Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effective Gene-Viral Therapy for Telomerase-Positive Cancers by Selective Replicative-Competent Adenovirus Combining with Endostatin Gene

Gene-viral therapy, which uses replication-selective transgene-expressing viruses to manage tumors, can exploit the virtues of gene therapy and virotherapy and overcome the limitations of conventional gene therapy. Using a human telomerase reverse transcriptase-targeted replicative adenovirus as an antiangiogenic gene transfer vector to target new angiogenesis and making use of its unrestrained proliferation are completely new concepts in tumor management. CNHK300-mE is a selective replication transgene-expressing adenovirus constructed to carry mouse endostatin gene therapeutically. Infection with CNHK300-mE was associated with selective replication of the adenovirus and production of mouse endostatin in telomerase-positive cancer cells. Endostatin secreted from a human gastric cell line, SGC-7901, infected with CNHK300-mE was significantly higher than that infected with nonreplicative adenovirus Ad-mE in vitro (800 ± 94.7 ng/ml versus 132.9 ± 9.9 ng/ml) and in vivo (610 ± 42 ng/ml versus 126 ± 13 ng/ml). Embryonic chorioallantoic membrane assay showed that the mouse endostatin secreted by CNHK300-mE inhibited angiogenesis efficiently and also induced distortion of pre-existing vasculature. CNHK300-mE exhibited a superior suppression of xenografts in nude mice compared with CNHK300 and Ad-mE. In summary, we provided a more efficient gene-viral therapy strategy by combining oncolysis with antiangiogenesis.
Modeling and Resonance Analysis of Multiparallel Inverters System Under Asynchronous Carriers Conditions

With increasing penetration of renewable energy sources into modern power systems, multiparallel inverters are commonly employed in the interface to the utility grid, giving rise to potential resonance problems. In order to better understand the issue, resonance of multiparallel inverters is analyzed under an asynchronous carrier. First, multiparallel inverter equivalent circuits are modeled within a controlled bandwidth. In order to investigate resonance characteristics under an asynchronous carrier, a crossover filter function is used to separate output currents of different frequencies for a two-parallel inverter to analyze the output current frequency response. With this approach, resonance characteristics are focused under asynchronous conditions, and the impact of shifting LCL parameters on resonance is examined. The influence of paralleled inverter number on output currents is examined, and the analysis is expanded to multiparallel inverter systems to determine the resonance characteristics. Experimental results validate the developed models and the proposed resonance characteristics.
Predictors of functional status in older people living at home

Objective: to describe changes in functional status of community-dwelling Spanish elderly people, followed for 2 years, and to identify socio-demographic and health characteristics that predict functional change. Method: we have analysed data from the first two waves of the longitudinal study, Ageing in Leganes, from a representative sample of community-dwelling people aged 65 and over (n o 1273). Functional status was categorized according to a hierarchical scale as: completely functional, with functional limitations, with instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) disability, with activities of daily living (ADL) disability or deceased. Multinomial logistic regression was used to estimate the predictive value of selected 1993 socio-demographic and health status variables on 1995 functional status. Results: prevalence of disability based on dependency in any of seven ADL items was 15.5%. Half of the respondents were disabled in at least one of 10 IADLs. Some improved functionally, others deteriorated. Men were more likely to recover function while women were more likely to enter and to remain in the IADL state. Socio- economic factors were associated to baseline functional status and to functional status change on bivariate analysis. Number of chronic diseases, presence of cognitive problems and depressive symptoms predicted transitions, even after controlling for baseline functional status. Conclusion: although estimates of prevalence of disability among people over 65 are higher in Spain than in other European and North American countries, the pattern of functional changes, both in the direction of improvement and decline, seems to be similar.
Controlling Human Perception of Basic User Traits

Much of our online communication is text-mediated and, lately, more common with automated agents. Unlike interacting with humans, these agents currently do not tailor their language to the type of person they are communicating to. In this pilot study, we measure the extent to which human perception of basic user trait information – gender and age – is controllable through text. Using automatic models of gender and age prediction, we estimate which tweets posted by a user are more likely to mis-characterize his traits. We perform multiple controlled crowdsourcing experiments in which we show that we can reduce the human prediction accuracy of gender to almost random – an over 20% drop in accuracy. Our experiments show that it is practically feasible for multiple applications such as text generation, text summarization or machine translation to be tailored to specific traits and perceived as such.
Dynamic Warp Formation and Scheduling for Efficient GPU Control Flow

