Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms of cytoskeletal regulation: modulation of membrane affinity in avian brush border and erythrocyte spectrins

The spectrins isolated from chicken erythrocytes and chicken intestinal brush border, TW260/240, share a common alpha subunit and a tissue- specific beta subunit. The ability of these related proteins to bind human erythrocyte inside out vesicles (IOVs) and human erythrocyte ankyrin in vitro have been quantitatively compared with human erythrocyte spectrin. Chicken erythrocyte spectrin binds human IOVs and human ankyrin with affinities nearly identical to that for human erythrocyte spectrin. TW260/240 does not significantly bind to either IOVs or ankyrin. These results demonstrate a remarkable tissue preservation of ankyrin-binding capacity, even between diverse species, and confirm the role of the avian beta-spectrins in modulating this functionality. Avian brush border spectrin may represent a unique spectrin which serves primarily as a filament cross-linker and which does not interact strongly with membrane-associated proteins.
Vascular effects of improving metabolic control with metformin or rosiglitazone in type 2 diabetes.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to test whether vascular reactivity is modified by improving metabolic control and peripheral insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In a randomized, double-blind design, we assigned 74 type 2 diabetic patients to rosiglitazone (8 mg/day), metformin (1,500 mg/day), or placebo treatment for 16 weeks and measured insulin sensitivity (euglycemic insulin clamp), ambulatory blood pressure, and forearm blood flow response to 1) intra-arterial acetylcholine (ACh), 2) intra-arterial nitroprusside, 3) the clamp, and 4) blockade of nitric oxide (NO) synthase. RESULTS Compared with 25 nondiabetic subjects, patients had reduced insulin sensitivity (30 +/- 1 vs. 41 +/- 3 micromol. min(-1). kg fat-free mass(-1); P < 0.001) and reduced maximal response to ACh (586 +/- 42 vs. 883 +/- 81%; P < 0.001). Relative to placebo, 16 weeks of rosiglitazone and metformin similarly reduced fasting glucose (-2.3 +/- 0.5 and -2.3 +/- 0.5 mmol/l) and HbA(1c) (-1.2 +/- 0.3 and -1.6 +/- 0.3%). Insulin sensitivity increased with rosiglitazone (+6 +/- 3 micromol. min(-1). kg fat-free mass(-1); P < 0.01) but not with metformin or placebo. Ambulatory diastolic blood pressure fell consistently (-2 +/- 1 mmHg; P < 0.05) only in the rosiglitazone group. Nitroprusside dose response, clamp-induced vasodilatation, and NO blockade were not affected by either treatment. In contrast, the slope of the ACh dose response improved with rosiglitazone (+40% versus baseline, P < 0.05, +70% versus placebo, P < 0.005) but did not change with either metformin or placebo. This improvement in endothelium-dependent vasodilatation was accompanied by decrements in circulating levels of free fatty acids and tumor necrosis factor-alpha. CONCLUSIONS At equivalent glycemic control, rosiglitazone, but not metformin, improves endothelium dependent vasodilatation and insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetes.
A Stimulus-organism-response Model To Structure Alipay Consumer Perceptions In China

Alipay is expanding all over the world in recent years. With the great brand image and customer value provided, Alipay has reached to top mobile payment service provider in the world. China is the major target market for Alipay. This study employs the theory of stimuli-organism-response (SOR), while adapts the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and technology of acceptance model (TAM) in conceptualizing the stimuli construct. The primary data collection approach is questionnaire-based survey, although the interviews provided some rich information which guided the operationalization process of the measurement instrument. The sample targeted the current consumers of Alipay services in China, of which 400 valid response were obtained. Based on multivariable statistical analysis such as multiple regression and structured equation modeling, the study confirms the validity of stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory of consumer behavior and brand perceptions study, and together with the cross-comparative studies of the demographics and psychographic variables, some important strategic implications are offered which provide the market-oriented insights to Alipay as well as similar mobile-payments and services in China.
Nuclear-encoded cytochrome c oxidase subunit 4 regulates BMI1 expression and determines proliferative capacity of high-grade gliomas

