Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New Drugs for Treating Dyslipidemia: Beyond Statins

Statins have been shown to be very effective and safe in numerous randomized clinical trials, and became the implacable first-line treatment against atherogenic dyslipidemia. However, even with optimal statin treatment, 60% to 80% of residual cardiovascular risk still exists. The patients with familial hypercholesterolemia which results in extremely high level of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) level and the patients who are intolerant or unresponsive to statins are the other hurdles of statin treatment. Recently, new classes of lipid-lowering drugs have been developed and some of them are available for the clinical practice. The pro-protein convertase subtilisin/kexintype 9 (PCSK9) inhibitor increases the expression of low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor in hepatocytes by enhancing LDL receptor recycling. The microsomal triglyceride transport protein (MTP) inhibitor and antisense oligonucleotide against apolipoprotein B (ApoB) reduce the ApoB containing lipoprotein by blocking the hepatic very low density lipoprotein synthesis pathway. The apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1) mimetics pursuing the beneficial effect of high density lipoprotein cholesterol and can reverse the course of atherosclerosis. ApoA1 mimetics had many controversial clinical data and need more validation in humans. The PCSK9 inhibitor recently showed promising results of significant LDL-C lowering in familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) patients from the long-term phase III trials. The MTP inhibitor and antisesnse oligonucleotide against ApoB were approved for the treatment of homozygous FH but still needs more consolidated evidences about hepatic safety such as hepatosteatosis. We would discuss the benefits and concerns of these new lipid-lowering drugs anticipating additional benefits beyond statin treatment.
A model of large quintessence isocurvature fluctuations and a low cosmic microwave background quadrupole

On the basis of quintessence models with anticorrelation between the quintessence fluctuations and adiabatic perturbations in the other matter components, we show that if the quintessence potential is sufficiently steep in the initial era, i.e., at the beginning of the radiation dominated epoch, the quintessence fluctuations can be large enough to sufficiently suppress the cosmic microwave background power spectrum at low multipoles without excess gravitational waves. The leaping kinetic term quintessence and the crossover quintessence models can realize such steep potentials at the initial stage, and therefore give rise to a low cosmic microwave background quadrupole as required by observations.
Mathematical model and analysis of peer-to-peer IPTV

Peer-to-peer overlay is an attractive solution to distribute video streams over large-scale IP networks. A number of algorithms and frameworks have been proposed. But generic and theoretical analysis of P2P streaming is scarce in the literature. In this paper, we present a novel probability model, making the formal analysis and performance evaluation of P2P IPTV accessible. With the help of the proposed model, we then reveal that the efficiency of P2P streaming system is closely correlated to piece diversity.
Shaping Behaviour among Students in Zambia's Public Universities: Can Guidance and Counselling be Useful?

How guidance and counselling services can shape students’ behaviour in Zambia’s public universities is not known. Thus the substantive aim of this study was to establish how guidance and counselling services can be used to shape students’ behaviour. This paper is an excerpt from an on-going PhD thesis. A descriptive survey research design was used to collect, analyse and interpret both quantitative and qualitative data. A total of105 respondents who included Deans of Student’s Affairs (DOSA), counsellors and students were selected for the study. In-depth interview guides, focus group discussions and self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from the sample. The study established that guidance and counselling services can shape behaviour of students in Zambia’s public universities. On the basis of the study findings, it is recommended that guidance and counselling be accessed by all students in public universities as it has the potential to shape and enhance positive behaviour among students.
Upper Temperature Limits of Tropical Marine Ectotherms: Global Warming Implications

Animal physiology, ecology and evolution are affected by temperature and it is expected that community structure will be strongly influenced by global warming. This is particularly relevant in the tropics, where organisms are already living close to their upper temperature limits and hence are highly vulnerable to rising temperature. Here we present data on upper temperature limits of 34 tropical marine ectotherm species from seven phyla living in intertidal and subtidal habitats. Short term thermal tolerances and vertical distributions were correlated, i.e., upper shore animals have higher thermal tolerance than lower shore and subtidal animals; however, animals, despite their respective tidal height, were susceptible to the same temperature in the long term. When temperatures were raised by 1°C hour−1, the upper lethal temperature range of intertidal ectotherms was 41–52°C, but this range was narrower and reduced to 37–41°C in subtidal animals. The rate of temperature change, however, affected intertidal and subtidal animals differently. In chronic heating experiments when temperature was raised weekly or monthly instead of every hour, upper temperature limits of subtidal species decreased from 40°C to 35.4°C, while the decrease was more than 10°C in high shore organisms. Hence in the long term, activity and survival of tropical marine organisms could be compromised just 2–3°C above present seawater temperatures. Differences between animals from environments that experience different levels of temperature variability suggest that the physiological mechanisms underlying thermal sensitivity may vary at different rates of warming.
Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Germany

