Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MicroRNA Expression Profile in RAW264.7 cells in Response to Brucella melitensis Infection

MicroRNA (miRNA) is small non-coding RNA with approximate 22 nt in length. Recent studies indicate that miRNAs play significant roles in pathogen-host interactions. Brucella organisms are Gram-negative facultative intracellular bacteria that cause Brucellosis. Brucella strains infect macrophages and establish chronic infection by altering host life activities including apoptosis and autophagy. Here, we report a comprehensive analysis of miRNA expression profiles in mock- and Brucella-infected RAW264.7 cells using high-throughput sequencing approach. In total, 344 unique miRNAs were co-expressed in the two libraries, in which 57 miRNAs were differentially expressed. Eight differentially expressed miRNAs with high abundance were subjected to further analysis. The GO enrichment analysis suggests that the putative target genes of these differentially expressed miRNAs are involved in apoptosis, autophagy and immune response. In particular, a total of 25 target genes are involved in regulating apoptosis and autophagy, indicating that these miRNAs may play important regulatory roles in the Brucella-host interactions. Furthermore, the interactions of miR-1981 and its target genes, Bcl-2 and Bid, were validated by luciferase assay. The results show that miR-1981 mimic up-regulated the luciferase activity of psiCHECK-2 Bcl-2 3′ UTR, but the luciferase activity of psiCHECK-2 Bid 3′ UTR was not changed significantly. Taken together, these data provide valuable framework on Brucella induced miRNA expression in RAW264.7 cells, and suggest that Brucella may establish chronic infection by regulating miRNA expression profile.
Integrated Decision-tree Testing Strategies for Mutagenicity and Carcinogenicity with Respect to the Requirements of the EU REACH Legislation

Liverpool John Moores University and FRAME recently conducted a research project sponsored by Defra, on the status of alternatives to animal testing with regard to the European Union REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) system for the safety testing and risk assessment of chemicals. The project covered all the main toxicity endpoints associated with the REACH system. This paper focuses on the prospects for using alternative methods (both in vitro and in silico) for mutagenicity (genotoxicity) and carcinogenicity testing — two toxicity endpoints, which, together with reproductive toxicity, are of pivotal importance for the REACH system. The manuscript critically discusses well-established testing approaches, and in particular, the requirement for short-term in vivo tests for confirming positive mutagenicity, and the need for the rodent bioassay for detecting non-genotoxic carcinogens. Recently-proposed testing strategies focusing on non-animal approaches are also considered, and our own testing scheme is presented and supported with background information. This scheme makes maximum use of pre-existing data, computer (in silico) and in vitro methods, with weight-of-evidence assessments at each major stage. The need for the improvement of in vitro methods, to reduce the generation of false-positive results, is also discussed. Lastly, ways in which reduction and refinement measures can be used are also considered, and some recommendations are made for future research to facilitate the implementation of the proposed testing scheme.
Arterial Stiffening in Western Diet-Fed Mice Is Associated with Increased Vascular Elastin, Transforming Growth Factor-β, and Plasma Neuraminidase

