Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Swimming against the Tide-Integrating Marketing with Environmental Management Via Demarketing

This paper examines the integration of environmental management with marketing through the application of de marketing in the marketing mix. The marketing material of a commercial tourism business based in a national park and the park itself is examined in terms of the (unconscious) application of demarketing strategies and instruments. It is proposed that, by moving to consciously incorporate such strategies into the marketing mix, greater management efficacy and sustainability can be achieved. The paper also contributes to the demarketing and environmental management discourse through recommending methods to increase the effectiveness of demarketing as a tool to limit the environmental excesses of competitive marketing strategies.
Interaction of Candida Species with the Skin

The human skin is commonly colonized by diverse fungal species. Some Candida species, especially C. albicans, do not only reside on the skin surface as commensals, but also cause infections by growing into the colonized tissue. However, defense mechanisms at the skin barrier level are very efficient, involving residential non-immune and immune cells as well as immune cells specifically recruited to the site of infection. Therefore, the skin is an effective barrier against fungal infection. While most studies about commensal and pathogenic interaction of Candida species with host epithelia focus on the interaction with mucosal surfaces such as the vaginal and gastrointestinal epithelia, less is known about the mechanisms underlying Candida interaction with the skin. In this review, we focus on the ecology and molecular pathogenesis of Candida species on the skin and give an overview of defense mechanisms against C. albicans in this context. We also discuss new research avenues in dermal infection, including the involvement of neurons, fibroblasts, and commensal bacteria in both mouse and human model systems.
Cross-Connected Networks for Multi-Task Learning of Detection and Segmentation

Multi-task learning improves generalization performance in neural networks by sharing knowledge among related tasks. Existing models are for task combinations annotated on the same dataset; research on how to utilize the knowledge of successful single-task convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that are trained on individual datasets is limited. We propose a cross-connected CNN, an architecture that connects singletask CNNs through convolutional layers that transfer useful information to their counterparts. We evaluated the architecture with a combination of detection and segmentation using datasets of two targets: pedestrians and wild birds. Experiments demonstrate how well our CNN learns general representations from multi-task learning.
Fluid-Solid Boundary Handling Using Pairwise Interaction Model for Non-Newtonian Fluid

In order to simulate fluid-solid boundary interaction for non-Newtonian Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) fluids, we present a steady and realistic fluid-solid boundary handling method using symmetrical interaction forces. Firstly, we use the improved SPH method to model the non-Newtonian fluid. Secondly, the density of boundary particle is created into the calculation of fluid-solid interaction forces. Besides, we apply friction conditions to constrain the fluid particles at the boundary. Finally, we apply the predictive-corrective scheme to correct the density deviation and improve boundary computing efficiency. The experiment confirms the feasibility for the interaction between non-Newtonian fluid and solid objects with this method. At the same time, it reflects the viscous characteristics and ensures the physical properties of non-Newtonian fluid. In addition, compared to existing methods, this method is more stable and easier to implement.
Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems

Close to a transition between different phases a substance can show universal behavior that is independent of the microscopic details and is characterized by power law correlations and critical exponents. In this Colloquium the concepts of criticality and universality are discussed when applied to biological systems and suggest that in some cases these systems can extract functional advantages close to criticality.
IL‐12‐induced up‐regulation of NKRP1A expression in human NK cells and consequent NKRP1A‐ mediated down‐regulation of NK cell activation

