Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sp100 Provides Intrinsic Immunity against Human Papillomavirus Infection

ABSTRACT Most DNA viruses associate with, and reorganize, nuclear domain 10 (ND10) bodies upon entry into the host nucleus. In this study, we examine the roles of the ND10 components PML, Sp100, and Daxx in the establishment of human papillomavirus type 18 (HPV18) infection of primary human keratinocytes. HPV18 DNA or HPV18 quasivirus was introduced into primary human keratinocytes depleted of each ND10 protein by small interfering RNA technology, and genome establishment was determined by using a quantitative immortalization assay and measurements of viral transcription and DNA replication. Keratinocyte depletion of Sp100 resulted in a substantial increase in the number of HPV18-immortalized colonies and a corresponding increase in viral transcription and DNA replication. However, Sp100 repressed viral transcription and replication only during the initial stages of viral establishment, suggesting that Sp100 acts as a repressor of incoming HPV DNA. IMPORTANCE The intrinsic immune system provides a first-line defense against invading pathogens. Host cells contain nuclear bodies (ND10) that are important for antiviral defense, yet many DNA viruses localize here upon cell entry. However, viruses also disrupt, reorganize, and modify individual components of the bodies. In this study, we show that one of the ND10 components, Sp100, limits the infection of human skin cells by human papillomavirus (HPV). HPVs are important pathogens that cause many types of infection of the cutaneous and mucosal epithelium and are the causative agents of several human cancers. Understanding how host cells counteract HPV infection could provide insight into antimicrobial therapies that could limit initial infection. The intrinsic immune system provides a first-line defense against invading pathogens. Host cells contain nuclear bodies (ND10) that are important for antiviral defense, yet many DNA viruses localize here upon cell entry. However, viruses also disrupt, reorganize, and modify individual components of the bodies. In this study, we show that one of the ND10 components, Sp100, limits the infection of human skin cells by human papillomavirus (HPV). HPVs are important pathogens that cause many types of infection of the cutaneous and mucosal epithelium and are the causative agents of several human cancers. Understanding how host cells counteract HPV infection could provide insight into antimicrobial therapies that could limit initial infection.
GLP-1 receptor activated insulin secretion from pancreatic β-cells: mechanism and glucose dependence

The major goal in the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus is to control the hyperglycaemia characteristic of the disease. However, treatment with common therapies such as insulin or insulinotrophic sulphonylureas (SU), while effective in reducing hyperglycaemia, may impose a greater risk of hypoglycaemia, as neither therapy is self‐regulated by ambient blood glucose concentrations. Hypoglycaemia has been associated with adverse physical and psychological outcomes and may contribute to negative cardiovascular events; hence minimization of hypoglycaemia risk is clinically advantageous. Stimulation of insulin secretion from pancreatic β‐cells by glucagon‐like peptide 1 receptor (GLP‐1R) agonists is known to be glucose‐dependent. GLP‐1R agonists potentiate glucose‐stimulated insulin secretion and have little or no activity on insulin secretion in the absence of elevated blood glucose concentrations. This ‘glucose‐regulated’ activity of GLP‐1R agonists makes them useful and potentially safer therapeutics for overall glucose control compared to non‐regulated therapies; hyperglycaemia can be reduced with minimal hypoglycaemia. While the inherent mechanism of action of GLP‐1R agonists mediates their glucose dependence, studies in rats suggest that SUs may uncouple this dependence. This hypothesis is supported by clinical studies showing that the majority of events of hypoglycaemia in patients treated with GLP‐1R agonists occur in patients treated with a concomitant SU. This review aims to discuss the current understanding of the mechanisms by which GLP‐1R signalling promotes insulin secretion from pancreatic β‐cells via a glucose‐dependent process.
Magnetospheric accretion-ejection processes in the classical T Tauri star AA Tauri

Context. Accretion and ejection are complex and related processes that vary on various timescales in young stars. Aims. We intend to investigate the accretion and outflow dynamics and their interaction from observations of the classical T Tauri star AA Tau. Methods. From a long time series of high resolution (R = 115 000) HARPS spectra and simultaneous broad-band photometry, we report new evidence for magnetospheric accretion as well as ejection processes in the nearly edge-on classical T Tauri star AA Tau. Results. AA Tau’s light curve is modulated with a period of 8.22 d. The recurrent luminosity dips are due to the periodic occultation of the central star by the magnetically-warped inner disk edge located at about 9 R� . Balmer line profiles exhibit a clear rotational modulation of high-velocity redshifted absorption components with a period of 8.22 days as well, with a maximum strength when the main accretion funnel flow passes through the line of sight. At the same time, the luminosity of the system decreases by about 1 mag, indicative of circumstellar absorption of the stellar photosphere by the magnetically-warped, corotating inner disk edge. The photospheric and He I radial velocities also exhibit periodic variations, and the veiling is modulated by the appearance of the accretion shock at the bottom of the accretion funnel. Diagnostics of hot winds and their temporal behaviour are also presented. Conclusions. The peculiar geometry of the young AA Tau system (nearly edge-on) allows us to uniquely probe the acretion-ejection region close to the star. We find that most spectral and photometric diagnostics vary as expected from models of magneticallychannelled accretion in young stars, with a large scale magnetosphere tilted by 20 ◦ onto the star’s spin axis. We also find evidence for time variability of the magnetospheric accretion flow on a timescale of a few rotational periods.
Handwritten Bangla Compound Character Recognition Using Gradient Feature

