Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endothelial cell adhesion molecules in meningococcal disease

BACKGROUND Endothelial damage is important in meningococcal disease. Cell adhesion molecules, including P selectin, E selectin, and intercellular cell adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1), are expressed by activated endothelium and then subsequently shed. METHODS ICAM-1, P selectin, and E selectin were measured on admission to hospital in children with meningococcal infections. RESULTS Concentrations of shed cell adhesion molecules are reported for 78 children. Eleven did not have meningococcal disease. Of the 67 with meningococcal disease, 40 had mild disease (Glasgow meningococcal septicaemia prognostic score (GMSPS) < 8) and 27 had severe disease (GMSPS ⩾ 8). E selectin and ICAM-1 values were higher in those with meningococcal disease. The E selectin values in those with severe disease were higher than in those with mild disease. P selectin concentrations were not altered in meningococcal disease, but those who died had lower concentrations. CONCLUSIONS Endothelial activation in meningococcal disease is reflected by shed ICAM-1 and E selectin concentrations.
Radio Propaganda and the Broadcasting of Hatred: Historical Development and Definitions

Foreword Acknowledgements Propaganda: Origins, Development and Utilization The Advents of Radio: Creating a Mass Audience for Propaganda and Incitement The Cold War and After: Propaganda War and Radio in Regional Conflicts Nazi Radio Propaganda - Setting the Agenda for Hatred Rwanda: Genocide, Hate Radio and the Power of the Broadcast Word Kenya: Political violence, the Media and the Role of Vernacular Radio Stations Conclusions: Propaganda, Hate and the Power of Radio Defining Hate Broadcasting Bibliography Index
The economy of tourism spaces : A multiplicity of "critical turns"

Two decades ago, Britton‟s (1991) eloquently argued for a political economy approach in geographic examinations of tourism stressing that this would reinforce the theoretical underpinnings of the geography of tourism. Inspired by this mandate, several geographers have periodically argued for strengthening tourism‟s conceptual ties to economic geography (Shaw and Williams 1994; Ioannides 1995; Milne 1996; Ioannides and Debbage 1998; Agarwal et al. 2000).
Advances in mechanisms of genetic instability related to hereditary neurological diseases

Substantial progress has been realized in the past several years in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms responsible for the expansions and deletions (genetic instabilities) of repeating tri-, tetra- and pentanucleotide repeating sequences associated with a number of hereditary neurological diseases. These instabilities occur by replication, recombination and repair processes, probably acting in concert, due to slippage of the DNA complementary strands relative to each other. The biophysical properties of the folded-back repeating sequence strands play a critical role in these instabilities. Non-B DNA structural elements (hairpins and slipped structures, DNA unwinding elements, tetraplexes, triplexes and sticky DNA) are described. The replication mechanisms are influenced by pausing of the replication fork, orientation of the repeat strands, location of the repeat sequences relative to replication origins and the flap endonuclease. Methyl-directed mismatch repair, nucleotide excision repair, and repair of damage caused by mutagens are discussed. Genetic recombination and double-strand break repair advances in Escherichia coli, yeast and mammalian models are reviewed. Furthermore, the newly discovered capacities of certain triplet repeat sequences to cause gross chromosomal rearrangements are discussed.
You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions

When surveyed about economic conditions, supporters of the president's party often report more positive conditions than its opponents. Scholars have interpreted this finding to mean that partisans cannot even agree on matters of fact. We test an alternative interpretation: Partisans give partisan congenial answers even when they have, or could have inferred, information less flattering to the party they identify with. To test this hypothesis, we administered two surveys to nationally representative samples, experimentally manipulating respondents' motivation to be accurate via monetary incentives and on-screen appeals. Both treatments reduced partisan differences in reports of economic conditions significantly. Many partisans interpret factual questions about economic conditions as opinion questions, unless motivated to see them otherwise. Typical survey conditions thus reveal a mix of what partisans know about the economy, and what they would like to be true.
Differential Item Functioning in the SF-36 Physical Functioning and Mental Health Sub-Scales: A Population-Based Investigation in the Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study

