Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
rAAV/ABAD-DP-6His attenuates oxidative stress-induced injury of PC12 cells

Our previous studies have revealed that amyloid β (Aβ)-binding alcohol dehydrogenase (ABAD) decoy peptide antagonizes Aβ42-induced neurotoxicity. However, whether it improves oxidative stress injury remains unclear. In this study, a recombinant adenovirus constitutively secreting and expressing Aβ-ABAD decoy peptide (rAAV/ABAD-DP-6His) was successfully constructed. Our results showed that rAAV/ABAD-DP-6His increased superoxide dismutase activity in hydrogen peroxide-induced oxidative stress-mediated injury of PC12 cells. Moreover, rAAV/ABAD-DP-6His decreased malondialdehyde content, intracellular Ca2+ concentration, and the level of reactive oxygen species. rAAV/ABAD-DP-6His maintained the stability of the mitochondrial membrane potential. In addition, the ATP level remained constant, and apoptosis was reduced. Overall, the results indicate that rAAV/ABAD-DP-6His generates the fusion peptide, Aβ-ABAD decoy peptide, which effectively protects PC12 cells from oxidative stress injury induced by hydrogen peroxide, thus exerting neuroprotective effects.
Budget impact analysis of sFlt-1/PlGF ratio as prediction test in Italian women with suspected preeclampsia

Abstract Introduction: Preeclampsia (PE) is a pregnancy disease which represents a leading cause of maternal and perinatal mortality and morbidity. Accurate prediction of PE risk could provide an increase in health benefits and better patient management. Objective: To estimate the economic impact of introducing Elecsys sFlt-1/PlGF ratio test, in addition to standard practice, for the prediction of PE in women with suspected PE in the Italian National Health Service (INHS). Methods: A decision tree model has been developed to simulate the progression of a cohort of pregnant women from the first presentation of clinical suspicion of PE in the second and third trimesters until delivery. The model provides an estimation of the financial impact of introducing sFlt-1/PlGF versus standard practice. Clinical inputs have been derived from PROGNOSIS study and from literature review, and validated by National Clinical Experts. Resources and unit costs have been obtained from Italian-specific sources. Results: Healthcare costs associated with the management of a pregnant woman with clinical suspicion of PE equal €2384 when following standard practice versus €1714 using sFlt-1/PlGF ratio test. Conclusions: Introduction of sFlt-1/PlGF into hospital practice is cost-saving. Savings are generated primarily through improvement in diagnostic accuracy and reduction in unnecessary hospitalization for women before PE’s onset.
SMART Tool Demonstration

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving interoperability between systems. An attractive benefit of SOA adoption is that it enables existing legacy systems to expose their functionality as services. The Service Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART) is a technique to help organizations make initial decisions about the feasibility of reusing legacy components as services within a SOA environment. This session will demonstrate the SMART Tool which supports the collection and analysis of data obtained during a SMART engagement.
The Power of Beaver's U against a Variance Increase in Market Model Residuals

To detect variance effects, researchers have primarily relied on the square of the standardized market model residual, i.e., Beaver's U.1 A similar statistic, the absolute value of the standardized residual, has also been used for this purpose. We call this statistic May's U.2 The rationale for using either Beaver's U or May's U is that, in a portfolio, a variance increase will be reflected in unusually large negative and positive residuals. These will tend to cancel out in a test based on ordinary residuals, but squared residuals or their absolute values will yield a cumulative effect. If the residuals are normally distributed (as assumed by the linear model), then Beaver's U is the best statistic, being most likely to detect a variance effect. Weekly and daily residuals are not normally distributed. They are leptokurtic ("heavy-tailed") and skewed. Marais [1984] notes that the normal approximation to Beaver's U is unreliable for significantly leptokurtic residuals and attempts to correct this unreliability through bootstrapping. Marais does not, however, consider the impact of leptokurtosis on the optimality of Beaver's U. We show that Beaver's U is no longer optimal for leptokurtic residuals and that it is dominated by May's U.
A $P recognizer for automatic facial emotion recognition using Kinect sensor

