Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal Analysis of the Prevalence, Maintenance, and IgA Response to Species of the Order Bacteroidales in the Human Gut

ABSTRACT Bacteroidales species are the most abundant Gram-negative bacteria of the human intestinal microbiota. These bacteria evolved to synthesize numerous capsular polysaccharides (PS) that are subject to phase variation. In Bacteroides fragilis, PS synthesis is regulated so that only one of the eight PS biosynthesis loci is transcribed at a time in each bacterium. To determine if the bacteria evolved this unusual property to evade a host IgA response, we directly studied the human fecal ecosystem. We performed a longitudinal analysis of the abundant Bacteroidales species from 15 healthy adults at four intervals over a year. For this study, we used bacterial culture to perform analyses not accurate with DNA-based methods, including quantification of total viable Bacteroidales bacteria, strain maintenance, and IgA responses. Abundant Bacteroidales isolates were identified to the species level using multiplex PCR and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Arbitrarily primed PCR was used for strain typing. IgA responses to endogenous strains carried over the year were analyzed, and the orientations of the invertible PS locus promoters from the ecosystem were quantified. Subjects consistently harbored from 5 × 108 to 8 × 1010 Bacteroidales bacteria/g of feces. Within the cohort, 20 different Bacteroidales species were detected at high concentrations. Bacteroides uniformis was the most prevalent; however, abundant Bacteroidales species varied between subjects. Strains could be maintained over the year within the ecosystem at high density. IgA responses were often not induced and did not correlate with the elimination of a strain or major changes in the orientations of the capsular PS locus promoters.
Using social media to develop and commercialize new ICT products

Objective The commercialization or go-to-market process is one of the most important activities for any business. Companies are searching for methodologies and techniques to rapidly validate their concepts and at an early stage integrate market needs into their development process so that they can accelerate the go-to-market process of a new product. In order to create an effective tool to support companies, this research is conducted to study on how social media be used in developing and commercializing new products.
NBQX Blocks Acute and Late Epileptogenic Effects of Perinatal Hypoxia

Summary: Clinically, and in experimental models, perinatal hypoxic encephalopathy is commonly associated with seizures. We previously described a rat model in which hypoxia induces seizures and permanently increases in seizure susceptibility in immature rats [postnatal day (P) 10–121 but not in older rats. In the present study, we compared the effect of pretreatment with the excitatory amino acid antagonists MK‐801 and NBQX versus lorazepam in our rat model of perinatal hypoxia. Animals exposed to hypoxia at P10 without treatment have frequent seizures during hypoxia and subsequently exhibit increased seizure susceptibility to flurothyl. Treatment with 6‐nitro‐7‐sulfamoylbenzo(f)quinoxaline‐2,3‐dione(NBQX 20 mglkg) effectively suppressed hypoxia‐induced seizures in immature rats and also protected against permanent changes in flurothyl threshold in adult‐hood, whereas treatment with MK‐801 (1 mg/kg) or lorazepam (LZP 1 mg/kg) did not prevent these hypoxia‐related epileptogenic effects. These results suggest that activation of a‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methyl‐4‐isoxazol propionic acid (AMPA) receptors may partly mediate the age‐dependent epileptogenic effect of hypoxia in the perinatal period
THE ROLE OF FGFR 2 ISOFORMS AND FREM 1 IN CRANIOFACIAL DEVELOPMENT

OBJECTIVES: 1) To determine whether the Fgfr2 mutant results in the generation of additional isoforms and 2) to characterize the spatial and temporal expression of Frem1 in the developing mid-face of WT mice. METHODS: Polymerase chain reaction using primers specific to different parts of the Fgfr2 gene and gel electrophoresis were performed to compare observed with expected band sizes in WT and mutant tissues. In situ hybridization using Frem1 gene-specific riboprobes was performed on tissue sections of E9.5, E10.5, E11.5 and E13.5 mouse embryos. RESULTS: In the Fgfr2 study, the pattern and sizes of the amplified fragments appear to be identical in all three genotypes. Frem1 was found to be strongly expressed at the epithelial-mesenchymal interface and in the underlying mesenchyme of various structures located in the midline. CONCLUSION: RT-PCR analyses suggest the absence of mutant-specific isoforms in the Fgfr2 mutant. The distinct expression of Frem1 especially of structures at the midline suggests an important role for this gene in mediating outgrowth and filling of mesodermal cells in the midface.
Effect of Corporate Governance Mechanisms on Financial Performance of Insurance Companies in Nigeria

