Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cerebral cavernous malformations proteins inhibit Rho kinase to stabilize vascular integrity

Endothelial cell–cell junctions regulate vascular permeability, vasculogenesis, and angiogenesis. Familial cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) in humans result from mutations of CCM2 (malcavernin, OSM, MGC4607), PDCD10 (CCM3), or KRIT1 (CCM1), a Rap1 effector which stabilizes endothelial cell–cell junctions. Homozygous loss of KRIT1 or CCM2 produces lethal vascular phenotypes in mice and zebrafish. We report that the physical interaction of KRIT1 and CCM2 proteins is required for endothelial cell–cell junctional localization, and lack of either protein destabilizes barrier function by sustaining activity of RhoA and its effector Rho kinase (ROCK). Protein haploinsufficient Krit1+/− or Ccm2+/− mouse endothelial cells manifested increased monolayer permeability in vitro, and both Krit1+/− and Ccm2+/− mice exhibited increased vascular leak in vivo, reversible by fasudil, a ROCK inhibitor. Furthermore, we show that ROCK hyperactivity occurs in sporadic and familial human CCM endothelium as judged by increased phosphorylation of myosin light chain. These data establish that KRIT1–CCM2 interaction regulates vascular barrier function by suppressing Rho/ROCK signaling and that this pathway is dysregulated in human CCM endothelium, and they suggest that fasudil could ameliorate both CCM disease and vascular leak.
Increased tumour necrosis factor α production in mesenteric lymph nodes of cirrhotic patients with ascites

Background: Cytokines produced in mesenteric lymph nodes of cirrhotic rats with bacterial translocation may participate in circulatory alterations of cirrhosis. Aim: To investigate whether cirrhotic patients present an increased local generation of cytokines in mesenteric lymph nodes. Methods: Mesenteric lymph nodes from 26 cirrhotic and 10 control patients were assessed for tumour necrosis factor α (TNF) and interleukin 6 mRNA and protein expression by competitive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, and by enzyme immunoassay and immunohistochemistry, respectively. Results: Interleukin 6 levels were not different between cirrhotics and controls. Protein and mRNA TNF levels in mesenteric lymph nodes from cirrhotics were higher than in controls (p<0.05). Tissue expression of TNF by immunohistochemistry was more abundant in cirrhotics. Ascitic patients showed higher TNF levels (47 (34–54) pg/mg protein) than patients without ascites (18 (17–25) pg/mg protein) (p<0.001). Elevated TNF levels (>28 pg/mg protein) in cirrhotics were associated with a higher Child-Pugh score, the antecedent of ascites, a lower prothrombin rate, and higher bilirubin and blood TNF levels. The strongest association, confirmed by multivariate analysis, was with the presence of ascites (p<0.001). Bacterial infections after transplantation, mainly by enteric bacteria, were only detected in patients with high TNF levels in mesenteric lymph nodes (33% of patients; p=0.05). Conclusion: Patients with advanced liver cirrhosis, and especially with ascites, have increased local production of TNF in mesenteric lymph nodes that, in common with experimental cirrhosis, may also be induced by bacterial translocation.
Hopelessness and Risk of Mortality and Incidence of Myocardial Infarction and Cancer

We examined the relationship among low, moderate, and high levels of hopelessness, all-cause and cause-specific mortality, and incidence of myocardial infarction (MI) and cancer in a population-based sample of middle-aged men. Participants were 2428 men, ages 42 to 60, from the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease study, an ongoing longitudinal study of unestablished psychosocial risk factors for ischemic heart disease and other outcomes. In 6 years of follow-up, 174 deaths (87 cardiovascular and 87 noncardiovascular, including 40 cancer deaths and 29 deaths due to violence or injury), 73 incident cancer cases, and 95 incident MI had occurred. Men were rated low, moderate, or high in hopelessness if they scored in the lower, middle or upper one-third of scores on a 2-item hopelessness scale. Age-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models identified a dose-response relationship such that moderately and highly hopeless men were at significantly increased risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality relative to men with low hopelessness scores. Indeed, highly hopeless men were at more than three-fold increased risk of death from violence or injury compared with the reference group. These relationships were maintained after adjusting for biological, socioeconomic, or behavioral risk factors, perceived health, depression, prevalent disease, or social support. High hopelessness also predicted incident MI, and moderate hopelessness was associated with incident cancer. Our findings indicate that hopelessness is a strong predictor of adverse health outcomes, independent of depression and traditional risk factors. Additional research is needed to examine phenomena that lead to hopelessness.
Cooperative Hybrid‐ARQ Protocols: Unified Frameworks for Protocol Analysis

