Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
STING activation of tumor endothelial cells initiates spontaneous and therapeutic antitumor immunity

Significance Tumor recognition by the immune system can occur spontaneously but has usually little impact on tumor growth. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive these responses could be exploited therapeutically to generate efficacious antitumor immunity. Here, we show that stimulator of IFN genes (STING), a molecule involved in cytosolic DNA sensing and required for the generation of spontaneous antitumor immune responses, can be targeted by intratumoral injection of cGAMP to boost antitumor immunity and to control tumor growth. The immune response induced by therapeutic but also spontaneous STING activation was dependent on type I IFN produced by endothelial cells in the tumor microenvironment, unraveling an unexpected role of the tumor vasculature in the initiation of spontaneous and therapeutic antitumor immunity via STING. Spontaneous CD8 T-cell responses occur in growing tumors but are usually poorly effective. Understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive these responses is of major interest as they could be exploited to generate a more efficacious antitumor immunity. As such, stimulator of IFN genes (STING), an adaptor molecule involved in cytosolic DNA sensing, is required for the induction of antitumor CD8 T responses in mouse models of cancer. Here, we find that enforced activation of STING by intratumoral injection of cyclic dinucleotide GMP-AMP (cGAMP), potently enhanced antitumor CD8 T responses leading to growth control of injected and contralateral tumors in mouse models of melanoma and colon cancer. The ability of cGAMP to trigger antitumor immunity was further enhanced by the blockade of both PD1 and CTLA4. The STING-dependent antitumor immunity, either induced spontaneously in growing tumors or induced by intratumoral cGAMP injection was dependent on type I IFNs produced in the tumor microenvironment. In response to cGAMP injection, both in the mouse melanoma model and an ex vivo model of cultured human melanoma explants, the principal source of type I IFN was not dendritic cells, but instead endothelial cells. Similarly, endothelial cells but not dendritic cells were found to be the principal source of spontaneously induced type I IFNs in growing tumors. These data identify an unexpected role of the tumor vasculature in the initiation of CD8 T-cell antitumor immunity and demonstrate that tumor endothelial cells can be targeted for immunotherapy of melanoma.
The 60° grid: routing channels in width d/√3

The 60" grid consists of vertical columns and diagonal tracks running at slopes of 2 30". This model offers a potentially large reduction in channel width, without resorting to wire overlap. For a channel routing problem with density d, the availability of the diagonal tracks leads to a lower bound of $: We present two nearoptimal channel routing algorithms. The first uses 5
Assessing Reading Fluency.

Assessing Reading Fluency is written by Dr. Timothy V. Rasinski (Ph.D., Ohio State University), a professor of education in the Department of Teaching, Leadership, and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University. He has published over 100 articles and 10 books on various aspects of reading education, including The Fluent Reader: Oral Reading Strategies for Building Word Recognition, Fluency, and Comprehension. Dr. Rasinski recently served on the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association and is an editor for the Journal of Literacy Research.
Association between Lumbar Bone Mineral Density and Carotid Intima-Media Thickness in Korean Adults: a Cross-sectional Study of Healthy Twin Study

Bone mineral density (BMD) has been suggested to be associated with atherosclerosis. In the present study, we evaluated the association between lumbar BMD and the segments of carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT), a surrogate marker of subclinical atherosclerosis, in Korean adults, with consideration of sex and menopause status. Among 1,679 Korean adults who enrolled in a Healthy Twin Study, 723 men, 690 premenopausal women, and 266 postmenopausal women measured the CIMT at the common carotid artery intima-media thickness (CCA-IMT), carotid bifurcation intima-media thickness (BIF-IMT), internal carotid artery intima-media thickness (ICA-IMT) using B-mode ultrasound and lumbar BMD using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. The composite CIMT was calculated as the mean value of three CIMTs. The association was evaluated using linear mixed models. In premenopausal women, lumbar BMD was positively associated with composite CIMT and with CCA-IMT (P = 0.008 and 0.002, respectively). However, no association was observed between BMD and CIMT in men or in postmenopausal women. Stratified analysis revealed the effect of body mass index (BMI) on the association between BMD and CIME. The positive association in premenopausal women persisted only in low BMI (< 25 kg/m2) group, whereas a positive association appeared at high BMI (≥ 25 kg/m2) group in men. A high lumbar BMD may indicate an elevated risk of subclinical atherosclerosis in premenopausal women and men with high BMI.
Research and Application of Association Rules Methods in Data Mining for Commercial Sales Analysis

This paper introduces the application of association rules methods in data mining and the FP-tree algorithm for mining association rules in commercial sales analysis. It begins with the discussion of the concepts of association rules, followed by the analysis of mining for association rules and the FP-tree algorithm, and ended with their applications in commercial sales analysis as well as the demonstration case study.
Evaluation and Management of the Infant Exposed to HIV-1 in the United States

