Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Awarding of Punitive Damage Under the Jordanian Civil Law: Is it Possible?

The aim of this article is not to provide comprehensive overview regarding punitive damage, but to investigate the possibility of awarding punitive damage under the Jordanian Civil Code. The Jordanian legislator did not provide for the awarding of punitive damage in an express term. The same position was taken by the Jordanian judiciary. However, the case of awarding exemplary damage still can be made – with satisfactory merits- in spite of the unclear standing of the statutes and judicial precedents.
Genetic Analysis and Enzyme Activity Suggest the Existence of More Than One Minimal Functional Unit Capable of Synthesizing Phosphoribosyl Pyrophosphate in Saccharomyces cerevisiae *

The PRS gene family inSaccharomyces cerevisiae consists of five genes each capable of encoding a 5-phosphoribosyl-1(α)-pyrophosphate synthetase polypeptide. To gain insight into the functional organization of this gene family we have constructed a collection of strains containing all possible combinations of disruptions in the five PRS genes. Phenotypically these deletant strains can be classified into three groups: (i) a lethal phenotype that corresponds to strains containing a double disruption in PRS2 and PRS4 in combination with a disruption in either PRS1 orPRS3; simultaneous deletion of PRS1 andPRS5 or PRS3 and PRS5 are also lethal combinations; (ii) a second phenotype that is encountered in strains containing disruptions in PRS1 and PRS3together or in combination with any of the other PRS genes manifests itself as a reduction in growth rate, enzyme activity, and nucleotide content; (iii) a third phenotype that corresponds to strains that, although affected in their phosphoribosyl pyrophosphate-synthesizing ability, are unimpaired for growth and have nucleotide profiles virtually the same as the wild type. Deletions ofPRS2, PRS4, and PRS5 or combinations thereof cause this phenotype. These results suggest that the polypeptides encoded by the members of the PRS gene family may be organized into two functional entities. Evidence that these polypeptides interact with each other in vivo was obtained using the yeast two-hybrid system. Specifically PRS1 and PRS3 polypeptides interact strongly with each other, and there are significant interactions between the PRS5 polypeptide and either the PRS2 or PRS4 polypeptides. These data suggest that yeast phosphoribosyl pyrophosphate synthetase exists in vivo as multimeric complex(es).
What Are the Optimal Dose of Administration and Time of Drainage for Topical Tranexamic Acid in Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery?

© The Korean Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. 2017. All right reserved. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. What Are the Optimal Dose of Administration and Time of Drainage for Topical Tranexamic Acid in Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery?
Silent cerebral infarctions in patients with late-onset mania.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Previously we have studied the relationship between senile depression and silent cerebral infarctions (SCIs). The goal of this study was to clarify the relationship between late-onset mania and SCIs using MR imaging. METHODS Twenty manic patients who developed a bipolar disorder after 50 years of age (late-onset mania) were selected prospectively. These patients were compared with 20 age- and sex-matched patients who developed an affective disorder while younger than 50 years of age (early-onset affective disorder) and with 20 patients who developed major depression after 50 years of age (late-onset major depression). Patients with focal neurological symptoms were excluded from the study. All patients underwent MR imaging to assess the incidence of SCIs. Patients diagnosed with SCIs were subclassified according to whether the infarction type was perforating, cortical, or mixed. RESULTS The incidence of SCIs in patients with late-onset mania was 65.0%; this incidence was significantly higher than that of patients with early-onset affective disorders (P < .05). The incidence of the mixed type of SCI was 50.0% in patients with late-onset mania; this was significantly higher than that in patients with late-onset major depression (P < .05). CONCLUSIONS Our findings suggest that approximately half of the cases of late-onset mania might be secondary mania related to SCIs. Because the mixed type of SCI is more prevalent in the patients with late-onset mania than in those with late-onset major depression, mania may be associated with the larger areas of brain damage and hence may be a more serious form of affective illness than major depression.
Polarity detection of online news articles based on sentence structure and dynamic dictionary

The importance of online news article has evolved notably with the advancement of information and technology. However, some of the news are violent as well as obnoxious. So, identifying and categorizing online news article automatically is important as well as remains challenging. Using opinion mining and sentiment analysis, we propose an intuitive approach of detecting positive or negative news from an online news article. Our approach consists of a sentence identification phase, followed by a dynamic library of predefined negative and positive strings and at last marking whether the paragraph is positive, negative or neutral. Our approach detects the polarity of online news articles with around 91% accuracy rate. Sentence type identification before using dynamic dictionary of positive and negative words is the key factor which resolves the issue of finding out the part of the sentence which holds the polarity of the sentence.
Murine Gammaherpesvirus 68 LANA and SOX Homologs Counteract ATM-Driven p53 Activity during Lytic Viral Replication

