Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stimulation of integrin-mediated adhesion of T lymphocytes and monocytes: two mechanisms with divergent biological consequences

We show that the adhesion of T lymphoid cells to immobilized fibronectin can be increased by two distinct mechanisms. The first is by increasing the affinity of the fibronectin receptor/ligand interaction using the anti-beta 1 integrin monoclonal antibody 8A2. The second is by treating the cells with phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA), which alters events that occur after receptor occupancy (e.g., cell spreading) without affecting receptor affinity. The effects of these two mechanisms on adhesion in the presence of physiological concentrations of soluble fibronectin suggest that they have different biological consequences. Under these conditions, the net effect of increasing the affinity of the fibronectin receptors is to decrease cell adhesion, whereas the increase in adhesion induced by PMA is unaffected. This suggests that the high affinity receptors are not primarily available for cell adhesion under these circumstances, and that they have an alternative function. We further show that high affinity binding of soluble fibronectin can be induced by either differentiation of the monocytic cell line THP-1 or by cross-linking the T cell receptor complexes on the T lymphoid cell line HUT-78. The differentiated monocytic cells express two populations of fibronectin receptors: a minority in a high affinity state, and the majority in a low affinity state. Thus they will both continue to adhere in the presence of physiological concentrations of soluble fibronectin and bind significant amounts of soluble fibronectin at the cell surface.
The trade‐labour and trade‐environment linkages: together or apart?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to challenge the common wisdom that environmental and labour concerns have been treated in a similar way by the multilateral trade regime by assessing the two subjects' patterns of inclusion in regional trade agreements and in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Design/methodology/approach – An historical overview of the institutional developments at the regional and the bilateral level is provided. The selected analytical perspective focuses primarily on institutional change rather than on a normative analysis of the righteousness of linkage.Findings – The article finds that the common knowledge placing both labour and the environment in the same position at the WTO originates from the alliances between organised labour and environmentalists during the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations. However, that alliance did not translate into the inclusion of both subjects at the WTO, which incorporated the environment while rejecting labour.Research limitations/.
A dynamic service lookup and discovery scheme using a self organizing overlay network for indoor location-based service

Indoor location-based service (LBS) has various challenges, including that of numerous service lookups being requested concurrently and frequently from several locations, and that the network infrastructure needs to support high scalability, such as inserting or deleting network nodes anytime and anywhere. In general, indoor LBS resources are generally located in close proximity to the requested point. However, a traditional centralized LBS system needs to maintain a geographical map of the entire building or complex in its central server, which can cause low scalability and traffic congestion. This paper presents a self-organizing and fully distributed indoor LBS platform through regional cooperation among devices, and a service lookup algorithm that searches for the shortest physical path to the service resource. An evaluation of the performance of the proposed platform has been compared to the traditional centralized method regarding the service turnaround time according to the number of concurrent lookup increases.
Therapeutic Concentrations of Heparin Augment Platelet Activation at the Time of Coronary Angiography

Background: Besides its anticoagulant effects, heparin is known to alter platelet (PLT) function. We examined the effects of unfractionated heparin on PLT function in patients with stable coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods and Results: PLT function was evaluated by whole-blood flow cytometry to detect PLT CD62 expression and by impedance aggregometry to assess platelet aggregation (PA) before and after bolus intravenous administration of low-dose heparin (2713 ± 1231 U) in 16 patients undergoing coronary angiography (group 1) and high-dose heparin (7937 ± 2414 U) in 16 patients undergoing coronary angioplasty (group 2). Activated clotting time (ACT) and plasma antifactor-Xa heparin levels also were measured. Heparin increased PLT CD62 expression, which was significantly more pronounced in group 1 patients with plasma heparin levels less than 0.7 U/mL and ACT of 222 ± 52 seconds compared with group 2 patients with heparin levels greater than 0.7 U/mL and ACT of 365 ± 86 seconds (8 ± 9 v -1 ± 4% change in resting PLTs, P = .01, and 11 ± 12 v 1 ± 6% increase in adenosine diphosphate (ADP) [5 μM]-stimulated PLTs, P = . 02). Heparin produced a slight increase in PA in group 1 patients (1.4 ± 5.3 ohms) as compared with the group 2 patients, where it significantly suppressed PA (-3.0 ± 5.3 ohms, P < .05 v group 1). A strong and statistically significant negative correlation between change in platelet CD62 expression and heparin concentration was observed in group 1 patients (r = -.5, P = .05, —ADP; r = —.65, P = .006, +ADP), whereas this relationship was weak and did not reach statistical significance in group 2 patients (r = -0.4, P = .2, -ADP; r = .11, P = 0.9; +ADP). Conclusion: Bolus administration of intravenous heparin augmented PLT activation in patients at clinically relevant anticoagulant concentrations (<0.7 U/mL). These findings may have implications for optimal dosing strategy for heparin as an antithrombotic agent in clinical situations characterized by platelet-dependent thrombotic events.
Multi-interchannel crosstalk in a DWDM millimeter-wave-band radio-over-fiber

