Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of p14ARF Through Subnuclear Compartmentalization

The p53-mediated pathway cell cycle arrest and apoptosis is central to cancer and an important point of focus for therapeutics development. The p14ARF ("ARF") tumor suppressor induces the p53 pathway in response to oncogene activation or DNA damage. However, ARF is predominantly nucleolar in localization and engages in several interactions with nucleolar proteins, whereas p53 is nucleoplasmic. This raises the question as to how ARF initiates its involvement in the p53 pathway. We have found that UV irradiation of cells disrupts the interaction of ARF with two of its nucleolar binding partners, B23(NPM, nucleophosmin, NO38, numatrin) and topoisomerase I, and promotes an immediate and transient subnuclear redistribution of ARF to the nucleoplasm, where it can engage the p53 pathway (Lee et al, Cancer Research 65:9834-42; 2005). The results support a model in which the nucleolus serves as a p53 upstream sensor of cellular stress, and add to a growing body of evidence that nucleolar sequestration of ARF prevents activation of p53. The results also have therapeutic implications for therapies based on exploiting p53 and other cellular stress response pathways to suppress cancer.
Evaluating the Predictability of Stock Market Returns via STARX-Tree Models

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the predictability of a stock market using the one-step-ahead forecasts of the returns as a signal for automatic trading. The paper presents a proposal of a multiple regime model that combines aspects from STAR models, and decision trees. The resulting model, so-called STARX-Tree, is a regression tree with smooth transition and linear ARX models fitted in the terminal nodes. The methodology was tested on 23 stocks of the U.S. stock market. The forecasting model is evaluated through statistical and financial measures and compared to the random walk model, the naive approach, the neural networks and the linear ARX model. The results pointed out that the STARX-Tree model outperforms the comparative models under the financial criterion.
A Modified Demodulation Technique for Single-Phase Grid Voltage Fundamental Parameter Estimation

This paper proposes a modified demodulation technique to provide accurate estimation of the single-phase grid voltage fundamental amplitude, frequency, and phase angle under distorted grid conditions. A quadrature oscillator is combined with a demodulation technique for rejecting oscillations at second harmonic generated by the demodulation of the fundamental voltage component; thus, it can provide more accurate estimation, as compared to a conventional one, using same-order and cutoff-frequency-based infinite-impulse-response low-pass filters after the demodulation stage. It also does not require a separate frequency estimation algorithm for adaptive demodulation as the frequency is obtained from the estimated initial phase by using a differentiation operation and an integral controller. The technique is relatively simple and can also reject the negative effects caused by harmonics under a wide range of fundamental frequency variation as specified by the standard requirements. When compared with a quadrature phase-locked loop technique, the proposed one provides improved estimation of the fundamental voltage parameters. The performance of the proposed technique is verified using both simulation and experimental results.
Australian Twin Registry: 30 Years of Progress

The Australian Twin Registry (ATR) is a national volunteer resource of twin pairs and higher-order multiples willing to consider participating in health, medical, and scientific research. The vision of the ATR is ‘to realize the full potential of research involving twins to improve the health and well-being of all Australians’. The ATR has been funded continuously by the National Health and Medical Council for more than 30 years. Its core functions entail the recruitment and retention of twin members, the maintenance of an up-to-date database containing members’ contact details and baseline information, and the promotion and provision of open access to researchers from all institutes in Australia, and their collaborators, in a fair and equitable manner. The ATR is administered by The University of Melbourne, which acts as custodian. Since the late 1970s the ATR has enrolled more than 40,000 twin pairs of all zygosities and facilitated more than 500 studies that have produced at least 700 peer-reviewed publications from classical twin studies, co-twin control studies, within-pair comparisons, twin family studies, longitudinal twin studies, randomized controlled trials, and epigenetics studies, as well as studies of issues specific to twins. New initiatives include: a Health and Life Style Questionnaire; data collection, management, and archiving using a secure online software program (The Ark); and the International Network of Twin Registries. The ATR's expertise and 30 years of experience in providing services to national and international twin studies has made it an important resource for research across a broad range of disciplines.
The Precautionary Principle in Cites: A Critical Assessment