The pediatrician plays a key role in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV-1 infection. For infants born to women with HIV-1 infection identified during pregnancy, the pediatrician ensures that antiretroviral prophylaxis is provided to the infant to decrease the risk of acquiring HIV-1 infection and promotes avoidance of postnatal HIV-1 transmission by advising HIV-1–infected women not to breastfeed. The pediatrician should perform HIV-1 antibody testing for infants born to women whose HIV-1 infection status was not determined during pregnancy or labor. For HIV-1–exposed infants, the pediatrician monitors the infant for early determination of HIV-1 infection status and for possible short- and long-term toxicity from antiretroviral exposures. Provision of chemoprophylaxis for Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia and support of families living with HIV-1 by providing counseling to parents or caregivers are also important components of care.
Patterns of Presentation and Outcomes of Patients with Acute Coronary Syndromes

Objectives: We undertook this study to assess the relationship between presentation pattern and mortality in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods: This registry included 10,455 patients with ACS, of whom 2,853 patients had ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction(STEMI), 3,060 patients had non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) and 4,542 patients had unstable angina. The primary outcome was 1-year mortality. Results: At 1 year there were 976 deaths, 390 (13.7%) among STEMI patients, 366 (12.0%) among NSTEMI patients and 220 (4.8%) among patients with unstable angina (OR = 1.17, 95% CI 1.01–1.35 for STEMI vs. NSTEMI; OR = 3.00, 95% CI 2.56–3.51 for STEMI vs. unstable angina, and OR = 2.58, 95% CI 2.20–3.04 for NSTEMI vs. unstable angina). In the Cox proportional hazards model ACS form was an independent correlate of 1-year mortality (HR = 0.90, 95% CI 0.73–1.13 for STEMI vs. NSTEMI; HR = 1.56, 95% CI 1.13–2.14 for STEMI vs. unstable angina; HR = 1.72, 95% CI 1.30–2.29 for NSTEMI vs. unstable angina). Conclusions: The presentation pattern affects 1-year mortality in patients with ACS, with unadjusted mortality being highest in patients with STEMI and lowest in patients with unstable angina.
Hotspots of Malaria Transmission in the Peruvian Amazon: Rapid Assessment through a Parasitological and Serological Survey

Background With low and markedly seasonal malaria transmission, increasingly sensitive tools for better stratifying the risk of infection and targeting control interventions are needed. A cross-sectional survey to characterize the current malaria transmission patterns, identify hotspots, and detect recent changes using parasitological and serological measures was conducted in three sites of the Peruvian Amazon. Material and Methods After full census of the study population, 651 participants were interviewed, clinically examined and had a blood sample taken for the detection of malaria parasites (microscopy and PCR) and antibodies against P. vivax (PvMSP119, PvAMA1) and P. falciparum (PfGLURP, PfAMA1) antigens by ELISA. Risk factors for malaria infection (positive PCR) and malaria exposure (seropositivity) were assessed by multivariate survey logistic regression models. Age-specific seroprevalence was analyzed using a reversible catalytic conversion model based on maximum likelihood for generating seroconversion rates (SCR, λ). SaTScan was used to detect spatial clusters of serology-positive individuals within each site. Results The overall parasite prevalence by PCR was low, i.e. 3.9% for P. vivax and 6.7% for P. falciparum, while the seroprevalence was substantially higher, 33.6% for P. vivax and 22.0% for P. falciparum, with major differences between study sites. Age and location (site) were significantly associated with P. vivax exposure; while location, age and outdoor occupation were associated with P. falciparum exposure. P. falciparum seroprevalence curves showed a stable transmission throughout time, while for P. vivax transmission was better described by a model with two SCRs. The spatial analysis identified well-defined clusters of P. falciparum seropositive individuals in two sites, while it detected only a very small cluster of P. vivax exposure. Conclusion The use of a single parasitological and serological malaria survey has proven to be an efficient and accurate method to characterize the species specific heterogeneity in malaria transmission at micro-geographical level as well as to identify recent changes in transmission.
Automatic detection of human faces in uncontrolled environments: Identification of direction and movement

This paper presents an application for automatic face detection on video streams from surveillance cameras in public or commercial places. In many situations it is useful to detect where to are people looking for, e.g. in exhibits, commercial mals, and public places in buildings. Our application is designed to work with surveillance cameras that are already available in those places, and do not imply an extra acquisition cost. The paper begins with a review of techniques used for face detection, a brief introduction to the OpenCV library, and of the requirements for the application. We then describe our approach, and present the main algorithms we used. We then perform an evaluation of the application, analyzing its performance throughout the processing, and analyze the accuracy of the recognition. We performed tests in real-time and off-line. The results are encouraging, and we identify limitations and improvements that can be introduced to decrease the error rate.
Flickr circles: Mining socially-aware aesthetic tendency

