Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protective Mechanism of Melatonin on Kainic Acid Induced Immune Modulatory Effect on Lymphocytes Derived from Mouse Spleen

Toxicity occurs when cells develop inflammation due to exposure to several toxic substances. The study was aimed to assess the damage (toxicity) induced by kainic acid on splenic lymphocyte and enriched T lymphocyte under in vitro conditions and the protective role of exogenous melatonin against this damage (toxicity). The study included assessment of inflammatory mechanism by the expression of immune modulatory cytokine mediators using real time PCR. Oxidative stress (reactive oxygen species) and nitrosative stress (reactive nitrogen species) were also studied to determine the free radical production. Interestingly, kainic acid caused severe splenic lymphocytes and enriched T lymphocyte damage which was evident from deleterious alterations in various parameters. Kainic acid treatment (1 mM) resulted in increased mRNA expression of cytokines like tumour necrosis factor-beta, interleukin 6, interleukin 1, interferon gamma, mitogen-activated protein kinase gene-14, inducible nitric oxide synthase and decreased interleukin 10 mRNA expression. Tritiated (3H) Thymidine Incorporation study signifies that kainic acid treatment (1 mM) increased the proliferation of splenic and enriched T lymphocytes. These changes were normalized by exogenous administration of melatonin (0.25-1.0 mM) in combination with kainic acid. Flow Cytometry Analysis using Annexin V apoptosis assay kit revealed an increase in apoptotic and necrosis (double positive cells) in splenic lymphocytes treated with kainic acid alone. However, melatonin treated in combination with kainic acid, showed attenuation to apoptosis and necrosis on splenic lymphocytes. This study depicts that kainic acid induced inflammatory toxicity could be attenuated by exogenous melatonin treatment as evident by the decreased levels of the inflammatory cytokines, immune reactions and free radical production.
Choosing the most appropriate biologic therapy for Crohn’s disease according to concomitant extra-intestinal manifestations, comorbidities, or physiologic conditions

ABSTRACT Introduction: approximately half of Crohn’s disease (CD) patients suffer from concomitant extra-intestinal manifestations (EIMs). Moreover, CD patients may suffer from comorbidities or have physiologic characteristics that may influence the outcome of a biologic treatment. Previous guidelines, published when only TNF-α antagonists were available as biological agents, addressed only management of CD patients with the most common EIMs. Areas covered: Because of the recent introduction of new biologics for the treatment of Crohn’s disease as well as increased awareness about comorbidities potentially able to affect the impact of biological drugs, here we provide an update on management considering old and new biologics with proven efficacy on both Crohn’s disease and associated conditions, in order to ideally profile the patient to the best of the current knowledge. Expert Opinion: While waiting for identification and validation of widely available and reliable biomarkers able to predict which biologic may yield the best response in the individual IBD patient (rigorous precision medicine), the choice of biologic agents in CD patients in order to achieve the best outcome still lies on a thorough assessment of patient-related characteristics as well as deep knowledge of the properties and place in therapy of each biologic drug.
Design and Evaluation of a Method to Derive Domain Metric Thresholds

Software metrics provide means to quantify several attributes of software systems. The effective measurement is dependent on appropriate metric thresholds as they allow characterizing the quality of software systems. Indeed, thresholds have been used for detecting a variety software anomalies. Previous methods to derive metric thresholds do not take characteristics of software domains into account, such as the difference between size and complexity of systems from different domains. Instead, they rely on generic thresholds that are derived from heterogeneous systems. Although derivation of reliable thresholds has long been a concern, we also lack empirical evidence about threshold variation across distinct software domains. This work proposes a method to derive domain-sensitive thresholds that respects metric statistics and is based on benchmarks of systems from the same domain. The proposed method is supported by a software tool. This tool helps the developer to write better code since the beginning, by providing a view with class metrics and warnings considering the system domain. To evaluate our method, we performed an evaluation with desktop and mobile systems. The first evaluation investigates whether and how thresholds vary across domains by presenting a large-scale study on 3,107 software systems from 15 desktop domains. For the second evaluation, we manually mined one hundred mobile applications from GitHub. We measured all these systems using a set of metrics, derived thresholds, and validated them through qualitative and quantitative analyses. As a result, we observed that our method gathered more reliable thresholds considering software domain as a factor when building benchmarks for threshold derivation. Moreover, for the desktop evaluation, we also observed that domain-specific metric thresholds are more appropriated than generic ones for code smell detection.
Responsiveness and Predictive Ability of the Chinese Version of the Action Research Arm Test in People with Cerebral Infarction

