Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcriptional trans-activation by the human papillomavirus type 16 E2 gene product

We identified a conditional transcriptional enhancer in the long control region (LCR) of human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16). This conditional enhancer requires activation in trans by a product of the viral early-region open reading frames (ORFs). Primer extension analysis of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase RNA isolated from transiently transfected CV-1 cells demonstrated that trans-activation of the HPV-16 LCR enhancer operated at the transcriptional level. Mutational analysis of the early ORFs demonstrated that the conditional enhancer of the LCR was trans-activated by the product of the E2 ORF. The E2 gene product of bovine papillomavirus type 1, which can trans-activate the conditional enhancer in the bovine papillomavirus type 1 LCR, was also capable of trans-activating the E2-responsive enhancer of HPV-16. The activity of the HPV-16 LCR enhancer was also assayed in two human cervical carcinoma cell lines, HeLa and SiHa, which harbor transcriptionally active, integrated HPV-18 and HPV-16 DNA sequences, respectively. No endogenous E2 or E2-like activity was detected in either cell line.
Empirical Analyses of Chinese Exchange Rate Behavior from 1979-2007

This paper presents a single-equation econometric model approach to define the variables that determined the real exchange rate behavior in China during the 1979-2007 period as an indicator of the government`s de facto exchange rate policy. The empirical findings confirm that the Chinese economic policy mix has almost always led to some real exchange rate volatility, which is inconsistent with the exchange rate policy between 1979-2007, the impact of the reserves on the real exchange rate is analyzed to determine the degree of government intervention to limit its volatility. Therefore, it is believed that the most viable solution in short-medium term for China is the `managed bands` regime around a crawling real effective exchange rate-central parity, with no pre-announced management bands parameters. This choice will allow Chinese policy-makers to steer the economy out of the numerous regional and international political and economic shocks.
The Effects of Tourism on the GDP of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia in the Process of European Integration

Tourism is a socio-economic phenomenon exerting considerable economic, social and political impact, thus securing itself an important position in the overall economic growth. The principal purpose of this paper is to present the effects of the EU integration process on tourist movements in Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro during the period 2006-2014, as 2006 was the year when one of the surveyed countries initiated EU accession negotiations, and tourism sector contribution to GDP in these countries in the period from 2002-2013 based on the data available for these years. To that end, the authors have compared the relationship between the number of foreign tourist arrivals and overnight stays and the GDP rates in the surveyed countries. Upon reviewing the available sources, the authors have reached the conclusion that during the EU integration period, an increase in the number of foreign tourists and overnight stays positively correlated with the GDP growth. EU integration process has had a positive bearing on tourism movements in the surveyed countries. The panel regression method has shown that despite a continuous increase in the number of foreign tourist arrivals, tourism sector still makes a modest direct contribution to the overall economic growth of the surveyed countries (Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia). Also, the Granger causality test was applied to demonstrate that it is not possible to predict GDP values in any of the surveyed countries based on the tourism revenue growth, while tourism contribution to GDP in Macedonia and Montenegro can be predicted based on their GDP.
Microbial communities within field‐collected Culiseta melanura and Coquillettidia perturbans

Although mosquitoes are well‐known vectors of human and animal diseases, pathogens are only minor components of their total endogenous microbial communities. The midguts of many insects, including mosquitoes, contain diverse microbial communities. In this study, we used denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis to identify the diversity of bacteria in field‐collected adult female Culiseta melanura (Diptera: Culicidae) (Coquillett) and Coquillettidia perturbans (Diptera: Culicidae) (Walker). Few significant differences in bacterial fauna between the two mosquito species were found, but the results suggest that host life history may be a determinant of the endogenous bacterial communities in mosquitoes. In the present study, the dominant bacteria are frequently identified as major components of other mosquito species' microbial flora, suggesting the establishment of a stable association between the mosquitoes and the microbes after initial acquisition from the environment.
Zebrin II Is Expressed in Sagittal Stripes in the Cerebellum of Dragon Lizards (Ctenophorus sp.)