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original data set drawn from the German parliament's own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871–1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct. ” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud's incidence is significantly related to a society's level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socioeconomic inequality, by making elections endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to the long-term process of democratization even after the “choice” of formally democratic rules.
The Expected Linkage Disequilibrium in Finite Popula- tions Revisited

The expected level of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in a finite ideal population at equilibrium is of relevance for many applications in population and quantitative genetics. Several recursion formulae have been proposed during the last decades, whose derivations mostly contain heuristic parts and therefore remain mathematically questionable. We propose a more justifiable approach, including an alternative recursion formula for the expected LD. Since the exact formula depends on the distribution of allele frequencies in a very complicated manner, we suggest an approximate solution and analyze its validity extensively in a simulation study. Compared to the widely used formula of Sved, the proposed formula performs better for all parameter constellations considered. We then analyze the expected LD at equilibrium using the theory on discrete-time Markov chains based on the linear recursion formula, with equilibrium being defined as the steady-state of the chain, which finally leads to a formula for the effective population size N_e. An additional analysis considers the effect of non-exactness of a recursion formula on the steady-state, demonstrating that the resulting error in expected LD can be substantial. In an application to the HapMap data of two human populations we illustrate the dependency of the N_e-estimate on the distribution of minor allele frequencies (MAFs), showing that the estimated N_e can vary by up to 30% when a uniform instead of a skewed distribution of MAFs is taken as a basis to select SNPs for the analyses. Our analyses provide new insights into the mathematical complexity of the problem studied.
Evaluating Behavioral Portfolio Theory on investors' purchase decisions at Tehran Stock Exchange

More than 50 years ago Friedman and Savage [1] stated that investors who purchase lottery tickets (risk taking behavior), buy insurance coverage (risk averse behavior) at the same time. They proposed an “S” shape utility function that features concave as loss and convex as winning. Eisenhauer [2] and many other researchers have confirmed risk behavior, as suggested by Friedman and Savage. Shefrin and Statman [3] combined: 1) Prospect Theory of Kahnman & Teversky [4], 2) Lops' Security, Potential, and Aspiration (SP/A) Theory [5], and 3) Thaler's Mental Account Theory [6] and presented a new descriptive model that shows investors design their portfolios as layered pyramid consisting of many different layers according to their investment goals and dominant emotions. The objective of this survey research is to trace the presence of layered pyramid of portfolios according to Behavioral Portfolio Theory among the potential investors at Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). 356 respondents who were chosen through random sampling among the potential investors at TSE have completed a questionnaire. Research data was analyzed with the help of explorative factor analysis. Research findings indicate six main factors that influence Iranian investors' purchase decisions as: “familiarity,” “hope,” “fear,” “optimism,” “pessimism,” and “aspiration”.
Pattern Regulator: Protecting Temporal Usage Privacy for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

In a wireless body area sensor network (WBAN), biosensors are implanted or worn on an individual to acquire medical data for a clinical diagnosis or physical monitoring. Traditionally, authentication and cryptography techniques are used to achieve the data confidentiality and privacy of a WBAN system. However, for WBAN systems, besides data itself, the pattern of data transmission may leak critical information about the user. For example, various medical sensors deliver data in different patterns and these patterns leak many critical facts, e.g., what sensors are used (which implies diseases the individual may have), and how frequent the sensor is sampling (which implies how urgent some abnormal observation is about a patient). In this work, to address this challenge, we design a regulator, which packs real data session into a type-independent transmission model at transmission layer. All valid data packets are equably sent at the frequency defined by the regulator and at the same length to clutter the inherent pace of valid data transmission and other parameters.We also propose a strategy PAS to minimize the overhead while preventing attackers from locating the patients. Our extensive experiments validate our regulator and PAS design.
On Achieving Local View Capacity Via Maximal Independent Graph Scheduling

