Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CYLD Negatively Regulates Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae-Induced IL-8 Expression via Phosphatase MKP-1-Dependent Inhibition of ERK

Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi), a Gram-negative bacterium, is the primary cause of otitis media in children and the exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in adults. A hallmark of both diseases is an overactive inflammatory response, including the upregulation of chemokines, such as interleukin-8 (IL-8). An appropriate inflammatory response is essential for eradicating pathogens. However, excessive inflammation can cause host tissue damage. Therefore, expression of IL-8 must be tightly regulated. We previously reported that NTHi induces IL-8 expression in an ERK-dependent manner. We also have shown that the deubiquitinase cylindromatosis (CYLD) suppresses NTHi-induced inflammation. However, the underlying molecular mechanism of how CYLD negatively regulates ERK-mediated IL-8 production is largely unknown. Here, we examine both human lung epithelial A549 cells and lung of Cyld −/− mice to show that CYLD specifically targets the activation of ERK. Interestingly, CYLD enhances NTHi-induced upregulation of another negative regulator, MAP Kinase Phosphatase-1 (MKP-1), which, in turn, leads to reduced ERK activation and subsequent suppression of IL-8. Taken together, the CYLD suppression of ERK-dependent IL-8 via MKP-1 may bring novel insights into the tight regulation of inflammatory responses and also lead to innovative therapeutic strategies for controlling these responses by targeting key negative regulators of inflammation.
On Estimating Causal Effects based on Supplemental Variables

This paper considers the problem of estimating causal effects of a treatment on a response using supplementary variables. Under the assumption that a treatment is associated with a response through a univariate supplementary variable in the framework of linear regression models, Cox (1960) showed that the estimation accuracy of the regression coefficient of the treatment on the response in the single linear regression model can be improved by using the recursive linear regression model based on the supplementary variable from the viewpoint of the asymptotic variance. However, such assumptions may not hold in many practical situations. In this paper, we consider the situation where a treatment is associated with a response through a set of supplementary variables in both linear and discrete models. Then, we show that the estimation accuracy of the causal effect can be improved by using the supplementary variables. Different from Cox (1960), the results of this paper are derived without the assumption of Gaussian error terms in linear models or dichotomous variables in discrete models. The results of this paper help us to obtain the reliable evaluation of causal effects from observed data.
Assessment of gait recognition based on the lower part of the human body

This paper is focused on the assessment of gait recognition on a constrained scenario, where limited information can be extracted from the gait image sequences. In particular we are interested in assessing the performance of gait images when only the lower part of the body is acquired by the camera and just half of a gait cycle is available (SFootBD database). Thus, various state-of-the-art feature approaches have been followed and applied to the data. A comparison with a standard and ideal gait database (USF database) is also carried out using similar experimental protocols. Results show that good recognition performance can be achieved using such limited data information for gait biometric (around 85% of rank 5 identification rate and 8.6% of EER). The comparison with a standard database shows that different feature approaches perform differently for each database, achieving best individual results with MPCA and EGEI methods for the SFootBD and the USF database respectively.
Correct and efficient work-stealing for weak memory models

Chase and Lev's concurrent deque is a key data structure in shared-memory parallel programming and plays an essential role in work-stealing schedulers. We provide the first correctness proof of an optimized implementation of Chase and Lev's deque on top of the POWER and ARM architectures: these provide very relaxed memory models, which we exploit to improve performance but considerably complicate the reasoning. We also study an optimized x86 and a portable C11 implementation, conducting systematic experiments to evaluate the impact of memory barrier optimizations. Our results demonstrate the benefits of hand tuning the deque code when running on top of relaxed memory models.
Threads on the Cheap: Multithreaded Execution in a WaveCach e Processor

Executing multiple threads on a single processor will play a key role the future scaling of computer performance, and while many new architectures propose novel uses for threads, few address the complexity required to sup port multiple threads in a single processor core. This paper describes extensions to WaveScalar, a recently propose d dataflow instruction set, and the WaveCache, a WaveScalar processor, that allow multiple threads to execute simultan eously. The original WaveCache is significantly less complex than a modern out-of-order von Neumann processor, and the modifications it requires for multithreading are very small . We demonstrate that resulting multithreaded architecture can efficiently execute applications from the Splash2 benchmar k suite.
Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America.

