Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analgesic and Anti-Inflammatory Activities of Aqueous Extracts of Fructus Ligustri Lucidi

Fructus Ligustri Lucidi has been used for its anti-inflammatory effects in traditional Chinese medicine. This study investigated the analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects of aqueous extracts of Fructus Ligustri Lucidi (AFLL) in mice. AFLL significantly inhibited the production of radicals and lipid oxidation in various models. The reference compounds present in AFLL, including quercetin, myricetin, caffeic acid, gallic acid and ellagic acid, exhibited the pharmacological activities by scavenging radicals and decreasing LPS-induced nitric oxide (NO) production in macrophages. Administration of AFLL showed a concentration dependent inhibition on the number of acetic acid-induced writhing responses and formalin-induced pain in the late phase, and paw edema development after Carr treatment in mice. The anti-inflammatory activities of AFLL could be via NO and tumor necrosis factor α(TNF-α) suppression and associated with the increase in the activities of catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx). Western blotting revealed that AFLL decreased Carr-induced inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) expressions. These results suggest that anti-inflammatory mechanisms of AFLL might be correlated to the decrease in the level of malondialdehyde (MDA), iNOS and COX-2 in the edema paw via increasing the activities of CAT, SOD and GPx in the liver. Overall, the results showed that AFLL could serve as a natural source of antioxidant, analgesic and anti-inflammation.
Dilemmas in Witnessing Elder Abuse in Caregiving Situations : A Family Member Perspective

Family members who witness elder abuse could be valuable partners to nurses and support personnel in case identification and intervention. The aim of this study was to explore an adult family member’s experiences of witnessing family situations of elder abuse. Interviews were conducted with a woman who had witnessed situations of elder abuse involving her uncle, his wife with disabilities, and health care personnel. Interviews were analyzed using van Manen’s thematic analysis and conception of narrative anecdotes, and development of poetic representations. The witness described conflictual feelings about her family and caregiving situation but felt there were no support personnel she could trust. She felt powerless and remained passive out of loyalty to family, need to protect family, and feeling shame that this was her family. Although she knew what she ought to do she could not live up to her ideals and instead tolerated escalating abuse. The family member witness viewed healthcare personnel as also tolerating and carrying responsibility for the abuse situation. For nurses and support personnel these findings point to the importance of personal and professional reflection and collegial discussions on morality, practice, what we see, and more importantly, what we do not see or want to see.
Isoproterenol Induces Vascular Oxidative Stress and Endothelial Dysfunction via a Giα-Coupled β2-Adrenoceptor Signaling Pathway

Objective Sustained β-adrenergic stimulation is a hallmark of sympathetic hyperactivity in cardiovascular diseases. It is associated with oxidative stress and altered vasoconstrictor tone. This study investigated the β-adrenoceptor subtype and the signaling pathways implicated in the vascular effects of β-adrenoceptor overactivation. Methods and Results Mice lacking the β1- or β2-adrenoceptor subtype (β1KO, β2KO) and wild-type (WT) were treated with isoproterenol (ISO, 15 μg.g−1.day−1, 7 days). ISO significantly enhanced the maximal vasoconstrictor response (Emax) of the aorta to phenylephrine in WT (+34%) and β1KO mice (+35%) but not in β2KO mice. The nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitor L-NAME abolished the differences in phenylephrine response between the groups, suggesting that ISO impaired basal NO availability in the aorta of WT and β1KO mice. Superoxide dismutase (SOD), pertussis toxin (PTx) or PD 98,059 (p-ERK 1/2 inhibitor) incubation reversed the hypercontractility of aortic rings from ISO-treated WT mice; aortic contraction of ISO-treated β2KO mice was not altered. Immunoblotting revealed increased aortic expression of Giα-3 protein (+50%) and phosphorylated ERK1/2 (+90%) and decreased eNOS dimer/monomer ratio in ISO-treated WT mice. ISO enhanced the fluorescence response to dihydroethidium (+100%) in aortas from WT mice, indicating oxidative stress that was normalized by SOD, PTx and L-NAME. The ISO effects were abolished in β2KO mice. Conclusions The β2-adrenoceptor/Giα signaling pathway is implicated in the enhanced vasoconstrictor response and eNOS uncoupling-mediated oxidative stress due to ISO treatment. Thus, long-term β2-AR activation might results in endothelial dysfunction.
Single Photon Sources

Graham Jensen: We present the results of an investigation to verify the feasibility of quantum dots and color-centered nanodiamonds as single photon sources. Using a confocal microscope incorporated into a Hanbury Brown and Twiss setup, the antibunched nature of the fluorescence of these sources is revealed. Along with a qualitative observation of antibunching in a histogram, the fluorescence lifetime of quantum dots is measured. The average fluorescence lifetime of quantum dots is determined to be ( ) . In addition to these parameters, observations of the spectrum and atomic force microscope profiles of color-centered nanodiamonds are recorded.
Making Network Interfaces Less Peripheral

