Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MicroRNAs in Neural Stem Cells and Neurogenesis

MicroRNA (miRNA) is a type of short-length (~22 nt) non-coding RNA. Most miRNAs are transcribed by RNA polymerase II and processed by Drosha-DGCR8 and Dicer complexes in the cropping and dicing steps, respectively. miRNAs are exported by exportin-5 from the nucleus to the cytoplasm after cropping. Trimmed mature miRNA is loaded and targets mRNA at the 3′ or 5′ untranslated region (UTR) by recognition of base-pairing in the miRNA-loaded RISC, where it is involved in gene silencing including translational repression and/or degradation along with deadenylation. Recent studies have shown that miRNA participates in various biological functions including cell fate decision, developmental timing regulation, apoptosis, and tumorigenesis. Analyses of miRNA expression profiles have demonstrated tissue- and stage-specific miRNAs including the let-7 family, miR-124, and miR-9, which regulate the differentiation of embryonic stem cells and/or neurogenesis. This review focuses on RNA-binding protein-mediated miRNA biogenesis during neurogenesis. These miRNA biogenesis-relating proteins have also been linked to human diseases because their mutations can cause several nervous system disorders. Moreover, defects in core proteins involved in miRNA biogenesis including Drosha, DGCR8, and Dicer promote tumorigenesis. Thus, the study of not only mature miRNA function but also miRNA biogenesis steps is likely to be important.
The PlantLIBRA consumer survey: Findings on the use of plant food supplements in Italy

Background Food supplements, and in particular those containing botanicals (plant food supplements, PFS), have in recent decades been of great interest both to consumers and to food/pharmaceutical industries. Objectives The aim of this paper is to examine replies by Italian consumers to the PlantLIBRA consumers' survey in order to: 1) assess the behaviour of an Italian population with respect to the use of PFS, and to compare it with that of other 5 countries involved in the whole survey; 2) identify different habits in the 4 Italian cities selected according to their geographical distribution; 3) collect independent information on the actual intake of PFS and consumers' behaviour. Subjects/setting 397 Italian consumers enrolled, 187 males (49.5%) and 191 female (50.5%). The distribution of subjects among the 4 cities included was: Milan 99; Venice 90; Rome 96 and Catania 96. Results The interest in PFS in Italy is high, the prevalence of "regular" consumers being 22.7%. Some differences were observed between the 4 cities involved: the pattern of use during the year was specific to each city; consumers in Milan reported reasons to use PFS significantly different from those in the whole Italian sample and did not indicate supermarkets as an important place of purchase; respondents from Rome and Catania more frequently used family doctors and pharmacists as a source of recommendation. Some significant difference among cities, sex and age groups were observed when the most frequently used botanicals were ranked. Conclusions The results provide new insights on the socio-economic characteristics and lifestyle of Italian PFS consumers, on their reasons for and pattern of use, and on their behaviour and expectations. The value of this information is not restricted to the specific country (Italy) but allows for a more general evaluation of the pattern of use, according to habits and geographical area.
Adverse prognostic significance of KIT mutations in adult acute myeloid leukemia with inv(16) and t(8;21): a Cancer and Leukemia Group B Study.

PURPOSE To analyze the prognostic impact of mutated KIT (mutKIT) in core-binding factor acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with inv(16)(p13q22) and t(8;21)(q22;q22). PATIENTS AND METHODS Sixty-one adults with inv(16) and 49 adults with t(8;21), assigned to postremission therapy with repetitive cycles of higher dose cytarabine were analyzed for mutKIT in exon 17 (mutKIT17) and 8 (mutKIT8) by denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography and direct sequencing at diagnosis. The median follow-up was 5.3 years. RESULTS Among patients with inv(16), 29.5% had mutKIT (16% with mutKIT17 and 13% with sole mutKIT8). Among patients with t(8;21), 22% had mutKIT (18% with mutKIT17 and 4% with sole mutKIT8). Complete remission rates of patients with mutKIT and wild-type KIT (wtKIT) were similar in both cytogenetic groups. In inv(16), the cumulative incidence of relapse (CIR) was higher for patients with mutKIT (P = .05; 5-year CIR, 56% v 29%) and those with mutKIT17 (P = .002; 5-year CIR, 80% v 29%) compared with wtKIT patients. Once data were adjusted for sex, mutKIT predicted worse overall survival (OS). In t(8;21), mutKIT predicted higher CIR (P = .017; 5-year CIR, 70% v 36%), but did not influence OS. CONCLUSION We report for the first time that mutKIT, and particularly mutKIT17, confer higher relapse risk, and both mutKIT17 and mutKIT8 appear to adversely affect OS in AML with inv(16). We also confirm the adverse impact of mutKIT on relapse risk in t(8;21) AML. We suggest that patients with core-binding factor AML should be screened for mutKIT at diagnosis for both prognostic and therapeutic purposes, given that activated KIT potentially can be targeted with novel tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
Patient Outcomes According to Adherence to Treatment Guidelines for Rhythm Control of Atrial Fibrillation

