Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The autoantibody rheumatoid factor may be an independent risk factor for ischaemic heart disease in men

Background: Subjects with rheumatoid arthritis have an increased prevalence of ischaemic heart disease (IHD). This is most likely in those people with the autoantibody rheumatoid factor (RF). RF is strongly associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) but is also present in up to 15% of all adults. Objective: To determine whether RF might identify people in a general population who also share an increased likelihood of developing IHD. Methods: Subjects from the Hertfordshire Cohort Study were investigated for the presence of RF. Subjects completed a questionnaire and attended a clinic where a history of IHD was recorded (ECG, coronary artery bypass grafting, Rose chest pain). Associations between the presence of RF, antinuclear antibodies (ANA), anticardiolipin antibodies (ACA) and IHD in 567 men and 589 women were investigated and compared with traditional risk factors for IHD. Results: RF was associated with an increased likelihood of IHD in men (odds ratio (OR) = 3.1, 95% CI 1.7 to 5.4, p<0.001). This increased risk could not be explained by traditional risk factors for IHD (mutually adjusted OR for RF 2.9 (95% CI 1.6 to 5.3), p<0.001). There was no significant association between RF in women or between ANA or ACA with IHD in men or women. Conclusion: This work suggests that RF is an independent risk factor for IHD in the general population. It lends support to the importance of inflammation in atherosclerosis and suggests that autoimmune processes may be involved. In addition, it raises the intriguing possibility that RF may have a direct role in the pathogenesis of IHD in some subjects.
Purification of lymphocytes and platelets by gradient centrifugation.

Abstract A two-step centrifugation technique is described in which 80 to 90 per cent of the total lymphocyte population of human and animal blood can be obtained free of erythrocytes, granulocytes, and platelets. Uncontaminated platelet populations were similarly obtained. The procedure was scaled sufficiently to allow the purification of large numbers of functionally viable cells in a relatively short period of time. The procedure was applied to purification of splenic lymphocytes, and pure lymphocyte populations were obtained with the selective exclusion of nonviable cells.
Innate STAT1-Dependent Genomic Response of Neurons to the Antiviral Cytokine Alpha Interferon

ABSTRACT Alpha/beta interferons (IFNs-α/β) are cytokines that play an essential role in the host defense against viral infection. Our previous studies have shown that the key IFN signaling molecule STAT1 is highly elevated and activated in central nervous system neurons during viral infection and in transgenic mice with astrocyte production of IFN-α (glial fibrillary acidic protein [GFAP]-IFN-α), suggesting that neurons are a very responsive target cell population for IFNs. To elucidate the genomic response of neurons to IFN-α, we undertook studies both in vitro and in vivo. Gene chip analysis was applied to RNA from IFN-α-treated or untreated primary cortical neuronal cultures derived from embryonic day 15 fetal wild-type or STAT1 knockout (KO) mice. The expression of 51 known and 5 unknown genes was increased significantly by more than twofold after exposure of wild-type but not STAT1 KO neurons to IFN-α. Some more highly expressed genes included IFN-induced 15-kDa protein, ubiquitin-specific protease 18, glucocorticoid attenuated response genes, IFN-induced GTPases, and the chemokine CXCL10. For several of these genes, the gene chip findings were confirmed by RNase protection assays. In addition, examination of the expression of some of these selected genes revealed that they were increased in neurons in the brain of either GFAP-IFN-α mice or mice infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. In conclusion, our study revealed a robust STAT1-dependent genomic response of neurons to IFN-α, highlighting an innate potential of these cells to defend against viral infection in the brain.
The Effects of Lesions to the Mammillary Region and the Hippocampus on Conditional Associative Learning by Rats

Rats with extensive lesions to the mammillary body region, the hippocampus, or rats which had received a control operation were trained postoperatively on two visuo‐spatial conditional associative learning tasks in which they had to learn to associate spatial cues with particular visual/auditory stimuli. The animals were subsequently trained on a spatial working memory task, the eight‐arm radial maze. Rats with lesions to the mammillary body region were able to acquire the conditional associative learning tasks at a rate comparable to that of operated control animals, whereas those with hippocampal lesions were not. By contrast, rats with a lesion of the mammillary body region or the hippocampus were significantly impaired in comparison with the operated control animals in the radial maze. The findings suggest that lesions to the mammillary body region impair spatial working memory without affecting the capacity to associate particular exteroceptive cues with spatial locations.
Rationalising Risk Assessment: Applications to Agricultural Business

To concentrate on treating the most serious risks, methods of business risk management usually seek to identify the main risks and to assess their relative importance. Risks are typically assessed in terms of their chances of occurrence and the severity of their consequences. The assessments may be performed by qualitative, semi-quantitative or quantitative analysis. This paper is focussed on quantitative methods, requiring assessments of specific probabilities and values for consequences.
Wireless Interference Prediction for Embedded Health Devices

