Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of Chemokine Production via Oxidative Pathway in HeLa Cells

Inflammation is associated with disease progression and, by largely unknown mechanisms, has been said to drive oncogenesis. At inflamed sites, neutrophils deploy a potent antimicrobial arsenal that includes proteinases, antimicrobial peptides, and ROS. Reactive oxygen species (ROSs) induce chemokines. In the present study, the concentrations of IL-8 in culture supernatants of HeLa cells treated with ROS were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. We used o-phenanthroline to deplete Fe2+ in order to investigate the mechanisms through which ROSs induce IL-8 secretion in our system. The iron chelator o-phenanthroline effectively inhibited H2O2-induced ERK2 activation. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays showed that IL-8 protein secretion was elevated in ROS-treated HeLa cells. When Fe2+ was removed from these cells, IL-8 secretion was inhibited. Collectively, these results indicate that Fe2+-mediated Erk pathway activation is an important signal transduction pathway in ROS-induced IL-8 secretion in epithelial cells.
Physical Interaction between Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor and DNA-dependent Protein Kinase in Mammalian Cells*

Binding of extracellular ligands to epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR) activate signal transduction pathways associated with cell proliferation, and these events are inhibited by monoclonal antibodies against EGFR. Since efficient DNA repair in actively growing cells may require growth factor signaling, it was of interest to explore any linkage between EGFR-mediated signaling and DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK), an enzyme believed to be involved in repairing double strand breaks and V(D)J recombination. We report that anti-EGFR monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and not EGFR ligands, trigger a specific early physical interaction between EGFR and a 350-kDa catalytic subunit of DNA or its regulatory heterodimeric complex Ku70/80, in a variety of cell types, both in vivo and in vitro. Inhibition of EGFR signaling by anti-EGFR mAb was accompanied by a reduction in the levels of the DNA-PK and its activity in the nuclear fraction. Confocal imaging revealed that a substantial amount of DNA-PK was co-localized with EGFR in anti-EGFR mAb-treated cells. Anti-EGFR mAb-induced physical interaction between EGFR and DNA-PK or Ku70/80 was dependent on the presence of EGFR, but not on the levels of EGFR. The EGFR associated with DNA-PK or Ku70/80 retains its intrinsic kinase activity. Our findings demonstrate the existence of a novel cellular pathway in mammalian cells that involves physical interactions between EGFR and DNA-PK or Ku70/80 in response to inhibition of EGFR signaling. Our present observations suggest a possible role of EGFR signaling in maintenance of the nuclear levels of DNA-PK, and interference in EGFR signaling may possibly result in the impairment of DNA repair activity in the nuclei in anti-EGFR mAb-treated cells.
Time and time again: The many ways to represent time

One of the most crucial problems in any computer system that involves representing the world is the representation of time. This includes applications such as databases, simulation, expert systems, and applications of Artificial Intelligence in general. In this brief article, I will give a survey of the basic techniques available for representing time, and then talk about temporal reasoning in a general setting as needed in AI applications. Quite different representations of time are usable depending on the assumptions that can be made about the temporal information to be represented. the most crucial issue is the degree of certainty one can assume. Can one assume that a timestamp can be assigned to each event, or barring that, that the events are fully ordered? Or can we only assume that a partial ordering of events is known? Can events be simultaneous? Can they overlap in time and yet not be simultaneous? If they are not instaneous, do we know the durations of events? Different answers to each of these questions allow very different representations of time.
Simulation of the human lumbar spine during stooping and squatting using a forward kinematics model

Working with human subjects to measure internal loadings of lumbar spine is difficult. Numerical modeling makes it possible to study response of spine to a variety of loading conditions. This paper reports the development of a rigid body model of spine using a forward kinematics approach. The model consists of accurate CAD representations of vertebrae interconnected by intervertebral discs providing six degrees of freedom at each joint. The vertebrae are articulated using Virtual Muscles controlled by PID controllers individually. The forward kinematics approach resolves the redundancy issues associated with other lumbar spine models which utilize inverse kinematics. The proposed model predicted similar trend for trunk rotations, compression forces and moments as described in the literature. The comparison between the proposed model and predictions from existing dynamic models showed good agreement.
Minimax Rates of Community Detection in Stochastic Block Models

