Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Arabidopsis Cucumovirus Multiplication 1 and 2 Loci Encode Translation Initiation Factors 4E and 4G

ABSTRACT The cum1 and cum2 mutations of Arabidopsis thaliana inhibit cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) multiplication. In cum1 and cum2 protoplasts, CMV RNA and the coat protein accumulated to wild-type levels, but the accumulation of the 3a protein of CMV, which is necessary for cell-to-cell movement of the virus, was strongly reduced compared with that in wild-type protoplasts. In cum2 protoplasts, the accumulation of turnip crinkle virus (TCV)-related RNA and proteins was also reduced. Positional cloning demonstrated that CUM1 and CUM2 encode eukaryotic translation initiation factors 4E and 4G, respectively. Unlike most cellular mRNA, the CMV RNA lacks a poly(A) tail, whereas the TCV RNA lacks both a 5′-terminal cap and a poly(A) tail. In vivo translation analyses, using chimeric luciferase mRNA carrying the terminal structures and untranslated sequences of the CMV or TCV RNA, demonstrated that these viral untranslated sequences contain elements that regulate the expression of encoded proteins positively or negatively. The cum1 and cum2 mutations had different effects on the action of these elements, suggesting that the cum1 and cum2 mutations cause inefficient production of CMV 3a protein and that the cum2 mutation affects the production of TCV-encoded proteins.
PCI-DSS requirements in the Mauritian Hospitality Industry

Property Management Systems (PMS) are Information Systems, which provide for hotel room check-in and checkout, reservations, rooms and revenue management, and many more features relevant to the hospitality industry. An important factor in choosing between a hosted PMS and an on-premise solution is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) requirements. PCI DSS are widely accepted set of policies and procedures to protect credit, debit and cash card transactions of cardholders against misuse of their personal card data. This paper discusses the study done with regards to the compliance to these requirements in the Mauritian Hospitality Industry, and 25 hotels out of the 107 operational hotels have been surveyed to gather data. Mauritian hotels have been approached for this study as this information is accessible to the authors and there is a homogenous mix of different categories of hotels to give reliable data. A PCI-DSS weightage matrix is proposed to assess the importance of each PCI-DSS requirement for a hotelier; an assessment which can help to decide whether to stay on-premise or to go for a cloud solution. It should be noted that this paper follows from a previous study carried out where the current IT infrastructure of the 25 hotels was analysed and the cost factor for moving to the cloud SaaS model was determined. The focus of this paper is on the PCI DSS requirements. Other factors like total cost of ownership, legal implications and SLAs have not been considered in this study.
The Combined Effect of Drought Stress and Heat Shock on Gene Expression in Tobacco1

In nature, plants encounter a combination of environmental conditions that may include stresses such as drought or heat shock. Although drought and heat shock have been extensively studied, little is known about how their combination affect plants. We used cDNA arrays, coupled with physiological measurements, to study the effect of drought and heat shock on tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) plants. A combination of drought and heat shock resulted in the closure of stomata, suppression of photosynthesis, enhancement of respiration, and increased leaf temperature. Some transcripts induced during drought, e.g. those encoding dehydrin, catalase, and glycolate oxidase, and some transcripts induced during heat shock, e.g. thioredoxin peroxidase, and ascorbate peroxidase, were suppressed during a combination of drought and heat shock. In contrast, the expression of other transcripts, including alternative oxidase, glutathione peroxidase, phenylalanine ammonia lyase, pathogenesis-related proteins, a WRKY transcription factor, and an ethylene response transcriptional co-activator, was specifically induced during a combination of drought and heat shock. Photosynthetic genes were suppressed, whereas transcripts encoding some glycolysis and pentose phosphate pathway enzymes were induced, suggesting the utilization of sugars through these pathways during stress. Our results demonstrate that the response of plants to a combination of drought and heat shock, similar to the conditions in many natural environments, is different from the response of plants to each of these stresses applied individually, as typically tested in the laboratory. This response was also different from the response of plants to other stresses such as cold, salt, or pathogen attack. Therefore, improving stress tolerance of plants and crops may require a reevaluation, taking into account the effect of multiple stresses on plant metabolism and defense.
Reconfiguring the Innovation Policy Portfolio for the SIP Mall Industry Using Novel MCDM Models