Background Although guidelines for antiarrhythmic drug therapy in atrial fibrillation (AF) were published in 2006, it remains uncertain whether adherence to these guidelines affects patient outcomes. Methods and Results We retrospectively evaluated the records of 5976 consecutive AF patients who were prescribed at least 1 antiarrhythmic drug between 2006 and 2013. Patients with 1 or more prescribed antiarrhythmic drugs that did not comply with guideline recommendations comprised the non–guideline‐directed group (=2920); the remainder constituted the guideline‐directed group (=3056). Time to events was assessed using the survival analysis method and adjusted for covariates using Cox regression. Rates of adherence to the guidelines increased significantly with a higher degree of prescriber specialization in arrhythmias (49%, 55%, and 60% for primary care physicians, general cardiologists, and cardiac electrophysiologists, respectively, P=0.001) for the first prescribed antiarrhythmic drug. Compared to the non–guideline‐directed group, the guideline‐directed group had higher rates of heart failure, but lower baseline CHADS2‐VASc scores (P<0.001) and lower rates of coronary artery disease, valvular disease, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, pulmonary disease, and renal insufficiency (P<0.05 for all). During 45±26 months follow‐up, the guideline‐directed group had a lower risk of AF recurrence (hazard ratio=0.86, 95% CI=0.80 to 0.93), fewer hospital admissions for AF (hazard ratio=0.87, 95% CI=0.79 to 0.97), and fewer procedures for recurrent AF, including electrical cardioversion, pacemaker implantation, and atrioventricular nodal ablation (P<0.01 for all). The mortality and stroke risks were similar between the groups. Conclusions Adherence to published guidelines in the antiarrhythmic management of AF is associated with improved patient outcomes.
Characterizing temporal locality and its impact on web server performance

The presence of temporal locality in web traces has long been recognized. However, the close proximity of requests for the same file in a trace can be attributed to two orthogonal reasons: long-term popularity and short-term correlation. The former reflects the fact that requests for a popular document appear "frequently" thus they are likely to be "close" in an absolute sense. The latter reflects the fact that requests for a given document might concentrate around particular points in the trace due to a variety of reasons, such as deadlines or surges in user interests, hence it focuses on "relative" closeness. We introduce a new measure of temporal locality, the scaled stack distance, which is insensitive to popularity and captures instead the impact of short-term correlation, and use it to parameterize a synthetic trace generator. Then, we validate the appropriateness of this quantity by comparing the file and byte miss ratios corresponding to either the original or the synthetic traces.
Optimizing efficacy of amphotericin B through nanomodification

Fungal infections and leishmaniasis are an important cause of morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised patients. The macrolide polyene antibiotic amphotericin B (AmB) has long been recognized as a powerful fungicidal and leishmanicidal drug. A conventional intravenous dosage form of AmB, AmB- deoxycholate (Fungizone or D-AmB), is the most effective clinically available for treating fungal and parasitic (leishmaniasis) infections. However, the clinical efficacy of AmB is limited by its adverse effects mainly nephrotoxicity. Efforts to lower the toxicity are based on synthesis of AmB analogues such as AmB esters or preparation of AmB-lipid associations in the forms of liposomal AmB (L-AmB or AmBisome), AmB lipid complex (Abelcet or ABLC), AmB colloidal dispersion (Amphocil or ABCD), and intralipid AmB. These newer formulations are substantially more expensive, but allow patients to receive higher doses for longer periods of time with decreased renal toxicity than conventional AmB. Modifications of liposomal surface in order to avoid RES uptake, thus increased targetability has been attempted. Emulsomes and other nanoparticles are special carrier systems for intracellular localization in macrophage rich organs like liver and spleen. Injectable nanocarriers have important potential applications as in site-specific drug delivery.
Efficiency optimization of WCDMA driven two-way Doherty power amplifiers over wide power range