Nuclear-encoded cytochrome c oxidase subunit 4 (COX4) is a key regulatory subunit of mammalian cytochrome c oxidase, and recent studies have demonstrated that COX4 isoform 1 (COX4-1) could have a role in glioma chemoresistance. The Polycomb complex protein BMI1 is a stem cell regulatory gene implicated in the pathogenesis of many aggressive cancers, including glioma. This study sought to determine if COX4 regulates BMI1 and modulates tumor cell proliferation. Using The Cancer Genome Atlas database and a retrospective data set from patients with glioblastoma multiforme, we found that BMI1 expression levels positively correlated with COX4-1 expression and overall survival. Whereas COX4-1 promoted cell growth by increasing BMI1 expression, COX4-2 inhibited cell growth even in cells overexpressing BMI1. We also demonstrate that COX4-1 attenuates mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, which is required for COX4-1-mediated effects on BMI1 expression and cell proliferation. Notably, mice bearing COX4-1-expressing glioma cell xenografts quickly developed invasive tumors characterized by the presence of multiple lesions positive for Ki-67, BMI1, and COX4-1, whereas mice bearing COX4-2-expressing xenografts rarely developed tumors by this point. COX4-1 also promoted the self-renewal of glioma stem-like cells, consistent with the reported role of BMI1 in stem cell growth. Taken together, these findings identify a novel COX4-1-mitochondrial ROS axis, in which differential expression of COX4 isoforms regulates mitochondrial ROS production and controls BMI1 expression.
Five-month-old infants' identification of the sources of vocalizations

Humans speak, monkeys grunt, and ducks quack. How do we come to know which vocalizations animals produce? Here we explore this question by asking whether young infants expect humans, but not other animals, to produce speech, and further, whether infants have similarly restricted expectations about the sources of vocalizations produced by other species. Five-month-old infants matched speech, but not human nonspeech vocalizations, specifically to humans, looking longer at static human faces when human speech was played than when either rhesus monkey or duck calls were played. They also matched monkey calls to monkey faces, looking longer at static rhesus monkey faces when rhesus monkey calls were played than when either human speech or duck calls were played. However, infants failed to match duck vocalizations to duck faces, even though infants likely have more experience with ducks than monkeys. Results show that by 5 months of age, human infants generate expectations about the sources of some vocalizations, mapping human faces to speech and rhesus faces to rhesus calls. Infants' matching capacity does not appear to be based on a simple associative mechanism or restricted to their specific experiences. We discuss these findings in terms of how infants may achieve such competence, as well as its specificity and relevance to acquiring language.
Repeat-Induced Point Mutation and the Population Structure of Transposable Elements in Microbotryum violaceum

Repeat-induced point mutation (RIP) is a genome defense in fungi that hypermutates repetitive DNA and is suggested to limit the accumulation of transposable elements. The genome of Microbotryum violaceum has a high density of transposable elements compared to other fungi, but there is also evidence of RIP activity. This is the first report of RIP in a basidiomycete and was obtained by sequencing multiple copies of the integrase gene of a copia-type transposable element and the helicase gene of a Helitron-type element. In M. violaceum, the targets for RIP mutations are the cytosine residues of TCG trinucleotide combinations. Although RIP is a linkage-dependent process that tends to increase the variation among repetitive sequences, a chromosome-specific substructuring was observed in the transposable element population. The observed chromosome-specific patterns are not consistent with RIP, but rather suggest an effect of gene conversion, which is also a linkage-dependent process but results in a homogenization of repeated sequences. Particular sequences were found more widely distributed within the genome than expected by chance and may reflect the recently active variants. Therefore, sequence variation of transposable elements in M. violaceum appears to be driven by selection for transposition ability in combination with the context-specific forces of the RIP and gene conversion.
Balance in Random Signed Graphs