Background Self-reported health status measures, like the Short Form 36-item Health Survey (SF-36), can provide rich information about the overall health of a population and its components, such as physical, mental, and social health. However, differential item functioning (DIF), which arises when population sub-groups with the same underlying (i.e., latent) level of health have different measured item response probabilities, may compromise the comparability of these measures. The purpose of this study was to test for DIF on the SF-36 physical functioning (PF) and mental health (MH) sub-scale items in a Canadian population-based sample. Methods Study data were from the prospective Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study (CaMos), which collected baseline data in 1996–1997. DIF was tested using a multiple indicators multiple causes (MIMIC) method. Confirmatory factor analysis defined the latent variable measurement model for the item responses and latent variable regression with demographic and health status covariates (i.e., sex, age group, body weight, self-perceived general health) produced estimates of the magnitude of DIF effects. Results The CaMos cohort consisted of 9423 respondents; 69.4% were female and 51.7% were less than 65 years. Eight of 10 items on the PF sub-scale and four of five items on the MH sub-scale exhibited DIF. Large DIF effects were observed on PF sub-scale items about vigorous and moderate activities, lifting and carrying groceries, walking one block, and bathing or dressing. On the MH sub-scale items, all DIF effects were small or moderate in size. Conclusions SF-36 PF and MH sub-scale scores were not comparable across population sub-groups defined by demographic and health status variables due to the effects of DIF, although the magnitude of this bias was not large for most items. We recommend testing and adjusting for DIF to ensure comparability of the SF-36 in population-based investigations.
Production functions : a theoretical and empirical study

The aim of this study is to investigate whether there exists a realistic theory of production. One can hardly claim that economists have ignored the study of production functions. The published literature has already reached considerable proportions and is still growing rapidly. Despite the widespread interest, (or perhaps because of it) the area lacks a consensus of opinion. Yet an understanding of the technology of production is crucial to the development of realistic theories and to the formulation of a wide range of policies. Of all the areas that we might distinguish, it probably has the most widespread and important implications for other economic theories.
User Interactivity in Very Large Scale Data Mining

Knowledge discovery is widely considered to be an interactive and iterative process. The data mining phase of KDD is, on the other hand, often assumed to be an indivisible step. We argue that user interaction during discovery runs is a central element in very large scale data mining. We describe a system architecture centered around a common, persistently stored search space. This gives good performance while simultaneously allowing for high user interactivity. Furthermore, the architecture supports an extremely robust and modular implementation of the data mining process. As a concrete instantiation, we discuss the use of this architecture in the ESPRIT KESO project (Knowledge Extraction for Statistical Offices).
Scheduling data items with time constraints based on on-demand mode in ubiquitous environments

This study proposes mobile services with time constraints in ubiquitous computing environments based on on-demand mode. For real-time mobile service, the need of mobile service for a real-time database management model is strong and providing real-time response to mobile transaction has became basic strategies in mobile data management. However, the resource constraints of ubiquitous computing systems make it difficult to satisfy timing requirements of supported strategies. This study provides on-line scheduling strategies for mobile data with timing constraint on multichannel broadcasting environments based on on-demand mode. The goal of this study ensures the most requests meeting their deadlines, which differs from previously proposed scheduling algorithms that aim to minimize the mean access time. The study presents a study of the performance of traditional real-time strategies and demonstrates traditional real-time algorithms which do not always perform the best in a mobile environment. The experimental results show the proposed algorithm, called on-demand broadcast program with time constraint (BPTC), outperforms miss rate for data timely delivery to mobile clients.
Do artificial ants march in step? ordered asynchronous processes and modularity in biological systems

Processes that occur in many biological systems are not synchronous, but are governed by asynchronous updating. Although some previous models of multi agent systems have incorporated asynchronous updating in an informal or implicit way, the importance of asynchronous behaviour has been largely overlooked. However, the update scheme chosen is very important in determining the overall system behaviour. We illustrate this point using several updating schemes in simple models. The implication is that care should be given to selecting an update scheme that is appropriate for the modelling application. We also observe that certain ordered asynchronous processes play a role in emergent modularity: an important process in the evolution of complexity in living systems.
Restoration of Corrupted Region and Segmentation

Image segmentation is fundamental to many image analysis problems. It aims to partition a digital image into a set of non-overlapping homogeneous regions. This paper describes a new method for restoration and segmentation in corrupted text images on the basis of color feature analysis by tensor voting in 3D. It is show how feature analysis can benefit from analyzing features using second order tensor. Proposed technique is applied to text images corrupted by manifold types of various noises. Firstly, selected dominant features in color space are analyzed by tensor voting in 3D, and noises are removed by an adaptive vector median iteratively. Finally, the region segmentation is performed by adaptive mean shift and separated clustering method respectively. We present experimental results of the proposed method operating on an image corrupted by various noises.
Reducing uncertainty in robotic surface assembly tasks based on contact information

In contrast to hard automation, flexible assembly using a general-purpose robot holds the promise of reducing costs and increasing productivity of small batch products as well as adaptivity to product changes. However, robotic assembly remains one of the most challenging problems in robotics research. In particular, it has to overcome uncertainty in the environment and the location of parts. This paper addresses how to estimate and correct part positioning uncertainties with respect to the assembly task by using the contact trajectory data collected during active part interaction. We first devise a nominal assembly motion sequence based on an approximate knowledge of the poses of the parts, which includes exploratory compliant moves for the purpose of parameter estimation. As the robot manipulator executes the nominal motion sequence, data collected during exploratory compliant moves are used to estimate part poses more accurately, and the improved information is used to update the subsequent assembly motion sequence to correct errors in the nominal plan. We implemented the strategy using a back-drivable Barrett WAM robotic arm without a force sensor and BarrettHand BH8-262. The empirical results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.
Short-text representation using diffusion wavelets

