Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of viral infections in the inception of asthma and allergies during childhood: could they be protective?

In 1983 Gregg' reviewed a long list of population surveys from all over the world on the prevalence of asthma and asthma-related syndromes. He observed that at least two patterns emerged from the data: (1) prevalence rates varied widely between populations by factors of up to 10 000; and (2) prevalence rates tended to be higher in populations with better medical care and higher socioeconomic conditions and hygiene standards. He also pointed out that the prevalence of asthma seemed to have increased during the ,nreceding decades in populations living in more developed countries with a "western" lifestyle. In subsequent years the stream of asthma surveys has consistently increased, but the patterns described by Gregg have not changed and, if anything, have become more accentuated. Studies now show that up to one quarter to one third of all young schoolchildren in the UK2 and Australia3 have recurrent wheeze, and almost halfhave at least one positive skin test to aeroallergens. Two articles in this issue of Thorax compare the prevalence of asthma in different population samples. Flynn4 reports a higher prevalence of frequent wheeze in children of Indian origin from rural Fiji than Melanesian Fijian children living in the same area. Leung and Ho5 found significantly lower prevalence rates of asthma and allergic sensitisation in Chinese children living in mainland China than in children of similar origin living in westernised Hong Kong, whereas Chinese children living in Malaysia had intermediate prevalence rates. As with many other similar studies, the differences observed in both reports remain largely unexplained.
A ] 2 3 A ug 2 00 2 On the Sums ∑

The sum in the title is a rational multiple of π n for all integers n = 2, 3, 4,. for which the sum converges absolutely. This is equivalent to a celebrated theorem of Euler. Of the many proofs that have appeared since Euler, a simple one was discovered only recently by Calabi [4]: the sum is written as a definite integral over the unit n-cube, then transformed into the volume of a polytope Π n ⊂ R n whose vertices' coordinates are rational multiples of π. We review Calabi's proof, and give two further interpretations. First we define a simple linear operator T on L 2 (0, π/2), and show that T is self-adjoint and compact, and that Vol(Π n) is the trace of T n. We find that the spectrum of T is {1/(4k + 1) : k ∈ Z}, with each eigenvalue 1/(4k + 1) occurring with multiplicity 1; thus Vol(Π n) is the sum of the n-th powers of these eigenvalues. We also interpret Vol(Π n) combinatorially in terms of the number of alternating permutations of n + 1 letters, and if n is even also in terms of the number of cyclically alternating permutations of n letters. We thus relate these numbers with S(n) without the intervention of Bernoulli and Euler numbers or their generating functions.
Selenium Inhibits Metastasis of Murine Melanoma Cells through the Induction of Cell Cycle Arrest and Cell Death

Background Melanoma is the most fatal form of skin cancer due to its rapid metastasis. Recently, several studies reported that selenium can induce apoptosis in melanoma cells. However, the precise mechanism remains to be elucidated. In this study, we investigated the effect of selenium on cell proliferation in murine melanoma and on tumor growth and metastasis in C57BL/6 mice. Methods Cell proliferation was measured by MTT assay in selenium-treated melanoma cells. Cell cycle distribution was analysized by staining DNA with propidum iodide (PI). mRNA and protein expression related to cell cycle arrest was measured by reverse transcription PCR and western blot. Tumor growth and metastasis was measured by in vivo model. Results Selenium was suppressed the proliferation of melanoma cells in a dose dependent manner. The growth inhibition of melanoma by selenium was associated with an arrest of cell cycle distribution at G0/G1 stage. The mRNA and protein level of CDK2/CDK4 was suppressed by treatment with selenium in a time-dependent manner. In vivo, tumor growth was not suppressed by selenium; however tumor metastasis was suppressed by selenium in mouse model. Conclusion These results suggest that selenium might be a potent agent to inhibit proliferative activity of melanoma cells.
Hybrid color space and Support vector machines for classification

In this study, Segmentation of color image is performed by supervised classification method based on hybrid color space. We define a kind of color space by selecting a set of color components which can belong to any of the different classical color spaces. We propose to classify pixels represented in the hybrid color space which is specifically designed to yield the best discrimination between the pixel classes and Support vector machines (SVM). The proposed approach has been successfully tested on real color images.
Opportunistic High Energy Physics Computing in User Space with Parrot

The computing needs of high energy physics experiments like the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider currently exceed the available dedicated computational resources, hence motivating a push to leverage opportunistic resources. However, access to opportunistic resources faces many obstacles, not the least of which is making available the complex software stack typically associated with such computations. This paper describes a framework constructed using existing software packages to distribute the needed software to opportunistic resources without the need for the job to have root-level privileges. Preliminary tests with this framework have demonstrated the feasibility of the approach and identified bottlenecks as well as reliability issues which must be resolved in order to make this approach viable for broad use.
Expression of Fragaria vesca PIP Aquaporins in Response to Drought Stress: PIP Down-Regulation Correlates with the Decline in Substrate Moisture Content

