Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decreased expression of microRNA-21 correlates with the imbalance of Th17 and Treg cells in patients with rheumatoid arthritis

The imbalance of Th17/Treg cell populations has been suggested to be involved in the regulation of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) pathogenesis; however, the mechanism behind this phenomenon remains unclear. Recent studies have shown how microRNAs (miRNAs) are important regulators of immune responses and are involved in the development of a variety of inflammatory diseases, including RA. In this study, we demonstrated that the frequencies of CD3+CD4+IL‐17+Th17 cells were significantly higher, and CD4+CD25+FOXP3+ Treg cells significantly lower in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from RA patients. Detection of cytokines from RA patients revealed an elevated panel of pro‐inflammatory cytokines, including IL‐17, IL‐6, IL‐1β, TNF‐α and IL‐22, which carry the inflammatory signature of RA and are crucial in the differentiation and maintenance of pathogenic Th17 cells and dysfunction of Treg cells. However, the level of miR‐21 was significantly lower in RA patients, accompanied by the increase in STAT3 expression and activation, and decrease in STAT5/pSTAT5 protein and Foxp3 mRNA levels. Furthermore, lipopolysaccharide stimulation up‐regulated miR‐21 expression from healthy controls, but down‐regulated miR‐21 expression from RA patients. Therefore, we speculate that miR‐21 may be part of a negative feedback loop in the normal setting. However, miR‐21 levels decrease significantly in RA patients, suggesting that this feedback loop is dysregulated and may contribute to the imbalance of Th17 and Treg cells. MiR‐21 may thus serve as a novel regulator in T‐cell differentiation and homoeostasis, and provides a new therapeutic target for the treatment of RA.
New Labour's State of Health: Political Economy, Public Policy and the NHS

Contents: Introduction: political economy, public policy and New Labour. Part 1 Political Economy: Political economy: economic regimes, political regimes and political economy in Britain The state, post-Fordism and health services. Part 2 Public Policy: Public policy and the state Illustrating public policy: how New Labour has made health policy Implementation: power, political structure, health policy and the 'new regulation'. Part 3 The NHS: Re-making the NHS Choice and markets The state of New Labour's healthcare state Conclusion: the New Labour state Index.
Long-run trends in earnings and employment in Hungary, 1972-1996

Transition from socialist to capitalist economy led to enormous changes in earnings and employment. In our study a long-horizon descriptive analysis is presented about the major trends, including the last fifteen years of socialism. Education, gender, calendar time, age and vintage effects are separately analyzed. Aggregate (quasi-) panel analysis is used to assess the role of labor demand and labor supply, concluding that exogenous supply factors explained most of what happened before the transition, while the transition itself was dominated by large labor demand shocks. These demand shocks are in large part structural, as opposed to cyclical, and are highly correlated with vintage, gender and education. The main results are summarized in a list of stylized facts.
Markteffizienz, "rationale Erwartungen" und Random-Walk des Wechselkurses: Ein Kommentar zum Aufsatz von B. Gerber

Der Kern von Gerbers Arbeit liegt im Versuch, das Random-Walk-Modell aus der Markteffizienz-Hypothese herzuleiten. Im weiteren schlägt er vor, dieses einfache, von Untersuchungen der Börsenkurse her bekannte Modell auf den Devisenmarkt zu übertragen. Gerber versucht, das um eine Trendkomponente erweiterte Random-WalkModell unter Verwendung einer zusätzlichen Annahme aus dem MarkteffizienzAnsatz zu deduzieren. In dieser Annahme unterstellt er, auf dem Devisenmarkt werde der laufende Kassakurs jeweils so bestimmt, dass die für die nächste Zeitperiode (von t bis t + 1) erwartete Kursänderung im Zeitablauf (für alle t) konstant ist. Aus der Verbindung der Markteffizienz-Hypothese mit diesem einfachen Gleichgewichtsmodell lassen sich u.a. folgende zwei Resultate herleiten: 1. Die um die erwartete Kursänderungsrate bereinigten Kursänderungen (w(t) — ô) lassen sich als einen speziellen stochastischen Prozess charakterisieren, den man «faires Spiel» nennt. Man spricht von einem «fairen Spiel», weil in jedem Zeitpunkt die Wahrscheinlichkeit einer positiven, um den Erwartungswert bereinigten Kursänderung genau der Chance einer entsprechenden negativen Änderung entspricht. 2. Bei einer konstanten erwarteten Kursänderungsrate folgt aus 1. , dass die Kursänderungen selbst linear stochastisch unabhängig sind.
A detection system to counter identity deception in social media applications