Cooperative hybrid‐automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols, which can exploit the spatial and temporal diversities, have been widely studied. The efficiency of cooperative HARQ protocols is higher than that of cooperative protocols because retransmissions are only performed when necessary. We classify cooperative HARQ protocols as three decode‐and‐forward‐based HARQ (DF‐HARQ) protocols and two amplified‐and‐forward‐based HARQ (AF‐HARQ) protocols. To compare these protocols and obtain the optimum parameters, two unified frameworks are developed for protocol analysis. Using the frameworks, we can evaluate and compare the maximum throughput and outage probabilities according to the SNR, the relay location, and the delay constraint. From the analysis we can see that the maximum achievable throughput of the DF‐HARQ protocols can be much greater than that of the AF‐HARQ protocols due to the incremental redundancy transmission at the relay.
Square root Bound on the Least Power Non-residue using a Sylvester-Vandermonde Determinant

We give a new elementary proof of the fact that the value of the least $k^{th}$ power non-residue in an arithmetic progression $\{bn+c\}_{n=0,1. }$, over a prime field $\F_p$, is bounded by $7/\sqrt{5} \cdot b \cdot \sqrt{p/k} + 4b + c$. Our proof is inspired by the so called \emph{Stepanov method}, which involves bounding the size of the solution set of a system of equations by constructing a non-zero low degree auxiliary polynomial that vanishes with high multiplicity on the solution set. The proof uses basic algebra and number theory along with a determinant identity that generalizes both the Sylvester and the Vandermonde determinant.
Morphology, behavior, and interaction of cultured epithelial cells after the antibody-induced disruption of keratin filament organization

The organization of intermediate filaments in cultured epithelial cells was rapidly and radically affected by intracellularly injected monoclonal antikeratin filament antibodies. Different antibodies had different effects, ranging from an apparent splaying apart of keratin filament bundles to the complete disruption of the keratin filament network. Antibodies were detectable within cells for more than four days after injection. The antibody-induced disruption of keratin filament organization had no light-microscopically discernible effect on microfilament or microtubule organization, cellular morphology, mitosis, the integrity of epithelial sheets, mitotic rate, or cellular reintegration after mitosis. Cell-to-cell adhesion junctions survived keratin filament disruption. However, antibody injected into a keratinocyte-derived cell line, rich in desmosomes, brought on a superfasciculation of keratin filament bundles, which appeared to pull desmosomal junctions together, suggesting that desmosomes can move in the plane of the plasma membrane and may only be 'fixed' by their anchoring to the cytoplasmic filament network. Our observations suggest that keratin filaments are not involved in the establishment or maintenance of cell shape in cultured cells.
COMPETITIVENESS AND AGRI-FOOD TRADE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the competitive performance of the EU countries for food trade in the European market during the period 1990-2003. To assess such performance the analysis considers comparative advantage and evaluates three indices: export market share (EMS), revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and net export index (NEI). These three indices are found to be high in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Spain, but only Spain has shown significant competitive performance during the last decade. Also the competitive performance of Germany and Italy is good, although their RCA and NEI values are low. Among the other countries the trend in the indices for Austria, Portugal and Sweden is on the increase.
Cognitive Artropods

Insects are nature’s engineering marvels. They can perform marvellous feats such as jumping many times their own body length, lifting many times their own body weight, moving around even with multiple missing limbs and doing all this with amazing efficiency. It is little wonder then that roboticists have been attempting to replicate nature’s design feat in robots. The primary thrust in the area of arthropod robotics has been locomotion. Various insect-like robots directly inspired by biology have been built using knowledge discovered about insect locomotion. As the literature in the area is vast and is much beyond the scope of this article, a brief review focussed on a critical analysis of a few hexapod robots is presented here. The robots discussed here include the series of cockroach-like robots built at Case Western Reserve University, the RHex program [Saranli01] at the University of Michigan and the joint work done by Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley [Clark01]. It is not a mere coincidence that all these robots have the cockroach as their biological basis (as does the example scenario given in the workshop prospectus). Cockroaches, in addition to being extremely hardy and agile, are also easy to study, as the vast literature on cockroach locomotion shows. Hence, these omnipresent pests are ideal models for roboticists. So as to increase performance as much as possible, bioroboticists (as they are known) try to incorporate the mechanics of a single species throughout the design of the robot. The study of cockroach gait has revealed that the legs of the cockroach essentially act as inverted pendulums on which the body swings. The cockroach has a tripod gait where only three legs are in contact with the ground at any given instant. Each leg passes through a stanceand aswingphase in one motion cycle, where the stance phase involves the part where the leg touches the ground and provides reaction force for movement and the swing part involves the forward motion of the leg. The cockroach robot series at Case Western Reserve consists of a series of roach-robots of different sophistication levels. Robot I [Beer92] and II [Quinn93] are basic in design and demonstrate simple walking behaviors. Robot III [Ritzmann00] is described in greater detail here. The robot legs in Robot III are designed to closely match the design of cockroach legs. The hind legs of a cockroach provide maximum thrust for locomotion while the front legs are solely to provide deceleration. The legs of Robot III follow this trend in that the hind legs are more powerful than the
Hurwitz Number Fields

