Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glucocorticoid Regulates Parkin Expression in Mouse Frontal Cortex: Implications in Schizophrenia

Stress and glucocorticoid hormones, which are released into the circulation following stressful experiences, have been shown to contribute significantly to the manifestation of various psychiatric illnesses including schizophrenia and depression. Studies in rodents have reported dose and time dependent effects of glucocorticoids on the expression of proteins related to neuroplasticity. However, the mechanism(s) involved in the regulation of proteins by glucocorticoids are not clear. Ubiquitin ligases play important role in degradation, trafficking and stabilization of proteins. The present study investigated the effect of glucocorticoid on ubiquitin-proteasome system in mouse frontal cortex. A significant increase in mRNA and protein levels of parkin, an E3 ubiquitin ligase was found in cultured mouse primary cortical neurons following corticosterone treatment. An increase in parkin levels was also found in mouse frontal cortex in vivo following acute dexamethasone treatment. However, chronic treatment with corticosterone did not change parkin protein levels in mouse frontal cortex. Studies using postmortem brain samples from schizophrenia and control subjects indicated a significant increase in parkin protein levels in frontal cortex of schizophrenia subjects suggesting a response to increased stress conditions in schizophrenia. These findings suggest a possible role of parkin in the pathophysiology of stress-related psychiatric disorders.
Review of thalidomide in the treatment of newly diagnosed multiple myeloma

The role of thalidomide has been well established in the setting of relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (MM). More recently, studies have been focused on upfront induction therapy. In newly diagnosed MM patients, thalidomide improved the response rates and the event-free survival induced by both high-dose and conventional chemotherapy regimens. The effect on survival needs to be further investigated. The efficacy of this drug is counterbalanced by a significant rate of both acute and long-term toxicities. Thus best timing of initiation, dosing schemes and duration of therapy is still unclear. Evidence is now emerging that clinical response can be achieved also at lower doses with minimal long term toxicity.
Anti-Inflammatory Effect of the Root extracts from Hibiscus syriacus in LPS-Stimulated RAW264.7 Cells

Hibiscus syriacus (H. syriacus) as the national flower of Korea has been used as the herbal medicine in Asia. In this study, we evaluated the anti-inflammatory effect of 70% ethanol extracts from the root of Hibiscus syriacus (RHS-E70) and elucidated the potential signaling pathway in LPS-stimulated RAW264.7 cells. RHS-E70 dose-dependently suppressed NO production by inhibiting iNOS and IL-β expression in LPS-stimulated RAW264.7 cells. RHS-E70 inhibited the phosphorylation and degradation of IκB-α, which contributed to the inhibition of p65 nuclear accumulation and NF-κB activation. Furthermore, RHS-E70 suppressed the phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and p38, which results in the inhibition of ATF2 phosphorylation and subsequent nuclear accumulation. These results indicate that RHS-E70 may exert antiinflammatory activity by inhibiting NF-κB and MAPK/ATF2 signaling. From these findings, RHS-E70 has potential to be a candidate for the development of chemopreventive or therapeutic agents for the inflammatory diseases.
Convergence Analysis of Narrowband Feedback Active Noise Control System With Imperfect Secondary Path Estimation

In many practical active noise control (ANC) applications, feedback structure using estimated secondary path to synthesize reference signal is preferred under various conditions. This paper analyzes the convergence behavior of the narrowband feedback ANC systems with imperfect secondary path estimation. Existing approaches do not include the analysis of the reference signal synthesis errors due to its interrelated feedback nature. In this paper, the reconstruction error is modeled using the secondary path estimation error. Using this model, the effects of estimation errors on the convergence of the feedback ANC system is investigated. To further examine the effects of error in the filtered- x and filtered- y signal paths, these two paths are analyze separately to isolate the effects caused by these paths. Computer simulations are conducted to verify the theoretical analysis presented in the paper.
Controlling of artificial neural network for fault diagnosis of photovoltaic array

High penetration of photovoltaic (PV) systems is expected to play important roles as power generation source in the near future. One of the typical deployments of PV systems is without supervisory mechanisms to monitor the physical conditions of cells or modules. In the longer term operation, the cells or modules may undergo fault conditions since they are exposure to the environment. Manually module checking is not recommended in this case because of time-consuming, less accuracy and potentially danger to the operator. Therefore, provision of early automatic diagnosis technique with quick and efficient responses is highly necessary. Since high accuracy is the important issue in the diagnosis problems, the paper present fault diagnosis method using three-layered artificial neural network. A single artificial neural network (ANN) is not suitable to provide precise solution for this fault identification. Therefore, several ANNs are developed, then automatic control based module voltage terminal is established. The proposed method is simple and accurate to detect the exact location of short-circuit condition of PV modules in array.
Comparative study of Third Culture Individuals (TCI) and non-Third Culture Individuals in relation to Cultural Intelligence

