Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Phenyl 2‐pyridyl ketoxime induces cellular senescence‐like alterations via nitric oxide production in human diploid fibroblasts

Phenyl‐2‐pyridyl ketoxime (PPKO) was found to be one of the small molecules enriched in the extracellular matrix of near‐senescent human diploid fibroblasts (HDFs). Treatment of young HDFs with PPKO reduced the viability of young HDFs in a dose‐ and time‐dependent manner and resulted in senescence‐associated β‐galactosidase (SA‐β‐gal) staining and G2/M cell cycle arrest. In addition, the levels of some senescence‐associated proteins, such as phosphorylated ERK1/2, caveolin‐1, p53, p16ink4a, and p21waf1, were elevated in PPKO‐treated cells. To monitor the effect of PPKO on cell stress responses, reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was examined by flow cytometry. After PPKO treatment, ROS levels transiently increased at 30 min but then returned to baseline at 60 min. The levels of some antioxidant enzymes, such as catalase, peroxiredoxin II and glutathione peroxidase I, were transiently induced by PPKO treatment. SOD II levels increased gradually, whereas the SOD I and III levels were biphasic during the experimental periods after PPKO treatment. Cellular senescence induced by PPKO was suppressed by chemical antioxidants, such as N‐acetylcysteine, 2,2,6,6‐tetramethylpiperidinyloxy, and L‐buthionine‐(S,R)‐sulfoximine. Furthermore, PPKO increased nitric oxide (NO) production via inducible NO synthase (iNOS) in HDFs. In the presence of NOS inhibitors, such as L‐NG‐nitroarginine methyl ester and L‐NG‐monomethylarginine, PPKO‐induced transient NO production and SA‐β‐gal staining were abrogated. Taken together, these results suggest that PPKO induces cellular senescence in association with transient ROS and NO production and the subsequent induction of senescence‐associated proteins.
A survey of job recommender systems

The Internet-based recruiting platforms become a primary recruitment channel in most companies. While such platforms decrease the recruitment time and advertisement cost, they suffer from an inappropriateness of traditional information retrieval techniques like the Boolean search methods. Consequently, a vast amount of candidates missed the opportunity of recruiting. The recommender system technology aims to help users in finding items that match their personnel interests; it has a successful usage in e-commerce applications to deal with problems related to information overload efficiently. In order to improve the e-recruiting functionality, many recommender system approaches have been proposed. This article will present a survey of e-recruiting process and existing recommendation approaches for building personalized recommender systems for candidates/job matching. Key words: Recommender systems, collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, hybrid approach, machine learning, e-recruiting, similarity measure.
Electrochemical Synthesis of Polypyrrole Nanowires.

Through a hole in a poly(ethyl acrylate) (PEA) layer that is electrochemically grafted to the surface of a vitreous carbon electrode-that is the route that must be taken by a growing polypyrrole nanowire in the electropolymerization of pyrrole. Chain growth is controlled by diffusion of the monomer through the DMF-swollen PEA layer, which acts as a template for the formation of nanowires (shown in the picture) with diameters of 400-1000 nm and lengths of up to 300 μm.
The feminine style, the male influence, and the paradox of gendered political blogspace

ABSTRACT This article explores gender differences in political communication among blogging politicians. The article sets out to explore two baseline questions: (1) Are distinct gendered ‘blogstyles’ to be found among political representatives? and (2) How do gender and gendered blogstyles interplay and affect the impact of political blogs? The empirical study draws on a survey targeting blogging politicians in Sweden (N = 523). The analysis identifies substantial differences in how female and male politicians communicate in the blogosphere as well as the outcomes in terms of feedback and impact. Female politicians, to a greater degree than their male counterparts, utilize blogging for the purpose of fostering a stronger connection with their readers as well as to enquire about ideas and policy perspectives. This strategy seems to be successful for fostering qualitative feedback from readers; yet, female bloggers have far less impact than their male colleges. We discuss two potential understandings of these results: relating to gender stereotypes and the network power structure of the blogosphere.
Code Reuse Prevention through Control Flow Lazily Check

Despite the numerous prevention and protection techniques that have been developed, the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities still represents a serious threat to the security of software systems and networks. Because of the adoption of the write or execute only policy (W⊕X) and address space layout randomization (ASLR), modern operate systems have been strengthened against code injection attacks. However, attackers have responded by employing code reuse attacks, in which software vulnerability is exploited to weave control flow through existing code base. Solutions targeting different aspects of the attack itself have had some success, but none of them can be a silver bullet. Under this situation, it is necessary to develop a general prevention to mitigate code reuse attacks. In this paper, we present a novel and general defense technique called control flow lazily check (CFLC), which allows for effective enforcement of control flow integrity. Specifically, instead of immediately determining the violation of control flow before the control flow transfer takes place, CFLC detects the violation after the transfer. Further, CFLC ensures that no deviation can be used to bypass the checking code and craft a malicious system call neither. To reduce the performance overhead, we introduce a coarse-grained CFLC based on the principle that a success intrusion must invoke a system call. We have implemented CFLC with the help of dynamic binary instrumentation tool and the evaluation demonstrates that CFLC can not only prevent code reuse attacks but also code injection attacks. It is shown that CFLC has achieved significant safety than other existing defenses with a modest performance penalty.
Plasma asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) concentration is independently associated with carotid intima-media thickness and plasma soluble vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (sVCAM-1) concentration in patients with mild-to-moderate renal failure.

