Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resveratrol can both enhance and relax adrenergic contractions of the rat tail artery

Our aims were to determine 1) if resveratrol's vasorelaxant action is greater in the distal (resistance) versus proximal (conductance) portion of the rat tail artery, and 2) if it can be blocked by agents known to block different potassium (K) channels in arterial smooth muscle. We found that its half-maximally effective concentration values were essentially identical (25 ± 3 versus 27 ± 3 μM) for relaxing adrenergically-precontracted rings prepared from distal versus proximal tissues. This does not confirm a previous report of greater relaxation in resistance versus conductance arteries. We also found that its relaxation could not be blocked by any of seven different K channel blockers. However, we uncovered a novel unanticipated action not yet reported. In half our arterial ring preparations, resveratrol transiently enhanced adrenergically-induced precontractions beginning well before its sustained relaxant effect became apparent. This action provides the first reasonable explanation for previously unexplained increases in arterial pressures observed during acute intravenous administration of resveratrol to animal models of traumatic ischemic tissue injury, in which hypotension is often present and in need of correction. Also unanticipated, this same transient enhancement of adrenergic contraction was notably inhibited by some of the same K channel blockers (particularly tetraethylammonium and glibenclamide) that failed to influence its relaxant effect. Although we do not rule out smooth muscle as a possible site for such a paradoxical finding, we suspect resveratrol could also be acting on K-selective mechano-sensitive ion channels located in the endothelium where they may participate in release of contracting factors.
Na+/K+ ATPase α1 and α3 Isoforms Are Differentially Expressed in α- and γ-Motoneurons

The Na+/K+ ATPase (NKA) is an essential membrane protein underlying the membrane potential in excitable cells. Transmembrane ion transport is performed by the catalytic α subunits (α1–4). The predominant subunits in neurons are α1 and α3, which have different affinities for Na+ and K+, impacting on transport kinetics. The exchange rate of Na+/K+ markedly influences the activity of the neurons expressing them. We have investigated the distribution and function of the main isoforms of the α subunit expressed in the mouse spinal cord. NKAα1 immunoreactivity (IR) displayed restricted labeling, mainly confined to large ventral horn neurons and ependymal cells. NKAα3 IR was more widespread in the spinal cord, again being observed in large ventral horn neurons, but also in smaller interneurons throughout the dorsal and ventral horns. Within the ventral horn, the α1 and α3 isoforms were mutually exclusive, with the α3 isoform in smaller neurons displaying markers of γ-motoneurons and α1 in α-motoneurons. The α3 isoform was also observed within muscle spindle afferent neurons in dorsal root ganglia with a higher proportion at cervical versus lumbar regions. We confirmed the differential expression of α subunits in motoneurons electrophysiologically in neonatal slices of mouse spinal cord. γ-Motoneurons were excited by bath application of low concentrations of ouabain that selectively inhibit NKAα3 while α-motoneurons were insensitive to these low concentrations. The selective expression of NKAα3 in γ-motoneurons and muscle spindle afferents, which may affect excitability of these neurons, has implications in motor control and disease states associated with NKAα3 dysfunction.
Exploring the Unconscious Nature of Insight Using Continuous Flash Suppression and a Dual Task

A growing body of evidence suggests that implicit information processing has considerable effects on the higherorder cognitive processes such as insight problem solving. Is such implicit information stored within the working memory system, or is it processed in a storage system other than working memory? To differentiate these two possibilities, the present study examined solution of the T-puzzle, an insight problem, after participants were or were not subliminally presented with the hint images by using the continuous flash suppression (CFS). A spatial tapping task, which is deemed to interfere with spatial working memory, was introduced during CFS. The two hypotheses each predicted deteriorated and maintained performance on the T-puzzle after the tapping task. Contrary to these hypotheses, participants tended to exhibit better solution performance and relaxation of constraints after having the tapping task, either with or without subliminal presentation of the hints. Mechanisms by which the secondary task may facilitate insight problem solving are discussed.
Changing Labour Markets and Early Career Outcomes: Labour Market Entry in Europe Over the Past Decade

The paper addresses the driving forces behind recent changes in labour market outcomes among market entrants in Europe. Based on data for 12 European countries from the 1988-97 European Community Labour Force Surveys, the empirical analyses estimate panel data models to assess the effects of cyclical changes in aggregate economic conditions, changing youth cohort sizes, increasing educational expansion and structural changes in labour demand on market entrants' unemployment risks and occupational allocation. In general, it is found that unemployment risks have closely followed the evolution of aggregate economic conditions with only slight impact from demographic factors. Changes in occupational allocation, in turn, are more dependent on the relative evolution of educational expansion and occupational upgrading trends. In addition, these trends have not affected all school leavers evenly: the lowest qualified are most heavily affected by cyclical changes in economic conditions, while leavers from tertiary level education have been more strongly affected by recent trends of changing occupational attainment. More troublesome, however, is that continuing occupational upgrading is established to contribute to increasing labour market difficulties in particular among the lowest qualified leavers.
Fuzzy Detection of Malicious Attacks on Web Applications Based on Hidden Markov Model Ensemble

