Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Monitoring consumer confidence in food safety: an exploratory study

In response to the potential for negative economic and societal effects resulting from a low level of consumer confidence in food safety, it is important to know how confidence is potentially influenced by external events. The aim of this article is to describe the development of a monitor that enables changes in consumer confidence in food safety and consumer food choice behaviour to be assessed in conjunction with changes in institutional activities and food safety incidents. Results of the first assessment of longitudinal data on consumer perceptions of food safety will be presented to provide the basis for the development of such a monitor. A better understanding of the interrelationships between antecedents and behavioural consequences of changes in consumer confidence in food safety over time will improve understanding of the effectiveness of public policy, and allow the development of best practice in risk communication and risk management.
Blockade of IL-10 signaling during BCG vaccination enhances and sustains Th 1 , Th 17 , and innate lymphoid IFN-γ and IL-17 responses and increases protection to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection

Vaccination with Mycobacterium bovis bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) remains the only prophylactic vaccine against tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), but gives variable protection against pulmonary disease. The generation of host Th1 responses following BCG vaccination is accepted as the major mechanism of protection against Mtb infection. Early production of IL-17 in the lungs following Mtb challenge of mice previously vaccinated with Mtb peptides in adjuvant has been shown to be required for efficient Th1 cell recruitment. IL-10 regulates various processes involved in generation of Th1 and Th17 responses. Previous studies have shown IL-10 as a negative regulator of the immune response to primary Mtb infection, with Il10−/− mice having reduced lung bacterial loads. In this study we show that inhibition of IL-10 signaling during BCG vaccination enhances host-generated antigen-specific IFN-γ and IL-17A responses, and that this regime gives significantly greater protection against aerogenic Mtb challenge in both susceptible and relatively resistant strains of mice. In Mtb-susceptible CBA/J mice, antibody blockade of IL-10R specifically during BCG vaccination resulted in additional protection against Mtb challenge of greater than 1-Log10 compared to equivalent isotype-treated controls. Protection observed following BCG vaccination concurrent with anti-IL-10R mAb treatment was sustained through chronic Mtb infection, and correlated with enhanced lung Th1 and Th17 responses, and enhanced IFN-γ and IL-17A production by γδ T cells and an innate-like Thy1.2+CD3— lymphoid population. We show that IL-10 inhibits optimal BCG-elicited protection, therefore suggesting antagonists of IL-10 may be of great benefit as adjuvants in preventive vaccination against tuberculosis. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Anne O’Garra aogarra@nimr.mrc. ac.uk Phone: (Direct) +44-208-816-2508 Fax: +44-208-816-2564. Europe PMC Funders Group Author Manuscript J Immunol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2013 April 15. Published in final edited form as: J Immunol. 2012 October 15; 189(8): 4079–4087. doi:10.4049/jimmunol.1201061. E uope PM C Fuders A uhor M ancripts E uope PM C Fuders A uhor M ancripts
The text mining and classification analyses on the relationship of Macau special administrative region's policy addresses from 2012 to 2013

The study aimed at analyzing the keywords of the Macau Special Administrative Region's 2012 and 2013 annual policy addresses. The contribution of the study included the following two points. First, the study used the text mining method in order to explore the content of policy address. Second, the study applied the SVM (Support Vector Machine) and random forests classification analysis to explore the relationship of the keywords between the two years' policy addresses.
Structural bases for inhibitor binding and catalysis in polyamine oxidase.

Polyamine oxidase (PAO) carries out the FAD-dependent oxidation of the secondary amino groups of spermidine and spermine, a key reaction in the polyamine catabolism. The active site of PAO consists of a 30 A long U-shaped catalytic tunnel, whose innermost part is located in front of the flavin ring. To provide insight into the PAO substrate specificity and amine oxidation mechanism, we have investigated the crystal structure of maize PAO in the reduced state and in complex with three different inhibitors, guazatine, 1,8-diaminooctane, and N(1)-ethyl-N(11)-[(cycloheptyl)methyl]-4,8-diazaundecane (CHENSpm). In the reduced state, the conformation of the isoalloxazine ring and the surrounding residues is identical to that of the oxidized enzyme. Only Lys300 moves away from the flavin to compensate for the change in cofactor protonation occurring upon reduction. The structure of the PAO.inhibitor complexes reveals an exact match between the inhibitors and the PAO catalytic tunnel. Inhibitor binding does not involve any protein conformational change. Such lock-and-key binding occurs also in the complex with CHENSpm, which forms a covalent adduct with the flavin N5 atom. Comparison of the enzyme complexes hints at an "out-of-register" mechanism of inhibition, in which the inhibitor secondary amino groups are not properly aligned with respect to the flavin to allow oxidation. Except for the Glu62-Glu170 pair, no negatively charged residues are involved in the recognition of substrate and inhibitor amino groups, which is in contrast to other polyamine binding proteins. This feature may be exploited in the design of drugs specifically targeting PAO.
A finite element method applied to new active contour models and 3D reconstruction from cross sections

