Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
wRAPping up early monocyte and neutrophil recruitment in atherogenesis via Annexin A1/FPR2 signaling.

Within the past 30 years, the recruitment and accumulation of proinflammatory monocytes and macrophages within atherosclerotic lesions has been a major area of research; however, the precise processes through which myeloid cells migrate are still being worked out. The formation of atherosclerotic lesions occurs in several well-characterized stages, and the recruitment of proinflammatory monocytes and neutrophils plays key roles in the initiation and progression of the disease.1 The extravasation of myeloid cells occurs in several steps (Figure), ranging from capture, to rolling, activation, binding and spreading, intravascular creeping, to transendothelial migration; and these steps are regulated in part by leukocyte (eg, β1, β2 integrins, and L-selectin) and endothelial cell adhesion molecules (eg, vascular cell adhesion molecule-1, intercellular adhesion molecule-1, and E-selectin), arrest chemokines (eg, CCL5 in atherosclerosis), and chemoattractant chemokines (eg, CCL2, CX3CL1, CXCL1, and CXCL2). 2 Based primarily on knockout studies in atherosclerotic mice, Ly6Chigh classical monocytes are known to be recruited in a CCL5–CCR5, CCL2–CCR2, and CX3CL1–CX3CR1–dependent fashion3–6 and neutrophils may use CCL5–CCR5, CCL3–CCR1/CCR5,7,8 and CXCL2–CXCR2.8 Although proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and an activated endothelium positively regulate myeloid cell recruitment in atherogenesis, several novel players such as proresolving eicosanoids and annexins may support the resolution of inflammation. In this issue of Circulation Research , Drechsler et al9 examined the role of the promiscuous G-protein–coupled chemokine receptor formyl peptide receptor 2 (FPR2) and one of its known anti-inflammatory ligands, Annexin A1, on myeloid cell recruitment in atherosclerosis. Although the role of Annexin A1 as an atheroprotective factor has been previously suggested, Dreschler et al9 described a mechanism by which Annexin A1 may regulate integrin-dependent neutrophil and monocyte recruitment during atherogenesis. This study provides compelling evidence that Annexin A1/FPR2 signaling plays an important role in negative regulation of the Rap-1–dependent …
An Improved LOS Method for Implementing Visibility Analysis of 3D Complex Landscapes

This paper presents an efficient method for implementing visibility analysis on complex landscapes based on an improved LOS (line of sight) algorithm. The method not only determines the viewshed through capturing the geometric relationship between the target points and viewpoint. It also judges the visibility of the target points by the elevations. The visibility of a part of the target points are determined through comparing the pointspsila elevations with the viewpointpsilas height, thus enhance the efficiency of visibility analysis on the terrain. Eventually visualize the results related to the given viewpoint on three-dimensional terrain surfaces. This method can not only be applied in the visibility analysis of the forest scenes, can also be used in the analysis of the urban environment. Experiments show that our method is superior to the traditional related methods.
Dimerization of Peptides by Calcium Ions: Investigation of a Calcium-Binding Motif

We investigated calcium-binding motifs of peptides and their recognition of active functionalities for coordination. This investigation generates the fundamentals to design carrier material for calcium-bound peptide-peptide interactions. Interactions of different peptides with active calcium domains were investigated. Evaluation of selectivity was performed by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry by infusing solutions containing two different peptides (P1 and P2) in the presence of calcium ions. In addition to signals for monomer species, intense dimer signals are observed for the heterodimer ions (P1 ⋯ Ca2+ ⋯ P2) (⋯ represents the noncovalent binding of calcium with the peptide) in the positive ion mode and for ions ([P1-2H]2− ⋯ Ca2+ ⋯ [P2-2H]2−) in the negative ion mode. Monitoring of the dissociation from these mass selected dimer ions via the kinetic method provides information on the calcium affinity order of different peptide sequences.
In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq

From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history - but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this ground breaking revelation, In "Time of War" explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam J. Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics - such as what they cost in lives and resources - than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues. With the help of World War II - era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of "the good war" that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace. With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, "In Time of War" offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence - and ultimately illuminate - each other.
System and Interface Framework for SCAPE as a Collaborative Infrastructure

