Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of depot fat in the hypothalamic control of food intake in the rat

The young rat adjusts its food intake so precisely to its energy needs that its fat stores remain almost constant. Considerable variation in food intake is brought about in response to change in heat loss to the environment, or in loss of food through the mammary gland in lactation, without appreciable change of weight. Hypothalamic damage permits excessive intake and causes obesity. The degree of obesity and in general its rate of development, is a function of the degree of dam age to the region of the tuber cinereum , and is independent of changes of intake with environmental temperature. It is suggested that the hypothalamic satiety mechanism is concerned only in the prevention of an overall surplus of energy intake over expenditure, which would cause the deposition of fat in the depots. The simplest way in which this lipostasis could be achieved is b y sensitivity to the concentration of circulating metabolites. There is no disturbance of temperature regulation or acclimatization to changed environmental temperature in obese rats. These findings do not support the suggestion made by Brobeck (1946) that food intake is controlled as part of the normal regulation of body temperature by a thermosensitive hypothalamic centre. The maximum daily in take of food during hyperphagia appears to be determined by some limiting factor additional to the hypothalamic mechanism. A similar factor appears to operate in lactation. Reasons are advanced for regarding this as the limiting rate at which absorbed foodstuffs can be removed from the circulation, that is as some aspect of the synthesis or transport of fat.
Complexities of TGF-β Targeted Cancer Therapy

Many advanced tumors produce excessive amounts of Transforming Growth Factor-β (TGF-β) which, in normal epithelial cells, is a potent growth inhibitor. However, in oncogenically activated cells, the homeostatic action of TGF-β is often diverted along alternative pathways. Hence, TGF-β signaling elicits protective or tumor suppressive effects during the early growth-sensitive stages of tumorigenesis. However, later in tumor development when carcinoma cells become refractory to TGF-β-mediated growth inhibition, the tumor cell responds by stimulating pathways with tumor progressing effects. At late stages of malignancy, tumor progression is driven by TGF-β overload. The tumor microenvironment is a target of TGF-β action that stimulates tumor progression via pro-tumorigenic effects on vascular, immune, and fibroblastic cells. Bone is one of the richest sources of TGF-β in the body and a common site for dissemination of breast cancer metastases. Osteoclastic degradation of bone matrix, which accompanies establishment and growth of metastases, triggers further release of bone-derived TGF-β. This leads to a vicious positive feedback of tumor progression, driven by ever increasing levels of TGF-β released from both the tumor and bone matrix. It is for this reason, that pharmaceutical companies have developed therapeutic agents that block TGF-β signaling. Nonetheless, the choice of drug design and dosing strategy can affect the efficacy of TGF-β therapeutics. This review will describe pre-clinical and clinical data of four major classes of TGF-β inhibitor, namely i) ligand traps, ii) antisense oligonucleotides, iii) receptor kinase inhibitors and iv) peptide aptamers. Long term dosing strategies with TGF-β inhibitors may be ill-advised, since this class of drug has potentially highly pleiotropic activity, and development of drug resistance might potentiate tumor progression. Current paradigms for the use of TGF-β inhibitors in oncology have therefore moved towards the use of combinatorial therapies and short term dosing, with considerable promise for the clinic.
Early metalinguistic competence: speech monitoring and repair behavior.

This article examines 2-3-year-olds' responses to specific (e.g., "Where did he go? ") and neutral (e.g., "What? ") requests for clarification. The focus is on children's ability to locate the linguistic errors that provoked neutral questions of clarification and their success in providing appropriate repair. It is argued that this behavior provides evidence for a speech monitor that detects errors and enables repair. Contrary to A. Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) claim, control over the production and comprehension of specific structures does not necessarily precede monitoring. Rather, metalinguistic abilities that are implicated in speech monitoring develop simultaneously with the acquisition of primary linguistic behavior and do not require awareness. It is claimed that such metaprocesses are fundamental to the use of language as a vehicle for the expression of intentional content.
Prevalence of X4 tropic HIV‐1 variants in patients with differences in disease stage and exposure to antiretroviral therapy