The authors present a model of deformation which solves some of the problems encountered with the original method such as instability and initial data while reducing the computational complexity. This model makes the curve, behave like a balloon which is inflated by an additional force. The initial curve need no longer be close to the solution to converge. The external forces that push the curve to the edges are modified to give more stable results. The system is solved using a conform finite element method in the minimization process. The evolution to the equilibrium presents less oscillations, convergence is obtained faster, and the final results are more accurate. This model is applied for segmenting ultrasound and magnetic resonance images. The authors have also made a first stage to 3-D object reconstruction. by tracking the extracted contour on a series of successive cross sections. <<ETX>>
Variations in job satisfaction for permanent and casual workers

This research uses both qualitative and quantitative data from 125 call centre staff to evaluate the job satisfaction of permanent and casual employees in a call centre setting. Findings indicate that human resource management practices impact on levels of employee job satisfaction yet there is no difference between permanent and casual workers with respect to their satisfaction with these practices. Casual workers do however report higher direct levels of job satisfaction than permanent workers. This latter finding of a preference for casual work status among the respondents leads into a discussion that work status rather than sophisticated human resource management approaches may, in some call centre situations, determine employee well-being. Employees working in a call centre that deals with more complex tasks who have a higher need to satisfy aspects of the relational psychological contract may however require more sophisticated developmental human resource management approaches.
Expression of the Receptor Protein-tyrosine Phosphatase, PTPμ, Restores E-cadherin-dependent Adhesion in Human Prostate Carcinoma Cells*

Normal prostate expresses the receptor protein-tyrosine phosphatase, PTPμ, whereas LNCaP prostate carcinoma cells do not. PTPμ has been shown previously to interact with the E-cadherin complex. LNCaP cells express normal levels of E-cadherin and catenins but do not mediate either PTPμ- or E-cadherin-dependent adhesion. Re-expression of PTPμ restored cell adhesion to PTPμ and to E-cadherin. A mutant form of PTPμ that is catalytically inactive was re-expressed, and it also restored adhesion to PTPμ and to E-cadherin. Expression of PTPμ-extra (which lacks most of the cytoplasmic domain) induced adhesion to PTPμ but not to E-cadherin, demonstrating a requirement for the presence of the intracellular domains of PTPμ to restore E-cadherin-mediated adhesion. We previously observed a direct interaction between the intracellular domain of PTPμ and RACK1, a receptor for activated protein kinase C (PKC). We demonstrate that RACK1 binds to both the catalytically active and inactive mutant form of PTPμ. In addition, we determined that RACK1 binds to the PKCδ isoform in LNCaP cells. We tested whether PKC could be playing a role in the ability of PTPμ to restore E-cadherin-dependent adhesion. Activation of PKC reversed the adhesion of PTPμWT-expressing cells to E-cadherin, whereas treatment of parental LNCaP cells with a PKCδ-specific inhibitor induced adhesion to E-cadherin. Together, these studies suggest that PTPμ regulates the PKC pathway to restore E-cadherin-dependent adhesion via its interaction with RACK1.
Block Advertisement Protocol

Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention from academia, financial service industry and enthusiasts. The trade-off between transaction confirmation throughput and centralization of hash power do not allow Bitcoin to perform at the same level as modern payment systems. Block Advertisement Protocol is proposed as a step to resolve this issue. The protocol allows block mining and block relaying to happen in parallel. The protocol dictates a miner to advertise the block it is going to mine allowing other miners to collect all the transactions in advance. When a block in mined, only header is relayed since most of data about the block is already known to all miners.
Insertion Sequence IS900 Revisited

ABSTRACT Many studies investigating Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in Crohn's disease have used molecular detection of IS900 in clinical samples, but some have described polymorphisms in IS900 as variants of this organism. Analysis of 23 M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis isolates revealed that IS900 is highly conserved, with only two sequevars distinguishing sheep and cattle lineages. Amplification of IS900-like sequences is not sufficient as a proxy for M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis.
Acute‐onset chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy: An electrodiagnostic study