Aldolase C, also known as zebrin II (ZII), is a glycolytic enzyme that is expressed in cerebellar Purkinje cells of the vertebrate cerebellum. In both mammals and birds, ZII is expressed heterogeneously, such that there are sagittal stripes of Purkinje cells with high ZII expression (ZII+) alternating with stripes of Purkinje cells with little or no expression (ZII-). In contrast, in snakes and turtles, ZII is not expressed heterogeneously; rather all Purkinje cells are ZII+. Here, we examined the expression of ZII in the cerebellum of lizards to elucidate the evolutionary origins of ZII stripes in Sauropsida. We focused on the central netted dragon (Ctenophorus nuchalis) but also examined cerebellar ZII expression in 5 other dragon species (Ctenophorus spp.). In contrast to what has been observed in snakes and turtles, we found that in these lizards, ZII is heterogeneously expressed. In the posterior part of the cerebellum, on each side of the midline, there were 3 sagittal stripes consisting of Purkinje cells with high ZII expression (ZII+) alternating with 2 sagittal stripes with weaker ZII expression (ZIIw). More anteriorly, most of the Purkinje cells were ZII+, except laterally, where the Purkinje cells did not express ZII (ZII-). Finally, all Purkinje cells in the auricle (flocculus) were ZII-. Overall, the parasagittal heterogeneous expression of ZII in the cerebellum of lizards is similar to that in mammals and birds, and contrasts with the homogenous ZII+ expression seen in snakes and turtles. We suggest that a sagittal heterogeneous expression of ZII represents the ancestral condition in stem reptiles which was lost in snakes and turtles.
Measuring sleep: accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of wrist actigraphy compared to polysomnography.

OBJECTIVES We validated actigraphy for detecting sleep and wakefulness versus polysomnography (PSG). DESIGN Actigraphy and polysomnography were simultaneously collected during sleep laboratory admissions. All studies involved 8.5 h time in bed, except for sleep restriction studies. Epochs (30-sec; n = 232,849) were characterized for sensitivity (actigraphy = sleep when PSG = sleep), specificity (actigraphy = wake when PSG = wake), and accuracy (total proportion correct); the amount of wakefulness after sleep onset (WASO) was also assessed. A generalized estimating equation (GEE) model included age, gender, insomnia diagnosis, and daytime/nighttime sleep timing factors. SETTING Controlled sleep laboratory conditions. PARTICIPANTS Young and older adults, healthy or chronic primary insomniac (PI) patients, and daytime sleep of 23 night-workers (n = 77, age 35.0 ± 12.5, 30F, mean nights = 3.2). INTERVENTIONS N/A. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Overall, sensitivity (0.965) and accuracy (0.863) were high, whereas specificity (0.329) was low; each was only slightly modified by gender, insomnia, day/night sleep timing (magnitude of change < 0.04). Increasing age slightly reduced specificity. Mean WASO/night was 49.1 min by PSG compared to 36.8 min/night by actigraphy (β = 0.81; CI = 0.42, 1.21), unbiased when WASO < 30 min/night, and overestimated when WASO > 30 min/night. CONCLUSIONS This validation quantifies strengths and weaknesses of actigraphy as a tool measuring sleep in clinical and population studies. Overall, the participant-specific accuracy is relatively high, and for most participants, above 80%. We validate this finding across multiple nights and a variety of adults across much of the young to midlife years, in both men and women, in those with and without insomnia, and in 77 participants. We conclude that actigraphy is overall a useful and valid means for estimating total sleep time and wakefulness after sleep onset in field and workplace studies, with some limitations in specificity.
Enhanced word embedding with multiple prototypes

Word representation is one of the basic word repressentation methods in natural language processing, which mapped a word into a dense real-valued vector space based on a hypothesis: words with similar context have similar meanings. Models like NNLM, C&W, CBOW, Skip-gram have been designed for word embeddings learning, and get widely used in many NLP tasks. However, these models assume that one word had only one semantics meaning which is contrary to the real language rules. In this paper we pro-pose a new word unit with multiple meanings and an algorithm to distinguish them by it's context. This new unit can be embedded in most language models and get series of efficient representations by learning variable embeddings. We evaluate a new model MCBOW that integrate CBOW with our word unit on word similarity evaluation task and some downstream experiments, the result indicated our new model can learn different meanings of a word and get a better result on some other tasks.
Neutralization of interleukin-17 suppresses allergic rhinitis symptoms by downregulating Th2 and Th17 responses and upregulating the Treg response

Allergic rhinitis (AR) has long been considered to predominantly involve the actions of Th2 cells, with relatively small contributions from Th1 cells. In recent years, the discovery of Th17 and regulatory T (Treg) cells has rendered the Th1/Th2 balance paradigm more complex and expanded our understanding of the pathogenesis of AR. IL-17, a key cytokine produced by Th17 cells, is known to induce allergen-specific Th2 cell activation, eosinophil and neutrophil accumulation, and serum IgE production in asthma; all of these features may play important roles in AR. To the best of our knowledge, only a few studies have assessed the feasibility of using IL-17 antagonists to treat AR. Thus, the principal objectives of the present study were, first, to determine the status of Th17 and Treg cells in the nasal mucosa of a mouse model of AR, and, second, to investigate the effects of IL-17 on such cells and the therapeutic efficacy of anti-IL-17 antibodies (Abs) in the context of AR. Anti-IL-17 Abs were given intranasally during the re-challenge of BALB/c mice with ovalbumin (OVA)-induced AR. We measured the numbers of nasal rubbing motions and sneezes, eosinophil and neutrophil levels, Th1, Th2, Th17, and Treg parameters in the nasal mucosa. Anti-IL-17 Abs markedly reduced the number of nasal rubbing motions and sneezes, decreased eosinophil and neutrophil infiltration, reduced Th2 and Th17 responses, and increased the Treg response. Anti-IL-17 Ab treatment protects against AR. These results will improve our understanding of AR pathogenesis and may lead to the development of novel therapeutic approaches for management of the condition.
Behavior problems antecede the development of wheeze in childhood: a birth cohort study.