Recently network analysis has gained more and more attentions in statistics, as well as in computer science, probability, and applied mathematics. Community detection for the stochastic block model (SBM) is probably the most studied topic in network analysis. Many methodologies have been proposed. Some beautiful and significant phase transition results are obtained in various settings. In this paper, we provide a general minimax theory for community detection. It gives minimax rates of the mis-match ratio for a wide rage of settings including homogeneous and inhomogeneous SBMs, dense and sparse networks, finite and growing number of communities. The minimax rates are exponential, different from polynomial rates we often see in statistical literature. An immediate consequence of the result is to establish threshold phenomenon for strong consistency (exact recovery) as well as weak consistency (partial recovery). We obtain the upper bound by a range of penalized likelihood-type approaches. The lower bound is achieved by a novel reduction from a global mis-match ratio to a local clustering problem for one node through an exchangeability property.
A field study of understanding child's knowledge, skills and interaction towards capacitive touch technology (iPad)

This paper discusses the implementation of a case study on capacitive touch technology for a child's knowledge, skills and interaction. The case study was done with 20 children aged 8 years old in the Games Lab at Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris. The objectives were (1) to identify children's knowledge about the capacitive touch technology; (2) to identify the skills (a child's sense and movement) in handling the capacitive touch technology; and (3) to identify the interaction involved between a child and the touch screen technology. For the case study, 20 iPad tablets from Apple were used. Four different types of games (with education and fun elements) were selected and played by these children. 20 research facilitators were involved in helping the researchers with every aspect of the case study, such as taking notes (for any affect expression such as vocal, facial and gestural behavior) and recording video. To facilitate the case study, an instrument was designed and used for the observation together with video records as references and additional evidence to be used in analyzing data. Findings show that (1) children have different information and understanding of the capacitive touch technology based on their experience; (2) children have different basic movements of finger when handling the capacitive touch technology; and (3) there are a significant differences and similarities in how children interact with the capacitive touch technology. To conclude, the paper will discuss how these findings can be used to tailored design any child's application involving touch-sensitive screen interactions.
Object and pose recognition using contour and shape information

Object recognition and pose estimation are of significant importance for robotic visual servoing, manipulation and grasping tasks. Traditionally, contour and shape based methods have been considered as most adequate for estimating stable and feasible grasps (Bicchi and Kumar, 2000). A new research direction has been advocated in visual servoing where image moments are used to define a suitable error function to be minimized. Compared to appearance based methods, contour and shape based approaches are also suitable for use with range sensors such as, for example, lasers. In this paper, we evaluate a contour based object recognition system building on the method in Nelson and Selinger (1998), suitable for objects of uniform color properties such as cups, cutlery, fruits etc. This system is one of the building blocks of a more complex object recognition system based both on stereo and appearance cues, (Bjorkman and Kragic, 2004). The system has a significant potential both in terms of service robot and programming by demonstration tasks. Experimental evaluation shows promising results in terms of robustness to occlusion and noise
School Leadership in Support of Teachers' Learning: The Dramatic Differences That Financial Resources Make

This article reports creative initiatives that 25 U.S. principals employed to support teacher learning in light of their financial resources. Nearly 90 hours of interviews with principals and 60 documents were coded to create narrative summaries and build profiles of how financial resources influenced how the school leaders supported teacher learning. All of the leaders worked creatively with the resources at hand to enhance teacher learning. Our research highlights that the best options are context specific and that shorter-term initiatives are insufficient. This report offers concrete examples, such as grantwriting and local partnerships, for working within financial constraints to support teacher learning.
New Cycloartane-type Triterpenes from Marcetia Latifolia (Melastomataceae) and In Silico Studies on Candida Parapsilosis Protease

We have previously reported the antimicrobial activity of the ethyl acetate extract of Marcetia latifolia, particularly against Candida parapsilosis. In this work we describe the isolation of two new cycloartane-type triterpenes, 28,29-bis-norcycloartan-3β,4α-diol (1) and 28,29-bis-norcycloart-24-en-3β,4α-diol (2) from the same extract. These compounds were mainly characterized by one- (1H, 13C and APT) and two-dimensional (1H-1H-COSY, 1H-1H-NOESY, HMQC and HMBC) NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and comparison with published structural data. In addition, the activity of triterpenes 1 and 2 on the Candida protease target was investigated by in silico methods using molecular docking.
Intergenerational solidarity between parents and adult children: a qualitative research among cohabiting and married children in Italy

The objective of this article is to compare the patterns of intergenerational solidarity between adult children who cohabit or are married and their own parents or their partner's parents through the analysis of 50 in-depth interviews. The research did not reveal any different behavioural patterns between cohabiting and married couples. Financial support provided by own parents or partner's parents and the presence of small children constituted positive factors which intensified the frequency of contacts and improved the quality of the relationship. In the event of illness of a parent, both the married and cohabiting couples provided assistance, especially when the illness was not disabling and there were no other kin relatives. When this was not possible, a private caregiver was hired or close family members provided assistance. Only those respondents who cohabited with a partner awaiting divorce were less willing to maintain contacts with their partner's parents. The presence of a family formed by previously married partners and the old age of the parents of the latter compromised the quality of the relationship and the willingness to provide assistance.
Memory Mapped SPM: Protecting Instruction Scratchpad Memory in Embedded Systems against Soft Errors

