Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Increase of Palmitic Acid Concentration Impairs Endothelial Progenitor Cell and Bone Marrow–Derived Progenitor Cell Bioavailability

Metabolic profiling of plasma nonesterified fatty acids discovered that palmitic acid (PA), a natural peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor γ (PPARγ) ligand, is a reliable type 2 diabetes biomarker. We investigated whether and how PA diabetic (d-PA) concentrations affected endothelial progenitor cell (EPC) and bone marrow–derived hematopoietic cell (BM-HC) biology. PA physiologic (n-PA) and d-PA concentrations were used. Proliferating cell nuclear antigen content and signal transducer and activator of transcription 5 (STAT5), PPARγ, cyclin D1, and p21Waf expression were evaluated. Small interfering RNA technology, gene reporter luciferase assay, electrophoretic mobility shift assay, chromatin immunoprecipitation assay, and coimmunoprecipitation were exploited. In vivo studies and migration assays were also performed. d-PA, unlike n-PA or physiological and diabetic oleic and stearic acid concentrations, impaired EPC migration and EPC/BM-HC proliferation through a PPARγ-mediated STAT5 transcription inhibition. This event did not prevent the formation of a STAT5/PPARγ transcriptional complex but was crucial for gene targeting, as p21Waf gene promoter, unlike cyclin D1, was the STAT5/PPARγ transcriptional target. Similar molecular events could be detected in EPCs isolated from type 2 diabetic patients. By expressing a constitutively activated STAT5 form, we demonstrated that STAT5 content is crucial for gene targeting and EPC fate. Finally, we also provide in vivo data that d-PA–mediated EPC dysfunction could be rescued by PPARγ blockade. These data provide first insights on how mechanistically d-PA drives EPC/BM-HC dysfunction in diabetes.
A review of global potentially available cropland estimates and their consequences for model‐based assessments

The world's population is growing and demand for food, feed, fiber, and fuel is increasing, placing greater demand on land and its resources for crop production. We review previously published estimates of global scale cropland availability, discuss the underlying assumptions that lead to differences between estimates, and illustrate the consequences of applying different estimates in model‐based assessments of land‐use change. The review estimates a range from 1552 to 5131 Mha, which includes 1550 Mha that is already cropland. Hence, the lowest estimates indicate that there is almost no room for cropland expansion, while the highest estimates indicate that cropland could potentially expand to over three times its current area. Differences can largely be attributed to institutional assumptions, i.e. which land covers/uses (e.g. forests or grasslands) are societally or governmentally allowed to convert to cropland, while there was little variation in biophysical assumptions. Estimates based on comparable assumptions showed a variation of up to 84%, which originated mainly from different underlying data sources. On the basis of this synthesis of the assumptions underlying these estimates, we constructed a high, a medium, and a low estimate of cropland availability that are representative of the range of estimates in the reviewed studies. We apply these estimates in a land‐change model to illustrate the consequences on cropland expansion and intensification as well as deforestation. While uncertainty in cropland availability is hardly addressed in global land‐use change assessments, the results indicate a large range of estimates with important consequences for model‐based assessments.
The relevance of a beta-book for Irish equities

This paper investigates the role of |3 coefficients in determining rates of return on equities traded in the Irish stock market. It concludes that a "Beta Book" would be inappropriate in this case due to institutional factors and related market inefficiencies. It suggests, however, that further research is needed to explore the relationship between rate of return and unique risk.
A power-efficient 1.056 GS/s resolution-switchable 5-bit/6-bit flash ADC for UWB applications

A 1.056 GS/s, 5-bit/6-bit switchable flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is designed in 0.18-mum CMOS, which is suitable to be used in an OFDM-UWB transceiver. A resolution switchable structure is proposed to optimize power consumption according to the dynamic requirement of the application. Two-stage interpolation and averaging techniques are employed to average the offset of the preamplifiers. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the proposed ADC achieves 4.2b/5.0b ENOB in 5-bit/6-bit working modes with a 413-MHz input signal. The mean value of DNL and INL is 0.32 and 0.56 LSB for 5-bit mode, while 0.47 and 0.62 LSB for 6-bit mode. The analog part consumes 36 mW and 98 mW from a 1.8-V supply in 5-bit and 6-bit operation mode, respectively
Environmental and microbial factors influencing methane and nitrous oxide fluxes in Mediterranean cork oak woodlands: trees make a difference