In this paper, we numerically investigate the influence of multi-interchannel optical crosstalk in a 25-GHz spaced dense-wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) millimeter-wave-band radio-over-fiber (RoF) downlink system. Up to 31 undesired RoF signals were intentionally mixed as the crosstalk with the desired RoF signal. We define the suppression ratio of the crosstalk as the ratio of the mm-wave power of the desired channel to the undesired channels which are estimated from optical spectrum of the detected RoF signal. The simulation results show that the receiver sensitivity degradation due to the crosstalk can be fairly well predicted with the measurable suppression ratio regardless of the total DWDM channel number.
Spontaneous pneumomediastinum: Experience in 13 adult patients

Background Spontaneous pneumomediastinum is an uncommon disorder. There is a lack of information on spontaneous pneumomediastinum in India. We aimed to understand the clinical profile, hospital course, and long-term outcome of such patients. Methods We retrospectively reviewed all patients (aged ≥15 years) diagnosed with spontaneous pneumomediastinum in the respiratory ward of a tertiary care hospital over a 7-year period from 2005. Results Of the 3326 patients hospitalized during the study period, 13 (10 male) were diagnosed with spontaneous pneumomediastinum, constituting 0.39% of all hospitalizations. The median age was 37 years (interquartile range 20–55 years). The most common presenting symptom was dyspnea in 85% followed by neck swelling (69%), chest pain (69%) and cough (54%). Subcutaneous emphysema and preexisting lung diseases were identified in 11 (85%) patients each. Post-tubercular pulmonary sequelae (5 patients) and asthma (4 patients) were the most common underlying lung diseases. Pneumothorax was identified in 6 (46%) patients; 4 required tube thoracostomy. Chest radiography was diagnostic in 92% of patients. The median length of hospital stay was 9 days (interquartile range 6–12 days). No recurrence was reported in 11 patients followed up for a median of 1550 days (interquartile range 691–1909 days). Conclusions Spontaneous pneumomediastinum is a benign disorder, but underlying lung diseases and concomitant pneumothorax are likely to complicate the disease course. Exacerbation of post-tubercular obstructive airway disease is a common risk factor for spontaneous pneumomediastinum in a tuberculosis endemic country.
Participation and Voting Policy Process in Nigeria: A Qualitative Study

Participatory policy process in Nigeria is prominently known to be elites dominating the entire process, and control every bit of its stages. In such cases, citizens participate to fulfill the requirements. Various contending views provide account of different facets of policy process with little attempts to assess actual experience. The scenario of e-voting policy process in Nigeria provides citizens with limited choice to influence the policy. Given the fact that policies produced from true sense of participatory process stand the chance for adoption, bring to the fore, the need to envisage extent of citizens’ participation in e-voting decision. In view of the foregoing and the need to evaluate real life experiences concerning e-voting policy antecedent, this study adopt face-to-face qualitative interview to explore the extent of citizens’ participation in the e-voting policy process as a potential challenge affecting adoption. Real experience accounts of the participants revealed bureaucratic oriented Nigerian policy process mainly dominated by elites. The accounts demonstrated the extent to which citizens are deprived and isolated from e-voting policy. Hence, the call to policy makers in Nigeria to be sensitive to the opinions of the citizens toward shaping policy direction as a requisite for e-voting adoption and socioeconomic development. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n4p362
Learning object from small and imbalanced dataset with Boost-BFKO

One of the main drawbacks of boosting is its overfitting and poor predictive accuracy when the training dataset is small and imbalanced. In this paper, we introduce a novel learning algorithm Boost-BFKO, which combines boosting and data generation. It is suitable for small and imbalanced training datasets. To enlarge training sets, Boost-BFKO uses the adaptive Balanced Feature Knockout procedure (BFKO) to generate new synthetic samples. To enrich the training sets, Boost-BFKO selects seed samples from the minority class, and rebalances the total weights of the different classes in the updated training dataset. Experiments on Caltech 101 database showed that our method achieves a desirable performance when only a few training samples are available for binary classification and multiple object classification.
The Determinants of Localization and Urbanization Economies: Evidence from the Location of New Firms in Spain