The canonical covering maps from Hurwitz varieties to configuration varieties are important in algebraic geometry. The scheme-theoretic fiber above a rational point is commonly connected, in which case it is the spectrum of a Hurwitz number field. We study many examples of such maps and their fibers, finding number fields whose existence contradicts standard mass heuristics.
Data Quality Notification in Cooperative Information Systems

Current approaches to the development of cooperative information systems are based on services to be offered by cooperating organizations, and on the opportunity of building coordinators and brokers on top of such services. The quality of data exchanged and provided by different services hampers such approaches, as data of low quality can spread all over the cooperative system. At the same time, improvement can be based on comparing data, correcting them and disseminating high quality data. In this paper, we consider the problem of disseminating quality information. In particular, we describe the Quality Notification Service, whose objective is to provide cooperating entities with information concerning the quality variations of exchanged data. By exploiting the information supplied by the Quality Notification Service, other applications and services can be built or modified to benefit of notifications of quality variations.
Chinese Overseas Students' Cultural Identification, Social Orientation and Subjective Well-Being

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship among Chinese overseas students' cultural identification, social orientation and subjective well-being in the process of acculturation. A questionnaire including scales of cultural identification, social orientation and subjective well-being was developed to investigate 144 Chinese students in Australia. The results indicate: (a) Chinese students' identification to Chinese culture will reduce with significant increase in identification to Australian mainstream culture along with the process of acculturation; (b) the process of acculturation can not directly bring about increase of individualism and reduction of collectivism but indirectly weaken one's collectivism through host national identification and co-national identification; (c) Chinese students' both cultural identification and social orientation can directly influence the subjective well-being (d) acculturation will directly influence Chinese overseas students' subjective well-being and also indirectly affect the subjective well-being through its effect on the students' cultural identification and social orientation, which are two mediate factors in the effect of acculturation on the students subjective well-being.
Authentication Using Virtual Certificate Authorities: A New Security Paradigm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are inherently difficult to secure: Limited memory resources rule out the predistribution of keys or certificates, while manual device (and key) configuration in the field is not feasible due to the dynamic and ad-hoc nature of WSNs. All this is complicated by the fact that WSN nodes are not tamper resistant and operate over an unsecure wireless medium. Public key infrastructures (PKI) can help to address this problem by providing initial trust between network nodes. While it has been already shown, that public key encryption methods (like Elliptic Curve Cryptography - ECC) can be implemented on sensor nodes with very limited resources, a fully-fleshed PKI infrastructure that enables many different devices from potentially many different manufactures to participate in many different separate distributed networks in a secure manner has not been introduced yet. This paper presents AVCA, “Authentication using Virtual Certificate Authorities”, which is such a PKI architecture. It is based on commonly used and well established PKI concepts and designed specifically for resource constrained devices on distributed ad-hoc networks. It provides a mechanism to overcome the difficulties in securing many distributed networks with non tamper-proof devices. AVCA has many benefits including that the basis for initial trust is not stored on any of the sensor devices and that these devices do not require significant memory. The architecture itself can be quite easily integrated into existing protocol stacks including those defined by IEEE 802.15. 4 [1] and ZigBee [2]. AVCA also enhances many of the original design goals of these wireless sensor network protocols such as simplicity, interoperability and scalability. The authors believe that AVCA offers a practical solution to many of the security issues that exist with sensor networks to date.
Time -frequency analysis of vocal source signal for speaker recognition