Viral tropism plays an important role in HIV pathogenesis. However, its correlation with the clinical outcome and following exposure to antiretroviral drugs are still unclear. HIV‐1 co‐receptor usage was examined in 206 infected individuals: 67 seroconverters, 52 chronically drug‐naïve, and 87 antiretroviral‐experienced patients. The V3 loop was sequenced from plasma HIV‐RNA and co‐receptor usage was inferred using a phenotype predictor software (http://genomiac2.ucsd.edu:8080/wetcat/v3.html), which classifies V3 sequences as R5 or X4. The overall prevalence of X4 viruses was 26.2%, with significant differences among groups: 13.4% in seroconverters, 25% in drug‐naïve, and 36.8% in antiretroviral‐ experienced patients (P = 0.001). The presence of X4 variants in the latter group was associated with higher viral load (P = 0.002) but not with lower CD4 counts. There was no association between HIV tropism and gender, transmission route or age. Neither with the CCR5 Δ32 genotype. Moreover, no association was found between HIV‐1 tropism and drug resistance mutations nor with failure to regimens based on either protease inhibitors or non‐nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Finally, no significant association was found between IL‐7 plasma levels with HIV‐1 tropism. In summary, X4 viruses are particularly frequent among antiretroviral‐experienced patients with high viral loads, irrespective of the CD4 count. Thus, CCR5 antagonists should be used with special caution in this subset of patients. J. Med. Virol. 79: 1040–1046, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Hepatitis C Virus NS4B Protein Can trans-Complement Viral RNA Replication and Modulates Production of Infectious Virus

ABSTRACT Studies of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) life cycle have been aided by development of in vitro systems that enable replication of viral RNA and production of infectious virus. However, the functions of the individual proteins, especially those engaged in RNA replication, remain poorly understood. It is considered that NS4B, one of the replicase components, creates sites for genome synthesis, which appear as punctate foci at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane. In this study, a panel of mutations in NS4B was generated to gain deeper insight into its functions. Our analysis identified five mutants that were incapable of supporting RNA replication, three of which had defects in production of foci at the ER membrane. These mutants also influenced posttranslational modification and intracellular mobility of another replicase protein, NS5A, suggesting that such characteristics are linked to focus formation by NS4B. From previous studies, NS4B could not be trans-complemented in replication assays. Using the mutants that blocked RNA synthesis, defective NS4B expressed from two mutants could be rescued in trans-complementation replication assays by wild-type protein produced by a functional HCV replicon. Moreover, active replication could be reconstituted by combining replicons that were defective in NS4B and NS5A. The ability to restore replication from inactive replicons has implications for our understanding of the mechanisms that direct viral RNA synthesis. Finally, one of the NS4B mutations increased the yield of infectious virus by five- to sixfold. Hence, NS4B not only functions in RNA replication but also contributes to the processes engaged in virus assembly and release.
Legitimacy faultlines in international society: The responsibility to protect and prosecute after Libya

Abstract There is a perceived legitimacy deficit in contemporary international society. A symptom of this is the political contestation surrounding the 2011 Libyan crisis and its influence on the 2011–13 Syrian crisis. This involved criticism being levelled at the coalition led by the so-called Permanent-3 for the way they implemented the protection of civilians mandate, as well as for the referral of the Libyan situation to the International Criminal Court. How the P3 respond to these developments will be driven in part by how this ‘legitimacy fault line’ is interpreted. The purpose of this article is to first give an interpretation that is informed by the work of contemporary English School scholars and the political theorists they draw on; and second to provide the context in which specific policy recommendations may guide the response of the P3 states. We argue that because the new legitimacy fault line divides on the procedural question of who decides how international society should meet its responsibilities rather than substantive disagreements about what those responsibilities are (that is, human protection and justice) the challenge to the liberal agenda of the P3 is not radical. However, we also argue that ignoring the procedural concerns of the African and BRICS states is not outcome neutral and could in fact do harm to both the ICC and the wider implementation of R2P. We consider two proposals for procedural reform and examine how the P3 response would impact on their claim to be good international citizens.
MAKRO-EKONOMİK BÜYÜMEYE MİKRO-KÜLTÜREL BİR YAKLAŞIM: TÜRKİYE’DE KENTLERİN KÜLTÜREL BÜYÜME DİNAMİKLERİ

New trend in growth literature is to investigate the non-conventional dynamics of micro-level economic growth. The purpose of this study is to find out the cultural growth dynamics of the most producutive Turkish cities. Findings indicated that focus on the future, rule of law, work ethic, individualism, religion, education, wealth, charity, relations to business environments and universities, secularism and citizenry are the dynamics which cause economic growth in the cities, and the effects of them vary depending on the city in consideration
Detection based local feature context for image classification