Introduction: Acute‐onset chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (A‐CIDP) is an increasingly recognized CIDP subtype. Differentiating A‐CIDP from Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS) is challenging but important, because there are different treatment outcomes. Methods: We report 3 patients with A‐CIDP who were initially diagnosed with severe GBS but were later confirmed to have CIDP based on their clinical course and electrodiagnostic (EDx) studies. We also report on the long‐term treatment of these patients and review the literature on EDx studies in this syndrome. Results: Three patients were initially diagnosed with GBS and responded to treatment. However, all 3 had arrest in improvement or deterioration during their rehabilitation phases. EDx studies showed prominent demyelinating changes many months after the initial presentation. All responded very well to immunotherapy. Conclusion: Although several features may suggest the diagnosis of A‐CIDP at initial presentation, close follow‐up of GBS patients during the recovery phase is also needed for accurate diagnosis. EDx studies may distinguish patients with A‐CIDP from GBS patients. Muscle Nerve 52: 900–905, 2015
How Much Is Too Much? Privacy Issues on Twitter

Social media provide many opportunities to connect people; however, the kinds of personally identifiable information that people share through social media is understudied. Such public discussions of personal information warrant a closer privacy discussion. This paper presents findings from a content analysis of Twitter in which the amount and kinds of personally identifiable information in Twitter messages were coded. Findings suggest that the majority of time Twitterers do write about themselves. Overwhelmingly, Twitterers do not include identifiable information such as phone numbers, email and home addresses. However, about a quarter of tweets do include information regarding when people are engaging in activities and where they are. This kind of information may have privacy implications when found in the same tweet or if coupled with other kinds of publicly available information.
Transaction Prices and Strategic Consumer Behavior: Pricing Evidence From the Airline Industry

The operations literature has increasingly accounted for the presence of strategic consumer behavior. Theory suggests that such a behaviour exposes firms to intertemporal competition and exerts downwards pressure on prices. However, little evidence exists to demonstrate the outcome effect and the magnitude effects of such consumer behavior. This paper fills this gap by providing evidence for the effects of strategic consumer behaviour supported by online decision support tools. Online decision support tools that provide consumers with information about future distributions of prices support strategic consumer behavior. This paper studies whether the availability of such information affects transacted prices. We conduct an empirical analysis in the context of the airline industry, where airfares are associated with frequent changes. We study the effect at the route level and find significant price differences between routes for which airfare prediction information is available, and routes without airfare prediction information. We find that the availability of information about future fare distributions is associated with lower transacted airfares. This effect was consistent across the different fare percentiles and amounted to transactions with prices approximately 3% lower. We further find that while the magnitude of the effect is most profound shortly after route fare prediction information is introduced, the negative effect on transacted airfares persists in the long run. Interestingly, we do not find evidence that low cost carriers are affected by such availability of information, whereas legacy carriers are affected across all fare percentiles. Our results lend support to the notion that price prediction decision tools make a statistically significant economic impact. Presumably, consumers are able to exploit the information available online and behave more strategically.
Histiocytosis X in two infants—treated with topical nitrogen mustard

Two infants suffering from histiocytosis X were treated successfully with a topically applied nitrogen mustard. All cutaneous symptoms disappeared completely within 2 weeks in one case while the skin improved significantly in the other. No irritation or dermatitis was experienced from the treatment. The only side‐effect noted was hyperpigmentation.
Pain Assessment in Dementia: Evaluation of a Point-of-Care Technological Solution

Pain is common among people with moderate to severe dementia, but inability of patients to self-report means it often goes undetected and untreated. We developed the electronic Pain Assessment Tool (ePAT) to address this issue. A point-of-care App, it utilizes facial recognition technology to detect facial micro-expressions indicative of pain. ePAT also records the presence of pain-related behaviors under five additional domains (Voice, Movement, Behavior, Activity, and Body). In this observational study, we assessed the psychometric properties of ePAT compared to the Abbey Pain Scale (APS). Forty aged care residents (70% females) over the age of 60 years, with moderate to severe dementia and a history of pain-related condition(s) were recruited into the study. Three hundred and fifty-three paired pain assessments (either at rest or post-movement) were recorded and analyzed. The ePAT demonstrated excellent concurrent validity (r = 0.882, 95% CI: 0.857–0.903) and good discriminant validity. Inter-rater reliability score was good overall (weighted κ= 0.74, 95% CI: 0.68–0.80) while internal consistency was excellent. ePAT has psychometric properties which make it suitable for use in non-communicative patients with dementia. ePAT also has the advantage of automated facial expression assessment which provides objective and reproducible evidence of the presence of pain.
Data Aggregation with Principal Component Analysis in Big Data Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), numerous sensors can produce a significant portion of the big data. It remains an open issue how to timely gather and transmit such large amount of data while minimizing data latency through wireless sensor networks (WSNs). On the other hand, spatially correlated sensor observations lead to considerable data redundancy in the network. To efficiently eliminate data redundancy and improve energy efficiency, in this paper, based on the fact that the more similar the measure data are, the smaller the amount of data after aggregation is, we first develop a new distributed clustering algorithm which can categorize sensor nodes with high similarity into a cluster for data aggregation, while ensuring uniform energy consumption within the cluster. Then, we propose a data aggregation algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) which can be executed in the cluster head (CH). Finally, our experimental results demonstrate that the amount of data transmission can be significantly reduced based on our proposed clustering and data aggregation algorithm.
Dirichlet-tree Distribution Enhanced Random Forests for Head Pose Estimation