Consumption of excess fat and carbohydrate (Western diet, WD) is associated with alterations in the structural characteristics of blood vessels. This vascular remodeling contributes to the development of cardiovascular disease, particularly as it affects conduit and resistance arteries. Vascular remodeling is often associated with changes in the elastin-rich internal elastic lamina (IEL) and the activation of transforming growth factor (TGF)-β. In addition, obesity and type II diabetes have been associated with increased serum neuraminidase, an enzyme known to increase TGF-β cellular output. Therefore, we hypothesized that WD-feeding would induce structural modifications to the IEL of mesenteric resistance arteries in mice, and that these changes would be associated with increased levels of circulating neuraminidase and the up-regulation of elastin and TGF-β in the arterial wall. To test this hypothesis, a WD, high in fat and sugar, was used to induce obesity in mice, and the effect of this diet on the structure of mesenteric resistance arteries was investigated. 4-week old, Post-weaning mice were fed either a normal diet (ND) or WD for 16 weeks. Mechanically, arteries from WD-fed mice were stiffer and less distensible, with marginally increased wall stress for a given strain, and a significantly increased Young's modulus of elasticity. Structurally, the wall cross-sectional area and the number of fenestrae found in the internal elastic lamina (IEL) of mesenteric arteries from mice fed a WD were significantly smaller than those of arteries from the ND-fed mice. There was also a significant increase in the volume of elastin, but not collagen in arteries from the WD cohort. Plasma levels of neuraminidase and the amount of TGF-β in mesenteric arteries were elevated in mice fed a WD, while ex vivo, cultured vascular smooth muscle cells exposed to neuraminidase secreted greater amounts of tropoelastin and TGF-β than those exposed to vehicle. These data suggest that consumption of a diet high in fat and sugar causes stiffening of the vascular wall in resistance arteries through a process that may involve increased neuraminidase and TGF-β activity, elevated production of elastin, and a reduction in the size and number of fenestrae in the arterial IEL.
Cardiometabolic disease and features of depression and bipolar disorder: Population-based, cross-sectional study

Background The relative contribution of demographic, lifestyle and medication factors to the association between affective disorders and cardiometabolic diseases is poorly understood. Aims To assess the relationship between cardiometabolic disease and features of depresion and bipolar disorder within a large population sample. Method Cross-sectional study of 145 991 UK Biobank participants: multivariate analyses of associations between features of depression or bipolar disorder and five cardiometabolic outcomes, adjusting for confounding factors. Results There were significant associations between mood disorder features and ‘any cardiovascular disease’ (depression odds ratio (OR) = 1.15, 95% CI 1.12–1.19; bipolar OR = 1.28, 95% CI 1.14–1.43) and with hypertension (depression OR = 1.15, 95% CI 1.13–1.18; bipolar OR = 1.26, 95% CI 1.12–1.42). Individuals with features of mood disorder taking psychotropic medication were significantly more likely than controls not on psychotropics to report myocardial infarction (depression OR = 1.47, 95% CI 1.24–1.73; bipolar OR = 2.23, 95% CI 1.53–3.57) and stroke (depression OR = 2.46, 95% CI 2.10–2.80; bipolar OR = 2.31, 95% CI 1.39–3.85). Conclusions Associations between features of depression or bipolar disorder and cardiovascular disease outcomes were statistically independent of demographic, lifestyle and medication confounders. Psychotropic medication may also be a risk factor for cardiometabolic disease in individuals without a clear history of mood disorder.
How Genetic Algorithms Really Work: Mutation and Hillclimbing

The invention relates to the production of washing powders of stabilized or enhanced appearance which contain a fluorescent whitening agent of the formula or of the formula wherein R1 is hydrogen or chlorine, and M is hydrogen, an alkali metal or ammonium ion. The stabilizing or enhancement of the appearance is effected by first dissolving or dispersing the fluorescent whitening agent in a mixture of water and a polyvinyl alcohol or polyvinyl pyrrolidone which is soluble or is able to swell in water, adding this solution or dispersion to the washing powder slurry and drying the slurry. The solution or dispersion can also be subsequently sprayed onto the dried residual washing powder. The appearance can be further enhanced by employing a polyethylene glycol, a surfactant containing ethyleneoxy and/or propyleneoxy groups, and/or a cellulose ether, in addition to the polymer in the solution or dispersion. The solution or dispersion comprising fluorescent whitening agent and polymer can also alternatively be dried, preferably by spray drying, to produce a preparation which, after it has been suspended in water, can also be added to the washing powder slurry. The slurry is then dried, preferably by spray drying.
Measuring interactivity and geographical closeness of Online Social Network users to support social recommendation systems

