Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nucleic Acid Therapeutics : Current Targets For Antisense Oligonucleotides And Ribozymes

Nucleic acids are becoming increasingly important as therapeutic molecules mainly for the ease with which specificity for a vast range of targets of these drugs is achieved. Yet the dose rates of several mg/kg are not easy to provide. Reform of drug policy has been suggested earlier to facilitate newer therapeutic strategies to be put to use. With the current technology, each mg of the unmodified oligonucleotide would cost US$ 20. That means someone with 50 kg of body weight requiring 50 mg would require to pay ca US$1000/per dose. That is where targeted delivery systems emerge as a possible hope for minimizing on the dose rates while new technology for synthesis for economical production of these drugs would remain welcome. The suspected toxicity and non-specificity associated with certain modifications need to be scrutinized. Studies on potential side effects and frequency of insertion of the administered oligonucleotides in recipient cell’s genome must remain under vigilance. In antiviral and anticancer applications, it will be necessary to establish regimen that ensures complete cure to avoid resurgence on withdrawal of the drugs. Most of the current data show good but partial elimination of viral or cancer targets.
Dressed Skeleton Expansion and the Coupling Scale Ambiguity Problem

Perturbative expansions in quantum field theories are usually expressed in powers of a coupling constant. In principle, the infinite sum of the expansion series is independent of the renormalization scale of the coupling constant. In practice, there is a. remnant dependence of the truncated series on the renormalization scale. This scale a.mbiguity can severely restrict the predictive power of theoretical calculations. The dressed skeleton expansion is developed as a calculational method which avoids the coupling scale ambiguity problem. In this method, physical quantities are expressed as functional expansions in terms of a coupling vertex function. The arguments of the vertex function are given by the physical momenta of each process. These physical momenta effectively replace the unspecified renormalization scale and eliminate the a.mbiguity problem. This method is applied to various field theoretical models and its main features and limitations acre explored. For quantum chromodynamics, an expression for the running coupling constant of the three-gluon vertex is obtained. The effective coupling scale of this vertex is shown to be essentially given by p2-Q~inQ~ed/Q~axr where Q$inr Qied and Q&ax are respectively the smallest, the next-to-smallest and the largest scale among the three gluon virtualities. This functional form suggests. that the three-gluon vertex becomes non-perturbative at asymmetric momentum configurations. Implications for four-jet physics is discussed. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Identifying the causes and effects of poor privacy practices by online social network users: the potential of advisory monitoring software in changing user behaviour

In this thesis the behaviour of online social network users is examined, with a particular focus on user activities that preserve or compromise personal privacy. A two-fold approach to data collection was used, with a large-scale online survey (n=90 respondents) that measured user's online social network use (using Facebook as a case study) and their personality traits (via Cattel's 16 Personality Factors questionnaire), followed by a smaller number of semi-structured interviews (n=14 participants). A hypothesis under examination was that personality traits serve to predict the behaviour of online social networks users, and have the potential to identify those users at risk of either carelessly or unknowingly compromising their personal privacy (and thereby placing themselves at risk of identity theft and other malice), and to inform the design of training materials that attempt to encourage those users to protect their personal information more carefully. Survey data were subject to correlational analysis to examine the association between the 16 Personality Factors, and the Big Five personality traits derived thereof, and the information visibility settings of the respondents (viz., in the online social network selected as a case study, the settings of "public", "friends only", "custom", "only me" or "not supplied" for each information type). To identify at-risk participant groups (i.e., those making sensitive personal information publically available), cluster analyses were performed by partitioning respondents into their dominant Big Five traits grouping. For survey respondents with the least cautious settings, it was found that the most highly correlated Big Five traits were Independence (Agreeableness) and Self-control (Conscientiousness), with a smaller effect of Tough-mindedness (Openness). More fine-grained analyses were performed that related user behaviour to facets within each trait. Follow-up interview data indicates that the true settings of at-risk group was indeed similar to those reported in the survey, but also that a significant proportion of participants were not aware of settings available to protect their privacy and so did not make use of them. Finally, a set of recommendations in relation to privacy settings has been constructed, in addition to detailed guidance of how to behave safely on the case study online social network (Facebook). A set of recommended actions for Facebook themselves are also included.
Gestational Diabetes Mellitus Upsets the Proportion of Fatty Acids in Umbilical Arterial but Not Venous Plasma

