Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An RXTE Survey of Long-Term X-Ray Variability in Seyfert 1 Galaxies

Data from the first three years of RXTE observations have been systematically analyzed to yield a set of 300 day 2-10 keV light curves with similarly uniform, ~5 day sampling, for a total of nine Seyfert 1 galaxies. This is the first X-ray variability survey to probe consistently timescales longer than a few days in a large number of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Comparison to ASCA data covering a similar band but much shorter (≲1 day) timescales shows that all the AGNs are more strongly variable on long timescales than on short timescales. This increase is greatest for the highest luminosity sources. The well-known anticorrelation between source luminosity and variability amplitude is both stronger and shallower in power-law slope when measured on long timescales. This is consistent with a picture in which the X-ray variability of Seyfert 1 galaxies can be can be described by a single, universal fluctuation power-density shape for which the cutoff moves to longer timescales for higher luminosity sources. All of the Seyfert 1 galaxies exhibit stronger variability in the relatively soft 2-4 keV band than in the harder 7-10 keV band. This effect is much too pronounced to be explained by simple models based either on the dilution of the power-law continuum by the Compton reflection component or on the hard X-rays being produced in a static, pair-dominated, plane-parallel Comptonizing corona.
The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art

Japan. However, the seniority and official standing of these contributors does come at the cost of apparent partiality on some issues. For example, the assertion by a senior government official that “political parties, labour unions, and the press function freely” (p. 249) may be justifiably regarded with some circumspection, and is indeed contradicted by other contributors (pp. 239–43). Moreover, the book is praised in its foreword for “looking ahead and putting past acrimony behind . in tune with the concept of national reconciliation” (p. ix). Regardless of the political virtues of such an approach, there are some contentious issues, apparently within the scope of the book, which have not been adequately addressed. Firstly, the issue of land expropriation by the Cambodian government and associated corporate entities receives only cursory attention (pp. 352–55). Secondly, there is no individual discussion in sections 1 to 3 of Cambodia’s relationship with Thailand and Lao PDR, which would no doubt have been of significant interest to many readers. The Preah Vihear border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia is briefly considered (albeit through the lens of Cambodia/Indonesia relations) (pp. 57–58), and relations between Cambodia and Laos are considered in relation to the damming of the Mekong and its tributaries (Ch. 23). The inclusion of extended commentary on these and other issues may have served to dispel the impression that the book is, in some but certainly not all respects, a partial and “sanitised” account of contemporary Cambodian politics and international relations.
Use of Aeromonas spp. as General Indicators of Antimicrobial Susceptibility among Bacteria in Aquatic Environments in Thailand

Antimicrobials are widely used, not only for treating human infections, but also for treatment of livestock and in fish farms. Human habitats in Southeastern Asian countries are located in close proximity to aquatic environments. As such, the human populations within these regions are at risk of exposure to antimicrobial resistant bacteria, and thereby disseminating antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs). In this study, we collected water samples from 15 sites (5 sites in Chao Phraya River, 2 sites at the mouth of Chao Phraya River, 3 sites in Ta Chin River, and 5 sites at city canals) and 12 sites (6 sites at city canals; 2 sites at chicken farms; 2 sites at pig farms; and 2 samples from sites at pig farms, which were subsequently treated at a biogas plant) in Thailand in 2013 and 2014, respectively. In total, 117 Aeromonas spp. were isolated from the water samples, and these organisms exhibited various antimicrobial susceptibility profiles. Notably, there was a significant correlation between the environmental concentration of tetracyclines and the rates of tetracycline resistance in the isolated Aeromonas spp. ; however, both the concentration and rates of tetracycline resistance in samples derived from pig farms were higher than those of samples harvested from other aquatic environments. These findings suggest that the high concentrations of antimicrobials observed in these aquatic environments likely select for ARGs. Furthermore, they indicate that Aeromonas spp. comprise an effective marker for monitoring antimicrobial resistance in aquatic environments.
Positioning atypical protein kinase C isoforms in the UV-induced apoptotic signaling cascade