A barrier to delivering improvements in network bandwidth and latency to users is the network interface (NI), which connects a network to the host computer that runs the network software. An NI includes hardware that exposes an internal interface-such as device registers-to a host processor. A key problem with most current NIs is that their internal interface is similar to that of a disk's interface. Because of such limitations, current NIs will not be adequate for use with newer, high-performance networks and host computers. High-performance local area networks have advanced so far that some view them as a new class of networks called system area networks (SANs). Emerging SANs deliver bandwidths of 10 Gbps or more and latencies of tens of nanoseconds-two to four orders of magnitude better than that delivered by most current LANs. New hosts demand much higher performance. If NIs do not adapt to these changes they will become a barrier to improving network performance. To solve this problem, future NIs should appear to their hosts more like memory than disk interfaces. The authors argue that treating NI accesses like memory accesses is justified by the importance of network performance to future computers.
Weblogs – Virtual Discussion in Educational Settings

Based on a comprehensive theoretical framework [1] – in which we (Baumgartner, Bergner and Pullich suggest a typology of Content Management Systems (CMSes)) – this article explores more in detail the intrinsic functionality of weblogs from an educational perspective. I will summarize different aspects of weblogs, which are unique for weblogs and central for their discursive educational usage: • Personal micro content updated frequently • Automatic reorganization on a calendar basis (daily, monthly, yearly archiving) • TrackBack mechanism as a way of establishing a virtual discussion context • Blogrolls as a means of creating a virtual discussion group and • RSS Feeds for syndication and subscription 1 Introductory Remark As outlined in recently published works [1, 2], our research group on educational technology combines Donald Schön’s Action Theory [3,4] with the Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas [5,6]. Our goal is to elaborate an action-communication approach and to apply it to everyday problems of eEducation. We are especially interested in providing support for teachers and learners alike for selecting necessary educational technology for their pedagogical goals. This resulted in an educationally motivated categorization scheme where Weblogs are characterized as specifically suitable for building up a virtual discussion context. Weblogs are one of the most discussed trends in business and education alike. It is clear that weblogs will have a bright future as a personal web publishing tool, but will they also invade the education and business areas? And more important: will their use mean just another tool or a radical change? In my presentation I will concentrate on the educational field, but I believe that my arguments will hold for cooperate e-Learning as well. In this article I will outline 4 important features of weblogs and characterize their features in an educational setting. 2 Micro Content and Personal Knowledge History Weblogs are defined as frequently updated websites where the entries – called posts – have a timestamp and are presented in a reverse chronological order with the most recent posts at the top of the page [7]. From a perspective where the teaching-learning relation is essentially seen as a special kind of communication, this intrinsic feature of weblogs has some educational ramifications.
Clients' and carers' experiences of an Early Intervention for Psychosis Service

Early Intervention Services (EISs) for Psychosis have developed rapidly over the past decade. They offer support to people aged between 14-35 years of age with a first presentation of psychotic symptoms or during the first three years of psychotic illness. A plethora of research has explored the effectiveness of the EIS approach in terms of clinical outcomes, but few studies have explored clients’ and carers’ experiences of such services. This study focussed on clients’ and carers’ views and experiences of an EIS. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 participants (8 clients and 5 carers) who had been involved with an EIS for at least six months. The data were collected and analysed using a Grounded Theory approach. The analysis suggested that the experiences of participants could be portrayed in terms of three interrelated core categories: i) ‘Engagement’ – comprised of factors that help or hinder engagement with the service; ii) ‘Ongoing involvement’ – comprised of factors that challenge or support continued involvement with the service (and with the client’s recovery); and iii) ‘Towards Independence’ – comprised of factors that help or hinder the process of moving on and the transition from service involvement towards independence. A varied list of personal, staff and service factors appeared to be related to various aspects of the three core categories. Findings from this study are discussed in terms of their clinical implications. It is suggested that the effectiveness of EIS provision might be enhanced by promoting awareness of mental health difficulties and the availability of this type of service, providing training to EIS staff and allied professionals, and encouraging the delivery of interventions targeted specifically at carers. It is suggested that future research could usefully explore the experiences of other people who may play an important role in the lives of those experiencing first episode psychosis, including mental health professionals, siblings and peers.
Group Recommender Systems: Combining User-User and Item-Item Collaborative Filtering Techniques

