Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cytotoxic Effect of Clerosterol Isolated from Codium fragile on A2058 Human Melanoma Cells

The cytotoxic effects and mechanism of action of clerosterol, isolated from the marine alga Codium fragile, were investigated in A2058 human melanoma cells. Clerosterol inhibited the growth of A2058 cells with an IC50 of 150 µM and induced apoptotic cell death, as evidenced by DNA fragmentation, an increase in the number of sub-G1 hypodiploid cells and the presence of apoptotic bodies. Clerosterol treatment caused the loss of mitochondrial membrane potential. Alterations in the expression of apoptosis-associated proteins in response to clerosterol treatment included upregulation of Bax, downregulation of Bcl-2 and activation of caspases 3 and 9. The pan-caspase inhibitor treatment attenuated the expression of the active form of caspases and cell death induced by clerosterol. The present results show that clerosterol exerts its cytotoxic effect in A2058 human melanoma cells by caspases-dependent apoptosis.
Optimal Use of Thienopyridines in Non-ST-Elevation Acute Coronary Syndrome Following CURRENT-OASIS 7

Over the past decades, antiplatelet therapy has evolved from the relatively weak oral agent aspirin to additional oral and parenteral agents with greater antiplatelet activity. One example of a successful agent is the second-generation thienopyridine clopidogrel. Clopidogrel inhibits platelet P2Y12 receptors and given with aspirin, which inhibits cyclooxygenase-1 enzyme, composes the actual standard of care of dual antiplatelet therapy.1–3 Dual antiplatelet therapy is recommended by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association, American College of Chest Physicians, and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) for patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and patients with ST-elevated myocardial infarction (STEMI) or unstable angina (UA)/non-STEMI (NSTEMI). 4–10 A common point of emphasis in these guidelines is the recommendation to provide a clopidogrel loading dose (LD) before PCI, although uncertainty remains in these recommendations on the optimal dose and optimal timing of administration. Whereas the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association UA/NSTEMI guidelines recommend a 300-mg clopidogrel LD, they acknowledge that although the supporting evidence is much weaker than that for a 300-mg LD, a higher dose of 600 or 900 mg may be more beneficial in some circumstances.8 The PCI guidelines recommend a 600-mg clopidogrel LD before or during the procedure.10 The ESC guidelines suggest that a 600-mg LD may be initiated immediately after the first medical contact for invasively managed patients with NSTEMI.5,6 Unfortunately, there are no clinical data and, therefore, no recommendation on the maintenance dose (MD) during the acute phase or chronic phase. The Clopidogrel Optimal Loading Dose Usage to Reduce Recurrent Events/Optimal Antiplatelet Strategy for Interventions (CURRENT-OASIS 7) trial is the first large-scale, randomized trial to compare 2 strategies: high-dose clopidogrel (600-mg LD/150-mg MD) versus standard-dose clopidogrel (300-mg LD/75-mg MD) to assess the added benefit of a higher platelet …
Boredom, Drugs, and Schools: Protecting Children in Gentrifying Communities

Gentrification beings a host of economic and social changes. Changes in community culture do not directly impact residents’ livelihoods or homes, but these differences in lifestyles shape peoples’ experiences of their homes. I examine rhetoric in three gentrifying neighborhoods in Atlanta, GA to see how it expresses both the uncertainty that new and long–time residents feel about their communities, and how it is indicative of boundary–work residents engage in to distinguish their group from the “others. ” Residents express concern about the safety and happiness of children in demographically changing communities. I find that residents focus on threats to children as a socially acceptable way to object to the different class, and sometimes race, background of their neighbors. This boundary maintenance activity serves to calcify divisions between groups of residents, and obscures the underlying schisms between the privileged and less–privileged residents in gentrifying neighborhoods.
First 3-D Reconstructions of Targets Hidden Beneath Foliage by Means of Polarimetric SAR Tomography

SAR tomography (SARTom) is an imaging technique that allows multiple phase center separation in the vertical direction, leading to a 3-D reconstruction of the imaged scene. The retrieval of volume structure information (e.g., for forest classification) and the solution of the layover problem are two of the most promising applications. In this letter, SARTom, in combination with polarimetry (PolSARTom), is exploited to image and to extract characteristic features (e.g., shape and height) of targets hidden beneath foliage. This analysis is applied to L-band airborne data acquired by the E-SAR system of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) during a tomographic campaign that took place in September 2006 on the test site of Dornstetten (Germany).
Student placement analyzer: A recommendation system using machine learning