Head pose estimation is important in human-machine interfaces. However, illumination variation, occlusion and low image resolution make the estimation task difficult. Hence, a Dirichlet-tree distribution enhanced Random Forests approach (D-RF) is proposed in this paper to estimate head pose efficiently and robustly under various conditions. First, PCA based sub-features space from Gabor features and histogram distributions of the facial patches are extracted to eliminate the influence of occlusion and noise. Then, the D-RF is proposed to estimate the head pose in a coarse-to-fine way. In order to improve the discrimination capability of the approach, an adaptive Gaussian mixture model is introduced in the tree distribution. The proposed method has been evaluated with different data sets spanning from -90° to 90° in vertical and horizontal directions under various conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the approachâs robustness and efficiency.
The Destination Loyalty Role in Sport Tourism Service Quality in Soccer

Based on the results, safety, service quality, destination image and social environment may be antecedents of destination loyalty in sport tourism. Soccer premier leagues` authorities in Iran are supposed to consider spectators and fans` concerns in to consideration in order to substantiate their destination loyalty. The present study develops a theoretical background in this respect. All the underlying theoretical background has been taken into consideration. Based on the results, safety, service quality, destination image and social environment may be antecedents of destination loyalty in sport tourism.
Detection of a Pseudonormal Mitral Inflow Pattern: An Echocardiographic and Tissue Doppler Study

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the ability of several echocardiographic and tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) derived parameters to improve the noninvasive diagnosis of a pseudonormal mitral inflow pattern. Methods: Ninety‐eight consecutive patients with age‐related normal transmitral Doppler profile underwent echocardiography including TDI and measurement of left ventricular end‐diastolic pressure (LVEDP) using fluid‐filled catheters. Peak transmitral velocities were determined at rest (E, A) and during the strain phase of a Valsalva maneuver. The difference in duration between the pulmonary venous retrograde velocity and the transmitral A‐velocity (PVR–A) was calculated from pulsed Doppler recordings. Propagation velocity of the early mitral inflow (VP) was determined by color M‐mode. Early diastolic peak mitral annulus velocities (E′) and the early diastolic transmyocardial velocity gradient of the posterior basal wall (MVG) were obtained by TDI. Results: Fifty‐two patients presented with normal diastolic function (group I: LVEDP 9.5 ± 3 mm Hg , E/A 1.1 ± 0.19 ), while pseudonormalization, defined as LVEDP 15 mm Hg and E/A > 0.9, was found in 46 patients (group II: LVEDP 23 ± 7 mm Hg , E/A 1.43 ± 0.83 ). The coefficient of linear correlation (r) and the area under ROC – curve (AUC) to predict LVEDP values 15 mm Hg were maximal for the index PVR–A ( AUC = 0.92, r = 0.77 ), followed by E/E′ (AUC = 0.80, r = 0.46), MVG (AUC = 0.65, r = 0.33) and E/VP (AUC = 0.69, r = 0.30), P < 0.01 , whereas the decrease in E/A ratio during Valsalva maneuver failed to reach significance. Similar results were observed when echocardiographic parameters were used to estimate the left ventricular diastolic pressure before atrial contraction. Conclusions: PVR–A enabled the most accurate estimation of LVEDP. TDI‐derived indices E/E′ and MVG are also reliable alternatives superior to the classical Valsalva maneuver to detect a pseudonormal transmitral Doppler profile. (ECHOCARDIOGRAPHY, Volume 20, May 2003)
Assessing Property Value Impacts of Dispersed Housing Subsidy Programs: Management and Work Plan

This report addresses how house prices affect dispersed housing subsidy program recipients who move into non-poor neighborhoods. It investigates neighborhood property price changes in two areas: (1) the section 8 certificate (including Moving to Opportunity households) program in Baltimore and (2) the scattered-site acquisition and new infill construction program of the Denver Housing Authority. The study uses a four-phase investigative strategy and covers community and policy reconnaissance, quantitative property value impact analysis, qualitative impact diagnosis, and policy implication analysis.