Several applications (e.g., Instagram, PiCsMu) integrate existing Online Social Networks (OSN) into the core of their solutions to explore social information. Although this integration enables more accurate social recommendation systems, the collection and monitoring of relevant OSN data by third-party applications is a challenging management task, since OSNs (a) impose rate restrictions to their Application Programming Interface (API) calls, (b) do not provide detailed information about specific OSN features, and (c) may provide incomplete or not up-to-date OSN data. Therefore, this paper covers the design, prototyping, and evaluation of JSocialLib, a new meta-API library for collecting OSN data from existing OSNs. It provides (1) an interaction- and (2) a location-based method in support of social recommendations systems.
Speaker Diarization Error Analysis Using Oracle Components

In this paper, we describe an analysis of our speaker diarization system based on a series of oracle experiments. In this analysis, each system component is substituted by an oracle component that uses the reference transcripts to perform flawlessly. By placing the original components back into the system one at a time, either in a top-down or bottom-up manner, the performance of each individual system component is measured. The analysis approach can be applied to any speaker diarization system that consists of a concatenation of separate components. Our experimental findings are relevant for most RT09s diarization systems that all apply similar techniques. The analysis revealed that three components caused most errors: speech activity detection, the inability to handle overlapping speech, and robustness of the merging component to cluster impurity.
Directed Testing of Event-Driven and Parallel Programs

Detecting computational states of a program, where safety requirements have been violated, is the main task of a software tester. We focus on three critical safety requirements. First, finding maximum stack usage in event-based systems, in order to avoid stack overflow. Second and third, absence of data race and deadlock in parallel programs, respectively. We will present how particular states of computation, where the above mentioned requirement are violated, is reached. Directed testing has shown considerable success in both academy and industry. However, applying directed testing's core form on programming paradigms, with a more complicated control flow is not nearly as successful as on sequential programs. The goal of this dissertation is to address how we can enhance directed testing to perform well with event-driven and parallel programs. For event-driven software we present a new approach, termed event-based directed testing. Our approach combines aspects of random testing and directed testing to generate challenging event sequences, for testing event-driven software. Our experiments show, we achieve significantly improved branch coverage and larger maximum stack sizes. For parallel programs, we also present a new dynamic technique to detect data races and deadlocks. Our technique combines previous work on concolic execution with a new constraint-based approach to drive an execution towards a concurrency bug candidate. Our technique has found almost twice as many real concurrency bugs as the four previous techniques combined.
The systems approach to medicine: controversy and misconceptions

The ‘systems approach’ to patient safety in healthcare has recently led to questions about its ethics and practical utility. In this viewpoint, we clarify the systems approach by examining two popular misunderstandings of it: (1) the systematisation and standardisation of practice, which reduces actor autonomy; (2) an approach that seeks explanations for success and failure outside of individual people. We argue that both giving people a procedure to follow and blaming the system when things go wrong misconstrue the systems approach.
ADDRESSING POWER CONSUMPTION FACTORS ( APCF ) TO MAXIMIZE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS LIFETIME

*Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, College of Engineering, University of Buraimi, , Al-Buraimi, Sultanate of Oman Students, College of Engineering, University of Buraimi, , Al-Buraimi, Sultanate of Oman ABSTRACT In this paper, popular energy saving schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) arestudied. There are many challenges that limits network lifetime. High power consumption is one of the issues that reduces network lifetime. The objective of this paper is to address the main factors that cause energy consumption and analyze their effects. Performance, network efficiency and maximizing network lifetime are measured by simulation, analysis by considering factors and comparison with network without considering these factors.
Conversational Grounding: Annotation and Analysis of Grounding Acts and Grounding Units