Aesthetic tendency discovery is a useful and interesting application in social media. This paper proposes to categorize large-scale Flickr users into multiple circles. Each circle contains users with similar aesthetic interests (e.g., landscapes or abstract paintings). We notice that: (1) an aesthetic model should be flexible as different visual features may be used to describe different image sets, and (2) the numbers of photos from different users varies significantly and some users have very few photos. Therefore, a regularized topic model is proposed to quantify user's aesthetic interest as a distribution in the latent space. Then, a graph is built to describe the similarity of aesthetic interests among users. Obviously, densely connected users are with similar aesthetic interests. Thus an efficient dense subgraph mining algorithm is adopted to group users into different circles. Experiments show that our approach accurately detects circles on an image set crawled from over 60,000 Flickr users.
Characterization of rat T helper cell clones specific for Bacteroides gingivalis antigen

During the past several years, much interest has been directed towards delineating and characterizing different subsets of T helper (Th) cells in order to understand their roles in immune processes. In this study, we report the generation of antigen-specific rat Th cell clones and their characterization in terms of phenotype, function, and lymphokine production. The clones were derived by culturing purified splenic T cells from rats immunized with the pathogen Bacteroides gingivalis with equivalent numbers of irradiated spleen cells from nonimmune rats and B. gingivalis whole-cell antigen. The clones required antigen stimulation but not exogenously added interleukin-2 for growth and were maintained in culture for approximately 6 months. The cloned T cells proliferated in response to the mitogen concanavalin A and to B. gingivalis whole-cell antigen but not to other microbial antigens. Phenotypic characterization of the cloned T cells for cell surface markers demonstrated that these cells were OX19+ W3/25+ OX8- OX22- and therefore probably represented a mature subpopulation of CD4+ Th cells. These cloned T cells were positive for interleukin-2 receptor expression. Culture supernatants from the Th cell clones which were collected at various times after antigen stimulation exhibited low interleukin-2 activity and high gamma interferon activity. This in vitro study provides evidence of a rat Th cell subset that could represent an important population in regulating immune responses to microbial antigens.
Mitochondrial Function / Dysfunction in Health and Disease Evidence for NHE 3-mediated Na transport in sheep and bovine forestomach

Rabbani I, Siegling-Vlitakis C, Noci B, Martens H. Evidence for NHE3-mediated Na transport in sheep and bovine forestomach. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 301: R313–R319, 2011. First published May 25, 2011; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00580. 2010. —Na absorption across the cornified, multilayered, and squamous rumen epithelium is mediated by electrogenic amiloride-insensitive transport and by electroneutral Na transport. High concentrations of amiloride ( 100 M) inhibit Na transport, indicating Na /H exchange (NHE) activity. The underlying NHE isoform for transepithelial Na absorption was characterized by mucosal application of the specific inhibitor HOE642 for NHE1 and S3226 for NHE3 in Ussing chamber studies with isolated epithelia from bovine and sheep forestomach. S3226 (1 M; NHE3 inhibitor) abolished electroneutral Na transport under control conditions and also the short-chain fatty acid-induced increase of Na transport via NHE. However, HOE642 (30 M; NHE1 inhibitor) did not change Na transport rates. NHE3 was immunohistochemically localized in membranes of the upper layers toward the lumen. Expression of NHE1 and NHE3 has been previously demonstrated by RT-PCR, and earlier experiments with isolated rumen epithelial cells have shown the activity of both NHE1 and NHE3. Obviously, both isoforms are involved in the regulation of intracellular pH, pHi. However, transepithelial Na transport is only mediated by apical uptake via NHE3 in connection with extrusion of Na by the basolaterally located Na-K-ATPase. The missing involvement of NHE1 in transepithelial Na transport suggests that the proposed “job sharing” in epithelia between these two isoforms probably also applies to forestomach epithelia: NHE3 for transepithelial transport and NHE1 for, among others, pHi and volume regulation.
Using null models to infer microbial co-occurrence networks