By extending Heider’s and Cartwright–Harary’s theory of balance in deterministic social structures, we study the problem of balance in social structures in which relations among individuals are random. An appropriate model for representing such structures is that of random signed graphs G n,p,q , defined as follows. Given a set of n vertices and fixed numbers p and q, 0<p+q<1, then between each pair of vertices, there exists a positive edge, a negative edge, or no edge with respective probabilities p, q, 1−p−q. We first show that almost always (i.e., with probability tending to 1 as n→∞), the random signed graph G n,p,q is unbalanced. Subsequently we estimate the maximum order of a balanced induced subgraph in G n,p,p and show that its order achieves only a finite number of values. Next, we study the asymptotic behavior of the degree of balance and give upper and lower bounds for the line index of balance. Finally, we study the threshold function of balance, e.g., a function p 0(n) such that if p≫p 0(n), then the random signed graph G n,p,p is almost always unbalanced, and otherwise, it is almost always balanced.
Cryptocoding system based on AES and concatenated coding scheme involving BCH and QC-LDPC

In single-level cell flash memory, the most popular error correction code used for protection of the stored data is Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes. However, BCH codes are not adequate to meet the error requirements of multi-level cell flash memory. Serial concatenation of codes increases the error correcting capability of the resulting system. Hence, a favorable concatenated coding scheme for next-generation flash memory is proposed which is the combination of BCH and QC-LDPC codes. Encryption schemes can be integrated with error-correction in order to achieve more security and reliability of the communication system. Here, Advanced Encryption Standard(AES-128) is used to encrypt the information first, and then the encrypted data is encoded by the concatenated coding scheme. This ensures the security and reliability of data to be stored or transmitted.
Multicarrier CDMA for cellular overlay systems

A code-division multiple access (CDMA) cellular overlay system is investigated, employing the idea of multicarrier CDMA, which has previously received significant attention as an alternative to traditional single-carrier CDMA. Overlay is pursued here as a means of long-term transition from narrowband cellular to CDMA cellular. A major result of this paper is the demonstration that the use of multicarrier CDMA in a fading channel is particularly beneficial to the narrowband system, as the CDMA users can reduce their transmitted powers as a result of diversity. Another significant conclusion is that the use of transmitter notching in the CDMA system in order to avoid active narrowband users outperforms a strategy in which a narrowband user is avoided by simply dropping the particular carrier which overlays it. Finally, results on the use of the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receiver in a fading channel are extended for use in the overlay scenario.
AN ADAPTIVE APPROACH FOR IDENTIFYING REPUTATION OF RESEARCHERS

Web 2.0 and social networks changed the way people communicate in the knowledge society. The main feature of this change is the way of people interacts with each other. The fast and consistently interaction has been used in several areas, such as scientific collaboration networks and identifies researchers with similar profiles in order to suggest new partners. In this paper, we address the issue of identifying the profile of researchers and measure their reputation. We propose an adaptive approach that supports both a profile model and an index to measure research reputation. The profile model maintains key elements of research curriculum. The elements in the profile definition is not based only on publication or paper citations, but also consider whole life science of the researchers built over their career. After, our index have metrics based on the trajectory of the researchers are used to calculate their reputation. The reputation metrics take into the attributes specified in the profile model. We show that the proposed approach defined by the profile model and by the reputation index can be used in several context and knowledge areas, once that it is comprehensive and adaptive. Experiments show that our metrics are strongly correlated with both H-Index and G-Index, taking in advance that the possibility of managing the weights defined for each elements allow the alignment with the researcher profiles.
Reduced dimension MAP turbo-BLAST detection