Predictability, energy consumption, area and reliability are the major concerns in embedded systems. Using scratchpad memories (SPMs) instead of cache memories play an increasing role to satisfy these concerns. Both cache and SPM as on-chip SRAM memories are highly vulnerable to soft errors and as they contain the most frequently used blocks of the program, their errors can easily propagate in system leading to erroneous results. Unlike the instruction cache, an error in the instruction SPM cannot be corrected using only parity bits by invalidating the erroneous line. This study suggests a low-cost mechanism to protect the instruction SPM against soft errors. The main idea underlying the proposed mechanism includes four stages: 1) to use parity codes for error detection in the SPM, 2) to keep an address matching table in the main memory to store the address of the copy of SPM blocks in the main memory, in the case of dynamic SPM, 3) to allocate a specific segment of the main memory as an SPM backup, in the case of static SPM, and 4) to recover from errors using an interrupt service routine (ISR). Compared with a single error correction /double error detection (SEC-DED) scheme, by using a 2-bit interleaved-parity per word, the proposed mechanism can correct at least three bit errors, while SEC-DED is capable of correcting only single bit error and detecting 2-bit errors. The experimental results reveal that the energy consumption and area overheads of the proposed mechanism are approximately 22% and 15% less than that of SEC-DED for a 4Kbyte SPM, respectively. Moreover, this mechanism provides 10 times lower performance loss compared with SEC-DED.
The Development of Prose in Early Modern English in View of the Gender Question: Using Grammatical Idiosyncrasies of 15th and 17th Century Letters

In a paper published ten years ago, I addressed prose, in this case Middle English prose, as a text type altogether different from verse by its insistence on transparency (‘glasnost’). While verse, such as Chaucer’s ‘Franklin’s Tale’ and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Pearl, are full of ‘Leerstellen’ (to put it paradoxically), Middle English prose up to the late 14th century was tediously clear and graspable. It seems that during the late Middle English and Early Modern English periods and in the wake of its general acceptance in the 15th century, English prose fundamentally changed its character by becoming more diversified, more specifically functional and more subjective. Up to Chaucer’s time, English prose had still been predominantly religious, namely homiletic, moreover, it had used the language of translations and the language of Latin rhetorics. But after this its function, particularly its secular function, widened, so that we can distinguish a flurry of prose genres
Close-Range Human Detection for Head-Mounted Cameras

In this paper we consider the problem of multi-person detection from the perspective of a head mounted stereo camera. As pedestrians close to the camera cannot be detected by classical full-body detectors due to strong occlusion, we propose a stereo depth-template based detection approach for close-range pedestrians. We perform a sliding window procedure, where we measure the similarity between a learned depth template and the depth image. To reduce the search space of the detector we slide the detector only over few selected regions of interest that are generated based on depth information. The region-of-interest selection allows us to further constrain the number of scales to be evaluated, significantly reducing the computational cost. We present experiments on stereo sequences recorded from a head-mounted camera setup in crowded shopping street scenarios and show that our proposed approach achieves superior performance on this very challenging data.
Variant in CAPN10 gene and environmental factors show evidence of association with excess weight among young people in a Colombian population.

UNLABELLED Introduction : Obesity results from interaction between genetic and environmental risk factors. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of three gene variants and environmental factors on obesity and overweight in young people aged 10 to 18 years in a Colombian population. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 424 subjects were selected and separated into three groups for a cross-sectional study; 100 obese and 112 overweight subjects were matched with 212 normal-weight controls. Associations were evaluated between excess weight and three genetic polymorphisms ( UCP3- rs1800849, FTO -rs17817449, and CAPN10 -rs3842570), as well as the family history, the time spent watching television and playing video games, and the diet. RESULTS A family history of obesity, the time spent watching television and playing video games, the lack of breastfeeding, a low consumption of cereals, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and a high consumption of fast foods were characteristics typically found in obese individuals compared to controls. A significant association between genotype I/I (SNP19 of CAPN10 ) and excess weight was found even with an active lifestyle. In addition, significant associations between the C/C genotype of the UCP3 gene and the G/G and T/T genotypes of the FTO gene and excess weight were found only in young sedentary individuals. CONCLUSIONS In this population, inadequate diet and sedentary lifestyle increased the risk of excess weight. Genotype I/I of SNP19 in CAPN10 was significantly associated with excess weight. In contrast, FTO and UCP3 variants exhibited effects only in sedentary environments.
Stress, coping, and resources in mothers of adults with developmental disabilities