This study investigated the effect of corporate governance on financial performance of Insurance companies in Nigeria. The study adopted ex-post facto research design and panel data covering five year period from 2011-2015 for twenty insurance companies. The study examined a range of corporate governance mechanisms such as board size, board independence, executive directors’ remuneration, non-executive directors’ remuneration, directors’ ownership, institutional ownership, foreign ownership and the study controlled the effect of the firm size using log of total assets. The Fixed effects model was used to evaluate the effect of these corporate governance mechanisms on financial performance of Nigerian insurance companies. The fixed effect econometric estimates showed that, board size and non-executive directors’ remuneration have negative and significant effect on financial performance proxy by return on assets (ROA). While board independence, and institutional ownership indicated positive and significant impact on the financial performance as predicted by agency theory. However, contrary to theoretical predictions executive directors’ remuneration, directors’ ownership, and foreign ownership did not make significant impact on the financial performance of Nigerian insurance companies. However, the fixed effect econometric estimator employed in this study indicated that corporate governance mechanisms affects the financial performance of Insurance companies in Nigeria. Therefore, the study recommends among other things that the board be restructured to a manageable size, and suggested that a performance-based remuneration be design for the directors. In addition, more non-executive directors should be appointed to the corporate board to enhance the effectiveness of the board in aligning the interest of the stakeholders.
A Review of Risk Management Planning and Reporting in South Africa’s Public Institutions

This exploratory work attempts to review the risk management planning and reporting practices applied in South Africa’s public institutions by defining variables that were deemed indicators of risk management planning and reporting practices, namely: the timing of the institutions’ strategic and combined assurance planning, documentation and active management of risks appearing in strategic risk registers and operational risk registers and the availability of risk management software (including its nature and usefulness). The results point to the fact that there is confusion regarding the timing of both strategic and combined assurance planning sessions. Some institutions conduct these in the preceding year, whereas others appear to be conducting these during the year of implementation. Results further suggest that the practice of implementing combined assurance has not yet been embedded in the majority of public institutions, pointing to uncoordinated assurance activities that could lead to ‘assurance fatigue’. Results further point to the fact that there are still public institutions that are unable to prepare the strategic and operational risk registers. This raises the question of how these risks are managed if they have not been measured and documented.
Novel Coupled-Line Microstrip Bandpass Filter with 2nd & 3rd Spurious Passbands Suppression

In this paper, a novel parallel coupled-line filter structure based on a reformulation of the sinusoidal modulation of the wiggly-line filter is proposed. With this new filter, both 2nd and 3rd harmonics spurious passbands can be reduced significantly. In order to demonstrate the proposed filter performance, three prototype filters are designed @ 900MHz with 10% fractional BW. From the simulation and experimental results, more than 25dB suppression in the second harmonic spurious passband has been obtained for the wiggly-line filter and its modified version. But, only the new filter can obtain about 14dB suppression in the third harmonic spurious passband.
A Physiological Marker for Assessing Anxiety Level in Humans: Frontal Midline Theta Activity

Abstract: The distinct theta rhythm in the frontal midline area during performance of mental tasks has been designated as Fmθ. Sixteen male university students who failed to show any appearance of Fmθ in 3 consecutive days were given diazepam 5 mg, amobarbital 80 mg, methylphenidate 15 mg and placebo, in a double‐blind, crossover design. Scores were made on the state anxiety scale of STAI; EEGs were recorded before and during performance of an arithmetic addition. The test was repeated twice: before and one hr after drug administration. Fmθ appeared following the drug administration even in those who had never shown the appearance of Fmθ, and the appearance time of Fmθ increased in the following order: diazepam > amobarbital > placebo > methylphenidate. The scores of STAI decreased in the same order. The speed of performed tasks was increased by methylphenidate and placebo, but decreased by amobarbital and diazepam. These results suggest that relief from anxiety might be reflected in the appearance of Fmθ and that Fmθ might be a useful tool to measure the anxiety level in humans.
Flavonoid biosynthesis in bilberry ( Vaccinium myrtillus L.)

