Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DETERMINATION OF ANTIOXIDANTS IN MEDICINAL HERBS

The evaluation of antioxidant capacity, total phenolics, vitamin C content and identification of several phenolic acids and flavonoids was performed in the following fresh and dried herbs widely used in folk medicine throughout Slovenia and elsewhere: elder berries (Sambucus nigra L.), barberries (Berberis vulgaris L.), rowan tree berries (Sorbus aucuparia L.), coltsfoot flowers (Tussilago farfara L.), linden flowers (Tilia platyphyllos Scop.), thyme flowers (Thymus vulgaris), milfoil flowers (Achillea millefolium) and plantain leafs (Plantago lanceolata L.). It was found out that selected medicinal herbs contain different antioxidants with different polarity and exhibit different antioxidant capacity. Their levels decrease with the drying process and during preparation of their infusions.
Study of Regions of Extended Homozygosity Provides a Powerful Method to Explore Haplotype Structure of Human Populations

Previous investigations have reported linkage disequilibrium occurring between nearby polymorphisms, a block‐like structure for such relationships, some instances where surprisingly few haplotypes are found and regions of extended homozygosity which are especially marked around centromeres and which are especially common on the X chromosome. We investigated the distribution and nature of regions of extended homozygosity in a sample of 1411 subjects included in a genome wide association study. Regions of extended homozygosity over 1Mb are common, with an average of 35.9 occurring per subject, and containing on average 73 homozygous markers. They have a markedly non‐random distribution. They are relatively common on the X chromosome and are seen at centromeres but are also concentrated at other chromosomal regions where presumably recombination is rare. They seem to be a consequence of some haplotypes being very common in the population and although sometimes this reflects the effect of a very common haplotype we also note that there are examples of two or three common haplotypes, each very different from each other, underlying this effect. Regions of extended homozygosity are commoner than previously appreciated. They result from the presence of extended haplotypes with high population frequency. Such regions concentrate in particular locations. The haplotypes involved are sometimes markedly disparate from each other. These regions offer a valuable opportunity for further investigation, in particular with regard to their ancestral history.
Trabectedin and its potential in the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma

Trabectedin is a new marine-derived compound that binds the DNA minor groove and interacts with proteins of the DNA repair machinery. Phase I trials have established the standard regimen as 1500 μg/m2 24-hour continuous infusion repeated every 3 weeks. Several phase II trials have shown response in 5%–10% of unselected patients with soft tissue sarcoma failing prior chemotherapy and disease stabilisation in 30%–40%. Furthermore, prolonged disease control has been described in 15%–20% of patients. Toxicities are mainly haematological and hepatic with grade 3–4 neutropenia and thrombocytopenia observed in approximately 50% and 20% of patients respectively, and grade 3–4 elevation of liver enzymes observed in 35%–50% of patients treated with trabectedin. Current research focuses on the identification of predictive factors for patients with soft tissue sarcoma treated with trabectedin.
Interfaces among executive functions, language and intentionality

A relacao entre linguagem e funcoes executivas, tambem conhecidas como funcoes cognitivas complexas, ja foi estabelecida no passado por Luria e Vygotsky. Este artigo tem por objetivo revisar o conceito de funcoes executivas sob as perspectivas neuropsicologica e cognitiva. Alguns dos reconhecidos modelos sobre processamento das funcoes executivas sao apresentados, assim como estudos recentes sobre funcoes executivas em criancas. O desenvolvimento das funcoes executivas e discutido sob o ponto de vista biologico, neuropsicologico e cognitivo, destacando-se a importância da linguagem nesses processos, enquanto funcao reguladora da acao intencional. Essa discussao propoe que aspectos do desenvolvimento sejam incluidos nos modelos futuros sobre funcoes executivas.
Nucleotide sequence of the Syrian hamster intracisternal A-particle gene: close evolutionary relationship of type A particle gene to types B and D oncovirus genes

We determined the complete nucleotide sequence of the intracisternal A-particle gene, IAP-H18, cloned from the normal Syrian hamster liver DNA. IAP-H18 was 7,951 base pairs in length with two identical long terminal repeats of 376 base pairs at both ends. On the coding strand, imperfect open reading frames corresponding to gag and pol of the retrovirus genome were observed, whereas many stop codons were present in the region corresponding to env. The putative H18 gag gene (809 amino acids) had a sequence homologous to the N-terminal half of the mouse mammary tumor virus gag gene and locally to the Rous sarcoma virus gag gene. The putative H18 pol gene (900 residues) was homologous to the Rous sarcoma virus pol gene almost throughout the entire region. Two conserved regions among the retrovirus pol genes have been reported. One presumably corresponds to the DNA polymerase and the RNase H domain, and the other corresponds to the DNA endonuclease domain of the multifunctional protein pol. By the comparison of the deduced amino acid sequences of the putative endonuclease domain of six representative oncovirus genomes, a phylogenetic tree of the oncovirus genomes was constructed, and the intracisternal A-particle (type A) genome was found to be more closely related to the mouse mammary tumor virus (type B) and squirrel monkey retrovirus (type D) genomes.
A Distributed SIR-Based Power Control Algorithm for WCDMA Systems

