Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phenotypic changes in the brain of SIV-infected macaques exposed to methamphetamine parallel macrophage activation patterns induced by the common gamma-chain cytokine system

One factor in the development of neuroAIDS is the increase in the migration of pro-inflammatory CD8 T cells across the blood–brain barrier. Typically these cells are involved with keeping the viral load down. However, the persistence of above average numbers of CD8 T cells in the brain, not necessarily specific to viral peptides, is facilitated by the upregulation of IL15 from astrocytes, in the absence of IL2, in the brain environment. Both IL15 and IL2 are common gamma chain (γc) cytokines. Here, using the non-human primate model of neuroAIDS, we have demonstrated that exposure to methamphetamine, a powerful illicit drug that has been associated with HIV exposure and neuroAIDS severity, can cause an increase in molecules of the γc system. Among these molecules, IL15, which is upregulated in astrocytes by methamphetamine, and that induces the proliferation of T cells, may also be involved in driving an inflammatory phenotype in innate immune cells of the brain. Therefore, methamphetamine and IL15 may be critical in the development and aggravation of central nervous system immune-mediated inflammatory pathology in HIV-infected drug abusers.
Effects of climate, fire and vegetation development on Holocene changes in total organic carbon concentration in three boreal forest lakes in northern Sweden

Abstract. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), diatoms, pollen, charcoal, loss-on-ignition (LOI), and nutrient elements in lake sediments were used to assess important factors controlling Holocene changes in the total organic carbon (TOC) concentration, pCO2, color and pH of lake water in three boreal forest lakes in northern Sweden. The results suggest that mire formation, fire frequency and humidity are the most important forcing factors on millennial timescales. Mires produce humic acids that become available to the lakes, whereas fires may reduce the pool of carbon in the catchments, and humidity controls the transportation of allochthonous carbon into the lakes. Vegetation development and temperature as sole factors are of minor importance for the TOC concentrations in these lakes on a millennial timescale. Two of the sites indicate that liming and possibly fish introduction and rotenone treatment in recent time has led to increased TOC, color and pH in the lake water, and changed the diatom community composition to an assemblage that has never been present before. Given the predicted climate change scenario that suggests a more humid climate, expanding mires and less frequent fires, our paleolimnological data suggest that TOC concentrations can be expected to increase in boreal forest lakes in the future. Since super-saturation and emission of CO2 from lakes is correlated to the TOC concentration of lake water, higher TOC concentrations may lead to increased emission of CO2 from lakes to the atmosphere.
Performance analysis of sphere detection combined with the LDPC decoding

In this paper, we investigate the low density parity-check (LDPC) decoding algorithms and the detection methods of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. For LDPC codes, min-sum and layered decoding algorithms are discussed, and for MIMO detection, the maximum likelihood (ML) decision based on the sphere decoding algorithm is mainly analyzed. Also, the performance of the combination of the channel coding and space time coding is presented, which use the preceding methods respectively. In this LDPC coded system, the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) is propagated from LDPC decoder to the MIMO detector and then fed back, which would increase the decoding efficiency.
Analyses of Sox-B and Sox-E Family Genes in the Cephalopod Sepia officinalis: Revealing the Conserved and the Unusual

Cephalopods provide an unprecedented opportunity for comparative studies of the developmental genetics of organ systems that are convergent with analogous vertebrate structures. The Sox-family of transcription factors is an important class of DNA-binding proteins that are known to be involved in many aspects of differentiation, but have been largely unstudied in lophotrochozoan systems. Using a degenerate primer strategy we have isolated coding sequence for three members of the Sox family of transcription factors from a cephalopod mollusk, the European cuttlefish Sepia officinalis: Sof-SoxE, Sof-SoxB1, and Sof-SoxB2. Analyses of their expression patterns during organogenesis reveals distinct spatial and temporal expression domains. Sof-SoxB1 shows early ectodermal expression throughout the developing epithelium, which is gradually restricted to presumptive sensory epithelia. Expression within the nervous system appears by mid-embryogenesis. Sof-SoxB2 expression is similar to Sof-SoxB1 within the developing epithelia in early embryogenesis, however appears in largely non-overlapping expression domains within the central nervous system and is not expressed in the maturing sensory epithelium. In contrast, Sof-SoxE is expressed throughout the presumptive mesodermal territories at the onset of organogenesis. As development proceeds, Sof-SoxE expression is elevated throughout the developing peripheral circulatory system. This expression disappears as the circulatory system matures, but expression is maintained within undifferentiated connective tissues throughout the animal, and appears within the nervous system near the end of embryogenesis. SoxB proteins are widely known for their role in neural specification in numerous phylogenetic lineages. Our data suggests that Sof-SoxB genes play similar roles in cephalopods. In contrast, Sof-SoxE appears to be involved in the early stages of vasculogenesis of the cephalopod closed circulatory system, a novel role for a member of this gene family.
Persuasive Self-Efficacy: Dispositional and Situational Correlates