Cork oak woodlands (montado) are agroforestry systems distributed all over the Mediterranean basin with a very important social, economic and ecological value. A generalized cork oak decline has been occurring in the last decades jeopardizing its future sustainability. It is unknown how loss of tree cover affects microbial processes that are consuming greenhouse gases in the montado ecosystem. The study was conducted under two different conditions in the natural understory of a cork oak woodland in center Portugal: under tree canopy (UC) and open areas without trees (OA). Fluxes of methane and nitrous oxide were measured with a static chamber technique. In order to quantify methanotrophs and bacteria capable of nitrous oxide consumption, we used quantitative real-time PCR targeting the pmoA and nosZ genes encoding the subunit of particulate methane mono-oxygenase and catalytic subunit of the nitrous oxide reductase, respectively. A significant seasonal effect was found on CH4 and N2O fluxes and pmoA and nosZ gene abundance. Tree cover had no effect on methane fluxes; conversely, whereas the UC plots were net emitters of nitrous oxide, the loss of tree cover resulted in a shift in the emission pattern such that the OA plots were a net sink for nitrous oxide. In a seasonal time scale, the UC had higher gene abundance of Type I methanotrophs. Methane flux correlated negatively with abundance of Type I methanotrophs in the UC plots. Nitrous oxide flux correlated negatively with nosZ gene abundance at the OA plots in contrast to that at the UC plots. In the UC soil, soil organic matter had a positive effect on soil extracellular enzyme activities, which correlated positively with the N2O flux. Our results demonstrated that tree cover affects soil properties, key enzyme activities and abundance of microorganisms and, consequently net CH4 and N2O exchange.
Electrified fuzzy spheres and funnels in curved backgrounds

We use the non-Abelian DBI action to study the dynamics of N coincident Dp-branes in an arbitrary curved background, with the presence of a homogenous world-volume electric field. The solutions are natural extensions of those without electric fields, and imply that the spheres will collapse toward zero size. We then go on to consider the D1? D3 intersection in a curved background and find various dualities and automorphisms of the general equations of motion. It is possible to map the dynamical equation of motion to the static one via Wick rotation, however the additional spatial dependence of the metric prevents this mapping from being invertible. Instead we find that a double Wick rotation leaves the static equation invariant. This is very different from the behaviour in Minkowski space. We go on to construct the most general static fuzzy funnel solutions for an arbitrary metric either by solving the static equations of motion, or by finding configurations which minimise the energy. As a consistency check we construct the Abelian D3-brane world-volume theory in the same generic background and find solutions consistent with energy minimisation. In the NS5-brane background we find time dependent solutions to the equations of motion, representing a time dependent fuzzy funnel. These solutions match those obtained from the D-string picture to leading order suggesting that the action in the large N limit does not need corrections. We conclude by generalising our solutions to higher dimensional fuzzy funnels.
High-mass X-ray binaries in the Small Magellanic Cloud: the luminosity function