The precautionary principle has become a popular principle in international environmental law. In 1994 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) explicitly endorsed the principle, but CITES was implicitly precautionary long before that. Both the implicit and the explicit versions of the precautionary principle endorsed by CITES are open to the criticism that they rule out the consideration of factors that are relevant to wildlife policy. Included in these factors is the impact of conservation policies on human communities. This conclusion is relevant both to the general evaluation of CITES and to any wider consideration of the value of the precautionary principle.
SOCIAL DILEMMAS: The Anatomy of Cooperation

The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled. The key two-person social dilemmas (Prisoner's Dilemma, Assurance, Chicken) and multiple-person social dilemmas (public goods dilemmas and commons dilemmas) are examined. The second part is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solu.
A pragmatic–explanatory continuum indicator summary (PRECIS): a tool to help trial designers

CMAJ • MAY 12, 2009 • 180(10) © 2009 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors E47 Randomized trials have traditionally been broadly categorized as either an effectiveness trial or an efficacy trial, although we prefer the terms “pragmatic” and “explanatory. ” Schwartz and Lellouch described these 2 approaches toward clinical trials in 1967. These authors coined the term “pragmatic” to describe trials that help users choose between options for care, and “explanatory” to describe trials that test causal research hypotheses (i.e., that a given intervention causes a particular benefit). We take the view that, in general, pragmatic trials are primarily designed to determine the effects of an intervention under the usual conditions in which it will be applied, whereas explanatory trials are primarily designed to determine the effects of an intervention under ideal circumstances. Thus, these terms refer to a trial’s purpose and, in turn, structure. The degree to which this purpose is met depends on decisions about how the trial is designed and, ultimately, conducted. Very few trials are purely pragmatic or explanatory. For example, in an otherwise explanatory trial, there may be some aspect of the intervention that is beyond the investigator’s control. Similarly, the act of conducting an otherwise pragmatic trial may impose some control resulting in the setting being not quite usual. For example, the very act of collecting data required for a trial that would not otherwise be collected in usual practice could be a sufficient trigger to modify participant behaviour in unanticipated ways. Further, several aspects of a trial are relevant, relating to choices of trial participants, health care practitioners, interventions, adherence to protocol and analysis. Thus, we are left with a multidimensional continuum rather than a dichotomy, and a particular trial may display varying levels of pragmatism across these dimensions. In this article, we describe an effort to develop a tool to assess and display the position of any given trial within the pragmatic–explanatory continuum. The primary aim of this tool is to help trialists assess the degree to which design decisions align with the trial’s stated purpose (decision-making v. explanation). Our tool differs, therefore, from that of Gartlehner and associates in that it is intended to inform trial design rather than provide a method of classifying trials for the purpose of systematic reviews. It can, however, also be used by research funders, ethics committees, trial registers and journal editors to make the same assessment, provided trialists declare their intended purpose and adequately report their design decisions. Hence, reporting of pragmatic trials is addressed elsewhere.
IMU-camera data fusion: Horizontal plane observation with explicit outlier rejection

In this paper, we address the problem of egomotion estimation using an inertial measurement unit and visual observations of planar features on the ground. The main practical difficulty of such a system is correctly determining the ground planar features from the visual observations. Herein, we propose a novel vision-aided inertial navigation system through simultaneous motion estimation and ground plane feature detection. We present a state-space formulation for the pose estimation problem and solve it via an augmented unscented Kalman filter. First, the predictions obtained by the Kalman filter are used to detect the ground plane features. Second, the detected features are fed back to the motion estimation algorithm to be used in the measurement update phase of the filter. The developed detection algorithm consists of two steps, namely homography-based and normal-based outlier rejection. The presented integration algorithm allows 6-DoF motion estimation in a practical scenario where the camera is not restricted to observe only the ground plane. Real-world experiments in an indoor scenario indicate the accuracy and reliability of our proposed method in the presence of outliers and non-ground obstacles.
Kit Ligand 2 Promotes Murine Oocyte Growth In Vitro1

