Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Virus-Specific Cytotoxic T-Lymphocyte and Helper Responses in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection

ABSTRACT Cellular immune responses are thought to be an important antiviral host defense, but the relationship between virus-specific T-helper and cytotoxic-T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses has not been defined. To investigate a potential link between these responses, we examined functional human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-specific memory CTL precursor frequencies and p24-specific proliferative responses in a cohort of infected untreated persons with a wide range of viral loads and CD4 cell counts. Levels of p24-specific proliferative responses positively correlated with levels of Gag-specific CTL precursors and negatively correlated with levels of plasma HIV-1 RNA. These data linking the levels of HIV-specific CTL with virus-specific helper cell function during chronic viral infection provide cellular immunologic parameters to guide therapeutic and prophylactic vaccine development.
Acute overexpression of wt p53 facilitates anticancer drug‐induced death of cancer and normal cells

The relationship between chemosensitivity and p53 is currently considered from two mutually exclusive points of view: (1) wt p53 increases chemosensitivity due to apoptosis and (2) wt p53 decreases chemosensitivity due to growth arrest and DNA repair. We used p53‐expressing adenovirus (Ad‐p53) to directly evaluate effect of p53 on sensitivity to anticancer drugs. When p53 was expressed at sublethal levels, it sensitized cells to the DNA‐damaging drugs Adriamycin, mitomycin C, actinomycin D, etoposide (VP16), cisplatin and CPT11. This sensitization was observed in cancer cell lines (N=10) regardless of endogenous p53 status and also in normal human lung and skin fibroblasts. The degree of sensitization appeared to be greater in cancer cells with mutant p53. Normal fibroblasts required significantly higher doses of Ad‐p53 to affect a drug's sensitivity partly because of their lower infectivity by adenovirus. Wt p53 not only decreased IC50 but also accelerated cell death induced by DNA‐damaging drugs. In contrast, sensitization to microtubule‐active drugs by p53 was shown only in a few cell lines. We conclude that exogenous wt p53 accelerates cell death induced by DNA damaging agents in both normal and cancer cells and offers no protection from anticancer drugs. Int. J. Cancer75:933–940, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Calcium signal induced by mechanical perturbation of osteoclasts

Multinucleated osteoclasts from rabbit long bone, 1–6 days in culture, respond to mechanical perturbation with a transient increase of intracellular calcium concentration ([Ca2+]i), as measured with the fluorescent indicator fluo‐3 on a confocal laser scanning microscope. In experiments with different extracellular calcium concentrations (from 11.8 mM to calcium‐free), the incidence, the magnitude, and the duration of [Ca2+]i responses decreases with decreasing bathing [Ca2+]. Following mechanical perturbation, a thapsigargin‐induced [Ca2+]i response has a lower magnitude than the thapsigargin‐induced response without mechanical perturbation. In thapsigargin‐pretreated osteoclasts the mechanical perturbation‐induced rise in [Ca2+]i is larger and longer than in control cells. Ni2+ inhibits the incidence and decreases both the magnitude and the duration of the responses, while nifedipine, verapamil, and Gd3+ have no effect. These measurements show that rabbit osteoclasts transduce a mechanical perturbation of the cell membrane into a [Ca2+]i signal via both a calcium influx and an internal calcium release. © 1995 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Glucose levels observed in daily clinical practice induce endothelial dysfunction in the rabbit macro‐ and microcirculation

We investigated whether different concentrations of elevated glucose – corresponding to levels observed in patients with type 2 diabetes under routine care (post‐prandial mean and maximum values) and those used for diagnosing diabetes – induce impairment of vascular reactivity of the macro‐ and microcirculation in non‐diabetic rabbits. Aortic rings and isolated perfused kidneys from normal rabbits were acutely exposed (3 h) to normal (5.5 mm) or high (7–25 mm) d‐glucose concentrations. Vascular reactivity was evaluated with endothelium‐dependent [acetylcholine (ACh) and bradykinin (BK)] and independent [sodium nitroprusside (SNP)] vasodilating agents. Endothelium‐dependent relaxation of the thoracic aorta induced by ACh or BK was significantly attenuated after a 3‐h exposure to high d‐glucose (15–25 mm) but not after corresponding increased osmolarity with mannitol solutions. Relaxation induced by SNP (endothelium‐independent) was not affected by high d‐glucose concentrations. Moreover, endothelium‐dependent but not independent vasodilation of the isolated rabbit kidney was also impaired after 3‐h perfusion with high d‐glucose (11.1–25 mm). Perfusion with mannitol solutions (15–25 mm) partially blunted endothelium‐dependent renal vasodilation. It is concluded that acute hyperglycemia corresponding to post‐prandial levels in patients with type 2 diabetes induces endothelial dysfunction of conduit vessels as well as of the renal circulation of non‐diabetic rabbits.
Hotel spa managers' perceptions of service quality in Greece