type="main"> The objective of this paper is to analyze why firms in some industries locate in specialized economic environments (localization economies) while those in other industries prefer large city locations (urbanization economies). To this end, we examine the location decisions of new manufacturing firms in Spain at the city level and for narrowly defined industries. First, we estimate firm location models to obtain estimates that reflect the importance of localization and urbanization economies in each industry. Then, we regress these estimates on industry characteristics related to the potential importance of labor market pooling, input sharing, and knowledge spillovers. Urbanization effects are high in knowledge-intensive industries, suggesting that firms locate in large cities to benefit from knowledge spillovers. We also find that localization effects are high in industries that employ workers whose skills are more industry-specific, suggesting that industries locate in specialized economic environments to share a common pool of specialized workers.
Sire evaluation for fertility and calving ease in Germany

Reproductive traits like fertility and calving ease are of increasing importance in cattle uregfiry progftrms, especially in dual propose cattre. Recording "*t" ro, these traits are negligible, if most of the information is already collected through routine data collection in the conte)tc ofherdbook keeping or routine bookkeeping ofan Al-operation. Therefore severar approaches exist to use this information for sere"iion purposes throughout the world (Philipsson etal. 1979, phiripsson r9gl, Freeman r9g4). rn Germany th--ere were severar routine evaluations for fertility and calving ease, using a sire model (Liderer lgg4, Distr et. al. 1988) ,which under the aspect of new ivaluation i. "thoa, were suboptimal. The Federar Ministry of Agriculture and Foresty granted funds to develop a program package to evaruate direct and matemal effects in one system for the above mentioned-raits. Thelrogram was developed by Georg Thaller with the skilled supporr of Maciej Gierdziewicz in 1993/94. This package is now in use in Germany and wii in the fu.ure also be adopted to Austrian conditions. vIT verden has just published their first results from this packag;. --.
Variance Swaps Under No Conditions

Conditional variance swaps are claims on realized variance which is accumulated when the underlying asset price stays within a certain range. Being highly sensitive to movements in both asset price and its variance, they require a very reliable model for pricing and risk-managing. In this article we apply the Heston stochastic volatility model, which is by now a widely accepted pricing model in many markets, to derive closed-form solutions for pricing and risk-managing of conditional variance swaps.
Anti-party sentiment and party system change in Italy

This article attempts to assess (a) the extent to which anti-party sentiment has been a factor in Italy's current political changes, with particular reference to the party system; (b) whether such changes can in turn be considered to be a preliminary step towards the rejection of the party-based model of democracy. Elite and mass indicators, whose values rose sharply at the end of the 1980s and culminated in the early 1990s, reveal that anti-party sentiment was indeed a factor in Italy's recent party system changes. The ability of anti-party and anti-system lists to attract many dissatisfied electors resulted in the major 1992–1994 party system realignment. Mass anti-party sentiment, however, appears to have ebbed after the 1993 referendums on party financing and on the electoral law, which were arguably the highest manifestations of popular rejection of the old party-system. It would seem that with realignment popular anti-party sentiment has reached its goals. Perhaps as a consequence, at least some of the successful anti-party parties are already becoming more party-like. In the transition between Italy's first and second Republics, the party-based model of democracy has not yet been replaced.
An option pricing-based model for evaluating the financial viability of privatized infrastructure projects

Privatized infrastructure projects have to demonstrate their financial and technical viability before they are undertaken. Although it is relatively easy to demonstrate the technical viability of an infrastructure project, the evaluation of the financial viability of a privatized infrastructure project is complex and challenging, mainly because of the uncertainties involved due to the project's scale, long concession period and complexity. Traditional methods, such as net present value (NPV) analysis, fall short in reflecting the characteristics of privatized infrastructure projects and the risks involved. This paper presents an option pricing based model, the BOT option valuation (BOT-OV) model, for evaluating the financial viability of a privatized infrastructure project. This quantitative model considers the project characteristics explicitly and evaluates the project from the perspectives of the project promoter and of the government when the project is under bankruptcy risk. Moreover, the model can evaluate the impact of the government guarantee and the developer negotiation option on the project financial viability.
Incongruent Hierarchies: Daughters and Younger Sons as Company CEOs

The daughter or younger son who becomes head of the family business must struggle with both self-identity and changing family role expectations. How do they do this? Father CEO: My oldest son is the nicest guy in the world and expects to become president of the company. But, my second son would be better. I also have a younger daughter in the business. I don't know what to do. I've told the kids they may have to decide. Daughter CEO: From the time I became president eleven years after I joined the company, I was competing with my father—not from my side but from his side. Then the family struggle really started, particularly when my older brother wanted to join the business. Younger brother CEO: I can't replace him, because he's my older brother, and I have to think my way out of it, or we may have a confrontation.
Geo-Social Distance-Based Data Dissemination for Socially Aware Networking