People vary in their self-efficacy as persuaders. After devising a brief measure of persuasive self-efficacy, we find that the construct correlates positively with a number of variables relevant to social interaction, including self-esteem, self-monitoring, extroversion, and openness to new experiences, and negatively with other variables, including communication apprehension and neuroticism. Social self-efficacy had a modest but significant relationship with persuasive self-efficacy. Drawing from research on contextual self-efficacy, we also examine some of the social situations where persuasive self-efficacy may matter and find that people vary in their self-efficacy as a persuader as a function of the context.
Inhibition of VEGF secretion and experimental choroidal neovascularization by picropodophyllin (PPP), an inhibitor of the insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor.

INTRODUCTION Choroidal neovascularization (CNV) is a debilitating complication of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and a leading cause of vision loss. Along with other angiogenic factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-1 and its receptor, IGF-1R, have been implicated in CNV. PURPOSE A prior study has shown that the cyclolignan picropodophyllin (PPP) efficiently blocks the insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor (IGF-1R) activity and causes cell death in uveal melanoma cell lines and in an in vivo model. In this study we investigated the effect of PPP on VEGF expression, both in vitro and in vivo, and whether this effect has antiangiogenic consequences in a murine CNV model. METHODS C57BL/6J mice with laser-induced CNVs were treated with PPP. Effects on CNV area were assayed by image analysis. VEGF levels in the choroid and retinal pigment epithelial cells (ARPE-19) were measured by Western blot or ELISA. Transcriptional activation of the VEGF promoter was determined by luciferase reporter gene assay. RESULTS Mice treated with PPP, administered intraperitoneally or orally, showed a 22% to 32% (P = 0.002) decrease in CNV area. Furthermore, VEGF levels in the choroid were significantly reduced. In cultured ARPE-19 cells, IGF-1 was shown to increase VEGF secretion. This increase was completely blocked by PPP. PPP reduced the level of transcriptional activity of the VEGF promoter. CONCLUSIONS PPP reduces IGF-1-dependent VEGF expression and CNV in vivo. Accordingly, IGF-1R inhibitors may be useful tools in the treatment of conditions associated with CNV, including neovascular AMD.
Coverage and Capacity Issues in Enterprise Wireless LAN Deployment

Although Wireless LANs market has grown tremendously in the last few years, their enterprise deployment has been fairly limited. From manual site survey process to ensure adequate coverage to well-known security issues in original standards, there have been several deterrents to widespread enterprise deployment of wireless LANs. In this paper we describe three of the core wireless LAN deployment problems – access point positioning and cell dimensioning, channel allocation, and access point load balancing, and show how existing tools and systems address these problems to provide adequate coverage and capacity across an enterprise. We bring out the similarities between these issues and related deployment issues in cellular networking arena, and discuss various proposed solutions in both contexts. Finally, we survey several advanced architectures that further automate the deployment and management of wireless LANs.
A Hardware Task-Graph Scheduler for Reconfigurable Multi-tasking Systems

Reconfigurable hardware can be used to build a multi-tasking system where tasks are assigned to HW resources at run-time according to the requirements of the running applications. These tasks are frequently represented as direct acyclic graphs and their execution is typically controlled by an embedded processor that schedules the graph execution. In order to improve the efficiency of the system, the scheduler can apply prefetch and reuse techniques that can greatly reduce the reconfiguration latencies. For a processor all these computations represent a heavy computational load that can significantly reduce the system performance. To overcome this problem we have implemented a HW scheduler using reconfigurablere sources. In addition we have implemented both prefetch and replacement techniques that obtain as good results as previous complex SW approaches, while demanding just a few clock cycles to carry out the computations. We consider that the HW cost of the system (in our experiments 3% of a Virtex-II PRO xc2vp30 FPGA) is affordable taking into account the great efficiency of the techniques applied to hide there configuration latency and the negligible run-time penalty introduced by the scheduler computations.
Variational Bayesian Method for Retinex

In this paper, we propose a variational Bayesian method for Retinex to simulate and interpret how the human visual system perceives color. To construct a hierarchical Bayesian model, we use the Gibbs distributions as prior distributions for the reflectance and the illumination, and the gamma distributions for the model parameters. By assuming that the reflection function is piecewise continuous and illumination function is spatially smooth, we define the energy functions in the Gibbs distributions as a total variation function and a smooth function for the reflectance and the illumination, respectively. We then apply the variational Bayes approximation to obtain the approximation of the posterior distribution of unknowns so that the unknown images and hyperparameters are estimated simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method for providing competitive performance without additional information about the unknown parameters, and when prior information is added the proposed method outperforms the non-Bayesian-based Retinex methods we compared.
Brand Personality of Web Search Engines: Who is the Conqueror of the Digital Age?

