years and now I think it fair to claim that most major corporations recognize that they have significant responsibility to local and global societies beyond simply making profit. All this means that there is now an increasing concern with the question of how corporations, and their employees, ought to behave, and this leads us to consider ethics as the appropriate theoretical and philosophical domain. I will bring into the debate two relatively recent approaches to ethics, Jurgen Habermas’s discourse ethics (stemming from his critical theory) and the critical realist approach of Bhaskar. These are interesting for several reasons: they both draw on traditional ethical theories, although different ones; they bring in new innovations of practical relevance; and they both share an over-arching critical perspective. The aim is to compare and contrast these with the traditional approaches to generate a potential ethical framework for business ethics.
Elasticity Management in Private and Hybrid Clouds

Cloud computing requires elasticity management for dynamically allocating and releasing resources. Even though the adoption of cloud services has been growing, there is little knowledge available for guiding users when they need to manage elasticity. This paper analyzes elasticity in private and hybrid clouds, using a university lab, PlanetLab and Amazon EC2. Results show that the choice of metrics and thresholds plays a key role in meeting performance levels and controlling costs and that cloudburst can be effectively used for a hybrid cloud but the choice of the type of virtual machine in the provider has a significant impact.
Enhancing Effects of Check-in/Check-out with Function-Based Support

Targeted interventions (also called Tier 2 interventions or secondary interventions) are implemented within a comprehensive three-tiered system of support consisting of universal interventions (for all students), targeted interventions (for students exhibiting mild behavioral difficulties), and intensive interventions (for students requiring individualized support). Check-in/check-out is a targeted intervention designed to reduce incidences of disruptive behavior and increase prosocial behavior. Although check-in/check-out has been shown to be effective in a number of published articles, studies are still needed documenting (a) the utility of this intervention when implemented by educators as part of the larger school system of support and (b) guidelines for increasing the likelihood the intervention is matched to students most likely to benefit. In the current study, the authors address both of these needs by evaluating effects of a school's implementation of check-in/check-out with two typically developing students in the school. When the intervention did not produce significant effects, the authors modified the intervention slightly based on outcomes of functional behavior assessments conducted prior to beginning the intervention; this resulted in positive outcomes for both students. These results demonstrate the utility of considering the function of problem behavior prior to implementing a targeted intervention such as check-in/check-out. Implications for other targeted interventions are discussed.
Efficient Key Updates through Subscription Re-encryption for Privacy-Preserving Publish/Subscribe

Content-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) is an appealing information dissemination paradigm for distributed systems. Consumers of data subscribe to a pub/sub service, typically offered through a distributed broker overlay, and indicate their interests as constraints over the information content. Publishers generate the information flow, which the brokers filter and route to the interested subscribers. Protecting the information confidentiality, and in particular the interests of subscribers, is an important concern when brokers are located in untrusted domains such as public clouds. Encrypted matching techniques allow untrusted brokers to store encrypted subscriptions and match them against encrypted publications. Updates of encryption keys regularly happen in such contexts due to changes in trust relations. These key updates cause the invalidation of stored encrypted subscriptions and force subscribers to re-encrypt and re-submit them. This long and costly operation impacts the pub/sub service continuity and performance. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that allows updating encrypted subscriptions directly at the brokers while maintaining privacy. We present an implementation of the technique for the ASPE encrypted matching scheme and prove the security of our extension. We evaluate its practical effectiveness through a prototype implementation including a dependable key distribution protocol. Our experiments show the ability to handle key updates while preserving service continuity and performance.
The Role of Social Signals in Telecommunication: Experimental Design

In this paper, we present the experimental design for the evaluation of the impact of social signal application on a user’s decision making in the area of telecommunications. The aim of the design is to show that user’s social signals are applicable feedbacks in conversational recommender systems. We use user satisfaction (with the system and content) evaluation criteria. During social interaction humans express social signals which provide quick feedbacks required by conversational recommender system. The experimental scenario is hands driven video-on-demand service with a conversational recommender system where the user selects among videos on screen. We limited our experimental scenario to the social signal of hesitation only. User is hesitating, when is faced with a variety of choices to make decisions (he is uncertain). The system adjusts the list of items to be recommended according to the extracted social signal {hesitation, no hesitation}.
Multi-port scattering matrix measurement using a reduced-port network analyzer

A novel method to acquire the scattering matrix of an n-port network from the measurements using a reduced-port network analyzer is developed. This method can obtain the scattering matrix of a nonreciprocal or reciprocal n-port network with the use of a three-port or two-port network analyzer. The formulation of this method considers the imperfection of terminators used in the measurement, and only two of the terminators are required to be known. Experimental results of a four-port microstrip circuit show the good accuracy using the developed method.
Identification of Genus Campylobacter and Four Enteropathogenic Campylobacter Species by PCR

