Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of multiple myeloma cell-derived exosomes in osteoclast differentiation

Bone disease is the most frequent complication in multiple myeloma (MM) resulting in osteolytic lesions, bone pain, hypercalcemia and renal failure. In MM bone disease the perfect balance between bone-resorbing osteoclasts (OCs) and bone-forming osteoblasts (OBs) activity is lost in favour of OCs, thus resulting in skeletal disorders. Since exosomes have been described for their functional role in cancer progression, we here investigate whether MM cell-derived exosomes may be involved in OCs differentiation. We show that MM cells produce exosomes which are actively internalized by Raw264.7 cell line, a cellular model of osteoclast formation. MM cell-derived exosomes positively modulate pre-osteoclast migration, through the increasing of CXCR4 expression and trigger a survival pathway. MM cell-derived exosomes play a significant pro-differentiative role in murine Raw264.7 cells and human primary osteoclasts, inducing the expression of osteoclast markers such as Cathepsin K (CTSK), Matrix Metalloproteinases 9 (MMP9) and Tartrate-resistant Acid Phosphatase (TRAP). Pre-osteoclast treated with MM cell-derived exosomes differentiate in multinuclear OCs able to excavate authentic resorption lacunae. Similar results were obtained with exosomes derived from MM patient's sera. Our data indicate that MM-exosomes modulate OCs function and differentiation. Further studies are needed to identify the OCs activating factors transported by MM cell-derived exosomes.
High School Size: Which Works Best and for Whom?

The study described in this article investigates the relationship between high school size and student learning. We used three waves of data from NELS:88 and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) methods to examine how students’ achievement growth in two subjects (reading and mathematics) over the high school years is influenced by the size of the high school they attend. Three research questions guided the study: (a) Which size high school is most effective for students’ learning? , (b) In which size high school is learning most equitably distributed? , and (c) Are size effects consistent across high schools defined by their social compositions? Results suggest that the ideal high school, defined in terms of effectiveness (i.e., learning), enrolls between 600 and 900 students. In schools smaller than this, students learn less; those in large high schools (especially over 2,100) learn considerably less. Learning is more equitable in very small schools, with equity defined by the relationship between learning and student socioeconomic status (SES). An important finding from the study is that the influence of school size on learning is different in schools that enroll students of varying SES and in schools with differing proportions of minorities. Enrollment size has a stronger effect on learning in schools with lower-SES students and also in schools with high concentrations of minority students. Implications for educational policy are discussed.
Identification of proteins of human colorectal carcinoma cell line SW480 by two-dimensional electrophoresis and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry.

AIM To conduct the proteomic analysis of human colorectal carcinoma cell line, SW480 by using two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) and matrix-assisted laser desorption /ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOFMS). METHODS The total proteins of human colorectal carcinoma cell line, SW480 were separated with 2-DE by using immobilized pH gradient strips and visualized by staining with silver nitrate. The gel images were acquired by scanner and 2-DE analysis software, Image Master 2D Elite. Nineteen distinct protein spots were excised from gel randomly and digested in gel by TPCK-trypsin. Mass analysis of the tryptic digest peptides mixture was performed by using MALDI-TOF MS. Peptide mass fingerprints (PMFs) obtained by the MALDI-TOF analysis were used to search NCBI, SWISS-PROT and MSDB databases by using Mascot software. RESULTS PMF maps of all spots were obtained by MALDI-TOF MS and thirteen proteins were preliminarily identified. CONCLUSION The methods of analysis and identification of protein spots of tumor cells in 2-DE gel with silver staining by MALDI-TOF MS derived PMF have been established. Protein expression profile of SW480 has been obtained. It is demonstrated that a combination of proteomics and cell culture is a useful approach to comprehend the process of colon carcinogenesis.
Ambient Noise Imaging through joint source localization

Underwater Ambient Noise Imaging (ANI) systems rely on the acoustic illumination produced by natural noise sources to image an object of interest. Snapping shrimp are a dominant natural source of illumination in tropical waters and their snaps occur randomly. Hence incoherent energy detection methods, which require no knowledge of the source locations, are usually employed to form images of the objects. This approach, although simple, only produces images when the anisotropy in ambient noise is conducive. Even in anisotropic noise, some sources ‘illuminate’ the target while others obscure it. In this paper we describe a different approach. We use a snap detection algorithm to estimate the locations of the noise sources on the sea-bottom and then use the sound from these sources to passively range and form images of the objects. By using only the noise from sources that provide us good illumination and rejecting undesirable sources, we improve the image quality. The feasibility of this approach has been experimentally demonstrated with the data collected during a recent deployment of ROMANIS, an ANI camera developed in Singapore.
CATE: Concolic Android Testing Using Java PathFinder for Android Applications