Recognition of handwritten characters of Indian script is difficult because of the presence of many complex shaped compound characters (cluster characters) as well as variability involved in the writing style of different individuals. This paper deals with recognition of off-line Bangla handwritten compound characters using modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF). The features used for recognition purpose are mainly based on directional information obtained from the arc tangent of the gradient. To get the feature, at first, a 2 times 2 mean filtering is applied 4 times on the gray level image and a non-linear size normalization is done on the image. A Roberts filter is then applied on the normalized image to obtain gradient image. Next, the arc tangent of the gradient (direction of gradient) is initially quantized into 32 directions and the strength of the gradient is accumulated with each of the quantized direction. Finally, the frequencies of these directions are down sampled using Gaussian filter to get 392 dimensional feature vectors. Using 5-fold cross validation technique we obtained 85.90% accuracy from a dataset of Bangla compound characters containing 20,543 samples.
Towards Consistency of Web Service Architectures

Web services are self-descriptive software components which can automatically be discovered and engaged, together with other web components, to complete tasks over the Internet. The integration of Web services entails consistency problems which can best be solved at the level of models. In this paper, we discuss an approach to model-based consistency management for component-based architectures and its application to Web service architectures.
The criminal career of men convicted of rape: evidence from a Norwegian national cohort

Abstract The extent to which sexual offenders are a group separate from other types of offenders has been debated for many years and investigated from different perspectives. The present study investigated similarities and differences regarding socio-economic background, criminal history and recidivism involving new crimes between rape offenders and three other groups: other sexual offenders, non-sexual violent offenders and other offenders. Data came from Norwegian population registers containing information on all crimes investigated from 1992 to 2012. The sample consisted of all persons convicted in 2002 and 2003 (N = 36,951). Background characteristics and estimated recidivism risk was described using hazard models. Results indicated that men convicted of rape (n = 142) had lower levels of education and that a higher percentage of them were on social benefits compared to the other crime groups. A large majority (79%) of rape-convicted men had previous convictions. Rape offenders were considerably more criminally active and diverse than the other crime groups. Prior criminal record, irrespective of type, increased the risk of recidivism in general. Controlling for other background characteristics did not alter this outcome. Treatment of convicted rapists needs to take into consideration that this offender group has much in common with violent offenders in general.
Reviews without a Purchase: Low Ratings, Loyal Customers, and Deception

The authors document that approximately 5% of product reviews on a large private label retailer's website are submitted by customers with no record of ever purchasing the product they are reviewing. These reviews are significantly more negative than other reviews. They are also less likely to contain expressions describing the fit or feel of the items and more likely to contain linguistic cues associated with deception. More than 12,000 of the firm's best customers have written reviews without confirmed transactions. On average, these customers have each made more than 150 purchases from the firm. This makes it unlikely that the reviews were written by the employees or agents of a competitor and suggests that deceptive reviews may not be limited to the strategic actions of firms. Instead, the phenomenon may be far more prevalent, extending to individual customers who have no financial incentive to influence product ratings.
Being Van Kampen is a universal property

Colimits that satisfy the Van Kampen condition have interesting exactness properties. We show that the elementary presentation of the Van Kampen condition is actually a characterisation of a universal property in the associated bicategory of spans. The main theorem states that Van Kampen cocones are precisely those diagrams in a category that induce bicolimit diagrams in its associated bicategory of spans, provided that the category has pullbacks and enough colimits.
Robust stability and stabilization of discrete singular systems: an equivalent characterization