RATIONALE It is not clear to what extent behavior problems observed in children with asthma antecede asthma development, or are a consequence of the disease. OBJECTIVES We investigated psychologic factors at age 3 years and subsequent development of wheeze by age 5 in an unselected birth cohort study. Children were recruited prenatally, followed prospectively, and reviewed at age 3 and 5 years. The rate of significant behavior problems at age 3 (above the clinically relevant cut-off on the Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory) was compared between children who had never wheezed (n = 397) and those developing late-onset wheezing (after age 3 years; n = 39). Late-onset wheezers were more likely to be above cut-offs for behavior problems at 3 years (before wheeze onset), compared with children who never wheezed, on Intensity (23.1% vs. 6.0%, p < 0.001) and Problem scores (10.8% vs. 1.3%, p < 0.001). Families of late-onset wheezers had poorer scores on family functioning variables, but we found no evidence of increased anxiety or depression scores in parents. In the multivariate analysis, significant and independent associates of late-onset wheeze were as follows: maternal asthma (odds ratio [OR] 5.4, 95% confidence intervals [CI] 2.1-13.8, p < 0.001), maternal smoking when child was 3 years (OR 3.3, CI 1.2-8.7, p = 0.02), expressiveness (OR 0.71, CI 0.55-0.9, p = 0.005), and significant behavior problems at age 3 years (OR 3.5, CI 1.2-9.9, p = 0.02). CONCLUSIONS Behavior problems in early life are associated with increased risk of subsequent development of wheeze.
Leukemia inhibitory factor mRNA expression is upregulated in macrophages and olfactory receptor neurons after target ablation

After target ablation by olfactory bulbectomy (OBX), the murine olfactory epithelium (OE) undergoes degenerative changes leading to apoptosis of olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) followed by regenerative changes that include proliferation of progenitor cells leading to neurogenesis and ORN replacement. Macrophages recruited to the OE after OBX are involved in both the degenerative and regenerative processes. Relative quantitative RT‐PCR was used to demonstrate that within hours of OBX, mRNAs encoding three key components in the leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) signaling pathway, including LIF, LIF receptor (LIFR), and STAT3, as well as cyclin D1, a growth factor sensor indicative of progenitor cell transformation, were upregulated. These mRNAs reached peak levels of expression on or before day 3 post‐OBX, coincident with the peak time for macrophage recruitment and progenitor cell proliferation. Cells expressing LIF mRNA in the OE of mice at 3 days post‐OBX, the time point at which LIF mRNA expression peaked, were identified using non‐isotopic in situ hybridization. LIF mRNA was localized in infiltrating macrophages; near‐adjacent sections exhibited macrophages immunoreactive for F4/80, a marker for activated macrophages, in numbers commensurate with those expressing LIF mRNA. LIF mRNA was also localized in surviving ORNs, identified by their expression of olfactory marker protein (OMP) mRNA and protein in near‐adjacent sections. Our data suggest that LIF functions as a mitogen originating from recruited macrophages through an intercellular signaling pathway that stimulates proliferation of progenitor cells leading to neurogenesis and regeneration, and as an intracellular survival factor for traumatized ORNs. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Public interest or interest group legislation

Federal regulation of child labor (unlike that passed in early nineteenth century England) did not materialize until the New Deal of the 1930s. The present paper examines, using anecdotal and empirical evidence, the motives underlying the passage of depression-based child labor legisla- tion embodied in the Senate vote on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Our study, which uti- lizes both dichotomous and trichotomous probit models of the vote, finds evidence that there were critical and dominant private as opposed to public interests behind the restrictions that the FLSA placed on child labor and the exemptions that it established.
Political Economy of Trade and Storage Policy Coordination, and the Role of Domestic Public Storage in the World Market

In this paper, a standard theoretical model of trade policy is extended to incorporate domestic public storage policy, so as to explore government political motivations in the context of border and domestic policy coordination. Theoretically, domestic storage policy can add to price stabilization in the presence of trade policy, and can reinforce a price-insulating trade policy through increasing the countryÂ’s market power. However, the effects of these two price stabilization instruments on the international market price are in opposite directions. Furthermore, the effect of domestic public storage on the world market is then tested, using China cotton as a case study. The VAR econometrics reveal that in the case of cotton during 2011-14, China as a large player in the global market was able to stabilize to a non-trivial extent the international price of cotton through altering its public stockpile.
Speaker Change Detection Based on the Pairwise Distance Matrix