We study a population of compact X-ray sources in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) using archival data from the XMM-Newton observatory. The total area of the survey is 1.5 deg 2 with the limiting sensitivity of 10 -14 erg s -1 cm -2 , corresponding to a luminosity of 4.3 x 10 33 erg s -1 at the SMC distance. Out of ∼150 point sources detected in the 2-8 keV energy band, ∼3/4 are cosmic X-ray background sources, observed through the SMC. Based on the properties of the optical and near-infrared counterparts of the detected sources, we identified likely high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) candidates and sources whose nature is uncertain, thus providing lower and upper limits on the luminosity distribution of HMXBs in the observed part of the SMC. The observed number of HMXBs is consistent with the prediction based on star formation rate (SFR) estimates derived from the supernovae frequency and an analysis of colour-magnitude diagrams for the stellar population. If, on the contrary, the true value of the SFR is better represented by far-infrared-, Ha- and ultraviolet-based estimators, then the abundance of HMXBs in the SMC may significantly (by a factor of as much as ∼10) exceed the value derived for the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies. The shape of the observed distribution at the bright end is consistent with the universal HMXB X-ray luminosity function. At the faint end, L x ≤ 2 x 10 15 erg s -1 , the upper limit on the luminosity function is consistent with the L -0.6 power law, while the lower limit is significantly flatter than this.
Botnet Detection by Monitoring Group Activities in DNS Traffic

Recent malicious attempts are intended to get financial benefits through a large pool of compromised hosts, which are called software robots or simply "bots. " A group of bots, referred to as a botnet, is remotely controllable by a server and can be used for sending spam mails, stealing personal information, and launching DDoS attacks. Growing popularity of botnets compels to find proper countermeasures but existing defense mechanisms hardly catch up with the speed of botnet technologies. In this paper, we propose a botnet detection mechanism by monitoring DNS traffic to detect botnets, which form a group activity in DNS queries simultaneously sent by distributed bots. A few works have been proposed based on particular DNS information generated by a botnet, but they are easily evaded by changing bot programs. Our anomaly-based botnet detection mechanism is more robust than the previous approaches so that the variants of bots can be detectable by looking at their group activities in DNS traffic. From the experiments on a campus network, it is shown that the proposed mechanism can detect botnets effectively while bots are connecting to their server or migrating to another server.
Assessing User Satisfaction with e-Learning Blog Systems

With the proliferation of educational use of blogs, measuring user satisfaction with blog-based learning systems has become an important issue for academics and practitioners. Although previous research has developed various instruments for measuring user satisfaction with asynchronous e-learning systems, none of the literature has addressed the measurement of user satisfaction with blog-based learning systems. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to develop and validate a multi-dimensional instrument for measuring e-learning blog satisfaction (ELBS) based on previous research. This study introduces and defines the construct of e-learning blog satisfaction, provides an empirical validation of the construct and its underlying dimensionality develops a generic e-learning blog satisfaction instrument with desirable psychometric properties, and investigates the instrument’s theoretical and practical applications. By analyzing data from a sample of 238 respondents, this study proposes a 5-factor, 20-item ELBS instrument. This empirically validated instrument will be useful to researchers in developing and testing blog-based learning theories, as well as to educators in understanding students’ ELBS and promoting the use of blog-based learning systems.
Weak Sobolev spaces and Markov uniqueness of operators

On introduit la notion de differentielle generalisee sur un espace mesure abstrait, et on construit des espaces de Sobolev forts et faibles correspondants. On demontre que la validite d'un theoreme «faible = fort», c'est-a-dire la coincidence des espaces de Sobolev faible et fort, implique l'unicite markovienne de l'operateur de diffusion associe a la differentielle generalisee. Comme applications, on obtient une condition necessaire et suffisante pour l'unicite markovien d'operateurs de diffusion localement strictement elliptiques en dimension finie, et une condition abstraite pour l'unicite markovienne d'un operateur d'Ornstein-Uhlenbeck sur l'espace des chemins d'une variete riemannienne compacte
A Communication Protocol for Sensor Database Construction by Rounding Sink

Recently, sensor databases have been used for many applications such as environment observations or weather forecasting. To construct sensor databases, some researches focus on the rounding sink approach. In the approach, rounding sinks repeatedly round in the area that sensors are deployed and collect data from each sensor. Compared with the traditional wireless sensor network approach, the rounding sink approach can reduce communication traffic since rounding sinks collect sensor data directly from sensors. Some data collection protocols to improve the effectiveness of the data collection by rounding sinks have been proposed, but they do not consider the data amount that each sensor has. Here, a problem occurs. Rounding sinks collect only a few data from a sensor even if it has many sensor data. In this paper, we propose a data collection protocol considering the data amount that each sensor has. In our proposed protocol, a rounding sink polls neighboring sensors and gets the data amount that the polled sensor has. Then, the rounding sink calculates the upper limit for the data amount to collect and collects the data up to the limit. We confirmed that our proposed protocol can give fairness to the amount of collected data.
Analysis of cooperative HARQ with opportunistic routing