Third Culture Individuals (TCIs) are individuals who spent a significant part of their developmental years outside of their passport country, often associated with having cultural intelligence and intercultural communication competence. While TCIs are naturally exposed to various cultures as a result of their mobility, non-TCIs do not necessarily share the same traits and experiences growing up. However due to globalization this may no longer be the case and may perhaps be the reason why despite the differences, TCI and non-TCIs are similar in some way. TCIs are known for their ability to be accepting of different cultures; a characteristic often associated with cultural intelligence, from this it can be assumed that TCIs have a higher level of Cultural Intelligence than non-TCIs. So far there hasn’t been sufficient research regarding TCIs in general, which also applies in theIndonesian context. This study compares the level of Cultural Intelligence of both Indonesian TCIs and non-TCIs through a quantitate research using the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) scale thatmeasures four dimensions; metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioral. Data in this research were gathered from an online survey, from a total of 140 Indonesian TCI and non-TCI respondents that are currently living in Indonesia. Results showed that TCI samples have a higher level of Cultural Intelligence than non-TCIs, with motivational CQ being the dimension scored highest for both TCI and non-TCI samples.
Adaptive Assignment for Quality-Aware Mobile Sensing Network with Strategic Users

Mobile crowdsourcing with smartphones is a novel paradigm that collects distributed data efficiently. Millions ofcrowdsourcing tasks should be assigned and performed every day. In order to give good service quality for mobile sensing applications, a practical assignment approach is indispensable for a task platform to select appropriate users. This paper considers heterogeneous task assignment problem in the mobile sensing network that cannot label users. We consider the following scenario: a requester posts a set of tasks onto the platform, the platform selects a subset of proper smartphones to complete the different kinds of tasks under a budget constraint, all users inthese transactions are strategic for maximizing their individual utility. The assignment approach should be designed to fight against strategic behaviors of smartphone users. We address this problem by introducing a novel mechanism for mobile sensing assignment based on the multi-armed bandit problem. Moreover, we present an adaptive algorithm to assign users according to the properties of task and which task they are good at. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our mechanism based on a real dataset, and the results demonstrate that proposed algorithm achieves better in high-quality assignment.
Overexpression of an Outer Membrane Protein Associated with Decreased Susceptibility to Carbapenems in Proteus mirabilis

Proteus mirabilis isolates commonly have decreased susceptibility to imipenem. Previously, we found P. mirabilis hfq mutant was more resistant to imipenem and an outer membrane protein (OMP) could be involved. Therefore, we investigated the role of this OMP in carbapenem susceptibility. By SDS-PAGE we found this OMP (named ImpR) was increased in hfq mutant and LC-MS/MS revealed it to be the homologue of Salmonella YbfM, which is a porin for chitobiose and subject to MicM (a small RNA) regulation. We demonstrated that ImpR overexpression resulted in increased carbapenem MICs in the laboratory strain and clinical isolates. Chitobiose induced expression of chb (a chitobiose utilization operon). Real-time RT-PCR and SDS-PAGE were performed to elucidate the relationship of hfq, impR, chb and MicM in P. mirabilis. We found MicM RNA was decreased in hfq mutant and chbBC-intergenic region (chbBC-IGR) overexpression strain (chbIGRov), while impR mRNA was increased in hfq mutant, micM mutant and chbIGRov strain. In addition, mutation of hfq or micM and overexpression of chbBC-IGR increased ImpR protein level. Accordingly, chitobiose made wild-type have higher levels of ImpR protein and are more resistant to carbapenems. Hfq- and MicM-complemented strains restored wild-type MICs. Mutation of both impR and hfq eliminated the increase in carbapenem MICs observed in hfq mutant and ImpR-complementation of hfq/impR double mutant resulted in MICs as hfq mutant, indicating that the ImpR-dependent decreased carbapenem susceptibility of hfq mutant. These indicate MicM was antisense to impR mRNA and was negatively-regulated by chbBC-IGR. Together, overexpression of ImpR contributed to the decreased carbapenem susceptibility in P. mirabilis.
Hunger and Fullness: How High-Poverty Urban Students Experience School Food Policy

The issue of school food and its role in the learning environment has been overlooked by educators, education researchers, and policy makers. This study uses observations and interviews in three high-poverty, urban schools to investigate how participants experience school food policy in their daily lives. Participants at all three schools believed that addressing hunger and malnutrition by offering fresh and healthy foods helped to improve student engagement in class. This research contributes an ethnographic understanding of student experiences with food in schools and builds on various literatures regarding whole child reforms, childhood food insecurity, student engagement, and school food environments.
The First Cytokine Sequence Within Cartilaginous Fish: IL-1β in the Small Spotted Catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula)1