ABSTRACT Tumor suppressor p53 is activated in response to numerous cellular stresses, including viral infection. However, whether murine gammaherpesvirus 68 (MHV68) provokes p53 during the lytic replication cycle has not been extensively evaluated. Here, we demonstrate that MHV68 lytic infection induces p53 phosphorylation and stabilization in a manner that is dependent on the DNA damage response (DDR) kinase ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM). The induction of p53 during MHV68 infection occurred in multiple cell types, including splenocytes of infected mice. ATM and p53 activation required early viral gene expression but occurred independently of viral DNA replication. At early time points during infection, p53-responsive cellular genes were induced, coinciding with p53 stabilization and phosphorylation. However, p53-related gene expression subsided as infection progressed, even though p53 remained stable and phosphorylated. Infected cells also failed to initiate p53-dependent gene expression and undergo apoptosis in response to treatment with exogenous p53 agonists. The inhibition of p53 responses during infection required the expression of the MHV68 homologs of the shutoff and exonuclease protein (muSOX) and latency-associated nuclear antigen (mLANA). Interestingly, mLANA, but not muSOX, was necessary to prevent p53-mediated death in MHV68-infected cells under the conditions tested. This suggests that muSOX and mLANA are differentially required for inhibiting p53 in specific settings. These data reveal that DDR responses triggered by MHV68 infection promote p53 activation. However, MHV68 encodes at least two proteins capable of limiting the potential consequences of p53 function. IMPORTANCE Gammaherpesviruses are oncogenic herpesviruses that establish lifelong chronic infections. Defining how gammaherpesviruses overcome host responses to infection is important for understanding how these viruses infect and cause disease. Here, we establish that murine gammaherpesvirus 68 induces the activation of tumor suppressor p53. p53 activation was dependent on the DNA damage response kinase ataxia telangiectasia mutated. Although active early after infection, p53 became dominantly inhibited as the infection cycle progressed. Viral inhibition of p53 was mediated by the murine gammaherpesvirus 68 homologs of muSOX and mLANA. The inhibition of the p53 pathway enabled infected cells to evade p53-mediated cell death responses. These data demonstrate that a gammaherpesvirus encodes multiple proteins to limit p53-mediated responses to productive viral infection, which likely benefits acute viral replication and the establishment of chronic infection.
Oxidative stress contributes to abnormal glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity in two hyperlipidemia models.

OBJECTIVE Lipid metabolism disturbance can result in insulin resistance and glucose intolerance; however, the features of glucose metabolism are still elusive in different dyslipidemia. Our study intended to explore the characteristics and molecular mechanisms of glucose metabolism abnormal in hypercholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia models. METHODS Two mouse models were used in this study, one was lipoprotein lipase gene-deleted (LPL(+/-)) mice, and the other was high fat dietary (HFD) mice. Levels of total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), high-density lipoprotein-cholesterin (HDL-c) and low-density lipoprotein-cholesterin (LDL-c) in serum were measured by full-automatic biochemical analyzer. Intraperitoneal glucose tolerance test (IPGTT) was performed to evaluate insulin sensitivity and β-cell function. Malondialdehyde (MDA) and total superoxide dismutase (T-SOD) levels in serum were measured by colorimetric determination. mRNA expression of superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1), catalase (CAT), glutathione peroxidase 1 (Gpx1), nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2a) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma coactivator 1 alpha (PGC-1α) in liver, skeletal muscle, visceral fat and subcutaneous fat were measured by Real-Time PCR. RESULTS Compared with HFD mice, the levels of serum TG were significantly higher in LPL(+/-) mice, whereas the levels of TC, HDL-c, LDL-c were significantly lower. The plasma glucose levels were increased at each time point of intra-peritoneal glucose tolerance test (IPGTT) in both groups. Furthermore, the level of serum fasting insulin and homeostasis model assessment index-insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) increased with a decreased ISI in both groups. In addition, the plasma MDA of HFD group was higher than that of lipoprotein lipase-deficiency (LPL(+/-)) group, while the activity of T-SOD in HFD group was lower than that in LPL(+/-) group. Real-Time PCR revealed that the expressions of SOD1, CAT and Gpx1 in liver and subcutaneous fat were lower in HFD group than those in LPL(+/-) group, but higher in skeletal muscle and visceral fat. CONCLUSIONS There are different in glucose metabolism between high TG mice and high TC mice. Impaired insulin sensitivity is more serious in HFD mice than that in LPL(+/-) mice. Oxidative stress could contribute to insulin resistance in hyperlipidemia mice.
Fog Computing May Help to Save Energy in Cloud Computing