Autism is a developmental disorder involving qualitative impairments in social interaction. One source of those impairments are difficulties with facial expressions of emotion. Autistic people often have difficulty to recognize or to understand other people's emotions and feelings, or expressing their own. This work proposes a method to automatically recognize seven basic emotions among autistic children in real time: Happiness, Anger, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Disgust, and Neutral. The method uses the Microsoft Kinect sensor to track and identify points of interest from the 3D face model and it is based on the $P point-cloud recognizer to identify multi-stroke emotions as point-clouds. The experimental results show that our system can achieve above 94.28% recognition rate. Our study provides a novel clinical tool to help children with autism to assisting doctors in operating rooms.
Fostering Residential Demand Response through Dynamic Pricing Schemes: A Behavioural Review of Smart Grid Pilots in Europe

Many smart grid projects make use of dynamic pricing schemes aimed to motivate consumers to shift and/or decrease energy use. Based upon existing literature and analyses of current smart grid projects, this survey paper presents key lessons on how to encourage households to adjust energy end use by means of dynamic tariffs. The paper identifies four key hypotheses related to fostering demand response through dynamic tariff schemes and examines whether these hypotheses can be accepted or rejected based on a review of published findings from a range of European pilot projects. We conclude that dynamic pricing schemes have the power to adjust energy consumption behavior within households. In order to work effectively, the dynamic tariff should be simple to understand for the end users, with timely notifications of price changes, a considerable effect on their energy bill and, if the tariff is more complex, the burden for the consumer could be eased by introducing automated control. Although sometimes the mere introduction of a dynamic tariff has proven to be effective, often the success of the pricing scheme depends also on other factors influencing the behavior of end users. An important condition to make dynamic tariffs work is that the end users should be engaged with them.
Effective Mucosal Immunity to Anthrax: Neutralizing Antibodies and Th Cell Responses Following Nasal Immunization with Protective Antigen1

Mucosal, but not parenteral, immunization induces immune responses in both systemic and secretory immune compartments. Thus, despite the reports that Abs to the protective Ag of anthrax (PA) have both anti-toxin and anti-spore activities, a vaccine administered parenterally, such as the aluminum-adsorbed anthrax vaccine, will most likely not induce the needed mucosal immunity to efficiently protect the initial site of infection with inhaled anthrax spores. We therefore took a nasal anthrax vaccine approach to attempt to induce protective immunity both at mucosal surfaces and in the peripheral immune compartment. Mice nasally immunized with recombinant PA (rPA) and cholera toxin (CT) as mucosal adjuvant developed high plasma PA-specific IgG Ab responses. Plasma IgA Abs as well as secretory IgA anti-PA Abs in saliva, nasal washes, and fecal extracts were also induced when a higher dose of rPA was used. The anti-PA IgG subclass responses to nasal rPA plus CT consisted of IgG1 and IgG2b Abs. A more balanced profile of IgG subclasses with IgG1, IgG2a, and IgG2b Abs was seen when rPA was given with a CpG oligodeoxynucleotide as adjuvant, suggesting a role for the adjuvants in the nasal rPA-induced immunity. The PA-specific CD4+ T cells from mice nasally immunized with rPA and CT as adjuvant secreted low levels of CD4+ Th1-type cytokines in vitro, but exhibited elevated IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, and IL-10 responses. The functional significance of the anti-PA Ab responses was established in an in vitro macrophage toxicity assay in which both plasma and mucosal secretions neutralized the lethal effects of Bacillus anthracis toxin.
Epidemiology of dengue infections in Kassala, Eastern Sudan