Power control has been an important issue in multiple access systems allowing more users to share the system resources. The capacity of the WCDMA system is limited by the total interference, called multiple access interference (MAI). An efficient power control algorithm is always required to improve the system performance. In this paper, we propose a distributed, first order power control algorithm. The proposed algorithm uses an exponential function with a modified form of the LMS algorithm in order to achieve a better speed of convergence. We examine the proposed algorithm for time varying multipath Rayleigh fading environment. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm and the 3GPP standard algorithm. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves better convergence and saves on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required to achieve a certain performance. We also demonstrate that the proposed algorithm works well for different mobile speeds with a continuously changing channel.
Towards 'mindful journalism': Applying Buddhism's Eightfold Path as an ethical framework for modern journalism

Religious codes of morality have informed professional ethical principles, particularly with regard to fairness, truth and honesty. Buddhism has a growing relevance in Western societies, prompted by migration and a developing interest in Eastern religions and philosophies. This article considers Buddhism's 'Noble Eightfold Path' and explores its applicability to Fourth Estate journalism in the modern era. It takes each of its elements - understanding free of superstition, kindly and truthful speech, right conduct, doing no harm, perseverance, mindfulness and contemplation - and uses modern examples to illustrate their potential usefulness to the journalist seeking to practise responsible truth-seeking and truth-telling. It assesses whether such an approach would allow the reportage of such topics as celebrity gossip and official corruption and examines the ethics of subterfuge, deception and treatment of vulnerable sources in this light.
Particle swarm with speciation and adaptation in a dynamic environment

This paper describes an extension to a speciation-based particle swarm optimizer (SPSO) to improve performance in dynamic environments. The improved SPSO has adopted several proven useful techniques. In particular, SPSO is shown to be able to adapt to a series of dynamic test cases with varying number of peaks (assuming maximization). Inspired by the concept of quantum swarms, this paper also proposes a particle diversification method that promotes particle diversity within each converged species. Our results over the moving peaks benchmark test functions suggest that SPSO incorporating this particle diversification method can greatly improve its adaptability hence optima tracking performance.
ReLiance: a machine learning and literature-based prioritization of receptor—ligand pairings

Motivation: The prediction of receptor—ligand pairings is an important area of research as intercellular communications are mediated by the successful interaction of these key proteins. As the exhaustive assaying of receptor—ligand pairs is impractical, a computational approach to predict pairings is necessary. We propose a workflow to carry out this interaction prediction task, using a text mining approach in conjunction with a state of the art prediction method, as well as a widely accessible and comprehensive dataset. Among several modern classifiers, random forests have been found to be the best at this prediction task. The training of this classifier was carried out using an experimentally validated dataset of Database of Ligand-Receptor Partners (DLRP) receptor—ligand pairs. New examples, co-cited with the training receptors and ligands, are then classified using the trained classifier. After applying our method, we find that we are able to successfully predict receptor—ligand pairs within the GPCR family with a balanced accuracy of 0.96. Upon further inspection, we find several supported interactions that were not present in the Database of Interacting Proteins (DIPdatabase). We have measured the balanced accuracy of our method resulting in high quality predictions stored in the available database ReLiance. Availability: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~bioiuser/ReLianceDB/index.php Contact: yves.moreau@esat.kuleuven.be; ernesto.iacucci@gmail.com Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Statistical Certification of Software Systems

Common software release procedures based on statistical techniques try to optimize the trade-off between further testing costs and costs due to remaining errors. We propose new software release procedures where the aim is to certify with a certain confidence level that the software does not contain errors. The underlying model is a discrete time model similar to the geometric Moranda model. The decisions are based on a mix of classical and Bayesian approaches to sequential testing and do not require any assumption on the initial number of errors.
PShare: Position sharing for location privacy based on multi-secret sharing