Tiny computers located in end-user premises are becoming popular as local servers for Internet of Things (IoT) and Fog computing services. These highly distributed servers that can host and distribute content and applications in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion are known as nano data centers (nDCs). Despite the growing popularity of nano servers, their energy consumption is not well-investigated. To study energy consumption of nDCs, we propose and use flow-based and time-based energy consumption models for shared and unshared network equipment, respectively. To apply and validate these models, a set of measurements and experiments are performed to compare energy consumption of a service provided by nDCs and centralized data centers (DCs). A number of findings emerge from our study, including the factors in the system design that allow nDCs to consume less energy than its centralized counterpart. These include the type of access network attached to nano servers and nano server's time utilization (the ratio of the idle time to active time). Additionally, the type of applications running on nDCs and factors such as number of downloads, number of updates, and amount of preloaded copies of data influence the energy cost. Our results reveal that number of hops between a user and content has little impact on the total energy consumption compared to the above-mentioned factors. We show that nano servers in Fog computing can complement centralized DCs to serve certain applications, mostly IoT applications for which the source of data is in end-user premises, and lead to energy saving if the applications (or a part of them) are off-loadable from centralized DCs and run on nDCs.
Development and sea trial of the compact cruising type AUV system

In this paper, we present an overview of two cruising AUVs recently developed by National Maritime Research Institute of Japan. Sharing the same hardware and software architectures, two AUVs divide their responsibilities by employing acoustic bottom survey devices of different purposes. Pursuing the easiness in generating a behavior plan corresponding to a specific mission, pattern-based behavior planner is developed and commonly used by two AUVs. Right after their completion, two AUVs were deployed in Suruga Bay and successfully achieved lots of missions imposed on their trial dives. Results of trial dives of our AUVs are also presented in this paper.
Tax Mimicking in the Short- and the Long-Run: Evidence from German Reunification

This paper uses the quasi-experiment of Germany´s reunification to identify local tax mimicking by municipalities in Eastern-Germany. After reunification, East-German municipalities were allowed to independently set, for the first time in decades, local business and property tax rates. I explore whether the tax rates chosen by East-German border municipalities were influenced by the tax rates of adjacent West-German municipalities. To obtain causal estimates, I rely on instrumental variables regressions within the spatial lag framework, using West-German border municipalities - tax rates in 1989 as instruments for their post-reunification tax rates. The results suggest that East-German municipalities mimicked business tax rates immediately after reunification, but not in later years. I find no evidence of mimicking for property taxes. These results indicate that mimicking is not an important determinant of local tax policy.
GaN-based high-power-density electrolytic-free universal input LED driver

This paper presents a high-power-density high-power-factor GaN-based two-stage electrolytic-free offline LED driver. The LED driver achieves high power density through the use of a hybrid film-ceramic stacked switched capacitor (SSC) energy buffer, and a comprehensive optimization methodology that evaluates various converter topologies and designs, and minimizes overall system volume while maintaining high efficiency. Based on this optimization approach, a totem-pole bridgeless boost PFC converter is selected for the first stage, while a stacked-input isolated LLC converter is selected for the second stage. The optimization procedure also minimizes the passive volume of the SSC energy buffer incorporating the volumetric energy density of commercially available capacitors. The optimized SSC energy buffer utilized in the proposed LED driver has 50% less passive volume than a capacitor-only solution. A 600-W prototype LED driver designed using the proposed approach for universal input voltage (90–305 Vrms) and 24 V output voltage is built and tested. The PFC stage achieves a peak efficiency of 98% while the LLC stage achieves a peak efficiency of 95%. The prototyped LED driver achieves a power density of 28 W/in3.
Comparison of dynamic and static operation of a novel optical read-out technology for micromachined cantilever sensors

A novel, optical approach to the interrogation of MEMS cantilever sensors is discussed. We investigate the effects of placing a diffraction grating in a Si waveguide below a cantilever arm, to create a resonant cavity which will create interference on an optical signal through the waveguide. We look at FDTD simulations of the optical power transmitted through this device as the cantilever's height changes in relation to the diffraction grating. We discuss the use of this interrogation technique on micro-cantilever-based sensors operating in both the dynamic and static mode.
Econometric models in foreign exchange market