Although microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature, relatively little is known about the structural and functional roles of their constituent organisms’ underlying interactions. A common approach to study such questions begins with extracting a network of statistically significant pairwise co-occurrences from a matrix of observed operational taxonomic unit (OTU) abundances across sites. The structure of this network is assumed to encode information about ecological interactions and processes, resistance to perturbation, and the identity of keystone species. However, common methods for identifying these pairwise interactions can contaminate the network with spurious patterns that obscure true ecological signals. Here, we describe this problem in detail and develop a solution that incorporates null models to distinguish ecological signals from statistical noise. We apply these methods to the initial OTU abundance matrix and to the extracted network. We demonstrate this approach by applying it to a large soil microbiome data set and show that many previously reported patterns for these data are statistical artifacts. In contrast, we find the frequency of three-way interactions among microbial OTUs to be highly statistically significant. These results demonstrate the importance of using appropriate null models when studying observational microbiome data, and suggest that extracting and characterizing three-way interactions among OTUs is a promising direction for unraveling the structure and function of microbial ecosystems. Author Summary Microbes are ubiquitous in the environment. We know that microbial communities – the groups of microbes that live together, interact, and depend on one another – vary across environments. Multiple processes, ranging from competition between microbes to environmental stress, are believed to alter microbial community composition. Here, we describe a set of statistical techniques that can more accurately identify the underlying taxa relationships that structure the observed abundances of microbes across habitats. Using a large data set of soil samples collected across North and South America, we both illustrate the statistical artifacts that incorrect methods can introduce and describe proper techniques based on appropriate null models for studying how the abundances of taxa vary across soil samples. These tools improve our ability to distinguish ecologically meaningful interactions from simple statistical noise in such observational data. Our application of these tools suggests some previous claims about the network structure of microbial communities may be statistical artifacts. Furthermore, we find that three-way interactions among microbial taxa are significantly more common than we would expect at random, and thus may provide a novel means for identifying ecologically meaningful interactions.
Amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex function during anticipated peer evaluation in pediatric social anxiety.

CONTEXT Amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) dysfunction manifests in adolescents with anxiety disorders when they view negatively valenced stimuli in threatening contexts. Such fear-circuitry dysfunction may also manifest when anticipated social evaluation leads socially anxious adolescents to misperceive peers as threatening. OBJECTIVE To determine whether photographs of negatively evaluated smiling peers viewed during anticipated social evaluation engage the amygdala and vlPFC differentially in adolescents with and without social anxiety. DESIGN Case-control study. SETTING Government clinical research institute. PARTICIPANTS Fourteen adolescents with anxiety disorders associated with marked concerns of social evaluation and 14 adolescents without a psychiatric diagnosis matched on sex, age, intelligence quotient, and socioeconomic status. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Blood oxygenation level-dependent signal measured with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Before and during neuroimaging scans, participants anticipating social evaluation completed peer- and self-appraisals. Event-related analyses were tailored to participants' ratings of specific peers. RESULTS Participants classified 40 pictures of same-age peers as ones with whom they did or did not want to engage in a social interaction. Anxious adolescents showed greater amygdala activation than healthy adolescents when anticipating evaluation from peers previously rated as undesired for an interaction. Psychophysiological interaction connectivity analyses also revealed a significant positive association between amygdala and vlPFC activation in anxious vs healthy adolescents in response to these stimuli. CONCLUSIONS Anticipating social evaluation from negatively perceived peers modulates amygdala and vlPFC engagement differentially in anxious and healthy adolescents. Amygdala and vlPFC dysfunction manifests in adolescent anxiety disorders in specific contexts of anticipated peer evaluation.
Misurare il contributo della comunicazione alla corporate reputation per la creazione di valore

Obiettivo del paper : Il lavoro si propone di analizzare la correlazione tra il livello di reputazione delle organizzazioni e la sua “rilevanza”, in termini di comunicazione, quale “strumento” per migliorare le performance aziendali. Metodologia : E stata realizzata una ricerca esplorativa su un gruppo di imprese del settore alberghiero con sede in provincia di Salerno, per valutare se e come il loro quoziente reputazionale, calcolato rifacendosi ad un originale modello multistadio, possa essere influenzato dall’attivita di comunicazione. Risultati : Il progetto di ricerca fornisce un contributo rilevante alle problematiche di governance delle imprese, dal momento che la comunicazione qualifica interdipendenze sistemiche sia da un punto di vista interno che esterno e, allo stesso tempo, suggerisce possibili influenze sulla creazione di valore, sintetizzate nel reputation quotient, da parte dell’impresa. Limiti della ricerca : Lo studio si basa su una esemplificazione, utilizzando un panel di aziende nel settore alberghiero. Sarebbe utile poter allargare la base campionaria ed i settori economici analizzati. Implicazioni pratiche : La comunicazione assume un ruolo strategico per la diffusione dei risultati conseguiti in termini di creazione di valore, a patto che si basi su performance consolidate. Al contrario, il valore si disperde quando gli investimenti in comunicazione sono finalizzati a mascherare prestazioni mediocri, potendo, in casi estremi, acuire o addirittura determinare situazioni di crisi aziendale, violando “il patto di trasparenza” stipulato dall’impresa con i propri stakeholder. Originalita del lavoro : Utilizzando lo Schema delle Aree RQ si puo verificare se nel governo d’impresa sia stato attribuito un ruolo “adeguato” alla comunicazione quale vettore per la creazione di valore. Parole chiave: quoziente reputazionale; modello delle aree reputazionali; investimenti in comunicazione