The purpose of the present study was to investigate which dimensions of service quality are most important to Hotel Spa managers for their customers' satisfaction in Greece. Thirty three (n=33) Hotel Spa managers in Greece volunteered to participate in the present study. Measurements included the use of the SERVQUAL instrument (Parasuraman et al., 1988) to measure perceptions of service quality. Factor Analysis (principal component) with Varimax rotation was used to identify the predictive variables of managers' perceptions. The results showed that three variables and four items of SERVQUAL model were the most predictive variables of managers' perceptions. Factors were labeled as follows: Responsiveness, Reliability and Tangibles. Items were labeled as follows: timeliness of Hotel Spa's staff, employees' professionalism, food and beverages and providing promptness service implementation. Those three factors and four items explained Hotel Spa managers' perceptions at the percentage of 50.97%. In conclusion, human (responsiveness and reliability) and environmental (tangibles) factors of service quality are important parameters for Hotel Spa managers in Greece, when they design marketing services aiming to improve their customers' satisfaction.
Is a multiple excitation of a single atom equivalent to a single excitation of an ensemble of atoms

Recent technological advances have enabled to isolate, control and measure the properties of a single atom, leading to the possibility to perform statistics on the behavior of single quantum systems. These experiments have enabled to check a question which was out of reach previously: Is the statistics of a multiple excitation of an atom N times equivalent to a single excitation of an ensemble of N atoms? We present a new method to analyze quantum measurements which leads to the conclusion that the answer is most probably no. We discuss the merits of the analysis and its conclusion.
Understanding the Structure of Post-Implementation ERP Teams

The question of IT organizational structure remains relevant and unresolved. To investigate how organizations structure their post-implementation ERP team, the authors interviewed key stakeholders from ERP implementations at 12 universities to determine how other institutions resolved similar issues. Given the highly integrated nature of ERPs, centralizing a team to support the new system seemed logical. Alternatively, returning subject matter experts to their business units could facilitate knowledge transfer. After reviewing prior research, categorizing interview data and analyzing results, the authors found conflicting results. Salient issues that surfaced during data analysis led to further exploration of two factors. First, commitments made during the project’s initiation constrained the choices available to management at its completion. Second, management’s initial goals influenced their willingness to consider alternative support structures when the projects completed. This research highlights the critical nature of early decisions and offers insights for research and practice.
Multifactor Authentication for Hospital Inventory access in Virtual Private Cloud

In recent times, cloud computing has influenced every sector of life, from managing user database online on the cloud to access it on the cloud makes it more flexible to use. Cloud computing has its own security issues like privacy, integrity, confidentiality and authentication. In order to access data on the cloud Authentication majorly plays a very important role. This paper presents a secure multifactor authentication that can be used for Hospital Inventory access in Virtual Private Cloud. Virtual Private cloud is having the benefit of localization as all the data of cloud are accessible within the organization. To secure Hospital Inventory access in Virtual Private Cloud this paper proposes multifactor authentication technique using Biometric, MAC address via payload . The proposed a multifactor authentication protocol which is also validated by using a validation tool Scyther. The outcomes indicate that the proposed multifactor authentication is a robust technique.
Rural Livelihood Options for "a better and more sustainable future". Local perspectives from Myanmar and Morocco

In 2015, state leaders adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to address global inequalities and respond to heightened concern about challenges, arising from contemporary global change. This thesis contributes to addressing these challenges, by extending the knowledge base that rural development stakeholders can draw on to co-construct viable livelihood options for vulnerable rural people. Paper I does so on the basis of cross-sectional household survey data and clustering techniques, applied to explore the differentiated livelihood strategies of rural people in Myanmar. Results of this study show that households engaged in six relatively distinct livelihood strategies, which differed in terms of their relative reliance on land-based vis-a-vis other income generation activities and their income poverty implications. These findings imply differentiated vulnerabilities of rural households, e.g. to climate change, shifting land-governance regimes and labour market forces. Paper II is based on local knowledge research, exploring the opportunity space for a tree-based adaptation of livelihoods and farming systems in Morocco’s drylands. Results of this study show that respondents already maintain a diversity of trees on their farms, but water scarcity, the low profitability of production systems and social conflicts constitute critical barriers to an agroforestry-based climate adaptation. Paper II further demonstrates the utility of local knowledge in climate adaptation research, showing that local knowledge methods facilitate inquiry into the contextual variability of livelihood contexts, technology-adoption barriers and extension priorities that farmers perceive. Brought together, both papers contribute to realising the vision of “a better and more sustainable future” for rural people.
Face recognition under varying illumination using adaptive filtering

