Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of the Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1/CC Chemokine Receptor 2 System on Nephrin Expression in Streptozotocin-Treated Mice and Human Cultured Podocytes

OBJECTIVE Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), a chemokine binding to the CC chemokine receptor 2 (CCR2) and promoting monocyte infiltration, has been implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy. To assess the potential relevance of the MCP-1/CCR2 system in the pathogenesis of diabetic proteinuria, we studied in vitro if MCP-1 binding to the CCR2 receptor modulates nephrin expression in cultured podocytes. Moreover, we investigated in vivo if glomerular CCR2 expression is altered in kidney biopsies from patients with diabetic nephropathy and whether lack of MCP-1 affects proteinuria and expression of nephrin in experimental diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Expression of nephrin was assessed in human podocytes exposed to rh-MCP-1 by immunofluorescence and real-time PCR. Glomerular CCR2 expression was studied in 10 kidney sections from patients with overt nephropathy and eight control subjects by immunohistochemistry. Both wild-type and MCP-1 knockout mice were made diabetic with streptozotocin. Ten weeks after the onset of diabetes, albuminuria and expression of nephrin, synaptopodin, and zonula occludens-1 were examined by immunofluorescence and immunoblotting. RESULTS In human podocytes, MCP-1 binding to the CCR2 receptor induced a significant reduction in nephrin both mRNA and protein expression via a Rho-dependent mechanism. The MCP-1 receptor, CCR2, was overexpressed in the glomerular podocytes of patients with overt nephropathy. In experimental diabetes, MCP-1 was overexpressed within the glomeruli and the absence of MCP-1 reduced both albuminuria and downregulation of nephrin and synaptopodin. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that the MCP-1/CCR2 system may be relevant in the pathogenesis of proteinuria in diabetes.
Characterizing Multivariate Information Flows

One of the crucial steps in scientiﬁc studies is to specify de pen-dent relationships among factors in a system of interest. Givenlittle knowledge of a system, can we characterize the underlyingdependent relationships through observation of its temporal be-haviors? In multivariate systems, there are potentially many pos-sible dependentstructures confusable with each other, and it maycause false detection of illusory dependency between unrelatedfactors. The present study proposes a new information-theoreticmeasure with consideration to such potential multivariate rela-tionships. The proposed measure, called multivariate transferentropy, is an extension of transfer entropy, a measure of tem-poral predictability. In the simulations and empirical studies, wedemonstrated that the proposedmeasure characterized the latentdependentrelationships in unknowndynamical systems more ac-curately than its alternative measure.
Optimal Redistributive Capital Taxation in a Neoclassical Growth Model

This paper provides a counterexample to the simplest version of the redistribution models considered by Judd (1985) in which the government chooses an optimal distortionary tax on capitalists to finance a lump-sum payment to workers. I show that the steady-state optimal tax on capital income is generally non-zero when the capitalists' utility is logarithmic and the government faces a balanced-budget constraint. With log utility, agents' optimal decisions depend solely on the current rate of return, not any future rates of return or tax rates. This feature of the economy effectively deprives the government of a useful policy instrument because promises about future tax rates can no longer influence current allocations. When combined with a lack of other suitable policy instruments (such as government bonds), the result is an inability to decentralize the allocations that are consistent with a zero limiting capital tax. I show that the standard approach to solving the dynamic optimal tax problem yields the wrong answer in this (knife-edge) case because it fails to properly enforce the constraints associated with the competitive equilibrium. Specifically, the standard approach lets in an additional policy instrument through the back door.
Efficient extraction of news articles based on RSS crawling

The expansion of the World Wide Web has led to a state where a vast amount of Internet users face and have to overcome the major problem of discovering desired information. It is inevitable that hundreds of web pages and weblogs are generated daily or changing on a daily basis. The main problem that arises from the continuous generation and alteration of web pages is the discovery of useful information, a task that becomes difficult even for the experienced internet users. Many mechanisms have been constructed and presented in order to overcome the puzzle of information discovery on the Internet and they are mostly based on crawlers which are browsing the WWW, downloading pages and collect the information that might be of user interest. In this manuscript we describe a mechanism that fetches web pages that include news articles from major news portals and blogs. This mechanism is constructed in order to support tools that are used to acquire news articles from all over the world, process them and present them back to the end users in a personalized manner.
The Interrelationships between Lactose Intolerance and the Modern Dairy Industry: Global Perspectives in Evolutional and Historical Backgrounds