Recent advances in graphics processing units (GPUs) have resulted in massively parallel hardware that is easily programmable and widely available in commodity desktop computer systems. GPUs typically use single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) pipelines to achieve high performance with minimal overhead incurred by control hardware. Scalar threads are grouped together into SIMD batches, sometimes referred to as warps. While SIMD is ideally suited for simple programs, recent GPUs include control flow instructions in the GPU instruction set architecture and programs using these instructions may experience reduced performance due to the way branch execution is supported by hardware. One approach is to add a stack to allow different SIMD processing elements to execute distinct program paths after a branch instruction. The occurrence of diverging branch outcomes for different processing elements significantly degrades performance. In this paper, we explore mechanisms for more efficient SIMD branch execution on GPUs. We show that a realistic hardware implementation that dynamically regroups threads into new warps on the fly following the occurrence of diverging branch outcomes improves performance by an average of 20.7% for an estimated area increase of 4.7%.
Maintaining cooperation in homogeneous multi-agent system

During multi-agent interactions, robust strategies are needed to help the agents to coordinate their actions to achieve efficient outcomes. A large body of previous work focuses on designing strategies towards the goal of Nash equilibrium, which can be extremely inefficient in many situations such as prisoner's dilemma game. A number of improved algorithms based on Q-learning have been developed recently for agents to achieve mutual cooperation in games like prisoner's dilemma. However, almost all of them involve only two agents playing the same game repeatedly. However, this may not reflect the real scenario in practical multi-agent interaction situations. In practical multi-agent environments, each agent may interact with multiple agents at the same time and each agent may only be allowed to interact with a specific set of agents, which is determined by the system's underlying topology. In this paper, we propose a learning framework by taking into consideration the underlying interaction topology of the agents. We show that the system can maintain certain level of cooperation though the agents are individually rational. To better understand this phenomenon, we also develop a mathematical model to analyze the dynamics resulting from the learning framework. The theoretical results of the mathematical model are shown to be able to successfully predict the transition point and the expected behaviors of the system compared with the simulation results.
Problem-solving skills in male and female problem gamblers

The current study was designed to compare the self-reported problem-solving skills of male and female gamblers. In total, 148 females and 112 males (mean age = 43.6 years, SD = 12.0), responding to an advertisement for people concerned about their gambling, completed the Problem Solving Inventory ( Heppner, 1988 ). The PSI consists of three factors related to self-perception of problem-solving: confidence, personal control and approach-avoidance style. Gamblers were categorized into three subgroups according to their DSM-IV scores: Asymptomatic, Problem, and Pathological. Results from a series of analyses of co-variance (co-varying for the confounding effects of current emotional distress) revealed that gender had no significant effect, but problem severity on appraisal of problem-solving confidence and sense of personal control had a significant effect. Pathological gamblers were less confident and felt less in control than the other subgroups while engaging in problem-solving activities. Problem gamblers tended to have more negative appraisals of control than Asymptomatic gamblers. Problem-solving skills were also a significant predictor of DSM-IV scores for pathological gambling (i.e., negative appraisals were associated with higher DSM-IV scores). The results suggest that problem-solving skills are deficient in pathological gamblers and problem gamblers, but are not related to gender.
High-performance sport, learning and culture: new horizons for sport pedagogues?

Background: Research in sport coaching and sport pedagogy including studies published in this special issue bring to the fore the relationship between learning and culture in contexts of high-performance sport. This paper acknowledged that how learning, culture and their relationship are conceptualised is a crucial issue for researchers and professionals in high-performance sport. Purpose and approach: This paper arises from a theoretical analysis of the research studies presented in this special issue. The analysis undertaken focused on the understanding and representation of the concepts of learning and culture and critically examined the methodological application of particular conceptualisations. The intention was to extend insight into both theoretical and methodological issues associated with understanding and researching athlete and coach learning, and high-performance sport settings. Findings and discussion: This paper identifies tendencies for separatist and reductionist thinking about learning and culture in high-performance sport settings. A relational perspective is identified as critical to extending research and professional practice that is directed towards learning and/or culture. Researchers are urged to avoid identifying either athlete or coach learning (only) with specific events or experiences, and similarly avoid positioning culture as something that sits apart from athletes’ and coaches’ participation and learning in elite sport settings. The dual notions of ‘learning practices as cultural practice’ and ‘cultural practice as pedagogical practice’ are proposed as a basis for holistic thinking about learning and culture in high-performance sport settings. The extent to which such thinking is reflected in the various contributions to the special issue is considered. Attention is then directed to the methodological challenges that researchers face if they are to reflect a conceptualisation of learning as both embedded and embodied in cultural practices. Challenging and extending the underlying vision of learning that researchers, coaches and athletes have is revealed as a critical consideration in regard to research design, data collection and ways in which participants are variously positioned, represented and ‘involved’ in research. Embodied perspectives are identified as particularly worthy of greater attention in contemporary research that seeks to extend understanding of athlete and/or coaches’ learning and lived experiences within and amidst elite sporting cultures. Recent scholarship focusing on the body and lived experience is identified as providing theoretical and methodological insights that can extend future research and practice. Conclusions: Foregrounding a relational perspective is fundamental to extending the understanding of learning and culture in high-performance sport. Future research also needs to clearly embrace the methodological challenges presented by new conceptualisations.
Identification of humanoid robots dynamics using floating-base motion dynamics