Preface to the 1991 Edition PART I: The Setting A New Role for the States Magnitudes The Fall and Rise of Lotteries PART II: The Games and the Players The Games People Play Why (and How) They Play The Demand for Lottery Products Winners and Losers PART III: The Government's Business State Politics and the Lottery Bandwagon The Suppliers The Sales Pitch PART IV: Lotteries as Public Policy A "Painless Tax"? Choices Appendix: Supplementary Tables Notes References Index
A Framework for Optimal Control Allocation with Structural Load Constraints

Conventional aircraft generally employ mixing algorithms or lookup tables to determine control surface deflections needed to achieve moments commanded by the flight control system. Control allocation is the problem of converting desired moments into control effector commands. Next generation aircraft may have many multipurpose, redundant control surfaces, adding considerable complexity to the control allocation problem. These issues can be addressed with optimal control allocation. Most optimal control allocation algorithms have control surface position and rate constraints. However, these constraints are insufficient to ensure that the aircraft's structural load limits will not be exceeded by commanded surface deflections. In this paper, a framework is proposed to enable a flight control system with optimal control allocation to incorporate real-time structural load feedback and structural load constraints. A proof of concept simulation that demonstrates the framework in a simulation of a generic transport aircraft is presented.
Differences of Socio-psychology, Eating Behavior, Diet Quality and Quality of Life in South Korean Women according to Their Weight Status

We aimed at assessing psychological variables and eating behaviors on quality of diet and life in South Korean women according to their weight status. Socio-psychology, eating behavior, quality of diet and quality of life data were assessed in 114 women (mean age: 34.5 ± 8.09 years). NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-RS) and coping styles questionnaire were used to assess socio-psychology variables, and eating behavior was assessed using the Eating Attitudes Test-26 (EAT-26), Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ), and General Food Craving Questionnaire Test (G-FCQ-T). Quality of diet was analyzed by Diet Quality Index-international (DQI-I), and obesity-related quality of life was evaluated using the Korean Obesity-related Quality of life Scale (KOQOL). Significant differences were in the psychological variables and eating behaviors in the obese group than the normal and overweight groups (p < 0.05). The overall score of DQI-I was significantly lower in the obese group than that of their counterparts (p < 0.05). BMI was positively correlated with neuroticism, emotional eating, and obesity-related quality of life, and negatively correlated with diet quality. Neuroticism was positively correlated with emotional eating and food craving. Emotional eating was positively correlated with obesity-related quality of life. In conclusion, women with a higher BMI had significantly more problematic eating behaviors, poor diet quality and quality of life.
The 15D instrument of health-related quality of life: properties and applications

The 15D is a generic, comprehensive, 15-dimensional, standardized, self-administered measure of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) that can be used both as a profile and single index score measure. This paper examines the acceptability, reliability, validity, discriminatory power and responsiveness to change of its health state descriptive system and valuation system and presents some examples of applications. As a profile measure on roughly comparable dimensions the 150 performs equally well as the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) and SF-20, in some respects even better, and clearly better than EQ-5D. The remaining nine to ten dimensions of the 15D provide a large reserve in terms of discriminatory power and responsiveness to change. The valuation system is based on an application of the multiattribute utility theory. The single index score (15D score) on a 0–1 scale, representing the overall HRQoL, is calculated from the health state descriptive system by using a set of population-based preference or utility weights. The 15D scores are shown to be highly reliable, sensitive and responsive to change, generalisable at least in Western-type societies, and particularly valid for deriving quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) gained for resource allocation purposes. The instrument is recommended by the Washington Panel and is available in several languages for clinical economic evaluation and population studies.
Communicating European Values in Institutional Discourse: A statistical model for the analysis of citizens’ perception of EU

