Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential Inactivation of Postsynaptic Density‐Associated and Soluble Ca2+/Calmodulin‐Dependent Protein Kinase II by Protein Phosphatases 1 and 2A

Abstract: Autophosphorylation of Ca2+/calmodulin‐dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) at Thr286 generates Ca2+‐independent activity. As an initial step toward understanding CaMKII inactivation, protein phosphatase classes (PP1, PP2A, PP2B, or PP2C) responsible for dephosphorylation of Thr286 in rat forebrain subcellular fractions were identified using phosphatase inhibitors/activators, by fractionation using ion exchange chromatography and by immunoblotting. PP2A‐like enzymes account for >70% of activity toward exogenous soluble Thr286‐autophosphorylated CaMKII in crude cytosol, membrane, and cytoskeletal extracts; PP1 and PP2C account for the remaining activity. CaMKII is present in particulate fractions, specifically associated with postsynaptic densities (PSDs); each protein phosphatase is also present in isolated PSDs, but only PP1 is enriched during PSD isolation. When isolated PSDs dephosphorylated exogenous soluble Thr286‐autophosphorylated CaMKII, PP2A again made the major contribution. However, CaMKII endogenous to PSDs (32P autophosphorylated in the presence of Ca2+/calmodulin) was predominantly dephosphorylated by PP1. In addition, dephosphorylation of soluble and PSD‐associated CaMKII in whole forebrain extracts was catalyzed predominantly by PP2A and PP1, respectively. Thus, soluble and PSD‐associated forms of CaMKII appear to be dephosphorylated by distinct enzymes, suggesting that Ca2+‐independent activity of CaMKII is differentially regulated by protein phosphatases in distinct subcellular compartments.
Canadian Financial Reporting Institutions

The recently published Easy Prey Investors: Why Broken Safety Nets Threaten Your Wealth lambastes virtually every aspect of Canadian financial reporting in exceptionally harsh terms. Although the authors' assertions about the implications of financial reporting violations they have seen are mostly unsubstantiated or overblown, publications like theirs are useful if they stimulate continual, thoughtful consideration of Canada's institutional arrangements. I discuss various methodologies for doing this and present some novel evidence indicating that some of the authors' assertions are simply incorrect. Canada's financial reporting institutions, like all institutions, are not perfect, so we must always listen to their critics' suggestions for reforming them; however, our institutions are in much better shape than Easy Prey Investors asserts.Institutions canadiennes du secteur de l'information financiA¨re RA©sumA© La rA©cente publication Easy Prey Investors: Why Broken Safety Nets Threaten Your Wealth discrA©dite pratiquement chaque aspect de l'information financiA¨re au Canada en des termes particuliA¨rement sA©vA¨res. MAame si les affirmations des auteurs quant aux consA©quences des cas de violation des principes d'information financiA¨re qu'ils ont observA©s ne reposent pour l'essentiel sur aucune preuve, des ouvrages comme le leur sont utiles dans la mesure oA¹ ils favorisent le suivi assidu et vigilant des dispositifs institutionnels du Canada. Diverses mA©thodologies permettant d'effectuer ce suivi sont ici analysA©es, et des preuves inA©dites de l'inexactitude manifeste de certaines des assertions des auteurs d'Easy Prey Investors sont avancA©es. Les institutions canadiennes du secteur de l'information financiA¨re, comme toutes les institutions, ne sont pas parfaitesÂ ; il nous faut donc demeurer attentifs aux suggestions de rA©forme que formulent ceux qui les critiquent. Nos institutions sont nA©anmoins dans un A©tat bien meilleur que ne le prA©tend Easy Prey Investors.
Characterization of humoral and cell-mediated immune responses directed against hepatitis C virus F protein in subjects co-infected with hepatitis C virus and HIV-1

Background:Hepatitis C virus (HCV) F protein is encoded in an alternate reading frame overlapping the core protein region. Its precise sequence, biological function and mode of expression are currently unclear. This study was conducted to examine the prevalence and characteristics of host humoral and cell-mediated immune responses directed against F protein in patients co-infected with HCV and HIV-1. Methods:Mutations were introduced to allow the expression of HCV-1a F protein in the absence of core. This recombinant and a truncated form lacking the first 11 amino acid residues shared with core were expressed in Escherichia coli, and their amino acid sequences were verified by mass spectrometry. Vaccinia-F protein recombinants were used to test F protein-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) activity. The binding of F protein-derived peptides to HLA-A*0201 was studied to identify putative CTL epitopes. Results:Sera from 23 of 39 patients infected with various HCV genotypes recognized the truncated form, including 13 of 25 subjects co-infected with HIV-1, indicative of antigenic crossreactivity and consistent with the conservation of F protein coding sequences between HCV genotypes. Crossreactive F protein-specific CTL precursors were detected in nine of 11 HCV-infected subjects, including seven of nine patients co-infected with HCV and HIV-1. Finally, three novel putative HLA-A*0201-restricted CTL epitopes were identified. Conclusion:These results indicate that patients co-infected with HCV and HIV-1 can mount immunoglobulin and CTL responses directed against HCV F protein that are fully comparable in scope and magnitude with those observed in individuals infected with HCV alone.
Visual response of neurons in the lateral intraparietal area and saccadic reaction time during a visual detection task