The use of context is shown effective for researchers. However, most of them only take context information at the visual word level without considering the context relationship of local features. For tackling this problem, a novel method is proposed by considering the detection based local feature context. Each image is represented as background and foreground. Given a position in background or foreground, to represent this position's visual information, we use the local feature on this position as well as other local features based on angles and distances to this position. Taking use of local feature context is more discriminative and is also invariant to rotation and scale change. The local feature context can then be applied in the task of image classification. Our method is demonstrated effective by experiments on the UIUC-Sports and Caltech-101 datasets.
Validación concurrente de la escala de manifestaciones ¿relevantes para la enfermedad de Alzheimer (ROSA) en pacientes mexicanos

Objetivo: la escala de manifestaciones relevantes para la enfermedad de Alzheimer (ROSA), es un nuevo instrumento breve y multidimensional. Aplicamos ROSA y tres instrumentos estándar a pacientes con enfermedad de Alzheimer (EA) y otros tipos de demencia, para establecer su validación concurrente analizando la correlación de las áreas evaluadas por ROSA con los instrumentos correspondientes para cada una de ellas, en los diferentes grupos estudiados. Material y métodos: se evaluó a 101 pacientes con EA y otros tipos de demencias, con ROSA y tres instrumentos de uso frecuente: la evaluación breve del estado mental (MMSE), el cuestionario del cuidador sobre el deterioro cognoscitivo en el anciano (IQCODE) y el inventario neuropsiquiátrico (NPI). Se calculó el coeficiente de correlación de Spearman de ROSA, con los intrumentos seleccionados, para cada uno de los grupos evaluados. Resultados: los coeficientes de correlación más elevados y consistentes correspondieron al grupo con EA, seguidas del grupo con demencia fronto-temporal (DFT) y demencia mixta (DM). El grupo de demencia vascular (DV) presentó correlaciones bajas y sin significancia estadística. La DFT fue el único grupo con correlación significativa entre la sección de conducta de ROSA y el NPI. Conclusión: estudiamos la validación concurrente de una escala para pacientes con EA, en distintos tipos de demencia y obtuvimos resultados similares para pacientes con EA y DFT, siendo este último el único grupo con una correlación significativa entre la sección conductual de ROSA y el NPI. Recomendamos realizar una validación de ROSA para pacientes mexicanos con EA y explorar su posible uso para pacientes con DFT.
Ubiquitous systems and the family: thoughts about the networked home

Developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing herald a future in which computation is embedded into our daily lives. Such a vision raises important questions about how people, especially families, will be able to engage with and trust such systems whilst maintaining privacy and individual boundaries. To begin to address such issues, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study eliciting trust, privacy and identity concerns about pervasive computing. Over three hundred UK citizens participated in 38 focus groups. The groups were shown Videotaped Activity Scenarios [11] depicting pervasive or ubiquitous computing applications in a number of contexts including shopping. The data raises a number of important issues from a family perspective in terms of access, control, responsibility, benefit and complexity. Also findings highlight the conflict between increased functionality and the subtle social interactions that sustain family bonds. We present a Pre-Concept Evaluation Tool (PRECET) for use in design and implementation of ubicomp systems.
An insight into the pull requests of GitHub

Given the increasing number of unsuccessful pull requests in GitHub projects, insights into the success and failure of these requests are essential for the developers. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between successful and unsuccessful pull requests made to 78 GitHub base projects by 20,142 developers from 103,192 forked projects. In the study, we analyze pull request discussion texts, project specific information (e.g., domain, maturity), and developer specific information (e.g., experience) in order to report useful insights, and use them to contrast between successful and unsuccessful pull requests. We believe our study will help developers overcome the issues with pull requests in GitHub, and project administrators with informed decision making.
Toward a cross-layer monitoring process for mobile ad hoc networks

The intrusion detection system (IDS) for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) consists in monitoring the nodes' behavior, in order to detect the malicious activity of nodes. Many existing solutions deal with the problem at each layer separately. But new kinds of misbehavior attacks are cross-layer attacks. And such smart misbehaviors cannot be detected at the level of one layer. In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer approach based on physical, MAC, and routing layers for a monitoring mechanism. A new analytical model is proposed to illustrate the parameters' effect on these different layers. The impact of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and the distance between monitor and monitored nodes are clearly introduced. Moreover, the difference between the carrier sense, the interference range, and the transmission range is taken into account in our model. The proposed model improves the evaluation of the nodes' cooperation and reduces the risk of having any false positive rate. The analytical study and simulation results illustrate our purpose. In addition, with the simulations' results, we illustrate the impact of the distance between monitor and monitored nodes on the monitoring mechanism. Finally, we show that our cross-layer mechanism has a lower false positive rate than the classical Watchdog mechanism in different network's parameters such as the nodes' density, the speed mobility, and the different trafﬁc loads.
Transforming Asynchronous Systems with Crash-Stop Failures and Failure Detectors to the General Omission Model