Recent studies have documented the involvement of the atypical protein kinase C (aPKC) isoforms in important cellular functions such as cell proliferation and survival. Exposure of cells to a genotoxic stimulus that induces apoptosis, such as UV irradiation, leads to a profound inhibition of the atypical PKC activity in vivo. In this study, we addressed the relationship between this phenomenon and different proteins involved in the apoptotic response. We show that (i) the inhibition of the aPKC activity precedes UV-induced apoptosis; (ii) UV-induced aPKC inhibition and apoptosis are independent of p53; (iii) Bcl-2 proteins are potent modulators of aPKC activity; and (iv) the aPKCs are located upstream of the interleukin-converting enzyme-like protease system, which is required for the induction of apoptosis by both Par-4 (a selective aPKC inhibitor) and UV irradiation. We also demonstrate here that inhibition of aPKC activity leads to a decrease in mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase activity and simultaneously an increase in p38 activity. Both effects are critical for the induction of apoptosis in response to Par-4 expression and UV irradiation. Collectively, these results clarify the position of the aPKCs in the UV-induced apoptotic pathway and strongly suggest that MAP kinases play a role in this signaling cascade.
Remote ischemic preconditioning fails to improve early renal function of patients undergoing living-donor renal transplantation: a randomized controlled trial.

and liver transplantation is indicated only for patients with end-stage liver and cardiac disease or familial amyloidosis, limiting its clinical use. Recent reports have described the use of a partial auxiliary liver in the context of kidney transplantation (15, 16), demonstrating that the auxiliary liver may offer a protective effect when transplanted together with a kidney from the same donor, despite a positive crossmatch between the donor and the recipient. The results of the antibody analyses in these reports have supported the hypothesis that even smaller liver grafts protect the transplanted kidneys by reducing the levels of specific DSA reactivity. Whether such partial auxiliary liver transplants may be performed in the context of heart transplantation in patients with high titers of DSA is speculative. In conclusion, transplantation of a liver graft immediately before heart transplantation can achieve profound and sustained decrease in DSA and protect the transplanted heart for celland antibody-mediated rejection, even in the presence of preformed high titers of such antibodies. Combined heart and liver transplantation in ‘‘reversed order’’ may become a therapeutic option for highly sensitized patients waiting for a heart transplant. Richard C. Daly Yan Topilsky Lyle Joyce Tal Hasin Manish Gandhi Charles Rosen Julie Heimbach Brooks S. Edwards Naveen Pereira John M. Stulak Christopher J. Arendt Soon J. Park Sudhir S. Kushwaha 1 Division of Cardiovascular Surgery Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN 2 Division of Cardiovascular Disease Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN 3 Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN 4 Division of Transplant Surgery Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN 5 Division of Pharmacy and Therapeutics Mayo Clinic Rochester, MN
Planning and Using Resurrection City

Abstract Resurrection City was the dwelling place, on the Mall, of about 2,800 demonstrators brought to Washington, D.C., as part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “Poor People's Campaign of 1968. ” Rains and organizational difficulties within the City and the Campaign eventually caused severe problems; yet at the peak of its development it was a demonstration of people building for themselves with enthusiasm and pride. Though temporary, Resurrection City is a useful model of the community development process in action.
Synchronized Morphological and Syntactic Disambiguation for Arabic

In this paper, we present a unique approach to disambiguation Arabic using a synchronized rule-based model. This approach helps in highly accurate analysis of sentences. The analysis produces a semantic net like structure expressed by means of Universal Networking Language (UNL)- a recently proposed interlingua. Extremely varied and complex phenomena of Arabic language have been addressed.
Unambiguous SAR signal reconstruction from nonuniform displaced phase center sampling

The displaced phase center (DPC) technique will enable a wide-swath synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with high azimuth resolution. In a classic DPC system, the pulse repetition frequency (PRF) has to be chosen such that the SAR carrier moves just one half of its antenna length between subsequent radar pulses. Any deviation from this PRF will result in a nonuniform sampling of the synthetic aperture. This letter derives an innovative reconstruction algorithm and shows that an unambiguous reconstruction of a SAR signal is possible for nonuniform sampling of the synthetic aperture. This algorithm will also have great potential for multistatic satellite constellations as well as the dual receive antenna mode in Radarsat 2 and TerraSAR-X.
Empowering newly married women in Iran: A new method of social work intervention that uses a client-directed problem-solving model in both group and individual sessions

We set out to assess the processes by which a personal empowerment-oriented intervention based on learning spaces and the Rahyab problem-solving model can help newly married women in Iran to gain more control over their life situations. Learning to use the problem-solving model independently was an important component of this seven months’ educational program. A descriptive field study design based on qualitative methods was employed for data collection and analysis. The analysis of these processes showed how, through group and individual interventions, these women could influence their intimate relationships by altering their thoughts, their management of emotions, and their overt behavior. We invite more research on how empowerment-oriented interventions can be used to support newly married women as a part of family educational programs.
Secondary Effects of Glyphosate Action in Phelipanche aegyptiaca: Inhibition of Solute Transport from the Host Plant to the Parasite

