Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endogenous hydrogen sulfide is associated with angiotensin II type 1 receptor in a rat model of carbon tetrachloride-induced hepatic fibrosis

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of endogenous hydrogen sulfide (H2S) on the expression levels of angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AGTR1) in a rat model of carbon tetrachloride (CCl4)-induced hepatic fibrosis. A total of 56 Wistar rats were randomly divided into four groups: Normal control group, model group, sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS) group, and DL-propargylglycine (PAG) group. Hepatic fibrosis was induced by CCl4. The rats in the PAG group were intraperitoneally injected with PAG, an inhibitor of cystathionine-γ-lyase (CSE). The rats in the NaHS group were intraperitoneally injected with NaHS. An equal volume of saline solution was intraperitoneally injected into both the control and model groups. All rats were sacrificed at week three or four following treatment. The serum levels of hyaluronidase (HA), laminin protein (LN), procollagen III (PcIII), and collagen IV (cIV) were detected using ELISA. The serum levels of alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST), and albumin (ALB) were detected using an automatic biochemical analyzer. The liver mRNA expression levels of CSE were detected by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The liver expression levels of AGTR1 and the plasma expression levels of H2S were detected using western blot analyses. The results indicated that the severity of hepatic fibrosis, the serum expression levels of HA, LN, PcIII, cIV, ALT, and AST, the liver expression levels of CSE and AGTR1, and the plasma expression levels of H2S were significantly higher in the PAG group, as compared with the model group (P<0.05). Conversely, the expression levels of ALB were significantly lower in the PAG group, as compared with the model group. In addition, the severity of hepatic fibrosis, the serum expression levels of HA, LN, PcIII, cIV, ALT, and AST, the liver expression levels of CSE and AGTR1, and the plasma expression levels of H2S were significantly lower in the NaHS group, as compared with the model group (P<0.05). These results suggest that endogenous H2S is associated with CCl4-induced hepatic fibrosis in rats, and may exhibit anti-fibrotic effects. Furthermore, H2S reduced the liver expression levels of AGTR1, which may be associated with the delayed progression of hepatic fibrosis.
Mobilizing strategies for environmental change

In recent years, there has been shift in the ways in which people support charities and non-profits. While environmental groups and non governmental organizations (NGO) earlier depended on traditional media and grassroots campaigns to get their messages heard, nowadays social media offers an additional distribution method for their messages. However, up to now, the potential of online activism to bring about social or political change has been debated. Advocates contend its positive contribution to participatory democracy. Critics however, deride it as being so-called “slacktivist” activity that bear minimal societal gain. The term ‘slacktivist’ is often used by critical scholars and practitioners who describe a new type of activist whose participation solely entails partaking online and whose activity bear minimal societal gain. As the act of ‘slacktivism’ becomes more and more commonplace, there is much concern amongst charities and non-profits that this would conflict with or even replace traditional forms of activism or political participation, such as donating money or partaking in a rally or protest. This study contributes to this discussion amongst scholars and practitioners by analyzing the mobilizing effects of efficacy messages on behavioral intent of environmental political participation. The positive mobilizing effects of efficacy messages on political participation have been discussed in the literature; however, minimal attention has been given to its specific effects on environmental political participation. By means of an online experiment with a Dutch national sample (N = 215), this study examines whether a fear-inducing or efficacy (internal, external, response) frame in (newspaper) messages is a better predictor for environmental political participation. Furthermore, the mediating effects of three discrete emotions (hope, fear, and anger) and the moderating effects of being considered a mere slacktivist or activist are included in the conceptual model. The findings of this study indicate that emotions fear and anger have a positive effect on environmental political participation. When evaluating the effect of efficacy information on environmental political participation, it appeared that such messaging had no significant effect on perceived efficacy. Yet, the most important finding of this study is the existence of an indirect mediation effect, meaning that the experiment reduces fear but then the reduction in fear overall reduces participation level, despite fear’s positive contribution towards participation. Moreover, this indirect mediation effect only happened significantly for slacktivists. The results of this study can serve as a foundation for future studies that aim to research the effectiveness of efficacy information and emotions on environmental political participation. As well as for practitioners in the field of environmental communication in their mobilization strategies.
Are They Political? Examining Asian American College Students’ Civic Engagement