Recommender Systems, these days, are no longer personal recommender systems, rather they are group recommender systems which list out recommendations for a group of users. Also, they are an integral part of today's web sites (mainly shopping, search engine etc.) who want to keep track of their users' preferences. Although we cannot build a recommender system for every individual, we can build a recommender system which considers the preferences of a group of users. Hence the concept of group recommendation is even more difficult. Recent researches transpire that there is no efficient group recommendation technique available in the market and also the techniques developed till date are good for individual application or web sites. In this paper we have proposed a new approach to group recommender system using collaborative filtering technique which is one of the two techniques of building recommender systems. In our proposed method we have combined the features of item-item collaborative filtering as well as user-user collaborative filtering to make efficient group recommendation by making homogeneous groups. We have also made a sincere attempt to list out the precision of our group recommender system by using the movie lens data set which is mostly used worldwide for recommender system testing.
Synthetic niche substrates engineered via two‐photon laser polymerization for the expansion of human mesenchymal stromal cells

The present study reports on the development of an innovative culture substrate, micro‐fabricated by two‐photon laser polymerization (2PP) in a hybrid organic–inorganic photoresin. It was previously demonstrated that this substrate is able to guide spontaneous homing and colonization of mesenchymal stromal cells by the presence of synthetic microniches. Here, the number of niches covering the culture substrate was increased up to 10% of the total surface. Human bone marrow‐derived mesenchymal stromal cells were expanded for 3 weeks and then their proliferation, clonogenic capacity and bilineage differentiation potential towards the osteogenic and adipogenic lineage were evaluated, both by colorimetric assays and by real‐time polymerase chain reaction. Compared with cells cultured on glass substrates, cells expanded on 2PP substrates showed a greater colony diameter, which is an index of clonogenic potential. Following medium conditioning on 2PP‐cultured cells, the expression of RUNX2 and BSP genes, as well as PPAR‐gamma, was significantly greater than that measured on glass controls. Thus, human cells expanded on the synthetic niche substrate maintained their proliferative potential, clonogenic capacity and bilineage differentiation potential more effectively than cells expanded on glass substrates and in some aspects were comparable to non‐expanded cells. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Secure top-k query processing via untrusted location-based service providers

This paper considers a novel distributed system for collaborative location-based information generation and sharing which become increasingly popular due to the explosive growth of Internet-capable and location-aware mobile devices. The system consists of a data collector, data contributors, location-based service providers (LBSPs), and system users. The data collector gathers reviews about points-of-interest (POIs) from data contributors, while LBSPs purchase POI data sets from the data collector and allow users to perform location-based top-k queries which ask for the POIs in a certain region and with the highest k ratings for an interested POI attribute. In practice, LBSPs are untrusted and may return fake query results for various bad motives, e.g., in favor of POIs willing to pay. This paper presents two novel schemes for users to detect fake top-k query results as an effort to foster the practical deployment and use of the proposed system. The efficacy and efficiency of our schemes are thoroughly analyzed and evaluated.
Cerebral Perfusion Measurements in Elderly with Hypertension Using Arterial Spin Labeling

Purpose The current study assesses the feasibility and value of crushed cerebral blood flow (CBFcrushed) and arterial transit time (ATT) estimations for large clinical imaging studies in elderly with hypertension. Material and Methods Two pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (ASL) scans with (CBFcrushed) and without flow crushers (CBFnon-crushed) were performed in 186 elderly with hypertension, from which CBF and ATT maps were calculated. Standard flow territory maps were subdivided into proximal, intermediate and distal flow territories, based on the measured ATT. The coefficient of variation (CV) and physiological correlations with age and gender were compared between the three perfusion parameters. Results There was no difference in CV between CBFcrushed and CBFnon-crushed (15–24%, p>0.4) but the CV of ATT (4–9%) was much smaller. The total gray matter correlations with age and gender were most significant with ATT (p = .016 and p<.001 respectively), in between for CBFcrushed (p = .206 and p = .019) and least significant for CBFnon-crushed (p = .236 and p = .100). Conclusion These data show the feasibility and added value of combined measurements of both crushed CBF and ATT for group analyses in elderly with hypertension. The obtained flow territories provide knowledge on vascular anatomy of elderly with hypertension and can be used in future studies to investigate regional vascular effects.
Optimizing Batch Linear Queries under Exact and Approximate Differential Privacy