This paper represents a system, which detects malicious HTTP request and obtains the lowest false-positive rate with high detection rate. For this purpose, each extracted feature of a HTTP request is modeled by multiple hidden Markov models as a classifier ensemble. HMMs outputs of an ensemble are fused to product a probabilistic value that showing normalcy of corresponding feature. In this system, instead of a threshold, a fuzzy inference is applied to produce a flexible decision boundary. So, fuzzy sets and rules of decision module are formed manually, next, output of each HMM ensemble is converted to a fuzzy value with respect to fuzzy sets. Finally, a fuzzy inference engine uses these values to produce output that indicates whether the HTTP request is normal or abnormal. Experiments show that this approach is flexible and has acceptable accuracy in detecting requests close to the decision boundary, and false-positive rate is 0.79%.
Role of the β-Chemokine Receptors CCR3 and CCR5 in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection of Monocytes and Microglia

ABSTRACT Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection in mononuclear phagocyte lineage cells (monocytes, macrophages, and microglia) is a critical component in the pathogenesis of viral infection. Viral replication in macrophages serves as a reservoir, a site of dissemination, and an instigator for neurological sequelae during HIV-1 disease. Recent studies demonstrated that chemokine receptors are necessary coreceptors for HIV-1 entry which determine viral tropism for different cell types. To investigate the relative contribution of the β-chemokine receptors CCR3 and CCR5 to viral infection of mononuclear phagocytes we utilized a panel of macrophage-tropic HIV-1 strains (from blood and brain tissue) to infect highly purified populations of monocytes and microglia. Antibodies to CD4 (OKT4A) abrogated HIV-1 infection. The β chemokines and antibodies to CCR3 failed to affect viral infection of both macrophage cell types. Antibodies to CCR5 (3A9) prevented monocyte infection but only slowed HIV replication in microglia. Thus, CCR5, not CCR3, is an essential receptor for HIV-1 infection of monocytes. Microglia express both CCR5 and CCR3, but antibodies to them fail to inhibit viral entry, suggesting the presence of other chemokine receptors for infection of these cells. These studies demonstrate the importance of mononuclear phagocyte heterogeneity in establishing HIV-1 infection and persistence.
IETF 6TSCH: Combining IPv6 Connectivity with Industrial Performance

This document presents a new work called 6TSCH that is starting at the IETF to enable a large IPv6 multi-link subnet with industrial-grade performances of jitter, latency and reliability. The subnet is composed of a high speed powered backbone and a number of IEEE802.15. 4e TSCH wireless mesh networks attached and synchronized by specialized Backbone Routers. Route Computation may be achieved in a centralized or in a distributed fashion, and tracks are installed to forward well-known flows with deterministic properties along their multi-hop path.
The Effect of IT Complementary Resources on Fast Growth Small-to-Medium Enterprise Performance: A Resource-based View

Owing to limited resources available to small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) to take advantage of technologies, IT is regarded as less important to SMEs compared with larger firms. Understanding whether and how IT helps SMEs to achieve business advantage still remains unclear. Drawing upon the resource-based view theory, the information systems (IS) and fast growth company literature, we develop and test a theoretical model that integrates IT complementary resources, business process performance and firm performance. We propose that fast growth SMEs are highly entrepreneurial and innovative, know how to strategically utilize IT to improve business processes and thus achieve rapid growth. Structural equation modeling is employed to test our theoretical conceptualization of 310 Australian fast-growth SMEs across different industrial sectors. The results show that IT complementary resources do lead to firm growth through enhancing activity integration and information sharing processes along the value chains. This research contributes to the ongoing debate of IT business value in the SME context and highlights the ways in which IT helps fast growth SMEs to achieve business success.
QoS performance of optical burst switching in IP-over-WDM networks

We address the issue of how to provide basic quality of service (QoS) in optical burst-switched WDM networks with limited fiber delay lines (FDLs). Unlike existing buffer-based QoS schemes, the novel offset-time-based QoS scheme we study in this paper does not mandate any buffer for traffic isolation, but nevertheless can take advantage of FDLs to improve the QoS. This makes the proposed QoS scheme suitable for the next generation optical Internet. The offset times required for class isolation when making wavelength and FDL reservations are quantified, and the upper and lower bounds on the burst loss probability are analyzed. Simulations are also conducted to evaluate the QoS performance in terms of burst loss probability and queuing delay. We show that with limited FDLs, the offset-time-based QoS scheme can be very efficient in supporting basic QoS.
Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates

