Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationship between Interleukin-10 −1082A/G Polymorphism and Risk of Ischemic Stroke: A Meta-Analysis

Objective To analyze the association between −1082A/G polymorphism in interleukin-10 (IL-10) gene and ischemic stroke (IS) risk by meta-analysis. Methods We carried out a systematic electronic search in PubMed, BIOSIS Previews, Science Direct, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chinese Biomedical Database, Weipu database and WANGFANG Database. Pooled odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (95%CIs) were calculated to assess the strength of the association. Results 7 studies were included. There was no significant association between IL-10 −1082A/G polymorphism and IS risk under all genetic models in overall estimates (A vs. G: OR = 1.23,95%CI = 0.85–1.79;AA vs. GG: OR = 1.01,95%CI = 0.47–2.19; AG vs. GG: OR = 0.76, 95%CI = 0.38–1.55; AA+AG vs. GG: OR = 0.89,95%CI = 0.46–1.73; AA vs. AG+GG: OR = 1.39, 95%CI = 0.91–2.13). Similarly, no associations were found in subgroup analysis based on ethnicity and source of controls. However, removing the study deviating from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) produced statistically significant associations for overall estimates under recessive model(AA VS. AG+GG OR 1.58, 95% CI 1.04–2.42) and among Asians in all genetic models (A VS.G OR 1.64, 95% CI 1.07–2.53; AA vs. GG OR1.91, 95% CI 1.31–2.80; AG vs. GG OR1.44, 95% CI 1.09–1.91; AA+AG vs. GG OR 1.54, 95% CI 1.18–2.01;AA VS. AG+GG OR 1.79, 95% CI 1.07–3.00). Even after Bonferroni correction, the associations were observed still significantly in Asians under the two models (AA vs. GG OR1.91, 95% CI 1.31–2.80, P = 0.0008; AA+AG vs. GG OR 1.54, 95% CI 1.18–2.01, P = 0.001). Conclusion This meta-analysis indicates that IL10 −1082 A/G polymorphism is associated with IS susceptibility in Asians and the −1082 A allele may increase risk of IS in Asians. Considering the sample size is small and between-study heterogeneity is remarkable, more studies with subtle design are warranted in future.
BIDDING BEHAVIOUR IN THE ECB S MAIN REFINANCING OPERATIONS DURING THE FINANCIAL MARKET TURMOIL

Liquidity provision through its repo auctions has been one of the main instruments of the European Central Bank (ECB) to address the recent money market tensions. In this paper, we analyze individual bidding behaviour of banks in the ECBs main re nancing operations (MROs) during the ongoing turmoil in money and nancial markets. We are using a unique data set comprising tender operations from March 2004 to December 2007 with bidding data from 877 counterparties. We nd that increased bid rates can be explained by , inter alia, the increased private value character of the auction, the increased attractiveness of the ECBs tender operations due to its collateral framework and banks bidding more aggressively to avoid being rationed at the marginal rate. Participation drops and a new group of bidders that places all their bids below the marginal rate, thus in e¤ect "opting out", emerges. JEL-Codes: E52, D44, C33, C34
Pengaruh Motivasi Kerja dan Kompensasi terhadap Kinerja Karyawan di PT. Samudra Bahari Utama

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat pengaruh Motivasi Kerja dan Kompensasi terhadap Kinerja Karyawan. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah metode penelitian kuantitatif dengan jumlah 80 responden. Data dikumpulkan dengan menggunakan metode kuisioner dan analisis data yang digunakan adalah analisis regresu linier berganda. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa motivasi kerja dan kompensasi berpengaruh terhadap peningkatan kinerja karyawan. Secara parsial motivasi kerja memberikan pengaruh lebih dominan dari pada kompensasi dalam meningkatkan kinerja karyawan.
Tracking a Driver’s Face against Extreme Head Poses and Inference of Drowsiness Using a Hidden Markov Model