Humans learned to exploit ruminants as a source of milk about 10,000 years ago. Since then, the use of domesticated ruminants as a source of milk and dairy products has expanded until today when the dairy industry has become one of the largest sectors in the modern food industry, including the spread at the present time to countries such as China and Japan. This review analyzes the reasons for this expansion and flourishing. As reviewed in detail, milk has numerous nutritional advantages, most important being almost an irreplaceable source of dietary calcium, hence justifying the effort required to increase its consumption. On the other hand, widespread lactose intolerance among the adult population is a considerable drawback to dairy-based foods consumption. Over the centuries, three factors allowed humans to overcome limitations imposed by lactose intolerance: (i) mutations, which occurred in particular populations, most notably in the north European Celtic societies and African nomads, in which carriers of the lactose intolerance gene converted from being lactose intolerant to lactose tolerant; (ii) the ability to develop low-lactose products such as cheese and yogurt; and (iii) colon microbiome adaptation, which allow lactose intolerant individuals to overcome its intolerance. However, in a few examples in the last decade, modern dairy products, such as the popular and widespread bio-cultured yogurts, were suspected to be unsuitable for lactose intolerant peoples. In addition, the use of lactose and milk-derived products containing lactose in non-dairy products has become widespread. For these reasons, it is concluded that it might be important and helpful to label food that may contain lactose because such information will allow lactose intolerant groups to control lactose intake within the physiological limitations of ~12 g per a single meal.
Tool-specific performance of vibration-reducing gloves for attenuating fingers-transmitted vibration

BACKGROUND Fingers-transmitted vibration can cause vibration-induced white finger. The effectiveness of vibration-reducing (VR) gloves for reducing hand transmitted vibration to the fingers has not been sufficiently examined. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to examine tool-specific performance of VR gloves for reducing finger-transmitted vibrations in three orthogonal directions (3D) from powered hand tools. METHODS A transfer function method was used to estimate the tool-specific effectiveness of four typical VR gloves. The transfer functions of the VR glove fingers in three directions were either measured in this study or during a previous study using a 3D laser vibrometer. More than seventy vibration spectra of various tools or machines were used in the estimations. RESULTS When assessed based on frequency-weighted acceleration, the gloves provided little vibration reduction. In some cases, the gloves amplified the vibration by more than 10%, especially the neoprene glove. However, the neoprene glove did the best when the assessment was based on unweighted acceleration. The neoprene glove was able to reduce the vibration by 10% or more of the unweighted vibration for 27 out of the 79 tools. If the dominant vibration of a tool handle or workpiece was in the shear direction relative to the fingers, as observed in the operation of needle scalers, hammer chisels, and bucking bars, the gloves did not reduce the vibration but increased it. CONCLUSIONS This study confirmed that the effectiveness for reducing vibration varied with the gloves and the vibration reduction of each glove depended on tool, vibration direction to the fingers, and finger location. VR gloves, including certified anti-vibration gloves do not provide much vibration reduction when judged based on frequency-weighted acceleration. However, some of the VR gloves can provide more than 10% reduction of the unweighted vibration for some tools or workpieces. Tools and gloves can be matched for better effectiveness for protecting the fingers.
Improved Sentence Similarity Algorithm based on VSM and its application in Question Answering System

In the FAQ-based Chinese Question Answering System, the most critical issue is how to calculate the similarity between the user questions and the questions in the FAQ. The traditional VSM-based Sentence Similarity Algorithm usually regards word as the basic linguistic unit of sentences and mainly considers the statistical information of words in questions, but doesn't take the word importance in the professional field and the semantic information of words into account. For these reasons, this paper proposes an Improved Sentence Similarity Algorithm Based on VSM, regarding notion as the basic linguistic unit of sentences, through conceptually abstracting and professionally classifying to improve the performance of Sentence Similarity Algorithm. Testing in Chinese FAQ system of specific areas, experimental result shows that the performance of the improved algorithm is superior to the traditional VSM-based sentence similarity algorithm evidently.
The role of cue enhancement and frequency fine-tuning in hearing impaired phone recognition

