Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The mitochondrial ubiquitin ligase plays an anti‐apoptotic role in cardiomyocytes by regulating mitochondrial fission

Apoptosis plays a critical role in the development of myocardial infarction. Cardiomyocytes are enriched with mitochondria and excessive mitochondrial fission can trigger cellular apoptosis. Recently, the mitochondrial ubiquitin ligase (MITOL), localized in the mitochondrial outer membrane, was reported to play an important role in the regulation of mitochondrial dynamics and apoptosis. However, the underlying mechanism of its action remains uncertain. The present study was aimed at uncovering the role of MITOL in the regulation of cardiomyocyte apoptosis. Our results showed that MITOL expression was up‐regulated in cardiomyocytes in response to apoptotic stimulation. Mitochondrial ubiquitin ligase overexpression blocked dynamin‐related protein 1 accumulation in the mitochondria, and attenuated the mitochondrial fission induced by hydrogen peroxide. Conversely, MITOL knockdown sensitized cardiomyocytes to undergo mitochondrial fission, resulting in subsequent apoptosis. These findings suggest that MITOL plays a protective role against apoptosis in cardiomyocytes, and may serve as a potential therapeutic target for apoptosis‐related cardiac diseases.
The Role and Effectiveness of Parish Councils in Gloucestershire: Adapting to New Modes of Rural Community Governance.

This thesis examines the changing roles of rural parish councils in the context of the Government White Paper on Rural England (DEFRA, November 2000). This suggested that new responsibilities should be given to Parish Councils within rural policy and planning frameworks. Concepts such as ‘Partnership’, 'Parish Plans' and ‘Quality Parish Councils' were mooted as possible vehicles to promote greater community participation and increased local 'empowerment' in the governance of rural communities. The proposals for parish councils are part of a new 'integrated approach' to rural planning which seeks to combine the state and voluntary sectors through the ideals of partnership. The research examines the appropriateness and willingness of parish councils in Gloucestershire to fulfill the new responsibilities set down in the Rural White Paper and the key they have as ‘agents’ of government. It explores and assesses how far they have adjusted to the new forms of governance set out by the White Paper, and considers how they have adapted alongside greater voluntary and community activity, focussing in particular on the new forms of partnership distributed across the countryside. The research found that the effectiveness of parish councils in Gloucestershire is extremely varied and often piecemeal in nature, influenced by a wide variety of social, economic and geographical factors. Both individual decisions and wider structural factors, including the opportunities provided by self-interest, influence the variations in the type and level of participation in community leadership. In Gloucestershire, the emergence of new organisations and actors in rural community governance has generated only a moderate shift in the way parish councils operate. Parish councils consider that they have very little influence in the broader sphere of rural governance structures. Recent government legislation regarding community involvement, partnership and participation has been slow to filter down to a large number of parish councils in the county. The geography of partnership initiatives across the UK has emerged as a very uneven map of rural governance. This “map” is mirrored in the incidence of effective partnerships within rural politics in Gloucestershire. Indeed the complex nature of participation in community governance and leadership revealed by the research confirms the need for further examination of the shift from “joined up” to “joining up” partnerships, and the incidence of partnership marginalisation felt across many parish councils in the county. Some signposts for future research are also identified.
Of macrophages and red blood cells; a complex love story

Macrophages tightly control the production and clearance of red blood cells (RBC). During steady state hematopoiesis, approximately 1010 RBC are produced per hour within erythroblastic islands in humans. In these erythroblastic islands, resident bone marrow macrophages provide erythroblasts with interactions that are essential for erythroid development. New evidence suggests that not only under homeostasis but also under stress conditions, macrophages play an important role in promoting erythropoiesis. Once RBC have matured, these cells remain in circulation for about 120 days. At the end of their life span, RBC are cleared by macrophages residing in the spleen and the liver. Current theories about the removal of senescent RBC and the essential role of macrophages will be discussed as well as the role of macrophages in facilitating the removal of damaged cellular content from the RBC. In this review we will provide an overview on the role of macrophages in the regulation of RBC production, maintenance and clearance. In addition, we will discuss the interactions between these two cell types during transfer of immune complexes and pathogens from RBC to macrophages.
Polarization and Belief Dynamics in the Black and White Communities: An Agent-Based Network Model from the Data