BACKGROUND Patients with renal insufficiency have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease that is not fully explained by the presence of known cardiovascular risk factors. In patients with end-stage renal disease, increased serum concentration of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA), an endogenous inhibitor of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), has been linked to excess cardiovascular morbidity. We investigated, in patients with mild-to-moderate renal failure, the relationship between plasma ADMA and three surrogate markers of atherosclerosis that have been shown to have prognostic value, namely carotid intima-media thickness (IMT), plasma soluble vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (sVCAM-1), and plasma C-reactive protein (CRP). METHODS We used baseline data of an ongoing randomized trial in which the effects of oxidative stress-lowering treatment on vascular function and structure are studied in patients with chronic nondiabetic renal failure without clinical evidence of atherosclerosis (GFR 15 to 70 mL/min/per 1.73 m(2) according to the Cockcroft-Gault equation; ATIC study). RESULTS Data from 93 patients were used. Creatinine clearance was inversely related to plasma ADMA concentration (standardized beta after adjustment = -0.342, P = 0.023). Plasma ADMA was strongly related to carotid IMT in univariate (beta = 0.459, P < 0.0001) and multivariate analysis (beta= 0.444, P < 0.0001). Plasma ADMA was also significantly related with plasma soluble vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (sVCAM-1) in univariate (beta = 0.260, P = 0.010) and multivariate (beta = 0.242, P = 0.022) analysis. Plasma ADMA was not significantly related to C-reactive protein (beta = -0.134, P = 0.204). CONCLUSION In patients with mild-to-moderate renal failure, renal function is inversely associated with plasma ADMA, which, in turn, is positively associated with carotid IMT and plasma sVCAM-1 concentration. Increased plasma ADMA may be a link between renal function and cardiovascular disease in patients with mild-to-moderate renal failure.
From River Blindness to Neglected Tropical Diseases—Lessons Learned in Africa for Programme Implementation and Expansion by the Non-governmental Partners

After more than 20 years of action against some of the most debilitating neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), lessons have been learned by the non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) in the light of changes in programme strategies and partnerships. This article aims to summarise the development of the non-governmental networks supporting the NTD programmes, starting with the original 1992 model to combat onchocerciasis (river blindness), and will review the lessons learned that have equipped the NGDOs to step up their support to NTD control and elimination. At the beginning of the 1990s, a small group of seven NGDOs began to work together to support onchocerciasis control [1]. Today, more than 50 international and national NGDOs (of which 30 collaborate at the international level) work together to control or eliminate five priority NTDs affecting more than one billion of the poorest people [2]. This is a significant contribution to the objectives of World Health Assembly resolutions and the London Declaration on NTDs [3], as well as addressing Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1, “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;” MDG 6 “Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;” and MDG 8, “Develop a global partnership for development. ” In 2013, the first annual report of the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases recorded increased treatments and funding and significant progress towards the World Health Organization (WHO)’s roadmap for implementation for control, elimination, or eradication by 2020. This achievement has been made possible by developing networks of NGDOs and partnerships with governments of the endemic countries, with international and bilateral agencies, with drug donation programmes for specific diseases, and with the communities affected by those diseases [4]. By 2011, NGDOs reported support in 125 countries to more than 330 million treatments for five priority diseases: onchocerciasis, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis (LF), schistosomiasis, and soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH) [5]. These diseases have effective mass drug administration (MDA) strategies supported by donated or very-low-cost drugs available to control or eliminate them [6,7].
A new construction of signature waveforms for synchronous CDMA systems

We consider synchronous code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, where all users are divided into groups of small size. The signature waveforms for users in each group are constructed from the same signature sequence but with different chip waveforms. To minimize the multiple access interference (MAI) at the output of the correlators, Welch-bound-equality (WBE) sequences and chip waveforms having optimal correlation property are employed. The main idea behind the proposed construction is to suppress the inter-group interference from users in different groups as much as possible (even to remove it completely) at the expense of introducing the intra-group interference among the users in the same group. The intra-group interference, however, can be easily handled by a low-complexity, optimal (or suboptimal) multiuser detector(s) if the group size is kept small enough. As special cases, the proposed constructions correspond to the optimal design of the signature waveforms and the conventional system that uses a single chip waveform, respectively. Thus the proposed construction offers a flexibility to trade performance for complexity. In particular, it is demonstrated that, while the conventional system's error performance is very sensitive to even a small amount of overload, the proposed system with two users per group can have up to 100% overload with an excellent error performance.
Weave ElGamal Encryption for Secure Outsourcing Algebraic Computations over ℤp