PIP aquaporin responses to drought stress can vary considerably depending on the isoform, tissue, species or level of stress; however, a general down-regulation of these genes is thought to help reduce water loss and prevent backflow of water to the drying soil. It has been suggested therefore, that it may be necessary for the plant to limit aquaporin production during drought stress, but it is unknown whether aquaporin down-regulation is gradual or triggered by a particular intensity of the stress. In this study, ten Fragaria PIP genes were identified from the woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca L.) genome sequence and characterised at the sequence level. The water relations of F. vesca were investigated and the effect of different intensities of drought stress on the expression of four PIP genes, as well as how drought stress influences their diurnal transcription was determined. PIP down-regulation in the root corresponded to the level of drought stress. Moreover, transcript abundance of two genes highly expressed in the root (FvPIP1;1 and FvPIP2;1) was strongly correlated to the decline in substrate moisture content. The amplitude of diurnal aquaporin expression in the leaves was down-regulated by drought without altering the pattern, but showing an intensity-dependent effect. The results show that transcription of PIP aquaporins can be fine-tuned with the environment in response to declining water availability.
Inventory Modeling in Supply Chain Management: A Review

In supply chain management, the inventory management of materials, semi-manufactured goods and products is often concerned and attracts a lot of scholars' attentions. With the economy globalization, three new trends appeared in the supply chain management: materials procurement globalization, manufacture globalization and products distribution globalization. Consequently, three new areas in inventory modeling were paid more attentions to: 1. Multiple supplier and multi-product inventory models from the point of the upstream of the supply chain; 2. Multi-echelon inventory models including manufacturers, dealers and retailers from the point of the interior structure of the supply chain; 3. Stochastic multi-product demand inventory models from the point of the downstream of the supply chain. In this paper, the three areas mentioned above were discussed in detail and some new inventory models and researches were reviewed, and at the end of the paper, the research directions of the inventory management in supply chain management were given.
Preterm infants' T cell responses to inactivated poliovirus vaccine.

BACKGROUND The antigen-specific T cell responses of preterm infants to immunization are not well understood. The aim of the present study was to compare the T cell responses of preterm infants after inactivated poliovirus vaccination with those of term infants. METHODS We prospectively enrolled 2-month-old preterm (gestational age, 33 weeks) and term (gestational age, 37 weeks) infants to receive 3 doses of diphtheria-tetanus toxoids-acellular pertussis-hepatitis B virus-inactivated poliovirus vaccine. Whole blood and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were stimulated with poliovirus vaccine, and memory T cell activation was analyzed by flow cytometry and lymphoproliferation, respectively. Levels of poliovirus neutralizing antibodies were measured in serum. RESULTS We enrolled 33 preterm and 50 term infants. Preterm infants had fewer circulating CD4(+)CD45RO(+) memory (P = .005) and CD4(+)CD69(+)IFN-gamma(+) cells activated by staphylococcus enterotoxin B at 2 (P = .015) and 7 (P = .05) months of age. After immunization, preterm and term infants had comparable frequencies of poliovirus-specific CD4(+)CD45RO(+)CD69(+)IFN-gamma(+) memory T cells (P = .79). PBMCs from preterm infants had diminished poliovirus-specific lymphoproliferation (P<.001). Although all infants developed seroprotective poliovirus antibody titers, serotype 1 titers were lower among preterm infants (P = .03). CONCLUSIONS Preterm infants develop poliovirus-specific T cell responses that are comparable to those of term infants. However, they demonstrate nonspecific and poliovirus-specific functional T cell limitations, suggesting that investigations into whether T cell differences remain as preterm infants mature are warranted.
A M ULTIPLE K ERNEL F UZZY C-M EANS C LUSTERING A LGORITHM FOR B RAIN MR I MAGE S EGMENTATION

In spite of its computational efficiency and wide spread popularity, the FCM algorithm does not take the spatial information of pixels into consideration. In this paper, a multiple kernel fuzzy c-means clustering (MKFCM) algorithm is presented for fuzzy segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images. By introducing a novel adaptive method to compute the weights of local spatial values in the objective function, the new multiple kernel fuzzy clustering algorithm is capable of utilizing local contextual information to impose local spatial continuity, thus improving the classification accuracy and reduces the number of iterations. To estimate the intensity in homogeneity, the global intensity is introduced into the coherent local intensity clustering algorithm. Our results show that the proposed MKFCM algorithm can effectively segment the test images and MR images. Comparisons with other FCM approaches based on number of iterations and time complexity demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.
Analyzing Task and Technology Characteristics for Enterprise Architecture Management Tool Support