During visual detection with saccades, a target with higher luminance is detected with reduced reaction times. In such visual detection behaviors, luminance‐related sensory signals should be converted into movement‐related signals for saccade initiation. At the site where the visuomotor transformation takes place, there is the possibility that visual activity not only encodes the target luminance but also affects the generation of an upcoming saccade. To assess this possibility, we recorded single‐cell activity from visually responsive neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) when monkeys made a saccade to an isolated target over five luminance levels. We found that as stimulus luminance increased, visual response strength increased, and response onset latency decreased. These luminance‐related changes in activity were significantly correlated with changes in reaction time. In particular, changes in response onset latency accounted for a substantial part of the observed changes in reaction time, suggesting that luminance‐related changes in response onset latency may propagate to the saccade generation process. However, the length of time from response onset to saccade onset was not constant but increased as luminance was reduced, suggesting the existence of other luminance‐dependent processing in downstream and/or parallel pathways before saccade generation. Additionally, we failed to find strong covariance between response strength or latency and reaction time when the effect of luminance changes was removed. Thus, the present results reveal how visually responsive LIP neurons contribute to saccade generation in visual detection.
Wide-slot antenna for UWB applications

A wide-slot antenna with a fork-shaped microstrip line feed structure is investigated and optimized for UWB applications. The prototype shows good UWB behavior. The bandwidth for 10 dB return loss is more than 2 octaves (f/sub h//f/sub 1/=4.52, or (f/sub h/-f/sub 1/)/f/sub 0/=127%); it also shows a good gain flatness and phase linearity. The proposed antenna is easy to fabricate, low cost and presents stable characteristic over 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz, and it is suitable for future UWB applications.
Lifestyle and travel motivation of the elderly in South Korea: baseline characteristics and the relationship between demographic factors

ABSTRACT The objectives of this research are to explore the lifestyle dimensions of the elderly and to verify whether selected sociodemographic factors cause significant differences among their lifestyles and travel motivations. A total of 311 responses were collected with self-administered questionnaires that comprised 3 main sections: questions on lifestyle using 24 general activities, interests, and opinions (AIO) statements, 34 questions about travel motivations, and 8 basic questions about sociodemographic characteristics. The results revealed that sociodemographic characteristics, such as age, gender, marital status, education, health, and economic status, played a crucial role in explaining the difference in lifestyles and travel motivations of the elderly. This study provides insights that allow for better identification of Korean elderly travel market segments.
Epirubicin-encapsulated long-circulating thermosensitive liposome improves pharmacokinetics and antitumor therapeutic efficacy in animals

In the present work, a long-circulating epirubicin hydrochloride (EPI)-containing thermosensitive liposome aiming at antitumor therapy, DPPC/MSPC/DSPG/DSPE-mPEG2000 (EPI-LTSL), was developed and evaluated. Nonthermosensitive and traditional liposomes, HSPC/cholesterol/DSPG/DSPE-mPEG2000 (EPI-NTSL) and HSPC/cholesterol (EPI-LIP), were also prepared at the same time for comparison. Temperature-dependent EPI release from loaded liposomes in vitro was characterized by the fluorescence method. Different liposome preparations were administered in rats by intravenous injection at the same dosage of 12 mg·kg−1. EPI and internal standard daunorubicin hydrochloride (DAU) were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography and verified by LC tandem mass spectrometry. In the pharmacodynamics study, the EPI-LTSL was combined with local hyperthermia for target-specific delivery to the anesthetized and tumor-bearing mice. According to the in vitro results, more than 90% of loaded EPI was released from MSPC-containing liposome (EPI-LTSL) within 4 minutes at 43°C, while at 37°C, less than 5% was released beyond 60 minutes. However, less than 5% of drug was released at 43°C for the other two liposomes without MSPC (EPI-NTSL and EPI-LIP). The results of the pharmacokinetics study in rats showed that not only the circulation time of EPI was prolonged significantly, but also the concentration in vivo was promoted for EPI-LTSL, compared to EPI-NTSL and EPI-solution. The mean tumor inhibitory rate for EPI-LTSL, EPI-NTSL, and EPI-solution were 61.1, 39.6, and 43.1%, respectively.
The European networks of research, education and training stakeholders in agroecology