“If we know more, we can achieve more. ” This adage also applies to communication networks, where more information about the network state translates into higher sum-rates. In this paper, we formalize this increase of sum-rate with increased knowledge of the network state. The knowledge of network state is measured in terms of the number of hops, h, of information available to each transmitter and is labeled as h-local view. To understand how much capacity is lost due to limited information, we propose to use the metric of normalized sum-capacity, which is the h -local view sum-capacity divided by global-view sum capacity. For the cases of one and two-local view, we characterize the normalized sum-capacity for many classes of deterministic and Gaussian interference networks. In many cases, a scheduling scheme called maximal independent graph scheduling is shown to achieve normalized sum-capacity. We also show that its generalization for 1-local view, labeled coded set scheduling, achieves normalized sum-capacity in some cases where its uncoded counterpart fails to do so.
Compromising Ad-Hoc Networks by Attacking Weakly Connected Dominating Set

As a special kind of attack, the node compromise attack destroy security, reliability and confidentiality of ad-hoc networks. However, previous research paid little attention on developing general attacking models, which are fundamentals for designing network security mechanisms. In this paper, we approach node compromise attack formalizing problem from an adversarial view and present a general attacking model based on invading virtual backbones of network, which is constructed based on Weakly Connected Dominating Set (WCDS). To investigate the features of our scheme, simulations are conducted to illustrate the influences of infection ratio to network performance. Analysis and simulations results showed that bigger infection ratio can reduce set of compromised nodes, enhance attacking efficiency, save resource expenditure and shorten attacking time.
"Age of computers"; an innovative combination of history and computer game elements for teaching computer fundamentals

Age of computers (AoC) is an online multiplayer game used in teaching of computer fundamentals in a M.Sc. study in computer science. It supplements traditional auditorium lectures by a rich set of problems in a computer game like environment. The story of the game is linked to the historical periods (epochs) of computers, and the content is organized in rooms or places on a map. A chat window for each historical period is used for communication with other students and teaching assistants. The first version of AoC was used in a class with 250 students. Almost all students agreed that "AoC is more motivating than traditional exercises", and a majority claimed that they learn more through AoC than by traditional exercises. We are currently working on an improved version of AoC for the 2004 fall semester based on the feedback from an extensive questionnaire.
Microcystic Variant of an Intraosseous Meningioma in the Frontal Area: A Case Report

Meningiomas located inside the bone of the calvaria belong to the group of rare types of tumours. The microcystic variant is the least common in this area. Due to their similarity to other tumours in this area, the imaging test of those tumours may constitute the source of an improper preoperative diagnosis. According to the records of the Department of Neurosurgery in Bielsko-Biała, 133 patients diagnosed with an intracranial meningioma confirmed by a histopathological test were operated in the last 10 years (2004–2014). In the histopathological test, three patients were diagnosed with the microcystic variant, which constitutes 2.25% of the cases. Only one variant of microcystic meningioma was located inside the bone, which constitutes 0.75% of all the meningiomas operated.
Substitution-diffusion based Image Cipher

In this paper, a new image encryption scheme using a secret key of 128-bit size is proposed. In the algorithm, image is partitioned into several key based dynamic blocks and further, each block passes through the eight rounds of diffusion as well as substitution process. In diffusion process, sequences of block pixels are rearranged within the block by a zigzag approach whereas block pixels are replaced with another by using difference calculation of row and column in substitution process. Due to high order of substitution and diffusion, common attacks like linear and differential cryptanalysis are infeasible. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is efficient and has high security features.
UNERTAN SYNDROME: A CASE SERIES DEMONSTRATING HUMAN DEVOLUTION

A large family with six individuals exhibiting the Unertan syndrome (UTS) was identified residing in southern Turkey. All of the individuals had mental impairments and walked on all four extremities. The practice of intra-familial marriages suggested that the UTS may be an autosomal recessive disorder, similar to previously described cases. The inferior portions of the cerebellum and vermis were absent as evidenced by MRI and CT scans. The height and head circumference of those affected were within normal ranges. Barany's test suggested normal vestibular system function. The subjects could not name objects or their close relatives. The males (n = 4) could understand simple questions and commands, but answered questions with only one or two sounds. The females (n = 2) were superior to the males with respect to language skills and walking, suggesting an association between walking and speaking abilities. One male exhibited three walking patterns at the same time: quadripedal, tiptoe, and scissor walking. Another male used two walking styles: quadripedal and toe-walking. It is emphasized that there are important differences between the UTS and the disequilibrium syndrome. It is suggested that the inability to walk upright in those affected with the UTS may be best explained by a disturbance in lateral-balance mechanisms, without being related to the cerebello-vestibular system. An interruption of locomotor development during the transition from quadripedality to bipedality may result in habitual walking on all four extremities and is normal in some children. Because quadripedal gait is an ancestral trait, individuals with the UTS, exhibiting a manifestation of reverse evolution in humans, may be considered an experiment of nature, useful in understanding the mechanisms underlying the transition from quadripedality to bipedality during human evolution. The proposed mutant gene or gene pool playing a role in human quadrupedality may also be responsible for human bipedality at the same time. Herein there is no intent to insult or injure; rather, this report is an endeavor to better understand human beings. Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of International Journal of Neuroscience for the following free supplemental resource(s): video clips.
CATEGORY CHANGING PROCESS OF JAVANESE IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS USED IN SERAT DEWARUCI

