Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immunosuppressive Tryptophan Catabolism and Gut Mucosal Dysfunction Following Early HIV Infection.

BACKGROUND Tryptophan (Trp) catabolism into kynurenine (Kyn) contributes to immune dysfunction in chronic human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. To better define the relationship between Trp catabolism, inflammation, gut mucosal dysfunction, and the role of early antiretroviral therapy (ART), we prospectively assessed patients early after they acquired HIV. METHODS Forty patients in the early phase of infection were longitudinally followed for 12 months after receiving a diagnosis of HIV infection; 24 were untreated, and 16 were receiving ART. Kyn/Trp ratio, regulatory T-cells (Tregs) frequency, T-cell activation, dendritic cell counts, and plasma levels of gut mucosal dysfunction markers intestinal-type fatty acid-binding protein, soluble suppression of tumorigenicity 2, and lipopolysaccharide were assessed. RESULTS Compared with healthy subjects, patients in the early phase of infection presented with elevated Kyn/Trp ratios, which further increased in untreated patients but normalized in ART recipients. Accordingly, in untreated subjects, the elevated Treg frequency observed at baseline continued to increase over time. The highest CD8(+) T-cell activation was observed during the early phase of infection and decreased in untreated patients, whereas activation normalized in ART recipients. The Kyn/Trp ratio was positively associated with CD8(+) T-cell activation and levels of inflammatory cytokines (interleukin 6, interferon γ-inducible protein 10, interleukin 18, and tumor necrosis factor α) and negatively associated with dendritic cell frequencies at baseline and in untreated patients. However, ART did not normalize plasma levels of gut mucosal dysfunction markers. CONCLUSIONS Early initiation of ART normalized enhanced Trp catabolism and immune activation but did not improve plasma levels of gut mucosal dysfunction markers.
The causal effect of banks' equity stakes on their lending

Recent studies find that banks give more credit to companies in which they hold an equity stake. However, due to reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this correlation cannot be interpreted causally. We overcome this issue by using the German capital gains tax reform in 2000 as a natural experiment. The reform abolished the tax on capital gains, allowing banks to sell their equity stakes in industrial companies. Similar to previous studies, we find that banks give more credit to companies in which they hold an equity stake before the tax reform. However, after the tax reform, banks sell their holdings and subsequently increase lending to these borrowers even more. This finding suggests that the positive cross-sectional correlation is misleading and that equity and debt financing by banks are substitutes rather than complements. The substitutability can be explained by banks trying to limit their exposure to a single creditor. Being able to sell their equity stakes allows banks to expand lending while keeping the overall exposure to the borrower’s risk constant. Consistent with this explanation, we also find an increase in lending to other companies that are correlated with the firm in which the bank sells the equity stake. Using detailed loan level data for Germany, we are able to control for both firm-level and bank-level trends in our difference-in-difference set-up. Our findings show that banks’ risk management, which regards loans and equity stakes as substitutes, is more important than potential monitoring benefits of banks’ equity stakes.
Effects of Weak Surface Modification on Co/SiO2 Catalyst for Fischer-Tropsch Reaction

A weak surface modification is applied to Co/SiO2 catalyst by hydrothermal treatment at 180°C for 5 h. Aluminum is introduced to Co/SiO2 catalysts during the surface modification. The effects of surface modification on Co/SiO2 catalyst are studied by changing the operating sequences of surface modification and cobalt impregnation in the catalyst preparation. Surface modification before cobalt impregnation makes Co3O4 particle small and dispersed into the deep part of enlarged pore in SiO2, while surface modification after cobalt impregnation does not obviously change the particle size of Co3O4. The improved amplitude of catalytic activity is similar for the two kinds of catalysts, but they are benefited from different factors. The content of iso-hydrocarbons in the products is increased by the surface modifications.
Relational Predictors of Eating Issues in Female College Students

ABSTRACT This study examined the relative contributions of peer teasing, relational aggression, and body image disturbance on subclinical maladaptive eating patterns among female college students. One hundred and two female college students completed self-report online surveys on peer teasing, relational aggression, body image disturbance, and eating problems. Consistent with our hypotheses, greater level of peer teasing, relational aggression, and body image disturbance were associated with higher rates of maladaptive eating patterns. Body image disturbance emerged as the only significant positive predictor of maladaptive eating patterns in the final regression model. Current findings indicate the close link between peer teasing, relational aggression, body image disturbance, and maladaptive eating patterns among female young adults. These results are relevant for better insight into mental health risks areas and development of both prevention and early intervention strategies to address subclinical level of eating problems among women in college settings.
Statistical Research on the Bioactivity of New Marine Natural Products Discovered during the 28 Years from 1985 to 2012