This paper studies the effects of the design parameter on the efficiency of two-way Doherty power amplifiers driven by signals having high peak to average power ratio (PAPR). The optimal value of the design parameter (α) is calculated as a function of the output power back-off for two WCDMA signals having a PAPR of 7.3 dB and 9.8 dB, respectively. It is shown that, for the considered signals, the optimal value of α depends only on the output power back-off. Parametric study demonstrated that while the optimal value of α results in high efficiency over a reduced power range, a judicious sub-optimal choice of the design parameter will lower the peak average efficiency but considerably increase the high efficiency power range of the Doherty amplifier.
A Fast and Robust License Plate Detection Algorithm Based on Two-stage Cascade AdaBoost

License plate detection (LPD) is one of the most important aspects of an automatic license plate recognition system. Although there have been some successful license plate recognition (LPR) methods in past decades, it is still a challenging problem because of the diversity of plate formats and outdoor illumination conditions in image acquisition. Because the accurate detection of license plates under different conditions directly affects overall recognition system accuracy, different methods have been developed for LPD systems. In this paper, we propose a license plate detection method that is rapid and robust against variation, especially variations in illumination conditions. Taking the aspects of accuracy and speed into consideration, the proposed system consists of two stages. For each stage, Haar-like features are used to compute and select features from license plate images and a cascade classifier based on the concatenation of classifiers where each classifier is trained by an AdaBoost algorithm is used to classify parts of an image within a search window as either license plate or non-license plate. And it is followed by connected component analysis (CCA) for eliminating false positives. The two stages use different image preprocessing blocks: image preprocessing without adaptive thresholding for the first stage and image preprocessing with adaptive thresholding for the second stage. The method is faster and more accurate than most existing methods used in LPD. Experimental results demonstrate that the LPD rate is 98.38% and the average computational time is 54.64 ms.
A semantic-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) discovery and selection system

With the proliferation of Software-as-a-Service in the cloud environment, users find it tiresome and time consuming to search for the right service that satisfies all their requirements. In addition, services may provide the same functionality but differ in their characteristics or the Quality of Service attributes (QoS) they offer. In this paper, we propose a semantic-based system that facilitates the SaaS publication, discovery and selection processes. To achieve these goals, we developed a unified ontology that combines services domain knowledge, SaaS characteristics, QoS metrics and real SaaS offers. A hybrid service matchmaking algorithm is introduced based on the proposed ontology. It integrates semantic-based metadata and ontology-based matching. Prototypical implementation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$t$</tex> </formula>-Tests, <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$F$</tex> </formula>-Tests and Otsu's Methods for Image Thresholding

Otsu's binarization method is one of the most popular image-thresholding methods; Student's t -test is one of the most widely-used statistical tests to compare two groups. This paper aims to stress the equivalence between Otsu's binarization method and the search for an optimal threshold that provides the largest absolute Student's t-statistic. It is then naturally demonstrated that the extension of Otsu's binarization method to multi-level thresholding is equivalent to the search for optimal thresholds that provide the largest F -statistic through one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, general equivalences between some parametric image-thresholding methods and the search for optimal thresholds with the largest likelihood-ratio test statistics are briefly discussed.
EducaTableware: Sound Emitting Tableware for Encouraging Dietary Education

We propose “EducaTableware (Educate/Tableware),” a design for interactive tableware devices that makes eating more playful and improves daily eating habits through auditory feedback to encourage specific mealtime behaviors. We have developed a fork-type device for use when eating. This device emits sounds when a user is consuming a food item. In this paper, we discuss the EducaTableware concept, describe the implementation of the fork-type device, and conduct a user test with child subjects for one week.
Knowledge discovery in time series databases

Adding the dimension of time to databases produces time series databases (TSDB) and introduces new aspects and difficulties to data mining and knowledge discovery. In this correspondence, we introduce a general methodology for knowledge discovery in TSDB. The process of knowledge discovery in TSDR includes cleaning and filtering of time series data, identifying the most important predicting attributes, and extracting a set of association rules that can be used to predict the time series behavior in the future. Our method is based on signal processing techniques and the information-theoretic fuzzy approach to knowledge discovery. The computational theory of perception (CTP) is used to reduce the set of extracted rules by fuzzification and aggregation. We demonstrate our approach on two types of time series: stock-market data and weather data.
Estimating probabilities for effective data fusion

Data Fusion is the combination of a number of independent search results, relating to the same document collection, into a single result to be presented to the user. A number of probabilistic data fusion models have been shown to be effective in empirical studies. These typically attempt to estimate the probability that particular documents will be relevant, based on training data. However, little attempt has been made to gauge how the accuracy of these estimations affect fusion performance. The focus of this paper is twofold: firstly, that accurate estimation of the probability of relevance results in effective data fusion; and secondly, that an effective approximation of this probability can be made based on less training data that has previously been employed. This is based on the observation that the distribution of relevant documents follows a similar pattern in most high-quality result sets. Curve fitting suggests that this can be modelled by a simple function that is less complex than other models that have been proposed. The use of existing IR evaluation metrics is proposed as a substitution for probability calculations. Mean Average Precision is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, with evaluation results demonstrating competitive performance when compared with related algorithms with more onerous requirements for training data.
Ageing and its implications for housing and urban development: South Australia