Abstract In Europe, agroecology has become the center of many debates that animate political and professional arenas, particularly regarding the definition and scope of the concept itself. This paper attempts to understand the ways that the term agroecology is conceptualized by different participantsparticipants and how these concepts circulate so as to explore the interests at stake in the institutionalization of agroecology within the research and education institutions of Europe. We address the core research question of: what dynamics emerge in the networks of European stakeholders of agroecology? By combining different approaches of institutionalization based on network and discourse analysis, we study the dynamics of research, education and training organizations. We identify 10 different concepts of agroecology, distributed among 103 organizations. The significant difference that has been observed between the agroecological concepts in research and those in education/training emphasizes the gap between these two disciplines. The latter support a more political, transdisciplinary and holistic view of agroecology when compared to the former. Moreover, collaboration among European agroecology stakeholders is limited in both research and education/training. We also found that in most cases, collaboration between scholars does not guarantee a shared notion of agroecology, and conversely, sharing the same notion of agroecology does not assure collaboration. This led us to question the feasibility of institutionalizing agroecology and the missing link between a shared vision and the collective mobilization of stakeholders around a strong agroecology programme.
Evidence for the Use of Hearing Assistive Technology by Adults: The Role of the FM System

Hearing assistive technologies include listening, alerting, and/or signaling devices that use auditory, visual, and/or tactile modalities to augment communication and/or facilitate awareness of environmental sounds. The importance of hearing assistive technologies in the management of adults with hearing loss was recently acknowledged in an evidence-based clinical practice guideline developed by the American Academy of Audiology. Most currently available evidence for hearing assistive technology use by adults focuses on frequency-modulated (FM) technology. Previous research is reviewed that demonstrates the efficacy of FM devices for adults in terms of laboratory measures of speech understanding in noise. Also reviewed are the outcomes from field trials of FM use by community-dwelling adults, which, to date, have been disappointing. Few to no individuals, in previous studies, elected to use FM devices at the end of the trial periods. Data are presented from a 1-group pretest-posttest study examining the role of extensive counseling, coaching, and instruction on FM use by adults. In addition, the potential influence of the cost of devices to the individual was eliminated by conducting the study with veterans who were eligible to receive FM systems through the Veterans Affairs National Hearing Aid Program. Positive outcomes were obtained at the end of a 6-week trial period and were found to remain 1 year after study completion. Implications for increasing the evidence base for the use of FM devices by adults are discussed.
Cell‐free DNA levels in pregnancies at risk of sickle‐cell disease and significant ethnic variation

Cell‐free (cf) DNA in maternal circulation is increasingly investigated in pregnancy. This study aimed to determine whether sickle‐cell trait women had quantitative differences of cf‐DNA to controls and if there was an ethnic difference between the cf‐DNA levels of Northern European and African/African‐Caribbean populations. Non‐invasive prenatal diagnosis, through quantification of fetal and total cf‐DNA, was tested in 33 pregnant women at risk of carrying a fetus affected with sickle‐cell disease and 124 control pregnancies. A significant variation in cf‐DNA was found between ethnic groups, which should be taken into consideration in future studies measuring cf‐DNA.
Long-term monitoring reveals an avian species credit in secondary forest patches of Costa Rica

Degraded and secondary forests comprise approximately 50% of remaining tropical forest. Bird community characteristics and population trends in secondary forests are infrequently studied, but secondary forest may serve as a “safety net” for tropical biodiversity. Less understood is the occurrence of time-delayed, community-level dynamics such as an extinction debt of specialist species or a species credit resulting from the recolonization of forest patches by extirpated species. We sought to elucidate patterns and magnitudes of temporal change in avian communities in secondary forest patches in Southern Costa Rica biannually over a 10 year period during the late breeding season and mid-winter. We classified birds caught in mist nets or recorded in point counts by residency status, and further grouped them based on preferred habitat, sensitivity to disturbance, conservation priority, foraging guild, and foraging strata. Using hierarchical, mixed-effects models we tested for trends among species that share traits. We found that permanent-resident species increased over time relative to migrants. In both seasons, primary forest species generally increased while species typical of secondary forest, scrub, or edge declined. Species relatively sensitive to habitat disturbance increased significantly over time, whereas birds less sensitive to disturbance decreased. Similarly, generalists with higher habitat breadth scores declined. Because, we found very few changes in vegetation characteristics in secondary forest patches, shifts in the avian community toward primary forest species represent a species credit and are likely related to vegetation changes in the broader landscape. We suggest that natural regeneration and maturation of secondary forests should be recognized as a positive conservation development of potential benefit even to species typical of primary forest.
A New Fault Diagnosis Algorithm that Improves the Integration of Fault Detection and Isolation