This paper addresses the secure outsourcing problem for large-scale matrix computation to a public cloud. We propose a novel public-key weave ElGamal encryption (WEE) scheme for encrypting a matrix over the field Zp. The scheme has the echelon transformation property. We can apply a series of elementary row/column operations to transform an encrypted matrix under our WEE scheme into the row/column echelon form. The decrypted result matches the result of the corresponding operations performed on the original matrix. For security, our WEE scheme is shown to be entry irrecoverable for non-zero entries under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. By using our WEE scheme, we propose five secure outsourcing protocols of Gaussian elimination, Gaussian-Jordan elimination, matrix determinant, linear system solver, and matrix inversion. Each of these protocols preserves data privacy for clients (data owners). Furthermore, the linear system solver and matrix inversion protocols provide a cheating-resistant mechanism to verify correctness of computation results. Our experimental result shows that our protocols gain efficiency significantly for an outsourcer. Our outsourcing protocol solves a linear system of n = 1, 000 equations and m = 1, 000 unknown variables about 472 times faster than a non-outsourced version. The efficiency gain is more substantial when (n,m) gets larger. For example, when n = 10, 000 and m = 10, 000, the protocol can solve it about 56, 274 times faster. Our protocols can also be easily implemented in parallel computation architecture to get more efficiency improvement.
Serum procalcitonin as a diagnostic marker of neonatal sepsis

Purpose We evaluated serum procalcitonin (PCT) as a diagnostic marker of neonatal sepsis, and compared PCT levels with C-reactive protein (CRP) levels. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 269 neonates with a suspected infection, admitted to Wonkwang University School of Medicine & Hospital between January 2011 and December 2012, for whom PCT and CRP values had been obtained. Neonates were categorized into 4 groups according to infection severity. CRP and PCT values were analyzed and compared, and their effectiveness as diagnostic markers was determined by using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. We also calculated the sensitivity, specificity, and positive, and negative predictive values. Results The mean PCT and CRP concentrations were respectively 56.27±81.89 and 71.14±37.17 mg/L in the "confirmed sepsis" group; 15.64±32.64 and 39.23±41.41 mg/L in the "suspected sepsis" group; 9.49±4.30 and 0.97±1.16 mg/L in the "mild infection" group; and 0.21±0.12 and 0.72±0.7 mg/L in the control group. High concentrations indicated greater severity of infection (P<0.001). Five of 18 patients with confirmed sepsis had low PCT levels (<1.0 mg/L) despite high CRP levels. In the ROC analysis, the area under the curve was 0.951 for CRP and 0.803 for PCT. The cutoff concentrations of 0.5 mg/L for PCT and 1.0 mg/L for CRP were optimal for diagnosing neonatal sepsis (sensitivity, 88.29% vs. 100%; specificity, 58.17% vs. 85.66%; positive predictive value, 13.2% vs. 33.3%; negative predictive value, 98.6% vs. 100%, respectively). Conclusion PCT is a highly effective early diagnostic marker of neonatal infection. However, it may not be as reliable as CRP.
Availability Impact of Hard and Soft Failures in Enterprise Storage Systems

Enterprise storage systems have been an integral part of any high-end computing systems. Availability of storage systems is essential to timely provide requested data to servers. Any service disruption, caused by either data loss or data unavailability, can be very costly for enterprise applications such as e-banking or eshopping. Component failure is one of major causes of data loss or data unavailability. Although data loss can be prevented by data protection techniques such as remote mirroring, snapshots, and backups, these techniques have been less effective to avoid data unavailability. In this work, we investigate the impact of hard and soft failures of processor cores on the overall availability of enterprise storage systems. We use an analytical technique based on Markov model to estimate number of system downtime events.
Lipoprotein (a) is not part of the acute phase response

