Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms through which high glucose concentration raises [Ca2+]i in renal proximal tubular cells.

BACKGROUND The basal levels of cytosolic calcium ([Ca2+]i) of renal proximal tubular cells of rats with streptozotocin-induced diabetes are elevated. It is possible that this phenomenon is mediated by the hyperglycemia, which may cause both increased calcium influx into and/or decreased calcium efflux out of these cells. METHODS We examined whether high glucose concentration in vitro causes acute rise in [Ca2+]i of freshly isolated renal proximal tubular cells and explored the pathways that are involved in such an event. RESULTS There were dose and time dependent increments in [Ca2+]i of renal proximal tubular cells exposed to high concentrations of glucose. A similar effect was observed with equimolar concentrations of mannitol or choline chloride but not urea. A substantial part of the rise in [Ca2+]i was inhibited when the media contained verapamil, nifedipine, amlodipine or ryanodine and when the cells were placed in a calcium free media. Inhibitors of G protein(s) (GDPbetaS or pertussis toxin), inhibitors of cAMP-protein kinase A pathway (RpcAMP or H-89), inhibitors of protein kinase C (staurosporine or calphostin) and inhibitor of Na+-H+ exchanger (HOE 694) blocked the rise in a dose dependent manner. High glucose concentration also caused a decrease in ATP content of these cells and a reduction in the Vmax of their Ca2+ATPase. CONCLUSIONS The results are consistent with the formulation that the osmotic activity (cell shrinkage) of the high glucose concentration may activate a stretch receptor with subsequent stimulation of various cellular pathways including G protein(s), cAMP-protein kinase A and phospholipase C systems and calcium channels. Activation of these cellular pathways permits both calcium influx into renal tubular cells and mobilization of calcium from their intracellular stores. Further, a decrease in calcium efflux secondary to the reduction in the Vmax of Ca2+ ATPase may occur. It is possible that the rise in [Ca2+]i is critical for the stimulation of the events that lead to restoration of cell volume to normal.
Political leaders and public administrators: Interaction patterns and pictures in Finnish local government decision-making processes

The rapid change of local government operating environment shapes the interaction between political leaders and public administrators, who work in the constant riptide of service responsiveness and economic pressure. We investigate the relationship between political leaders and public administrators in the local administration of social and health services. The patterns and pictures are examined empirically, with data gathered from strategic-level political leaders and public administrators in six Finnish local government organisations. The analysis applies multivariate methods. The results suggest that there are different groups among the political leaders. The differences are not based on political opinions, but rather on the attitudes towards the decision-making process, also the views on local government decision-making processes differ between the groups. The rapid contextual change experienced in the public organisations requires a fast and well-informed response from political leaders and public administrators; even political differences can be pushed aside in this turbulent operating environment.
At Least 1 in 20 16S rRNA Sequence Records Currently Held in Public Repositories Is Estimated To Contain Substantial Anomalies

ABSTRACT A new method for detecting chimeras and other anomalies within 16S rRNA sequence records is presented. Using this method, we screened 1,399 sequences from 19 phyla, as defined by the Ribosomal Database Project, release 9, update 22, and found 5.0% to harbor substantial errors. Of these, 64.3% were obvious chimeras, 14.3% were unidentified sequencing errors, and 21.4% were highly degenerate. In all, 11 phyla contained obvious chimeras, accounting for 0.8 to 11% of the records for these phyla. Many chimeras (43.1%) were formed from parental sequences belonging to different phyla. While most comprised two fragments, 13.7% were composed of at least three fragments, often from three different sources. A separate analysis of the Bacteroidetes phylum (2,739 sequences) also revealed 5.8% records to be anomalous, of which 65.4% were apparently chimeric. Overall, we conclude that, as a conservative estimate, 1 in every 20 public database records is likely to be corrupt. Our results support concerns recently expressed over the quality of the public repositories. With 16S rRNA sequence data increasingly playing a dominant role in bacterial systematics and environmental biodiversity studies, it is vital that steps be taken to improve screening of sequences prior to submission. To this end, we have implemented our method as a program with a simple-to-use graphic user interface that is capable of running on a range of computer platforms. The program is called Pintail, is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License open source license, and is freely available from our website at http://www.cardiff. ac.uk/biosi/research/biosoft/ .
The administrator role in professional development in international schools:perspectives on planning, implementing, evaluating and resourcing