Speaker change detection is most commonly done by statistically determining whether the two adjacent segments of a speech stream are significantly different or not. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect speaker change points based on the minimum statistics of the pairwise distance matrix of feature vectors. The use of the minimum statistics makes it possible to compare between the similar acoustic groups, which is effective in suppressing the phonetic variation. Experimental results showed that the proposed method is promising for speech change detection problem.
Real activities manipulation by bidders prior to mergers and acquisitions

Purpose - This study aims to examine the ability of investors to process signs of real activities manipulations at bidder firms in the quarters leading to the announcement of a merger. It further provides a supplementary explanation for the post-merger underperformance puzzle. Design/methodology/approach - Examining a sample of cash-only, stock swap and mixed mergers completed between 1980 and 2011, it was found that bidder firms increase the use of real activities manipulation in the quarters leading up to the merger announcements. Using average abnormal stock return method, it is shown that the short-term positive effect of real activities manipulation on share prices is stronger than accrual-based earnings management. Findings - While bidders are able to escape investors’ scrutiny in the short run, it is not the case in the long run. It was found that bidders’ long-run stock performance, measured by matched buy-and-hold stock returns, is inversely related to their pre-announcement level of earnings management. This paper contributes to the literature on earnings management by considering how real activities manipulations affect stock prices in mergers and acquisitions. Originality/value - This study tests whether real activities manipulation, in addition to accrual-based earnings management, explains the underperformance puzzle of the acquiring firms in M&As. Zang (
Sensitivity to Violence Measured by Ratings of Severity Increases after Nonviolence Training

It was hypothesized that training in nonviolence would increase participants' sensitivity to violence because such training emphasizes both the harm and the avoidability of many kinds of violence. This research built upon earlier studies, which had proposed that ratings of the severity of violent behaviors (e.g., murder, bullying, cursing) can be interpreted as measuring sensitivity to violence. Two quasi-experiments examined changes in ratings of severity obtained before and after nonviolence training. In Study 1, 28 college-age traffic offenders who received nonviolence training judged stimulus behaviors ranging from life-threatening physical harm to verbal disrespect as more violent after their training. An untrained comparison group did not show this change. In Study 2, 30 student teachers who received instruction in nonviolence also rated behaviors as more violent after training; an untrained comparison group did not. Results are interpreted as showing increased sensitivity to violence following exposure to nonviolence.
Mask-Constrained Power Synthesis of Linear Arrays With Even Excitations

An existing effective approach for the synthesis of linear arrays providing power patterns lying in arbitrary masks is extended to the case where an even distribution is required on element excitations. The approach consists of a linear programming optimization plus a polynomial factorization, and it allows one to deal with a considerably reduced computational burden with respect to the previous approaches. By so doing, it is now possible to solve problems that cannot be successfully tackled by the previous techniques. An extension of the overall strategy to the synthesis of fields guaranteeing optimal performances in terms of directivity or ripple in the main-beam region is also given.
The Implicitome: A Resource for Rationalizing Gene-Disease Associations

High-throughput experimental methods such as medical sequencing and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify increasingly large numbers of potential relations between genetic variants and diseases. Both biological complexity (millions of potential gene-disease associations) and the accelerating rate of data production necessitate computational approaches to prioritize and rationalize potential gene-disease relations. Here, we use concept profile technology to expose from the biomedical literature both explicitly stated gene-disease relations (the explicitome) and a much larger set of implied gene-disease associations (the implicitome). Implicit relations are largely unknown to, or are even unintended by the original authors, but they vastly extend the reach of existing biomedical knowledge for identification and interpretation of gene-disease associations. The implicitome can be used in conjunction with experimental data resources to rationalize both known and novel associations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the implicitome by rationalizing known and novel gene-disease associations, including those from GWAS. To facilitate the re-use of implicit gene-disease associations, we publish our data in compliance with FAIR Data Publishing recommendations [https://www.force11. org/group/fairgroup] using nanopublications. An online tool (http://knowledge.bio) is available to explore established and potential gene-disease associations in the context of other biomedical relations.
Online Fair Allocation in Autonomous Vehicle Sharing

Autonomous vehicle industry is developing by leaps and bounds. We envisage a situation where autonomous vehicles act as taxis to transport clients. During the transportation, vehicle sharing is enabled and encouraged. We propose fair allocation in payment for passengers of a shared vehicle. The allocation is endowed with the characteristics of envy freeness and maximin utilities. Furthermore, we devise working mechanisms for autonomous vehicles, including (i) planning routes with minimum detour; (ii) choosing clients to recommend vehicle sharing; (iii) carrying passengers continuously. Our work may serve as a good preparation for the marketization of autonomous taxis.