This paper investigates the importance of spectrotemporal characteristics of the source excitation signal for speaker recognition. We propose an effective feature extraction technique for obtaining essential timefrequency information from the linear prediction (LP) residual signal, which are closely related to the glottal excitation of individual speaker. With pitch synchronous analysis, wavelet transform is applied to every two pitch cycles of the LP residual signal to generate a new feature vector, called Wavelet Octave Coefficients of Residues (WOCOR), which provides additional speaker discriminative power to the commonly used linear predictive Cepstral coefficients (LPCC). Experimental evaluation over a Cantonese speaker recognition corpus demonstrates the effectiveness of WOCOR for speaker recognition. Recognition tests with WOCOR and LPCC outperforms the conventional methods of using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC).
Efficient coding in dolphin surface behavioral patterns

We show that the law of brevity, i.e. the tendency of words to shorten as their frequency increases, is also found in dolphin surface behavioral patterns. As far as we know, this is the first evidence of the law in another species, suggesting that coding efficiency is not unique to humans. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2009.
Achieving lightweight multicast in asynchronous Networks-on-Chip using local speculation

We propose a lightweight parallel multicast targeting an asynchronous NoC with a variant Mesh-of-Trees topology. A novel strategy, local speculation, is introduced, where a subset of switches are speculative and always broadcast. These switches are surrounded by non-speculative switches, which throttle any redundant packets, restricting these packets to small regions. Speculative switches have simplified designs, thereby improving network performance. A hybrid network architecture is proposed to mix the speculative and non-speculative switches. For multicast benchmarks, significant performance improvements with small power savings are obtained by the new approach over a tree-based non-speculative approach. Interestingly, similar improvements are also shown for unicast. Finally, another benefit is to reduce the address field size in multicast packets.
Semi-Distributed User Relaying Algorithm for Amplify-and-Forward Wireless Relay Networks

In this paper, designing an effective user relaying algorithm, in terms of relay node selection and power allocation, is discussed for amplify-and-forward wireless relay networks. The objective is to simplify the application of user relaying in practical wireless communication networks so that the system capacity can be improved with low computational complexity and system overhead. Beginning with the derivation of a tight threshold-based sufficient condition on the feasibility of a relay node, i.e., ensuring that user relaying via the node can achieve a larger channel capacity than direct transmission, a semi-distributed user relaying algorithm is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, each relay node can make decision on its feasibility individually, and the ultimate decision on the relay node selection among multiple feasible ones is made in a centralized manner. Since there is no need on exchanging channel state information among different network nodes, the proposed algorithm is simple for implementation and suitable for practical applications, which have stringent constraints on system overhead. By comparing with the centralized user relaying algorithm, which requires global channel state information of the whole network, the proposed semi-distributed algorithm can provide comparable system capacity, but has significantly reduced computational complexity.
PROMISing Steps Towards Computer Hygiene

Recent worm epidemics proved beyond any doubt that the existing centralized worm containment mechanisms are no longer adequate to protect vulnerable systems, resulting in a shift towards distributed cooperative systems that aim to safeguard and immunize the susceptible population by automatically vaccinating them. We present PROMIS, a P2P based algorithm that provides its participants with early information regarding the existence of a worm epidemic and lets them automatically adjust their security level. We argue that our approach is based on the principles of hygiene: taking the basic precautions to avoid infection when an epidemic is on the rise. The ultimate security is your understanding of reality —H. Stanley Judd
Polyelectrolyte Threading through a Nanopore

Threading charged polymers through a nanopore, driven by electric fields E, is investigated by means of Langevin dynamics simulations. The mean translocation time 〈τ〉 is shown to follow a scaling law Nα, and the exponent α increases monotonically from 1.16(4) to 1.40(3) with E. The result is double-checked by the calculation of mean square displacement of translocation coordinate, which asserts a scaling behavior tβ (for t near τ) with β complying with the relation αβ=2. At a fixed chain length N, 〈τ〉 displayed a reciprocal scaling behavior E−1 in the weak and also in the strong fields, connected by a transition E−1.64(5) in the intermediate fields. The variations of the radius of gyration of chain and the positions of chain end are monitored during a translocation process; far-from-equilibrium behaviors are observed when the driving field is strong. A strong field can strip off the condensed ions on the chain when it passes the pore. The total charges of condensed ions are hence decreased. The studies for the probability and density distributions reveal that the monomers in the trans-region are gathered near the wall and form a pancake-like density profile with a hump cloud over it in the strong fields, due to fast translocation.