In this paper, we do performance analysis of the cooperative HARQ protocol in a wireless adhoc multihop network employing spatial ALOHA. We model the nodes in such a network by a homogeneous 2-D Poisson point process. We study the tradeoff between the transport capacity submetrics inherent in the network when using cooperative HARQ protocol and opportunistic routing by optimizing the transport capacity w.r. t the network design parameters, coding rate and medium access probability. Using approximations, we obtain an analytic expression for the expected progress of opportunistic routing. By way of numerical results, we show that the network design parameters obtained by optimizing the analytic expression of transport capacity closely follows that of Monte Carlo based exact transport capacity optimization.
Unprotected sex following HIV testing among women in Uganda and Zimbabwe: short- and long-term comparisons with pre-test behaviour.

BACKGROUND Despite widespread condom promotion for HIV prevention, prospective measurement of condom use before and after HIV testing is infrequent. METHODS We analysed data from a prospective study of hormonal contraception and HIV acquisition among Zimbabwean and Ugandan women (1999-2004), in which HIV testing and counselling were performed approximately every 3 months. We used zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models to examine the number and proportion of unprotected sex acts, comparing behaviour reported 2-6 months before HIV testing with behaviour reported both 2-6 months (short-term analysis) and 12-16 months (long-term analysis) after HIV testing. RESULTS Short- and long-term analyses were similar, so we present only long-term findings from 151 HIV-infected and 650 uninfected participants. The proportion of HIV-infected women reporting any unprotected acts in a typical month declined from 74% (pre-infection behaviour) to 56% (12-16 months after HIV diagnosis). In multivariable models, HIV-infected women were twice as likely to report that all sex acts were protected by condoms after diagnosis compared with beforehand [adjusted odds ratio (aOR): 1.99, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.12-3.53]; uninfected women were somewhat less likely to report that all acts were protected (aOR: 0.82, 95% CI: 0.64-1.04). HIV-infected women also reduced their number of unprotected acts by 38% (95% CI: -16 to -55%). However, their proportion of unprotected acts changed little (7% reduction, 95% CI: -18 to + 6%). Uninfected women reported little change in number or proportion of unprotected acts over the same time period. CONCLUSIONS HIV-infected women reduced the number, but not the proportion, of unprotected acts. HIV-negative women did not increase condom use after testing and counselling, but neither did they decrease condom use, suggesting that testing negative was not interpreted as endorsement of risky behaviour.
Evaluating Switch Architectures and Memory Management Policies for Cache-coherent Multiprocessors: an Application-based Study

In this paper, the eeect of interconnection network switch designs on the application performance of cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (CC-NUMA) multiprocessors is studied in detail. Wormhole routing and cut-through switching have been evaluated for these shared-memory multiprocessors that employ a full map directory-based cache coherence protocol. The switch design considers virtual channels and varying number of input buuers per switch. The eeect of various memory management or data placement policies on the traac interference in the interconnection network is also studied. The evaluation is based on execution-driven simulation using ve diierent scientiic applications to capture the random bursty nature of the network traac arrival. The memory traces for diierent memory management techniques, namely buddy, round-robin & rst-touch policies, are analyzed and their performance is compared. We show that the use of cut-through switching with buuers and virtual channels improves the average message latency with all the above policies. The waiting times of messages at various stages of the network are also presented. Finally, we show the variation of stall times and execution times for these applications by varying several switch design parameters, cache block size and memory page size.
Representation of Word Sentiment, Idioms and Senses