Abstract Oocyte-granulosa cell communication, mediated by paracrine factors, is essential for oocyte development. Kit ligand (KITL) is expressed in granulosa cells as soluble (KITL1) or membrane-associated (KITL2) proteins. However, the relative biopotency of each isoform during oocyte development is unknown. Our initial results showed that Kitl2 was down-regulated in cultured granulosa cells. To determine the effect of the two isoforms of KITL on oocyte growth, Kitl-deficient fibroblasts were transfected with constructs expressing either KITL1 or KITL2, and growing oocytes were isolated from 12-day-old mice and cultured on the transfected fibroblasts for 2 days. At the end of culture, oocyte diameters were measured, the incidence of spontaneous germinal vesicle breakdown (GVBD) was noted, and oocytes were analyzed for KIT receptor expression. Oocyte growth occurred only in the presence of the KITL2-producing fibroblasts, and suppression of KITL2 expression impaired oocyte growth. Up-regulation of KIT expression occurred in the presence of KITL2 but not KITL1. The presence of KITL2 inhibited spontaneous GVBD. Meiosis inhibitors did not attenuate the GVBD that occurred in the absence of KITL2, suggesting that this process reflects oocyte degeneration rather than meiotic progression. These results indicate that KITL2 is the principal KITL isoform required for oocyte growth and survival in vitro.
In vitro effects of therapeutic ultrasound on the nucleus of human fibroblasts.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The purpose of this investigation was to examine the cytological effects of therapeutic ultrasound on human fibroblasts. MATERIAL AND METHODS Using an in vitro approach, the number of cells recovered, the morphology of chromosomes, and the presence of mitotic spindles were studied after sonication of human fibroblasts in culture. The ultrasound output had a frequency of 1 MHz and was delivered in a pulse mode of 2 milliseconds "on" and 8 milliseconds "off. " Sonication was given for 0, 30, 60, and 90 seconds. RESULTS There was a time-dependent decrease in number of cells recovered, a fourfold increase in mitotic index in the cells that survived the treatment, and a nearly eightfold increase of chromosomal aberrations with loss of mitotic spindles. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION The dose-dependent lytic effect of nonthermal ultrasound could result in fractionation of cells, which might facilitate phagocytosis during chronic inflammation. In addition, we observed an increase in chromosomal aberrations and a loss of mitotic spindles as a result of an extremely short ultrasound treatment (30 seconds). Whether these alterations are mutagenic or not warrants further study. It is possible that in our in vitro experiments, the ultrasound received was greater than would occur in a clinical situation.
Social Assistance in Five Countries in North-Western Europe

In this paper, we calculate the disposable incomes in 2012 of three selected family types receiving social assistance in five countries in north-western Europe. We also calculate the net replacement rates for families receiving social assistance, calculated on the basis of the disposable incomes of 'average workers' in the five countries, as reported by the OECD. The results show that the Danish social assistance benefits are the highest, or among the highest, of the five countries; Swedish benefits are the lowest or among the lowest, but very much in line with those in Germany. The benefits in the United Kingdom for families with children are in the middle of the group, whereas the UK's benefits for single persons without children are among the lowest. In the Netherlands the picture is more mixed; for single persons without children the benefits are among the highest, for lone parents they are around the middle, and for couples with children the benefits are comparatively low.
Financial Position of Czech Employees at the Beginning of the 3rd Millennium according to Educational Attainment