Adequate tool support for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and its respective management function is crucial for the success of the discipline in practice. However, currently available tools used in organizations focus on structured information neglecting the collaborative effort required for developing and planning the EA. As a result, utilization of these tools by stakeholders is often not sufficient and availability of EA products in the organization is limited. We investigate the integration of existing EA tools and Enterprise Wikis to tackle these challenges. We will describe how EA initiatives can benefit from the use and integration of an Enterprise Wiki with an existing EA tool. Main goal of our research is to increase the utilization of EA tools and enhance the availability of EA products by incorporating unstructured information content in the tools. For this purpose we analyze task characteristics that we revealed from the processes and task descriptions of the EA department of a German insurance organization and align them with technology characteristics of EA tools and Enterprise Wikis. We empirically evaluated these technology characteristics using an online survey with results from 105 organizations in previous work. We apply the technology-to-performance chain model to derive the fit between task and technology characteristics for EA management (EAM) tool support in order to evaluate our hypotheses.
Indonesian Older Adults’ Mental Health: An Overview

There have been numerous investigations regarding the prevalence of common psychological problems among the older adults, but the majority of them are conducted in a Western setting. This study attempts to provide some data on the mental health of Indonesian older adults, specifically: stress, chronic pain acceptance, depression, and insomnia. The result shows that prevalence of psychological problems is high and comparable to result from the Western studies. Unfortunately, even though the rate of psychological problems cases is similar to the West, access to psychological services is still very far from Western standard. Keywords: Indonesian older adults; stress; chronic pain acceptance; depression; insomnia
Transfer of Cognitive Skills in Developmental Tasks

The main question we try to answer in this paper is whether stage-like progression in cognitive development can be explained by transfer of cognitive skill among tasks. We focus on the following question: To what extent does training on one task improve the performance on another task? The tasks are Piaget’s (1959) Balance Scale Task and Number Conservation Task, and a task that we will call the UneSentence Task, which is taken from Karmiloff-Smith's (1979) experiment on the acquisition of determiners in French. We re-implemented already existing models within the framework of the PRIMs cognitive architecture (Taatgen, 2013). Each task was subdivided in certain stages related to the complexity of the problem-solving strategies. We show that mastery of a certain stage of a problem becomes easier if a higher stage of another task is mastered first.
Colonization and plant growth promoting characterization of endophytic Pseudomonas chlororaphis strain Zong1 isolated from Sophora alopecuroides root nodules

The endophytic strain Zong1 isolated from root nodules of the legume Sophora alopecuroides was characterized by conducting physiological and biochemical tests employing gfp-marking, observing their plant growth promoting characteristics (PGPC) and detecting plant growth parameters of inoculation assays under greenhouse conditions. Results showed that strain Zong1 had an effective growth at 28 ºC after placed at 4–60 ºC for 15 min, had a wide range pH tolerance of 6.0–11.0 and salt tolerance up to 5% of NaCl. Zong1 was resistant to the following antibiotics (μg/mL): Phosphonomycin (100), Penicillin (100) and Ampicillin (100). It could grow in the medium supplemented with 1.2 mmol/L Cu, 0.1% (w/v) methylene blue and 0.1–0.2% (w/v) methyl red, respectively. Zong1 is closely related to Pseudomonas chlororaphis based on analysis the sequence of 16S rRNA gene. Its expression of the gfp gene indicated that strain Zong1 may colonize in root or root nodules and verified by microscopic observation. Furthermore, co-inoculation with Zong1 and SQ1 (Mesorhizobium sp.) showed significant effects compared to single inoculation for the following PGPC parameters: siderophore production, phosphate solubilization, organic acid production, IAA production and antifungal activity in vitro. These results suggest strains P. chlororaphi Zong1 and Mesorhizobium sp. SQ1 have better synergistic or addictive effect. It was noteworthy that each growth index of co-inoculated Zong1+SQ1 in growth assays under greenhouse conditions is higher than those of single inoculation, and showed a significant difference (p < 0.05) when compared to a negative control. Therefore, as an endophyte P. chlororaphis Zong1 may play important roles as a potential plant-growth promoting agent.
Negotiating Indianness