When simulating and controlling robot dynamics it is necessary to know the inertial parameters and the joint dynamics accurately. As these parameters are usually not provided by manufacturers, identification is then an essential step in robotics. In addition with the up coming wide-spreading of humanoid robots in the society the identification of humanoid dynamics has became mandatory to insure safety. This paper proposes a method to estimate humanoid robots inertial parameters using a minimal set of sensors. Only joint angles and external forces information are required. Simulations have provided exciting trajectories that are reproduced on a small-size humanoid robot. Experimental results are given.
Practical safety in flexible access control models

Assurance that an access control configuration will not result in the leakage of a right to an unauthorized principal, called safety, is fundamental to ensuring that the most basic of access control policies can be enforced. It has been proven that the safety of an access control configuration cannot be decided for a general access control model, such as Lampson's access matrix, so safety is achieved either through the use of limited access control models or the verification of safety via constraints. Currently, almost all safety critical systems use limited access control models, such as Bell--LaPadula or Domain and Type Enforcement, because constraint expression languages are far too complex for typical administrators to use properly. However, researchers have identified that most constraints belong to one of a few basic types, so our goal is to develop a constraint expression model in which these constraints can be expressed in a straightforward way and extensions can be made to add other constraints, if desired. Our approach to expressing constraints has the following properties: (1) an access control policy is expressed using a graphical model in which the nodes represent sets (e.g., of subjects, objects, etc.) and the edges represent binary relationships on those sets and (2) constraints are expressed using a few, simple set operators on graph nodes. The basic graphical model is very simple, and we extend this model only as necessary to satisfy the identified constraint types. Since the basic graphical model is also general, further extension to support other constraints is possible, but such extensions should be made with caution as each increases the complexity of the model. Our hope is that by keeping the complexity of constraint expression in check, flexible access control models, such as role-based access control, may also be used for expressing access control policy for safety-critical systems.
Biochemical and Genetic Evidence for the Presence of Multiple Phosphatidylinositol- and Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-Bisphosphate-Specific Phospholipases C in Tetrahymena

ABSTRACT Eukaryotic phosphoinositide-specific phospholipases C (PI-PLC) specifically hydrolyze phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate [PtdIns(4,5)P2], produce the Ca2+-mobilizing agent inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate, and regulate signaling in multicellular organisms. Bacterial PtdIns-specific PLCs, also present in trypanosomes, hydrolyze PtdIns and glycosyl-PtdIns, and they are considered important virulence factors. All unicellular eukaryotes studied so far contain a single PI-PLC-like gene. In this report, we show that ciliates are an exception, since we provide evidence that Tetrahymena species contain two sets of functional genes coding for both bacterial and eukaryotic PLCs. Biochemical characterization revealed two PLC activities that differ in their phosphoinositide substrate utilization, subcellular localization, secretion to extracellular space, and sensitivity to Ca2+. One of these activities was identified as a typical membrane-associated PI-PLC activated by low-micromolar Ca2+, modestly activated by GTPγS in vitro, and inhibited by the compound U73122 [1-(6-{[17β-3-methoxyestra-1,3,5(10)-trien-17-yl]amino}hexyl)-1H-pyrrole-2,5-dione]. Importantly, inhibition of PI-PLC in vivo resulted in rapid upregulation of PtdIns(4,5)P2 levels, suggesting its functional importance in regulating phosphoinositide turnover in Tetrahymena. By in silico and molecular analysis, we identified two PLC genes that exhibit significant similarity to bacterial but not trypanosomal PLC genes and three eukaryotic PI-PLC genes, one of which is a novel inactive PLC similar to proteins identified only in metazoa. Comparative studies of expression patterns and PI-PLC activities in three T. thermophila strains showed a correlation between expression levels and activity, suggesting that the three eukaryotic PI-PLC genes are functionally nonredundant. Our findings imply the presence of a conserved and elaborate PI-PLC-Ins(1,4,5)P3-Ca2+ regulatory axis in ciliates.
Genome‐scale model of
 C. autoethanogenum
 reveals optimal bioprocess conditions for high‐value chemical production from carbon monoxide