As the IC (Integrated Circuit) industry migrates to the Systems-on-Chip (SOC) era, the nature of Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) which can narrow the “design productivity gap” between the increase in IC design complexity and increased IC design productivity has made SIP critical for the design and implementation of complex SOCs. However, potential business, legal, and technical problems in the traditional SIP transaction business processes have become the major obstacles for SIP industry development. As a result, a web-based SIP transaction e-commerce mechanism called “SIP Mall” that aims to resolve the above two categories of SIP transaction problems did emerge. Although the SIP Malls play such an important role for resolving the above mentioned SIP business, legal and technical problems and thus will help develop the IC industry further in the future, the SIP Mall industry is still unfortunately immature. No existing SIP Malls make profits or account for a significant share of the worldwide SIP transactions. This research will develop an analytic frame for defining an innovation policy portfolio, the aim of which is to develop the SIP Mall industry to the point where the value added of SIP Malls will be enhanced. The enhancement will benefit the nations’ competitiveness of SIP and IC industries which has already become one of the major concerns for SIP and IC industry leading countries. The IIRs (industry innovation requirements) are summarized using the Delphi method, and the major IIRs derived by DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) are also introduced. After the IIRs are derived, the relationship between the IIRs and innovation policy tools are derived by GRA (Grey Relation Analysis). Then, the innovation policy tools are clustered based on the Grey Grades derived by GRA. Finally, innovation policy portfolios are presented for government policy definition. An empirical study of Taiwan’s SIP Mall industry is given to illustrate the analytic procedures. The results demonstrate that an innovation policy portfolio, consisting of an inclusion of scientific and technical, education, public enterprise, information, legal and regulatory, financial, and taxation policy tools will be the most necessary aspect to develop Taiwan’s SIP Mall industry.
The relationship between pelvic, spinal and hip involvement in ankylosing spondylitis--one disease process or several?

UNLABELLED One hundred and one consecutive patients with ankylosing spondylitis (males 85%) were reviewed by radiographic evaluation after a mean disease duration of 21.2 years (mean age at onset 22.9 years). Osteitis pubis occurred in seven cases of varied duration and severity of disease. Hip involvement (grade 2-4) occurred in 19%. Their mean age of onset (19.6 years) was younger than for those with normal hips (25.1 years; p = 0.003). Lone sacroiliitis (grade 3 and 4) without ascending spinal disease occurred in 11 patients. The mean age at onset for those with lone sacroiliitis and marked spinal disease was similar (23.3 and 24.9 years respectively; NS). By contrast, disease duration was 13.3 and 28.4 years respectively (p = 0.0007). Five patients (three women) had severe pelvic and cervical spine disease with normal lumbar spine. IN CONCLUSION 1. Osteitis pubis occurs as an unusual, random event. 2. Hip involvement is an expression of young age at onset. 3. Lone sacroiliitis is uncommon and progression to ascending spinal disease is primarily a function of disease duration. 4. Skip lesions occur rarely and particularly in women. 5. Sacroiliitis and ascending spinal disease are part of the same spectrum.
Friendship quality in adolescents with and without an intellectual disability.

BACKGROUND High friendship quality is often defined by high levels of intimacy, companionship, closeness and low levels of conflict. Quality friendships develop over time and may be influenced by both behaviour problems and social skills. MATERIALS AND METHODS Participants were 103, 13-year-old adolescents with or without intellectual disabilities in the United States. Adolescents and their mothers participated in an open-ended interview of friendship quality and completed measures of social skills and behaviour problems. This study addressed differences in friendship quality between children with and without intellectual disabilities and explored early indicators of friendship development. RESULTS Adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID) had friendships characterized by significantly lower levels of warmth/closeness and positive reciprocity than their typically developing peers. Likewise, adolescents with ID spent less time with friends outside of school and were less likely to have a cohesive group of friends. Social skills and behaviour problems at age 9 predicted friendship quality at age 13 above and beyond disability status, with higher levels of social skills and lower levels of behaviour problems related to higher ratings on measures of friendship quality. CONCLUSIONS It appears that adolescents with intellectual disabilities have friendships that are characterized by less warmth/closeness and less positive reciprocity than the friendships of their typically developing peers. This discrepancy appears to be impacted by early social skills and behaviour problems in addition to the presence of the intellectual disability.
Does the consumers’ buying behavior differ for vegetarian and non-vegetarian food products?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and compare the factors which affect the consumers’ buying behavior of vegetarian and non-vegetarian food products in an emerging middle-size market. The paper also compares the preferences of the consumers for various food products and their respective market attributes. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 282 households of two middle-sized cities of India were personally surveyed with a structured questionnaire. Simple statistical analysis such as frequency distribution, factor analysis and analysis of variance, and logit regression were carried out to infer the required information. Findings – The results indicate that consumers consume more of vegetarian product than that of non-vegetarian products. Most of the consumers were interested in seeing and verifying the products of both of the categories before buying. Age and income of the consumers play important role in influencing their buying behavior for vegetarian food products, but not that of non-vegetarian food products. It was found that credence attributes of products, and market attributes play a dominant role in influencing the consumers’ behavior for both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food products. Packaged branded products were not popular in both the food categories. Research limitations/implications – The localized nature of this study limits the scope of wider generalization. Future research could use larger samples spread across all regions having different food culture. Practical implications – The findings of the study will be of help to food retailers who are interested to know whether the consumers’ buying process for these two categories of food products is more or less same or different in nature. This would help them to customize their product-specific marketing strategies as per the customers’ preferences and requirements. Originality/value – The paper gives a comparative insight on consumers’ behavior toward both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. It provides specific reasons for having different or similar marketing strategies for two categories of food.
Factors Behind Rise and Fall in the Sales of Unit Linked Insurance Plans in India