A speech-based hearing test is designed to identify the susceptible error-prone phones for individual hearing impaired (HI) ear. Only robust tokens in the experiments' noise levels had been chosen for the test. The noise-robustness of tokens is measured as SNR90s of the token, which is the signal to the speech-weighted noise ratio where an NH listener would recognize the token with an accuracy of 90% on average. Two sets of tokens T1 and T2 having the same consonant-vowels but different talkers with distinct SNR90s had been presented at flat gain at listeners' most comfortable level. We studied the effects of frequency fine-tuning of the primary cue by presenting tokens of the same consonant but different vowels with similar SNR90s. Additionally, we investigated the role of changing the intensity of primary cue in HI phone recognition, by presenting tokens from both sets T1 and T2. On average, 85% of tokens are improved when we replaced the CV with the same CV but with a more robust talker. Additionally, using CVs with similar SNR90, on average, tokens are improved by 28%, 28%, 25%, and 19%, when we replaced the vowel with ɑ, ɛ, ə, and ɪ. The confusion pattern in each case provides insight into how these changes affect the phone recognition in each HI ear. We propose to prescribe hearing aid amplification tailored to individual HI ears, based on the confusion pattern, the response from cue enhancement, and the response from frequency fine-tuning of the cue. A speech-based hearing test is designed to identify the susceptible error-prone phones for individual hearing impaired (HI) ear. Only robust tokens in the experiments' noise levels had been chosen for the test. The noise-robustness of tokens is measured as SNR90s of the token, which is the signal to the speech-weighted noise ratio where an NH listener would recognize the token with an accuracy of 90% on average. Two sets of tokens T1 and T2 having the same consonant-vowels but different talkers with distinct SNR90s had been presented at flat gain at listeners' most comfortable level. We studied the effects of frequency fine-tuning of the primary cue by presenting tokens of the same consonant but different vowels with similar SNR90s. Additionally, we investigated the role of changing the intensity of primary cue in HI phone recognition, by presenting tokens from both sets T1 and T2. On average, 85% of tokens are improved when we replaced the CV with the same CV but with a more robust talker. Additionally.
Modelling Lexical Redundancy for Machine Translation

Certain distinctions made in the lexicon of one language may be redundant when translating into another language. We quantify redundancy among source types by the similarity of their distributions over target types. We propose a language-independent framework for minimising lexical redundancy that can be optimised directly from parallel text. Optimisation of the source lexicon for a given target language is viewed as model selection over a set of cluster-based translation models.Redundant distinctions between types may exhibit monolingual regularities, for example, inflexion patterns. We define a prior over model structure using a Markov random field and learn features over sets of monolingual types that are predictive of bilingual redundancy. The prior makes model selection more robust without the need for language-specific assumptions regarding redundancy. Using these models in a phrase-based SMT system, we show significant improvements in translation quality for certain language pairs.
FTAA , Anti-Corruption and Equilibria

This paper analayzes different FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) elements and the related economic, political, technological and social effects. We will demonstrate that, in Latin America, noncooperative or competitive equilibria do not solve the conflicts between FFTA supporters (the government and exporters) and detractors (social, religious and academic movements.) Finally, we will show that, due to the undeniable asymmetries which exist among the 34 FTAA countries, the most viable solution (a true integration) can be obtained by means of the cooperative equilibria. Journal of Economics Classification C62; C70; C73; C79 Keywords1: FTAA, Free Trade Area of the Americas, Anticorruption, Cooperative equilibria.
TOWARDS CONTINUOUS ONLINE LEARNING BASED COGNITIVE SPEECH PROCESSING

Despite the substantial progress of the speech processing technology, it is generally acknowledged that we have a long way to go before developing ASR systems which exhibit performance approaching that of humans. Many researchers believe that simply extending our current theories and practical solutions may never lead us to that goal. One promising research direction is development of learning algorithms exhibiting human-like learning behavior. There is an apparent discrepancy between the way humans acquire their language and the way we train our systems. Humans are ”learning machines” while our current systems are actually ”learned machines”. The ability to learn and reason in a continuing loop is attributed to the emerging cognitive systems. In this paper, we present our approach and ideas for future research in developing a cognitive speech processing system. This system has a hierarchical structure where each layer works according to the same algorithm, but represents different space or level of abstraction. The lowest layer corresponds to the acoustic space and the other layers to phonetic, word and phrase spaces respectively. The information between layers flows in both directions: bottom-up during recognition and top-down during generation, i.e. synthesis. Development of the full system poses multiple research challenges and problems discussed in this paper.
Controllable Fair Queuing for Service Utilities

Computing and storage utilities must control resource usage to meet contractual performance targets for hosted customers under dynamic conditions, including flash crowds and unexpected resource failures. This paper explores properties of proportional share resource schedulers that are necessary for stability and responsiveness under feedback control. It shows that the fairness properties commonly defined for proportional share schedulers using Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) are not preserved across changes to the relative weights of competing request flows. As a result, conventional WFQ schedulers are not controllable by a resource controller that adapts by adjusting the weights. The paper defines controllable fairness properties, presents an algorithm to adjust any WFQ schedule when the weights change, and proves that the algorithm results in controllable-fair WFQ schedulers. The analytic results are confirmed by experimental evaluation using a three-tier Web service and a prototype controllable-fair scheduler called C-SFQ(D) . C-SFQ(D) extends depth-controlled Start-time Fair Queuing, which supports interposed proportional sharing for complex network services with no internal support for differentiated service quality. The prototype includes an adaptive control system that adjusts the flow weights on the C-SFQ(D) scheduler to meet latency and throughput targets under a variety of conditions. Experimental results demonstrate the importance of controllablefair scheduling for feedback control of network services.
Prognostic Significance for Stroke of a Morning Pressor Surge and a Nocturnal Blood Pressure Decline: The Ohasama Study