Although common in birds, social monogamy, or pair-living, is rare among mammals because internal gestation and lactation in mammals makes it advantageous for males to seek additional mating opportunities. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of social monogamy among mammals: as a male mate-guarding strategy, because of the benefits of biparental care, or as a defense against infanticidal males. However, comparative analyses have been unable to resolve the root causes of monogamy. Primates are unusual among mammals because monogamy has evolved independently in all of the major clades. Here we combine trait data across 230 primate species with a Bayesian likelihood framework to test for correlated evolution between monogamy and a range of traits to evaluate the competing hypotheses. We find evidence of correlated evolution between social monogamy and both female ranging patterns and biparental care, but the most compelling explanation for the appearance of monogamy is male infanticide. It is only the presence of infanticide that reliably increases the probability of a shift to social monogamy, whereas monogamy allows the secondary adoption of paternal care and is associated with a shift to discrete ranges. The origin of social monogamy in primates is best explained by long lactation periods caused by altriciality, making primate infants particularly vulnerable to infanticidal males. We show that biparental care shortens relative lactation length, thereby reducing infanticide risk and increasing reproductive rates. These phylogenetic analyses support a key role for infanticide in the social evolution of primates, and potentially, humans.
Some Problems and Results on Combinatorial Number Theory

I have written many papers with similar titles during my long life. I will try to write this paper in such a way that it will not entirely be contained in the union of the set of my previous papers and that a t least some of the open problems I state will not be entirely hopeless. Perhaps the most interesting and significant results are those connected with van der Waerden’s and SzemerCdi’s theorem, but since I and others have written a great deal about these questions, I will include only a short discussion of these problems at the end of the paper. For a rich source of solved and unsolved problems in combinatorial number theory, see [ 10,201. First of all I mention a few old problems and results. First a very simple old well-known result of mine.
A Study of Offline Events and Its Influence on Online Social Connections in Douban

Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter are popular for finding, promoting and attending offline events like meetings, concerts and parties. Much work has looked into characterizing these social networks and their user behavior, but less has been explored about the events. With the emergence of event and activity-based applications such as Facebook Events, Google+ Events, EventBrite, Meet up, and Douban Events (a similar service in China), we can connect with other people online and meet them offline. In this paper, we study the user behavior around people attending offline events which are promoted online using Douban. We present results around the event properties, user behavior around the event, and social influence to an event. Our results show that event distribution by participants and wishers follow the typical power-law distribution of social networks, most users attend or like short events that last several days, and that there is an exponential relationship between follow probability and number of common events attended between two users and a linear relationship for common events interested in. All these findings can ultimately help to provide a better understanding on how SNS could affect user behavior in events, and provide guidelines on how to improve the design of event-based applications, particularly for mobile social network services.
Family Matters: Child Welfare in Twentieth-Century New Zealand

How well are children in New Zealand cared for? This question is now being asked with increasing urgency. This book provides a background to the debate by tracing the development of child welfare in New Zealand. It begins in 1902, with the pioneering steps towards the state taking responsibility for child welfare, and ends in 1992 with the creation of the Children and Young Persons Service. It discusses, among other things, the creative ideas of John Beck, the role of courts and custodial institutions, juvenile delinquency, adoption and fostering. The actual experiences of children and their families and of workers in child welfare are used to illustrate this history.
Human-voice enhancement based on online RPCA for a hose-shaped rescue robot with a microphone array

This paper presents an online real-time method that enhances human voices included in severely noisy audio signals captured by microphones of a hose-shaped rescue robot. To help a remote operator of such a robot pick up a weak voice of a human buried under rubble, it is crucial to suppress the loud ego-noise caused by the movements of the robot in real time. We tackle this task by using online robust principal component analysis (ORPCA) for decomposing the spectrogram of an observed noisy signal into the sum of low-rank and sparse spectrograms that are expected to correspond to periodic ego-noise and human voices. Using a microphone array distributed on the long body of a hose-shaped robot, ego-noise suppression can be further improved by combining the results of ORPCA applied to the observed signal captured by each microphone. Experiments using a 3-m hose-shaped rescue robot with eight microphones show that the proposed method improves the performance of conventional ego-noise suppression using only one microphone by 7.4 dB in SDR and 17.2 in SIR.
Protecting personal health information : The roles of context , framing and priming in privacy-related choices

One such method of influencing decision making involves wording of the question. For example, when asked to choose between two options, participants tend to select the option with the strongest positive features; however, when asked to reject one of two options, participants tend to select (reject) the option with the strongest negative features. The option people reject and choose could well be the same [2].
Behavioral Detection of Malicious Programs on Mobile Handsets