The Bell-Labs Layered Space-time (BLAST) architecture is a simple and efficient multi-antenna coding structure that can achieve high-spectral efficiency. Many BLAST detectors require more receiver antennas than transmitter antennas. We propose a novel turbo-processing BLAST detector based on a group detection strategy that can operate in systems with fewer receiver antennas than transmitter antennas. A maximum a posteriori (MAP) decision is made using a group of transmitted symbols and the remaining signal contribution is treated as interference. The interference is characterized as a non-zero mean colored noise source that is whitened before a decision is made. The proposed detector, the reduced dimension MAP (RDMAP) detector, is a generalization of both the MAP detector and the turbo-processing minimum mean squared error (MMSE) detector (Sellathurai et al. (2002); Abe et al. (2001)). Simulation is used to compare the GMAP detector with the MAP detector and MMSE detector.
Using Crowdsourcing and Active Learning to Track Sentiment in Online Media

Tracking sentiment in the popular media has long been of interest to media analysts and pundits. With the availability of news content via online syndicated feeds, it is now possible to automate some aspects of this process. There is also great potential to crowdsource Crowdsourcing is a term, sometimes associated with Web 2.0 technologies, that describes outsourcing of tasks to a large often anonymous community. much of the annotation work that is required to train a machine learning system to perform sentiment scoring. We describe such a system for tracking economic sentiment in online media that has been deployed since August 2009. It uses annotations provided by a cohort of non-expert annotators to train a learning system to classify a large body of news items. We report on the design challenges addressed in managing the effort of the annotators and in making annotation an interesting experience.
Linkage between the temporal and spatial variability of dissolved organic matter and whole-stream metabolism

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is an important resource for microbes, thus affecting whole-stream metabolism. However, the factors influencing its chemical composition and thereby also its bio-availability are complex and not thoroughly understood. It was hypothesized that whole-stream metabolism is linked to DOM composition and that the coupling of both is influenced by seasonality and different land-use types. We tested this hypothesis in a comparative study on two pristine forestry streams and two non-forestry streams. The investigated streams were located in the Harz Mountains (central Europe, Germany). The metabolic rate was measured with a classical two-station oxygen change technique and the variability of DOM with fluorescence spectroscopy. All streams were clearly net heterotrophic, whereby non-forestry streams showed a higher primary production, which was correlated to irradiance and phosphorus concentration. We detected three CDOM components (C1, C2, C3) using parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis. We compared the excitation and emission maxima of these components with the literature and correlated the PARAFAC components with each other and with fluorescence indices. The correlations suggest that two PARAFAC components are derived from allochthonous sources (C1, C3) and one is derived autochthonously (C2). The chromophoric DOM matrix was dominated by signals of humic-like substances with a highly complex structure, followed by humic-like, fulfic acids, low-molecular-weight substances, and with minor amounts of amino acids and proteins. The ratios of these PARAFAC components (C1 : C2, C1 : C3, C3 : C2) differed with respect to stream types (forestry versus non-forestry). We demonstrated a significant correlation between gross primary production (GPP) and signals of autochthonously derived, low-molecular-weight humic-like substances. A positive correlation between P / R (i.e. GPP/daily community respiration) and the fluorescence index FI suggests that the amount of autochthonously produced DOM increased overall with increasing GPP. In accordance with the coupling between DOM and the metabolism, our data also indicate that the composition of DOM is subject to seasonal fluctuations. We concluded that temporal and spatial differences in DOM composition are driven by whole-stream metabolism, in addition to pronounced effects coming from allochthonous sources.
Computational aspects of the Hausdorff distance in unbounded dimension

We study the computational complexity of determining the Hausdorff distance of two polytopes given in halfspace- or vertex-presentation in arbitrary dimension. Subsequently, a matching problem is investigated where a convex body is allowed to be homothetically transformed in order to minimize its Hausdorff distance to another one. For this problem, we characterize optimal solutions, deduce a Helly-type theorem and give polynomial time (approximation) algorithms for polytopes.
Securing virtual network function placement with high availability guarantees