Abstract In the light of today’s widespread deficit in civic participation and public endorsement, the European Union institutions are seeking ways to renew citizens’ support and consensus. Different communicative approaches are being adopted in institutional domains in order to foster a sense of allegiance to the Union and develop a new system of collective values that EU citizens can more easily identify with. Communication policies in the EU sphere increasingly involve the new media and the use of new technologies, which are not only employed to channel new identity-building strategies; they also reflect citizens’ new perception of Community institutions and the role they play in their daily life. In its ‘Internet strategy’, the European Commission3 stated that one of the objectives set by EUROPA, the official EU web site, was to “help create a sense of European community as a supplement to the national sphere” as well as to “allow people to express and exchange their views and opinions throughout Europe”. The study makes a comparative analysis of one of EUROPA’s main informative sections, “The EU at a Glance”, in its previous (2002) and current version (2009), with a view to investigating the way institutional and social changes are reflected in discursive practices (Fairclough 1992). In particular, the comparison highlights the emergence of new strategies adopted by the EU in promoting itself. It also focusses on the steady process of ‘neutralization’ of the identity values advocated at supranational level in order to gather consensus among citizens: the EU no longer appeal to its historical and cultural common heritage to legitimate its entity. Instead it is increasingly stressing the objective and tangible benefits that derive from EU membership and that the EU offers and ‘advertises’ as a real service-provider (e.g. better living standards, consumer rights, lower tariffs, higher mobility, etc.). The prioritization of these new values is demonstrated by means of a linguistic analysis, which unveils how these longitudinal changes are reflected in forms of linguistic realisation in the new online version of the web section under investigation (“The EU at a Glance”). The language analysis is complemented by a statistical study carried out by a model for qualitative assessment (D’Elia and Piccolo 2005; Piccolo 2006) which demonstrates how the discursive transformations in the web site directly respond to and reflect a real change in citizens’ vision and perception of EU values.
Determination of synthetic drugs used to adulterate botanical dietary supplements using QTRAP LC-MS/MS

Adulteration of botanical dietary supplements with prohibited synthetic drugs has become a serious problem. In this paper, a method for testing synthetic drugs used to adulterate botanical dietary supplements was developed using liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS/MS) coupled with a linearity ion-trap system in the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) plus enhanced product ion (EPI) mode. Twenty-three drugs exhibiting various pharmacological effects, comprising blood pressure and lipid-lowering agents, sedative drugs, anti-diabetic drugs, weight-reducing agents and aphrodisiac compounds, were studied. For all drugs, a single transition was monitored using protonated molecules as precursor ions. EPI spectra were stored in a library and recognized by library searching. Several undeclared drugs were identified in herbal remedies, e.g., glibenclamide, sibutramine hydrochloride and sildenafil. Overall, 35 positive samples were found out of a total of 105 botanical dietary supplements tested. The method was selective, sensitive, rapid, high-throughput and reliable.
The Monoclonal Antitoxin Antibodies (Actoxumab–Bezlotoxumab) Treatment Facilitates Normalization of the Gut Microbiota of Mice with Clostridium difficile Infection

Antibiotics have significant and long-lasting impacts on the intestinal microbiota and consequently reduce colonization resistance against Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Standard therapy using antibiotics is associated with a high rate of disease recurrence, highlighting the need for novel treatment strategies that target toxins, the major virulence factors, rather than the organism itself. Human monoclonal antibodies MK-3415A (actoxumab–bezlotoxumab) to C. difficile toxin A and toxin B, as an emerging non-antibiotic approach, significantly reduced the recurrence of CDI in animal models and human clinical trials. Although the main mechanism of protection is through direct neutralization of the toxins, the impact of MK-3415A on gut microbiota and its restoration has not been examined. Using a CDI murine model, we compared the bacterial diversity of the gut microbiome of mice under different treatments including MK-3415A, vancomycin, or vancomycin combined with MK-3415A, sampled longitudinally. Here, we showed that C. difficile infection resulted in the prevalence of Enterobacter species. Sixty percent of mice in the vehicle group died after 2 days and their microbiome was almost exclusively formed by Enterobacter. MK-3415A treatment resulted in lower Enterobacter levels and restoration of Blautia, Akkermansia, and Lactobacillus which were the core components of the original microbiota. Vancomycin treatment led to significantly lower survival rate than the combo treatment of MK-3415A and vancomycin. Vancomycin treatment decreased bacterial diversity with predominant Enterobacter and Akkermansia, while Staphylococcus expanded after vancomycin treatment was terminated. In contrast, mice treated by vancomycin combined with MK-3415A also experienced decreased bacterial diversity during vancomycin treatment. However, these animals were able to recover their initial Blautia and Lactobacillus proportions, even though episodes of Staphylococcus overgrowth were detected by the end of the experiments. In conclusion, MK-3415A (actoxumab–bezlotoxumab) treatment facilitates normalization of the gut microbiota in CDI mice. It remains to be examined whether or not the prevention of recurrent CDI by the antitoxin antibodies observed in clinical trials occurs through modulation of microbiota.
Supporting storage configuration for I/O intensive workflows