The rapidly growing capability and world-wide proliferation of smart phones and mobile handhelds have begun to attract the attention of virus writers in recent years. The p ast three years alone have witnessed an exponential rise in the number of distinct mobile malware families to over 30, and their variants to more than 170. These malware can spread via Bluetooth and SMS/MMS messages, enable remote control of a device, modify critical system files, damage existing applications including anti-virus programs, and block MMC memory cards, to name a few. Current-generation mobile anti-virus solutions are primitive when compared to their desktop counterparts, and may not be scalable given th e small footprint of mobile devices as new families of crossplatform malware continue to appear. This paper proposes a novel behavioral detection framework to capture mobile worms, viruses and Trojans, instead of the signature-based solutions currently available for m bile devices. First, we generate a database of malicious behavior signatures by studying over 25 distinct families of mobile viruses and worms targeting the Symbian OS, including their 140 variants, reported to date. Next, we describe a two-stage mapping technique that constructs these signatures at run-time from monitoring the system events and API calls in Symbian OS. We discriminate malicious behavior of malware from normal behavior of applications by training a classifier based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Our evaluation results indicate that behavioral detection ca identify current mobile viruses and worms with over 96% accuracy. We also find that the time and resource overheads of constructing the behavior signatures from low-level API calls are acceptably low for practical deployment. Most mobile device manufacturers and mobile service providers can implement our proposed framework without any major modification of the handset operating environment.
A Hybrid Data Clustering Approach Based on Cat Swarm Optimization and K-Harmonic Mean Algorithm

Clustering is an important task that is used to find subsets of similar objects from a set of objects such that the objects in the same subsets are more similar than other subsets. Large number of algorithms has been developed to solve the clustering problem. K-Harmonic Mean (KHM) is one of the popular technique that has been applied in clustering as a substitute of K-Means algorithm because it is insensitive to initialization issues due to built in boosting function. But, this method is also trapped in local optima. On the other hand, Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) is the latest population based optimization method used for global optimization. In this paper a hybrid data clustering method is proposed based on CSO and KHM which includes the advantage of both algorithms and named as CSOKHM. The hybrid CSOKHM not only improved the convergence speed of CSO but also escape the KHM method to run in local optima. The performance of the CSOKHM is evaluated using seven datasets and compared with KHM, PSO, PSOKHM, ACA, ACAKHM, GSAKHM, CSO methods. The experimental results show the applicability of CSOKHM method.
Controlled generation in example-based machine translation

The theme of controlled translation is currently in vogue in the area of MT. Recent research (Scha ̈ler et al., 2003; Carl, 2003) hypothesises that EBMT systems are perhaps best suited to this challenging task. In this paper, we present an EBMT system where the generation of the target string is filtered by data written according to controlled language specifications. As far as we are aware, this is the only research available on this topic. In the field of controlled language applications, it is more usual to constrain the source language in this way rather than the target. We translate a small corpus of controlled English into French using the on-line MT system Logomedia, and seed the memories of our EBMT system with a set of automatically induced lexical resources using the Marker Hypothesis as a segmentation tool. We test our system on a large set of sentences extracted from a Sun Translation Memory, and provide both an automatic and a human evaluation. For comparative purposes, we also provide results for Logomedia itself.
Computers And Productivity In France: Some Evidence

In this paper, we make a first attempt to explore the relationship between computer use and productivity in French manufacturing and services industries. We match information on computer utilization in the work place collected at the employee level in the years 1987,1991 and 1993, with information on firm productivity, capital intensity and average wage available at the firm level. Being based on the answers of very few interviewed employees (only one for 75% of the firms in our samples), our measure of firm computer use is subject to important sampling errors, and hence our estimates of computer impacts are largely affected by random errors in variables downward biases. Nonetheless we find coherent and persuasive evidence that the computer impacts on productivity are indeed positive and that the returns to the firm should at least be in the same range as the returns to the other types of capital. We also show that the sampling errors in measurement biases can be assessed, and we make the general point that econometric studies of the firm can be effectively and substantially enriched by using information collected from workers, even if very few of them are surveyed per firm.
The mediating role of IT knowledge integration capability in the relationship between team performance and team climate

The purpose of our paper is twofold: on one hand we draw on the team climate literature to understand how IT knowledge integration capability can be promoted within team-based structures; on the other hand we rely on resource-based view framework for understanding how IT knowledge integration capability affects teams performance, in terms of effectiveness, and efficiency. We tested our research model on a sample of 410 members and leaders of 69 organizational work teams. Results show the critical role played by team climate for favouring IT knowledge integration capability, which in turn affects team outcomes.