A novel method to extract illumination invariant features using the adaptive filter is proposed for face recognition under varying lighting conditions, the proposed method estimates illumination by minimizing the difference between the normalized illumination and estimated original illumination in the logarithm domain. To evaluate effectiveness of our method, three illumination methods (MSR, SQI and LTV) were implemented using Yale B database. It shows that the performance of the proposed method is better than other methods.
Microtubule stabilising agents for cancer chemotherapy

Background: Microtubules are very important targets for cancer chemotherapy. During the past 15 years, three structurally diverse classes of microtubule stabilising agents (MSAs), namely, taxanes, epothilones and discodermolides, have been approved as anticancer agents or subjected to clinical trials, and many novel MSAs have also been identified. Objective: This review focuses on recent advances in the use of taxanes, epothilones and discodermolides, as well as some recently described natural product based MSAs. Methods: Data were identified through the search of PubMed for research articles and reviews, the website of European patents (http://ep.espacenet.com) and US patents (www.uspto.gov) for patents up to October 2008. Only well-established MSAs are mentioned in this review. Results/conclusion: Great advances have been made in the application of MSAs in antitumour clinical practice and drug discovery. Many structure–activity relationship studies of MSAs as novel anticancer drugs have been conducted in recent years. To enhance the efficacy of MSAs as clinically useful therapeutics, numerous efforts have been made in combination chemotherapy regimens and include: i) the combination of structurally different MSAs, ii) combination of MSAs with other classes of anticancer agent with a different mechanism of action and iii) novel ways of administrating well-established MSAs.
What Role Does Trust Play in the Relationship Between Psychological Distance and Knowledge Sharing

The existence of psychological distance implies that individuals have a sense of uncertainty, resulting in a non-trust attitude; the increase of psychological distance also makes employees unable to obtain psychological pleasure and will not produce knowledge-sharing behavior. Therefore, the distance between the minds has a negative impact on trust and knowledge sharing. Trust can reduce each other's uncertainty, increase mutual psychological commitment, enhance the knowledge sharing in the organization. Therefore, trust has a direct positive impact on knowledge sharing and can play an intermediary role in psychological distance and knowledge sharing.
Design, modelling and characterization of transmission lines for mm-wave silicon ICs

This paper describes the design, modelling and characterization of transmission lines for millimetre wave silicon integrated circuits up to 65 GHz. The simulation results of three different EM simulators for a selected hybrid coplanar layout structure are presented. Two different deembedding methods are investigated and compared with respect to sensitivity to typical measurement errors. Finally both methods are applied to the measurement results of the fabricated test structures in a 250 nm BiCMOS technology showing good agreement to EM simulations and predicted sensitivity to measurement errors.
Budget Hotel Performance Based on Customers’ Perspective and Competitive Strategy

For tourists, the speed and ease of access to tourist sites is an important factor when traveling. This prompts the concept of an affordable and comfortable hotel (budget hotel). The study aims to analyze the impact of competitive strategy and dimensions to hotel performance. The dimensions of competitive strategy consist of brand image, human resources, information technology, and service quality, all of which are taken into consideration for this study. Hotel performance is measured by a single dimension namely from the customer’s perspective (customer-based performance). Data is collected and processed from 200 budget hotel consumers in the Island of Bali, which is considered a national tourism parameter in Indonesia. The data processing tool employed is SEM (Structural Equation Modeling). The study found a positive effect of competitive strategy and its dimensions, namely brand image, human resources, information technology, and service quality toward hotel performance. Furthermore, information technology is found to be the strongest factor affecting hotel performance. However, brand image is the most important factor in the competitive strategy dimension of budget hotels. For further research, it is suggested to research hotel performance using multiple performance measurements.
Kinesthetic Mind Reader : A Method to Identify Image Schemas in Natural Language

Natural language understanding remains one of the weak spots of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive systems in general. In cognitive linguistics, image schemas were introduced as spatio-temporal relations learned from sensorimotor processes that constitute conceptual building blocks for highlevel cognition, such as language and reasoning. In this role, they have been successfully employed in computational concept invention and conceptual metaphor research. However, due to their abstract nature identifying them in natural language is an open challenge. To address this issue, this paper proposes a spectral clustering method combined with semantic role labeling to semi-automatically detect image schemas in natural language. In the majority of identified spatial clusters from the Europarl corpus the proposed method detected image schemas, which shows that it works effectively on large corpora. The outcome of this method is a repository of natural language expressions annotated with image schemas that can be used to improve spatial language understanding and provide examples to supervised machine learning approaches.
Stakeholder Views on Interactions between Low-carbon Policies and Carbon Markets in China: Lessons from the Guangdong ETS