This work proposes a new model-based fault diagnosis method that improves the integration of the fault detection and isolation tasks. A new interface between fault detection and fault isolation is presented that contains information about the degree of fault signal activation and the occurrence time of fault signals. A combination of five fault signature matrices is used for the fault isolation process. The matrices store knowledge about faulty system behavior: boolean fault signal occurrence, signs of residual violation, sensitivities, time of fault signal activation and fault signal occurrence order. Finally, the new method is applied to the well-known two-tanks benchmark problem.
Personalized Itinerary Recommendation with Queuing Time Awareness

Personalized itinerary recommendation is a complex and time-consuming problem, due to the need to recommend popular attractions that are aligned to the interest preferences of a tourist, and to plan these attraction visits as an itinerary that has to be completed within a specific time limit. Furthermore, many existing itinerary recommendation systems do not automatically determine and consider queuing times at attractions in the recommended itinerary, which varies based on the time of visit to the attraction, e.g., longer queuing times at peak hours. To solve these challenges, we propose the PersQ algorithm for recommending personalized itineraries that take into consideration attraction popularity, user interests and queuing times. We also implement a framework that utilizes geo-tagged photos to derive attraction popularity, user interests and queuing times, which PersQ uses to recommend personalized and queue-aware itineraries. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PersQ in the context of five major theme parks, based on a Flickr dataset spanning nine years. Experimental results show that PersQ outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines, in terms of various queuing-time related metrics, itinerary popularity, user interest alignment, recall, precision and F1-score.
The European Heritage: A Critical Re-Interpretation

Gerard Delanty offers a critical interpretation of the European heritage today in light of recent developments in the human and social sciences, and in view of a mood of crisis in Europe that compels us to re-think the European past. One of the main insights informing this book is that a transnational and global perspective on European history can reorient the European heritage in a direction that offers a more viable way for contemporary Europe to articulate an intercultural identity in keeping with the emerging shape of Europe, and with its own often acknowledged past. He argues that the European heritage is based less on a universalistic conception of culture than on a plurality of interconnecting narratives. Such a perspective opens up new directions for scholarship and public debate on heritage that are guided by critical cosmopolitan considerations that highlight contention, resistances, competition, and dissonance. He argues that the specificity of the European dimension of culture is in the entanglement of many cultures rather than in an original culture. The cultures of Europe are not separated but have been shaped in close interaction with each other and with the non-European world. Nations are not therefore unique, exceptional, or fundamentally different from each other. The outcome of such intermingling is a multiplicity of ideas of Europe that serve as shared cultural reference points.
On the performance of advanced receivers in unsynchronized small cell LTE networks

Next generation long term evolution (LTE) systems evolve towards small cell networks to boost spectrum efficiency through extreme frequency reuse. To mitigate the impact of the resulting tremendous co-channel interference, advanced receivers supporting network assisted interference cancellation and suppression (NAICS) represent a promised technique to meet the ubiquitous cell edge free experience. However, as the interfering signals will reach the cell edge user equipment (UE) at varying delays, unsynchronized small cell networks might experience large timing offsets (TOs) and considerably limit the expected downlink (DL) performance. In this paper we focus on reliable channel estimation for diverse types of NAICS receivers operating in rich interfering small cell LTE networks. With analytical results we derive the impact of TOs on channel estimation, show that the promised performance of each of the NAICS receivers vanishes when neglecting the varying delays and against expectations perform worse than conventional linear interference suppression receivers. However, estimating and compensating the impact of the TOs, reliable channel estimation can be achieved and as a result the expected DL performance of each of the investigated NAICS receivers can be guaranteed in unsynchronized small cell LTE networks.
Altered CD38 expression in thioacetamide‐induced rat model of liver cirrhosis

Abstract: Background: Cirrhosis is a gradually developing, chronic disease which involves the whole liver. Here, we have shown that CD38 undergoes altered expression upon thioacetamide‐induced cirrhosis in rats. CD38 is a type II transmembrane glycoprotein that exhibits ADP‐ribosyl cyclase and cADPR hydrolase activities. In this study, the gene and protein expressions of CD38 were investigated in a thioacetamide‐induced rat model of cirrhosis.
Volatility Estimations under the Financial Crisis in the Japanese Market and Testing for Jumps

In this paper, we estimate some volatilities and analyze each value through high frequency data under financial crisis 2008. Precisely speaking, we study the asymmetric diversity of volatility fluctuation, the distribution mixture hypothesis proposed by Clark[4], prediction power of volatility and existence of jump on volatility process. As the result, 1. We observe the asymmetric diversity of volatility fluctuation. 2. Fluctuation of returns is occurred by not only volatility but also other factor. 3. When we forecast volatility, it is useful to add implied volatility as new exogenous variable in time series model. 4. We found it is necessary to formulate volatility estimation considering jump.