Successful conversations often rest on common understanding, where all parties are on the same page about the information being shared. This process, known as conversational grounding, is crucial for building trustworthy dialog systems that can accurately keep track of and recall the shared information. The proficiencies of an agent in grounding the conveyed information significantly contribute to building a reliable dialog system. Despite recent advancements in dialog systems, there exists a noticeable deficit in their grounding capabilities. Traum provided a framework for conversational grounding introducing Grounding Acts and Grounding Units, but substantial progress, especially in the realm of Large Language Models, remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present the annotation of two dialog corpora employing Grounding Acts, Grounding Units, and a measure of their degree of grounding. We discuss our key findings during the annotation and also provide a baseline model to test the performance of current Language Models in categorizing the grounding acts of the dialogs. Our work aims to provide a useful resource for further research in making conversations with machines better understood and more reliable in natural day-to-day collaborative dialogs.
Methyl 3-[(E)-furfurylidene]dithiocarbazate

The molecule of the title Schiff base compound, C7H8N2OS2, prepared by the reaction of methyl dithiocarbazate and furfural in an ethanol solution under reflux, adopts an E configuration; the dithiocarbazate and furan units are located on opposite sides of the C=N double bond. The planar dithiocarbazate group is twisted slightly with respect to the furan ring, making a dihedral angle of 5.2 (1)°. Adjacent molecules are linked by N—H⋯S hydrogen bonding to form a supramolecular dimer across an inversion center.
Patterns for In-code Algebraic Testing

This paper describes an in-code approach to automatic algebraic-based software testing and a number of useful design patterns for doing it. The approach uses algebras as testable views on a system. These views form test interfaces which are highly automatable. Specifications are expressed in terms of axioms of the algebras. We use the testing tool T2 to provide automation. T2 works with in-code specifications; these are specifications written directly in a programming language. Because in-code specifications do not need any additional skill to master, they are more likely to be adopted by engineers on the field. Because they need no additional tools to parse and to keep them insync with the implementation, they are much cheaper to maintain. So, for real uses they have a good chance
Just dance with me: an authentic partnership approach to understanding leisure in the dementia context

Most research on marginalised groups, including those living with illness or disability, continues to exclude those experiencing illness or disability from decision making in the research endeavour. This is particularly true for persons living with dementia, who are stigmatised, misunderstood and assumed to lack the capacity to actively participate in all aspects of the research process. In this paper, we provide a detailed account of one collaborative project, an innovative participatory action research (PAR) project that brought together persons living with dementia, family members, recreation professionals from a range of settings (i.e., the community, day programmes, long-term care homes), Alzheimer Society staff and researchers as we worked together to consider the notion of leisure and its meanings for persons living with dementia. We describe the PAR cycles of planning, acting/observing and reflecting on what we have completed thus far; share our reflections on the process, including our struggles and insights on the possibilities of the approach; and present what we have learned from our partners with dementia about how we can better support them in similar processes.
ECC Parity: A Technique for Efficient Memory Error Resilience for Multi-Channel Memory Systems

Servers and HPC systems often use a strong memory error correction code, or ECC, to meet their reliability and availability requirements. However, these ECCs often require significant capacity and/or power overheads. We observe that since memory channels are independent from one another, error correction typically needs to be performed for one channel at a time. Based on this observation, we show that instead of always storing in memory the actual ECC correction bits as do existing systems, it is sufficient to store the bitwise parity of the ECC correction bits of different channels for fault-free memory regions, and store the actual ECC correction bits only for faulty memory regions. By trading off the resultant ECC capacity overhead reduction for improved memory energy efficiency, the proposed technique reduces memory energy per instruction by 54.4% and 20.6%, respectively, compared to a commercial chip kill correct ECC and a DIMM-kill correct ECC, while incurring similar or lower capacity overheads.
Rhea: Automatic Filtering for Unstructured Cloud Storage