Embedded healthcare devices are becoming increasingly popular. A device could use a low-power sensor to send data. These low-power sensors typically use ZigBee wireless signals; however, these signals are easily masked by stronger WiFi signals. If a sensor is sending data at the same time as a WiFi-enabled device, the sensor data is lost and needs to be retransmitted. This causes a loss in efficiency and energy usage of the sensor. We proposed two algorithms, based on a Hidden Markov Model and concordance, that are able to predict when a WiFi interference will occur, which ensures with high accuracy that the ZigBee sensor can send data without any risk of wireless interference. Concordance is based on the premise that past history repeats itself. Our experimental results are based on real datasets. Our Hidden Markov Model has a prediction accuracy rate of over 78% and our concordance algorithm has a prediction accuracy rate of over 70%. Our algorithms can also predict longer periods of time and achieve a higher prediction accuracy than current algorithms. Our concordance algorithm has a very low processing overhead, taking microseconds to make a prediction. The throughput improvement gain of our proposed algorithms over current algorithms is a factor of 2.5.
Decision style in British and Swedish organizations: a comparative examination of strategic decision making

SUMMARY In this paper results from parallel large scale studies of strategic decision making in Sweden and the United Kingdom are reported. Swedish decision makers are found to employ a decision making style which emphasizes negotiation within a restricted group. This style, which involves considerable information search, leads to very long decision times. Strategic decisions in Britain are made among groups which include fewer strongly committed participants. Delays are common and often serious, but do not lengthen the process unduly. Decision styles in both countries include contrasting tendencies which produce a dynamic tension in the decision arena.
Family firms and corporate culture: a case study from a Less Developed Country (LDC)

This paper reports on an intensive case study of an important aspect of family firms. There has been limited prior research on corporate culture, an important component of management control in family firms in developing countries. The paper attempts to understand the nature and dynamics of the corporate culture of a family-controlled tea manufacturing and exporting firm in a less developed country, Sri Lanka which can either hinder or enhance a firm's ability to respond successfully to the challenges it faces. The paper reveals the values, practices and behaviour, which created the capabilities that enabled this firm to succeed in the global market.
Sound Levels in Classrooms and Effects on Self-Reported Mood among School Children

The principle of this field study is an investigation of recorded sound levels in 24 classrooms and relations between sound level measures and aspects of children's rated annoyance, task orientation, and inattentiveness. The background sound-exposure levels were distributed within the interval of 33–42 dB(A)eq and the activity sound level exposure ranged between 47–68 dB(A)eq. The recorded levels must be considered as high for work environments where steady concentration and undisturbed communication is essential. Results do not support the hypothesis that lower background-sound level and fewer students per class would improve the sound environment by generating a lower activity noise or the hypothesis that higher sound levels should increase annoyance and inattentiveness as well as deteriorate task orientation ratings.
Bio-environmental control of malaria in an industrial complex at Hardwar (U.P.), India.

A study on the bio-environmental control of industrial malaria was launched at Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., the country's foremost industrial complex. Malaria was a serious problem on the campus of the complex and routine methods of malaria control by providing screened doors, larviciding, fogging, limited spraying in the unauthorized colonies and chemotherapy were not effective. The project staff diverted the existing resources to reduce mosquito breeding sites by using fly ash to fill low lying areas, borrow pits and ditches, etc.; cleaning blocked drains and improving drainage by constructing cemented drains, mosquito-proofing overhead water storage tanks, improving surveillance and chemotherapy and introducing developmental schemes to make it a holistic process. The entire campus was brought under the alternate strategy during a 5 month period. In less than one year indigenous transmission was interrupted and the areas brought under maintenance at a cost of US +28,000. The study showed that in this instance malaria control should first be based on source reduction rather than insecticidal methods.
Privatization and efficiency in Brazilian telecommunications: an empirical study

This article evaluates the technical efficiency in Brazilian telecommunications after privatization by comparing the relative efficiency scores for July 1998 and December 1999, obtained by means of Data Envelopment Analysis methodology. The main result indicated that no differential levels of efficiency could be detected across the two periods. Moreover there was evidence of a decreasing returns to scale pattern in 1999.
Osteoprotegerin Regulates Pancreatic β-Cell Homeostasis upon Microbial Invasion