This chapter focuses on the cultural economy of Auckland as a way to explore manifestations of diversity within the present-day Indian diaspora in New Zealand. The majority of recent migrants to New Zealand live in Auckland and are young professionals and students from Punjab and other parts of north India, whose cultural preferences differ from the more conservative earlier generations of settlers. This chapter investigates the divergence of views on what constitutes authentic Indian culture in New Zealand, particularly the tension between ‘traditional’ and ‘pop’ cultures reflected in the debates over publicly funded performing art events such as the Diwali festival. The chapter points to problems arising from New Zealand government and local council efforts to support multicultural policies and practices without due recognition of the internal diversity of New Zealand’s Indian diaspora.
Was Ökonomen lesen und schätzen: Ergebnisse einer Umfrage

Abstract This paper summarizes the main results of a survey, which we conducted in May 2000 among German-speaking economists about their views on economics publications. Our results indicate that the world market for economics publications is not fully integrated across countries, but it appears to be at least partially segmented. Economics journals published in German-speaking countries appear to be relatively important for the work of German-speaking economists even though other journals have a better reputation among them. And although internationally reputed journals enjoy the highest reputation among Germanspeaking economists, domestic economic journals enjoy a higher reputation than would be justified according to international citation-based rankings. Especially older German-speaking economists tend to attach relatively high importance and reputation to domestic journals, while younger economists tend to favour international journals that focus on certain subfields of economics.
Unit-memory Hamming turbo codes

Several parallel concatenated coding schemes (turbo codes) based on multimemory (MM) convolutional codes (more specifically, a (2,1,4,7) code) were proposed to achieve near Shannon-limit error correction performance with reasonable decoding complexity. On the other hand, in many cases of interest, unit-memory (UM) codes have been demonstrated to have larger free distances than the MM codes with the same rate and the same number of memory elements. New turbo codes based on the (8, 4, 3, 8) UM Hamming code are developed and shown to possess better performance potential in some senses. The standard turbo decoding algorithms, however, do not appear to achieve this potential.
Household livelihoods in semi-arid regions: options and constraints

The overall aim of this study was to explore what the development community can do, or facilitate, to significantly improve livelihoods in semi-arid systems.The authors based their analysis on two case-study sites in the communal lands of southern Zimbabwe. The main tool was a detailed livelihood questionnaire, supplemented by participatory appraisal and observation, action research, biophysical analysis and systems modelling. Most households rely on cash and subsistence income from a number of sources - dryland crop production, gardening, livestock production, woodland activities, wage or home industries and remittances/gifts. Marked wealth differentiation occurs, with local people recognising the different wealth groupings largely on the basis of various capital assets. One factor driving differentiation is whether a household has access to remittance income. Elements of change can be identified in numerous aspects of the capital assets and the livelihood strategies. The authors suggest that there are some key drivers of change, namely: (a) rainfall, (b) macro-economic changes, (c) changing institutional arrangements and social processes, and (d) demographic processes and HIV/AIDS. The overall conclusion is that there are very few options for significantly improving livelihoods in semi-arid regions and that the poverty alleviation targets set by the international community are overly ambitious.The analyses suggest that rainfall variation and the state of the macro-economy are likely to have a greater impact on livelihood status than local rural development interventions.
European Neolithic societies showed early warning signals of population collapse

Significance This study explores whether archaeologically detectable declines in resilience precede the onset of large-scale human population collapses. Our case study is the European Neolithic: a period that began approximately 9,000 y ago when the introduction of agricultural technologies initiated phases of rapid population growth that were in many cases followed by demographic instability and dramatic collapse. Our study finds evidence that statistical signatures of decreasing resilience can be detected long before population decline begins. To our knowledge, this study is the first to find early warning signals of demographic regime shift among human populations. The results suggest that archaeological information can potentially be used to monitor social and ecological vulnerability in human societies at large spatial and temporal scales. Ecosystems on the verge of major reorganization—regime shift—may exhibit declining resilience, which can be detected using a collection of generic statistical tests known as early warning signals (EWSs). This study explores whether EWSs anticipated human population collapse during the European Neolithic. It analyzes recent reconstructions of European Neolithic (8–4 kya) population trends that reveal regime shifts from a period of rapid growth following the introduction of agriculture to a period of instability and collapse. We find statistical support for EWSs in advance of population collapse. Seven of nine regional datasets exhibit increasing autocorrelation and variance leading up to collapse, suggesting that these societies began to recover from perturbation more slowly as resilience declined. We derive EWS statistics from a prehistoric population proxy based on summed archaeological radiocarbon date probability densities. We use simulation to validate our methods and show that sampling biases, atmospheric effects, radiocarbon calibration error, and taphonomic processes are unlikely to explain the observed EWS patterns. The implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of Neolithic ecosystems are discussed, and we present a general framework for analyzing societal regime shifts using EWS at large spatial and temporal scales. We suggest that our findings are consistent with an adaptive cycling model that highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of early European populations. We close by discussing the implications of the detection of EWS in human systems for archaeology and sustainability science.