Eighty‐one (71.7%) out of 113 patients had confirmed dengue infection (using ELISA IgM serology) at Kassala, Eastern Sudan during the period of August through November 2010. According to the WHO criteria, dengue fever (DF), dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), and dengue shock syndrome (DSS) were observed in 30.9, 58, and 11.1% of these patients, respectively. The mean age of these 81 patients was 25.5 years. Male:female ratio was 1.8:1. Various symptoms including fever (100%), headache (75.3%), vomiting (55.6%), nausea (53.1%), and backache (30.9%) were observed among these patients. Thrombocytopenia (<100/109 platelets/L), and leucopenia (WBC count <4,000 × 109 cells/L) and hemoconcentration (hematocrit >45) were reported in 86.4, 69.1, and 67.9% of the patients, respectively. High alanine aminotransferase (ALT, >65 U/L) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST >37 U/L) were seen in 9.9 and 14.8% of the patients, respectively. There were five (6.1%) deaths, three of them had DHF and the other two patients had DSS. J. Med. Virol. 84:500–503, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Structural destabilization and chaperone-assisted proteasomal degradation of MLH1 as a mechanism for Lynch syndrome

1: The Linderstrøm-Lang Centre, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Ole Maaløes Vej 5, DK-2200 Copenhagen, Denmark. 2: Current address: Computational Biology Laboratory, Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Strandboulevarden 49, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. 3: Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Blegdamsvej 3B, DK2200 Copenhagen, Denmark. 4: Department of Surgical Gastroenterology, Aalborg University Hospital, DK-9000 Ålborg, Denmark. 5: Department of Clinical Genetics, Rigshospitalet, Blegdamsvej 9, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. 6: Tohoku University Hospital, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.
Sensor Fault Diagnosis for Aero Engine Based on Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine with Memory Principle

The on-board sensor fault detection and isolation (FDI) system is essential to guarantee the reliability and safety of an aero engine. In this paper, a novel online sequential extreme learning machine with memory principle (MOS-ELM) is proposed for detecting, isolating, and reconstructing the fault sensor signal of aero engines. In many practical online applications, the sequentially coming data chunk usually possesses a characteristic of timeliness, and the overdue training data may mislead the subsequent learning process. The proposed MOS-ELM can improve the training process by introducing the concept of memory principle into the online sequential extreme learning machine (OS-ELM) to tackle the timeliness of the data chunk. Simulations on some time series problems and some benchmark databases show that MOS-ELM performs better in generalization performance, stability, and prediction accuracy than OS-ELM. The experiment results of the MOS-ELM-based sensor fault diagnosis system also verify the excellent generalization performance of MOS-ELM and indicate the effectiveness and feasibility of the developed diagnosis system.
Calcium Binding of ARC Mediates Regulation of Caspase 8 and Cell Death

ABSTRACT Apoptosis repressor with CARD (ARC) possesses the ability not only to block activation of caspase 8 but to modulate caspase-independent mitochondrial events associated with cell death. However, it is not known how ARC modulates both caspase-dependent and caspase-independent cell death. Here, we report that ARC is a Ca2+-dependent regulator of caspase 8 and cell death. We found that in Ca2+ overlay and Stains-all assays, ARC protein bound to Ca2+ through the C-terminal proline/glutamate-rich (P/E-rich) domain. ARC expression reduced not only cytosolic Ca2+ transients but also cytotoxic effects of thapsigargin, A23187, and ionomycin, for which the Ca2+-binding domain of ARC was indispensable. Conversely, direct interference of endogenous ARC synthesis by targeting ARC enhanced such Ca2+-mediated cell death. In addition, binding and immunoprecipitation analyses revealed that the protein-protein interaction between ARC and caspase 8 was decreased by the increase of Ca2+ concentration in vitro and by the treatment of HEK293 cells with thapsigargin in vivo. Caspase 8 activation was also required for the thapsigargin-induced cell death and suppressed by the ectopic expression of ARC. These results suggest that calcium binding mediates regulation of caspase 8 and cell death by ARC.
Genomic Instability in Patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Assessed by the Arbitrarily Primed Polymerase Chain Reaction