We have developed a multi-user collaborative infrastructure, SCAPE (an acronym for Stereoscopic Collaboration in Augmented and Projective Environments), which is based on recent advancement in head-mounted projective display (HMPD) technology. SCAPE combines the functionalities of an interactive workbench and a room-sized immersive display to concurrently create both exocentric and egocentric perspectives. SCAPE intuitively provides a shared space in which multiple users can simultaneously interact with a 3D synthetic environment from their individual viewpoints, and each user has concurrent access to the environment from multiple perspectives at multiple scales. SCAPE also creates a platform to merge the traditionally separate paradigms of virtual and augmented realities. In this paper, we discuss the design principles we have followed to conceptualize the SCAPE system and briefly summarize SCAPE's hardware implementation. Furthermore, we discuss in detail the high-level design and implementation of the SCAPE architecture, and present a set of unique widget interfaces currently available in our implementation that enable and facilitate interaction and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate SCAPE's unique visualization and interface capabilities via a testbed application Aztec Explorer.
Impact of late-to-refill reminder calls on medication adherence in the Medicare Part D population: evaluation of a randomized controlled study

Objectives This study evaluates a nationwide pharmacy chain’s late-to-refill (LTR) reminder program that entails local pharmacists placing reminder calls to Medicare Part D patients. Methods We conducted a randomized controlled study among 735,218 patients who exhibited nonadherent behavior by not refilling a maintenance medication 3 days from an expected refill date. Patients were randomly assigned to an intervention group who received LTR reminder calls or to a control group. We used Walgreens pharmaceutical claims data from 2015 to estimate the impact of LTR calls on short-term and annual adherence. Results The initial refill rate within the first 14 days of the expected refill date significantly increased in the intervention group by 22.8% (6.09 percentage points) compared to the control group (P<0.001). The proportion of days covered (PDC) in the intervention group increased significantly by 1.5% (0.856 percentage points) relative to the control group (P<0.001) over 365 days. Patients in the intervention group were significantly more adherent (PDC ≥80%) by 3% (0.97 percentage points) compared to the control group (P<0.001). Over a 270-day follow-up period, persistence significantly increased by 2.15 days in the intervention group (P<0.001). Conclusion Results from this study suggest that LTR reminder calls increased adherence for Medicare Part D patients who are late in refilling their medications and therefore have the potential to reduce their risk for hospitalization and health care costs. Additionally, the intervention increased the number of patients with PDC ≥80% by ~3%, positively impacting Medicare Part D plan quality rating.
"The European Union and Multi-Level Governance in Practice: Patterns of Subnational Involvement: Expansion, Divergence, Complexity"

The turbulent ratification of the Treaty of the European Union has given a new sharpness to old debates about democratic representativeness in the European arena. The crisis of representation after Maastricht was however limited in terms of who and what was criticised: Maastricht was a crisis of intergovernmentalism. There as several alternative ways for establishing links between the citizen and Europe. This paper focuses on the role of subnational intermediaries in day-to-day policy making. The first part of the paper places subnational mobilisation in a broader understanding of the Euro-polity. Three competing conceptualisations: state-centric model, supranational model, and multi-level governance make distint predictions about the features, opportunities and constraints for subnational mobilisation. Next, the contemporary variety of subnational mobilisation is compared with each model. The final section points at some implications for representative democracy in the Euro-polity.
Fall down detection for surveillance system of health care

Since the world technology grows faster and faster, the people is becoming much more health than ever before, thus getting longer of living age. On the other hand however, the rising number of elderly people also course the problem such as the aging of population. One case is that the population of elderly who live alone is increasing and more assistance should support on the situation the health care resource is less. Thus we proposed the surveillance system to apply for this situation. This paper focuses on the surveillance system which focuses on the individual house to detect the unmoral behavior such as falling down when elderly people lives alone. And comparing with the most popular methodology such as Aspect Ratios, the method we proposed has conquered its weakness and performed will in most situations.
An investigation of the effects of top management team characteristics on the performance of municipal councils in Kenya (a survey of municipal councils in Nyeri county)