Cartilaginous fish are considered the most primitive living jawed vertebrates with a complex immune system typical of all jawed vertebrates. Cytokine homologs are found within jawless and bony fish, although no cytokine or cytokine receptor genes have been sequenced in cartilaginous fish. In this study the complete coding sequence of the small spotted catshark (Scyliorhinus canicula) IL-1β gene is presented that contains a short 5′ untranslated region (54 bp), a 903-bp open reading frame, a 379-bp 3′ untranslated region, a polyadenylation signal, and eight mRNA instability motifs. The predicted translation (301 amino acids) has highest identity to trout IL-1β (31.7%), with greatest homology within the putative 12 β-sheets. The IL-1 family signature is also present, but there is no apparent signal peptide. As with other nonmammalian IL-1β sequences, the IL-1-converting enzyme cut site is absent. Expression of the IL-1β transcript is detectable by RT-PCR in the spleen and testes, induced in vivo with LPS. Furthermore, a 7-fold increase of transcript levels in splenocytes incubated for 5 h with LPS was seen. The genomic organization comprises six exons and five introns with highest homology seen in exons encoding the largest amount of secondary structure per amino acid. Southern blot analysis suggests at least two copies of the IL-1β gene or genes related to the 3′ end of the IL-1β sequence are present in the catshark. The cloning of IL-1β in S. canicula, the first cytokine sequenced within cartilaginous fish, verifies previous bioactivity evidence for the presence of inflammatory cytokines.
Form‐field gauge symmetry in M‐theory

We show how to cast an interacting system of M‐branes into manifestly gauge‐invariant form using an arrangement of higher‐dimensional Dirac surfaces. Classical M‐theory has a cohomologically nontrivial and noncommutative set of gauge symmetries when written using a “doubled” formalism containing 3‐form and 6‐form gauge fields. We show how the arrangement of Dirac surfaces allows an integral subgroup of these symmetries to be preserved at the quantum level. The proper context for discussing these large gauge transformations is relative cohomology, in which the 3‐form transformation parameters become exact when restricted to the five‐brane worldvolume. This structure yields the correct lattice of M‐theory brane charges.
On some concepts of emotional engine for BDI agent system

Emotions are one of those phenomena which are rarely seen in connection with exact disciplines such as computer science or information technologies. However, with the widespread use of computer systems we see nowadays, the demand to include emotions to reasoning of artificial systems emerged and formalized emotional models have been created. In this paper we deal with an emotional engine we developed on the basis of the OCC model of emotions and its revised form. The emotional engine has been implemented as a conservative extension of the Jadex BDI agent platform. The paper describes basic concepts of the engine, namely a closed feedback loop between emotional and BDI part of a BDI agent and an emotional state representation.
The Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games in Education

This chapter reports the design of an instructional simulation for use as a museum display that incorporates elements of game design theory, narrative theory, and instructional theory within a layered design framework. The purpose is to show how multiple theories from distinct fields converge to influence a single design and to show how design elements arising from different theories work together to produce artifacts capable of operating outside narrow views of the theory’s traditional venue and metaphor. The chapter will show how the structures supplied by the different theories combined to provide a “discipline” (Schön, 1987) for the design and how theory-related design language terms that begin as abstractions are integrated and given specific dimension during design.
Neutrophil Extracellular Traps as Innate Immune Reaction against the Emerging Apicomplexan Parasite Besnoitia besnoiti

Besnoitia besnoiti infection in cattle is an important emerging protozoan disease in Europe causing economic losses and severe clinical signs, such as generalized dermatitis, orchitis, and vulvitis in affected animals. Neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation was recently demonstrated as an important effector mechanism of PMN acting against several invading pathogens. In the present study, interactions of bovine PMN with tachyzoites of B. besnoiti were investigated in this respect in vitro. For the demonstration and quantification of NETs, extracellular DNA was stained by Sytox Orange or Pico Green. Fluorescent illustrations as well as scanning electron microscopy analyses (SEM) showed PMN-promoted NET formation rapidly being induced upon contact with B. besnoiti tachyzoites. Co-localization of extracellular DNA with histones, neutrophil elastase (NE) and myeloperoxidase (MPO) in parasite entrapping structures confirmed the classical characteristics of NET. Exposure of PMN to viable, UV attenuated and dead tachyzoites showed a significant induction of NET formation, but even tachyzoite homogenates significantly promoted NETs when compared to negative controls. NETs were abolished by DNase treatment and were reduced after PMN preincubation with NADPH oxidase-, NE- and MPO-inhibitors. Tachyzoite-triggered NET formation led to parasite entrapment as quantitative assays indicated that about one third of tachyzoites were immobilized in NETs. In consequence, tachyzoites were hampered from active invasion of host cells. Thus, transfer of tachyzoites, previously being confronted with PMN, to adequate host cells resulted in significantly reduced infection rates when compared to PMN-free infection controls. To our knowledge, we here report for the first time B. besnoiti-induced NET formation. Our results indicate that PMN-triggered extracellular traps may represent an important effector mechanism of the host early innate immune response against B. besnoiti which may lead to diminishment of initial parasite infection rates during the acute infection phase.
An X-Ray Timing Study of XTE J1550–564: Evolution of the Low-Frequency Quasi-periodic Oscillations for the Complete 2000 Outburst