Location-based applications such as Facebook Places, Foursquare, or Loopt attract millions of users by implementing point of interest finders, friend finders, geosocial networking, etc. Typically, these applications act as clients to a location service such as Google Latitude or Yahoo Fire Eagle, which manage mobile object positions and ensure the scalability to provide various clients with mobile object positions. However, exposing precise user positions raises user privacy concerns, especially if location service providers are not fully trusted, and private position information could be “lost”, leaked, stolen, etc. To enable the secure management of private user positions on non-trusted location servers (LSs), we present novel position sharing approaches based on the concept of multi-secret sharing. Our approaches split up a precise user position into position shares, which are distributed to different LSs of different providers such that a compromised provider only reveals user positions with degraded precision. On the other hand, clients can combine several shares queried from different LSs to increase their provided precision without the need to store precise information at a single LS. We propose two position sharing approaches: PShare-SLM is the first position sharing approach presented so far for symbolic location models. For geometric location models, we present PShare-GLM, which improves existing geometric position sharing approaches [1] by considering continuous position updates and by increasing the robustness against various attacks.
Subcutaneous and visceral fat distribution and daily physical activity: comparison between young and middle aged women.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of aging and physical activity on distribution patterns in subcutaneous and visceral fat. METHODS: Distributions of subcutaneous rat mass at six segments (face and neck, forearm, upper arm, trunk, thigh, and lower leg) were determined by adipose tissue thickness measurements by B mode ultrasonogram and body surface areas. Visceral fat mass was calculated by subtracting subcutaneous fat mass from the total fat mass determined hydrodensitometrically. Measurements were made on young and middle aged, trained and sedentary women (four groups). RESULTS: Per cent body fat was lower in trained than in sedentary individuals, both in the young and the middle aged subjects. The distribution of subcutaneous fat mass differed between sedentary and trained women. Trained young women had a reduced subcutaneous fat mass compared to sedentary young subjects in all segments except face and neck; the disparity between middle aged sedentary and trained women was limited to upper arm and trunk (P < 0.01 each), with no significant difference in face and neck, forearm, and lower limb segments. Differences in visceral fat mass between sedentary and trained subjects were similar for young and middle aged women (young, 2.5 v 3.7 kg; middle aged, 4.0 v 6.5 kg). CONCLUSIONS: Women who exercise regularly appear to accumulate less adipose tissue, especially in upper arm and trunk segments as they get older, with visceral fat mass remaining lower than in sedentary individuals.
Skew circuits of small width. (English)

A celebrated result of D. A. Barrington [Width-3 permutation branching programs. Techn. Rep. MIT/LCS/TM-29, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1985)] proved that polynomial size, width-5 branching programs (BP) are equivalent in power to a restricted form of branching programs – polynomial sized width-5 permutation branching programs (PBP), which in turn capture all of NC1. On the other hand it is known that width-3 PBPs require exponential size to compute the AND function. No such lower bound is known for width-4 PBPs, however it is widely conjectured that width-4 PBPs will not capture all of NC1. In this work, we study the power of bounded width branching programs by comparing them with bounded width skew circuits.
Integrating Bayesian Networks into Knowledge-Intensive CBR

In this paper we propose an approach to knowledge intensive CBR, where explanations are generated from a domain model consisting partly of a semantic network and partly of a Bayesian network (BN). The BN enables learning within this domain model based on the observed data. The domain model is used to focus the retrieval and reuse of past cases, as well as the indexing when learning a new case. Essentially, the BN-powered submodel works in parallel with the semantic network model to generate a statistically sound contribution to case indexing, retrieval and explanation.
Improved GPR image quality by truncating the bandwidth of the Fourier transform in 2D diffraction tomographic inversion

Diffraction tomography (DT) has been applied in ground penetrating radar (GPR) to obtain images of buried objects. In order to obtain a unique solution for the object function, a maximum frequency range should be used in a DT inversion routine. In this paper, a method is proposed to appropriately truncate the frequency range of the Fourier-transformed (FT) scattered field for a 2D DT inversion routine. This is achieved by determining the variation of the phase in the FT scattered field. The number of zero-crossings of the FT phase along the spatial axis is counted and a moving-average filter is applied to enable proper bandwidth selection. Numerical simulations are demonstrated using synthetic data with additive white Gaussian noise.
Security Conference for the Next Generation DRIVE-BY DOWNLOAD ATTACKS : EFFECTS AND DETECTION METHODS

The aim of this study is to present and analyze the problem of drive-by download attacks. Drive-by downloads have become one of the most common ways to infect a large group of unsuspected users. Attackers take full advantage of the functionality of the Internet and its dominance in various transactions of everyday life and spread malware by exploiting vulnerable systems for financial gain. These client-side attacks launched when visiting malicious web sites have become the centre of attention for security researchers and anti-virus companies. The main objective of this paper, therefore, is to understand and describe the conditions under which these attacks happen, the weaknesses that create the problem and the effects they cause on the victims' machines, in order to get deeper to the changes that occur to the system after the infection. An actual infection from malware caused by a drive-by download intends to support the last task. The study, furthermore, spreads on the main techniques known today as a detection mechanism for malicious web pages and the challenges associated with them.
Influences of experimental microclimate manipulation on conifer regeneration in a recently disturbed, low-elevation site in the Colorado Front Range: Implications for post-fire regeneration under a changing climate