Indian insurance sector is very large and has the presence of great number of companies. It has watched new heights from the past nearly one decade due to the opening up of insurance sector for both private and foreign companies after which many new foreign companies entered by making joint ventures with Indian firms like ICICIPrudential Life, HDFC Standard Life, TATA-AIG etc. These companies came up with new product namely Unit Linked Insurance Plan(ULIP) in which the capital of the customers was invested in the Stock Market and it offered short range plans also. In the initial time period all the companies made good business because people liked the new product but after a gap of about 7-8 years when the actual returns were come, people start ignoring the ULIP’s as the returns were not accordingly as promised by the different Insurance companies.
Trade and competition in Korean manufacturing

The primary objective of this thesis is to examine the efficiency and welfare effects on Korean manufacturing of an increase in competition from foreign firms. The Korean case is of interest because it represents an experience with liberalisation of a protected manufacturing sector in a small open economy. In the study, the imperfectly competitive nature of Korea's manufacturing sector is explicitly incorporated into the model. The analysis focuses first on the effects of an increase in foreign competition on domestic monopoly power, X-efficiency and national welfare. The market concentration of Korean manufacturing industry remained high throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The evidence suggests that financial subsidies to industry accelerated the level of market concentration, and that protection, especially through import quotas, was associated with high levels of X-inefficiency. The analysis also indicates that, in a small open economy, a rise in foreign competition has positive welfare effects, even when the economy is characterised by oligopoly and scale economies.
Trauma: the Seductive Hypothesis

In much of contemporary culture, “trauma” signifies not so much terrible experience as a particular context for understanding and responding to a terrible experience. In therapy, in the media, and in international interventions, the traumatized are seen not simply as people who suffer and so are deserving of concern and aid; they are seen also as people who suffer for us, who are given special dispensation. They are treated with awe if they tell a certain kind of trauma story, and are ignored or vilified if they tell another. Trauma has become not simply a story of pain and its treatment, but a host of sub-stories involving the commodification of altruism, the justification of violence and revenge, the entry point into “true experience,” and the place where voyeurism and witnessing intersect. Trauma is today the stuff not only of suffering but of fantasy. Historically, trauma theory and treatment have shown a tension, exemplified in the writings of Freud and Janet, between those who view trauma as formative and those who view it as exceptional. The latter view, that trauma confers exceptional status deserving of special privilege, has gained ground in recent years and has helped to shape the way charitable dollars are distributed, how the traumatized are presented in the media, how governments justify and carry out international responses to trauma, and how therapists attend to their traumatized patients. This response to trauma reflects an underlying, unarticulated belief system derived from narcissism; indeed, trauma has increasingly become the venue, in society and in treatment, where narcissism is permitted to prevail.
A cache management policy in proxy server for an efficient multimedia streaming service

In this paper, we present a cache management policy to efficiently store the videos in a proxy server. The objective of cache management policy is to maximize the quality of service (QoS) to interested clients by improving the hit rate of popular videos. Our cache management policy is based on capturing the changing preference of the videos according to recentness, frequency, and playback length of the requested videos. For this purpose, we define a parameter, access time, which represents the total playback time of video within a predefined interval. We also utilize the time popularity (TP) that denotes the number of client access to the each video within a predefined interval. Using the access time and TP, we can estimate a maximum available space of a video which means the maximum size of storage space to be allocated to the video. Our simulation results show that the bit rate of the proposed method is greater than the previous works. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than other algorithm such as LRU, LFU, and TP methods in terms of packet bit rate in random access pattern and Zipf distribution access pattern.
Direct assessment of multiple testing correction in case‐control association studies with related individuals

Genome‐wide association studies typically test large numbers of genetic variants in association with trait values. It is well known that linkage disequilibrium (LD) between nearby markers tends to introduce correlation among association tests. Failure to properly adjust for multiple comparisons can lead to false‐positive results or missing true‐positive signals. The Bonferroni correction is generally conservative in the presence of LD. The permutation procedure, although has been widely employed to adjust for correlated tests, is not applicable when related individuals are included in case‐control samples. With related individuals, the dependence among relatives' genotypes can also contribute to the correlation between tests. We present a new method Pnorm to correct for multiple hypothesis testing in case‐control association studies in which some individuals are related. The adjustment with Pnorm simultaneously accounts for two sources of correlations of the test statistics: (1) LD among genetic markers (2) dependence among genotypes across related individuals. Using simulated data based on the International HapMap Project, we demonstrate that it has better control of type I error and is more powerful than some of the recently developed methods. We apply the method to a genome‐wide association study of alcoholism in the GAW 14 COGA data set and detect genome‐wide significant association. Genet. Epidemiol. 35:70–79, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cytokines Interleukin-1β and Tumor Necrosis Factor-α Regulate Different Transcriptional and Alternative Splicing Networks in Primary β-Cells