Unstructured storage and data processing using platforms such as MapReduce are increasingly popular for their simplicity, scalability, and flexibility. Using elastic cloud storage and computation makes them even more attractive. However cloud providers such as Amazon and Windows Azure separate their storage and compute resources even within the same data center. Transferring data from storage to compute thus uses core data center network bandwidth, which is scarce and oversubscribed. As the data is unstructured, the infrastructure cannot automatically apply selection, projection, or other filtering predicates at the storage layer. The problem is even worse if customers want to use compute resources on one provider but use data stored with other provider(s). The bottleneck is now the WAN link which impacts performance but also incurs egress bandwidth charges. This paper presents Rhea, a system to automatically generate and run storage-side data filters for unstructured and semi-structured data. It uses static analysis of application code to generate filters that are safe, stateless, side effect free, best effort, and transparent to both storage and compute layers. Filters never remove data that is used by the computation. Our evaluation shows that Rhea filters achieve a reduction in data transfer of 2x- 20,000x, which reduces job run times by up to 5x and dollar costs for cross-cloud computations by up to 13x.
Disposition and Metabolism of Radiolabeled Casopitant in Humans

Casopitant [1-piperidinecarboxamide,4-(4-acetyl-1-piperazinyl)-N-((1R)-1-(3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)-ethyl)-2-(4-fluoro-2-methylphenyl)-N-methyl-(2R,4S)-(GW679769)] is a novel neurokinin-1 receptor antagonist being developed for the prevention of chemotherapy-induced and postoperative nausea and vomiting. The disposition of [14C]casopitant was determined in a single-sequence study in six healthy male subjects after single-dose 90-mg i.v. and 150-mg oral administration. Blood, urine, and feces were collected at frequent intervals after dosing. Plasma, urine, and fecal samples were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry coupled with off-line radiodetection for metabolite profiling. Moreover, urine was also analyzed with 1H-NMR to further characterize metabolites. Plasma pharmacokinetic parameters for casopitant, a major metabolite (M13, coded as GSK525060), and total radioactivity were determined. Absorption of radioactivity after oral administration appeared to be nearly complete; elimination was principally via the feces both after oral and intravenous administration. Urinary elimination accounted for only <8% of total radioactivity. The main circulating metabolites were a hydroxylated derivative, M13 (coded as GSK525060), and, after oral administration, a deacetylated and oxidized metabolite, M12 (coded as GSK631832). In addition, many other metabolites were identified in plasma and excreta: the principal route of metabolism included multiple oxidations, loss of the N-acetyl group, modifications or loss of the piperazine group, and cleavage of the molecule. Casopitant was extensively metabolized, and only negligible amounts were excreted as unchanged compound. Some phase II metabolites were also observed, particularly in urine.
Effects of bias in solar radiative transfer codes on global climate model simulations

Codes commonly used in climate and weather prediction models for calculating the transfer of solar radiation in the atmosphere show systematic differences amongst each other, and even the best of codes show systematic differences with respect to observations. A 1‐dimensional radiative‐convective equilibrium model is used to show the effects of such bias on the global energy balance and on the global response to a doubling of CO2. We find the main impact is in the energy exchange terms between the surface and atmosphere and in the convective transport in the lower troposphere, where it exceeds 10 W m−2. The impact on model response to doubling of CO2, on the other hand, is quite small and in most cases negligible.
Gender and Age Group Differences in Stereotypes about Mental Health Care Providers

Mental health care providers play a significant role in the prevention of mental health problems and promotion of well-being. The aim of the study was to explore gender and age group differences in stereotypes about helping professionals in the mental health care field. The data were derived from 338 Latvian-speaking adults aged 18 to 87. They rated stereotypic characteristics of five typical helping professionals (a family doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a clergyman, and an astrologer) on a seven-point Likert-type scale. The stereotype content model was used to measure warmth and competence stereotypes (Fiske, Xu, Cuddy, & Glick, 1999). Gender differences show that women rate a typical psychiatrist higher on warmth and four of five helping professionals higher on competence; the family doctor is an exception. Age group differences show that the older age group (aged 50 to 87) compared to the younger age group (aged 18 to 49) rate a psychiatrist and a psychologist lower on warmth and competence, but a family doctor – higher on competence. The findings are discussed in the terms of attitudes toward mental health care providers. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013. v4n10p185