Public health care interventions-regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example-standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities.
Mathematical Modeling and Dynamic Simulation of Metabolic Reaction Systems Using Metabolome Time Series Data

The high-throughput acquisition of metabolome data is greatly anticipated for the complete understanding of cellular metabolism in living organisms. A variety of analytical technologies have been developed to acquire large-scale metabolic profiles under different biological or environmental conditions. Time series data are useful for predicting the most likely metabolic pathways because they provide important information regarding the accumulation of metabolites, which implies causal relationships in the metabolic reaction network. Considerable effort has been undertaken to utilize these data for constructing a mathematical model merging system properties and quantitatively characterizing a whole metabolic system in toto. However, there are technical difficulties between benchmarking the provision and utilization of data. Although, hundreds of metabolites can be measured, which provide information on the metabolic reaction system, simultaneous measurement of thousands of metabolites is still challenging. In addition, it is nontrivial to logically predict the dynamic behaviors of unmeasurable metabolite concentrations without sufficient information on the metabolic reaction network. Yet, consolidating the advantages of advancements in both metabolomics and mathematical modeling remain to be accomplished. This review outlines the conceptual basis of and recent advances in technologies in both the research fields. It also highlights the potential for constructing a large-scale mathematical model by estimating model parameters from time series metabolome data in order to comprehensively understand metabolism at the systems level.
Contrast Medium Induced Nephropathy after Endovascular Stent Graft Placement: An Examination of Its Prevalence and Risk Factors

Endovascular stent graft placement has become a major treatment for thoracic and abdominal aneurysms. While endovascular therapy is less invasive than open surgery, it involves the use of a contrast medium. Contrast media can cause renal impairment, a condition termed as contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN). This study sought to evaluate the incidence and risk factors of CIN following endovascular stent graft placement for aortic aneurysm repair. The study included 167 consecutive patients who underwent endovascular stent graft placement in our hospital from October 2013 to June 2014. CIN was diagnosed using the European Society of Urogenital Radiology criteria. Patients with and without CIN were compared. Chi-squared tests, t-tests, and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed. Thirteen patients (7.8%) developed CIN. Left ventricular dysfunction and intraoperative blood transfusion were significantly more frequent in the CIN group (P = 0.017 and P = 0.032, resp.). Multivariate analysis showed that left ventricular dysfunction had the strongest influence on CIN development (odds ratio 9.34, P = 0.018, and 95% CI = 1.46–59.7). Patients with CIN also experienced longer ICU and hospital stays. Measures to improve renal perfusion flow should be considered for patients with left ventricular dysfunction who are undergoing endovascular stent graft placement.
Feature extraction and pattern recognition of EMG-based signal for hand movements

EMG pattern recognition has been developed to interpret the performance of different functional movements. It can be used to develop the movement control techniques of assistive devices for people who are physically disabled. Suitable features in time domain are extracted from three different hand movements. The EMG signal was recorded from Cubitus (Elbow) bending, Carpus (Wrist) twist, Brachium (Arm) twist and Palm contraction of forty eight healthy subjects (male and female) by two pairs of Ag-AgCl surface electrodes on the right and left antebrachium. The performance of the classifier indicates EMG-based recognition accuracy for similar movement of right vs. left is found to be more than 95% and for different movement of around 90%. Also, the classification accuracy for average data set is achieved around 93-97% when compared for left and right hand.
Regulating utilities : a time for change?

Now that privatisation of utilities is substantially complete, regulation has become a major economic and political issue. To provide an intellectual basis for utility regulation, each year the Institute in conjunction with the London Business School publishes a set of Readings which assess the state of regulation, considers the state of regulation, considers what problems have arisen, and discusses how they might be solved, taking into account the experiences of other countries. The authors adopt no common political or ideological stance: they bring a variety of viewpoints to bear since the intentions is to stimulate debate. The 1996 edition of this comprehensive and up-to-date review of utility regulation in Britain includes contributions not only from academic commentators but from the utility regulators and the heads of the general competition authorities.
A server's perspective of Internet streaming delivery to mobile devices