OBJECTIVE—Neonates of women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) have reduced levels of arachidonic acid (AA) (20:4 n-6) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) (22:6 n-3). To assess whether this is the result of impaired placental transfer or endogenous fetal metabolism, fatty acids in umbilical venous and arterial plasma were analyzed in neonates of GDM women. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Fatty acids were analyzed by gas chromatography in the plasma of 15 subjects with GDM and 30 healthy control subjects undergoing elective cesarean section and in vein and artery cord blood collected separately. RESULTS—The percentages of AA (20:4 n-6), DHA (22:6 n-3), and total n-6 or n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) as well as total PUFAs were lower in umbilical arterial but not in venous plasma of neonates of the GDM versus the control group. CONCLUSIONS—An altered handling or metabolism of long-chain PUFAs by the fetus rather than impaired placental transfer seems to be responsible for the lower proportion of those fatty acids in the plasma of neonates of GDM mothers.
Health behavior stage and the prevalence of health risk behaviors in inner Mongolian secondary school students: a cross-sectional study

Abstract This study evaluated stages of health behavior change and the prevalence of physical inactivity, unhealthy eating, poor stress management, alcohol consumption, and smoking in Inner Mongolian secondary school students. The relationship between engaging in health risk behaviors and demographic characteristics was also explored. In total, 2,794 students, largely in the contemplation and preparation stages, were enrolled. The prevalence of physical inactivity, unhealthy eating, poor stress management, alcohol consumption, and smoking were 31%, 33%, 46.8%, 18.6%, and 8.4%, respectively. Logistic regression analysis identified differences according to school grade, sex, ethnicity, residence areas, and school. Poor stress management in students is a serious health concern in Inner Mongolia.
Sparse de-convolution of space charge signal in PEA method

Space charge measurement in dielectric materials is very important to understand breakdown mechanism in power cables. Among several methods like pulsed electro-acoustic method, pulse propagation method, laser induced pressure propagation, the pulsed electro-acoustic method is widely used for space charge measurement due to ease of application. However, the signal obtained in the method does not represent original space charge. To obtain original space charge signal de-convolution is required. In this paper, authors examined applicability of sparse de-convolution to obtain original space charge signal using the pulsed electro-acoustic method. Charge signal obtained using poly methyl methacrylate sample, in authors' laboratory has been taken as a reference.
Comparative Functional Genomics Analysis of NNK Tobacco-Carcinogen Induced Lung Adenocarcinoma Development in Gprc5a-Knockout Mice

Background Improved understanding of lung cancer development and progression, including insights from studies of animal models, are needed to combat this fatal disease. Previously, we found that mice with a knockout (KO) of G-protein coupled receptor 5A (Gprc5a) develop lung tumors after a long latent period (12 to 24 months). Methodology/Principal Findings To determine whether a tobacco carcinogen will enhance tumorigenesis in this model, we administered 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone (NNK) i.p. to 2-months old Gprc5a-KO mice and sacrificed groups (n = 5) of mice at 6, 9, 12, and 18 months later. Compared to control Gprc5a-KO mice, NNK-treated mice developed lung tumors at least 6 months earlier, exhibited 2- to 4-fold increased tumor incidence and multiplicity, and showed a dramatic increase in lesion size. A gene expression signature, NNK-ADC, of differentially expressed genes derived by transcriptome analysis of epithelial cell lines from normal lungs of Gprc5a-KO mice and from NNK-induced adenocarcinoma was highly similar to differential expression patterns observed between normal and tumorigenic human lung cells. The NNK-ADC expression signature also separated both mouse and human adenocarcinomas from adjacent normal lung tissues based on publicly available microarray datasets. A key feature of the signature, up-regulation of Ube2c, Mcm2, and Fen1, was validated in mouse normal lung and adenocarcinoma tissues and cells by immunohistochemistry and western blotting, respectively. Conclusions/Significance Our findings demonstrate that lung tumorigenesis in the Gprc5a-KO mouse model is augmented by NNK and that gene expression changes induced by tobacco carcinogen(s) may be conserved between mouse and human lung epithelial cells. Further experimentation to prove the reliability of the Gprc5a knockout mouse model for the study of tobacco-induced lung carcinogenesis is warranted.
tmVar: a text mining approach for extracting sequence variants in biomedical literature

MOTIVATION Text-mining mutation information from the literature becomes a critical part of the bioinformatics approach for the analysis and interpretation of sequence variations in complex diseases in the post-genomic era. It has also been used for assisting the creation of disease-related mutation databases. Most of existing approaches are rule-based and focus on limited types of sequence variations, such as protein point mutations. Thus, extending their extraction scope requires significant manual efforts in examining new instances and developing corresponding rules. As such, new automatic approaches are greatly needed for extracting different kinds of mutations with high accuracy. RESULTS Here, we report tmVar, a text-mining approach based on conditional random field (CRF) for extracting a wide range of sequence variants described at protein, DNA and RNA levels according to a standard nomenclature developed by the Human Genome Variation Society. By doing so, we cover several important types of mutations that were not considered in past studies. Using a novel CRF label model and feature set, our method achieves higher performance than a state-of-the-art method on both our corpus (91.4 versus 78.1% in F-measure) and their own gold standard (93.9 versus 89.4% in F-measure). These results suggest that tmVar is a high-performance method for mutation extraction from biomedical literature. AVAILABILITY tmVar software and its corpus of 500 manually curated abstracts are available for download at http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih. gov/CBBresearch/Lu/pub/tmVar
Social Aspects of Crisis Effects on Households: The Case of Ukraine