AbstrAct Today, as business becomes ever more challenging, brands become the main assets of many companies. Fierce competition forces companies to differentiate their products from those of competitors in the market. However, it is extremely difficult to create this differentiation based on the functionality attribute of the products, since advanced technology makes it possible for companies to imitate the functionality attributes. Hence, marketers begin to create personalities for their brands in order to be more appealing to the consumers. Brand personality is defined as " the set of human characteristics associated with a brand " and it is asserted that the brand personality leads to differentiation in terms of consumer perceptions and preferences. At the moment, millions of people use search engines in order to reach the most relevant information. Since search engines, as the senior actors of the online world, provide similar services, it is enormously crucial for them to create differentiation. Google is the dominant search engine brand and, in this paper, its success has been examined by utilizing the brand personality scale of Aaker (1997). This study tries to identify the brand personality dimensions that search engine companies create in the minds of Internet users by using past research on brand personality scales as a guide. Furthermore, it is also aims to determine the distinct brand personality dimensions of Google as the most preferred and used search engine. It is found that Google has been perceived as the most " competent " search engine brand. Furthermore, depending on the MANOVA results, it is shown that all three search engines have statistically significant differences only on the " competence " dimension. " Sincerity " and " excitement " are the other two dimensions which significantly differentiate Google from both MSN and Yahoo.
Clinical judgement in violence risk assessment

The present article discusses the three main approaches to violence risk assessment, clinical judgement, actuarial assessment, and structured clinical judgement, informing the reader of the comparative benefits and short-comings of these methods of violence risk assessment. In particular, the present article highlights the controversy within the literature surrounding clinical judgement in comparison to actuarial assessments of violence risk, and proposes that the statistically significant ‘improvements’ of violence prediction when using actuarial scales in comparison to clinical predictions of dangerousness do not necessarily measure the skill of the clinician adequately. Specifically, an assessment of ‘dangerousness’ does not equal a prediction of violent recidivism. It is argued that clinicians are not predictive forecasters of risk, as in actuarial scales, but are, rather, trained to manage risk. In addition, suggestions for future research directions in the field of improving violence risk assessments are made.
Cutting Edge: Repurification of Lipopolysaccharide Eliminates Signaling Through Both Human and Murine Toll-Like Receptor 21

Toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 has recently been associated with cellular responses to numerous microbial products, including LPS and bacterial lipoproteins. However, many preparations of LPS contain low concentrations of highly bioactive contaminants described previously as “endotoxin protein,” suggesting that these contaminants could be responsible for the TLR2-mediated signaling observed upon LPS stimulation. To test this hypothesis, commercial preparations of LPS were subjected to a modified phenol re-extraction protocol to eliminate endotoxin protein. While it did not influence the ability to stimulate cells from wild-type mice, repurification eliminated the ability of LPS to activate cells from C3H/HeJ (Lpsd) mice. Additionally, only cell lines transfected with human TLR4, but not human or murine TLR2, acquired responsiveness to both re-extracted LPS and to a protein-free, synthetic preparation of lipid A. These results suggest that neither human nor murine TLR2 plays a role in LPS signaling in the absence of contaminating endotoxin protein.
A SIMPLE FREEZE-FRACTURE REPLICATION METHOD FOR ELECTRON MICROSCOPY

A simple method to achieve results similar to the freeze-etching technique of Moor et al. (1961) is described. The frozen tissue is cut under liquid nitrogen with a razor blade outside the evaporator rather than inside with a cooled microtome. The conditions of the experiment do not favor sublimation, and it is proposed that the structure of the replica be explained by local faults in the cleavage plane which leaves structures, such as membranes, standing above the ice. Micrographs of replicas of glycerol-protected frozen small intestine of mouse prepared by the method are presented and the structural details they show are discussed. The problem of vapor-deposited contamination is discussed. It is concluded that this is a practical method for obtaining electron micrographs that are relatively free of artifact, and that further improvements may be expected from the use of rapidly frozen fresh tissue and a clean vacuum system, possibly of the ion-pumped type.
The DLR FSJ: Energy based design of a variable stiffness joint

Bringing mechanically compliant joints to robots is in the focus of interest world wide, especially in the humanoid robotics community. Variable Stiffness Joints (VSJ) promise to gain a high performing and robust robotic system. The presented DLR Floating Spring Joint (FSJ) is a VSJ module designed for the first 4 axes of the anthropomorphic DLR Hand Arm System. The DLR Hand Arm System aims to match the skills of its natural archetype. For this purpose, the joints have to be extremely compact to fit into the arm. At the same time they require a high power density in order to approximate the human arm skills. The new DLR FSJ is designed completely from an energy based point of view. This addresses not only energy efficient components and low friction design, but also that the potential energy of the spring is used as good as possible. A demonstration of robustness is given by the investigation of a blunt impact to the tip of the arm.
The Conference in Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2014 ( PED 2014 ) A Virtual Reality Platform to Study Crowd Behaviors