Existing research shows the importance of teacher professional development and that decisions regarding professional development in schools lie with administrators. However, while studies have been conducted on the need for administrators fostering professional development in schools in the USA, there appears to be limited research on administrator views of professional development in international school environments. The purpose of this study was to consider views of administrators in international schools regarding professional development activities. Using a mixed methods sequential explanatory design, a questionnaire followed by in-depth interviews, data was collected from a convenience and purposive sample of administrators from international schools in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East so as to explore and provide answers to the main research question: “What are the views of administrators on how professional development is planned, implemented, evaluated and resourced in international schools? ” Findings from quantitative data indicated strong agreement that administrators should work collaboratively with teachers to determine the professional development needs of the school and that teachers should be involved in assessing professional development effectiveness. Analysis of qualitative data indicated the following themes: teachers are sent to conferences/workshops for professional development or content experts are brought to the school; decisions about professional development should align with school goals; professional development needs should be determined by teachers and administrators collaboratively; there are no significant professional development evaluation processes in place; 2% of the budget is standard allocation in schools for professional development and school boards approve the budget while administrators decide on allocation. By addressing the study’s purpose, this research seeks to contribute to the larger conversation on how administrator views on professional development in international schools can add knowledge to the limited research on effective avenues to professional development in the international school context.
Message authentication and wormhole detection mechanism in wireless sensor network

One of the most effective way to prevent unauthorized and corrupted message being forwarded in wireless sensor network. But there is high computational and communication overhead in addition to lack of scalability and resilience to node compromise attacks. So to address these issues, a polynomial-based scheme was recently introduced. However, this scheme and its extensions all have the weakness of a built-in threshold determined by the degree of the polynomial. when the number of messages transmitted is larger than this threshold, the adversary can fully recover the polynomial. In the existing system, an unconditionally secure and efficient source anonymous message authentication (SAMA) scheme is presented which is based on the optimal modified Elgamal signature (MES) scheme on elliptic curves. This MES scheme is secure against adaptive chosen-message attacks in the random oracle model. This scheme enables the intermediate nodes to authenticate the message so that all corrupted message can be detected and dropped to conserve the sensor power. While achieving compromise resiliency, flexible-time authentication and source identity protection, this scheme does not have the threshold problem. While enabling intermediate nodes authentication, this scheme allows any node to transmit an unlimited number of messages without suffering the threshold problem. But by using this method the black hole and gray hole attacks are detected but wormhole attack is doesn't detect. Because the wormhole attack is one of the harmful attacks which degrade the network performance. So, in the proposed system, one innovative technique is introduced which is called an efficient wormhole detection mechanism in the wireless sensor networks. In this method, considers the RTT between two successive nodes and those nodes' neighbor number which is needed to compare those values of other successive nodes. The identification of wormhole attacks is based on the two faces. The first consideration is that the transmission time between two wormhole attack affected nodes is considerable higher than that between two normal neighbor nodes. The second detection mechanism is based on the fact that by introducing new links into the network, the adversary increases the number of neighbors of the nodes within its radius. An experimental result shows that the proposed method achieves high network performance.
Big Data in Public Affairs Education

Abstract Public affairs schools face the challenge of including emergent topics in their curricula to prepare students for the public sector job market. Some such topics reflect advances in the use of information technologies; others reflect updates to industry standards or changing needs of public sector information management professionals. This article focuses on big data that are created through citizens’ use of new technologies and the combination of administratively collected data with online data. Big data require changes in government information management skills, including collection, cleaning, and interpreting unstructured and unfiltered data; real-time decision making based on early signals and patterns that emerge; and new organizational roles and tasks, such as open innovation and change management. This article reviews the existing literature, compares big data requirements in neighboring disciplines, and suggests 13 modules for a big data syllabus that extend Mason’s PAPA model of ethical considerations for the information age.
Efficient and generalized geometric range search on encrypted spatial data in the cloud

With cloud services, users can easily host their data in the cloud and retrieve the part needed by search. Searchable encryption is proposed to conduct such process in a privacy-preserving way, which allows a cloud server to perform search over the encrypted data in the cloud according to the search token submitted by the user. However, existing works mainly focus on textual data and merely take numerical spatial data into account. Especially, geometric range search is an important queries on spatial data and has wide applications in machine learning, location-based services(LBS), computer-aided design(CAD), and computational geometry. In this paper, we proposed an efficient and generalized symmetric-key geometric range search scheme on encrypted spatial data in the cloud, which supports queries with different range shapes and dimensions. To provide secure and efficient search, we extend the secure kNN computation with dynamic geometric transformation, which dynamically transforms the points in the dataset and the queried geometric range simultaneously. Besides, we further extend the proposed scheme to support sub-linear search efficiency through novel usage of tree structures. We also present extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed schemes on a real-world dataset. The results show that the proposed schemes are efficient over encrypted datasets and secure against the curious cloud servers.
On the role of financial derivatives for the genesis and analysis of volatility in commodity markets