This study presents a new method to track driver’s facial states, such as head pose and eye-blinking in the real-time basis. Since a driver in the natural driving condition moves his head in diverse ways and his face is often occluded by his hand or the wheel, it should be a great challenge for the standard face models. Among many, Active Appearance Model (AAM), and Active Shape Model (ASM) are two favored face models. We have extended Discriminative Bayesian ASM by incorporating the extreme pose cases, called it Pose Extended—Active Shape model (PE-ASM). Two face databases (DB) are used for the comparison purpose: one is the Boston University face DB and the other is our custom-made driving DB. Our evaluation indicates that PE-ASM outperforms ASM and AAM in terms of the face fitting against extreme poses. Using this model, we can estimate the driver’s head pose, as well as eye-blinking, by adding respective processes. Two HMMs are trained to model temporal behaviors of these two facial features, and consequently the system can make inference by enumerating these HMM states whether the driver is drowsy or not. Result suggests that it can be used as a driver drowsiness detector in the commercial car where the visual conditions are very diverse and often tough to deal with.
ARCSM: A Distributed Feedback Control Mechanism for Security-critical Real-time System

Since the real-time systems are becoming increasingly networked, there are some growing critical challenges of security management and risk control. For the unpredicted and especially unsecured environments, such security-critical distributed real-time embedded systems need to enforce security on multiple nodes in order to against the potential threats as well as satisfying the real-time requirements. Unlike the traditional ad hoc static designing approaches, based on feedback theory, this paper proposes an Adaptive Risk Control and Security Management (ARCSM) mechanism for centralized distributed systems. ARCSM has the ability to guarantee the soft real-time and provide as strong security protection as possible. To meet this requirement, the host server is able to refuse to serve for the deadline missed tasks. In each node, a two-level scheduling framework is designed to implement the feedback control twice. In the first feedback, an appropriate initial security level is assigned for new task. At the runtime, the second feedback can dynamically adjust the ready tasks' security level based on runtime status. Considering features of embedded systems, we measured the energy and time costs of cryptographic algorithms and established a method to quantify the security risk. Moreover, the relationship between time and energy costs analyzed in this paper leaves its significance for the future researches. Experimental results demonstrate that our mechanism can be adaptive to the fluctuation of input workloads and has better performance than open-loop schemes.
ZQL: A Unified Middleware Bridging Both Relational and NoSQL Databases

A large amount of unstructured data are being continuously generated by mobile applications, e.g., Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, due to the popularity of smart devices, e.g., iPad, iWatch and smartphone. These data are undoubtedly of great value but need to be first well stored and then analyzed. Nevertheless, traditional relational database management system (RDBMS) is not well qualified for this job. As a result, NoSQL databases are proposed and become very popular. Judging from the present situations, RDMBSs play a better role in managing relational data, and thus application developers have to face the situation of co-existence of both RDBMS and NoSQL databases, and knowing the details of the underlying data distributions and structures of different databases. To this end, in this paper, we aim to propose a unified, transparent query engine, as a middleware, called "ZQL", by using MySQL and Hive as underlying two exemplary databases, however its usage goes far beyond these two databases. ZQL aims to support application development by hiding the specific details of both NoSQL databases and RDBMS. Finally, extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and functionalities of the proposed and implemented ZQL middleware.
Epigenetic Mechanisms Contribute to the Expression of Immune Related Genes in the Livers of Dairy Cows Fed a High Concentrate Diet