Despite some research to the contrary, many hold the “model minority” stereotype that Asian American youth are civically unengaged. To highlight their diverse experiences, we examined profiles of civic engagement in 3,556 Asian American students from the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey. Using 7 indicators of political and community participation, latent class analysis revealed 3 subgroups: Highly Involved (11%), Voting Involved (57%), and Uninvolved (32%). Compared to Chinese Americans, Filipino and East Indian/Pakistani American students were most likely to be Voting Involved. First-generation immigrants were least represented, and students with more educated parents most represented, in the Voting Involved group. Campus experiences including climate of respect, freedom of expression, academic engagement, cultural identity development, and religious participation were uniquely associated with civic engagement typologies. Findings advance research on heterogeneity among Asian American youth and offer implications for colleges and universities that aim to promote civic development among Asian American students.
Centralized and Distributed Clustering Methods for Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) technology is a key component for ubiquitous com- puting. In order to achieve the long term operation of WSNs, communication protocols based on clustering have been extensively studied such as LEACH, ACE and HEED. In this paper, we propose two types of clustering methods for WSNs. The first type, which is based on centralized management, employs vector quantization (VQ) for effective clustering. The second type, which is performed in a distributed distributed fashion, takes into account remaining battery level and node density. The proposed methods are com- pared with conventional methods LEACH, HEED and ANTCLUST. The effectiveness of the proposed meth- ods are demonstrated by numerical simulation.
The Maize Root Transcriptome by Serial Analysis of Gene Expression1[w]

Serial Analysis of Gene Expression was used to define number and relative abundance of transcripts in the root tip of well-watered maize seedlings (Zea mays cv FR697). In total, 161,320 tags represented a minimum of 14,850 genes, based on at least two tags detected per transcript. The root transcriptome has been sampled to an estimated copy number of approximately five transcripts per cell. An extrapolation from the data and testing of single-tag identifiers by reverse transcription-PCR indicated that the maize root transcriptome should amount to at least 22,000 expressed genes. Frequency ranged from low copy number (2–5, 68.8%) to highly abundant transcripts (100→1,200; 1%). Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR for selected transcripts indicated high correlation with tag frequency. Computational analysis compared this set with known maize transcripts and other root transcriptome models. Among the 14,850 tags, 7,010 (47%) were found for which no maize cDNA or gene model existed. Comparing the maize root transcriptome with that in other plants indicated that highly expressed transcripts differed substantially; less than 5% of the most abundant transcripts were shared between maize and Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Transcript categories highlight functions of the maize root tip. Significant variation in abundance characterizes transcripts derived from isoforms of individual enzymes in biochemical pathways.
Mechanical design principles of a mitotic spindle

An organised spindle is crucial to the fidelity of chromosome segregation, but the relationship between spindle structure and function is not well understood in any cell type. The anaphase B spindle in fission yeast has a slender morphology and must elongate against compressive forces. This ‘pushing’ mode of chromosome transport renders the spindle susceptible to breakage, as observed in cells with a variety of defects. Here we perform electron tomographic analyses of the spindle, which suggest that it organises a limited supply of structural components to increase its compressive strength. Structural integrity is maintained throughout the spindle's fourfold elongation by organising microtubules into a rigid transverse array, preserving correct microtubule number and dynamically rescaling microtubule length. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.03398. 001
A COMPARISON OF DUAL LAGRANGE MULTIPLIER SPACES FOR MORTAR FINITE ELEMENT DISCRETIZATIONS

Domain decomposition techniques provide a powerful tool for the numerical approxima- tion of partial differential equations. We focus on mortar finite element methods on non-matching triangulations. In particular, we discuss and analyze dual Lagrange multiplier spaces for lowest order finite elements. These non standard Lagrange multiplier spaces yield optimal discretization schemes and a locally supported basis for the associated constrained mortar spaces. As a consequence, stan- dard efficient iterative solvers as multigrid methods or domain decomposition techniques can be easily adapted to the nonconforming situation. Here, we introduce new dual Lagrange multiplier spaces. We concentrate on the construction of locally supported and continuous dual basis functions. The optimality of the associated mortar method is shown. Numerical results illustrate the performance of our approach.
Terrain Simplification Simplified: A General Framework for View-Dependent Out-of-Core Visualization

We describe a general framework for out-of-core rendering and management of massive terrain surfaces. The two key components of this framework are: view-dependent refinement of the terrain mesh and a simple scheme for organizing the terrain data to improve coherence and reduce the number of paging events from external storage to main memory. Similar to several previously proposed methods for view-dependent refinement, we recursively subdivide a triangle mesh defined over regularly gridded data using longest-edge bisection. As part of this single, per-frame refinement pass, we perform triangle stripping, view frustum culling, and smooth blending of geometry using geomorphing. Meanwhile, our refinement framework supports a large class of error metrics, is highly competitive in terms of rendering performance, and is surprisingly simple to implement. Independent of our refinement algorithm, we also describe several data layout techniques for providing coherent access to the terrain data. By reordering the data in a manner that is more consistent with our recursive access pattern, we show that visualization of gigabyte-size data sets can be realized even on low-end, commodity PCs without the need for complicated and explicit data paging techniques. Rather, by virtue of dramatic improvements in multilevel cache coherence, we rely on the built-in paging mechanisms of the operating system to perform this task. The end result is a straightforward, simple-to-implement, pointerless indexing scheme that dramatically improves the data locality and paging performance over conventional matrix-based layouts.
Linearized gravity about a brane