Osteoprotegerin (OPG), a decoy receptor for receptor activator of NF-κB ligand (RANKL), antagonizes RANKL’s osteoclastogenic function in bone. We previously demonstrated that systemic administration of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to mice elevates OPG levels and reduces RANKL levels in peripheral blood. Here, we show that mice infected with Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Mycobacteria or influenza virus also show elevated serum OPG levels. We then asked whether OPG upregulation following microbial invasion had an effect outside of bone. To do so, we treated mice with LPS and observed OPG production in pancreas, especially in β-cells of pancreatic islets. Insulin release following LPS administration was enhanced in mice lacking OPG, suggesting that OPG inhibits insulin secretion under acute inflammatory conditions. Consistently, treatment of MIN6 pancreatic β-cells with OPG decreased their insulin secretion following glucose stimulation in the presence of LPS. Finally, our findings suggest that LPS-induced OPG upregulation is mediated in part by activator protein (AP)-1 family transcription factors, particularly Fos proteins. Overall, we report that acute microbial infection elevates serum OPG, which maintains β-cell homeostasis by restricting glucose-stimulated insulin secretion, possibly preventing microbe-induced exhaustion of β-cell secretory capacity.
Predictors of Maternal Parental Self-Efficacy Among Primiparas in the Early Postnatal Period

Maternal parental self-efficacy is a crucial factor for facilitating the smooth transition into motherhood, particularly for primiparas. The aims of this study were to examine the predictors of maternal parental self-efficacy and its relationship with social support, postnatal depression (PND), and socio-demographic variables of primiparas during the early postnatal period. A descriptive correlational study design was adopted. The instruments, Perceived Maternal Parental Self-Efficacy, Perinatal Infant Care Social Support, and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, were used to collect data from a purposive sample of 122 primiparas on the day of discharge (1-3 days post delivery) in a tertiary public hospital in Singapore. There were significant correlations among maternal parental self-efficacy, social support, and postnatal depression. The main predictors of maternal parental self-efficacy were social support, ethnicity, maternal age, and family income. The maternal parental self-efficacy, social support, and PND should be routinely assessed to provide necessary support to needy mothers.
Emergence, Adoption, and Implementation of Collaborative Wildlife Management or Wildlife Partnerships in Kenya: A Look at Conditions for Success

This article explores the factors that contribute to the emergence and adoption of wildlife partnerships in Kenya. This is a management approach based on the concept of collaborative management (comanagement). In addition, the article analyzes two case studies and examines how successful the implementation of partnership projects has been in terms of stewardship, distributional aspects, and fulfilling conservation interests. The key factors found to favor wildlife partnerships include enabling policies, the presence of organizational capacity within user groups, and the access of local communities to benefits from wildlife through land ownership. Furthermore, it was found that the approach has had mixed success because important challenges emerged from its implementation. The article concludes by highlighting several implications for the future of wildlife partnerships in Kenya.
Function of a Subunit Isoforms of the V-ATPase in pH Homeostasis and in Vitro Invasion of MDA-MB231 Human Breast Cancer Cells*

It has previously been shown that highly invasive MDA-MB231 human breast cancer cells express vacuolar proton-translocating ATPase (V-ATPases) at the cell surface, whereas the poorly invasive MCF7 cell line does not. Bafilomycin, a specific V-ATPase inhibitor, reduces the in vitro invasion of MB231 cells but not MCF7 cells. Targeting of V-ATPases to different cellular membranes is controlled by isoforms of subunit a. mRNA levels for a subunit isoforms were measured in MB231 and MCF7 cells using quantitative reverse transcription-PCR. The results show that although all four isoforms are detectable in both cell types, levels of a3 and a4 are much higher in MB231 than in MCF7 cells. Isoform-specific small interfering RNAs (siRNA) were employed to selectively reduce mRNA levels for each isoform in MB231 cells. V-ATPase function was assessed using the fluorescent indicators SNARF-1 and pyranine to monitor the pH of the cytosol and endosomal/lysosomal compartments, respectively. Cytosolic pH was decreased only on knockdown of a3, whereas endosome/lysosome pH was increased on knockdown of a1, a2, and a3. Treatment of cells with siRNA to a4 did not affect either cytosolic or endosome/lysosome pH. Measurement of invasion using an in vitro transwell assay revealed that siRNAs to both a3 and a4 significantly inhibited invasion of MB231 cells. Immunofluorescence staining of MB231 cells for V-ATPase distribution revealed extensive intracellular staining, with plasma membrane staining observed in ∼18% of cells. Knockdown of a4 had the greatest effect on plasma membrane staining, leading to a 32% reduction. These results suggest that the a4 isoform may be responsible for targeting V-ATPases to the plasma membrane of MB231 cells and that cell surface V-ATPases play a significant role in invasion. However, other V-ATPases affecting the pH of the cytosol and intracellular compartments, particularly those containing a3, are also involved in invasion.
News Classification from Social Media Using Twitter-based Doc2Vec Model and Automatic Query Expansion