Every year, hundreds of new compounds are discovered from the metabolites of marine organisms. Finding new and useful compounds is one of the crucial drivers for this field of research. Here we describe the statistics of bioactive compounds discovered from marine organisms from 1985 to 2012. This work is based on our database, which contains information on more than 15,000 chemical substances including 4196 bioactive marine natural products. We performed a comprehensive statistical analysis to understand the characteristics of the novel bioactive compounds and detail temporal trends, chemical structures, species distribution, and research progress. We hope this meta-analysis will provide useful information for research into the bioactivity of marine natural products and drug development.
Evaluating the cost-benefit of using cloud computing to extend the capacity of clusters

In this paper, we investigate the benefits that organisations can reap by using "Cloud Computing" providers to augment the computing capacity of their local infrastructure. We evaluate the cost of six scheduling strategies used by an organisation that operates a cluster managed by virtual machine technology and seeks to utilise resources from a remote Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider to reduce the response time of its user requests. Requests for virtual machines are submitted to the organisation's cluster, but additional virtual machines are instantiated in the remote provider and added to the local cluster when there are insufficient resources to serve the users' requests. Naïve scheduling strategies can have a great impact on the amount paid by the organisation for using the remote resources, potentially increasing the overall cost with the use of IaaS. Therefore, in this work we investigate six scheduling strategies that consider the use of resources from the "Cloud", to understand how these strategies achieve a balance between performance and usage cost, and how much they improve the requests' response times.
FACTORS INFLUENCING CITIZEN ’ S UASGE OF E-GOVERNMENT SERVICES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES : THE CASE OF EGYPT Prof

Today most governments across the globe encourage initiating contact through the Internet to provide citizens with more convenient and accessible public services. This channel is known as government-to-citizen electronic government application (G2C e-government). Although studies in e-government are increasing in number, related models offered in the academic literature are mainly conceptual; while empirical studies are heavily ignored. Moreover, the existing literature focused on developed countries, while the worldwide growth of e-commerce has shown the need to extend this research to other unstudied developing countries. Therefore, our research attempts to fill this gap in the literature by developing and validating an empirical-based model for systematically predicting and examining the various critical factors influencing citizen intention to use public e-services in developing countries, and enhancing the probability of their participation, as well as, examining the actual implementation of egovernment applications in Egypt as an example. In contrast to previous works, the current empirical study extended the research scope by combining the most critical factors identified in literature and applied them in the local context, therefore our proposed model contained variables that have not been integrated into one framework, to examination simultaneously for validation and relationship. A richer research methodology is used in our empirical study combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Based on our findings the study has made a number of important managerial and academic implications. The results of this paper can be re-examined or extended to other developing countries to create a complete picture in this area.
On the representation and querying of sets of possible worlds

We represent a set of possible worlds using an incomplete information database. The representation techniques that we study form a hierarchy, which generalizes relations of constants. This hierarchy ranges from the very simple Codd-table, (i e , a relation of constants and distinct variables called nulls, which stand for values present but unknown), to much more complex mechanisms involving views on conditioned-tables, (i e , queries on Codd-tables together with conditions). The views we consider are the queries that have polynomial data-complexity on complete information databases. Our conditions are conjunctions of equalities and inequalities. (1) We provide matching upper and lower bounds on the data-complexity of testing containement, membership, and uniqueness for sets of possible worlds and we fully classify these problems with respect to our representation hierarchy. The most surprising result in this classification is that it is complete in &Pgr;2p, whether a set of possible worlds represented by a Codd-table is a subset of a set of possible worlds represented by a Codd-table with one conjuction of inequalities. (2) We investigate the data-complexity of querying incomplete information databases. We examine both asking for certain facts and for possible facts. Our approach is algebraic but our bounds also apply to logical databases. We show that asking for a certain fact is coNP-complete, even for a fixed first order query on a Codd-table. We thus strengthen a lower bound of [16], who showed that this holds for a Codd-table with a conjunction of inequalities. For each fixed positive existential query we present a polynomial algorithm solving the bounded possible fact problem of this query on conditioned-tables. We show that our approach is, in a sense, the best possible, by deriving two NP-completeness lower bounds for the bounded possible fact problem when the fixed query contains either negation or recursion.
Checkpointing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)-A Survey