System provisioning, resource allocation, and system configuration decisions for I/O-intensive workflow applications are complex even for expert users. Users face choices at multiple levels: allocating resources to individual sub-systems (e.g., the application layer, the storage layer) and configuring each of these optimally (e.g., replication level, chunk size, caching policies in case of storage) all having a large impact on overall application performance. This paper presents our progress on addressing the problem of supporting these provisioning, allocation and configuration decisions for workflow applications. To enable selecting a good choice in a reasonable time, we propose an approach that accelerates the exploration of the configuration space based on a low-cost performance predictor that estimates total execution time of a workflow application in a given setup. Our evaluation shows that: (i) the predictor is effective in identifying the desired system configuration, (ii) it can scale to model a workflow application run on an entire cluster, while (iii) using over 2000x less resources (machines x time) than running the actual application.
Proliferating Dendritic Cell Progenitors in H u m a n Blood

CD34 § cells in human cord blood and marrow are known to give rise to dendritic cells (DC), as well as to other myeloid lineages. CD34 § cells are rare in adult blood, however, making it difficult to use CD34 + ceils to ascertain if DC progenitors are present in the circulation and if blood can be a starting point to obtain large numbers of these immunostimulatory antigenpresenting cells for clinical studies. A systematic search for DC progenitors was therefore carried out in several contexts. In each case, we looked initially for the distinctive proliferating aggregates that were described previously in mice. In cord blood, it was only necessary to deplete erythroid progenitors, and add granulocyte/macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) together with tumor necrosis factor (TNF), to observe many aggregates and the production of typical DC progeny. In adult blood from patients receiving CSFs after chemotherapy for malignancy, GMCSF and TNF likewise generated characteristic DCs from HLA-DR negative precursors. However, in adult blood from healthy donors, the above approaches only generated small DC aggregates which then seemed to become monocytes. When interleukin 4 was used to suppress monocyte development (Jansen, J. H., G.-J. H. M. Wientjens, W. E. Fibbe, K. Willemze, and H. C. Kluin-Nelemans. 1989. J. Exp. Med. 170:577.), the addition of GM-CSF led to the formation of large proliferating DC aggregates and within 5-7 d, many nonproliferating progeny, about 3-8 million cells per 40 ml of blood. The progeny had a characteristic morphology and surface composition (e.g., abundant HLA-DK and accessory molecules for cell-mediated immunity) and were potent stimulators of quiescent T cells. Therefore, large numbers of DCs can be mobilized by specific cytokines from progenitors in the blood stream. These relatively large numbers of DC progeny should facilitate future studies of their FceRI and CD4 receptors, and their use in stimulating T cell-mediated resistance to viruses and tumors.
Conducting Longitudinal Experiments with Behavioral Models in Repeated Stackelberg Security Games on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Recently, there has been an increase of interest in domains involving repeated interactions between defenders and adversaries. This has been modeled as a repeated Stackelberg Security Game (repeated SSG). Although different behavioral models have been proposed for the attackers in these games, human subjects experiments for testing these behavioral models in repeated SSGs have not been conducted previously. This paper presents the first “longitudinal study” – at least in the context of SSGs – of testing human behavior models in repeated SSG settings. We provide the following contributions in this paper. First, in order to test the behavioral models, we design a game that simulates the repeated interactions between the defender and the adversary and deploy it on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Human subjects are asked to participate in this repeated task in rounds of the game, with a break between consecutive rounds. Second, we develop several approaches to keep the human subjects motivated throughout the course of this longitudinal study so that they participate in all measurement occasions, thereby minimizing attrition. We provide results showing improvements of retention rate due to implementation of these approaches. Third, we propose a way of choosing representative payoffs that fit the real-world scenarios as conducting these experiments are extremely time-consuming and we can only conduct a limited number of such experiments.
A utility scale battery energy storage system for intermittency mitigation in multilevel medium voltage photovoltaic system

A battery energy storage system (BESS) for a utility scale photovoltaic (PV) power plant is proposed. PV systems suffer from intermittency and partial shading problems, which could lead to power fluctuations and reduce grid stability. Utilities' inability to service the contracted load might lead to hefty penalties by the regulators. To reduce the effects of intermittency on PV output, a utility scale BESS is proposed for a multilevel inverter with medium frequency transformer link. This also enables PV plants to participate in short-term energy markets. The BESS power is rated at 10% of the PV plant rating. The battery is interfaced to the PV system dc bus through a bidirectional 3-level boost-buck dc-dc converter, which is controlled to regulate power flow. Analysis shows that a 10% BESS rating is capable of providing real power support to mitigate insolation intermittencies by 80%. The operation for battery charging and discharging modes are discussed in this paper. A design example for a 125 kW BESS is provided and simulation results validate grid support capability. Experimental results from a scaled-down laboratory prototype are also presented in this paper.