This paper studies the impact of omission failures on asynchronous distributed s ystems with crash-stop failures. For the large group of problem specifications that are restricted to correct processes, we show how to transform a crash-stop related problem specification into an equivalent omission one. For that, we provide transformations for algorithms and failure detectors, such that if and only if an algorithm using a failure detector satisfies a problem specification, then the transformed algorithm using the transformed failure detector satisfies the transformed problem specification. Our transformed problem specification is ensured to be non-trivial, and moreover, the transformation reveals itself to be in a reasonable sense weakest failure detector preserving. Our results help to use the power of the well-understood crash-stop model to aut omatically derive solutions for the general omission model, which has recently raised interest for being noticeably applicable for security problems in distributed environments equipped with security modules such as smartcards.
Neuroscience and the Mind

Francis Crick has identified a doctrine-the neuron doctrine-which he apparently regards as both true and astonishing. I begin by carefully articulating Crick's doctrine, arguing that whilst plausible it is certainly not astonishing. I then consider a related doctrine, the biological neuroscience thesis (BNT). According to BNT, mental science is biological neuroscience, where biological neuroscience is pretty much exhausted by neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and neurochemistry. Stoljar and Gold argue that BNT is unsupported by current scientific developments. I argue that well-established results in the cognitive sciences show that it is false.
Effect of Mix Proportions on Rheological and Hardened Properties of Composite Cement Pastes

There is an increasing need to identify the effect of mix composition on the rheological properties of composite cement pastes using simple tests to determine the fluidity, the cohesion and other mechanical properties of grouting appli- cations such as compressive strength. This paper reviews statistical models developed using a fractional factorial design which was carried out to model the influence of key parameters on properties affecting the performance of composite ce- ment paste. Such responses of fluidity included mini-slump, flow time using Marsh cone and cohesion measured by Lombardi plate meter and unit weight, and compressive strength at 3 d, 7 d and 28 d. The models are valid for mixes with 0.35 to 0.42 water-to-binder ratio (W/B), 10% to 40% of pulverised fuel ash (PFA) as replacement of cement by mass, 0.02 to 0.06% of viscosity enhancer admixture (VEA), by mass of binder, and 0.3 to 1.2% of superplasticizer (SP), by mass of binder. The derived models that enable the identification of underlying primary factors and their interactions that influence the modelled responses of composite cement paste are presented. Such parameters can be useful to reduce the test protocol needed for proportioning of composite cement paste. This paper attempts also to demonstrate the usefulness of the models to better understand trade-offs between parameters and compare the responses obtained from the various test methods which are highlighted. The multi parametric optimization is used in order to establish isoresponses for a de- sirability function of cement composite paste. Results indicate that the replacement of cement by PFA is compromising the early compressive strength and up 26%, the desirability function decreased.
Guiding Techniques for Collaborative Exploration in Multi-scale Shared Virtual Environments

Exploration of large-scale 3D Virtual Environments (VEs) is often difficult because of lack of familiarity with complex virtual worlds, lack of spatial information that can be offered to users and lack of sensory (visual, auditory, locomotive) details compared to the exploration of real environments. To address this problem we propose three guiding techniques in the form of navigation aids to enable one or several users (called helping user(s)) to help one main user (called exploring user) to explore the VE efficiently. These three techniques consist in drawing directional arrows, lighting up a path to follow, and orienting a compass to show a direction to the exploring user. All the three techniques are generic so they can be used for any kind of 3D VE, and they do not affect the main structure of the VE so its integrity is guaranteed.
Analytical technologies for identification and characterization of the plant N-glycoproteome

N-glycosylation is one of the most common and complex post-translational modifications of eukaryotic proteins and one that has numerous roles, such as modulating protein stability, sorting, folding, enzyme activity, and ligand interactions. In plants, the functional significance of N-glycosylation is typically obscure, although it is a feature of most secreted proteins and so is potentially of considerable interest to plant cell wall biologists. While analytical pipelines have been established to characterize yeast, mammalian, and bacterial N-glycoproteomes, such large-scale approaches for the study of plant glycoproteins have yet to be reported. Indeed, the N-glycans that decorate plant and mammalian or yeast proteins are structurally distinct and so modification of existing analytical approaches are needed to tackle plant N-glycoproteomes. In this review, we summarize a range of existing technologies for large-scale N-glycoprotein analysis and highlight promising future approaches that may provide a better understanding of the plant N-glycoproteome, and therefore the cell wall proteome and other proteins associated with the secretory pathway.