Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ACIDIFICATION OF ENDOCYTIC VESICLES AND THE INTRACELLULAR PATHWAYS OF LIGANDS AND RECEPTORS a

Receptor-mediated endocytosis is a process used by cells to rapidly and efficiently clear occupied receptors from the cell surface. Occupied receptors, and to some extent unoccupied receptors,', concentrate in specialized regions of the plasma membrane which have been identified as clathrin-coated pits. This high concentration of receptors within a small percentage of the cell surface area allows rapid clearance of receptors ( t , , , 5 min) with a minimum of plasma membrane In double-labeling studies, using fluorescein-labeled q-macroglobulin (F-a,M) and several rhodamine-labeled molecules, it has been shown that cqM enters the same endocytic vesicles in fibroblasts as insulin,' epidermal growth factor,' thyroid hormone,' and diphtheria toxin: Electron microscopic studies have shown that lowdensity lipoproteins', ' and enveloped viruses', also enter these same endocytic vesicles. Most of the ligands that enter cells by receptor-mediated endocytosis are degraded in lysosomes. However, the enzymatic portion of diphtheria toxin and the nucleocapsids of enveloped viruses must enter the cytoplasm. Some types of receptors (e.g., epidermal growth factor1',") are utilized only once or a few times, but others (e.g., qM,12 asialoglycoproteins," or low-density lipoproteins") return to the cell surface and are recycled. Since receptors and ligands enter the same endocytic vesicles but reach different intracellular destinations, it is evident that sorting must occur within the cell. From electron microscopic observations in mouse fibroblasts,". l6 we know that a,M remains in prelysosomal endocytic vesicles for approximately 20 min after endocytosis. Various kinetic studies on receptor re~ycling,'~ diphtheria toxin intoxification,'" l9 and virus penetration,' indicate that sorting must occur while ligands are still in endocytic vesicles. Work in several laboratories has indicated that exposure to a low-pH environment within the cell could account for many aspects of the sorting of ligands and receptors. Several ligands, including a,M, dissociate from their receptors at a mildly acidic PH. "-'~ Dissociation is obviously a requirement for recycling receptor systems. When diphtheria toxin is bound to cell surfaces and briefly exposed to pH 5.0, toxin chains cross the plasma membrane and enter the cytoplasm. '** I' Similarly, when Semliki Forest Virus is exposed to pH 5, the virus envelope fuses with the plasma membrane, and this allows entry of the nucleocapsid into the cytoplasm? ,' Fluorescein fluorescence is strongly pH dependent, and various fluorescein derivatives have been used to measure the pH of lys0somes,2~ phagosomes,28*29 and the ~ytoplasm. ~'. ~' We have used fluorescein-labeled q M to measure the pH within the endocytic vesicles where sorting is thought to occur, and the pH of the endocytic vesicles was found to be 5.0. 16 As discussed in this paper, various drugs have been
An Analysis of Perceptual Gaps among Chamber Management, Chamber Member Contacts, and a Proxy Sample of Chamber Member Employees: An Attempt to Improve Marketing Efficacy

Decreases in membership for a local chamber of commerce led the authors to conduct research to assist them in determining why they have been experiencing difficulty with business organization memberships within the last few years. This paper presents findings from an exploratory study that examined perceptual gaps on a series of factors that the authors believe when identified, may lead to improved marketing efficacy. Chamber management, chamber member contacts, and a proxy sample of chamber member employees for a local chamber of commerce completed surveys to assess the level of consistency among their perceptions of value added benefits of chamber membership. The authors believe the results of this study may be useful for other chambers of commerce and organizations when their long-term survival is dependent on active memberships. Note: The authors failed to provide
How to Render Frames and Influence People

Rendering systems generally treat the production of images as an objective process governed by the laws of physics. However, perception and understanding on the part of viewers are subjective processes influenced by a variety offactors. For example, in the presentation of architectural drawings, the apparent precision with which the drawings are made will affect whether the viewer considers the design as part of a preliminary design or as part of a final polished project, and to some extent the level of confidence the viewer has in the encoded information.
Leveraging Spectrum Sharing and Defragmentation to $p$ -Cycle Design in Elastic Optical Networks

In this letter, a new protection technique, namely Spectrum Shared pre-configured cycles (SS-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-cycles), is proposed for survivable elastic optical networks. SS-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-cycles permit to cut spectrum usage and spectrum fragmentation ratio (SFR) by leveraging special spectrum sharing among multiple <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-cycles that have common link(s). To compute SS-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-cycles, we first formulate an integer linear programming model to obtain the optimal solution in small instance, and then develop a time-efficient heuristic algorithm to solve large-scale instances. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed SS-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-cycles outperform conventional <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-cycles without spectrum sharing in terms of spectrum usage and SFR.
Burnout and coping strategies among hospital staff nurses.