Usual text document representations such as tf-idf do not work well in classification tasks for short-text documents and across diverse data domains. Optimizing different representations for different data domains is infeasible in a practical setting on the Internet. Mining such representations from the data in an unsupervised manner is desirable. In this paper, we study a representation based on the multi-scale harmonic analysis of term-term co-occurrence graph. This representation is not only sparse, but also leads to the discovery of semantically coherent topics in data. In our experiments on user-generated short documents e.g., newsgroup messages, user comments, and meta-data, we found this representation to outperform other representations across different choice of classifiers. Similar improvements were also observed for data sets in Chinese and Portuguese languages.
An region of interest based video compression for indoor surveillance

Motion detection is an important part in video surveillance. When it is combined with video compression and transmission, the bit rate can be further minimized under a fixed background. In this paper, we show that under indoor circumstance, most of the macro blocks (MB) in I frame are redundant in the sequence. In H.264, standard pulse code modulation (PCM) is chosen to encode MBs by writing pixel values directly into the bit stream. Experiments show that surveillance sequence hardly uses this PCM in encoding, leaving us an interface to encode background MBs with. The foreground is encoded normally using H.264, which causes little degradation in video quality while the bit rate is dramatically decreased. In decoder, PCM MB is decoded accordingly.
The sustainability of long-term growth: socioeconomic and ecological perspectives.

Growth and sustainability - an overview, M. Munasinghe, O. Sunkel et al. Symposium on "Sustainability of Long Term Growth": towards sustainomics - a transdisciplinary metaframework for making development more sustainable, M. Munasinghe economic development in a neo-liberal world - unsustainable globalization? J.B. Opschoor growth, globalization and an agenda for ecological economics, R.B. Norgaard dematerialization, competitiveness and employment in a globalized economy, F. Hinterberger and F. Luks policies and institutions for sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean, J.A. Ocampo. General framework papers: beyond growth -avoiding uneconomic growth, H.E. Daly development thinking in the age of environment - of wise use of nature for the good society, I. Sachs quantifying natural capital - beyond monetary value, J.M. Naredo globalization versus internationalization - some implications, H.E. Daly. Modelling and applications papers: ecology and optimal economic growth - an optimal ecological economic growth model and its sustainability implications, S.M. N. Islam why an inverted u-shaped environmental Kuznets curve may not exist, G. Kadekodi and M.M. Agarwal industrial pollution and international trade - the Brazilian experience, C.E. F. Young environmental consequences of trade liberalization in the western hemisphere, M. Tsigas, D. Gray et al dynamic environmental policy in developing countries in the presence of a balance of trade deficit and a tariff, A.A. Batabyal, H. Beladi and D.M. Lee GLEAM - a simple model for the analysis of equity in policies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through tradable permits, P. Baer and P. Templet estimating non-renewable resource capital consumption, A.C. Hansen measuring genuine savings - are most resource-extracting countries really sustainable? E. Neumayer.
ProtPhylo: identification of protein–phenotype and protein–protein functional associations via phylogenetic profiling

ProtPhylo is a web-based tool to identify proteins that are functionally linked to either a phenotype or a protein of interest based on co-evolution. ProtPhylo infers functional associations by comparing protein phylogenetic profiles (co-occurrence patterns of orthology relationships) for more than 9.7 million non-redundant protein sequences from all three domains of life. Users can query any of 2048 fully sequenced organisms, including 1678 bacteria, 255 eukaryotes and 115 archaea. In addition, they can tailor ProtPhylo to a particular kind of biological question by choosing among four main orthology inference methods based either on pair-wise sequence comparisons (One-way Best Hits and Best Reciprocal Hits) or clustering of orthologous proteins across multiple species (OrthoMCL and eggNOG). Next, ProtPhylo ranks phylogenetic neighbors of query proteins or phenotypic properties using the Hamming distance as a measure of similarity between pairs of phylogenetic profiles. Candidate hits can be easily and flexibly prioritized by complementary clues on subcellular localization, known protein–protein interactions, membrane spanning regions and protein domains. The resulting protein list can be quickly exported into a csv text file for further analyses. ProtPhylo is freely available at http://www.protphylo. org.
Abstract 53: An Abundant Dysfunctional Apolipoprotein A1 in Human Atheroma