One of the biggest challenges that higher learning institutions face today is to improve the placement performance of students. The placement prediction is more complex when the complexity of educational entities increase. Educational institutes look for more efficient technology that assist better management and support decision making procedures or assist them to set new strategies. One of the effective ways to address the challenges for improving the quality is to provide new knowledge related to the educational processes and entities to the managerial system. With the machine learning techniques the knowledge can be extracted from operational and historical data that resides within the educational organization's databases using. The dataset for system implementation contains information about past data of students. These data are used for training the model for rule identification and for testing the model for classification. This paper presents a recommendation system that predicts the students to have one of the five placement statuses, viz., Dream Company, Core Company, Mass Recruiters, Not Eligible and Not Interested in Placements. This model helps the placement cell within an organization to identify the prospective students and pay attention to and improve their technical as well as interpersonal skills. Furthermore, the students in pre-final and final years of their B. Tech course can also use this system to know their individual placement status that they are most likely to achieve. With this they can put in more hardwork for getting placed in to the companies that belong to higher hierarchies.
Entwicklung einer Simulationsumgebung für hochgradig multimodale Wellenleiterstrukturen

Future high performance computer systems with multiple high speed processors per board will require data bandwidth in excess of what is possible with existing electrical connections. The introduction of optical communication channels on the board level could eliminate this potential future bottleneck. To make this possible, optical waveguides and optical transmitters and receivers have to be integrated into the design and production workflow for such systems. In this work an environment for the simulation and investigation of two new problems, which occur when integrating multimode optical waveguides at the board level, was developed. The first problem is that waveguides are laid into much sharper bends when integrated into printed circuit boards, then in other optical data transmission systems, which leads to significant losses in signal strength. The second problem is that the surfaces of waveguides embedded into printed circuit boards are much rougher than for example those of optical fibers. This leads to greater losses and coupling between different modes. For both problems an approach using ray tracing was used and all the software was written in MatLabc ©.
Petri Net Diagnosability Analyzer

This paper presents a software tool to deal with the diagnosis of discrete-event system modeled by labeled Petri nets (LPNs). This tool, called PEtri-Net-based Diagnosability Analyzer (PENDA), is an updated version of the prototype that implements our techniques for (K-)diagnosability analysis of discrete-event models. In order to cope with the state explosion problem that arises when establishing a diagnoser, PENDA implements an incremental and on-the-fly algorithm to analyze (K-)diagnosability while partially building the state space of the LPN. In addition, several improvements have been carried out in the source code to improve the time/memory efficiency of the analysis. The current version shows better performance and allows for handling LPN models encoded in the standard PNML format.
Survey of Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

An ad hoc network consists of a number of mobile hosts who communicate with each other over a wireless channel without any centralized control. The basic problem is to obtain a distributed routing scheme so that under the network connectivity assumption any mobile host can transmit/receive data from any other host in the network. Due to the lack of any infrastructure, a host may need the aid of other hosts to route a packet to the destination. The algorithms should provide loopfree routes, multiple routes (wireless bandwidth is usually scarce), allow scalability, and run in a timely fashion such that the topology does not change before the routes are created. In this paper we survey the existing algorithms of ad hoc routing and attempt a classi cation based on their capacity to adapt under conditions such as: high/low mobility, high/normal node density, di erent tra c patterns, average per message latency.
Using Physical Context in a Mobile Social Networking Application for Improving Friend Recommendations

In online social networks such as Face book, people receive friend recommendations that are based usually on common friends or similar profile such as having the same interest or coming from the same company. However, people receive friend spam in which they do not know why they should add this friend. If we can record the physical context then we can determine how you met that person, and use that for recommending that person to you. In this paper, we create a friend recommendation system using proximity encounters and meetings as physical context called Encounter Meet. We conduct a user study to examine whether physical context-based friend recommendations is better than common friends. Results show that on average, the Encounter Meet algorithm recommended more friends to participants that they added and more recommendations were ranked as good, compared with the common friend algorithm. The results can be used to help design context-aware recommendations in physical environments.
Pulmonary Vein Antrum Isolation in Patients With Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation: More Than a Decade of Follow-Up