This study examined the relationship between use of coping strategies and burnout among 150 randomly selected staff nurses from four hospitals. The instruments used were the frequency dimension of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson 1981) and the Ways of Coping (Revised) (Folkman & Lazarus 1985). In the canonical correlation analysis, two significant canonical variate sets differentiated nurses on the dimension of burnout. Nurses who experienced increased levels of burnout used the coping strategies of escape/avoidance, self-controlling and confronting (P less than 0.001). Nurses who experience decreased levels of burnout used the coping strategies of planful problem solving, positive reappraisal, seeking social support, and self-controlling (P less than 0.003). Self-controlling coping, although present in both variate sets, was used to a lesser extent by nurses with decreased burnout levels. The positive relationship between planful problem solving and reduced burnout levels supports the theoretical framework of Lazarus. This framework asserts that during the appraisal process, persons evaluate the harmfulness of an event and their own coping resources. Persons with lower levels of burnout may perceive the event as amenable to change or they may perceive their coping resources as adequate. Either perception may promote the view that the situation is amenable to problem solving. Another rationale for the effectiveness of particular coping strategies may lie in the reactions that these strategies engender in others. The use of planful problem solving, seeking social support and positive reappraisal has been reported to result in the offering of greater social support than when confronting and self-controlling coping were used. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Pedestrian detection based on background modeling and head-shoulder recognition

Pedestrian detection is of much importance for its practical applications. This paper develops a novel pedestrian detection system which consists of three stages: motion region detection based on background modeling, feature extraction in the guidance of prior information, and map-based classification applying support vector machine (SVM) and Adaboost. First of all, an adaptive Gaussian Mixture Model is proposed to reduce the search for human targets in the background region. Secondly, the paper extracts a variant of HOG (Histograms of Oriented Gradients) and Haar-like feature to describe pedestrians, according to the prior information of human's relatively stable head-shoulder structure in various views. Thirdly, for the best performance of feature descriptors, this paper applies the combination of SVM (Support Vector Machine) and Adaboost, separately for HOG and Haar-like feature, as the final classifier. Experiment results validate the effectiveness of our method.
Construction and characterization of a mercury‐independent MerR activator (MerRAC): transcriptional activation in the absence of Hg(II) is accompanied by DNA distortion.

The MeR regulatory protein of transposon Tn501 controls the expression of the mercury resistance (mer) genes in response to the concentration of mercuric ions. MerR is unique among prokaryotic regulatory proteins so far described in that it acts as a repressor [‐Hg(II)] and an activator [+Hg(II)] of transcription of the mer genes, but binds to a single site on the DNA in both cases. This transcriptional activation process has been postulated to involve a protein‐induced conformational change in the DNA that allows RNA polymerase more readily to form an open complex at the promoter. It has been shown [Frantz and O'Halloran (1990) Biochemistry, 29, 4747–4751] that activation of transcription by MerR in the presence of mercury is accompanied by hypersensitivity of the operator to chemical nucleases that are sensitive to local distortion in DNA structure. Here we describe specific mutations in MerR that allow the protein to stimulate transcription in the absence of the allosteric activator Hg(II). We demonstrate that the degree of activation caused by these mutants directly correlates with the degree of DNA distortion as measured by the hypersensitivity of MerR‐DNA complexes to the nuclease Cu‐5‐phenyl‐o‐phenanthroline. These results support the model described above.
The time-effect relationship of central action in acupuncture treatment for weight reduction.

PURPOSE To study the time-effect relationship of action of acupuncture on the satiety center of ventromedial nucleus of hypothalamus (VMH) in rats with experimental obesity. METHODS Microelectrode recording method of nerve cells and stereotaxic technique for brain were adopted with discharge frequency (Hz/s) of nerve impulse in VMH as the index, and the time-effect of acupuncture action in different periods between groups were observed. RESULTS Electric activity in acupuncture group was higher than in the obesity model group (P < 0.001) and the normal group (P < 0.01) respectively, and the curve of acupuncture action within 2 hours showed irregular fluctuation. CONCLUSION Acupuncture can increase excitability of the satiety center, with a better long-term effect.
Mobility , Security , and Autonomous Reconfigurability in Worldwide Computing

Autonomous reconfiguration of distributed systems is a critical component of reliable and efficient execution of programs over highly dynamic open large-scale computer networks. Autonomous reconfiguration requires program mobility and a comprehensive security framework. In this paper, we present an actor language with extensions for mobility and security, as well as the operational semantics to reason about these topics in distributed systems. Furthermore, we introduce a system reconfiguration decision function that enables autonomous actors to dynamically find their optimal network location based on availability of resources, such as network bandwidth, latencies and processing power. Finally, we describe our open-source World-Wide Computer framework and preliminary implementation results.
Long-Term Exposure to Traffic-Related Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Mortality