Microscopic pedestrian simulation models are based on local interactions between agents. Many interactions occur between walkers, with many factors of influence. There is a need for observations of individuals facing interactions in crowds to better understand them and improve the level of realism of simulation algorithms. We explore Virtual Reality (VR) as an experimental tool to perform such observations with an accurate control of experimental conditions. However, the bias introduced in the collected data through the VR-system must be evaluated. We present the effort we have made in the last few years to evaluate such bias. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of PED2014.
How Well Do Distributional Models Capture Different Types of Semantic Knowledge?

In recent years, distributional models (DMs) have shown great success in representing lexical semantics. In this work we show that the extent to which DMs represent semantic knowledge is highly dependent on the type of knowledge. We pose the task of predicting properties of concrete nouns in a supervised setting, and compare between learning taxonomic properties (e.g., animacy) and attributive properties (e.g., size, color). We employ four state-of-the-art DMs as sources of feature representation for this task, and show that they all yield poor results when tested on attributive properties, achieving no more than an average F-score of 0.37 in the binary property prediction task, compared to 0.73 on taxonomic properties. Our results suggest that the distributional hypothesis may not be equally applicable to all types of semantic information.
Chinese learners' perceptions towards teachers' language use in lexical explanations: A comparison between Chinese-only and English-only instructions

This paper examines Chinese learners' contextualized perceptions of and preferences towards teachers' language use for explaining unknown lexical items, and compares the perceptions of 68 Chinese university students in the context of English-only versus Chinese-only lexical explanations. A questionnaire was administered to students to investigate their general language use preferences. 36 follow-up interviews were also conducted in order to examine students' perceptions in the context of more specific lexical explanations. While questionnaire responses suggested that a majority of students held positive attitude towards both types of explanations, interview data indicated more negative perceptions towards the lexical explanations they received. The perceived distinctions of learners towards the use of English and the use of Chinese as teachers’ language choices for lexical explanations were uncovered with regard to the learning of lexis. The paper discusses the implications of the study for classroom practice specifically in the area of lexical explanations and situates the discussion in the broader context of the debate around L1 use in the L2 classroom. © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. System xxx (2016) xxx-xxx
Widespread Thalamic Terminations of Fibers Arising in the Superficial Medullary Dorsal Horn of Monkeys and Their Relation to Calbindin Immunoreactivity

The relay of pain fibers from the spinal and medullary dorsal horn in the thalamus has become a controversial issue. This study analyzed the relationship of fibers arising in lamina I to nuclei in and around the caudal pole of the ventral posterior nuclear complex and especially to a zone of calbindin-dense immunoreactivity (VMpo) identified by some authors as the sole thalamic relay for these fibers. We show that the densest zone of calbindin immunoreactivity is part of a more extensive, calbindin-immunoreactive region that lies well within the medial tip of the ventral posterior medial nucleus (VPM), as delineated by other staining methods, and prove that the use of different anti-calbindin antibodies cannot account for differences in interpretations of the organization of the posterior thalamic region. By combining immunocytochemical staining with anterograde tracing from injections involving lamina I, we demonstrate widespread fiber terminations that are not restricted to the calbindin-rich medial tip of VPM and show that the lamina I arising fibers are not themselves calbindin immunoreactive. This study disproves the existence of VMpo as an independent thalamic pain nucleus or as a specific relay in the ascending pain system.
Youth interaction with online strangers: experiences and reactions to unknown people on the Internet

ABSTRACT Previous research on youths’ experiences with online strangers has mostly utilized quantitative designs which may result in the omission of important parts of the youths’ experiences and perceptions. In this qualitative study, we adopt a child-centred approach and focus on the children’s and adolescents’ experiences with unknown people from the Internet. This is one of the most pronounced parental concerns, despite the fact that an online presence is now normative for most children. We use the data from focus-groups and individual interviews in nine European countries (N = 368) conducted with youths between the ages of 9 and 16 years. Participants were asked about their perceptions of potentially negative or problematic situations while using the Internet and digital technology. Using thematic analysis, we classified youths’ experiences and reactions related to interacting with online strangers in four themes: (1) non-verbal interaction; (2) initiation of contact; (3) communication; and (4) face-to-face meeting. In all four levels of interactions, children and adolescents reported a variety of positive and negative experiences and reactions. We interpret our findings with a co-construction model which perceives children and adolescents as active participants in the online world. We conclude that children are successfully making active decisions to initiate, continue, and stop interactions with unknown people from the Internet. These findings broaden the current perspectives of youths’ meetings with unknown people online.