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of top management team characteristics on the performance of municipal councils. The target population was 50 top and middle level managers at the Municipal ·Councils in Nyeri County. The researcher gave a background of the study, its purpose, objectives and the research questions. The researcher also recognized the work done by other researchers through reference to their literature, reference to recent studies or publications on the effects of top management team characteristics, justification of the study, conceptual framework and operational framework. Finally, the methodology that was used in carrying out the research was outlined. A descriptive cross sectional survey was carried out to establish the effects of top management team characteristics on the performance of municipal councils. 50 members of the municipal councils top management team were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. The means of data collection, analysis and presentation was also highlighted. Additional data was retrieved from files and reports in custody of the council. The study found that 68% of the respondents in the study were male with the women making up only 32% of the study population. All the respondents' agreed that the size of the top management team mattered and the major reason given for this was the influence of the level of interpersonal relations. The experience of the top level management was found to have influence on the performance of organizations especially with regards to the functional field. The researcher concluded that the country still has a long way to go with regards to achieving gender equality. The researcher also concluded that more and more people were embracing education. Among others the researcher recommended that more research should be carried out to determine what between small and big size management teams produce the best results.
Survey on eInclusion Actors in the EU27

This report presents the results of an online survey that collect relevant data from almost 3,000 organisations working on eInclusion in 27 European countries, which is the first attempt in Europe to collect primary data from those actors. This research constitutes a building block of a larger project ‘Measuring the Impact of eInclusion Actors on Digital Literacy, Skills and Inclusion goals of the Digital Agenda for Europe’ (MIREIA), a policy-oriented research project which aims to better understand the role of these actors across the European Union and to create adequate measurement instruments to provide evidence about how they contribute to the achievement of the Europe 2020 policy goals, from the eInclusion perspective. The findings of the analysis provide policy relevant insights and help shed light on the size of the sector, the types of organisations providing eInclusion services and their capacity (staff, budgets, funding sources and network), the services they provide and the target groups they address. In conclusion, they illustrate the key relevance of these estimated 250,000 actors in EU27 in advancing social and economic inclusion goals of the Europe2020 strategy, and in particular the digital literacy and inclusion goals of the Digital Agenda for Europe.
The Signaling Value of a High School

Although economists acknowledge that various indicators of educational attainment (e.g., highest grade completed, credentials earned) might serve as signals of a worker’s productivity, the practical importance of education-based signaling is not clear. In this paper we estimate the signaling value of a high school diploma, the most commonly held credential in the U.S. To do so, we compare the earnings of workers that barely passed and barely failed high school exit exams, standardized tests that, in some states, students must pass to earn a high school diploma. Since these groups should, on average, look the same to firms (the only difference being that "barely passers" have a diploma while "barely failers" do not), this earnings comparison should identify the signaling value of the diploma. Using linked administrative data on earnings and education from two states that use high school exit exams (Florida and Texas), we estimate that a diploma has little effect on earnings. For both states, we can reject that individuals with a diploma earn eight percent more than otherwise-identical individuals without one; combining the state-specific estimates, we can reject signaling values larger than five or six percent. While these confidence intervals include economically important signaling values, they exclude both the raw earnings difference between workers with and without a diploma and the regression-adjusted estimates reported in the previous literature. ∗For useful discussions, we thank Kelly Bedard, Ken Chay, Mike Geruso, Marco Manacorda, Rob McMillan, Devah Pager, Craig Riddell and, especially, David Lee. For helpful comments and suggestions, we thank seminar participants at Bristol University, Brown University, Columbia University, the Florida Department of Education, Harvard University, London School of Economics, Northwestern University, Pompeu Fabra, Princeton University, RAND, Rutgers University, University of Toronto, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, University of Florida, the SOLE 2010 conference, the NBER 2010 Summer Institute and the Southern California Conference of Applied Microeconomics (Claremont McKenna College). Clark thanks the Florida Department of Education for generously supplying the Florida data used in this paper and for providing invaluable information on the relevant institutions. Much of this work was completed while Clark was visiting the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. We thank Marion Aouad and Yu Xue for excellent research assistance. Financial support was generously provided by the U.S. Department of Education (under grant R305R060096). The opinions expressed in this paper are ours, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Florida Department of Education, the Texas Department of Education or the U.S. Department of Education.
Market Structure in the Residential Real Estate Brokerage Market