This note deals with the problems of robust stability and stabilization for uncertain discrete-time singular systems. The parameter uncertainties are assumed to be time-invariant and norm-bounded appearing in both the state and input matrices. A new necessary and sufficient condition for a discrete-time singular system to be regular, causal and stable is proposed in terms of a strict linear matrix inequality (LMI). Based on this, the concepts of generalized quadratic stability and generalized quadratic stabilization for uncertain discrete-time singular systems are introduced. Necessary and sufficient conditions for generalized quadratic stability and generalized quadratic stabilization are obtained in terms of a strict LMI and a set of matrix inequalities, respectively. With these conditions, the problems of robust stability and robust stabilization are solved. An explicit expression of a desired state feedback controller is also given, which involves no matrix decomposition. Finally, an illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach.
A nonlinear long memory model for US unemployment

textabstractTwo important empirical features of monthly US unemployment are that shocks to the series seem rather persistent and that unemployment seems to rise faster in recessions than that it falls during expansions. To jointly capture these features of long memory and nonlinearity, respectively, we put forward a new time series model and evaluate its empirical performance. We find that the model describes the data rather well and that it outperforms related competitive models on various measures of fit.
Comparative Analysis of AI Planning Systems: A Report on the AAAI Workshop

The Workshop on Comparative Analysis of AI Planning Systems, held during the 1994 national AI conference, was lively and interesting. Both the theoretical and practical sides of the AI planning community were represented. Several papers contributed to the theoretical analysis of planning algorithms, and others showed the first steps toward convergence between such theoretical work and practical work on the system engineering aspects of working planners.
An Artificial Nerve Network Realization in the Measurement of Material Permittivity

Effective complex permittivity measurements of materials are important in microwave engineering and microwave chemistry. Artificial neural network (ANN) computational module has been used in microwave technology and becomes a useful tool recently. A neural network can be trained to learn the behavior of an effective permittivity of material under microwave irradiation in a test system, and it can provide a fast and accurate result for the permittivity measurement of material. Thus, an on-line measurement has been realized. This paper presents a simple and convenient reconstruction algorithm for determining the dielectric properties of materials. First, a measurement system is designed, and the reflection coefficient is calculated by employing full-wave simulations. Second, an artificial nerve network has been applied, and adequate simulated materials are utilized to train the networks. Last, the trained network is employed to reconstruct the effective permittivity of several organic solvents using the measured scattering parameters, and the reconstructed results for several organic solvents agree well with reference data and the relative errors between them are less than 5%.
An effective way for moving object detection in traffic scenes

Freeway monitoring is one of the key elements in ITS (Intelligent Transportation System). Moving vehicle extraction is an important preprocessing step in freeway monitoring. It has great influence on the following steps, such as object tracking, classification and behavior analysis. This paper presents an effective method to extract moving objects. Our approach proved to be robust to sudden light changes in the traffic scenes.
The Role of RING Box Protein 1 in Mouse Oocyte Meiotic Maturation

RING box protein-1 (RBX1) is an essential component of Skp1-cullin-F-box protein (SCF) E3 ubiquitin ligase and participates in diverse cellular processes by targeting various substrates for degradation. However, the physiological function of RBX1 in mouse oocyte maturation remains unknown. Here, we examined the expression, localization and function of RBX1 during mouse oocyte meiotic maturation. Immunofluorescence analysis showed that RBX1 displayed dynamic distribution during the maturation process: it localized around and migrated along with the spindle and condensed chromosomes. Rbx1 knockdown with the appropriate siRNAs led to a decreased rate of first polar body extrusion and most oocytes were arrested at metaphase I. Moreover, downregulation of Rbx1 caused accumulation of Emi1, an inhibitor of the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C), which is required for mouse meiotic maturation. In addition, we found apparently increased expression of the homologue disjunction-associated protein securin and cyclin B1, which are substrates of APC/C E3 ligase and need to be degraded for meiotic progression. These results indicate the essential role of the SCFβTrCP-EMI1-APC/C axis in mouse oocyte meiotic maturation. In conclusion, we provide evidence for the indispensable role of RBX1 in mouse oocyte meiotic maturation.
MET Amplification Status in Therapy-Naïve Adeno- and Squamous Cell Carcinomas of the Lung

Purpose: MET is a potential therapeutic target in lung cancer and both MET tyrosine kinase inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies have entered clinical trials. MET signaling can be activated by various mechanisms, including gene amplification. In this study, we aimed to investigate MET amplification status in adeno- and squamous cell carcinomas of the lung. We propose clearly defined amplification scores and provide epidemiologic data on MET amplification in lung cancer. Experimental Design: We evaluated the prevalence of increased MET gene copy numbers in 693 treatment-naïve cancers by FISH, defined clear cutoff criteria, and correlated FISH results to MET IHC. Results: Two thirds (67%) of lung cancers do not have gains in MET gene copy numbers, whereas 3% show a clear-cut high-level amplification (MET/centromer7 ratio ≥2.0 or average gene copy number per nucleus ≥6.0 or ≥10% of tumor cells containing ≥15 MET copies). The remaining cases can be subdivided into intermediate- (6%) and low-level gains (24%). Importantly, MET amplifications occur at equal frequencies in squamous and adenocarcinomas without or with EGFR or KRAS mutations. Conclusion: MET amplification is not a mutually exclusive genetic event in therapy-naïve non–small cell lung cancer. Our data suggest that it might be useful to determine MET amplification (i) before EGFR inhibitor treatment to identify possible primary resistance to anti-EGFR treatment, and (ii) to select cases that harbor KRAS mutations additionally to MET amplification and, thus, may not benefit from MET inhibition. Furthermore, our study provides comprehensive epidemiologic data for upcoming trials with various MET inhibitors. Clin Cancer Res; 21(4); 907–15. ©2014 AACR.
Situs inversus and cystic kidney disease: Two adult patients with this Heterogeneous syndrome