News classification is among essential needs for people to organize, better understand, and utilize information from the Internet. This motivates the authors to propose a novel method to classify news from social media. First, we propose to vectorize an article with TD2V, our pre-trained Twitter-based universal document representation following Doc2Vec approach. We then define Modified Distance to better measure the semantic distance between two document vectors. Finally, we apply retrieval and automatic query expansion to get the most relevant labeled documents in a corpus to determine the category for a new article. As our TD2V is created from 297 million words in 420,351 news articles from more than one million tweets in Twitters from 2010 to 2017, it can be used as one of the efficient pre-trained models for English document representation in various applications. Experiments on datasets from different online sources show that our method achieves the classification accuracy better than existing methods, specifically 98.4±0.3% (BBC dataset), 98.9±0.7% (BBC Sport dataset), 94.1±0.2% (Amazon4 dataset), and 78.6% (20NewsGroup dataset). Furthermore, in the classification training process, we just encode all articles in the training set with TD2V, not to train a dedicated classification model for each of these datasets.
Newly Mapped Gene for Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm and Dissection

Thoracic aortic aneurysm and dissection (TAAD) is associated with high mortality and medical expense. These poor outcomes are preventable by surgical repair; however, identifying at-risk individuals is difficult. Researchers are actively surveying the human genome (the repository of human genes) to characterize the genetic determinants of TAAD by identifying chromosomal regions likely to harbor such predisposing genes. In previous studies, investigators identified genetic markers shared by a subset of families who were ascertained to have the disease, which clustered into 2 chromosomal regions: 5q13-q15 (TAAD1) and 11q23.2-q24 (familial aortic aneurysm [FAA1]). In a subsequent study, a third chromosomal region at 3p24-25 (TAAD2) was found to contribute to TAAD in a 4-generation, 52-member family that displayed little evidence of sharing either the TAAD1 or FAA1 regions. Although additional regions of the genome may contribute to TAAD, investigators are focusing their efforts on identifying the actual genes and the specific mutations that participate in the disease process. The goal of these endeavors is to develop screening tests to identify individuals at risk for familial TAAD. This genetic discovery has significant clinical implications because high-risk individuals and families can be closely monitored and can benefit from preventative surgical repairs.
Mitigating Radio Interference in Large IoT Networks through Dynamic CCA Adjustment

The performance of low-power wireless sensor networks used to build Internet of Things applications often suffers from radio interference generated by co-located wireless devices or from jammers maliciously placed in their proximity. As IoT devices typically operate in unsupervised large-scale installations, and as radio interference is typically localized and hence affects only a portion of the nodes in the network, it is important to give low-power wireless sensors and actuators the ability to autonomously mitigate the impact of surrounding interference. In this paper we present our approach DynCCA, which dynamically adapts the clear channel assessment threshold of IoT devices to minimize the impact of malicious or unintentional interference on both network reliability and energy efficiency. First, we describe how varying the clear channel assessment threshold at run-time using only information computed locally can help to minimize the impact of unintentional interference from surrounding devices and to escape jamming attacks. We then present the design and implementation of DynCCA on top of ContikiMAC and evaluate its performance on wireless sensor nodes equipped with IEEE 802.15. 4 radios. Our experimental investigation shows that the use of DynCCA in dense IoT networks can increase the packet reception rate by up to 50% and reduce the energy consumption by a factor of 4.
Learning tomanage innovation

Technological innovation is widely accepted to be a complex learning proces through which firms try to acquire and develop distinctive technological competence. But there is a second dimension to such learning which relates to the ways in which the innovation process is managed, which also involves a developmental, cumulative progress. No all firms have the same level of skill in managing projects, in understanding user needs, in search behaviour, in managing inter-fin relationship, etc.; these are all abilities which are learned over time. This paper reviews the concept of capability development as it applies to the management of technological innovation. It illustrates this with the example of continuous improvement (CI)—a key capability which is associated with high levels of involvement in the innovation process through the contribution of regular incremental improvement ideas from a large proportion of th workforce. CI is a simple concept bus is proving very difficult to implement successful in pract.
Uteroplacental insufficiency programmes vascular dysfunction in non‐pregnant rats: compensatory adaptations in pregnancy

• Uteroplacental insufficiency programmes uterine vascular dysfunction in female offspring born growth restricted. The vascular adaptations in these female offspring when they in turn become pregnant are poorly understood. • Females born small and later become pregnant have compensatory vascular adaptations, such that the increased uterine and renal arterial stiffness observed in the non‐pregnant state was resolved in late pregnancy. • Vascular smooth muscle and endothelial function was normal in pregnant growth restricted female offspring. There was a reduced sensitivity to angiotensin II, but an increased sensitivity to phenylephrine in uterine arteries during pregnancy, and enhanced endothelium‐mediated relaxation in uterine and mesenteric arteries. Importantly, arteries of growth restricted females adapted to these changes. • Pregnancy was associated with increased outside and internal diameters in uterine and mesenteric arteries, but not renal and femoral arteries, and being born growth restricted did not alter this process. • These findings may assist our understanding of the maternal vascular adaptations to pregnancy in growth restricted female offspring.