We report on RXTE observations of the microquasar XTE J1550-564 during a ~70 day outburst in 2000 April-June. We focus here on the temporal properties of the source and study the behavior of low-frequency (0.1-10 Hz) quasi-periodic oscillations (LFQPOs), which seem to be of different types. We focus on the so-called type C (according to the classification of Remillard and collaborators), which corresponds to a strong 0.1-6 Hz LFQPO found to be present during at least 17 observations. We find that the frequency of the QPO is better correlated with the soft X-ray (≤7 keV) flux than with the hard flux (≥7 keV). If soft X-rays represent the behavior of an accretion disk, the relation shows that the disk may set the LFQPO frequency. In two cases, the identification of the type of QPO is not straightforward. If the QPOs in those two cases are type A (or B), then we may be seeing the QPO type alternate between type C and type A (or B), and this may represent some rapid changes in the physical properties of the accretion flow before the system stabilizes and slowly decays toward the end of the outburst. On the other hand, if all the QPOs are of type C, we may be observing an inversion in the frequency versus flux relation similar to that seen in GRO J1655-40. We discuss the QPO behavior in the framework of theoretical models.
Direct Arterial Pressure and Electrocardiogram during Motor Car Driving

Direct arterial pressure and electrocardiogram have been measured continuously over a period of 24 hours in 15 patients. Observations have been made on the behaviour of these variables during 30 separate episodes of motor car driving. The patients were divided into three groups: (1) five normotensive subjects, (2) five patients with essential hypertension who were not receiving therapy, and (3) five patients with angina pectoris who were either normotensive or hypertensive. In all but one subject, apart from variable changes in heart rate, no significant arrhythmias or S-T segment changes were observed in the electrocardiogram. The arterial pressure remained remarkably stable throughout the driving period in all three groups and there was no significant difference between the levels of blood pressure at the beginning and end of a journey. There were short periods of raised arterial pressure during driving related to such episodes as overtaking, but these quickly returned to baseline levels. Two patients experienced anginal pain during driving. It is concluded that motor car driving does not have such a pronounced effect on the blood pressure as might have been thought.
Discovering mainstream knowledge in source codes of programming learners

There are lots of archives of problems for programming practice on the Internet. The problems in these archives, however, are not organized effectively for programming tutoring. To select the problems suitable for students to exercise, it is required to know the knowledge necessary to solve the problems and the knowledge that students have mastered. This can be done by discovering the problem-solving knowledge in the program source codes that the students have submitted. We propose a method based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to discover the knowledge behind source codes of problem solutions. By constructing a formal context from many source codes for a given problem, the FCA is applied to building a formal concept lattice, from which the mainstream knowledge for solving the problem can be discovered. 60 problems were mined by the proposed method, which analyzed 2710 source codes submitted by 51 students. We found that on average each mainstream method had about 50% students employing it while other methods had only about 5%.
ERPs in the context of the orienting reflex

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Analysis on Stock Market Volatility with Collective Human Behaviors in Online Message Board

The stock market is constantly changing and sometimes the stock prices unaccountably plummet and surge. So, the stock market is recognized as a complex system and the change on the stock prices is unpredictable. Recently, many researchers try to understand the stock market as the network between individual stocks and to discover a hint about the change of the stock prices from big data being created in real time from Internet. We focus on the correlation among the stock market and human interaction with the Internet especially stock message board. By analyzing changes in the article volumes for stocks, we find that the correlation strength of between the article volume and the stock price has relevance to the stock return. We propose a new method for recommending stock portfolio base on the result of our analysis. According to the simulated investment test, the returns of our portfolio is about 1.82% per month which is about 0.85% and 1.48% higher than that of the Markowitz's efficient portfolio and that of the KOSPI average respectively. This study presents that collective human behavior on Internet stock message board helps to better understand the stock market.