Like all software, Android applications are not immune to bugs, security vulnerabilities, and a wide range of other issues. Concolic analysis, a hybrid software verification technique which performs symbolic execution along with a concrete execution path, has been used for a variety of purposes including software testing, code clone detection, and security-related activities. We created a new publicly available concolic analysis tool for analyzing Android applications: Concolic Android TEster (CATE). Building on Java Path Finder (JPF-SPF), this tool performs concolic analysis on a raw Android application file (or source code) and provides output in a useful and easy to understand format.
Conditional Immortalization of Human B Cells by CD40 Ligation

It is generally assumed that human differentiated cells have a limited life-span and proliferation capacity in vivo, and that genetic modifications are a prerequisite for their immortalization in vitro. Here we readdress this issue, studying the long-term proliferation potential of human B cells. It was shown earlier that human B cells from peripheral blood of healthy donors can be efficiently induced to proliferate for up to ten weeks in vitro by stimulating their receptor CD40 in the presence of interleukin-4. When we applied the same stimuli under conditions of modified cell number and culture size, we were surprised to find that our treatment induced B cells to proliferate throughout an observation period of presently up to 1650 days, representing more than 370 population doublings, which suggested that these B cells were immortalized in vitro. Long-term CD40-stimulated B cell cultures could be established from most healthy adult human donors. These B cells had a constant phenotype, were free from Epstein-Barr virus, and remained dependent on CD40 ligation. They had constitutive telomerase activity and stabilized telomere length. Moreover, they were susceptible to activation by Toll-like receptor 9 ligands, and could be used to expand antigen-specific cytotoxic T cells in vitro. Our results indicate that human somatic cells can evade senescence and be conditionally immortalized by external stimulation only, without a requirement for genetic manipulation or oncoviral infection. Conditionally immortalized human B cells are a new tool for immunotherapy and studies of B cell oncogenesis, activation, and function.
Implementing OmpSs support for regions of data in architectures with multiple address spaces

The need for features for managing complex data accesses in modern programming models has increased due to the emerging hardware architectures. HPC hardware has moved towards clusters of accelerators and/or multicores, architectures with a complex memory hierarchy exposed to the programmer. We present the implementation of data regions on the OmpSs programming model, a high-productivity annotation-based programming model derived from OpenMP. This enables the programmer to specify regions of strided and/or overlapped data used by the parallel tasks of the application. The data will be automatically managed by the underlying run-time environment, which could transparently apply optimization techniques to improve performance. This approach based on a high-productivity programming model contrasts with more direct approaches like MPI, where the programmer has to explicitly deal with the data management. It is generally believed that these are capable of achieving the best possible performance, so we also compare the performance of several OmpSs applications against well-known counterparts MPI implementations obtaining comparable or better results.
Use of instructional design theory and an individualized hybrid strategy for assessment in library-based instruction.

Since 1996, a librarian at the University of Florida, Gainesville, has partnered with a professor to develop and implement a term project in PCB3063, an undergraduate genetics course with first-day enrollment of approximately 120 students. Evaluative studies suggest that the class and project represent successful collaborations between the library and an academic unit [1, 2], and students report a high level of satisfaction with the course on standard course evaluations. One unique aspect of the course project is that topics are individually assigned to students, and assessment, including assessment of database searching skills, is tied to that specific topic. While course instructors are convinced (and the literature supports [3]) that such individualized assignments enhance student learning, grading the assignments for this large service course required approximately 45 hours of effort per semester for the collaborating librarian. In 2008, the instructors (professor and librarian) explored ways to decrease grading time without compromising student learning and with the intention of retaining the individualized assessment. ASSIGNMENT OBJECTIVES AND ORIGINAL FORMAT
Deep Inferior Epigastric Perforator Flap: A Modification That Simplifies Elevation

The deep inferior epigastric perforator flap is accepted worldwide as a reliable and relatively safe technique for autologous breast reconstruction. Preserving the continuity of the rectus muscle, it reduces donor site morbidity, allowing less postoperative pain, a faster recovery, and a reduced hospital stay. Nevertheless, the more complex nature of this type of surgery leads to increased operating time and a demand for more tedious microsurgical dissection. The authors present a modification of the deep inferior epigastric perforator flap harvesting technique that allows a more safe, simple, and faster elevation of the flap. They have used it successfully for breast reconstruction in 3 patients.
Compact Analog Phase Shifters using Thin-Film (Ba,Sr)TiO3 Varactors