According to the significance of the econometric models in foreign exchange market, the purpose of this research is to give a closer examination on some important issues in this area. The research covers exchange rate pass-through into import prices, liquidity risk and expected returns in the currency market, and the common risk factors in currency markets. Firstly, with the significant of the exchange rate pass-through in financial economics, the first empirical chapter studies on the degree of exchange rate pass-through into import in emerging economies and developed countries in panel evidences for comparison covering the time period of 1970-2009. The pooled mean group estimation (PMGE) is used for the estimation to investigate the short run coefficients and error variance. In general, the results present that the import prices are affected positively, though incompletely, by the exchange rate. Secondly, the following study addresses the question whether there is a relationship between cross-sectional differences in foreign exchange returns and the sensitivities of the returns to fluctuations in liquidity, known as liquidity beta, by using a unique dataset of weekly order flow. Finally, the last study is in keeping with the study of Lustig, Roussanov and Verdelhan (2011), which shows that the large co-movement among exchange rates of different currencies can explain a risk-based view of exchange rate determination. The exploration on identifying a slope factor in exchange rate changes is brought up. The study initially constructs monthly portfolios of currencies, which are sorted on the basis of their forward discounts. The lowest interest rate currencies are contained in the first portfolio and the highest interest rate currencies are in the last. The results performs that portfolios with higher forward discounts incline to contain higher real interest rates in overall by considering the first portfolio and the last portfolio though the fluctuation occurs.
SSAS: Semantic Similarity for Abstractive Summarization

Ideally a metric evaluating an abstract system summary should represent the extent to which the system-generated summary approximates the semantic inference conceived by the reader using a human-written reference summary. Most of the previous approaches relied upon word or syntactic sub-sequence overlap to evaluate system-generated summaries. Such metrics cannot evaluate the summary at semantic inference level. Through this work we introduce the metric of Semantic Similarity for Abstractive Summarization (SSAS), which leverages natural language inference and paraphrasing techniques to frame a novel approach to evaluate system summaries at semantic inference level. SSAS is based upon a weighted composition of quantities representing the level of agreement, contradiction, independence, paraphrasing, and optionally ROUGE score between a system-generated and a human-written summary.
Catalytic Intermediates of Inducible Nitric-oxide Synthase Stabilized by the W188H Mutation*

Background: Trp-188 plays a role in regulating the activity of nitric-oxide synthase (NOS). Results: W188H mutation stabilizes a 420-nm intermediate by distorting the heme macrocycle. Conclusion: The 420-nm intermediate is a hydroxide-bound ferric heme species with a tetrahydrobiopterin radical center. Significance: The data provide the first evidence for a critical intermediate in NOS. Nitric-oxide synthase (NOS) catalyzes nitric oxide (NO) synthesis via a two-step process: l-arginine (l-Arg) → N-hydroxy-l-arginine → citrulline + NO. In the active site the heme is coordinated by a thiolate ligand, which accepts a H-bond from a nearby tryptophan residue, Trp-188. Mutation of Trp-188 to histidine in murine inducible NOS was shown to retard NO synthesis and allow for transient accumulation of a new intermediate with a Soret maximum at 420 nm during the l-Arg hydroxylation reaction (Tejero, J., Biswas, A., Wang, Z. Q., Page, R. C., Haque, M. M., Hemann, C., Zweier, J. L., Misra, S., and Stuehr, D. J. (2008) J. Biol. Chem. 283, 33498–33507). However, crystallographic data showed that the mutation did not perturb the overall structure of the enzyme. To understand how the proximal mutation affects the oxygen chemistry, we carried out biophysical studies of the W188H mutant. Our stopped-flow data showed that the 420-nm intermediate was not only populated during the l-Arg reaction but also during the N-hydroxy-l-arginine reaction. Spectroscopic data and structural analysis demonstrated that the 420-nm intermediate is a hydroxide-bound ferric heme species that is stabilized by an out-of-plane distortion of the heme macrocycle and a cation radical centered on the tetrahydrobiopterin cofactor. The current data add important new insights into the previously proposed catalytic mechanism of NOS (Li, D., Kabir, M., Stuehr, D. J., Rousseau, D. L., and Yeh, S. R. (2007) J. Am. Chem. Soc. 129, 6943–6951).
A Control Scheme to Minimize Muscle Energy for Power Assistant Robotic Systems Under Unknown External Perturbation

This paper proposes a novel control method to minimize muscle energy for power-assistant robotic systems that support the intended motions of a user under unknown external perturbations, using surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals. Conventional control methods based on force/torque (F/T) sensors have limitations to detect human intentions and could, presumably, misunderstand or distort such intentions because of external perturbations of the interaction forces, such as those found in activities of daily living. F/T sensors measure the sum of the applied force, including unknown external forces and human intention; thus, a power-assistant robot controller cannot exactly decompose the real human force. In this paper, we describe a counterexample that cannot be supported by conventional force-sensor-based control methods. We also verify why these control methods may guide human behavior in the wrong direction, and thus, have limitations under unknown external perturbations. We then propose a new control method to minimize the muscle energy indicated by sEMG signals. The proposed control approach is fundamentally based on the concept of power-assistance, in which a robot can reduce the users expended muscle energy while performing given tasks. The proposed control approach is verified through experiments using a power-assistant robotic system for the upper limbs under external perturbations.