IL‐12, in contrast to IL‐2, strongly up‐regulated the expression of the NKRP1A lectin molecule on human NK cells. This effect appeared to be specific for NKRP1A as the expression of other functional NK cell surface molecules such as CD16 and different killer inhibitory receptors (KIR) including CD158a and CD158b, p70 and p140 were not affected by culture in IL‐12. In addition, we found that polyclonal or clonal NK cell populations derived in the presence of IL‐2 displayed an increased expression of NKRP1A after culture in IL‐12. The IL‐12‐induced NKRP1A expression was time and dose dependent, reaching a maximum by 7 days of culture in the presence of 2 ng/ml IL‐12 and it was inhibited by the addition of anti‐IL‐12 monoclonal antibody. The IL‐12‐dependent NKRP1A up‐regulation was abrogated by the incubation of NK cells with actinomycin D, thus suggesting that IL‐12 induces de novo transcription of NKRP1A mRNA. Functional analysis revealed that the engagement of the NKRP1A molecule in IL‐12‐ but not in IL‐2‐cultured NK cells leads to a strong inhibition of the cytolytic activity induced by cross‐linking of CD16 or p46, a recently described NK cell‐specific triggering surface molecule. Our findings suggest that IL‐12 up‐regulates the expression of NKRP1A which, in turn, can regulate NK cell activation induced via different triggering pathways. This would imply that NKRP1A‐mediated functions may be regulatd by the cytokine microenvironment that NK cells may encounter at inflammatory sites.
Wearable Audio and IMU Based Shot Detection in Racquet Sports

Wearables like smartwatches which are embedded with sensors and powerful processors, provide a strong platform for development of analytics solutions in sports domain. To analyze players' games, while motion sensor based shot detection has been extensively studied in sports like Tennis, Golf, Baseball; Table Tennis and Badminton are relatively less explored due to possible less intense hand motion during shots. In our paper, we propose a novel, computationally inexpensive and real-time system for shot detection in table tennis, based on fusion of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and audio sensor data embedded in a wrist-worn wearable. The system builds upon our presented methodology for synchronizing IMU and audio sensor input in time using detected shots and achieves 95.6% accuracy. To our knowledge, it is the first fusion-based solution for sports analysis in wearables. Shot detectors for other racquet sports as well as further analytics to provide features like shot classification, rally analysis and recommendations, can easily be built over our proposed solution.
Connexins and Nitric Oxide Inside and Outside Mitochondria: Significance for Cardiac Protection and Adaptation

Irreversible myocardial damage happens in the presence of prolonged and severe ischemia. Several phenomena protect the heart against myocardial infarction and other adverse outcomes of ischemia and reperfusion (IR), namely: hibernation related to stunned myocardium, ischemic preconditioning (IPC), ischemic post-conditioning, and their pharmacological surrogates. Ischemic preconditioning consists in the induction of a brief IR to reduce damage of the tissue caused by prolonged and severe ischemia. Nitric oxide (NO) signaling plays an essential role in IPC. Nitric oxide-sensitive guanylate cyclase/cyclic guanosine-3′,5′-monophosphate (cGMP)-dependent protein kinase type I-signaling pathway protects against the IR injury during myocardial infarction. Mitochondrial ATP-sensitive and Ca2+-activated K+ channels are involved in NO-mediated signaling in IPC. Independently of the cGMP-mediated induction of NO production, S-nitrosation represents a regulatory molecular mechanism similar to phosphorylation and is essential for IPC. Unlike conditioning phenomena, the mechanistic basis of myocardial stunning and hibernation remains poorly understood. In this review article, we hypothesize that the disruption of electrical syncytium of the myocardium may underly myocardial stunning and hibernation. Considering that the connexins are the building blocks of gap junctions which represent primary structural basis of electrical syncytium, we discuss data on the involvement of connexins into myocardial conditioning, stunning, and hibernation. We also show how NO-mediated signaling is involved in myocardial stunning and hibernation. Connexins represent an essential element of adaptation phenomena of the heart at the level of both the cardio- myocytes and the mitochondria. Nitric oxide targets mitochondrial connexins which may affect electrical syncytium continuum in the heart. Mitochondrial connexins may play an essential role in NO-dependent mechanisms of myocardial adaptation to ischemia.
Policy based Collaborative Tagging for Privacy Protection