Declining fertility, increasing life expectancy and the effect of the ‘baby boomer’ generation moving into older age groups has contributed to an increase in the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over. This trend will continue over years, to such an extent, that the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over will grow, from the current 13% to 25% by 2051. Demographic changes and urban policies/governance issues are major concerns in cities, and it is expected to have a significant impact on cities in the future. The changing age profile, along with lifestyle and work pattern changes, will effect the future housing arrangements and urban development. The aim of this paper is to examine the consequences of ageing on urban development and housing in South Australia. The research found that current and future housing requirements of older South Australians, varies within and between some groups/cohorts and this differentiation was clearly related to where people live, their age, socio-economic status and the assets they hold. ‘Ageing in situ’ or ‘ageing in place’, is seen as a more preferred option by the aged people. There is a strong need to offer more support for ageing in place and options for appropriate and affordable accommodation in suitable locations with a right house design.
Vascular endothelial growth factor and the angiopoietins: working together to build a better blood vessel.

Angiogenesis is a complex multistep process by which new blood vessels are formed from the preexisting vasculature.1 2 Angiogenesis is a crucial event in normal embryonic development, and it contributes to the development and progression of a number of diseases, including cancer, arthritis, and diabetes. Conversely, insufficient growth of collateral vessels is a major clinical problem in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The involvement of angiogenesis, or the failure of angiogenesis, in these important diseases has created a tremendous effort to define the molecular mechanisms by which the process is driven. Until recently, most of the work in the field has focused on polypeptide growth factors, such as fibroblast growth factor and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which are mitogenic for endothelial cells in vitro and produce an angiogenic response in vivo. Angiopoietins (Ang1 and Ang2) constitute a novel family of endothelial growth factors that are ligands for the endothelium-specific receptor tyrosine kinase, Tie2.3 Unlike other endothelial growth factors, stimulating Tie2 in cultured endothelial cells with either Ang1 or Ang2 does not produce a mitogenic response.3 Similar to other angiogenic factors, however, Ang1 can stimulate endothelial sprouting in vitro.4 Complicating matters, Ang2 appears to block the activation of Tie2 by Ang1, suggesting …
Salary Determinants for Higher Institutions of Learning in Kenya

There has been a debate over the years on which category of salary determinants best predicts an employee salary, that is, whether it is organizational characteristics or individual attributes. This study adopts a hybrid approach and seeks to examine the relationship between work experiences, level of education, job category, and employee’s salary. The findings of the study have shown that there is a strong relationship. In addition, we have constructed a salary determinant model for employees of higher institutions of learning in Kenya. The study has great significance to human resource practitioners, who would find the salary determination model very useful in their practice. The hybrid approach to salary determination will also provide a different academic and scholarly perspective to the study of salary determinants.
Problems in the system of mandatory reporting of children living with domestic violence

Abstract Historically, the chasm between services for women and services for children has been problematised in the domestic and family violence arena. However, this paper argues that it is now equally, or more problematic, that the recognition of harm to children in the context of domestic and family violence has ‘grafted’ statutory child protection response to intervention in this area. This paper argues that when judged against the criteria for a functional system, one which is effective, efficient, efficacious or ethical then there are a number of areas in which the child protection system fails in relation to children living with domestic violence. The paper raises three issues of particular concern: (a) responding to a widespread social problem through an individualised response at the tertiary end of provision; (b) undermining the voluntary and empowerment model of intervention for women through compulsory, statutory intervention with children; (c) creating a mandatory pathway to an intervention system which is not set up to work with an adult and child victim or intervene effectively with men who use violence.
Student Victimization in Hispanic High Schools: A Research Note and Methodological Comment

This research note provides a descriptive analysis of survey data on self‐reported victimization at school obtained from a sample of 230 high school students who reside in a predominantly Hispanic urban area located on the US–Mexico border. Consistent with prior research on school crime, the data show that males are more likely to be victimized than females and that theft is the most frequent form of victimization experienced by the students. The data also indicate that the rate of victimization among the sample of predominantly Hispanic students is substantially higher than the national average and that Hispanic students are more likely to be victimized than their non‐Hispanic peers; a finding which contradicts recent studies showing that the rate of victimization among Hispanics and non‐Hispanics is similar. The implications for future research are discussed.