The present paper deals with the development of wage distribution by educational attainment in the Czech Republic in the years 2003-2012, analysing fifty wage distributions as the object of research and the gross monthly wage in CZK as the research variable. It examines the development of wage distribution in time and the gross monthly wage in relation to the level of educational attainment. It also pursues the development of the minimum wage in the monitored period. The author pays special attention to the lowest guaranteed wage levels classified according to wage classes and work capability assessment, comparing the minimum wage to the wage of subsistence. The forecasts of future wage distribution are an integral component of the research, the financial standing of Czech households being evaluated in an international context within the European Union.
The effects of transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt on portal hypertensive gastropathy

In addition to variceal bleeding, haematemesis may occur due to haemorrhagic gastritis in patients with portal hypertension. This has been known as portal hypertensive gastropathy (PHG). We have evaluated the effects of the transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) on portal venous pressure (PVP) and endoscopic gastric mucosal changes observed in patients with portal hypertension. We performed TIPS in 12 patients with complications due to portal hypertension as follows: variceal bleeding in nine patients (bleeding from oesophageal varices in seven and gastric varices in two), refractory ascites in three and haemorrhage from severe PHG in one. Endoscopic examinations were performed before and after TIPS for all patients. Changes of PVP and gastric mucosal findings on endoscopy were analysed. Before TIPS, PHG was seen in 10 patients. Portal venous pressure decreased from an average of 25.1 ± 8.8 to 17.1 ± 6.2 mmHg after TIPS (P < 0.005). On endoscopy, PHG improved in nine of 10 patients. Oesophagogastric varices improved in eight of 11 patients. In one patient with massive haematemesis, haemorrhage from severe PHG completely stopped after TIPS. Because TIPS effectively reduced PVP, this procedure appeared to be effective for the treatment of uncontrollable PHG.
A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behaviour

FROM its very beginning the theory of consumer's choice has marched steadily towards greater generality, sloughing off at successive stages unnecessarily restrictive conditions. From the time of Gossen to our own day we have seen the removal of (a) the assumption of linearity of marginal utility; (b) the assumption of independence of utilities; (c) the assumption of the measurability of utility in a cardinal sense; and (d) even the assumption of an integrable field of preference elements. The discrediting of utility as a. psychological concept robbed it of its only possible virtue as an explanation -of human behaviour in other than a circular sense, revealing its emptiness as even a construction. As a result the most modern theory confines itself to an analysis of indifference elements, budgetary equilibrium being defined by equivalence of price ratios to respective indifference slopes. Consistently applied, however, the modern criticism turns back on itself and cuts deeply. For just as we do not claim to know by introspection the behaviour of utility, many will argue we cannot know the behaviour of ratios of marginal utilities or of indifference directions. Why should one believe in the increasing rate of marginal substitution, except in so far as it leads to the type of demand functions in the market which seem plausible ? Even on the advanced front we are confronted with this dilemma -either the argument with respect to indifference varieties is circular or to many people inadmissible (at least without further demonstration). Hence, despite the fact that the notion of utility has been repudiated or ignored by modern theory, it is clear that much of even the most modern analysis shows vestigial traces of the utility concept. Thus, to any person not
Transcriptome changes in Polygonum multiflorum Thunb. roots induced by methyl jasmonate