The paper investigates the effect of crisis on households’ welfare and severity of poverty in Ukraine. We use Ukrainian Household Survey for three years – 2006, 2009, and 2010 that allows us to investigate separately economic conditions before, during and after the crisis. Welfare in our paper is measured by total income and total expenses per equivalent member; poverty is measured using an income and expenses approach, three different poverty lines are investigated. Most welfare and poverty determinants change over time, as the economic situation changes, although such determinants as education and work experience are equally important in all periods. Residents of Kyiv earn and spend, on average, by 9-11% more than residents of the rest of the country. Based on empirical results some policy recommendations were suggested family-support policies, support for small business, subsidizing new job-creation, healthy life-style support policies, public investment into child day-care facilities, and improvement of job-matching and professional training.
Recovering software layers from object oriented systems

Recovering the architecture of existing software systems remains a challenge and an active research field in software engineering. In this paper, we propose an approach to recover the layered architecture of object oriented software systems. To do so, our approach first recovers clusters corresponding to the various responsibilities of the system; the challenge in this context is to find the appropriate level of granularity of these responsibilities. Then the recovered clusters are assigned to layers using an optimization algorithm that exploits the principles of the layering architectural style. The approach was validated on five Java open source systems.
Interpretable Two-level Boolean Rule Learning for Classification

This paper proposes algorithms for learning two-level Boolean rules in Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF, i.e. AND-of-ORs) or Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF, i.e. OR-of-ANDs) as a type of human-interpretable classification model, aiming for a favorable trade-off between the classification accuracy and the simplicity of the rule. Two formulations are proposed. The first is an integer program whose objective function is a combination of the total number of errors and the total number of features used in the rule. We generalize a previously proposed linear programming (LP) relaxation from one-level to two-level rules. The second formulation replaces the 0-1 classification error with the Hamming distance from the current two-level rule to the closest rule that correctly classifies a sample. Based on this second formulation, block coordinate descent and alternating minimization algorithms are developed. Experiments show that the two-level rules can yield noticeably better performance than one-level rules due to their dramatically larger modeling capacity, and the two algorithms based on the Hamming distance formulation are generally superior to the other two-level rule learning methods in our comparison. A proposed approach to binarize any fractional values in the optimal solutions of LP relaxations is also shown to be effective.
Cyclical Changes in Short-Run Earnings Mobility in Canada, 1982-1996

The paper by Charles M. Beach and Ross Finnie represents the first attempt to quantify short-term or cyclical changes in earnings mobility in Canada. Mobility analysis can be seen as a complement to the analysis of income distribution. For a given degree of earnings inequality, more earnings mobility corresponds to securing greater labour market opportunity. Using longitudinal income-tax-based data, the authors divide the employed population into eight age/sex groups: entry workers (20–24), younger workers (25–34), prime-age workers (35–54), and older workers (55–64) for both sexes; and divide the earnings distribution into lower, middle and upper regions or earnings intervals based on median earnings levels for the distribution as a whole, and calculate the proportion of workers in each group for all years over the 1982–96 period. They also develop transition matrices that show the probability of moving from one earnings interval to another over a one-year period. They find that there have been major cyclical changes in earnings polarization and that these changes have been concentrated in recessions, notably in the 1990–92 downturn. They also find that men in particular experienced a marked decrease in their net probability of upward mobility in the earnings distribution during recessions, as the probability of moving up fell sharply as did the probability of moving down. The results of the paper are particularly relevant for an understanding of how earnings mobility may be affected by the current economic slowdown.
CRI : A Novel Rating Based Leasing Policy and Algorithm for Efficient Resource Management in IaaS Clouds

Cloud Computing is transfiguring development of information technology industry by providing scalable services on a pay per use basis. Cloud hosts and consumers are tied with service level agreement (SLA). SLA provides description of services provided by the cloud host. A cloud host can serve to multiple consumers and this is called cloud computing multi tenant model. Though, cloud shows infinite capacity, still there must be some policy to maintain order of execution of users’ tasks. Consumers can be served in a first come first serve, round robin or on a priority basis. This paper proposes a new leasing policy named CRI (Consumer Rating Index) and an algorithm for prioritizing consumers on the basis of CRI scores. Experimental results show that this policy and algorithm can be used for efficient functioning at cloud hosts side. Keywords— IaaS, Resource management, Rating based priority, CRI.
Impact of financial market developments on the monetary transmission mechanism