OBJECTIVE Cytokines contribute to pancreatic β-cell death in type 1 diabetes. This effect is mediated by complex gene networks that remain to be characterized. We presently utilized array analysis to define the global expression pattern of genes, including spliced variants, modified by the cytokines interleukin (IL)-1β + interferon (IFN)-γ and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α + IFN-γ in primary rat β-cells. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Fluorescence-activated cell sorter–purified rat β-cells were exposed to IL-1β + IFN-γ or TNF-α + IFN-γ for 6 or 24 h, and global gene expression was analyzed by microarray. Key results were confirmed by RT-PCR, and small-interfering RNAs were used to investigate the mechanistic role of novel and relevant transcription factors identified by pathway analysis. RESULTS Nearly 16,000 transcripts were detected as present in β-cells, with temporal differences in the number of genes modulated by IL-1β + IFNγ or TNF-α + IFN-γ. These cytokine combinations induced differential expression of inflammatory response genes, which is related to differential induction of IFN regulatory factor-7. Both treatments decreased the expression of genes involved in the maintenance of β-cell phenotype and growth/regeneration. Cytokines induced hypoxia-inducible factor-α, which in this context has a proapoptotic role. Cytokines also modified the expression of >20 genes involved in RNA splicing, and exon array analysis showed cytokine-induced changes in alternative splicing of >50% of the cytokine-modified genes. CONCLUSIONS The present study doubles the number of known genes expressed in primary β-cells, modified or not by cytokines, and indicates the biological role for several novel cytokine-modified pathways in β-cells. It also shows that cytokines modify alternative splicing in β-cells, opening a new avenue of research for the field.
A BiCMOS monolithic Ka-band down-converter for satellite communication systems

A high performance Ka-band down-converter front-end for satellite communications in 0.18-μm BiCMOS is demonstrated. By using the dual-transformer-feedback design, the low-noise amplifier (LNA) can achieve low noise figure (NF) and wide matching bandwidth simultaneously. Also, the GM-boosted mixer together with the IF amplifier with adaptive bias and 3D inductor provides high gain and high linearity to relax the overall system requirements. The measured NF is lower than 6.25 dB with an average conversion gain of 47.5 dB covering the entire RF band from 18.2 to 21.4 GHz. A high linearity (OP1dB > 4.2 dBm) with an excellent gain flatness (±1.5dB) are achieved under a power consumption of only 80 mW. Compared with previously reported works, the presented design has the highest gain and linearity, lower NF, and a smallest chip size (core area: 0.24 mm2).
12 Interaction Between Exposure to Neurotoxicants and Drug Abuse

Humans are continuously exposed to a variety of environmental neurotoxicants. Over the past 30 years, at least 100,000 chemicals, including pesticides, food additives, drugs, and cosmetics, have been registered for commercial use in the United States (Muir & Howard, 2006). Twenty years ago, about 750 chemicals had shown neurotoxic effects in laboratory animals (Anger, 1984). Actually, the number is thought to exceed a thousand, although no authoritative estimate of the real number of neurotoxicants is available (Grandjeand & Landrigan, 2006).
Complementary and alternative medical therapy use among Chinese and Vietnamese Americans: prevalence, associated factors, and effects of patient-clinician communication.

OBJECTIVE We examined the use of complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies among Chinese and Vietnamese Americans who had limited proficiency with the English language and explore the association between patient-clinician discussions about CAM therapy use and patient assessments of quality of care. METHODS We surveyed Chinese and Vietnamese Americans who visited 11 community health centers in 8 major cities throughout the United States. RESULTS Of the 4410 patients surveyed, 3258 (74%) returned completed questionnaires. Two thirds of respondents reported they had "ever used" some form of CAM therapy; however, only 7.6% of these patients had discussed their use of CAM therapies with clinicians. Among patients who had used CAM therapies during the week before their most recent visits, clinician-patient discussions about CAM therapy use were associated with better overall patient ratings of quality of care. CONCLUSION Use of CAM therapies was common among Chinese and Vietnamese Americans who had limited proficiency with the English language. Although discussions about CAM therapy use with clinicians were uncommon, these discussions were associated with better ratings of quality of care.