Background—We report the outcome of pulmonary vein (PV) antrum isolation in paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (AF) patients over more than a decade of follow-up. Methods and Results—A total of 513 paroxysmal AF patients (age 54±11 years, 73% males) undergoing catheter ablation at our institutions were included in this analysis. PV antrum isolation extended to the posterior wall between PVs plus empirical isolation of the superior vena cava was performed in all. Non-PV triggers were targeted during repeat procedure(s). Follow-up was performed quarterly for the first year and every 6 to 9 months thereafter. The outcome of this study was freedom from recurrent AF/atrial tachycardia. At 12 years, single-procedure arrhythmia-free survival was achieved in 58.7% of patients. Overall, the rate of recurrent arrhythmia (AF/atrial tachycardia) was 21% at 1 year, 11% between 1 and 3 years, 4% between 3 and 6 years, and 5.3% between 6 and 12 years. Repeat procedure was performed in 74% of patients. Reconnection in the PV antrum was found in 31% of patients after a single procedure and in no patients after 2 procedures. Non-PV triggers were found and targeted in all patients presenting with recurrent arrhythmia after ≥2 procedures. At 12 years, after multiple procedures, freedom from recurrent AF/atrial tachycardia was achieved in 87%. Conclusions—In patients with paroxysmal AF undergoing extended PV antrum isolation, the rate of late recurrence is lower than what previously reported with segmental or less extensive antral isolation. However, over more than a decade of follow-up, nearly 14% of patients developed recurrence because of new non-PV triggers.
Exploiting Concurrency Vulnerabilities in System Call Wrappers

System call interposition allows the kernel security model to be extended. However, when combined with current operating systems, it is open to concurrency vulnerabilities leading to privilege escalation and audit bypass. We discuss the theory and practice of system call wrapper concurrency vulnerabilities, and demonstrate exploit techniques against GSWTK, Systrace, and CerbNG.
Establishing the Range of Perceptually Natural Visual Walking Speeds for Virtual Walking-In-Place Locomotion

Walking-In-Place (WIP) techniques make it possible to facilitate relatively natural locomotion within immersive virtual environments that are larger than the physical interaction space. However, in order to facilitate natural walking experiences one needs to know how to map steps in place to virtual motion. This paper describes two within-subjects studies performed with the intention of establishing the range of perceptually natural walking speeds for WIP locomotion. In both studies, subjects performed a series of virtual walks while exposed to visual gains (optic flow multipliers) ranging from 1.0 to 3.0. Thus, the slowest speed was equal to an estimate of the subjects normal walking speed, while the highest speed was three times greater. The perceived naturalness of the visual speed was assessed using self-reports. The first study compared four different types of movement, namely, no leg movement, walking on a treadmill, and two forms of gestural input for WIP locomotion. The results suggest that WIP locomotion is accompanied by a perceptual distortion of the speed of optic flow. The second study was performed using a 4×2 factorial design and compared four different display field-of-views (FOVs) and two types of movement, walking on a treadmill and WIP locomotion. The results revealed significant main effects of both movement type and field of view, but no significant interaction between the two variables. Particularly, they suggest that the size of the display FOV is inversely proportional to the degree of underestimation of the virtual speeds for both treadmill-mediated virtual walking and WIP locomotion. Combined, the results constitute a first attempt at establishing a set of guidelines specifying what virtual walking speeds WIP gestures should produce in order to facilitate a natural walking experience.
Using Communication Infrastructure Theory to Formulate a Strategy to Locate “Hard-to-Reach” Research Participants

In health-communication research, participants who are disproportionately affected by health disparities are often “hard-to-reach,” making them difficult to identify for formative research. This study used communication infrastructure theory (CIT) to create a strategy for locating a specific subset of residents—those who use 911 for healthcare—within a low-income Atlanta community. Findings suggest the need for strategies that involve employing both the communication channels that are part of the neighborhood storytelling network and the community's discursive spaces, more specifically the communication hot spots and community comfort zones located within the community's built environment.
ERECT PANICLE2 Encodes a Novel Protein That Regulates Panicle Erectness in Indica Rice

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) inflorescence (panicle) architecture is an important agronomic trait for rice breeding. A number of high-yielding japonica rice strains, characterized by an erect panicle (EP) of their architecture, have been released as commercial varieties in China. But no EP-type indica varieties are released so far. Here, we identified two allelic erect-panicle mutants in indica rice, erect panicle2-1 (ep2-1) and erect panicle2-2 (ep2-2), exhibiting the characteristic erect panicle phenotype. Both mutants were derived from spontaneous mutation. We cloned the EP2 gene by way of a map-based cloning strategy, and a transgenic complementation test rescued the phenotype of ep2-1. Anatomical investigations revealed that the ep2 mutants have more vascular bundles and a thicker stem than that of wild-type plants, explaining the panicle erectness phenotype in ep2 mutants. It was shown that EP2 was specifically expressed in the vascular bundles of internodes by GUS staining and RT–PCR. EP2 encodes a novel plant-specific protein, which localizes to the endoplasmic reticulum with unknown biochemical function. In addition, EP2 also regulates other panicle characteristics, such as panicle length and grain size, but grain number per panicle shows little change, indicating that the mutation of the ep2 gene could be applied in EP-type indica rice breeding.
Study on optimal slip ratio identification and traction control for electric vehicle