Collaborative tagging is one of the most popular and diffused services available online. The main purpose of collaborative tagging is to loosely classify resources based on end-users feedback, expressed in the form of tags. Content/resource categorization has been seen a challenging research topic in recent year. Tag suppression is a privacy enhancing technique for the semantic Web. In this paper, users are assigned a tag to resources on the Web revealing their personal preferences. However, in order to avoid privacy attackers from profiling users based on their interests, they may wish to refrain from tagging certain resources. Consequently, tag suppression protects user privacy to a certain manner, but at the cost of semantic loss incurred by suppressing tags. In a nutshell, this technique poses a trade-off between privacy and suppression. In this paper, this trade off is investigated in a systematic fashion and provides an extensive theoretical analysis. User privacy is measure as the entropy of the users tag distribution after the suppression of some tags.
Currency Exposure and Hedging Practices among Indian Non-financial Firms

This article investigates the exchange-rate exposure of S&P CNX 500 non-financial constituents during 2006–2011. By using a standard two-factor market model, we measure the sensitivity of stock returns to changes in the exchange rate and find that 11 per cent of sample firms are significantly exposed to exchange-rate fluctuations. Further, we empirically evaluate the impact of hedging strategies adopted by our sample firms on the exchange-rate exposure. Our evidence suggests that the usage of foreign currency derivatives and foreign currency debt significantly reduces firms’ exchange-rate exposure. Smaller firms appear to have lower levels of exchange-rate exposure as compared to larger firms. A significant negative relationship between exchange-rate exposure and foreign currency derivatives supports the hypothesis that firms use foreign currency derivatives for hedging and not for speculative purposes. These results are found to be robust to alternative ways of measuring foreign currency exposure, exchange-rate indices and estimation methods.
A Method for Making Inferences in Network Analysis: Comment on Forbes, Wright, Markon, and Krueger (2017)

Forbes, Wright, Markon, and Krueger (2017) make a compelling case for proceeding cautiously with respect to the overinterpretation and dissemination of results using the increasingly popular approach of creating “networks” from co-occurrences of psychopathology symptoms. We commend the authors on their initial investigation and their utilization of cross-validation techniques in an effort to capture the stability of a variety of network estimation methods. Such techniques get at the heart of establishing “reproducibility,” an increasing focus of concern in both psychology (e.g., Pashler & Wagenmakers, 2012) and science more generally (e.g., Baker, 2016). However, as we will show, the problem is likely worse (or at least more complicated) than they initially indicated. Specifically, for multivariate binary data, the marginal distributions enforce a large degree of structure on the data. We show that some expected measurements—such as commonly used centrality statistics—can have substantially higher values than what would usually be expected. As such, we propose a nonparametric approach to generate confidence intervals through Monte Carlo simulation. We apply the proposed methodology to the National Comorbidity Survey – Replication, provided by Forbes et al., finding that the many of the results are indistinguishable from what would be expected by chance. Further, we discuss the problem of multiple testing and potential issues of applying methods developed for 1-mode networks (e.g., ties within a single set of observations) to 2-mode networks (e.g., ties between 2 distinct sets of entities). When taken together, these issues indicate that the psychometric network models should be employed with extreme caution and interpreted guardedly.
Chronic Consumption of Artificial Sweetener in Packets or Tablets and Type 2 Diabetes Risk: Evidence from the E3N-European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Study