Checkpointing is a popular fault-tolerance technique in mobile computing. It is a way to record the current status of information, which may be required while recovery after failures. Thus, in case of failure, computation may be restarted from the saved checkpoint instead from the beginning. Checkpointing-based rollback recovery is used in various domains like applied sciences, database management, computer networks and many more. Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs) consists of a number of mobile hosts (MHs) connected with each other via wireless links. Here, the challenge is limited power supply and storage capacity. Therefore, checkpointing is a major confront in such dynamic environment. This survey paper presents a comprehensive survey of checkpointing algorithms along with an analysis of their performance characteristics.
A new approach to time-optimal straight-line trajectory for omni-directional mobile robots with multi-objective costs

We examine time-optimal straight-line trajectory generation for three-wheeled omni-directional mobile robots. Our studies are based on the mobile robot dynamics with battery voltage bounds. We formulate a multi-objective problem that has both translational and rotational costs for time-optimality. Using the switching functions by maximum principle, we present a new approach to determine extreme control components used as motor input. Through the proposed method, we find three combinations of optimal candidates to be the optimal solutions of our problem.
A multifrequency angular power spectrum analysis of the Leiden polarization surveys

The Galactic synchrotron emission is expected to be the most relevant source of astrophysical contamination in cosmic microwave background polarization measurements, at least at frequencies $\nu \la 70$ GHz and at angular scales $\theta\ga 30'$. We present a multifrequency analysis of the Leiden surveys, linear polarization surveys covering the Northern Celestial Hemisphere at five frequencies between 408 MHz and 1411 MHz. By implementing specific interpolation methods to deal with these irregularly sampled data, we produced maps of the polarized diffuse Galactic radio emission with a pixel size $\simeq$$0.92^\circ$. We derived the angular power spectrum (APS) ( PI , E , and B modes) of the synchrotron dominated radio emission as function of the multipole, $\ell$. We considered the whole covered region and some patches at different Galactic latitudes. By fitting the APS in terms of power laws ($C_\ell \sim \kappa\cdot\ell^{\alpha}$), we found spectral indices that steepen with increasing frequency: from $\alpha \sim -(1{-}1.5)$ at 408 MHz to $\alpha \sim -(2{-}3)$ at 1411 MHz for $10 \la \ell \la 100$ and from $\alpha \sim -0.7$ to $\alpha \sim -1.5$ for lower multipoles (the exact values depending on the considered sky region and polarization mode). The bulk of this flattening at lower frequencies can be interpreted in terms of Faraday depolarization effects. We then considered the APS at various fixed multipoles and its frequency dependence. Using the APSs of the Leiden surveys at 820 MHz and 1411 MHz, we determined possible ranges for the rotation measure, RM , in the simple case of an interstellar medium slab model . Also taking into account the polarization degree at 1.4 GHz, it is possible to break the degeneracy between the identified RM intervals. The most reasonable of them turned out to be $RM \sim 9{-}17$ rad/m 2 although, given the uncertainty on the measured polarization degree, RM values in the interval ~$53{-}59$ rad/m 2 cannot be excluded.
Inferring protein interactions from experimental data by association probabilistic method

To elucidate protein interaction networks is one of the major goals of functional genomics for whole organisms. So far, various computational methods have been proposed for inference of protein–protein interactions. Based on the association method by Sprinzak et al., we propose an association probabilistic method in this short communication to infer protein interactions directly from the experimental data, which outperformed other existing methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency despite its simple form. Specifically, we show that the association probabilistic method achieves the highest accuracy among the existing approaches for the measures of root‐mean‐square error and the Pearson correlation coefficient, and also runs much faster than the LP‐based method, by experimental dataset in Yeast. Software is available from the authors upon request. Proteins 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Electrocardiographic abnormalities in patients with heart failure

Summary Background The morbidity and mortality from heart failure (HF) differ between patients with reduced (< 50%) and with preserved (≥ 50%) left ventricular ejection fraction (LV EF) on account of many factors, including abnormalities detected in the electrocardiogram (ECG). The aim of this study was to determine and compare the ECG abnormalities between HF patients with reduced and with preserved LV EF. Methods The study was cross-sectional in design and carried out in Aminu Kano teaching hospital and Murtala Mohammed specialist hospital, Kano, Nigeria, from April 2005 to June 2006. We studied the resting electrocardiograms of all HF patients aged 15 years and older who were referred to the two centres for echocardiography. Results A total of 113 patients were studied and 98.2% of them had abnormal ECGs. Forty-two patients (37.2%) had preserved LV EF while the remaining 71 (62.8%) had reduced LV EF. Left ventricular hypertrophy (LV H) was the commonest ECG abnormality, found among 55 patients (77.5%) with reduced LV EF, and 21 patients (50%) with preserved LV EF (p = 0.0026). The commonest arrhythmia was atrial fibrillation, found among 10 patients (14.1%) with reduced LV EF and eight patients (19.1%) with preserved LV EF (p = 0.486). Prolonged corrected QT interval was found among 30 (71.4%) and 56 patients (78.9%) with preserved and reduced LV EF, respectively (p = 0.370). Conclusion Most of the patients with heart failure studied in Kano, Nigeria had abnormal electrocardiograms, and the most common abnormality was LV H.
A distributed interest management scheme for massively multi-user virtual environments