Summary Background: Situs inversus is a rare complication of cystic kidney diseases. Only three genes, INVS (NPHP2), NPHP3 and PKD2 have been proved to be responsible for some cases, while the responsible genes in many others are still unknown. Case Reports: Here we report two male patients with situs inversus combined with cystic kidney disease without any family history of polycystic kidney disease. Their renal function was normal in childhood but culminated in end stage renal disease in middle age. No pathogenic mutations were found in mutation analysis of INVS, IFT88, PKD2, UMOD or NPHP3 in them. Conclusions: Past reported cases of situs inversus and cystic kidney diseases were divided into three groups, i.e., gestational lethal renal dysplasia group, infantile or juvenile nephronophthisis group and polycystic kidney disease group. The present patients are different from each of these groups. Moreover, the renal lesions of the present two cases are quite different from each other, with one showing mildly atrophic kidneys with small numbers of cysts and the other an enlarged polycystic kidney disease, suggesting very heterogeneous entities.
Reinforcing Parser Preferences through Tagging

Lexical ambiguity is an important source of inefciency for wide-coverage HPSG parsing. In this paper, we propose a lexical analysis lter which removes unlikely lexical cat- egories. The lter is implemented as a straightforward HMM n-gram POS-tagger, which com- putes the 'a posteriori' probability of each lexical category. A lexical category is removed if a competing lexical category is sufciently more likely. The novel aspect of our approach is the fact that the tagger is trained on the output of the parser itself; therefore there is no need for hand-annotated material. Use of this lter increases the speed of the parser considerably, and in addition gives rise to an improvement in parsing accuracy. R · ESUM · E. L'ambigu¤ · e lexicale est une source importante de l'inefcacit · e de l'analyse syn- ecision.
An Empirical Re-Examination of the Weak Form Efficient Markets Hypothesis of the Ghana Stock Market Using Variance-Ratios Tests

This study empirically re-examines the weak form efficient markets hypothesis of the Ghana Stock Market using a new robust non-parametric variance-ratios test in addition to its parametric alternative. The main finding is that stock returns are conclusively not efficient in the weak form, neither from the perspective of the strict random walk nor in the relaxed martingale difference sequence sense. Unlike previous evidence, our finding is robust to thin-trading, sub-sample periods as well as the choice of dataset. Consistent with prior studies, the results of the parametric variance-ratios test are ambiguous. By contrast, its non-parametric alternative provides conclusive results.
Direct eye contact influences the neural processing of objects in 5-month-old infants

Abstract Do 5-month-old infants show differences in processing objects as a function of a prior interaction with an adult? Using a live ERP paradigm we assessed this question utilizing a within-subjects design. Infants saw objects during two pretest phases with an adult experimenter. We recorded event-related potentials to the presentation of objects following the interactive pretest phases. Experimental conditions differed only in the nature of eye contact between the infant and the experimenter during the pretests. In one condition the experimenter engaged the infant with direct eye contact. In a second condition the experimenter looked only at the infant's chest. We found that the negative component, related to attentional processes, showed differences between experimental conditions in left fronto-central locations. These data show that 5-month-old infants allocate more attention to objects that have been previously seen during direct eye-contact interaction. In addition, these results clarify the functional nature of the negative component.
Secure hypergraphs: privacy from partial broadcast

A "partial broadcast channel" enables one processor to send the same message---simultaneously and privately---to a fixed subset of processors. Suppose that a collection of processors are connected by an arbitrary network of partial broadcast channels (a hypergraph). We initiate the study of necessary and sufficient conditions, complexity bounds, and protocols for individual processors to exchange private messages across this network. Private message exchange, in turn, enables the realization of general secure computation primitives. The model (motivated by various environments such as multicast network architectures and group communication in distributed systems) is an intermediate setting between the private channels model and the full information model, both of which have been investigated extensively in the last few years. We assume a computationally unlimited adversary (i.e., the information theoretic notion of security), and our techniques are combinatorial. Both the possibility and the polynomial-time feasibility of private message exchange are investigated.