Abstract Polymerase chain reactions based on the 16SrRNA gene, and specific genes, can be used to identifybacteria of the genus Campylobacter, and four Campylobacter species. A specificity test usingprimers of the genus Campylobacter from reference strains showed cross-reactivity with Helicobacterpylori. Multiplex PCR of the four Campylobacter spp found no amplicons. The lowest limit fordetection of the genus Campylobacter and the four Campylobacter spp were both 103 cfu/ml. Aftercollecting stool samples from patients at Nong Khai, Phrapokklao, and Khon Kaen hospitals, a total of160 samples were used to obtain cultures of Campylobacter spp. Six C. jejuni-positive specimens werepositive by the PCR method developed. This method may be suitable for diagnosing Campylobacterspp in clinical samples in the future. Keywords: Campylobacter, polymerase chain reaction
Survey of Dropout Methods for Deep Neural Networks

Dropout methods are a family of stochastic techniques used in neural network training or inference that have generated significant research interest and are widely used in practice. They have been successfully applied in neural network regularization, model compression, and in measuring the uncertainty of neural network outputs. While original formulated for dense neural network layers, recent advances have made dropout methods also applicable to convolutional and recurrent neural network layers. This paper summarizes the history of dropout methods, their various applications, and current areas of research interest. Important proposed methods are described in additional detail.
A Content-Adaptive Distortion–Quantization Model for H.264/AVC and its Applications

Accurately estimating the resultant quality or distortion associated with quantization parameter (QP) is very helpful to video encoding. In this research, a content-adaptive distortion-quantization model for H.264/AVC is proposed to predict the distortion level, which is defined as the difference between the original video frame and the decoded one in the sum of squared errors. The proposed model has only one adjustable parameter related to the macroblock content and provides a mapping between QP and the corresponding distortion before the exact encoding process. Given a targeted frame quality measured in peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), this model can help to assign a suitable QP value to each frame. Two applications are then presented, i.e., the single-pass constant frame PSNR coding and the two-pass coding with the additional bitrate or storage constraint, both of which may facilitate such applications of video archiving and editing. The experimental results show that the targeted PSNR of each decoded frame can be achieved effectively by the proposed mechanism.
Hippocampal sclerosis in the parkinsonism‐dementia complex of Guam: quantitative examination of neurons, neurofibrillary tangles, and TDP‐43 immunoreactivity in CA1

The cornu ammonis 1 (CA1) area in the hippocampus of the parkinsonism‐dementia complex (PDC) of Guam was examined quantitatively with special references to the number of neurons, intraneuronal (i) and extracellular (e) neurofibirillary tangles (NFTs), and TDP‐43 (43‐kDa trans‐activation‐responsive region DNA‐binding protein)‐immunopositive structures, in 24 Chamorro patients with PDC of Guam and seven control Chamorro Guamanians (both groups having no ischemic or anoxic complications). The results were that: (i) in the patients with mildly involved PDC, total numbers of neurons, iNFTs and eNFTs were almost the same as those of neurons of controls; (ii) in patients severely involved, total numbers of neurons, iNFTs and eNFTs decreased markedly; (iii) the decrease of the number of pyramidal neurons in CA1 with positive nuclear TDP‐43 was intimately correlated with the decrease in total neuron numbers; (iv) whereas the numbers of neurons and TDP‐43‐immunopositive intracytoplasmic aggregation in the CA1 area were inversely correlated; and (v) depression of nuclear TDP‐43 immuonostainability was not affected by the presence or absence of NFTs. In conclusion, hippocampal sclerosis exists in PDC; there is a possibility of elimination of eNFTs which appeared in the CA1 in patients with PDC and loss of the neurons correlates with disappearance of nuclear TDP‐43, but not with appearance of intraneurocytoplasmic TDP‐43 aggregation or iNFTs.
Zn2+ regulates Kv2.1 voltage‐dependent gating and localization following ischemia

The delayed‐rectifier K+ channel Kv2.1 exists in highly phosphorylated somatodendritic clusters. Ischemia induces rapid Kv2.1 dephosphorylation and a dispersal of these clusters, accompanied by a hyperpolarizing shift in their voltage‐dependent activation kinetics. Transient modulation of Kv2.1 activity and localization following ischemia is dependent on a rise in intracellular Ca2+and the protein phosphatase calcineurin. Here, we show that neuronal free Zn2+also plays a critical role in the ischemic modulation of Kv2.1. We found that sub‐lethal ischemia in cultured rat cortical neurons led to characteristic hyperpolarizing shifts in K+ current voltage dependency and pronounced dephosphorylation of Kv2.1. Zn2+chelation, similar to calcineurin inhibition, attenuated ischemic induced changes in K+ channel activation kinetics. Zn2+chelation during ischemia also blocked Kv2.1 declustering. Surprisingly, we found that the Zn2+rise following ischemia occurred in spite of calcineurin inhibition. Therefore, a calcineurin‐independent rise in neuronal free Zn2+ is critical in altering Kv2.1 channel activity and localization following ischemia. The identification of Zn2+ in mediating ischemic modulation of Kv2.1 may lead to a better understanding of cellular adaptive responses to injury.
Systematic error detection for RFID reliability

In this paper, we propose an approach to increase the reliability of RFID (radio frequency identification), not relying on the performance of each devices, but relying on a mechanism of entire networked system, which manages objects and/or people in the real world with RFID tags. We identified there exist many factors to reduce the accurate identifications of RFID tags, which results in the reduction of the total-system reliability. Moreover, we show the effect of our approach in diverse parameters such as the number of misidentifications, the length of transportations, the number of RFID readers.