Massively multi user virtual environment (MMVE) applications must deal with the challenge of update message exchange among a large set of nodes distributed over the Internet. Therefore design of scalable network protocols is a major concern in such large scale distributed architectures. Several approaches have been proposed to aid update exchange in MMVEs. Message localization has always been a key point in the design of such distributed network protocols. Area of interest management (AoIM) mainly deals with the issues related to the update message localization with respect to the userpsilas interest. As the number of users in the virtual environment increases, update message localization becomes more important in order to prevent the transmission of a huge bulk of unnecessary updates to uninterested users. Therefore, scalable and efficient area of interest management is a crucial point in MMVE design. This paper introduces a new zone selection and distributed regional message filtering architecture for MMVE applications. We propose Delaunay tetrahedrization as a good way of virtual world partitioning due to several promising features. Moreover we propose the partitioning to be done with respect to barriers in order to reach a better performance through the filtering the updates that need not be propagated over the barriers. We will also introduce a distributed interest management protocol based on the previous partitioning technique. Our proposed distributed message dissemination approach is capable of providing the interested users with variable updates rate according to their required level of detail.
Image group compression using texture databases

An image compression approach capable of exploiting redundancies in groups of images is introduced. The approach is based on image segmentation, texture analysis and texture synthesis. The proposed algorithm extracts textured regions from an image and merges them with similar texture data from other images, in order to take advantage of textural re-occurrences between the images. The texture extraction is done by taking overlapping rectangular texture parameter samples from the input image(s), and using a clustering algorithm to merge them into spatially connected regions, resulting in a polygonal texture map. The textures of that map are henceforth analysed by extracting various features from the texture regions. Using a metric defined on these features, the textures are then merged with entries from a central database, which consists of all the textures in all the images of the image collection, so that for each image, only a polygonal segmentation map and references into this texture database need to be stored. Decoding (decompression) works by extracting the polygonal texture map followed by filling the map regions with patterns generated using texture synthesis based on the texture feature vectors from the database.
Differential effects of selective and non-selective nitric oxide synthase inhibitors on the blood perfusion of ischemia-reperfused myocardium in dogs

Background Nitric oxide (NO) is protective for the cardiovascular system, and excessive NO exerts negative effects on the circulatory system. This study aimed to compare the effects of selective or non-selective NO synthase (NOS) inhibitors on blood flow perfusion of ischemia-reperfused myocardium. Materials/Methods Male mongrel dogs were randomly assigned to 4 groups: only ischemia-reperfusion (control), ischemia-reperfusion plus Nω-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (NAME) treatment, ischemia-reperfusion plus aminoguanidine (AMD) treatment, and sham operation group. Myocardial contrast echocardiography (MCE) was performed. Blood samples were taken for measurement of NO. Background-subtracted peak videointensity (PVI) and PVI ratio in myocardium were measured. Results In the NAME-treated group, the PVI at 5 min reperfusion did not significantly differ from pre-LAD-occlusion, but declined to and retained at a level obviously lower than the pre-LAD-occlusion. In the AMD-treated group, the PVI at 5 min reperfusion was significantly higher than at pre-LAD-occlusion, and then restored to and remained at the pre-LAD-occlusion level. The changes of PVI ratios in the 3 groups were similar to PVI values. In the AMD-treated group, the curve width increased in the early reperfusion, but returned to the pre-LAD-occlusion level at 90 min reperfusion. The plasma NO concentration in the NAME-treated group greatly decreased and remained low during the whole period of reperfusion. In the AMD-treated group, there were only slight increases in NO concentrations during reperfusion. Conclusions NAME totally inhibited NO production and attenuated myocardial blood flow perfusion. Aminoguanidine significantly relieved the increase in NO production and alleviated the congestion of reperfused myocardium. Selective inhibitors of iNOS might be useful in the management of certain diseases associated with ischemia-reperfusion.