Purpose To detect the responsiveness and predictive ability of the Chinese version Action Research Arm Test (C-ARAT) in participants within the first 3 months after cerebral infarction. Methods Ninety-seven individuals (75 men, mean age 59.87 ± 10.94 years) with a first cerebral infarction were enrolled in this study. The participants were evaluated by two outcome measures: C-ARAT and the Barthel Activities of Daily Living Index (BI) at five time points: 0D, 3W, 3M, 6M and 1Y after enrolment. The standardised response mean (SRM) and the Wilcoxon signed rank test were used to analyse responsiveness. Predictive validity was determined by using Spearman's rank correlation coefficients. The predicted performance of C-ARAT on activities of daily living (ADLs) was measured by linear regression model. Floor and ceiling effects were estimated by counting the proportion of subjects falling outside the 5% lower or upper boundary, respectively. Results The C-ARAT showed moderate to large responsiveness in detecting changes over time (SRM = 0.58–0.84). The C-ARAT subscales showed small to large responsiveness (SRM = 0.44–0.90). The C-ARAT at 0D showed moderate to good correlation with the BI scores at 3W, 3M and 6M (ρ = 0.561–0.624, p < 0.001), and exhibited fair correlation with the BI score 1Y after enrolment (ρ = 0.384, p < 0.05). C-ARAT was a good predictor (adjusted R2 = 0.185–0.249) of BI within 3M follow-up. The C-ARAT total score showed a notable floor effect at 0D and 3W and a notable ceiling effect at 3M, 6M and 1Y. Conclusion The results of this study support the use of the C-ARAT as a measurement of upper extremity function in individuals with a first cerebral infarction.
Standardization of the Evaluation Index System for Low-Carbon Cities in China: A Case Study of Xiamen

The construction of a reasonable evaluation index system for low-carbon cities is an important part of China’s green development strategy in urban areas. In this study, based on the theoretical framework for the concept of low-carbon cities, the perspectives from three index systems—that is, the Drivers, Pressures, State, Impact, Response model of intervention (DPSIR), a complex ecosystem, and a carbon source/sink process—were integrated to extract common indicators from existing evaluation index systems for low-carbon cities. Subsequently, a standardized evaluation index system for low-carbon cities that contained five indicators—carbon emission, low carbon production, low carbon consumption, low-carbon policy, and social economic development—was established. Thereafter, Xiamen was selected for an empirical analysis by determining the indicator weight with an entropy weight method and by carrying out a comprehensive evaluation using a linear summation model. The results showed that the weights of the five selected primary indicators for the evaluation of low-carbon cities were: low-carbon production > low-carbon consumption > social economic development > carbon emission > low-carbon policy. Among the secondary indicators, the average entropy weight of “pollution emission” was the highest at 0.1591, while the average entropy weight of “urbanization rate” was the lowest at 0.0360. Furthermore, the comprehensive index of low-carbon development in 2015 was higher than that in 2010, while the rate of economic growth was greater than the growth rate of carbon emission, which indicated that the relative decoupling of economic growth from carbon emission was basically achieved.
P qr transitive G raphs of O rder Tetravalent H alf-arc -

A graph is half-arc-transitive if its automorphism group acts transitively on its vertex set, edge set, but not arc set. Let n be a product of three primes. The problem on classification of the half-arctransitive graphs of order n has been considered in [J Algebraic Combin 1(1992) 275-282, Discrete Math 310(2010) 1721-1724, European J Combin 28(2007) 726733], and it was solved for the cases where n is a prime cube or twice a product of two primes. In this paper, we give the classification of the tetravalent half-arc-transitive graphs of order pqr, where p, q, r are distinct odd primes. Keywordscayley graph; vertex-transitive graph; halfarc-transitive graph; simple group;quotient graph
Balancing the approaches of environmental conservation by considering ecosystem services as well as biodiversity