Considering the current landscape of the internet where there is a plethora of social networking sites and collaborative websites like Wikipedia concern about malicious users keeping multiple accounts is of prime importance. Most of the collaborative sites allow users to easily create an account and start accessing the content. Social media services such as collaborative project's single user constantly creates many accounts with different account names not long after a block has been applied. The blocked person who creates multiple accounts is called sockpuppet. Current mechanism for detecting deception are based on human deception detection (e.g., speech or text). Although these method have high detection accuracy, but it cannot be applied in databases with large volumes of data. So they are computationally inefficient. There is an efficient method for detecting identity deception by using both Nonverbal (e.g., user activity or Movement) and Verbal Behavior (facial expression, text) in the social media environment. These methods increase high detection accuracy. Post examination and close monitoring on these methods which finds out that it can be applied to any social media environment.
Energy-efficient and reference-free monotonic capacitor switching scheme with fewest switches for SAR ADC

A novel switching scheme for low energy charge-redistribution digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to be used in successive approximation register (SAR) analogue to-digital converters (ADCs) is presented which requires only 2 references, VREF and ground. With the monotonic capacitor switching procedure and C-2C dummy capacitor, the proposed switching scheme achieves 90.61% less switching energy, 74.7% less area and 41.18% less number of switches compared to conventional architecture, which results in an energy-efficient and switch-fewest switching scheme. Behavioral simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed switching scheme.
Improving speech intelligibility in background noise by SII-dependent amplification and compression ∗

In many speech communication applications it is of great interest to achieve a high intelligibility to ensure good communication. However, in these applications speech is often disturbed by additive noise and/or reverberation. Therefore, it is desirable to develop algorithms that are able to maintain a high intelligibility in such disturbed scenarios. While amplifying the speech to achieve good signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) is an easy approach, it is often not applicable due to technical limitations of the amplification system or unpleasantly high sound levels. Consequently, algorithms that increase speech intelligibility while maintaining equal powers are preferable. Several algorithms have been proposed in the past that use either frequency-dependent amplification, dynamic range compression, transient amplification, or modulations filtering techniques. The first attempt to investigate the effect of different signal processing strategies on speech intelligibility was made by Licklider and Pollack [1]. While they did not consider any additive noise or reverberation they could demonstrate that speech intelligibility in quiet is not necessarily affected by strategies such as high-pass or lowpass filtering and clipping. Niederjohn and Grotelueschen [2] proposed a preprocessing algorithm that uses high-pass filtering followed by static rapid amplitude compression. They observed an increase in speech intelligibility for preprocessed speech in white noise over the unprocessed speech at the same SNR. Zorila et al. [4] adopted the idea of dynamic range compression as a mean to increase the speech intelligibility. They used a static input-output characteristic for their dynamic range compression and used several frequency-dependent amplification steps prior to compression. Recently, Sauert and Vary proposed an algorithm that uses timeand frequency-dependent amplification of the speech signal aiming to maximize the SII [3]. However, this approach suffers from spectral adaption to the background noise. Therefore in a recent approach they considered an SNR-dependent transition between SIIweighted and unity-weighting of the speech signal [6]. In this contribution we describe an algorithm and its
Mal-netminer: malware classification based on social network analysis of call graph

In this work, we aim to classify malware using automatic classifiers by employing graph metrics commonly used in social network analysis. First, we make a malicious system call dictionary that consists of system calls found in malware. To analyze the general structural information of malware and measure the influence of system calls found in malware, we adopt social network analysis. Thus, we use social network metrics such as the degree distribution, degree centrality, and average distance, which are implicitly equivalent to distinct behavioral characteristics. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed system performs well in classifying malware families within each malware class with accuracy greater than 98%. As exploiting the social network properties of system calls found in malware, our proposed method can not only classify the malware with fewer features than previous methods adopting graph features but also enables us to build a quick and simple detection system against malware.
Error Correction Mechanisms and Short-Run Expectations

Reflecting the nature of economic decisions, the error correction mechanism (ECM) in the error-correction representation of a system of co-integrated variables may arise from forward-looking behavior. In such a case, the estimated ECM coefficients may misleadingly appear to be insignificant or to have the opposite-than-expected sign if the variables in the error-correction representation do not adequately capture short-run expectations. This paper explores the nature of this problem with a theoretical model for consumption and demonstrates how severe the problem can be with U.S. data. Because the conditions for similar erroneous inferences are likely to apply to many other settings, the paper also recommends a reexamination of the evidence in cases where the ECM appears to be insignificant or to display the "wrong" sign.
Quantenkryptographie und Quantenteleportation

Zusammenfassung: Zunächst werden einige quantenmechanische Grundlagen wiederholt und später benötigte Methoden vorgestellt. Im ersten Hauptteil werden die Grundzüge der Quantenkryptographie anhand des BB84-Protokolls erläutert, sowie die experimentelle Realisierung und Weiterentwicklungen dieses Protokolls besprochen. Im zweiten Hauptteil wird auf die Grundprinzipien der Quantenteleportation, sowie deren experimentelle Anwendung eingegangen.
Information Refinement and Revision for Medical Expert System - Automated Extraction of Hierarchical Rules from Clinical Data -