Virtual Network Functions as a Service (VNFaaS) is currently under attentive study by telecommunications and cloud stakeholders as a promising business and technical direction consisting of providing network functions as a service on a cloud (NFV Infrastructure), instead of delivering standalone network appliances, in order to provide higher scalability and reduce maintenance costs. However, the functioning of such NFVI hosting the VNFs is fundamental for all the services and applications running on top of it, forcing to guarantee a high availability level against attacks and software failures. Indeed the availability of an VNFaaS relies on the failure rate of its single components, namely the servers, the virtualization software, and the communication network. The proper assignment of the virtual machines implementing network functions to NFVI servers and their protection from both endogenous and exogenous threats is essential to guarantee high availability. We model the High Availability Virtual Network Function Placement (HA- VNFP) as the problem of finding the best assignment of virtual machines to servers guaranteeing protection by replication. We propose a probabilistic approach to measure the real availability of a system and design both efficient and effective algorithms that can be used by stakeholders for both online and offline planning.
CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AS ENVISIONED BY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS OF THE POST-INDEPENDENCE GEORGIAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

In this study, experiences of elementary school teachers about classroom management and the meaning they ascribe to the concept of classroom management were examined through a phenomenological research study. The opinions of teachers working at the elementary school level were investigated through the dimensions of strengths and weaknesses of the teachers, problems encountered in classroom management, and the teachers’ suggestions for how to become an ideal teacher. The sample of the study consisted of a total of 48 teachers who served in elementary schools in the cities of Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Batumi, Rustavi and Marneuli of Georgia in the 2018–2019 academic year. In the study, a semi-structured interview form consisting of 8 open-ended questions was used as a data collection instrument. The categories were created by the researchers comparing the statements of the participants by using the debriefing method. The results of the study were finalized after they were revised by the researchers and the participants working together. Various data were shared in the findings section indicating that the teachers had strong competence in ensuring a safe learning environment within a friendly environment with students; nevertheless, they experienced problems in terms of behavioral rules and communication. In the results section, it was discussed how the teachers’ experiences in classroom management were related to the topics of social culture and friendly atmosphere. Article visualizations:
A population-level prediction tool for the incidence of first-episode psychosis: translational epidemiology based on cross-sectional data

Objectives Specialist early intervention services (EIS) for people aged 14–35 years with first episodes of psychosis (FEP) have been commissioned throughout England since 2001. A single estimate of population need was used everywhere, but true incidence varies enormously according to sociodemographic factors. We sought to develop a realistically complex, population-based prediction tool for FEP, based on precise estimates of epidemiological risk. Design and participants Data from 1037 participants in two cross-sectional population-based FEP studies were fitted to several negative binomial regression models to estimate risk coefficients across combinations of different sociodemographic and socioenvironmental factors. We applied these coefficients to the population at-risk of a third, socioeconomically different region to predict expected caseload over 2.5 years, where the observed rates of ICD-10 F10-39 FEP had been concurrently ascertained via EIS. Setting Empirical population-based epidemiological data from London, Nottingham and Bristol predicted counts in the population at-risk in the East Anglia region of England. Main outcome measures Observed counts were compared with predicted counts (with 95% prediction intervals (PI)) at EIS and local authority district (LAD) levels in East Anglia to establish the predictive validity of each model. Results A model with age, sex, ethnicity and population density performed most strongly, predicting 508 FEP participants in EIS in East Anglia (95% PI 459, 559), compared with 522 observed participants. This model predicted correctly in 5/6 EIS and 19/21 LADs. All models performed better than the current gold standard for EIS commissioning in England (716 cases; 95% PI 664–769). Conclusions We have developed a prediction tool for the incidence of psychotic disorders in England and Wales, made freely available online (http://www.psymaptic.org), to provide healthcare commissioners with accurate forecasts of FEP based on robust epidemiology and anticipated local population need. The initial assessment of some people who do not require subsequent EIS care means additional service resources, not addressed here, will be required.