We use the Israel condition to treat carefully the weak-field perturbations due to the presence of matter on a 3-brane embedded between two regions of anti-de Sitter (AdS) space with different curvature lengths. A four dimensional Newton's Law only emerges at distances that are large compared to the AdS lengths. When a scalar curvature is included in the brane action, however, it is possible to generate a four dimensional theory of gravity even when one or both of the AdS lengths is large compared to distances along the brane. In particular, we provide an example in which the AdS lengths can be larger than the millimeter experimental bound.
Evidence Based Reasoning in Classifier Hierarchies

Hierarchical neural networks naturally combine subsymbolic information processing with symbolic information as they consist of several neural classifiers which provide hierarchically structured knowledge. This knowledge implies a particular uncertainty which is indicated by the magnitude of the classifier outputs. There are different ways to combine this expert knowledge to a collective output. Two different methods are evaluated in this paper: a method similar to the decision tree approach and an evidence theoretic approach utilising Dempster-Shafer theory. The proposed approaches have been evaluated using three different data sets and two different types of classifiers. It was shown that the evidence theoretic approach yields improved classification performance.
V. Reports of Mental Activity during Sleep *

The variety of mental activity during sleep was investigated by obtaining reports of this activity upon awakening from two different kinds of sleep: (1) REM (rapid eye-movement) periods, which are characterized by a low voltage, random EEG and the presence of rapid eye-movements, and (2) NREM periods, which are characterized by 12–14 cps sleep spindles and/or slow, high amplitude delta EEG activity and the absence of rapid eye-movements. A total of 186 awakening reports were obtained from 17 subjects who spent from one to three nights each sleeping in the laboratory. As had been described in earlier investigations, reports of mental activity during sleep were obtained more frequently on awakenings from REM periods than on awakenings from NREM periods. However, a considerable amount of mental activity was obtained on NREM awakenings. As compared with REM period mentation, this NREM mental activity was described as more like thinking and less like dreaming, less vivid, less visual, more conceptual, under greater volitional control, more plausible, more concerned with the contemporary life of the subject, occurring in lighter sleep, less emotional, and more pleasant. The NREM mental activity was interpreted as resembling the unfocused, floating, background mentation of waking life, and it was hypothesized that the poor recall for this type of mentation might be related to its relative lack of perceptual intensity.
Path privacy protection in continuous location-based services over road networks

The spatial query has been one of the highly demanded services in mobile computing system recently. To protect users' location privacy, existing architecture provides a trustworthy anonymizer to blur users' location from the service provider. However, with mobile capability, users' location extends from one spot to a continuous traveling route. For such continuous spatial query, it raises much more challenges for an anonymizer to protect users' continuous privacy. This paper conducts research on ensuring users' location privacy under the network-constrained road network environments. We first argue that the concept of continuous location privacy should be transferred to users' path privacy, which are consecutive road segments that needs to be protected. A novel M-cut requirement is proposed to achieve the goal of user path privacy. Mobile users can customize their privacy level through M-cut requirement. Last, two methods of constructing the cloaked spatial region are provided in our research, namely Random Selection and Junction Sharing. These algorithms support path privacy and also take system computation and communication overhead into consideration.
Picasso: full duplex signal shaping to exploit fragmented spectrum

Wireless spectrum is increasingly fragmented due to the growing proliferation of unlicensed wireless devices and piecemeal licensed spectrum allocations. Current radios are ill-equipped to exploit such fragmented spectrum since they expect large contiguous chunks of spectrum to operate on. In this paper we argue that future radios should provide full duplex signal shaping to the higher layers to systematically exploit fragmented spectrum. Such an architectural design would allow the radio to decouple the use of different spcetrum fragments. We present the design and implementation of Picasso, a system that provides such a general signal shaping abstraction. Picasso has two novel components: a self-interference cancellation technique and a programmable filter engine that enables it to simultaneously send and receive over different spectrum fragments. We provide an initial design and empirically evaluate the feasibility of both components.
Human face based approach for video summarization