Food price volatility has re-emerged as an important topic of political discussion since the food price crisis of 2007/08. Not only the observation of increasing price levels but also their apparent increased volatility on key markets (most notably grains) has triggered many studies both at the conceptual and the empirical level. Since people suffer from high and unstable prices, especially in least developed countries, this development has been widely recognized as a global problem, and a major impediment to combating hunger and malnutrition. This thesis aims to contribute to the debate on how best to cope with agricultural commodity price volatility. To gain a comprehensive overview of agricultural price volatility, its causes, and potential ways to help affected market participants in a meaningful way, this thesis focuses on three major aspects that built the three main chapters of this cumulative dissertation: Chapter 2 aims to robustly answer the question of how volatility has developed since the food price crisis of 2007/2008. General differences in volatility level, volatility of volatility, and volatility persistence for a set of realized, GARCH model-based and implied volatilities are noted for three agricultural commodities – wheat, corn, and soybeans. Moreover, common statements regarding the increase of volatility since the food price crisis of 2007/2008 and further relevant issues such as changes in volatility persistence and quantification of the increase are analyzed in terms of a robust conclusion. Chapter 3 identifies drivers of volatility for several oilseed and vegetable oil markets. The chapter provides an investigation of the joint effects of fundamental volatility drivers and spillover effects between related markets. Chapter 4 introduces a set of related risk measures to characterize the detailed structure of volatility in agricultural commodity markets. These measures allow for a decomposition of overall price moves into “large" changes with potentially severe economic consequences and “normal" changes. Forward-looking estimators of the risk measures that extract market expectations about future commodity price moves from current option prices are derived. An empirical study on major grain markets demonstrates the forecasting power of the implied estimators. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that managing risk and mitigating the impacts of excessive price volatility can only be successful if one is aware of which commodity markets are affected, which specific kind of price risk one faces, and consequently which group of market participants needs protection, and if this risk is recognized early enough to undertake helpful measures.
Automated Segmentation of in Vivo and Ex Vivo Mouse Brain Magnetic Resonance Images

Segmentation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data is required for many applications, such as the comparison of different structures or time points, and for annotation purposes. Currently, the gold standard for automated image segmentation is nonlinear atlas-based segmentation. However, these methods are either not sufficient or highly time consuming for mouse brains, owing to the low signal to noise ratio and low contrast between structures compared with other applications. We present a novel generic approach to reduce processing time for segmentation of various structures of mouse brains, in vivo and ex vivo. The segmentation consists of a rough affine registration to a template followed by a clustering approach to refine the rough segmentation near the edges. Compared with manual segmentations, the presented segmentation method has an average kappa index of 0.7 for 7 of 12 structures in in vivo MRI and 11 of 12 structures in ex vivo MRI. Furthermore, we found that these results were equal to the performance of a nonlinear segmentation method, but with the advantage of being 8 times faster. The presented automatic segmentation method is quick and intuitive and can be used for image registration, volume quantification of structures, and annotation.
Local Antibiotic Delivery by a Bioabsorbable Gel Is Superior to PMMA Bead Depot in Reducing Infection in an Open Fracture Model

Objectives: Local delivery allows a high concentration of antibiotics to be achieved in the wound while avoiding the side effects and cost of systemic administration. Beads molded from polymethylmethacrylate cement are commonly used for local antibiotic delivery but are not ideal. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a bioabsorbable gel delivering vancomycin and gentamicin is more effective in reducing infection than beads delivering vancomycin and tobramycin. Methods: This study used a segmental defect rat model contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus and treated with clinically relevant local antibiotic doses, delivered by gel or beads. In the gel group, 1 mL of gel containing gentamicin and vancomycin was spread throughout the wound. In the bead group, four 3-mm beads containing tobramycin and vancomycin were placed in the wound, 2 in the defect and 2 in the adjacent tissue envelope, there was also a control group that received no antibiotic treatment. After 14 days, bone and hardware was harvested for separate microbiological analysis. Results: There was a significantly lower infection rate in groups treated with antibiotics delivered by gel compared with those treated with either antibiotic beads or no antibiotics at all (P < 0.001). Quantitative cultures also demonstrate significantly less bacteria in the wounds treated with the gel than in the control or bead groups (P ⩽ 0.004). Conclusions: These results suggest that antibiotic delivery by a gel is superior to beads. The authors propose that antibiotic depot by polymethylmethacrylate antibiotic beads is less effective because this method has to rely on diffusion of the antibiotic from the high concentration close to the beads to all regions of the wound.
Tuberculosis in dialysis patients, single centre experience from an endemic area