There is continuing controversy over whether the pattern of circadian blood pressure (BP) variation that includes a nocturnal decline in BP and a morning pressor surge has prognostic significance for stroke risk. In this study, we followed the incidence of stroke in 1430 subjects aged ≥40 years in Ohasama, Japan, for an average of 10.4 years. The association between stroke risk and the pattern of circadian BP variation was analyzed with a Cox proportional hazards model after adjustment for possible confounding factors. There was no significant association between total stroke risk and the nocturnal decline in BP (percentage decline from diurnal level) or between total stroke risk and the morning pressor surge. The cerebral infarction risk was significantly higher in subjects with a <10% nocturnal decline in BP as compared with subjects who had a ≥10% nocturnal decline in BP (P=0.04). The morning pressor surge was not associated with a risk of cerebral infarction. On the other hand, an increased risk of cerebral hemorrhage was observed in subjects with a large morning pressor surge (≥25 mm Hg; P=0.04). Intracerebral hemorrhage was also observed more frequently in extreme dippers (those with a ≥20% nocturnal decline in BP) than dippers (those with a 10% to 19% decline; P=0.02). A disturbed nocturnal decline in BP is associated with cerebral infarction, whereas a large morning pressor surge and a large nocturnal decline in BP, which are analogous to a large diurnal increase in BP, are both associated with cerebral hemorrhage.
Analysis Of Self Efficacy And Social Physique Anxiety Between Women Engaged In Physical Exercise And Those Having Sedentary Lifestyle

Background: A growing body of research suggests that factors like self-efficacy, self-esteem, anxiety, wellbeing are strongly associated with psychological health. Research on the importance of exercise in relation to the self –efficacy, anxiety related to body and exercise in women is scarce. The difference (if any) in the self-efficacy and other related variable like anxiety within the women who engage themselves by involving in physical exercise and those who aren’t involved in any such exercise related activities, needs to be studies extensively in order to understand these constructs in relation to exercise and sedentary lifestyle. Objective: The present study seeks to explore the in self-efficacy and social physical anxiety in women who are engaged in physical exercise and those who aren’t involved in any such exercise related activities and having sedentary lifestyle. Methods: The participants were women in the age range of 24-35 years who were engaged in physical exercise (gymnasium, aerobics class, dancing class, zumba) and women engaged in no physical activity pertaining any form or exercise (sedentary lifestyle) . The participants in both the groups were given two scales to be completed with no time constraints. The two scales consisted of Exercise Self Efficacy Scale and The Social Physique Anxiety Scale. The data was analysed and the t test was calculated in order to identify if there are differences between the scores of two groups. Results: The data collected from both the groups will be analyzed for descriptive statistics. The obtained mean score for Self efficacy for women involved with physical exercise was 33. On the other hand the obtained Mean Score for Self efficacy for women having sedentary lifestyle was 26.56. The obtained mean from the Social Physique Anxiety scores of the physical exercise group and sedentary lifestyle group was 25.9 and 38.73 respectively. (p=0.0001). The further inferential analysis through t test showed significant difference between the self-efficacy scores of both the groups. The self-efficacy scores were found to be higher in the group of participants who were involved in physical exercise as compared to those who had sedentary lifestyle. On the other hand, the social physique anxiety scores were found to be higher in the group of participants who reported having sedentary lifestyle as compared to the scores of the participants who reported engaging in exercise (p<0.05). Conclusion: This study puts a light on how exercise can be related to mental health in terms of the psychological factors like self-efficacy and social physique exercise. The results found in this study do indicate that exercise and sedentary lifestyles are related to social physique anxiety and self- efficacy.
p57KIP2: “Kip”ing the Cell under Control

p57KIP2 is an imprinted gene located at the chromosomal locus 11p15.5. It is a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor belonging to the CIP/KIP family, which includes additionally p21CIP1/WAF1 and p27KIP1. It is the least studied CIP/KIP member and has a unique role in embryogenesis. p57KIP2 regulates the cell cycle, although novel functions have been attributed to this protein including cytoskeletal organization. Molecular analysis of animal models and patients with Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome have shown its nodal implication in the pathogenesis of this syndrome. p57KIP2 is frequently down-regulated in many common human malignancies through several mechanisms, denoting its anti-oncogenic function. This review is a thorough analysis of data available on p57KIP2, in relation to p21CIP1/WAF1 and p27KIP1, on gene and protein structure, its transcriptional and translational regulation, and its role in human physiology and pathology, focusing on cancer development. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(12):1902–19)