Purpose Epigenetic modifications critically regulate the expression of immune-related genes in response to inflammatory stimuli. It has been extensively reported that a high concentrate (HC) diet can trigger systemic inflammation in dairy cows, yet it is unclear whether epigenetic regulation is involved in the expression of immune genes in the livers of dairy cows. This study aimed to investigate the impact of epigenetic modifications on the expression of immune-related genes. Experimental Design In eight mid-lactating cows, we installed a rumen cannula and catheters of the portal and hepatic veins. Cows were randomly assigned to either the treatment group fed a high concentrate (HC) diet (60% concentrate + 40% forage, n = 4) or a control group fed a low concentrate (LC) diet (40% concentrate + 60% forage, n = 4). Results After 10 weeks of feeding, the rumen pH was reduced, and levels of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in the rumen, and portal and hepatic veins were notably increased in the HC group compared with the LC group. The expression levels of detected immune response-related genes, including Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), cytokines, chemokines, and acute phase proteins, were significantly up-regulated in the livers of cows fed a HC diet. Chromatin loosening at the promoter region of four candidate immune-related genes (TLR4, LPS-binding protein, haptoglobin, and serum amyloid A3) was elicited, and was strongly correlated with enhanced expression of these genes in the HC group. Demethylation at the promoter region of all four candidate immune-related genes was accompanied by chromatin decompaction. Conclusion After HC diet feeding, LPS derived from the digestive tract translocated to the liver via the portal vein, enhancing hepatic immune gene expression. The up-regulation of these immune genes was mediated by epigenetic mechanisms, which involve chromatin remodeling and DNA methylation. Our findings suggest that modulating epigenetic mechanisms could provide novel ways to treat systemic inflammatory responses elicited by the feeding of a HC diet.
Separate metabolic pathways leading to DNA fragmentation and apoptotic chromatin condensation

Apoptosis is the predominant form of cell death observed in a variety of physiological and pathological conditions such as cancer involution, insect metamorphosis, the development of the immune and nervous systems, and embryogenesis. The typical nuclear changes taking place in apoptotic cells include extensive condensation of chromatin and internucleosomal DNA fragmentation into units of 200 base pairs. However, the mechanisms responsible for both chromatin condensation and DNA fragmentation have yet to be elucidated. In this study, micrococcal nuclease and the divalent cations, Ca2+ and Mg2+, were applied to isolated nuclei in an attempt to reconstitute in vitro the digestion of genomic DNA associated with apoptosis. Micrococcal nuclease was found to induce a typical pattern of DNA fragmentation, but did not give rise to chromatin condensation, whereas Ca2+/Mg2+ induced both chromatin condensation and DNA fragmentation in isolated mouse liver nuclei. When the endonuclease inhibitor ZnCl2 was used, the DNA fragmentation induced by Ca2+/Mg2+ in nuclei could be completely inhibited, but chromatin condensation still occurred. For comparison, intact liver cells were treated with valinomycin, a potassium ionophore, which gave rise to an atypical cell death, with chromatin condensation appearing without DNA fragmentation. Our results suggest that endonuclease activation in apoptosis is neither necessary nor sufficient to induce chromatin condensation, and that DNA fragmentation and chromatin condensation may be triggered through separate pathways during apoptosis.
Robot action plans that form and maintain expectations

Robots performing general purpose plans must deal with a wide variety of contexts. Situations they encounter might differ only in subtle, but important details in context and parameterization that have a massive impact on an action's outcome. To avoid the effort of encoding all possible combinations of subtleties into plans, we present a prediction framework that gives robot agents an intuition of their actions' effects and for choosing parameter values that have proven to be useful before. We let a robot form these predictions and expectations from episodic memories collected during earlier plan executions, improving its own behavior with every new situation encountered. We evaluate and explain our approach using experiments performed on a PR2 robot performing complex mobile manipulation activities in a kitchen environment.
An Extension of the Talbot – Ogden Hydrology Model to an Affine Multi-dimensional Moisture Content Domain