Distributional Semantic Models (DSM) that represent words as vectors of weights over a high dimensional feature space have proved very effective in representing semantic or syntactic word similarity. For certain tasks however it is important to represent contrasting aspects such as polarity, different senses or idiomatic use of words. We present two methods for creating embeddings that take into account such characteristics: a feed-forward neural network for learning sentiment specific and a skip-gram model for learning sense specific embeddings. Sense specific embeddings can be used to disambiguate queries and other classification tasks. We present an approach for recognizing idiomatic expressions by means of the embeddings. This can be used to segment queries into meaningful chunks. The implementation is available as a library implemented in Python with core numerical processing written in C++, using a parallel linear algebra library for efficiency and scalability.
The properdin-like type I repeats of human thrombospondin contain a cell attachment site

Thrombospondin (TS) is a modular adhesive glycoprotein that contains three domains previously implicated in the attachment of cells to TS. These include the amino-terminal heparin-binding domain, the carboxy terminal cell or platelet-binding domain, and an RGDA sequence of TS. We have characterized a mAb against human TS, designated A4.1, which inhibits the attachment of human melanoma cells (G361) to TS. The epitope for A4.1 lies within the amino terminal half of the central stalklike region of TS which is distinct from the three known cell attachment sites. This region of TS is recovered in a 50-kD peptide after chymotryptic digestion of TS in EDTA. It contains the procollagen- like domain of TS as well as three type I repeats of a 60-residue segment homologous to two malarial proteins and the complement proteins properdin, and factors C6 through C9. The purified chymotryptic fragment is an effective attachment factor for G361 cells. A4.1 blocks adhesion to the 50-kD domain, as do some sulfated glycoconjugates. RGD (and RGE) peptides and mAbs against other domains of TS are not inhibitory. Peptides (19 mers) based on the core homology sequence of the three type I repeats of TS are potent attachment factors for these cells, and this adhesion is also inhibited by sulfated glycoconjugates. A polyclonal antibody raised against one of these peptides inhibits adhesion of G361 cells to the peptides, to the 50-kD fragment and to intact TS. Thus a new cell-adhesion site has been identified in TS whose sequence is very similar to the site identified in region II of the circumsporozoite protein of malaria parasites (Rich, K. A., F. W. George IV, J. L. Law, and W. J. Martin. 1990. Science (Wash. DC) 249:1574-1577. Thus there may be a common receptor which binds TS, malarial proteins, and properdin.
ISO 9000/1994, ISO 9001/2000 and TQM: The performance debate revisited

The debate about the impact of ISO 9000/1994 on performance has been waging since its inception. While there is a general agreement regarding the positive impact of TQM on performance, there has been less agreement among the academics about the impact of ISO 9000/1994. Perhaps in response to such debate, the new ISO 9001/2000 has appeared purporting to be more in line with the TQM philosophy. As of now, how this 2000 version actually affects performance is yet to be explored. In this study, we compare the implementation of ISO 9000/1994 and ISO 9001/2000 as representing two different efforts to implement quality management practices. We evaluate its impact on company performance with a sample of 713 Spanish industrial companies. We also examine if the 2000 version of ISO is taking us closer to the implementation of TQM. Further, we depart from the past studies methodologically by considering performance as a formative construct rather than a reflective construct. Based on the mean and covariance structural (MACS) analyses, we conclude that ISO 9001/2000 certified companies do not perform noticeably better than ISO 9000/1994 or non-certified companies. However, we find that ISO 9001/2000 certified companies apply TQM at a higher level than ISO 9000/1994 certified companies, but whether they actually perform better is less clear. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel. : +34 868887801; fax: +34 868 887537. E-mail addresses: mili@um.es (M. Martı́nez-Costa), Thomas.choi@asu.edu (T.Y. Choi), josean.martinez@upct.es (J.A. Martı́nez), angel.martinez@upct.es (A.R. Martı́nez-Lorente). 1 Tel. : +1 4809656135. 2 Tel. : +34 968325776; fax: +34 968327008. 3 Tel. : +34 968325618; fax: +34 968327008.