Indonesia is a big country that has a great number of population, cultures, dialects, and languages as well. Here the writer takes Serat Dewaruci as his preference because there exist the event and the multicultural education learning in it. As it is told in Serat Dewaruci, the King decendant, firstly, Wrekudara can not speak polite Javanese (kromo and kromo inggil), but after finding the Dewaruci, he can speak polite Javanese and even talk by using expressions. Many of the expressions talked are the idiomatic expressions. That is why, the writer introduce it further to the reader with the title: “An Analysis on Category Changing Process of Javanese Idiomatic Expressions Used in Serat Dewaruci”. The problems of the present study covers: What are the idiomatic expressions found at the third part in Serat Dewaruci? In writing and composing this paper, the writer has a purpose, that is analysing the category changing process happened to Javanese idiomatic expressions those are used in Serat Dewaruci. The study was qualitative in which the data was in the form of corpus of text. The data collected were consulted them to the experts, whether the collected data were correct or not. After the data had been collected, the selection of the data were done to choose the accurate data given by the informants. Furthermore, the step in data analysis is analyse the word changing of the idiomatic expressions by applying the process of the category changing. From this analysis, it is found that there are 2 kinds of idiomatic expression categories. They are: the idiomatic expressions those are as phrases, and the idiomatic expressions those are as sentences or clauses. Finally, the writer suggests that the Javanese youth have to take care this Javanese literary work, especially the Javanese song, because it is difficult or even impossible for the other country literary work to influence the Javanese one. The writer also suggests that this paper can be used as the comparative analysis for further research. Keywords: Expressions, idiom classification, category changing
NEEC Research : Toward GPS-denied Landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on Ships at Sea

This paper reports on a Naval Engineering Education Center (NEEC) design-build-test project focused on the development of a fully autonomous system for landing Navy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on transiting ships at sea. Our NEEC team of engineering students researched image processing techniques, estimation frameworks, and control algorithms to collaboratively learn and train in Navy-relevant autonomy. We accomplished the autonomous landing using fiducial markers detected by a camera onboard the UAV, decomposed the resulting homography into 6-degree of freedom relative-pose information between the UAV and landing platform, performed state estimation with a delayed-state extended Kalman filter, and then executed the motion control. Results for the state estimation framework and experimental tests using a motion capture system for independent ground-truth are presented. The proposed system performed successfully on a robotic testbed consisting of a micro UAV and an unmanned ground vehicle.
Severi Degrees in Cogenus 3

In this short note, a new computation of the degree of the locus of 3-nodal plane curves in the linear system of degree d plane curves is given. The answer is expressed as a tautological class on a blow-up of the Hilbert scheme of 3 points in the plane. The class is evaluated by the Bott residue formula.
Acrylamide gel electrophoresis studies of the incorporation of cytidine- 3 H into mouse skin RNA at early times after treatment with phorbol esters.

The tumor-promoting activities of multiple applications of phorbol and of four phorbol diesters as well as the effect of a single application of each on the incorporation of cytidine-3H into skin RNA were determined in female Charles River CD1 mice. Effective tumor formation correlated with a stimulation of cytidine-3H incorporation. The nature of the early RNA response was analyzed by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The extraction procedure allowed quantitative isolation of undegraded RNA from whole mouse skin. By 3 hr after treatment with effective tumor promoters, there was a large stimulation of incorporation of cytidine-3H into “32 S” RNA, rRNA, and 4 to 5 S RNA. Stimulation of cytidine-3H incorporation into 32 S RNA was observed as early as 30 min after treatment with the most effective promoter, 12- O -tetradecanoyl-phorbol-13-acetate. Comparison of the responses in cytidine-3H incorporation 3 hr after treatment with tumor promoting phorbol esters and 2 irritants suggested that the phorbol esters were able to induce increased incorporation into 32 S RNA earlier than the irritants, while both caused increased incorporation into the 4 to 5 S RNA.