The Talbot–Ogden hydrology model provides a fast mass conservative method to compute infiltration in unsaturated soils. As a replacement for a model based on Richards equation, it separates the groundwater movement into infiltration and redistribution for every time step. The typical feature making this method fast is the discretization of the moisture content domain rather than the spatial one. The Talbot-Ogden model rapidly determines how well ground water and aquifers are recharged only. Hence, it differs from models based on advanced reservoir modeling that are uniformly far more expensive computationally since they determine where the water moves in space instead, a completely different and more complex problem. According to the pore-size distribution curve for many soils, this paper extends the one dimensional moisture content domain into a two dimensional one by keeping the vertical spatial axis. The proposed extension can describe any pore-size or porosity distribution as an important soil feature. Based on this extension, infiltration and redistribution are restudied. The unconditional conservation of mass in the Talbot–Ogden model is inherited in this extended model. A numerical example is given for the extended model.
An IDS First Line of Defense for Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks arouse imminently an important interest within industrial and research communities. Actually, their salient features, essentially the absence of infrastructure and auto-management, promise huge applications and possibilities for wireless communication. However, the tremendous boom of these networks depends incontestably on their reliability in terms of security and quality of services (QoS). In this paper, we study the ad hoc security vulnerabilities for which cryptographic-based solutions are ineffective and which require IDS. Appropriate designed IDS services appear essential as countermeasures to those threats, where previous IDS proposals often seem to be too sophisticated in the ad hoc environment and merely ineffective. Our goal here is to provide an IDS mechanism dedicated to the OLSR protocol, fitting to its characteristics and operation, and designed to avoid its vulnerabilities. Hence, our proposed IDS represents an urgent and primary line of defense since it protects from the protocol flaws themselves avoiding a significant panoply of easily operated attacks.
Mutations of Photosystem II D1 Protein That Empower Efficient Phenotypes of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii under Extreme Environment in Space

Space missions have enabled testing how microorganisms, animals and plants respond to extra-terrestrial, complex and hazardous environment in space. Photosynthetic organisms are thought to be relatively more prone to microgravity, weak magnetic field and cosmic radiation because oxygenic photosynthesis is intimately associated with capture and conversion of light energy into chemical energy, a process that has adapted to relatively less complex and contained environment on Earth. To study the direct effect of the space environment on the fundamental process of photosynthesis, we sent into low Earth orbit space engineered and mutated strains of the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, which has been widely used as a model of photosynthetic organisms. The algal mutants contained specific amino acid substitutions in the functionally important regions of the pivotal Photosystem II (PSII) reaction centre D1 protein near the QB binding pocket and in the environment surrounding Tyr-161 (YZ) electron acceptor of the oxygen-evolving complex. Using real-time measurements of PSII photochemistry, here we show that during the space flight while the control strain and two D1 mutants (A250L and V160A) were inefficient in carrying out PSII activity, two other D1 mutants, I163N and A251C, performed efficient photosynthesis, and actively re-grew upon return to Earth. Mimicking the neutron irradiation component of cosmic rays on Earth yielded similar results. Experiments with I163N and A251C D1 mutants performed on ground showed that they are better able to modulate PSII excitation pressure and have higher capacity to reoxidize the QA − state of the primary electron acceptor. These results highlight the contribution of D1 conformation in relation to photosynthesis and oxygen production in space.
Resilience level among adolescent children: a school-based study in Kolkata, India

Background: The rat race of modern life is affecting each and every strata of our society and adolescents are not exempted from this underlying stress. Lack of resilience in adolescents may lead to psychosocial maladaptation and psychopathology in adulthood. This study was undertaken to determine the resilience level and its possible predictors among adolescents of a Kolkata based school.Methods: This was an institution-based, observational cross-sectional study done from June-August’17 among 151 students of 7th-9th standards in a school of Kolkata. A pre-designed, pretested, structured, self-administered questionnaire along with CYRM-12 (‘Child and Youth Resilience Measure-12’) questionnaire was used. The scoring of each question was from 1-3 (higher score indicates more resilience) in CYRM-12 and in this study median attained score of 31 was taken as cut off for determining resilience level. Ethical issues were addressed. SPSS (v.16.0) was used for data analysis.Results: Among 151 students of 12-14 years, 57(37.7%) students were resilient and factors like ‘class’ [OR=4.01(1.85-8.67)]; ‘family type’ [OR=7.73(3.66-16.30)]; ‘time spent with father’ [OR=8.64(4.07-18.37)]; ‘time spent with mother’ [OR=5.97 (2.87-12.42); ‘physical activities’ [OR=9.11 (4.07-20.37) and self-rated school performance [OR=3.12(1.39-6.96)] were associated with high resilience during univariate logistic regression analysis. In the final model of multivariable logistic regression analysis by LR forward method factors like ‘family type’ [AOR=4.45(1.73-11.45)]; ‘time spent with father’ [AOR=5.27(2.04-13.6)]; ‘time spent with mother’ [AOR=4.83(1.80-12.90)] and ‘physical activities’ [AOR=8.14(2.95-22.47)] retained its significance.Conclusions: Quality parental time for children and engagement in physical activity will help to increase resilience level and build up the coping capacity.
The Effects of Wildfire on Mortality and Resources for an Arboreal Marsupial: Resilience to Fire Events but Susceptibility to Fire Regime Change