Background: Intravenous myocardial contrast echocardiography with harmonic power Doppler imaging (HPDI) enables assessment of myocardial perfusion. Its accuracy in comparison with positron emission tomography (PET), which is one of the most reliable clinical gold standards for myocardial perfusion, remains to be determined. Objective: To assess the ability of HPDI to identify myocardial perfusion abnormalities, using PET as a gold standard. Methods: 23 patients with myocardial infarction underwent HPDI. Images were obtained from the apical two and four chamber views at pulsing intervals of one to eight cardiac cycles with continuous infusion of Levovist (Schering, Germany). PET was done within two weeks of HPDI. The left ventricle was divided into 12 segments and myocardial opacification by HPDI and uptake of NH3 by PET in each segment was graded as normal, mildly reduced, or severely reduced. Results: Of the 276 segments examined, adequate image quality was obtained in 226 (82%) by HPDI; 50 segments were excluded because of inadequate image quality. There were more exclusions in the basal segments than in the mid or apical segments (p < 0.0001). Of the 226 segments analysed, overall concordance between HPDI and PET was 82% (χ = 0.70). In the apex, more segments were overestimated by HPDI than were underestimated (χ2 = 6.25, p = 0.012). Conclusions: HPDI and PET gave similar results in the assessment of myocardial perfusion abnormalities. However, poor image quality in the basal segments and overestimation of perfusion in the apical segments are current limitations of HPDI.
UBP 41 Is a Proapoptotic Ubiquitin-specific Protease 1

We have isolated Ubp41, a ubiquitin-specific protease, in a screen for proapoptotic genes. We found that overexpression of Ubp41 is sufficient to elicit all features of apoptosis in human cells. In contrast, an enzymatically defective UBP41 mutant and homologous ubiquitin-processing protease family members did not significantly induce cell death. Overexpression of Ubp41 resulted in a strong deubiquitination of a broad range of proteins, but surprisingly did not lead to a stabilization of protein substrates known to be regulated by the ubiquitin-proteasome system such as the cell cycle factors p21 and p27. Hence, in contrast to the proteasome inhibitor MG132, Ubp41 overexpression did not arrest cells in G2/M. Rather, overexpression of hUbp41 seems to interfere with the ubiquitin-system and to cause the activation of apoptosis pathways by stabilizing specific substrates. Hence, for the first time we found that a member of the deubiquitinating enzymes has a direct proapoptotic activity additionally tightening the connection between apoptosis and the ubiquitin-proteasome system.
Bipartition of graphs based on the normalized cut and spectral methods

The main objective of this paper is to solve the problem of finding graphs on which the spectral clustering method and the normalized cut produce different partitions. To this end, we derive formulae for minimum normalized cut for graphs in some classes such as paths, cycles, complete graphs, double-trees, lollipop graphs LPn;m, roach type graphs Rn;k and weighted paths Pn;k. values of their corresponding entries in the second eigen- vector and they provide some counter examples for which each of these algorithms produce poor separators. They used an eigenvector based on the second smallest eigen- value of a difference Laplacian matrix as well as a specified number of eigenvectors corresponding to small eigenvalues. Finally, they extend their algorithm to a generalized ver- sion of spectral methods that allows for the use of more than a constant number of eigenvectors and showed that there are some graphs for which the performance of all the above spectral algorithms was poor. We follow their meth- ods, especially in the cases of graph automorphism and even-odd eigenvector theorem, for the concrete classes of graphs such as roach graphs, double-trees, and double-tree cross paths. We prefer to use a normalized Laplacian ma- trix rather than a difference Laplacian matrix, and describe these properties in terms of formal graph notations.
Molecular analysis of picocyanobacterial community structure along an Arabian Sea transect reveals distinct spatial separation of lineages

We investigated the community structure of Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus along a transect in the Arabian Sea during September 2001. The transect spanned contrasting oceanic conditions, allowing investigation of the effects of both horizontal and vertical environmental gradients over relatively large spatial scales on picocyanobacterial population structure. We applied previously developed oligonucleotide probes specific for different Prochlorococcus ecotypes and Synechococcus clades by hybridization to ‘oxygenic phototroph’ 16S ribosomal DNA polymerase chain reaction amplicons. Flow cytometry data showed that, in general, the picocyanobacterial community was dominated by Prochlorococcus in the southern oligotrophic waters and by Synechococcus in the northern mesotrophic waters. Molecular analysis of these picophytoplankton communities, however, revealed more specific spatial separation of lineages along the transect, with Prochlorococcus in southern surface waters being dominated by the high light‐adapted ecotype, while low light‐adapted (LL) ecotypes were confined to deeper waters below the surface‐mixed layer. Interestingly, between Sta. 2 to 4, the LL genotype MIT9303 appeared to be partitioned at the very base of the euphotic zone, beneath other LL genotypes. Most of the central and northern parts of the transect were dominated by Synechococcus genotypes of the clade II lineage. A significant exception was in the mesotrophic upwelling region, where genotypes representative of clades V/VI/ VII dominated. Members of the recently discovered clades IX and X were found in subsurface samples in warm, coastal waters. We propose that discrete differences, both horizontally and vertically, in a suite of environmental parameters along the transect provide optimal growth conditions for specific genotypes in a particular patch of water, giving rise to distinct spatial compartmentalization of picocyanobacterial lineages.