Flavonoids are a class of secondary metabolites in plants that are involved in many important functions. Various flavonoid compounds have also been reported to be beneficial for human health. Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) is the characteristic field layer species in boreal forests and the fruits of bilberry are rich in anthocyanin pigments, a subclass of flavonoids. In the present work, flavonoid biosynthesis was examined in different tissues of bilberry. The focus was on the developing fruits of wild type and natural color mutants of bilberry, and on effect of solar radiation on flavonoid biosynthesis in bilberry leaves. For the isolation of RNA for gene expression analysis, a method was optimized for different tissues of bilberry. The cDNA fragments of five genes from the flavonoid pathway, coding phenylalanine ammonia-lyase, chalcone synthase, flavanone 3-hydroxylase, dihydroflavanol 4reductase and anthocyanidin synthase, were isolated from bilberry using polymerase chain reaction technique, sequenced, and labelled with dioxigenin-dUTP label. These homologous, bilberry-specific probes were used for determining the expression of the flavonoid pathway genes in bilberry fruits, flowers and leaves with a modified non-radioactive method developed in the course of the study. The anthocyanins, catechins, proanthocyanidins, flavonols and hydroxycinnamic acids in fruits, leaves and different fractions of bilberry were identified and quantified with high-performance liquid chromatography combined with a diode array detector and mass spectrometer. The results demonstrate a correlation between anthocyanin accumulation and expression of the flavonoid pathway genes during the ripening of berries. A correlation between flavonol and anthocyanin biosynthesis was detected in bilberry and also in previous literature collected from flavonol and anthocyanin analyses from other fruits. Accordingly, models for the connection between flavonol and anthocyanin synthesis in fruit species were suggested. Activation of the expression of flavonoid pathway genes and accumulation of flavonoids and hydroxycinnamic acids was detected in leaves growing under direct solar radiation, compared to the shadow leaves of the same plants. Based on the results, it is suggested that cyanidin of anthocyanins and flavonol quercetin play a predominant role in the defence against high solar radiation in Vaccinium leaves. The results give new information about the biosynthesis of flavonoids in bilberry at the gene level, in addition to the information of the composition and content of flavonoids during fruit development and in different parts of the bilberry plant. Also, new information was obtained of the roles of flavonoids in protecting plants from excess solar radiation.
Preserving rotation invariant properties in differential evolution algorithm

Differential evolution (DE) is an efficient and powerful population-based stochastic direct search method for solving optimization problems over continuous space. It uses both crossover and mutation for producing offspring. Mutation is rotation-invariant while crossover is not rotation-invariant. As a result, the performance of DE degrades in problems with strong linkage among variables. In this paper, we propose a new DE algorithm that uses rotation-invariant crossover operators to achieve better optimization performance when solving rotated problems. The proposed algorithm has been examined on a test-suite of 12 benchmark functions. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Asymmetric factional groups in family firms: When is family faultline beneficial to the firm?