Receiving Internet streaming services on various mobile devices is getting more and more popular. To understand and better support Internet streaming delivery to mobile devices, a number of studies have been conducted. However, existing studies have mainly focused on the client side resource consumption and streaming quality. So far, little is known about the server side, which is the key for providing successful mobile streaming services. In this work, we set to investigate the Internet mobile streaming service at the server side. For this purpose, we have collected a one-month server log (with 212 TB delivered video traffic) from a top Internet mobile streaming service provider serving worldwide mobile users. Through trace analysis, we find that (1) a major challenge for providing Internet mobile streaming services is rooted from the mobile device hardware and software heterogeneity. In this workload, we find over 2800 different hardware models with about 100 different screen resolutions running 14 different mobile OS and 3 audio codecs and 4 video codecs. (2) To deal with the device heterogeneity, transcoding is used to customize the video to the appropriate versions at runtime for different devices. A video clip could be transcoded into more than 40 different versions in order to serve requests from different devices. (3) Compared to videos in traditional Internet streaming, mobile streaming videos are typically of much smaller size (a median of 1.68 MBytes) and shorter duration (a median of 2.7 minutes). Furthermore, the daily mobile user accesses are more skewed following a Zipf-like distribution but users' interests also quickly shift. Considering the huge demand of CPU cycles for online transcoding, we further examine server-side caching in order to reduce CPU cycle demand. We show that a policy considering different versions of a video altogether outperforms other intuitive ones when the cache size is limited.
Visual Detection of Unknown Objects in Video Games Using Qualitative Stability Analysis

Many current computer vision approaches for object detection can only detect objects that have been learned in advance. In this paper, we present a method that uses qualitative stability analysis to infer the existence of unknown objects in certain areas of the images based on gravity and stability of already detected objects. Our method recursively searches these areas for unknown objects until all detected objects form a stable structure or no new objects can be identified anymore. We evaluate our method using the popular video game Angry Birds. We only start with detecting the green pigs and are able to automatically identify and detect all essential game objects in all 400+ available levels. All objects can be accurately and reliably detected. Our method can be applied to other video games where objects obey gravity and are bound by polygons.
Social problems in transition. Perceptions of influential groups in Estonia, Russia and Finland.

The thesis examines influential groups' perceptions of social problems in Estonia, Russia and Finland. The context of the study is the ongoing "Eastern transition" in Estonia and Russia and the "Western transformation" in Finland. Each is changing the accustomed ways to define and treat social problems. The focus is on comparing definitions of social problems, including the causes and solutions suggested by the influential groups. The main assumption is that the framework of defining social problems is changing in all three countries: the state's role as the body responsible for people's welfare is diminishing, while more emphasis is being placed on the role of individuals, the market and civil society. Theoretically, the approach is close to social constructionism, according to which social problems are products of collective definition processes. Furthermore, I assume that the influential groups, formed of journalists, administrators and business people, have the power and the possibility to influence the course of social change. The data consists of focus group interviews conducted in Tallinn, St. Petersburg and Helsinki in 1995-1996. The thesis suggests that, for all three countries, the determining factor behind the definitions of social problems is the heavy social costs of the transition and transformation. According to the interviewees, Estonia and Russia are now afflicted with vicious circles of social problems, centered around the problems of crime, poverty, housing, poor health and environmental pollution. In Finland, unemployment and poverty were regarded as the most serious social problems. Mainly due to the severe social problems, the interviewees were not willing to transfer the responsibility for people's welfare from the state to the market or civil society. The changes in the framework of defining social problems thus turned out to be much less dramatic than expected. Altogether, the results indicate that the welfare systems created during the post-war era are now being partly dismantled in all three countries. However, in the opinion of the influential groups, there is no overall disillusionment with big state solutions to social problems.
Towards a View-Based Process for Designing and Documenting RESTful Service Architectures

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for service-based design. Regarded to be used in massively distributed and loosely coupled hypermedia systems, REST has been the de facto architecture style for REST-based web services (called RESTful services). Besides business functionality, RESTful services should address quality attribute requirements, which are commonly described in scenarios (textual descriptions of how to achieve such attribute in the system's context). However, to properly mapping scenarios into architectural elements is a non-trivial task. Furthermore, architects often fail to document adequately the design decisions taken during such mapping. These issues can result in low-quality RESTful services. In this paper, we present a view-based process that provides mechanisms to represent quality attribute scenarios as concrete design decisions that can be later used in the design of RESTful service architectures.
Deep Artificial Neural Networks and Neuromorphic Chips for Big Data Analysis: Pharmaceutical and Bioinformatics Applications