Because of immunity defect, patients with end‐stage renal disease are at increased risk of developing infections, tuberculosis (TB) in particular. The incidence of TB is higher in dialysis patients than in general population. We retrospectively reviewed the charts of dialysis patients with TB in our facility. A total of 287 dialysis patients (153 male, 134 female, 223 haemodialysis (HD), 64 continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) patients, mean age 46 ± 15) were reviewed from October 1997 to January 2002. TB developed in 30 patients (17 male, 13 female, 24 HD and six CAPD). Thirteen patients with TB presented with fever of unknown origin (FUO) and four of them subsequently developed military lesions on chest X‐ray. Nine patients had pulmonary TB (four with pleural effusions), five patients had TB lymphadenits, two patients had TB peritonitis and one patient had vertebral TB. TB was presented mostly as FUO among dialysis patients in a region under poor socio‐economic conditions. In such areas with endemic TB, dialysis patients who present with FUO should be carefully evaluated for the presence of TB, and test therapy for TB should be performed in otherwise unexplained FUO.
Structure and Development of Sphenophyllum oblongifolium from the Upper Carboniferous of France

Variation in branching pattern and leaf morphology in Sphenophyllum oblongifolium are investigated based on new compression material from the Upper Carboniferous (Stephanian) of France. Morphometric analysis reveals correlation between several parameters (internodal length, maximum diameter of axis, leaf length). Ontogenetic variability of axis diameter and internodal length is also demonstrated. There is no evidence of a rhythmic elongation of stems, which are interpreted as axes with a determinate but continuous growth. The vegetative system of S. oblongifolium is composed of four to five successive orders of axes. Branching is intermittent and diffuse, with an aleatory distribution of proleptic branches in which internode length may equal that in the parent stem. In the slender axes of the vegetative system of S. oblongifolium there is no clear hierarchy among successive orders of axes. This contrasts with the situation in the calamitean sphenopsids, where the successive orders of axes show distinct differences in diameter. Heterophylly of S. oblongifolium is documented in detail. As in some other species (e.g., Sphenophyllum emarginatum), heterophylly is interpreted partly as an adaptation to a more or less scrambling habit.
The AML1-MTG8 Leukemic Fusion Protein Forms a Complex with a Novel Member of the MTG8(ETO/CDR) Family, MTGR1

ABSTRACT The AML1-CBFβ transcription factor complex is essential for the definitive hematopoiesis of all lineages and is the most frequent target of chromosomal rearrangements in human leukemia. In the t(8;21) translocation associated with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), theAML1(CBFA2/PEBP2αB) gene is juxtaposed to theMTG8(ETO/CDR) gene. We show here that the resultant AML1-MTG8 gene product specifically and strongly interacts with an 85-kDa phosphoprotein. Molecular cloning of cDNA indicated that the AML1-MTG8-binding protein (MTGR1) is highly related to MTG8 and similar to Drosophila Nervy. Comparison of amino acid sequences among MTGR1, MTG8, and Nervy revealed four evolutionarily conserved regions (NHR1 to NHR4). Ectopic expression of AML1-MTG8 in L-G murine myeloid progenitor cells inhibits differentiation to mature neutrophils and induces cell proliferation in response to granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF). Analysis with C-terminal deletion mutants of AML1-MTG8 indicated that the region of 51 residues (488 to 538), which contains NHR2, is essential for the induction of G-CSF-dependent cell proliferation. Immunoprecipitation analysis indicates that this region is required for AML1-MTG8 to form a stable complex with MTGR1. Overexpression of MTGR1 stimulates AML1-MTG8 to induce G-CSF-dependent proliferation of L-G cells and to interfere with AML1-dependent transcription. These results suggest that AML1-MTG8 could function as a complex with MTGR1 and that the complex might be important in promoting leukemogenesis.
Mini-P1 plasmid partitioning: excess ParB protein destabilizes plasmids containing the centromere parS

The partition system of the unit-copy plasmid P1 consists of two proteins, the parA and parB gene products, and a cis-acting site, parS. Production of high levels of the P1 ParB protein, from an external promoter on a high-copy-number vector, inhibits the propagation of lambda-mini-P1 prophages and destabilizes other P1-derived plasmids. The interference by ParB protein depends on the parS site, or centromere, of the P1 partition region; plasmids lacking parS are unaffected. The defect is more severe than the defect due to mutations that simply eliminate par function. In the presence of excess ParB protein, plasmids carrying parS are more unstable than would be predicted from a random distribution at cell division. The destabilization is a segregation defect, as the copy number of parS-bearing plasmids is not decreased under these conditions. Thus, it appears that ParB protein binds to parS; if too much protein is present, it sequesters such plasmids so they cannot be properly, or even randomly, partitioned. This suggests that under normal conditions, ParB protein recognizes and binds to parS and may be the protein responsible for pairing plasmids during the process of partitioning at cell division.