Differential privacy is a promising privacy-preserving paradigm for statistical query processing over sensitive data. It works by injecting random noise into each query result such that it is provably hard for the adversary to infer the presence or absence of any individual record from the published noisy results. The main objective in differentially private query processing is to maximize the accuracy of the query results while satisfying the privacy guarantees. Previous work, notably Li et al. [2010], has suggested that, with an appropriate strategy, processing a batch of correlated queries as a whole achieves considerably higher accuracy than answering them individually. However, to our knowledge there is currently no practical solution to find such a strategy for an arbitrary query batch; existing methods either return strategies of poor quality (often worse than naive methods) or require prohibitively expensive computations for even moderately large domains. Motivated by this, we propose a low-rank mechanism (LRM), the first practical differentially private technique for answering batch linear queries with high accuracy. LRM works for both exact (i.e., ε-) and approximate (i.e., (ε, Δ)-) differential privacy definitions. We derive the utility guarantees of LRM and provide guidance on how to set the privacy parameters, given the user's utility expectation. Extensive experiments using real data demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art query processing solutions under differential privacy, by large margins.
Depolarizing Actions of Hydrogen Sulfide on Hypothalamic Paraventricular Nucleus Neurons

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a novel neurotransmitter that has been shown to influence cardiovascular functions as well and corticotrophin hormone (CRH) secretion. Since the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) is a central relay center for autonomic and endocrine functions, we sought to investigate the effects of H2S on the neuronal population of the PVN. Whole cell current clamp recordings were acquired from the PVN neurons and sodium hydrosulfide hydrate (NaHS) was bath applied at various concentrations (0.1, 1, 10, and 50 mM). NaHS (1, 10, and 50 mM) elicited a concentration-response relationship from the majority of recorded neurons, with almost exclusively depolarizing effects following administration. Cells responded and recovered from NaHS administration quickly and the effects were repeatable. Input differences from baseline and during the NaHS-induced depolarization uncovered a biphasic response, implicating both a potassium and non-selective cation conductance. The results from the neuronal population of the PVN shed light on the possible physiological role that H2S has in autonomic and endocrine function.
On the parallel computation thesis

We develop a generic programming language for parallel algorithms, one that works for all data structures and control structures. We show that any parallel algorithm satisfying intuitively-appealing postulates can be modeled by a collection of cells, each of which is an abstract state machine, augmented with the ability to spawn new cells. The cells all run the same algorithm and communicate via a shared global memory. Using a formal definition of what makes such an algorithm effective, we prove the validity of the Parallel Computation Thesis, according to which all reasonable parallel models of computation have roughly equivalent running times. La filosofia e scritta in questo grandissimo libro che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi a gli occhi (io dico l’universo) ma non si puo intender se prima non s’ impara a intender la lingua e conoscere i caratteri ne’ quali e scritto. Egli e scritto in lingua matematica e i caratteri sono triangoli, cerchi, ed altre figure geometriche senza i quali mezi e impossibile a intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi e un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro laberinto. —Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore) This work was carried out in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree [22] of the second author. The first author’s research benefitted from a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies (France), with the financial support of the French state, managed by the French National Research Agency’s “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+). A portion of this article was presented in a talk entitled, “Generic Parallel Algorithms,” at Computability in Europe (CiE) 2014 [16]. “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open
Comprehensive Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (CTONI)

From the first mental test devised by Simon and Binet in the early 1900's, nonverbal and performance tests have been an integral part of ability assessment. Early in this century test developers realized there was a need for these types of items and instruments. The evaluation of foreign language persons, speech and language impaired, hearing impaired, orthopedically handicapped, etc. was at a disadvantage when evaluated only by verbal instruments. The CTONI can be used with students ages 6 years to 18 years 11 months who can understand the directions for the subtests: formulate
PERCEPTION OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION WORKERS TOWARDS SAFETY, HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT

The construction industry is known as one of the most hazardous activities. Therefore, safety on the job site is an important aspect with respect to the overall safety in construction. This paper assesses the safety level perception of the construction building workers towards safety, health and environment on a construction job site in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The above study was carried out by choosing 5 selected large building construction projects and 5 small building construction projects respectively in and around Kuala Lumpur area. In the present study, an exhaustive survey was carried out in these 10 project site areas using a standard checklist and a detailed developed questionnaire. The checklist comprised 17 divisions of safety measurements which are considered and perceived to be important from the safety point of view and was assessed based on the score obtained. The questionnaire comprised the general information with 36 safety attitude statements on a 1-5 Likert scale which was distributed to 100 construction workers. The results of the checklist show the difference of safety levels between the large and small projects. The study revealed that the large projects shown a high and consistent level in safety while the small projects shown a low and varied safety levels. The relationship between the factors can be obtained from the questionnaire. They are organizational commitment, factor influencing communication among workmates, worker related factors, personal role and supervisors' role factors, obstacles to safety and safe behavior factors and management commitment at all levels in line with the management structure and risk taking behavioral factors. The findings of the present study revealed invaluable indications to the construction managers especially in improving the construction workers' attitude towards safety, health and environment and hence good safety culture in the building construction industries.