This study provides empirical evidence regarding brokerage firm concentration in a local market multiple listing service setting over the year 1992-1995. To evaluate the level of brokerage firm concentration in this market, Gini Coefficients, Herfindahl-Hirschman Indices and Concentration Ratios for each year of the study period are calculated. Our results indicate that for firms responsible for listing properties, firm concentration has not varied substantially over the four-year study period. However, for those firms that were responsible for actually selling properties, firm concentration has decreased over the study period. This finding tends to indicate that the MLS now provides greater exposure to a wide variety of sales firms, therefore leading to a higher level of competition with a lower level of concentration for selling firms in this local market.
A characterization of prefix n-power words

Abstract Primitive words play a very important role in formal language theory for their elementary combinatorial properties. Analogous to primitive words, we consider prefix n-primitive words. Prefix n-primitivities are applied to check whether a neural network converges for a set of data. In this note we continue our previous work to characterize any two distinct words u, v, where u is a p-primitive word, such that the catenation uv i is prefix n-primitive, where i≥3.
Honokiol Protected against Heatstroke-Induced Oxidative Stress and Inflammation in Diabetic Rats

We aimed at investigating the effect of honokiol on heatstroke in an experimental rat model. Sprogue-Dawley rats were divided into 3 groups: normothermic diabetic rats treated with vehicle solution (NTDR+V), heatstroke-diabetic rats treated with vehicle (HSDR+V), and heatstroke rats treated with konokiol (0.5–5 mg/ml/kg) (HSDR+H). Sixty minutes before the start of heat stress, honokiol or vehicle solution was administered. (HSDR+H) significantly (a) attenuated hyperthermia, hypotension and hypothalamic ischemia, hypoxia, and neuronal apoptosis; (b) reduced the plasma index of the toxic oxidizing radicals; (c) diminished the indices of hepatic and renal dysfunction; (d) attenuated the plasma systemic inflammatory response molecules; (e) promoted plasma levels of an anti-inflammatory cytokine; (f) reduced the index of infiltration of polymorphonuclear neutrophils in the serum; and (g) promoted the survival time fourfold compared with the (HSDR+V) group. In conclusion, honokiol protected against the outcome of heatstroke by reducing inflammation and oxidative stress-mediated multiple organ dysfunction in diabetic rats.
IT capability, strategic flexibility and enterprise performance: The empirical evidence from the manufacturing enterprises in Pearl River Delta

Utilizing the model of the relationships among IT capability, strategic flexibility, non-financial performance and financial performance, we carry out an empirical research based on a sample of the manufacturing enterprises in Pearl River Delta. Then strategic flexibility is classified as proactive flexibility and reactive flexibility to conduct further analyses, which help us find out more details about the relationships linking IT capability to financial performance. Results indicate that, in general, IT capability and strategic flexibility are both positively related to non-financial performance, and IT capability is positively related to strategic flexibility, and non-financial performance is positively related to financial performance. From further analysis, IT capability is found to be positively related to proactive flexibility and reactive flexibility, which are both positively related to non-financial performance. Especially, proactive flexibility is found to be positively related to reactive flexibility, which is out of our expectation.
Inferring custom architectures from OpenCL

OpenCL has emerged as the de facto cross-platform standard in the GPU-based HPC computing domain. However, in FPGA-based HPC systems, OpenCL-to-FPGA compilers often yield suboptimal results due to the rigid architecture, limited shared-memory, and non-existent inter-work-item communication pathways implied by the OpenCL model. In this work, a methodology of inferring application-specific OpenCL “work-item” interfaces based on kernel code analysis is explored. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented using an OpenCL source-to-source translator, which allows automated generation of the FPGA-based hardware accelerators directly from the OpenCL sources. The type and implementation of the inferred interface is tailored to match the data access patterns within the kernel. The inferred interface outperforms limitations of the OpenCL rigid architecture and communication model. The presented approach achieves a ~30x speedup over the generic memory-based approach for a 16 work-items application. A set of OpenCL coding patterns targeting FPGA-based HPC systems is also introduced. This technique is demonstrated on a popular bioinformatics algorithm, yet is applicable to any such algorithm with non-standard inter-cell communications.
Sizing and optimization of low power process variation aware standard cells

The yield of low voltage digital circuits based on standard cell design is found to be sensitive to local gate delay and power variations due to uncorrelated intra-die parameter fluctuations. Caused by random nature of doping positions they lead to more pronounced deviations for minimum transistor sizes. The basic idea of this work is to optimize the transistor level single standard cells by making the cells more resistant for process variations.