Background: The influence of artificial sweeteners on metabolic diseases is controversial. Artificially sweetened beverages have been associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) but biases and reverse causation have been suspected to have influenced the observed association. In addition, it has been suggested that investigation into the relationship between the frequency and duration of the consumption of packet or tablet artificial sweeteners and T2D risk is necessary. Methods: We used data from 61,440 women in the prospective E3N-European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition study, conducted between 1993 and 2011. We estimated hazards ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs of T2D risk associated with both the frequency and the duration of use of artificial sweeteners consumed in packets or tablets. Results: Compared to “never or rare” consumers of artificial sweeteners, those using them “always or almost always” had an increased risk of T2D (HR = 1.83 [95% CI 1.66-2.02] in the multivariate model [MM], HR = 1.33 [95% CI 1.20-1.47] when further adjusted for body mass index, BMI). Women consuming artificial sweeteners in packets or tablets for more than 10 years also had an increased risk of T2D compared to never or rare users (HR = 2.10 [95% CI 1.83-2.40] in the MM and HR = 1.15 [95% CI 1.00-1.33] when adjusted for BMI, respectively). Conclusions: Our data suggest that both a higher frequency and a longer consumption of artificial sweeteners in packets or tablets was associated with T2D risk, independently of major T2D risk factors, but partially mediated by adiposity. A precautionary principle should be applied to the promotion of these products that are still largely recommended as healthy sugar substitutes.
Experimental Demonstration of Geometrically-Shaped Constellations Tailored to the Nonlinear Fibre Channel

A geometrically-shaped 256-QAM constellation, tailored to the nonlinear optical fibre channel, is experimentally demonstrated. The proposed constellation outperforms both uniform and AWGN-tailored 256-QAM, as it is designed to optimise the trade-off between shaping gain, nonlinearity and transceiver impairments.
Hypothermia in Multiple Sclerosis: Beyond the Hypothalamus? A Case Report and Review of the Literature

Hypothermia is a rare and poorly understood complication of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We report on a 66-year-old patient currently with Secondary Progressive MS (SP-MS) who developed unexplained hypothermia associated with multiple hospitalisations and we review the literature on this topic. In our case, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain failed to highlight hypothalamic disease, but spinal MRI identified a number of spinal cord lesions. Given the incidence and clinical significance of spinal involvement in MS and the hypothermic disturbances observed in high Spinal Cord Injury (SCI), we hypothesise that upper spinal cord pathology, along with hypothalamic and brainstem dysfunctions, can contribute to hypothermia.
Maximizing the Effect of Information Adoption: A General Framework

With the development of social networking services, social influence analyses, as well as the influence maximization tasks, have attracted wide attention in both academia and industry. Traditional studies mainly focus on simulating process of influence spread. However, two basic functions of social spread, i.e., information propagation and information adoption have not been clearly distinguished. Usually, as information adoption could be even more significant for information publishers in application scenarios, more comprehensive analysis for effect of adoption is urgently required. To that end, in this paper, we propose a novel framework to generally describe social spread, in which information adoption process is separately formulated as random events. Along this line, when we apply this framework to the information adoption maximization task, with proving that the adoption maximization problem is NP-hard and submodular, we further design a polling-based algorithm to achieve an effective approximation. Extensive experiments on four real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of proposed algorithms, which validates that our approach could better summarize the complete social spread process, and further support the necessity of distinguishing information adoption from information propagation.
UV radiation-induced SUMOylation of DDB2 regulates nucleotide excision repair

Subunit 2 of DNA damage-binding protein complex (DDB2) is an early sensor of nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway for eliminating DNA damage induced by UV radiation (UVR) and cisplatin treatments of mammalian cells. DDB2 is modified by ubiquitin and poly(ADP-ribose) (PAR) in response to UVR, and these modifications play a crucial role in regulating NER. Here, using immuno-analysis of irradiated cell extracts, we have identified multiple post-irradiation modifications of DDB2 protein. Interestingly, although the DNA lesions induced by both UVR and cisplatin are corrected by NER, only the UV irradiation, but not the cisplatin treatment, induces any discernable DDB2 modifications. We, for the first time, show that the appearance of UVR-induced DDB2 modifications depend on the binding of DDB2 to the damaged chromatin and the participation of functionally active 26S proteasome. The in vitro and in vivo analysis revealed that SUMO-1 conjugations comprise a significant portion of these UVR-induced DDB2 modifications. Mapping of SUMO-modified sites demonstrated that UVR-induced SUMOylation occurs on Lys-309 residue of DDB2 protein. Mutation of Lys-309 to Arg-309 diminished the DDB2 SUMOylation observable both in vitro and in vivo. Moreover, K309R mutated DDB2 lost its function of recruiting XPC to the DNA damage sites, as well as the ability to repair cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers following cellular UV irradiation. Taken together, our results indicate that DDB2 is modified by SUMOylation upon UV irradiation, and this post-translational modification plays an important role in the initial recognition and processing of UVR-induced DNA damage occurring within the context of chromatin.
Arsenic, ASARCO, and EPA: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Public Participation, and Polluter Games in the Regulation of Hazardous Air Pollutants