High density lipoproteins (HDL) are a heterogeneous group of particles formed predominantly around the major structural protein, apolipoprotein A1 (apoA1). Contemporary findings suggest functional measures of HDL/apoA1 may provide improved clinical relevance. Moreover, recent studies indicate apoA1 in human atheroma is dysfunctional, extensively oxidized by myeloperoxidase (MPO)-generated oxidants, and that in vitro oxidation of apoA1 by MPO impairs its cholesterol acceptor function. Using phage-display affinity maturation and recombinant immunoglobulin engineering we developed a high affinity monoclonal antibody (mAb) that specifically recognizes apoA1/HDL modified by the MPO/H 2 O 2 /halide system. An oxindolyl alanine (2-OH-Trp) moiety at tryptophan 72 of apoA1 serves as the mAb recognition site. Mutagenesis studies confirm a critical role for apoA1 Trp72 in MPO-dependent inhibition of ABCA1-dependent cholesterol acceptor activity of apoA1 in vitro and in vivo. While apoA1 containing a 2-OH-Trp 72 group (oxTrp72apoA1) is in low abundance within the circulation, it is remarkably abundant within human atherosclerotic plaque, accounting for 20% of apoA1 in aortic lesions. Functional characterization of immune-purified oxTrp72apoA1 from human atherosclerotic plaque and plasma reveals a lipid-poor lipoprotein virtually devoid of cholesterol acceptor activity. Recovered oxTrp72apoA1 demonstrated impaired capacity to promote HDL biogenesis in vivo, and potent pro-inflammatory activities including NF-κB activation and VCAM-1 surface expression on endothelial cells. Elevated oxTrp72apoA1 levels among sequential subjects presenting to a preventive cardiology clinic (n=627) were associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk, including after adjustments for traditional risk factors, apoA1 and MPO [Odds ratio (95%confidence interval), 4.2(1.5-13.0)]. Circulating oxTrp72apoA1 levels provide a window into monitoring the generation of an abundant pro-atherogenic apoA1 form within the artery wall.
Table Tennis for Three – The Video

Physical leisure activities such as table tennis provide healthy exercise and can offer a means to connect with others socially; however, players have to be in the same physical location to play. We have developed a networked table tennis-like game that is played with a real paddle and ball, augmented with a large-scale videoconference. Similar to networked computer games, this concept can support more than two locations. We are presenting a video of our latest prototype “Table Tennis for Three”. Table Tennis for Three has potential to achieve similar benefits known from traditional physical leisure activity such as
O R I G I N a L I N V E S T I G a T I O N Open Access

Sagittal abdominal diameter is a more independent measure compared with waist circumference to predict arterial stiffness in subjects with type 2 diabetes-a prospective observational cohort study Abstract Background: Anthropometric measurements are useful in clinical practice since they are non-invasive and cheap. Previous studies suggest that sagittal abdominal diameter (SAD) may be a better measure of visceral fat depots. The aim of this study was to prospectively explore and compare how laboratory and anthropometric risk markers predicted subclinical organ damage in 255 patients, with type 2 diabetes, after four years.
Immunotoxin Against a Donor MHC Class II Molecule Induces Indefinite Survival of Murine Kidney Allografts

Rejection of donor organs depends on the trafficking of donor passenger leukocytes to the secondary lymphoid organs of the recipient to elicit an immune response via the direct antigen presentation pathway. Therefore, the depletion of passenger leukocytes may be clinically applicable as a strategy to improve graft survival. Because major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II+ cells are most efficient at inducing immune responses, selective depletion of this population from donor grafts may dampen the alloimmune response and prolong graft survival. In a fully MHC mismatched mouse kidney allograft model, we describe the synthesis of an immunotoxin, consisting of the F(ab′)2 fragment of a monoclonal antibody against the donor MHC class II molecule I‐Ak conjugated with the plant‐derived ribosomal inactivating protein gelonin. This anti–I‐Ak gelonin immunotoxin depletes I‐Ak expressing cells specifically in vitro and in vivo. When given to recipients of kidney allografts, it resulted in indefinite graft survival with normal graft function, presence of Foxp3+ cells within donor grafts, diminished donor‐specific antibody formation, and delayed rejection of subsequent donor‐type skin grafts. Strategies aimed at the donor arm of the immune system using agents such as immunotoxins may be a useful adjuvant to existing recipient‐orientated immunosuppression.
Changes in Labor Force Composition and Male Earnings: A Production Approach

Models of aggregate production are estimated and used to investigate the effects of changes in labor force composition on the recently observed decline in the earnings of college graduates relative to other workers and on the fall in the earnings of younger workers relative to older workers. Changes in labor force composition explain substantial proportions of these observed earnings changes. The most important compositional change appears to have been the rapid increase in the number of young male college graduates. Projections outside the sample are consistent with depressed earnings throughout the lifetimes of the large baby-boom cohorts, especially among college graduates, but do not suggest that depressed college graduate earnings are a permanent phenomenon for all birth cohorts.