Since real-world decision making include several decision steps, real-world decision making agents have several sophisticated diagnostic reasoning mechanisms. Thus, if we want to update these reasoning steps, we have to extract rules for each step from real-world datasets. However, one of the most important problems on rule induction methods is that they aim at induction of simple rules and cannot extract rules that plausibly represent experts decision processes, which makes rule induction methods not applicable to the maintenance of real-world decision making agents. In this paper, the characteristics of experts rules are closely examined and a new approach to extract plausible rules is introduced, which consists of the following three procedures. First, the characterization of decision attributes (given classes) is extracted from databases and the classes are classified into several groups with respect to the characterization. Then, two kinds of sub-rules, characterization rules for each group and discrimination rules for each class in the group are induced. Finally, those two parts are integrated into one rule for each decision attribute. The proposed method was evaluated on medical databases, the experimental results of which show that induced rules correctly represent experts decision processes.
An efficient technique of multimodal biometrics using fusion of face and iris features

Multimodal biometrics system increase robustness by removing a dependency on one single biometric traits. In recent years, Multimodal biometrics has received large attention in research. Multimodal Biometrics are more secure than unimodal biometric as even if one biometric trait fail other is present. In this paper, we used a combination of face and iris biometric traits. We used Viola Jones algorithms for detection of face in an image and circular Hough transform to segmented iris part in the image. For feature extraction, we used Modular Principal Component analysis (MPCA) algorithm for face and 2D Gabor filter for iris. The obtained features of face and iris biometric traits are combined using Znorm fusion technique, and forming a single vector. This paper proposes unique own generated database of used modalities.
Biomaterials in Cardiovascular Research: Applications and Clinical Implications

Cardiovascular biomaterials (CB) dominate the category of biomaterials based on the demand and investments in this field. This review article classifies the CB into three major classes, namely, metals, polymers, and biological materials and collates the information about the CB. Blood compatibility is one of the major criteria which limit the use of biomaterials for cardiovascular application. Several key players are associated with blood compatibility and they are discussed in this paper. To enhance the compatibility of the CB, several surface modification strategies were in use currently. Some recent applications of surface modification technology on the materials for cardiovascular devices were also discussed for better understanding. Finally, the current trend of the CB, endothelization of the cardiac implants and utilization of induced human pluripotent stem cells (ihPSCs), is also presented in this review. The field of CB is growing constantly and many new investigators and researchers are developing interest in this domain. This review will serve as a one stop arrangement to quickly grasp the basic research in the field of CB.
Field-induced generation of electron traps in the tunnel oxide of flash memory cells

The processes of trap generation and electron trapping in the tunnel oxide of SuperFlash memory cells have been analyzed. The strongly non-uniform distribution of electric field in the SuperFlash cell allowed us to rule out the electron- or hole-related mechanisms of trap generation. The experimental results of single-trap-induced modulation of the tunneling rate, and the analysis of field and potential distribution in the tunnel oxide, point to the high electric field as a direct cause of electron-trap generation.
Web service description for mobile phone virus

As the rate of utilization of the smart and mobile device grows up year by year, it makes the Smartphone begin to be paid attention in information safety. According to statistics, several hundred kinds of virus that can endanger the Smartphone have appeared which increase averagely at the speeds of six to ten of each month. The Mobile phone virus can spread through various methods, such as SMS/MMS, Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, etc. The study applied on TOVE ontology project method to construct virus behavior ontology of the cell-phone one by one. Last but not the least, experiencing Web Service borderless ability strengthens the strong ability to express of knowledge of ontology and achieves the purpose that knowledge share through Web Service. It is possible to let more people know behavior and potential danger of mobile phone virus very well. There is an important basis to give and study the experts and scholars in this field in the future too.
Empirically supported treatments in pediatric psychology: nocturnal enuresis.

OBJECTIVE To review the medical and psychological literature concerning enuresis treatments in light of the Chambless criteria for empirically supported treatment. METHOD A systematic search of the medical and psychological literature was performed using Medline and Psychlit. RESULTS Several review studies and numerous well-controlled experiments have clearly documented the importance of the basic urine alarm alone as a necessary component in the treatment of enuresis or combined with the "Dry-Bed Training" intervention, establishing them as "effective treatments. " Other multicomponent behavioral interventions that also include the urine alarm such as "Full Spectrum Home Training" have further improved the outcome for bed-wetters, but are classified as "probably efficacious" at this time because independent researchers have not replicated them. Less rigorously examined approaches that focus on improving compliance with treatment or include a "cognitive" focus (i.e., hypnosis) warrant further study. CONCLUSIONS We recommend a "biobehavioral" perspective in the assessment and treatment of bed-wetting and suggest that combining the urine alarm with desmopressin offers the most promise and could well push the already high success rates of conditioning approaches closer to 100%. Much important work is yet to be completed that elucidates the mechanism of action for the success of the urine alarm and in educating society about its effectiveness so that its availability is improved.
Initial Public Offerings with Strong and Weak Premarket Interests