Background: Findings from previous cohort studies suggest a positive association between traffic-related air pollution and cardiovascular mortality. However, few studies have assessed intraurban variation in traffic-related pollution or evaluated cardiovascular effects at lower levels of pollution that are typically seen in Canadian cities. Methods: We conducted a cohort study of traffic-related air pollution and cardiovascular mortality among adults who lived in three cities in Ontario, Canada. Study members of the cohort were a random sample from the federal family income tax database, comprising 205,440 adults age 35–85 years, who lived in Toronto, Hamilton, or Windsor between 1982 and 1986. Follow-up ended on 31 December 2004. Mortality from cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases was ascertained using the Canadian Mortality Database. We estimated time-dependent concentrations of ambient nitrogen dioxide (NO2) from land-use regression models and assigned exposures to residences of subjects. Rate ratios (RRs) were estimated from Cox proportional hazard model adjusted for individual risk factors and selected contextual covariables. We adjusted indirectly for smoking and obesity. Results: The spatial distributions of NO2 did not change appreciably over the follow-up period. Cumulative exposure to NO2 was associated with a 12% increase in mortality from cardiovascular disease for each increase of 5 parts per billion of NO2 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 7%–17%) and a 15% increase (8%–21%) in mortality from ischemic heart disease. Risks of cardiovascular mortality were also increased with shorter term exposures, but the RRs were somewhat smaller. No association was found for cerebrovascular mortality (RR = 0.99 [95% CI = 0.91–1.08]). Conclusion: Traffic-related air pollution at relatively low concentrations in Ontario was associated with increased mortality from cardiovascular disease.
Effect of PA nonlinearities on max-ratio combining, transmit beamforming, and ST coding in OFDM

This paper gives a detailed analysis of the effects of Power Amplifier (PA) nonlinearities on various adaptive antenna techniques in OFDM. The analysis shows that Maximal Ratio Transmission (MRT) has a significant performance gain over PA nonlinearities compared to Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) and Alamouti Space-Time (ST) coding. Also, the analysis shows that the effect of the PA nonlinearities is the same for MRC and Alamouti encoding. The conclusion from the analysis is interest- ing because it means that when MRT is utilized by the transmit- ter, the PA can be driven further into its nonlinear region than for MRC or ST coding thus boosting the range of the communi- cation system (or allowing the use of less expensive PAs). Simula- tion results using measurements from a 20 watt solid-state broad- band PA are presented to verify the analytical expressions.
The Hypervariable Domain of the Murine Leukemia Virus Surface Protein Tolerates Large Insertions and Deletions, Enabling Development of a Retroviral Particle Display System

ABSTRACT The surface proteins (SU) of murine type-C retroviruses have a central hypervariable domain devoid of cysteine and rich in proline. This 41-amino-acid region of Friend ecotropic murine leukemia virus SU was shown to be highly tolerant of insertions and deletions. Viruses in which either the N-terminal 30 amino acids or the C-terminal 22 amino acids of this region were replaced by the 7-amino-acid sequence ASAVAGA were fully infectious. Insertions of this 7-amino-acid sequence at the N terminus, center, and the C terminus of the hypervariable domain had little effect on envelope protein (Env) function, while this insertion at a position 10 amino acids following the N terminus partially destabilized the association between the SU and transmembrane subunits of Env. Large, complex domains (either a 252-amino-acid single-chain antibody binding domain [scFv] or a 96-amino-acid V1/V2 domain of HIV-1 SU containing eight N-linked glycosylation sites and two disulfides) did not interfere with Env function when inserted in the center or C-terminal portions of the hypervariable domain. The scFv domain inserted into the C-terminal region of the hypervariable domain was shown to mediate binding of antigen to viral particles, demonstrating that it folded into the active conformation and was displayed on the surface of the virion. Both positive and negative enrichment of virions expressing the V1/V2 sequence were achieved by using a monoclonal antibody specific for a conformational epitope presented by the inserted sequence. These results indicated that the hypervariable domain of Friend ecotropic SU does not contain any specific sequence or structure that is essential for Env function and demonstrated that insertions into this domain can be used to extend particle display methodologies to complex protein domains that require expression in eukaryotic cells for glycosylation and proper folding.
Neuroinflammation and ALS: Transcriptomic Insights into Molecular Disease Mechanisms and Therapeutic Targets