Clostridium autoethanogenum is an industrial microbe used for the commercial-scale production of ethanol from carbon monoxide. While significant progress has been made in the attempted diversification of this bioprocess, further improvements are desirable, particularly in the formation of the high-value platform chemicals such as 2,3-butanediol (2,3-BD). A new, experimentally parameterised genome-scale model of C. autoethanogenum predicts dramatically increased 2,3-BD production under non-carbon-limited conditions when thermodynamic constraints on hydrogen production are considered.
Advances in Wireless Video Delivery

This paper reviews practical video delivery technologies, examining existing mobile networks, commercialized or standardized transport, and coding technologies. Compression efficiency, power dissipation, and error control are intrinsic issues in wireless video delivery. Among these issues, error control technologies are evaluated at four layers: 1) layer-1/2 transport; 2) end-to-end transport layer such as TCP/IP or RTP/UDP/IP; 3) error-resilience tool and network adaptation layer) and 4) source coder layer. Layer-1/2 transport tends to provide two distinct conditions: one quasi-error-free, in which upper layer error control technologies show a limited improvement, and one with a burst of errors during the fading period, in which the adaptability of error control is essential. Emerging mobile network quality of service will have a large variation of bandwidth and delay. Thus, adaptive rate control and error recovery are identified as more crucial issues for future research.
The Male Villain as Domestic Tyrant in Daniel Deronda: Victorian Masculinities and the Cultural Context of George Eliot's Novel

George Eliot's characterization of the tyrannous husband Henleigh Grandcourt is a key to understanding the construction of masculinities in her final—and most experimental and controversial—novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). Her use of Grandcourt as the mate of the principal female character, Gwendolen Harleth, and as a foil to the eponymous male protagonist, Daniel Deronda, is more complex than is usually assumed, and, unlike the contemporary poet Robert Browning in his portrayal of tyrannous husbands, she resists the “polarization into moral absolutes” inherent in the melodramatic mode. Eliot's commitment to certain “traditional” aspects of gender roles at the same time she acknowledges the need for profound social and cultural change is parallel with her continuing appreciation for the power and efficacy of religious values and states of mind after her loss of Christian faith. A close look at her treatment of Grandcourt's masculinity elucidates the widely discussed theme of individual and national consciousness in the novel, and reading her novel in this context against contemporary works helps us to understand Eliot's overall cultural vision, of which gender identity is one important component.
Genetic modifiers of Duchenne and facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophies

Muscular dystrophy is defined as the progressive wasting of skeletal muscles that is caused by inherited or spontaneous genetic mutations. Next‐generation sequencing has greatly improved the accuracy and speed of diagnosis for different types of muscular dystrophy. Advancements in depth of coverage, convenience, and overall reduced cost have led to the identification of genetic modifiers that are responsible for phenotypic variability in affected patients. These genetic modifiers have been postulated to explain key differences in disease phenotypes, including age of loss of ambulation, steroid responsiveness, and the presence or absence of cardiac defects in patients with the same form of muscular dystrophy. This review highlights recent findings on genetic modifiers of Duchenne and facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophies based on animal and clinical studies. These genetic modifiers hold great promise to be developed into novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of muscular dystrophies. Muscle Nerve 57: 6–15, 2018
Factor Structure, Reliability, and Validity of the Death Attitude Profile-Revised

The Present Study Examined The Factor Structure, reliability, and validity of the Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R; Wong, Reker, & Gesser, 1994) using a sample of 403 hospital and hospice nurses. A principal-components factor analysis of the DAP-R indicated that the DAP-R may consist of six factors instead of the five originally reported by Wong et al. The first four factors reported by Wong et al., which correspond to the subscales that they labeled Fear of Death, Death Avoidance, Approach Acceptance, and Escape Acceptance, were replicated in the present study, and these subscales were found to have acceptable levels of internal consistency and to possess some degree of concurrent validity. However, the items which loaded on the fifth factor in Wong et al.‘s study (their “Neutral Acceptance” subscale) were split across two factors in the present study, suggesting that this subscale may not be measuring a unitary construct.