This paper describes the realization of compact 360 degree phase-shifter MMICs using thin-film BST varactors in a series cascade of all-pass networks. Unlike conventional delay-line structures, all-pass networks provide constant phase shift with small variation of insertion loss. In similar fashion, very broadband phase-shifters can be implemented by cascading all-pass networks with staggered center-frequencies. Using a thin-film BST technology for the varactors, extremely compact and low-cost phase-shifter structures have been developed. Selected results are shown in the 1-30GHz range.
Deconstructing Organizational Commitment: Associations Among Its Affective and Cognitive Components, Personality Antecedents, and Behavioral Outcomes1

This study tests whether measurement of the cognitive aspect of organizational commitment can explain variance in behavioral expressions of commitment beyond Allen & Meyer's (1990) measure of the affective component of commitment. This cognitive component was measured by an index of belief accentuation. Undergraduates (N = 110) completed a questionnaire that measured all variables. Results show that students who polarize their judgments about the appropriateness of behavior at the university support the university more by defending it from criticism and praising it. This effect holds even after controlling for personality and demographic variables. Results also show that extraversion and agreeableness explain variance in the affective element of commitment and that conscientiousness explains variance in the cognitive element of commitment.
Visual Saliency for Smell Impulses and Application to Selective Rendering

A major challenge in generating high-fidelity virtual environments is to be able to provide interactive rates of realism. However this is very computationally demanding and only recently visual perception has been used in high-fidelity rendering to improve performance considerably by a series of novel exploitations; to render parts of the scene that are not currently being attended by the viewer at a much lower quality without the difference being perceived. This paper investigates the effect various smells have on the visual attention of the user when free viewing a set of engineered images. We verify the worth of investigating these saccade shifts (fast movements of the eyes) due to attention distraction to a congruent smell object. By analysing the gaze points, we identify time spent attending a particular area of a scene. We also present a technique from measured data to remodulate traditional saliency maps of image features to account for the observed results. We show that smell provides an impulse on attention to affect perception in such a way that this can be used to guide selective rendering of scenes through use of the remodulated saliency maps.
Entity Linking with people entity on Wikipedia

This paper introduces a new model that uses named entity recognition, coreference resolution, and entity linking techniques, to approach the task of linking people entities on Wikipedia people pages to their corresponding Wikipedia pages if applicable. Our task is different from general and traditional entity linking because we are working in a limited domain, namely, people entities, and we are including pronouns as entities, whereas in the past, pronouns were never considered as entities in entity linking. We have built 2 models, both outperforms our baseline model significantly. The purpose of our project is to build a model that could be use to generate cleaner data for future entity linking tasks. Our contribution include a clean data set consisting of 50Wikipedia people pages, and 2 entity linking models, specifically tuned for this domain.
Distributed Spatial Data Mining in Geospatial Knowledge Service Grid

As an extension of traditional data mining, distributed data mining (DDM) is a well-known issue that has been extensively studied to extract some hidden, useful and interesting information from data by using various kinds of resources distributed in different geography positions. In the literature, there are many methods and technologies proposed to implement large-scale distributed data mining, but owing to lack of autonomy, intelligentization and the limitation of expansibility, most of the works fail to reach a practical application in industry and commerce fields. With the rapid development of distributed sharing infrastructures and the emergence and mature of grid technology, providing knowledge services in grid environment is becoming the trend of knowledge discovery, and it will certainly make the technology of data processing into a broader way. In this paper, we elaborate on a geographical knowledge services grid test-bed, which is developed to support distributed & parallel geological problems solving, as an example, a distributed spatial outliers mining algorithm based on Delaunay triangulation(D-TIN) is introduced, and the perform scheduling of Delaunay triangulation construction and spatial outliers mining is presented too
A block based (t, n) visual cryptography scheme for unbounded n and t=2, 3

The (t, n) visual cryptography (VC) is a secret sharing scheme of decomposing a secret image into n transparencies, and the stacking of any t out of n transparencies reveals the secret content. The perfect security condition of VC scheme requires the strict requirement where any t-1 or fewer transparencies cannot extract any information about the secret. For n approaching infinity, previous studies consider the scenario where the probabilistic model is a pixel-to-pixel scheme that encodes each secret pixel to a corresponding pixel in each transparency. In this paper, we extend the pixel-to-pixel scheme to pixel-to-block scheme for the cases t=2 and 3. Given a secret image, the proposed VC scheme generates a transparency through coding each secret image pixel to a m-pixels shadow block on the corresponding position of the transparency. Experiments show that the stacking results reveal better visual quality than the probabilistic model scheme.
Bayesian linear state estimation using smart meters and PMUs measurements in distribution grids