Transcriptome profiling has been widely used to analyze transcriptomic variation in plants subjected to abiotic or biotic stresses. Although gene expression changes induced by methyl jasmonate (MeJA) have been profiled in several plant species, no information is available on the MeJA-triggered transcriptome response of Polygonum multiflorum Thunb. , a species with highly valuable medicinal properties. In this study, we used transcriptome profiling to investigate transcriptome changes in roots of P. multiflorum seedlings subjected to a 0.25 mmol/L-MeJA root-irrigation treatment. A total of 18 677 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were induced by MeJA treatment, of which 4535 were up-regulated and 14 142 were down-regulated compared with controls. These DEGs were associated with 125 metabolic pathways. In addition to various common primary and secondary metabolic pathways, several secondary metabolic pathways related to components with significant pharmacological effects were enriched by MeJA, including arachidonic acid metabolism, linoleic acid metabolism, and stilbenoid biosynthesis. The MeJA-induced transcriptome changes uncovered in this study provide a solid foundation for future study of functional genes controlling effective components in secondary metabolic pathways of P. multiflorum. 中文概要目 的研究外源茉莉酸甲酯(MeJA)处理对中药何首乌(Polygonum multiflorum)根转录组的影响,分析在外源MeJA 刺激下何首乌根各代谢途径中差异表达基因的变化,为寻找影响何首乌根主要药效成分合成的关键酶基因奠定基础。 创新点首次在中药何首乌上利用外源MeJA 处理研究何首乌根转录组的变化,且获得了根中各代谢途径的大量差异表达基因。 方 法将何首乌植株分为对照组(Hoagland 营养液灌根)和实验组(含0.25 mmol/L MeJA 的Hoagland 营养液灌根)。 灌根处理26 h 后,分别提取对照组和实验组根中的总RNA,利用新一代测序技术分析对照组和实验组根的转录组变化并进行测序。 同时,利用美国国家生物技术信息中心(NCBI)的蛋白质数据库和基因数据库信息,对所测cDNA 序列进行基因功能注释和代谢途径归类,寻找MeJA 刺激下何首乌根各条代谢途径中的差异表达基因。 结 论外源MeJA 刺激处理可影响中药何首乌根转录组的表达变化(表S1)。 与对照相比,外源MeJA处理可导致何首乌根中4535 个基因上调, 14 142个基因下调变化,并分别在125 个代谢途径中富集(表1)。 代谢途径差异表达基因分析的结果表明,可在相应代谢途径中找到影响何首乌某些主要药效成分合成的关键酶基因(图2)。 差异表达基因的代谢途径归类分析结果提示今后可对何首乌根各代谢途径中的关键酶基因分别进行研究(表1)。 综上所述,利用外源MeJA 处理后进行转录组测序对寻找何首乌中主要有效成份合成的关键酶基因有重要价值。
Electoral Marginality and Party Loyalty in House Roll Call Voting

A number of scholars have tested the hypothesis that electoral marginality predisposes the legislator towards party disloyalty in roll call voting. The results of such tests have varied widely, and the relationship between the variables is still unclear. The problem, at least in part, seems to be due to inadequate controls for the demographic character of the districts, which is related to both of the primary variables. Using a measure of demographic character of district constructed through the use of regression analysis, the hypothesis is tested for the 88th through the 93rd Congresses. For neither Democrats nor Republicans is there a positive relationship between electoral marginality and party disloyalty when demographic character of district is controlled. Rather the data indicate that, especially for Republicans, party disloyalty tends to pay off in an electoral margin that is higher than expected, given the demographic character of the district. The most disloyal Republicans represent districts which, in demographic terms, are less Republican than those of their more loyal party colleagues; yet their electoral margins actually tend to surpass those of their more loyal colleagues.
Focusing SAR images by compressive sensing: Study of interferometric properties

In this work we study the problem of focusing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images by means of Compressive Sensing (CS). The presented technique is introduced as an alternative to the traditional focusing methods, suggesting new modes for data acquisition in a more efficient configurations or on-board processing in case of spaceborne sensors. In this paper the method is tested on both simulated and real images acquired by a Ground Based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GB-SAR), for which images of reduced size can be generated with no difficulty. Results of comparison of CS processing with an exact focusing algorithm are shown in terms of root mean square error of amplitude and phase as a function of the number of focused targets and undersampling of the acquisition lines. Coherence of a CS-processed couple of images is also evaluated. The purpose of the paper is to show the potential of CS applied to SAR systems, regardless (at the moment) of the efficiency in computational load. In particular, we show that the image can be reconstructed without loss of resolution after dropping a fair percentage of the received pulses.