China set up pilot Emission Trading Schemes (ETS) in seven cities and provinces from 2013 as a new instrument to incentivise carbon dioxide emission reduction and to reach its 40-45% carbon intensity reduction target by 2020. Using a two-stage survey (a closed-form questionnaire followed by open interviews), we elicit views of stakeholders from Guangdong province on carbon markets, with an emphasis on how ETS would interact with other existing or proposed low-carbon and clean energy policies. Our survey shows that academic stakeholders viewed the interactions between the carbon market and other lowcarbon policies as a significant potential problem but there was less awareness by stakeholders from other sectors. There is a positive correlation between recognising such policy interactions may pose a problem and the time spent working on energy saving and emission reduction policies. Whereas both increasing renewable targets and imposing a carbon tax in addition to an existing ETS would be expected to depress prices in the ETS, relatively few respondents identified this effect correctly. Apart from government respondents, all other stakeholders lacked confidence in China's carbon markets, which is associated with both their lack of knowledge and information about the market and concerns regarding uncertainties and government policy design. The need for learning from the pilot schemes particularly on monitoring, reporting and verification was seen as vital but challenging given the speed of rolling out a national ETS.
Public Entrepreneurship and Its Role in Public Value Creation

The research objective of the paper is to present the role of public entrepreneurship in creation of public value. The author maps its relationships and discusses a framework matching main actors (public managers, citizens) and links existing between them (actions undertaken by public managers). At the end of the paper, the author formulates objections raised after a critical analysis of the framework’s parts and articulates methodological guidelines for investigating the role of public entrepreneurship in creation of public value in different organisational types settings.
Bortezomib in refractory ANCA-associated vasculitis: a new option?

Bortezomib is a proteasome inhibitor approved for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Proteasome inhibition depletes short-lived and long-lived plasma cells and is a promising therapeutic approach to treat refractory antibody-mediated autoimmune diseases. In a small uncontrolled study from Charite (Berlin), recently published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases , 12 patients with systemic lupus erythematosis (SLE) with persistent disease activity and autoantibody production despite immunosuppression were treated with bortezomib according to the approved protocol for multiple myeloma.1 Disease activity declined significantly, though adverse events occurred in 11 of 12 patients and resulted in discontinuation of bortezomib in seven of them. Resistance to immunosuppressive treatment, including cyclophosphamide (CYC) and …
Studies in psychophysiology of dreams. III. The dream of narcolepsy.

I. Introduction Narcolepsy is a clinical entity characterized by the tendency to excessive sleep during the day. This tendency is manifested in either of two ways or in combination. The majority of patients give the classic story of almost irresistible episodes of daytime sleep lasting from a few minutes to several hours. 3,17,22,24 In addition, according to a few investigators, 3,4,22,24 some patients do not actually fall asleep but give a history of a persistent struggle to remain awake during the day. The external situations in which narcoleptic patients become very drowsy or go to sleep often do not differ from those which make normal individuals sleepy. If a narcoleptic is bored or disinterested he will tend to doze; if stimulated, he will be more alert. 3,17,22,24 The difference between normals and narcoleptics appears to be one of "degree rather than kind. " 24 For ex
Subconcussive head impact biomechanics: comparing differing offensive schemes.

PURPOSE Recent literature suggests that subconcussive impacts may influence cognitive functioning across the life span. These effects are suggested to manifest as functional and possibly structural changes. Head impact biomechanics during American football have been characterized from the high school to professional level, but style of play has not been considered. The aim of this investigation was to quantify and compare head impact frequencies and magnitudes between two different offensive schemes. METHODS We investigated the frequencies and magnitudes (linear acceleration [g], rotational acceleration [rad·s], and HITsp) of head impacts sustained by 83 high school football athletes, playing for schools using two different offensive schemes. The two schemes comprised a run-first offense (42 athletes) and a pass-first offense (41 athletes). The Head Impact Telemetry System was used to record head impact measures. RESULTS A total of 35,620 impacts were recorded across two seasons. Athletes in the run-first offense sustained an average of 456 head impacts per season (41 practices and 9 games), whereas the pass-first offense athletes sustained an average of 304 head impacts per season (44 practices and 9 games). The pass-first offense, however, sustained significantly higher impact magnitudes (P values < 0.05; 28.56g, 1777.58 rad·s, and 16.24) than the run-first offense (25.67g, 1675.36 rad·s, and 15.48) across a season. CONCLUSIONS These data provide a first look at how different offensive strategies may influence head impact exposure in football athletes. In the study population, a run-first offense was associated with more frequent head impacts, of smaller magnitude, than a pass-first offense.