In the present study, we used DNA profiling to measure genomic instability in 22 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Genomic instability was correlated with gender, the age of the patients at the time of diagnosis, the NSCLC subtype, histological grade and stage of the tumor, necrosis presence in the tumor and lymph node invasion. Genomic instability was significantly higher in patients older than 50 and those with adenocarcinoma compared to squamous-cell carcinoma. Most importantly, genomic instability significantly decreased as the tumor grade increased. Extensive genomic instability in the early carcinogenesis could be the prerequisite for NSCLC progression.
Smart electric vehicle charging: Security analysis

This paper provides a comprehensive security analysis of the Electric Vehicle (EV) charging service in Smart Grid (SG) environment (i.e. the “smart” EV charging application). It first describes three EV charging scenarios, at home, at work and at public places. Based on these use-case scenarios, the paper presents a model for smart EV charging, consisted of application entities and interactions among them. It then illustrates potential message types communicated among these entities. Based on this model and the exchanged messages, the paper analyses security problems and potential security threats imposed on the entities, which leads to the specification of a set of security and privacy requirements. These requirements could be used to guide the future design of solutions for secure smart EV charging systems and/or a risk/impact assessment of such systems.
Reassessment of the Tenacibaculum maritimum serotypes causing mortalities in cultured marine fis h

A serological analysis of a total of 35 strains of Tenacibaculum maritimum recovered from mortalities occurring from 2004 to 2006 in turbot (Scophthalmus maximus), sole (Solea solea) and blackspot seabream (Pagellus bogaraveo), cultured along the Iberian Peninsula, was performed in order to determine if the serotyping scheme described for this pathogen is sufficient or whether it needs reconsideration. In the previous scheme the turbot strains were all included in serovar 02. The results obtained in the present survey demonstrated that, in later years, serovar 03 has also been associated with turbot mortalities, which must be taken into consideration for the antigenic formulation of the commercial vaccines against tenacibaculosis.
Analytical reproducibility in (1)H NMR-based metabonomic urinalysis.

Metabonomic analysis of biofluids and tissues utilizing high-resolution NMR spectroscopy and chemometric techniques has proven valuable in characterizing the biochemical response to toxicity for many xenobiotics. To assess the analytical reproducibility of metabonomic protocols, sample preparation and NMR data acquisition were performed at two sites (one using a 500 MHz and the other using a 600 MHz system) using two identical (split) sets of urine samples from an 8-day acute study of hydrazine toxicity in the rat. Despite the difference in spectrometer operating frequency, both datasets were extremely similar when analyzed using principal components analysis (PCA) and gave near-identical descriptions of the metabolic responses to hydrazine treatment. The main consistent difference between the datasets was related to the efficiency of water resonance suppression in the spectra. In a 4-PC model of both datasets combined, describing all systematic dose- and time-related variation (88% of the total variation), differences between the two datasets accounted for only 3% of the total modeled variance compared to ca. 15% for normal physiological (pre-dose) variation. Furthermore, <3% of spectra displayed distinct inter-site differences, and these were clearly identified as outliers in their respective dose-group PCA models. No samples produced clear outliers in both datasets, suggesting that the outliers observed did not reflect an unusual sample composition, but rather sporadic differences in sample preparation leading to, for example, very dilute samples. Estimations of the relative concentrations of citrate, hippurate, and taurine were in >95% correlation (r(2)) between sites, with an analytical error comparable to normal physiological variation in concentration (4-8%). The excellent analytical reproducibility and robustness of metabonomic techniques demonstrated here are highly competitive compared to the best proteomic analyses and are in significant contrast to genomic microarray platforms, both of which are complementary techniques for predictive and mechanistic toxicology. These results have implications for the quantitative interpretation of metabonomic data, and the establishment of quality control criteria for both regulatory agencies and for integrating data obtained at different sites.
Enhancement of fruit shelf life by suppressing N-glycan processing enzymes