In video summarization, a short video clip is made from lengthy video without losing its semantic content using significant scenes containing important frames, called keyframes. This process finds importance in video content management systems. The proposed method involves automatic summarization of motion picture based on human face. In this method, those frames within which the appearances of an actor or actress, selected by the user, occurs are treated as keyframes. In the first step, the video is segmented into shots by Mutual Information. Then it detects the available faces in the frames of each shot using the local Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT) features and Sparse Network of Winnows (SNoW) classifier. Then the face of an actor of interest is selected to match with different available faces, already extracted, using Eigenfaces method. A shot is taken into consideration, if the method succeeds in finding at least one matched face in the shot. The selected shots are finally combined to create summarized video.
Double-Stranded RNA Binding Domain (dsRBD) of PKR Shows Variable Dynamics in the Presence of Bacteriophage Pf1: An NMR Insight and its Possible Implications

The human Protein Kinase R (PKR) is one of the important and critical components of the innate immune response against viral infection. It regulates distinct cellular functions and controls the fate of an RNA molecule in the cell. PKR dephosphorylation is characterised by inhibitory interactions between the kinase domain and the RNA binding domains (RBDs), but the complete structural details and dynamics of the latent state and its activation are not yet clear. Several studies on the activation of double stranded RNA binding domain (dsRBD) of Protein Kinase R (dsRBD-PKR) have been attempted during the last few decades. In order to further investigate on its activation mechanism, we have analysed the backbone ( 1 H- 15 N)-dynamics and chemical shift perturbation studies of dsRBD-PKR in the presence of bacteriophage Pf1. Pf1 is known to orient the protein in the presence of external magnetic field and, can be further used to get useful information about the protein properties such as the different dynamic behaviour in multidomain proteins like dsRBD-PKR. These NMR based results improve our basic understanding of the domain flexibilities of dsRBD-PKR where some secondary structural regions of dsRBM1 (dsRNA binding motif 1) show a different behaviour than the one from dsRBM2 (dsRNA binding motif 2) these observations further lead to a better understanding of PKR mechanism where dsRBM1 has more affinity towards RNA as compared to dsRBM2.
The Resultmaker Online Consultant: From Declarative Workflow Management in Practice to LTL

We present the process model employed in the result-maker online consultant (ROC) workflow management system as an example of a declarative workflow language used in practice. We describe and formalize the key primitives of the ROC process model as linear time temporal logic (LTL) formulas, in line with a recent proposal of van der Aalst and Pesic to use LTL as the foundation for flexible declarative process languages. The work is one of the first steps in a recently initiated research project (trustcare) aiming at contributing to the foundations for workflow management for trustworthy pervasive healthcare services by combining research in formal process models, pervasive user interfaces, and development of research based prototype extensions to the ROC workflow management system.
Intrisically Motivated Goal Space Creation for Autonomous Goal-Directed Exploration in High-Dimens

Today's robotic systems are given increasingly complex tasks in an increasing variety of situations such as object or social interaction. Many of those situations cannot be anticipated at design time : autonomous learning capacities are needed to adapt to novel, unexpected conditions. Yet, because of their complex bodies and multiple sensors, robots face highly-dimensional, unbounded, continuous sensorimotor spaces whose semantics are often unknown. Such spaces are too large to be explored exhaustively, an issue even more crucial in robotics given the expensive and slow nature of the physical interactions needed to gather training data. Learning in those spaces also raises other challenges, because robot's sensorimotors spaces are highly heterogeneous and multi-modal, with unreachable areas because of physical constraints, unlearnable areas because the actions of the agent do not have any influence on the sensors values, and yet other area where learning is made difficult by huge noise-to-signal ratios or requires the previous aquisition of other skills (e.g. learning reaching before grasping). This is why efficient explorations techniques are needed, where each interaction maximize the knowledge or competence gained through each interaction. To adress this issue, statistical learning techniques have focused on optimizing exploration policies to maximize various criteria in particular through active learning [1]-[3]. Another approach have stemmed from the field of developmental robotics, where inspiration from psychology and neuroscience research on animal and infant learning [4] [5] [6] have highlighted the importance of curiosity in skill acquisition. Several intrinsically motivated learning techniques have been proposed [10] [11] [12]. In this article, we will build on a particular intrinsically motivated, goal-oriented technique initiated by Baranes and Oudeyer [7], which defines the interest of an area of the sensorimotor space as the progress of the competence in reaching self-assigned goals in this area. This method has yielded excellent results in experiment with motor spaces of high dimension. Yet sensory spaces have remained limited to 2 or 3 dimensions, and the robot had only one type of action to consider. Moreover, the goal space was predefined by hand. We propose a broad expansion of the previous architecture, where the sensory space has 10+ dimensions, and relevant goal space are created and their interest evaluated by the algorithms through novel techniques. Additionally, we considers robotic agents that have several different actions at their disposal that can combine them temporally. To our knowledge, no existing work addresses both those challenges.