Abstract This study examined the relationship of various stressors, coping resources, and coping strategies on the level of stress reported by 147 mothers of adults with delayed development. A sense of mastery and the mother's health as well as financial well-being were significantly negatively related to stress. Coping behaviours of reframing of the problem and acquisition of social support were also significantly negatively related to stress. Implications of the results of this study for service providers are discussed.
Persistent Sharing of Fitness App Status on Twitter

As the world becomes more digitized and interconnected, information that was once considered to be private such as one's health status is now being shared publicly. To understand this new phenomenon better, it is crucial to study what types of health information are being shared on social media and why, as well as by whom. In this paper, we study the traits of users who share their personal health and fitness related information on social media by analyzing fitness status updates that MyFitnessPal users have shared via Twitter. We investigate how certain features like user profile, fitness activity, and fitness network in social media can potentially impact the long-term engagement of fitness app users. We also discuss implications of our findings to achieve a better retention of these users and to promote more sharing of their status updates.
QoS-Driven Cloud Resource Management through Fuzzy Model Predictive Control

Virtualized systems such as public and private clouds are emerging as important new computing platforms with great potential to conveniently deliver computing across the Internet and efficiently utilize resources consolidated via virtualization. Resource management in virtualized systems remains a key challenge because of their intrinsically dynamic and complex nature, where the applications have dynamically changing workloads and virtual machines (VMs) compete for the shared resources in a convolved manner. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a new resource management approach that can effectively capture the nonlinear behaviors in VM resource usages through fuzzy modeling and quickly adapt to the changes in the system through predictive control. The resulting fuzzy-model-predictive-control (FMPC) approach is capable of optimizing the VM resource allocations to applications according to their QoS targets. This approach is incorporated in a two-level cloud resource management framework where at the VM host level the node controllers employ FMPC to optimize dynamic VM resource allocations within individual hosts, and at the cloud zone level the global scheduler coordinates the node controllers to optimize resource utilization across hosts through dynamic VM migrations. The proposed approaches were implemented for Xen-based virtualized systems and evaluated using typical benchmarks (RUBiS, Free Bench) on a test bed with over 100 concurrent VMs. The results demonstrate that FMPC can accurately model the resource demands for dynamic applications and optimize the resource allocations to VMs with complex contentions. It substantially outperforms the traditional linear modeling based predictive control approach. The two-level resource management can make effective use of VM migrations to further improve performance across hosts as the host-level loads vary over time.
The Papillomavirus Minor Capsid Protein, L2, Induces Localization of the Major Capsid Protein, L1, and the Viral Transcription/Replication Protein, E2, to PML Oncogenic Domains

ABSTRACT We have used immunofluorescent staining and confocal microscopy to examine the subcellular localization of structural and nonstructural bovine papillomavirus (BPV) proteins in cultured cells that produce infectious virions. When expressed separately, L1, the major capsid protein, showed a diffuse nuclear distribution while L2, the minor capsid protein, was found to localize to punctate nuclear regions identified as promonocytic leukemia protein (PML) oncogenic domains (PODs). Coexpression of L1 and L2 induced a relocation of L1 into the PODs, leading to the colocalization of L1 and L2. The effect of L2 expression on the distribution of the nonstructural viral proteins E1 and E2, which are required for maintenance of the genome and viral DNA synthesis, was also examined. The localization of the E1 protein was unaffected by L2 expression. However, the pattern of anti-E2 staining was dramatically altered in L2-expressing cells. Similar to L1, E2 was shifted from a dispersed nuclear locality into the PODs and colocalized with L2. The recruitment of full-length E2 by L2 occurred in the absence of other viral components. L2 was shown previously to be essential for the generation of infectious BPV. Our present results provide evidence for a role for L2 in the organization of virion components by recruiting them to a distinct nuclear domain. This L2-dependent colocalization probably serves as a mechanism to promote the assembly of papillomaviruses either by increasing the local concentration of virion constituents or by providing the physical architecture necessary for efficient packaging and assembly. The data also suggest a role for a nonstructural viral protein, E2, in virion assembly, specifically the recruitment of the viral genome to the sites of assembly, through its high-affinity interaction with specific sequences in the viral DNA.
Human Classification of Low-Fidelity Replays of Student Actions

Human observations and classifications have shown to provide substantial leverage for developing models of students’ motivation, attitudes, and strategic choices, as a student interacts with an intelligent tutoring system. However, human observation and classification is highly timeconsuming, which has limited its use. We present a technique for conducting human classification on “low-fidelity” text-based replays of student behavior derived from logs of tutor usage. We show that low-fidelity classification is much faster than live classification, and that low-fidelity classification is approximately as accurate as live classification for detecting a behavior known as gaming the system, using a machine-learning detector of this behavior as the gold standard.