The objective of this paper is to determine how the monetary transmission mechanism is affected by financial market developments. The study is motivated by the fact that the Malaysian financial system has undergone tremendous change in the last decade and that the pace of change is only likely to accelerate in the coming decade. Given that monetary policy works through its influence on prices in the financial system, some of these changes could have important implications for the way monetary policy changes are transmitted through the financial system. These changes could have important implications for the effectiveness of monetary policy.
Semi‐implicit spectral collocation methods for reaction‐diffusion equations on annuli

In this article, we develop numerical schemes for solving stiff reaction‐diffusion equations on annuli based on Chebyshev and Fourier spectral spatial discretizations and integrating factor methods for temporal discretizations. Stiffness is resolved by treating the linear diffusion through the use of integrating factors and the nonlinear reaction term implicitly. Root locus curves provide a succinct analysis of the A‐stability of these schemes. By utilizing spectral collocation methods, we avoid the use of potentially expensive transforms between the physical and spectral spaces. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of these schemes. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 27: 1113–1129, 2011
BER performance of OFDM Amplify-and-Forward relaying system with subcarrier permutation

We perform error probability analysis of the uncoded OFDM fixed gain Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relaying system with subcarrier permutation (SCP). Two SCP schemes, named: the best-to-best SCP (BTB SCP) and the best-to-worst SCP(BTW SCP) are considered. Closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) of the above SCP methods are derived. Numerical results manifest that these SCP schemes may outperform one another, depending on the average channel conditions of the links involved. That is, BTB SCP is better in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while BTW SCP prevails in the medium and high SNR regime. Thus, it could be concluded that OFDM AF relaying systems may switch from the BTB SCP to BTW SCP in order to achieve optimum BER performance.
EXTERNAL CORPORATE VENTURING – EXPLORATION AND EXPLOITATION

External corporate venturing, which is new business creation activity through organizational modes such as corporate venture capital, alliances, acquisitions, or spin-offs has received relatively scant attention in the corporate entrepreneurship literature. Based on seven in-depth case studies of large European and US firms in the information and communication technology sector, this paper develops a coherent capability-based framework for external corporate venturing. The framework identifies a dual role of external corporate venturing in exploring new capabilities and business opportunities and in exploiting existing capabilities in new business opportunities.
Scalable Resource Management in Cloud Computing

The exponential growth of data and application complexity has brought new challenges in the distributed computing field. Scientific applications are growing more diverse with various workloads, including traditional MPI high performance computing (HPC) to fine-grained loosely coupled many-task computing (MTC). Traditionally, these workloads have been shown to run well on supercomputers and highly-tuned HPC Clusters. The advent of Cloud computing has brought the attention of scientists to exploit these resources for scientific applications at a potentially lower cost. We investigate the nature of the cloud and its ability to run scientific applications efficiently. Delivering high throughput and low latency for the various types of workloads at large scales has driven us to design and implement new job scheduling and execution systems that are fully distributed and have the ability to run in public clouds. We discuss the design and implementation of a job scheduling and execution system (CloudKon) that has three major features: 1) it is optimized to exploit the cloud resources efficiently through a variety of cloud services (Amazon SQS and DynamoDB) in order to get the best performance and utilization; 2) it is fully distributed and it is able to run large scale applications; 3) it supports various workloads including MTC and HPC applications concurrently. To further improve the performance and the flexibility of CloudKon, we designed and implemented a fully distributed message queue (Fabriq) that delivers an order of magnitude better performance than the Amazon Simple Queuing System (SQS). Designing Fabriq helped us expand our scheduling system to many other distributed system including non-Amazon clouds. We evaluated CloudKon with synthetic MTC workloads, synthetic HPC workloads, and synthetic MapReduce applications on the Amazon AWS cloud with up to 1K instances. Fabriq was also evaluated with synthetic workloads on Amazon AWS cloud with up to 128 instances.
Mutation Rate and Predicted Phenotypic Target Sizes in Ethylnitrosourea-Treated Mice

Chemical mutagenesis of the mouse is ongoing in several centers around the world, with varying estimates of mutation rate and number of sites mutable to phenotype. To address these questions, we sequenced ∼9.6 Mb of DNA from G1 progeny of ethylnitrosourea-treated mice in a large, broad-spectrum screen. We identified 10 mutations at eight unique sites, including six nonsynonymous coding substitutions. This calibrates the nucleotide mutation rate for two mutagenesis centers, implies significance criteria for positional cloning efforts, and provides working estimates of effective genetic target sizes for selected phenotypes.