In recent years, most plans for conservation have focused on biodiversity, ignoring the importance of the ecosystem services. This paper discusses limitations of the biodiversity-centred approach to conservation and reasons why ecosystem services need to be included to provide a balanced approach to conservation. To achieve this objective, there is need to improve the identification and valuation of ecosystem services. By focusing on biodiversity conservation, we may ignore many areas that are not rich in biodiversity but are important to human welfare and are under the threat of environmental degradation.
Parity-Only Caching for Robust Straggler Tolerance

Stragglers (i.e., nodes with slow performance) are prevalent and incur performance instability in large-scale storage systems, yet it is challenging to detect stragglers in practice. We make a case by showing how erasure-coded caching provides robust straggler tolerance without relying on timely and accurate straggler detection, while incurring limited redundancy overhead in caching. We first analytically motivate that caching only parity blocks can achieve effective straggler tolerance. To this end, we present POCache, a parity-only caching design that provides robust straggler tolerance. To limit the erasure coding overhead, POCache slices blocks into smaller subblocks and parallelizes the coding operations at the subblock level. Also, it leverages a straggler-aware cache algorithm that takes into account both file access popularity and straggler estimation to decide which parity blocks should be cached. We implement a POCache prototype atop Hadoop 3.1 HDFS, while preserving the performance and functionalities of normal HDFS operations. Our extensive experiments on both local and Amazon EC2 clusters show that in the presence of stragglers, POCache can reduce the read latency by up to 87.9% compared to vanilla HDFS.
The Relevant Market for Production and Wholesale of Electricity in the Nordic Countries: An Econometric Study

We apply cointegration analysis to daily averages of Nord Pool prices covering the period 2001-2007 in order to empirically characterize the geographical dimension of the relevant market for production and wholesale of electricity. We reach the following econometric conclusions: (i) price areas Finland, Sweden, and Norway 3 unambiguously belong to the same relevant market; (ii) Denmark 2 belongs to this same market except for the subsample 2004-2007; (iii) Norway 1 and Denmark 1 define separate markets on their own. We find that the stochastic trends in Nord Pool prices originate in countries abundant in capacity to generate hydro power.
GLADS: A gel-less approach for detection of STMS markers in wheat and rice

Sequence tagged microsatellite site (STMS) are useful PCR based DNA markers. Wide genome coverage, high polymorphic index and co-dominant nature make STMS a preferred choice for marker assisted selection (MAS), genetic diversity analysis, linkage mapping, seed genetic purity analysis etc. Routine STMS analysis involving low-throughput, laborious and time-consuming polyacrylamide/agarose gels often limit their full utility in crop breeding experiments that involve large populations. Therefore, convenient, gel-less marker detection methods are highly desirable for STMS markers. The present study demonstrated the utility of SYBR Green dye based melt-profiling as a simple and convenient gel-less approach for detection of STMS markers (referred to as GLADS) in bread wheat and rice. The method involves use of SYBR Green dye during PCR amplification (or post-PCR) of STMS markers followed by generation of a melt-profile using controlled temperature ramp rate. The STMS amplicons yielded characteristic melt-profiles with differences in melting temperature (Tm) and profile shape. These characteristic features enabled melt-profile based detection and differentiation of STMS markers/alleles in a gel-less manner. The melt-profile approach allowed assessment of the specificity of the PCR assay unlike the end-point signal detection assays. The method also allowed multiplexing of two STMS markers with non-overlapping melt-profiles. In principle, the approach can be effectively used in any crop for STMS marker analysis. This SYBR Green melt-profiling based GLADS approach offers a convenient, low-cost (20–51%) and time-saving alternative for STMS marker detection that can reduce dependence on gel-based detection, and exposure to toxic chemicals.
Layer by Layer Antimicrobial Coatings Based on Nafion, Lysozyme, and Chitosan