We develop the concept of asymmetric factional groups, or those in which involve both a factional group and independent entities. We take top management teams in family businesses as an example to illustrate how asymmetric factional groups might have an impact on firm performance. We extend group faultline model by arguing that asymmetric factional groups possess pre-established faultlines between family members and nonfamily members. We propose that large demographic faultlines in such groups would benefit firm performance, and these benefits are contingent on bifurcation bias showed by the controlling family, and regional development level of intermediate institutions. We test our model using data from Chinese listed family firms. Results provide strong support for our propositions.
Self-organizing neural grove: effective multiple classifier system with pruned self-generating neural trees

Multiple classifier systems (MCS) have become popular during the last decade. The self-generating neural tree (SGNT) is one of the suitable base-classifiers for MCS because of the simple setting and fast learning. However, the computation cost of the MCS increases in proportion to the number of SGNTs. In an earlier paper, we proposed a pruning method for the structure of the SGNT in the MCS to reduce the computation cost. In this paper, we propose a novel pruning method for effective processing and we call this model the self-organizing neural grove (SONG). The pruning method is constructed from an on-line pruning method and a off-line pruning method. We implement the SONG with two sampling methods. Experiments have been conducted to compare the SONG with an unpruned MCS based on SGNT, the MCS based on C4.5, and k-nearest neighbor method. The results show that the SONG can improve its classification accuracy as well as reducing the computation cost.
Healthy steps in an integrated delivery system: child and parent outcomes at 30 months.

OBJECTIVE To test the effects of the Healthy Steps for Young Children program (HS) (which supports parents managing children's developmental and behavioral issues)-with and without a prenatal component-on child health and development, parenting practices, and parental well-being. DESIGN A concurrent comparison with clinic-level assignment to intervention or usual care status. Nested in the intervention arm, a randomized trial compared HS with and without a prenatal component. SETTING Five primary care clinics in an integrated delivery system in the Pacific Northwest. PARTICIPANTS A consecutive sample of 439 pregnant women (80% of eligible) were enrolled. Follow-up data were obtained for 78% when the child was 30 months old. Intervention Families in intervention clinics received HS services, including developmental and behavioral advice and risk factor screening. In addition, those randomized to prenatal services received 3 home visits during pregnancy. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Assessed by telephone interview in the 3 domains of child health and development, parenting practices, and parental well-being. RESULTS Intervention was associated with positive outcomes in timely well-child care, immunization rates, breastfeeding, television viewing, injury prevention, and discipline strategies. Prenatal initiation of services was associated with larger expressive vocabularies at age 24 months. Mothers who received the intervention reported more depressive symptoms, but there was no increase in the proportion with clinically significant depression. CONCLUSIONS For members of an integrated delivery system, the HS intervention was associated with positive effects on children's health and parenting practices. There was little evidence of any additional benefit of HS services initiated during the prenatal period.
Deregulation and Trade Liberalization: The Indonesia Reform Program

Beginning in the early 1980s, Indonesia embarked on the most comprehensive trade liberalization program in its history. The long-term goal of the reform program is to replace Indonesia's industrial development strategy of import substitution industrialization with one of export oriented industrial growth. The issues to be discussed in this paper are: 1) the historical context from which the current liberalization program evolved, 2) the recent reform measures implemented by the Indonesian government, 3) the pattern of liberalization with respect to the sequencing and speed of reforms, and 4) the successes and failures of the new trade regime. DEB.EG'CJLA.TION AND TRADE LIBERALIZATION: TBE INDONESIAN :UP'ORK PB.OGB. All
Analyzing the results of automatic new topic identification

Purpose – Identification of topic changes within a user search session is a key issue in content analysis of search engine user queries. Recently, various studies have focused on new topic identification/session identification of search engine transaction logs, and several problems regarding the estimation of topic shifts and continuations were observed in these studies. This study aims to analyze the reasons for the problems that were encountered as a result of applying automatic new topic identification.Design/methodology/approach – Measures, such as cleaning the data of common words and analyzing the errors of automatic new topic identification, are applied to eliminate the problems in estimating topic shifts and continuations.Findings – The findings show that the resulting errors of automatic new topic identification have a pattern, and further research is required to improve the performance of automatic new topic identification.Originality/value – Improving the performance of automatic new topic iden.
Quantitative Analysis of HIV-1 Variants With the K103N Resistance Mutation After Single-Dose Nevirapine in Women With HIV-1 Subtypes A, C, and D