It is currently held that glyphosate efficiently controls the obligate holoparasite Phelipanche aegyptiaca (Egyptian broomrape) by inhibiting its endogenous shikimate pathway, thereby causing a deficiency in aromatic amino acids (AAA). While there is no argument regarding the shikimate pathway being the primary site of the herbicide's action, the fact that the parasite receives a constant supply of nutrients, including proteins and amino acids, from the host does not fit with an AAA deficiency. This apparent contradiction implies that glyphosate mechanism of action in P. aegyptiaca is probably more complex and does not end with the inhibition of the AAA biosynthetic pathway alone. A possible explanation would lie in a limitation of the translocation of solutes from the host as a secondary effect. We examined the following hypotheses: (a) glyphosate does not affects P. aegyptiaca during its independent phase and (b) glyphosate has a secondary effect on the ability of P. aegyptiaca to attract nutrients, limiting the translocation to the parasite. By using a glyphosate-resistant host plant expressing the “phloem-mobile” green fluorescent protein (GFP), it was shown that glyphosate interacts specifically with P. aegyptiaca, initiating a deceleration of GFP translocation to the parasite within 24 h of treatment. Additionally, changes in the entire sugars profile (together with that of other metabolites) of P. aegyptiaca were induced by glyphosate. In addition, glyphosate did not impair germination or seedling development of P. aegyptiaca but begun to exert its action only after the parasite has established a connection to the host vascular system and became exposed to the herbicide. Our findings thus indicate that glyphosate does indeed have a secondary effect in P. aegyptiaca, probably as a consequence of its primary target inhibition—via inhibition of the translocation of phloem-mobile solutes to the parasite, as was simulated by the mobile GFP. The observed disruption in the metabolism of major sugars that are abundant in P. aegyptiaca within 48 h after glyphosate treatment provides a possible explanation for this inhibition of translocation and might reflect a critical secondary effect of the herbicide's primary action that results in loss of the parasite's superior sink for solutes.
Temporal and Spatial Coexistence of Archaeal and Bacterial amoA Genes and Gene Transcripts in Lake Lucerne

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Functional traits explain variation in plant life history strategies

Significance Plants have evolved diverse life history strategies to succeed in Earth’s varied environments. Some species grow quickly, produce copious seeds, and die within a few weeks. Other species grow slowly and rarely produce seeds but live thousands of years. We show that simple morphological measurements can predict where a species falls within the global range of life history strategies: species with large seeds, long-lived leaves, or dense wood have population growth rates influenced primarily by survival, whereas individual growth and fecundity have a stronger influence on the dynamics of species with small seeds, short-lived leaves, or soft wood. This finding increases the ability of scientists to represent complex population processes with a few easily measured character traits. Ecologists seek general explanations for the dramatic variation in species abundances in space and time. An increasingly popular solution is to predict species distributions, dynamics, and responses to environmental change based on easily measured anatomical and morphological traits. Trait-based approaches assume that simple functional traits influence fitness and life history evolution, but rigorous tests of this assumption are lacking, because they require quantitative information about the full lifecycles of many species representing different life histories. Here, we link a global traits database with empirical matrix population models for 222 species and report strong relationships between functional traits and plant life histories. Species with large seeds, long-lived leaves, or dense wood have slow life histories, with mean fitness (i.e., population growth rates) more strongly influenced by survival than by growth or fecundity, compared with fast life history species with small seeds, short-lived leaves, or soft wood. In contrast to measures of demographic contributions to fitness based on whole lifecycles, analyses focused on raw demographic rates may underestimate the strength of association between traits and mean fitness. Our results help establish the physiological basis for plant life history evolution and show the potential for trait-based approaches in population dynamics.
City Marketing: The Past, the Present and Some Unresolved Issues

For several decades now, cities all over the world have been applying marketing techniques and increasingly adopting a marketing philosophy to meet their operational and strategic goals. City marketing has grown into an established field of research and an academic subdiscipline. This article begins with a description of the three main historical episodes of city marketing development and then assesses its current state, suggesting that cities have moved into a fourth episode, which centres on the application of city branding. Despite the accumulated experience, however, many issues surrounding the application of city marketing remain in need of further theoretical development and practical clarification. The last part of this article therefore seeks to further the discussion about the effects of city marketing, seeking to elicit the latent potential that city marketing might still hold for the future prospects of cities.
Recognition of quantized still face images