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting the motor nervous system. Despite the mechanism underlying motor neuron death is not yet clarified, multiple pathogenic processes have been proposed to account for ALS. Among these, inflammatory/immune responses have recently gained particular interest, although there are conflicting reports on the role of these processes in ALS pathogenesis and treatment. This apparent discrepancy may be due to the absence of an effective stratification of ALS patients into subgroups with markedly different clinical, biological, and molecular features. Our research group recently described genome-wide characterization of motor cortex samples from sporadic ALS (SALS) patients, revealing the existence of molecular and functional heterogeneity in SALS. Here, we reexamine data coming from our previous work, focusing on transcriptomic changes of inflammatory-related genes, in order to investigate their potential contribution in ALS. A total of 1573 inflammatory genes were identified as differentially expressed between SALS patients and controls, characterizing distinct topological pathways and networks, suggestive of specific inflammatory molecular signatures for different patient subgroups. Besides providing promising insights into the intricate relationship between inflammation and ALS, this paper represents a starting point for the rationale design and development of novel and more effective diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
Proposal Verb Semantics for Natural Language Understanding

A verb is the organizational core of a sentence. Understanding the meaning of the verb is therefore key to understanding the meaning of the sentence. Natural language understanding is the problem of mapping natural language text to its meaning representation: entities and relations anchored to the world. Since verbs express relations over their arguments in text, a lexical resource about verbs can facilitate natural language understanding by mapping verbs in text to relations over entities expressed by their arguments in the world. In this thesis, we propose an automatic construction of a verb resource that contains important semantics for natural language understanding. We propose to learn three important semantics about verbs that will complement existing resources on verbs such as WordNet and VerbNet. The three semantics are (1) the mapping of verbs to relations in knowledge bases, (2) the preand post-conditions of each verb on its arguments: the entry condition of entities that allow an event expressed by the verb to take place and the condition of entities that will be true after the event occurs, (3) the temporal sequences of verbs. The mapping of verbs to relations in knowledge bases such as NELL, YAGO, or Freebase can provide a direct link between the text and the background knowledge about the world in the knowledge bases; enabling inferences over the world knowledge to better understand the text. The preand post-conditions of verbs on their arguments and the temporal sequences of verbs will open a range of new inference options for natural language understanding; for example for predicting events, for temporal scoping of events, for inferring the cascading effect of events, for inferring the states of entities in text, or for understanding the meaning of a sentence in the context of other sentences in the same document.
Neurovascular invasion at the osteochondral junction and in osteophytes in osteoarthritis

Background: Normal adult articular cartilage is thought to be avascular and aneural. Objective: To describe neurovascular structures at the osteochondral junction and in osteophytes in tibiofemoral osteoarthritis (OA) displaying a range of severity of cartilage changes. Methods: Articular surfaces were obtained from 40 patients at total knee joint replacement surgery for tibiofemoral OA (TKR) and seven patients post mortem (PM). Antibodies directed against CD34 (vascular endothelium), protein gene product 9.5 (pan-neuronal marker), substance P and calcitonin gene-related peptide (sensory nerves) and C-flanking peptide of neuropeptide Y (sympathetic nerves) were used to localise blood vessels and nerves by immunohistochemistry. Severity of OA cartilage changes was graded histologically. Results: TKR and PM samples displayed a range of OA cartilage changes including tidemark breaching by vascular channels. Sympathetic and sensory nerves were both present within vascular channels in the articular cartilage, in both mild and severe OA. Perivascular and free nerve fibres, and nerve trunks were observed within the subchondral bone marrow and within the marrow cavities of osteophytes. Sensory and sympathetic nerves displayed similar distributions in each region studied. Conclusion: Vascularisation and the associated innervation of articular cartilage may contribute to tibiofemoral pain in OA across a wide range of structural disease severity.
Concepts for in-memory event tracing: runtime event reduction with hierarchical memory buffers

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems are getting more and more powerful but more and more complex, as well. Supportive environments, such as performance analysis tools, are essential to assist developers in utilizing the tremendous computational resources of such complex systems. For long-running and large-scale parallel applications, event-based performance analysis faces three challenges, yet unsolved: the number of resulting trace files limits scalability, the huge amount of collected data overwhelms file system and analysis capabilities, and the measurement bias, in particular, due to intermediate memory buffer flushes prevents a correct and meaningful analysis. This thesis proposes concepts for an in-memory event tracing workflow to meet these challenges. These concepts include new enhanced encoding techniques to increase memory efficiency, novel strategies for runtime event reduction to dynamically adapt trace size during runtime, and the Hierarchical Memory Buffer data structure, which incorporates a multi-dimensional, hierarchical ordering of events by common metrics, such as time stamp, calling context, event class, and function call duration. These concepts allow a trace size reduction of up to three orders of magnitude and can keep an entire measurement within a single fixed-size memory buffer, while still providing a coarse but meaningful analysis of the application.