In a globalized economy, the control of fruit ripening is of strategic importance because excessive softening limits shelf life. Efforts have been made to reduce fruit softening in transgenic tomato through the suppression of genes encoding cell wall–degrading proteins. However, these have met with very limited success. N-glycans are reported to play an important role during fruit ripening, although the role of any particular enzyme is yet unknown. We have identified and targeted two ripening-specific N-glycoprotein modifying enzymes, α-mannosidase (α-Man) and β-D-N-acetylhexosaminidase (β-Hex). We show that their suppression enhances fruit shelf life, owing to the reduced rate of softening. Analysis of transgenic tomatoes revealed ≈2.5- and ≈2-fold firmer fruits in the α-Man and β-Hex RNAi lines, respectively, and ≈30 days of enhanced shelf life. Overexpression of α-Man or β-Hex resulted in excessive fruit softening. Expression of α-Man and β-Hex is induced by the ripening hormone ethylene and is modulated by a regulator of ripening, rin (ripening inhibitor). Furthermore, transcriptomic comparative studies demonstrate the down-regulation of cell wall degradation- and ripening-related genes in RNAi fruits. It is evident from these results that N-glycan processing is involved in ripening-associated fruit softening. Genetic manipulation of N-glycan processing can be of strategic importance to enhance fruit shelf life, without any negative effect on phenotype, including yield.
Preparing Teacher Candidates with Disabilities: A Growing Experience

This paper explores one institution’s challenge in preparing effective classroom teachers via field practicum experiences. An assessment of the traditional system proved to both serve and hinder the preparation of teacher candidates with disabilities. Lessons learned from the assessment are shared along with the improved procedure that may be generalized to other teacher preparation programs with a similar vision. The goal is to create an “inclusive model of teacher preparation. ” (Reynolds, Scott, & Williams-Smith, n.d.)
Unleashing Tabular Content to Open Data: A Survey on PDF Table Extraction Methods and Tools

Portable Document Format (PDF) has been a popular way to exchange data in documents since Adobe introduced the format in 1993. Its report-like characteristic which preserves and prioritizes graphical visualization was part of the main publishing concerns among several segments including government agencies. In this way, tabular data started to be enclosed within PDF documents and disclosed in government portals. This situation, apart being surprisingly contradictory to data openness, is still found even in the major open data initiatives. It is estimated that roughly 13% of published files in some main open data portals around the world have their data made available in PDF. Thus, there is a need for effective tools capable of extracting tabular content (a main placeholder for data) from PDF to allow its data to be published in more open formats such as the well-known CSV which complies with accessible and machine processable open data principles. This paper aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the research in tabular content extraction specifically from PDF documents as well as to provide an overview of most recent practical results in the literature. The contribution of this work goes beyond theoretical discussions by helping data practitioners to understand to what extent methods and tools regarding tabular content extraction from PDF can benefit the open data initiatives in practical and effective ways.
Towards the Harmonisation of Local Accounting Systems in the International Context

In recent years efforts to modernise and regulate public accounting systems have been carried out in most countries, driven essentially by the interest in establishing a Public Accounting capable of satisfying the required needs for attaining efficient management of public resources, as well as for demonstrating accountability to stakeholders. In this paper we aim to analyse the degree of local government accounting harmonisation, demonstrating in a general way that their accounting systems show very little homogenisation, accounting diversity being, in fact, one of their principal characteristics. In this context, we refer to the benefits and problems involved in reducing the differences between accounting systems and in increasing the comparability of financial reporting.
Breast cancer incidence in Asian migrants to the United States and their descendants.

We studied breast cancer incidence during the period 1973-1986 in Asian residents of three U.S. geographic areas. The rate in Asian-American women born in China or Japan and in their U.S.-born counterparts was about 50% and 75% that of U.S.-born whites, respectively, and was approximately twice the rate of women residing in Asia. Breast cancer incidence was nearly identical in U.S.- and foreign-born Filipino-Americans, but it was 40% that of U.S.-born whites.