Conifer regeneration in ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Front Range depends on a relatively narrow set of climate requirements and may therefore be sensitive to increased temperature and altered precipitation regimes associated with human-induced climate change. Our study implemented a field experiment to examine the effects of microclimate manipulations of temperature and water on changes in stem height, biomass, and survival of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) seedlings planted in a recently disturbed setting. We also examined potential differences in shrub and herbaceous biomass in response to the microclimate manipulations. Our study employed a full factorial design to compare conifer seedling growth and survival among four experimental treatment types: (A) warmed only, (B) watered only (C) warmed + watered, and (D) control. We report findings only from the 2013 field season (year 2 of the experiment). Averages were compared using appropriate parametric (ANOVA + Tukey’s HSD) and nonparametric (Kruskal Wallis + Mann Whitney U) statistical techniques. We found significant and consistent differences among the four treatment types in terms of average growth and survival (P D > C > A) was observed for both ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir, although average growth and survival was higher in ponderosa pine than in Douglas-fir, regardless of treatment type (P < 0.05). Our findings suggest that warming temperatures and associated drought related to human-induced climate change is likely to inhibit post-disturbance regeneration of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir.
Trust in Network Organizations -- A Literature Review on Emergent and Evolving Behavior in Network Organizations

This systematic literature review examines different forms of evolving and emergent behavior in network organizations (NO) with an emphasis on trust. Because of the difficulties and importance in researching emergent behavior in network organizations, this review summarizes the main aspects of 17 papers and tries to disclose open research points by combining the different perspectives of behavior and forms of NOs. Due to the complexity of those organizations, there are several “soft aspects” that affect the partnership implicitly. In particular, trust is intertwined with other facets (e.g. legal aspects). IT governance and IT systems can have an impact on trust and vice versa. Therefore, maintaining a trustworthy relationship in a network organization is undoubtedly an enormous challenge for all participants. At the end of this literature review, we discuss some open research gaps like the influence of different cultures in NOs or the visualization of emergent behavior.
Cultural Diversity and Self-Sustaining Development: The Effective Facilitator

This article reports the findings of a Delphi study examining the personal qualities and skills of effective, intercultural community development workers. Unlike previous studies that focus on the traits of people who successfully adapt to cultures other than their own, this research examines what makes people effective as facilitators in an intercultural context. Two surveys examining the experience of intercultural community development workers reveal that the most important qualities of effective facilitators include discernment (wisdom), patience, people-orientation, respect, cultural sensitivity, flexibility, and balance. The skills that make them effective are interpersonal communication, the ability to gain confidence, listening skills, group process skills, the ability to ask questions, and the understanding of social processes. Community development agencies often emphasize project management skills in staff selection and training but must give more attention to helping facilitators enhance their.
Ro 48-8.071, a new 2,3-oxidosqualene:lanosterol cyclase inhibitor lowering plasma cholesterol in hamsters, squirrel monkeys, and minipigs: comparison to simvastatin.

2,3-Oxidosqualene:lanosterol cyclase (OSC, E.C. 5.4.99.7) represents a unique target for a cholesterol lowering drug. Partial inhibition of OSC should reduce synthesis of lanosterol and subsequent sterols, and also stimulate the production of epoxysterols that repress HMG-CoA reductase expression, generating a synergistic, self-limited negative regulatory loop. Hence, the pharmacological properties of Ro 48-8.071, a new OSC inhibitor, were compared to that of an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, simvastatin. Ro 48-8.071 blocked human liver OSC and cholesterol synthesis in HepG2 cells in the nanomolar range; in cells it triggered the production of monooxidosqualene, dioxidosqualene, and epoxycholesterol. It was safe in hamsters, squirrel monkeys and Göttingen minipigs at pharmacologically active doses, lowering LDL approximately 60% in hamsters, and at least 30% in the two other species, being at least as efficacious as safe doses of simvastatin. The latter was hepatotoxic in hamsters at doses > 30 mumol/kg/day limiting its window of efficacy. Hepatic monooxidosqualene increased dose-dependently after treatment with Ro 48-8.071, up to approximately 20 micrograms/g wet liver or less than 1% of hepatic cholesterol, and it was inversely correlated with LDL levels. Ro 48-8.071 did not reduce coenzyme Q10 levels in liver and heart of hamsters, and importantly did not trigger an overexpression of hepatic HMG-CoA reductase, squalene synthase, and OSC itself. In strong contrast, simvastatin stimulated these enzymes dramatically, and reduced coenzyme Q10 levels in liver and heart. Altogether these findings clearly differentiate the OSC inhibitor Ro 48-8.071 from simvastatin, and support the view that OSC is a distinct key component in the regulation of the cholesterol synthesis pathway.