In this work we address the problem of static state estimation (SE) in distribution grids by leveraging historical meter data (pseudo-measurements) with real-time measurements from synchrophasors (PMU data). We present a Bayesian linear estimator based on a linear approximation of the power flow equations for distribution networks, which is computationally more efficient than standard nonlinear weighted least squares (WLS) estimators. We show via numerical simulations that the proposed strategy performs similarly to the standard WLS estimator on a small distribution network. A key advantage of the proposed approach is that it provides explicit off-line computation of the estimation error confidence intervals, which we use to explore the tradeoffs between number of PMUs, PMU placement and measurement uncertainty. Since the estimation error in distribution systems tends to be dominated by uncertainty in loads and scarcity of instrumented nodes, the linearized method along with the use of high-precision PMUs may be a suitable way to facilitate on-line state estimation where it was previously impractical.
Acerca de las funciones psicológicas: un post-scriptum

Se describen los cuatro factores que caracterizan una funcion estimulo-respuesta: la mediacion, el tipo de relacion, el desligamiento funcional de la respuesta, y el criterio de ajuste. Se examina su correspondencia con las cuatro formas de causalidad aristotelica: material, formal, eficiente y final.
Social Norms in Outdoor Recreation: Searching for the Behavior-Condition Link

Social norms for encounters and setting conditions have been an important area of outdoor recreation research for the past 30 years. An important research assumption, based on Jackson's Return Potential Model, has been that norms for a given behavior and norms for conditions resulting from that behavior are linked. Empirical verification of a link is needed to validate this assumption. This research combines measures of behavioral obligations and sanctions with measures of normative preferences for resulting conditions using a visual approach to study the behavior-condition link for littering and litter in urban parks. The argument is that a behavioral obligation against littering should be directly linked to no tolerance for a littered environment. The results suggest that littering and litter represent two dimensions of the normative situation. Littering was found to be a clear example of a highly crystallized and intense behavioral norm while littered conditions were clearly defined by a highly crystallized and intense condition norm. The findings generally support a link between behavioral obligations not to litter and condition preferences to see no litter.
Molecular species delimitation methods recover most song‐delimited cicada species in the European Cicadetta montana complex

Molecular species delimitation is increasingly being used to discover and illuminate species level diversity, and a number of methods have been developed. Here, we compare the ability of two molecular species delimitation methods to recover song‐delimited species in the Cicadetta montana cryptic species complex throughout Europe. Recent bioacoustics studies of male calling songs (premating reproductive barriers) have revealed cryptic species diversity in this complex. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic analyses were used to analyse the mitochondrial genes COI and COII and the nuclear genes EF1α and period for thirteen European Cicadetta species as well as the closely related monotypic genus Euboeana. Two molecular species delimitation methods, general mixed Yule‐coalescent (GMYC) and Bayesian phylogenetics and phylogeography, identified the majority of song‐delimited species and were largely congruent with each other. None of the molecular delimitation methods were able to fully recover a recent radiation of four Greek species.
The Crystal Structure of Uncomplexed Actin in the ADP State

The dynamics and polarity of actin filaments are controlled by a conformational change coupled to the hydrolysis of adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP) by a mechanism that remains to be elucidated. Actin modified to block polymerization was crystallized in the adenosine 5′-diphosphate (ADP) state, and the structure was solved to 1.54 angstrom resolution. Compared with previous ATP-actin structures from complexes with deoxyribonuclease I, profilin, and gelsolin, monomeric ADP-actin is characterized by a marked conformational change in subdomain 2. The successful crystallization of monomeric actin opens the way to future structure determinations of actin complexes with actin-binding proteins such as myosin.
Constructing test problems for bilevel evolutionary multi-objective optimization

Many real-world problems demand a feasible solution to satisfy physical equilibrium, stability, or certain properties which require an additional lower level optimization problem to be solved. Although such bilevel problems are studied somewhat in the context of a single objective in each level, there are not many studies in which multiple conflicting objectives are considered in each level. Bilevel multi-objective optimization problems offer additional complexities, as not every lower level Pareto-optimal front has a representative solution to the upper level Pareto-optimal front and that only a tiny fraction of participating lower level fronts make it to the upper level front. A couple of recent studies by the authors have suggested a viable EMO method to handle such problems. In this paper, we analyze the difficulties which a bilevel EMO procedure may face in handling such problems and present a systematic construction procedure for bilevel optimization test problems. Based on the suggested principles, we propose five test problems which are scalable in terms of number of variables and objectives, and which enable researchers to evaluate different phases of a bilevel problem solving task. The test problem construction procedure is interesting and may motivate other researchers to extend the idea to develop further test problems.