The Internet of Things (IoT), which could connect everything in the world, is promising for the realization of smart cities. However, vehicles connected in the IoT challenges data collection and transmission. Socially aware networking is an emerging paradigm for high-efficiency data dissemination. Existing protocols take advantage of mobile nodes' social characteristics (e.g., user interest) to improve dissemination performance. However, they have not exploited enough of what relations are valuable between user interests and how these relations can affect the dissemination of social IoTs. This paper takes advantage of interest inclusion and intersection to solve the dissemination problem in a conference scenario. By constructing the structure of the Interest Tree to solely represent the relations of interest inclusion and interest intersection, we integrate vehicles' social factors into their geographical information, and introduce the concept of geo-social distance (GSD) as the basis of the proposed strategy. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our presented method by comparing with two other existing protocols in terms of four objective metrics, which include delivery ratio, overhead, hop-count, and average latency.
Toward a Social Policy for Argentina's Infrastructure Sectors: Evaluating the Past and Exploring the Future

Argentina was a pioneer of infrastructure reform in the early 1990s. The social dimension of infrastructure services was typically overlooked in the reform process. However, social sensitivities often resurfaced in the years that followed, leading to a series of ad hoc social policy measures that cumulatively amount to US$200 million a year. Foster quantifies and prioritizes the social challenges faced by the Argentine infrastructure sectors, evaluates how well existing social policies are functioning, and provides illustrative simulations of how certain changes in the design of social policy could improve the performance of current social policies. The author's findings are that current social policies do not prove to be very effective in targeting resources to the poor. They have no real impact on the distribution of income across customers. An important reason for this targeting failure is the tendency to allocate resources to all households resident in a particular geographical area, irrespective of socioeconomic status. A series of simulations that limit subsidies to households reaching a minimum score on a multidimensional poverty index show that individual targeting of this kind potentially leads to a more progressive distribution of subsidies. However, the greatest improvements in targeting performance would be achieved if efforts switched from subsidizing the use of infrastructure services to subsidizing connections to those services.
Biology versus environment in low birth weight children.

OBJECTIVE To explore the contribution of biologic risk factors versus socio-demographic and environmental risk factors in cognitive development of children with birth weight less than 2000 g, at the age of 12 years. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Infants discharged from a NICU of a referral hospital, with birth weight less than 2000 g between 1987-89 and followed up in the High Risk Clinic. METHODS The children were assessed at the age of 12 years, with the Weschler's Intelligence Scale for IQ and by Wide Range Achievement Test for mathematics skills. Mother's education, father's education, socio-economic status, family structure, spaciousness of the house, the locality in which the child lived and the type of school the child attended, were all recorded. A stimulation score was determined at 6 and 12 months and 3 years. Family environment score was used at 12 years. RESULTS The cohort consisted of 180 children, with 90 controls. The mean IQ of the study group was 89.5 +- 16.9, which was significantly lower than that of controls (97.2 +- 14.1) (P < 0.05). The mathematical skills of the study group were significantly poorer (P < 0.05) than that of controls. A multiple linear regression analysis was done using IQ as the dependent variable and all risk factors at birth, stimulation scores and socio-environmental factors as independent variables. Mothers education was the most important factor contributing to the total IQ, a variance of 25.2 % of the total variance 44.2 PERCENT. Fathers education emerged as an important factor for mathematics skills. School was the next important factor for IQ as well as academics. Controlling for all other background factors, birth weight was the only biologic factor of significance, and this had a very small contribution. CONCLUSION Parental education and the type of school attended by the child were the most important factors influencing cognitive development. The only biologic factor of importance was birth weight, but this too had a very small contribution.
" D " " " E " ^ De # noising ) ) LS # LDA ) classifica 1 on ) using ) the ) clean ) data ) ) Feature ) Vectors )

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is an overwhelming neurodegenerative disorder caused by deterioration of a neurotransmitter, known as dopamine. Lack of this chemical messenger in the brain impairs several brain regions and yields to various movement and non-motor symptoms. The incidence of PD is considered to be doubled in the next two decades and this urges more researches on its early diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we propose an approach to diagnose PD using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. We first introduce a joint feature-sample selection method to select the optimal subset of samples and features for a reliable training process. This procedure selects the most discriminative features and discards poor sample (outliers). Then, a robust classification framework is proposed that can simultaneously de-noise the selected subset of features and samples, and learn a classification model. Our model can further denoise the test samples based on the cleaned training data. Experimental results on both synthetic and a publicly available PD dataset show promising results.