Introduction: We used a sensitive point mutation assay, LigAmp, to detect and quantify K103N-containing variants in African women who received single-dose nevirapine (NVP) to prevent mother-to-child HIV-1 transmission. Methods: Plasma for testing was collected 6 to 8 weeks postpartum from 301 women (144 subtype A, 63 subtype C, and 94 subtype D). Results: The portion of women with 0.5% or more K103N-containing variants was lowest for subtype A (60/144, 41.7%) and highest for subtype C (44/63, 69.8%; P < 0.0001). K103N was rarely detected in pre-NVP samples. In a multivariate model, K103N detection was associated with HIV-1 subtype (C > A), after adjusting for log10 delivery viral load, the number of days between NVP dosing and sample collection, age, and parity. Among women with K103N detected: (1) the median %K103N was lower for subtype A (2.2%) than C (11.7%, P = 0.0001) or D (5.5%, P = 0.04), and (2) in a multivariate linear model, higher log10 (%K103N) was associated with HIV subtype (C > A, P = 0.0001; D > A, P = 0.01; and C vs D, no difference), but not other factors. Conclusions: After administration of single-dose NVP, K103N was detected more frequently and at higher levels in women with subtypes C and D than A. Further studies are needed to evaluate the clinical significance of NVP-resistant variants in this setting.
Design of a Tree-Queue Model for a Large-Scale System

In a large queuing system, the effect of the ratio of the filled data on the queue and waiting time from the head of a queue to the service gate are important factors for process efficiency because they are too large to ignore. However, many research works assumed that the factors can be considered to be negligible according to the queuing theory. Thus, the existing queuing models are not applicable to the design of large-scale systems. Such a system could be used as a product classification center for a home delivery service. In this paper, we propose a tree-queue model for large-scale systems that is more adaptive to efficient processes compared to existing models. We analyze and design a mean waiting time equation related to the ratio of the filled data in the queue. Based on simulations, the proposed model demonstrated improvement in process-efficiency, and it is more suitable to realistic system modeling than other compared models for large-scale systems. key words: large-scale system, tree-queue model, queuing process, waiting time, design
Increased NADH-oxidase-mediated superoxide production in the early stages of atherosclerosis: evidence for involvement of the renin-angiotensin system.

BACKGROUND Angiotensin II activates NAD(P)H-dependent oxidases via AT1-receptor stimulation, the most important vascular source of superoxide (O2*-). The AT1 receptor is upregulated in vitro by low-density lipoprotein. The present study was designed to test whether hypercholesterolemia is associated with increased NAD(P)H-dependent vascular O2*- production and whether AT1-receptor blockade may inhibit this oxidase and in parallel improve endothelial dysfunction. METHODS AND RESULTS Vascular responses were determined by isometric tension studies, and relative rates of vascular O2*- production were determined by use of chemiluminescence with lucigenin, a cypridina luciferin analogue, and electron spin resonance studies. AT1-receptor mRNA was quantified by Northern analysis, and AT1-receptor density was measured by radioligand binding assays. Hypercholesterolemia was associated with impaired endothelium-dependent vasodilation and increased O2*- production in intact vessels. In vessel homogenates, we found a significant activation of NADH-driven O2*- production in both models of hyperlipidemia. Treatment of cholesterol-fed animals with the AT1-receptor antagonist Bay 10-6734 improved endothelial dysfunction, normalized vascular O2*- and NADH-oxidase activity, decreased macrophage infiltration, and reduced early plaque formation. In the setting of hypercholesterolemia, the aortic AT1 receptor mRNA was upregulated to 166+/-11%, accompanied by a comparable increase in AT1-receptor density. CONCLUSIONS Hypercholesterolemia is associated with AT1-receptor upregulation, endothelial dysfunction, and increased NADH-dependent vascular O2*- production. The improvement of endothelial dysfunction, inhibition of the oxidase, and reduction of early plaque formation by an AT1-receptor antagonist suggests a crucial role of angiotensin II-mediated O2*- production in the early stage of atherosclerosis.