Background Big environmental disturbances have big ecological effects, yet these are not always what we might expect. Understanding the proximate effects of major disturbances, such as severe wildfires, on individuals, populations and habitats will be essential for understanding how predicted future increases in the frequency of such disturbances will affect ecosystems. However, researchers rarely have access to data from immediately before and after such events. Here we report on the effects of a severe and extensive forest wildfire on mortality, reproductive output and availability of key shelter resources for an arboreal marsupial. We also investigated the behavioural response of individuals to changed shelter resource availability in the post-fire environment. Methodology/Principal Findings We fitted proximity-logging radiotransmitters to mountain brushtail possums (Trichosurus cunninghami) before, during and after the 2009 wildfires in Victoria, Australia. Surprisingly, we detected no mortality associated with the fire, and despite a significant post-fire decrease in the proportion of females carrying pouch young in the burnt area, there was no short-term post-fire population decline. The major consequence of this fire for mountain brushtail possums was the loss of over 80% of hollow-bearing trees. The types of trees preferred as shelter sites (highly decayed dead standing trees) were those most likely to collapse after fire. Individuals adapted to resource decline by being more flexible in resource selection after the fire, but not by increased resource sharing. Conclusions/Significance Despite short-term demographic resilience and behavioural adaptation following this fire, the major loss of decayed hollow trees suggests the increased frequency of stand-replacing wildfires predicted under climate change will pose major challenges for shelter resource availability for hollow-dependent fauna. Hollow-bearing trees are typically biological legacies of previous forest generations in post-fire regrowth forests but will cease to be recruited to future regrowth forests if the interval between severe fires becomes too rapid for hollow formation.
Affective percept and voluntary action: a hypothesis.

I present a hypothesis concerning the neuronal, mental and behavioral effects of all kinds of affective (emotional) stimuli, i.e., of unpleasant and pleasant stimuli. I use the term stimulus in its broad sense. Affective stimuli evoke two associated percepts: "cognitive" and "affective". A food in the mouth, for example, evokes the gustatory percept and the percept of pleasure. However, affective percepts are unstable parts of cognitive-affective compounds. Five types of affective percepts are pain, fear, pleasure, "desire" and appetite in the broad sense of these words. Desire is evoked by inadequate pleasant stimuli. Affective percepts are "lower" or "higher". The latter are not directly associated with bodily needs. Esthetic and social percepts are higher, for example. Although pain and pleasure are essentially innate, they can be modified by sensory experience. Alimentary and esthetic preferences and social values are modifiable, for example. The neurons of pain and fear and of the unpleasant components of desire and appetite motivate four types of voluntary actions. These are, respectively, escape, avoidance, "optimization" and approach actions. All these actions eliminate the motivating displeasure. In addition, avoidance actions protect from the signaled pain, optimization actions increase the existing pleasure and approach actions provide the signaled pleasure. Thus, voluntary actions associated with different percepts occur according to one universal principle. Voluntary actions are "internal" and behavioral. During internal actions a goal and then an action plan are decided. These actions often provide the images of the goal stimuli and of particular movements.