We revisit IPO underpricing and long-run performance conditioned on premarket interest. Using 4,260 non-financial IPOs during 1990-2004, we find that even IPOs faced with weak premarket interest (and consequently priced lower) are underpriced on average by 4.3 percent, which is mostly unpredicted by previous studies. In the long run, we find that low-interest IPOs have much less underperformance than high-interest IPOs over the four years after IPO. Furthermore, after controlling for size, we find little evidence for longrun underperformance in low-interest IPOs. First Draft: September 2009 Revised: January 2010
Conjugate 2DPalmHash code for secure palm-print-vein verification

Multi-modal biometrics enjoy more merits than their single-modal counterparts in terms of accuracy performance and security. The fusion of hand-based biometrics such as palmprint and palmvein is straightforward since they can be acquired simultaneously with a customized image acquisition device. Conjugate 2DPalmHash Code (CTDPHC), which is constructed by 2DPalmHash Codes (2DPHCs) of palmprint and palmvein, is proposed as a cancelable multi-modal biometric. To determine the proper fusion strategy of 2DPHCs of palmprint and palmvein, different fusion rules at score level are compared and discussed. The transposition orientation ranges of 2DPHCs are also finetuned to improve the accuracy performance. Compared with 2DPHC, CTDPHC enjoys higher verification accuracy and stronger anti-counterfeit ability, while trades neither computational complexity nor storage cost.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE BANKING SECTOR : DISCUSSION

The Financial Times recently reported that the largest brewer in England was about to fall into Belgian hands. Bass Brewing was being acquired by Belgium’s Interbrew for the princely sum of $3.45 billion. With this transfer of ownership, 220 years of brewing under British ownership was about to come to an end. As a result, half of the British beer industry was now going to be in foreign hands, something the FT described as “unthinkable a few years ago. ” Similarly, not long ago the British hunting and shooting magazine, The Field, lamented the purchase of Britain’s oldest and most elegant shotgun manufacturer by a French firm. It seems that nothing in the commercial world is sacred anymore! Ownership of large or prestigious enterprises by foreigners is something that goes down hard in most countries, never more than in banking. But the reasons differ. Banking institutions have been and continue to be central to economic development, even in countries with well-developed capital markets.1 The greater the information and monitoring problems in lending, the greater has been the role of banks. This is especially true for small and medium-size firms without access to capital markets and where information is “impacted” and difficult to credibly transfer. Banks have also been central to the direction of economic development by governments, to the protection of nonbank firms from foreign takeover, to the sharing of risks with commercial and nonbank financial firms, and, sadly but true enough, to the intricate and pernicious web of relationships with politicians in search of illicit financing. Banking in
Tgf-β1 expression as a biomarker of poor prognosis in prostate cancer

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the correlation between transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β1) expression and prognosis in prostate cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS: TGF-β1 expression levels were analyzed using the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction to amplify RNA that had been isolated from fresh-frozen malignant and benign tissue specimens collected from 89 patients who had clinically localized prostate cancer and had been treated with radical prostatectomy. The control group consisted of 11 patients with benign prostate hyperplasia. The expression levels of TGF-β1 were compared between the groups in terms of Gleason scores, pathological staging, and prostate-specific antigen serum levels. RESULTS: In the majority of the tumor samples, TGF-β1 was underexpressed 67.0% of PCa patients. The same expression pattern was identified in benign tissues of patients with prostate cancer. Although most cases exhibited underexpression of TGF-β1, a higher expression level was found in patients with Gleason scores ≥7 when compared to patients with Gleason scores <7 (p = 0.002). Among the 26 cases of TGF-β1 overexpression, 92.3% had poor prognostic features. CONCLUSIONS: TGF-β1 was underexpressed in prostate cancers; however, higher expression was observed in tumors with higher Gleason scores, which suggests that TGF-β1 expression may be a useful prognostic marker for prostate cancer. Further studies of clinical specimens are needed to clarify the role of TGF-β1 in prostate carcinogenesis.
Enhanced Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms Using Local Dominance

In this paper, we propose a calculation method of local dominance and enhance multiobjective evolutionary algorithms by performing a distributed search based on local dominance. We divide the population into several sub-populations by using declination angles of polar coordinate vectors in the objective space. We calculate local dominance for individuals belonging to each sub-population based on the local search direction, and apply genetic operators to individuals within each sub-population. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing the search performance between NSGA-II, SPEA2 and their enhanced versions.