The regulation of arsenic emissions poses three recurring issues of environmental regulation: (1) the role that cost-benefit analysis should play in environmental decisions; (2) the extent to which the public should participate in environmental decisions; and (3) the problem of strategic behavior and the measures that EPA can take to prevent strategic behavior. ' This Comment will examine these three issues in the context of EPA's regulation, under section 112 of the Clean Air Act, of arsenic emitted from the ASARCO copper smelter in Tacoma, Washington. 2 These issues are particularly timely in light of current consideration of amendments to section 112. 3
An Examination of Social Media Marketing in China: How do the Top 133 Hotel Brands Perform on the Top Four Chinese Social Media Sites?

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to evaluate hotel companies’ social media marketing efforts using the “6Is” social media monitoring framework. More specifically, in this study we set out to understand how hotels disseminate information, engage with consumers, and distribute products through social media. We investigate the presence of the top 133 hotel brands in China on the top domestic Chinese social media sites in order to identify to what extent the hotel industry in China recognizes the potential of this marketing tool. The findings indicate that the majority of the hotels actively and consistently use the Sina Weibo and Wechat platforms for their social media marketing.
Parathyroid Hormone-Related Protein Negatively Regulates Tumor Cell Dormancy Genes in a PTHR1/Cyclic AMP-Independent Manner

Parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP) expression in breast cancer is enriched in bone metastases compared to primary tumors. Human MCF7 breast cancer cells “home” to the bones of immune deficient mice following intracardiac inoculation, but do not grow well and stain negatively for Ki67, thus serving as a model of breast cancer dormancy in vivo. We have previously shown that PTHrP overexpression in MCF7 cells overcomes this dormant phenotype, causing them to grow as osteolytic deposits, and that PTHrP-overexpressing MCF7 cells showed significantly lower expression of genes associated with dormancy compared to vector controls. Since early work showed a lack of cyclic AMP (cAMP) response to parathyroid hormone (PTH) in MCF7 cells, and cAMP is activated by PTH/PTHrP receptor (PTHR1) signaling, we hypothesized that the effects of PTHrP on dormancy in MCF7 cells occur through non-canonical (i.e., PTHR1/cAMP-independent) signaling. The data presented here demonstrate the lack of cAMP response in MCF7 cells to full length PTHrP(1–141) and PTH(1–34) in a wide range of doses, while maintaining a response to three known activators of adenylyl cyclase: calcitonin, prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), and forskolin. PTHR1 mRNA was detectable in MCF7 cells and was found in eight other human breast and murine mammary carcinoma cell lines. Although PTHrP overexpression in MCF7 cells changed expression levels of many genes, RNAseq analysis revealed that PTHR1 was unaltered, and only 2/32 previous PTHR1/cAMP responsive genes were significantly upregulated. Instead, PTHrP overexpression in MCF7 cells resulted in significant enrichment of the calcium signaling pathway. We conclude that PTHR1 in MCF7 breast cancer cells is not functionally linked to activation of the cAMP pathway. Gene expression responses to PTHrP overexpression must, therefore, result from autocrine or intracrine actions of PTHrP independent of PTHR1, through signals emanating from other domains within the PTHrP molecule.