The key technologies of Traction Control System (TCS) are the identification of the optimal slip ratio and the control of the optimal drive wheel slip ratio. This paper applies a Two-stage estimator, which integrates the recursive least-square algorithm with forgetting factor and the PI estimator, to estimate the real-time road adhesion coefficient. Then, the fuzzy analysis is applied for classification of the current road conditions and calculation of the optimal slip ratio for current road condition. A PID controller is used to control the electric motor torque to keep the real-time slip ratio of the drive wheels around the optimum slip ratio. Finally, the vehicle test verifies the identification and the control of the drive wheel slip ratio effective.
Enhanced Neutralizing Antibody Titers and Th1 Polarization from a Novel Escherichia coli Derived Pandemic Influenza Vaccine

Influenza pandemics can spread quickly and cost millions of lives; the 2009 H1N1 pandemic highlighted the shortfall in the current vaccine strategy and the need for an improved global response in terms of shortening the time required to manufacture the vaccine and increasing production capacity. Here we describe the pre-clinical assessment of a novel 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza vaccine based on the E. coli-produced HA globular head domain covalently linked to virus-like particles derived from the bacteriophage Qβ. When formulated with alum adjuvant and used to immunize mice, dose finding studies found that a 10 µg dose of this vaccine (3.7 µg globular HA content) induced antibody titers comparable to a 1.5 µg dose (0.7 µg globular HA content) of the licensed 2009 H1N1 pandemic vaccine Panvax, and significantly reduced viral titers in the lung following challenge with 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza A/California/07/2009 virus. While Panvax failed to induce marked T cell responses, the novel vaccine stimulated substantial antigen-specific interferon-γ production in splenocytes from immunized mice, alongside enhanced IgG2a antibody production. In ferrets the vaccine elicited neutralizing antibodies, and following challenge with influenza A/California/07/2009 virus reduced morbidity and lowered viral titers in nasal lavages.
Problems in Agile Global Software Engineering Projects especially within Traditionally Organised Corporations: [An exploratory semi-structured interview study]

Agile methods are used for different kinds of software development, even for complex and distributed projects. This leads to a mixture of traditional company organisation as well as project organisation and agile concepts, especially when agile methods are applied within traditionally organised corporations. Therefore, the main objective of this exploratory semi-structured interview study is to phrase out the occurring problems of this mixture, to describe them, to name their possible effects and to suggest potential solutions. Practitioners as well as researchers can use those information to improve their projects and to investigate possible solutions to lessen the described problems. During our study we have interviewed seven persons in six interviews who were working for five different companies in Germany. Our analysis revealed eight problems of agile global software engineering projects. Three of them are more likely and more harmful when traditionally organised corporations are involved. But one of those three problems seems solely occurring in global software engineering projects where one or more traditionally organised corporations take part.
New Steganography Scheme in Halftone Images

A so-called DHCED (Data Hiding by Conjugate Error Diffusion) method was proposed to hide a binary visual secret into halftone images such that the watermarked halftone image still has good visual quality. When decoding, the secret can be visually revealed by directly superimposing the halftone images. The authors claimed that the DHCED scheme reduced the boundary artifacts around the hidden visual secret in the watermarked halftone image than the previous schemes. However, the DHCED scheme does not achieve the perfect secrecy like the steganography scheme and is still compromised by the gradient-attack In this paper, by combining the halftoning technique and the visual cryptography technique, we introduce a new steganography scheme for halftone images. Our new scheme has the perfect secrecy that one cannot gain any information from the watermarked halftone image by either the human visual system or the computer program.
Grouping and Achievement in Cooperative Learning

Abstract Colleges typically group students homogeneously in classes by means of both admission requirements and course prerequisites, but when professors form cooperative learning groups within classes they generally use heterogeneous grouping. Authors compared heterogeneously and homogeneously grouped cooperative learning groups in six paired classes, taught by the same professor using matching syllabi and assignments. Overall, homogeneously grouped students (who were grouped based on achievement on the first test given in the course) significantly outperformed heterogeneously grouped students on the final examination. High- or average-achieving students particularly benefited from homogenous grouping. Low achievers did equally well in either type of group.
A Library of Analog Operators Based on the Hodgkin-Huxley Formalism for the Design of Tunable, Real-Time, Silicon Neurons

In this paper, we present a library of analog operators used for the analog real-time computation of the Hodgkin-Huxley formalism. These operators make it possible to design a silicon (Si) neuron that is dynamically tunable, and that reproduces different kinds of neurons. We used an original method in neuromorphic engineering to characterize this Si neuron. In electrophysiology, this method is well known as the “voltage-clamp” technique. We also compare the features of an application-specific integrated circuit built with this library with results obtained from software simulations. We then present the complex behavior of neural membrane voltages and the potential applications of this Si neuron.