In applications such as document understanding, only binary face images may be available as inputs to a face recognition (FR) algorithm. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the number of grey levels on PCA, multiple exemplar discriminant analysis (MEDA) and the elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) FR algorithms. The inputs to these FR algorithms are quantized images (binary images or images with small number of grey levels) modified by distance and Box-Cox transforms. The performances of PCA and MEDA algorithms are at 87.66% for images in FRGC version 1 experiment 1 after they are thresholded and transformed while the EBGM algorithm achieves only 37.5%. In many document understanding applications, it is also required to verify a degraded low-quality image against a high-quality image, both of which are from the same source. For this problem, the performances of PCA and MEDA are stable when the images were degraded by noise, downsampling or different thresholding parameters.
A Walk on the Human Side of Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecology is fundamentally a social and organizational construct. The article explores the centrality of human decision, imagination, skill, and process in effective industrial ecology applications. The role of self-organizing systems, social process, business drivers, industrial network theory and practice, environmental management systems, human resource strategies, and learning organizational constructs are presented as critical components of the industrial ecology concept and implementation. Broad inclusion of these conceptual and operational frameworks will assist in the spread of industrial ecology. Reductionist approaches to industrial ecology are challenged to seek systemic and socially cognizant strategies.
IDDT Testing: An Efficient Method for Detecting Delay Faults and Open Defects *

Some open defects in VLSI circuits may cause delay faults, and testing of open defects and delay faults remain difficult problem. In this paper, we show that i) some open defects cause delay faults and ii) those open defects and delay faults cause variations in I DDT waveforms. We propose a new IDDT testing method for detection of open defects and delay faults. Our method exploits the phenomenon that an open defect generates a local maximum in the I DDT waveform. We present experimental results performed on two test chips.
Automated Specification-based Testing of Interactive Components with AsmL

It is presented a promising approach to test interactive components, supporting the automatic generation of test cases from a specification. The relevance and difficulties (issues and challenges) associated with the testing of interactive components are first presented. It is shown that a formal specification with certain characteristics allows the automatic generation of test cases while solving some of the issues presented. The approach is illustrated with an example of automatic testing of the conformity between the implementation of a button, in the . Net framework, and a specification, written in the AsmL language, using the AsmL Tester tool. The conclusion discusses the characteristics of the tool and gives directions for future work. Index Terms — Formal Methods, Interactive Systems Testing. —————————— ——————————
Oral delivery of tumor‐targeting Salmonella exhibits promising therapeutic efficacy and low toxicity

Tumor‐targeting bacteria have been developed as powerful anticancer agents. Salmonella typhimurium VNP20009, a representative tumor‐targeting strain, has been systemically administered as a single‐agent therapy at doses of 1 × 106 to 3 × 106 colony‐forming unit (cfu)/mouse, or in combination with other antitumor agents at doses of 1 × 104 to 2 × 105 cfu/mouse. Recently, we reported that oral delivery of VNP20009 at the dose of 1 × 109 cfu/mouse induced significant anticancer effects comparable to that induced by systemic administration of this strain at 1 × 104 cfu/mouse. To further address the efficacy and safety of oral administration of bacteria, here we performed a systemically comparative analysis of anticancer efficacy and toxicity of VNP20009 administered: (i) orally at a dose of 1 × 109 cfu/mouse (VNP9‐oral); (ii) intraperitoneally at a dose of 1 × 104 cfu/mouse (VNP4‐i.p.); or (iii) intraperitoneally at a dose of 1 × 106 cfu/mouse in tumor‐free and tumor‐bearing murine models. The results showed that VNP9‐oral, similar to VNP4‐i.p., induced significant tumor growth inhibition whereas VNP6‐i.p. induced better anticancer effect in the B16F10 melanoma model. Among three treatments, VNP9‐oral induced the mildest and reversible toxicity whereas VNP6‐i.p. resulted in the most serious and irreversible toxicities when compared to other two treatments. Moreover, the combination of VNP9‐oral with a low dose of chemotherapeutics produced comparable antitumor effects but displayed significantly reduced toxicity when compared to VNP6‐i.p. The findings demonstrated that oral administration, as a novel avenue in the application of bacteria, is highly safe and effective. Moreover, the present preclinical study should facilitate the optimization of bacterial therapies with improved anticancer efficacy and reduced adverse effects in future clinical trials. (Cancer Sci 2009; 100: 2437–2443)