Over the past decade, Deep Artificial Neural Networks (DNNs) have become the state-of-the-art algorithms in Machine Learning (ML), speech recognition, computer vision, natural language processing and many other tasks. This was made possible by the advancement in Big Data, Deep Learning (DL) and drastically increased chip processing abilities, especially general-purpose graphical processing units (GPGPUs). All this has created a growing interest in making the most of the potential offered by DNNs in almost every field. An overview of the main architectures of DNNs, and their usefulness in Pharmacology and Bioinformatics are presented in this work. The featured applications are: drug design, virtual screening (VS), Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationship (QSAR) research, protein structure prediction and genomics (and other omics) data mining. The future need of neuromorphic hardware for DNNs is also discussed, and the two most advanced chips are reviewed: IBM TrueNorth and SpiNNaker. In addition, this review points out the importance of considering not only neurons, as DNNs and neuromorphic chips should also include glial cells, given the proven importance of astrocytes, a type of glial cell which contributes to information processing in the brain. The Deep Artificial Neuron–Astrocyte Networks (DANAN) could overcome the difficulties in architecture design, learning process and scalability of the current ML methods.
Multi-objective H∞ control of a laboratory model of active suspension system

This work deals with the H∞ control of a laboratory model of active suspension system. The design goal is to achieve a trade-off between the acceleration of the vehicle chassis, related to the comfort of the passengers, and control effort when the system is subjected to the disturbance associated with the road profile. Four control configurations are investigated: state-feedback, static output feedback, Proportional-Integral-Derivative control, and a combination of state feedback and static output feedback. The control objectives are formulated in terms of the H∞ norm of closed-loop transfer functions. A differential evolution algorithm is applied to solve the multi-objective optimization problem in the space of control parameters instead of already available functions for H∞ control synthesis due to a specific characteristic of the system model. The controllers are implemented in the laboratory model to investigate the efficiency of the proposed synthesis procedure and to compare the different control strategies.
The Impact of Numerical Expenditure Rules on Budgetary Discipline Over the Cycle

We study the impact of numerical expenditure rules on the propensity of governments to deviate from expenditure targets in response to surprises in cyclical conditions. Theoretical considerations suggest that due to political fragmentation in the budgetary process expenditure policy might be prone to a pro-cyclical bias. However, this tendency may be mitigated by numerical expenditure rules. These hypotheses are tested against data from a panel of EU Member States. Our key findings are that (i) deviations between actual and planned government expenditure are positively related to unanticipated changes in the output gap, and (ii) numerical expenditure rules reduce this pro-cyclical bias. Moreover, the pro-cyclical spending bias is found to be particularly pronounced for spending items with a high degree of budgetary flexibility. JEL Classification: C23, E62, H50
One way interdependent games

We introduce a new class of interdependent games, motivated by applications in large-scale power restoration, humanitarian logistics, and integrated supply-chains, where different agents have individual utilities but a social welfare objective must be optimized in a decentralized fashion. In these games, the utilities of one player does not depend on the decisions of the other player, giving her a strong bargaining position. We show that, in this setting, a Nash equilibrium can be arbitrarily far from the social welfare solution and that a VCG mechanism is never budget-balanced. Moreover, taking into account the budget, a VCG mechanism may lead to outcomes as bad as the worst Nash equilibria. We propose a privacy-preserving mechanism that is budget-balanced, incentive-compatible, satisfies ex-post individual rationality conditions, and has a constant price of anarchy. The mechanism is based on a single-offer bargaining protocol and we show that a randomized multi-offer protocol brings no additional benefit.
A Federated Integration of Networked Manufacturing Platforms

Networked manufacturing platforms have been widely used for their advantages, and integration of networked manufacturing platforms can provide a large-scale distributed cooperative environment. For commercial consideration, sometimes the integration is expected to be totally decentralized. The architecture for integration of networked manufacturing platforms and the hierarchy of federations are presented. The basic states of the federations are discussed. The factory/instance pattern is used to keep the state information, which is a key element of the federation management and other functions. Both the basic factory/instance pattern and the WS-resource factory/instance pattern are proposed in detail. Finally, the implementation is illustrated with the structure of a federated node