The study focuses on the development of a new family of layer-by-layer coatings comprising Nafion, lysozyme and chitosan to address challenges related to microbial contamination. Circular dichroism was employed to gain insights on the interactions of the building blocks at the molecular level. Quartz crystal microbalance tests were used to monitor in real time the build-up of multilayer coatings, while atomic force microscopy, contact angle and surface zeta potential measurements were performed to assess the surface characteristics of the multilayer assemblies. Remarkably, the nanocoated surfaces show almost 100% reduction in the population of both Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. The study suggests that Nafion based synergistic platforms can offer an effective line of defence against bacteria, facilitating antimicrobial mechanisms that go beyond the concept of exclusion zone.
Title Macrophages in Alzheimer ’ s disease : the blood-borne identity Permalink

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disorder clinically characterized by cognitive decline involving loss of memory, reasoning and linguistic ability. The amyloid cascade hypothesis holds that mismetabolism and aggregation of neurotoxic amyloid-b (Ab) peptides, which are deposited as amyloid plaques, are the central etiological events in AD. Recent evidence from AD mouse models suggests that blood-borne mononuclear phagocytes are capable of infiltrating the brain and restricting b-amyloid plaques, thereby limiting disease progression. These observations raise at least three key questions: (1) what is the cell of origin for macrophages in the AD brain, (2) do blood-borne macrophages impact the pathophysiology of AD and (3) could these enigmatic cells be therapeutically targeted to curb cerebral amyloidosis and thereby slow disease progression? This review begins with a historical perspective of peripheral mononuclear phagocytes in AD, and moves on to critically consider the controversy surrounding their identity as distinct from brain-resident microglia and their potential impact on AD pathology.
Support Dialog Systems : Issues , Problems , and Solutions

The goal of this paper is to give a description of the state of the art, the issues, the problems, and the solutions related to industrial dialog systems for the automation of technical support. After a general description of the evolution of the spoken dialog industry, and the challenges in the development of technical support applications, we will discuss two specific problems through a series of experimental results. The first problem is the identification of the call reason, or symptom, from loosely constrained user utterances. The second is the use of data for the experimental optimization of the Voice User Interface (VUI).
Climatic implications of background acidity and other chemistry derived from electrical studies of the Greenland Ice Core Project ice core

High-resolution continuous profiles were obtained on the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) ice core using two different electrical methods. After correction for temperature and density, the electrical conductivity method (ECM) technique responds only to acidity, while dielectric profiling (DEP) responds to acid, ammonium, and chloride. Detailed chemistry on a section of glacial-age ice allows us to confirm the calibration factor for chloride in DEP. Acidity dominates the DEP variability in the Holocene, Allerod/Bolling, and larger interstadials; ammonium dominates in the Younger Dry as, while chloride is the major contributor in cold periods including smaller interstadials. From the electrical signals plotted on a linear timescale we can deduce the background (nonvolcanic) acidity of the ice, varying from always acidic in the Holocene to always alkaline in the cold periods. In the interstadials, the ice is close to neutral, with most of it acidic in larger interstadials, most of it alkaline in smaller ones, and rapid alternations within interstadials. It is not clear whether neutralization of individual acidic particles occurred in the atmosphere or whether acid and alkaline particles coexisted until deposition in the snowpack. The changes in acidity observed at GRIP apply at least to all of Greenland and probably to much of North America. There would have been ecological effects and important changes in the uptake of some chemicals onto ice. If acidic sulfate particles were neutralized and removed from the atmosphere, which remains uncertain, then there are atmospheric chemistry and radiative effects that require further investigation.
Novel Neutrino-Floor and Dark Matter Searches with Deformed Shell Model Calculations

Event detection rates for WIMP-nucleus interactions are calculated for 71Ga, 73Ge, 75As, and 127I (direct dark matter detectors). The nuclear structure form factors, which are rather independent of the underlying beyond the Standard Model particle physics scenario assumed, are evaluated within the context of the deformed nuclear shell model (DSM) based on Hartree-Fock nuclear states. Along with the previously published DSM results for 73Ge, the neutrino-floor due to coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEνNS), an important source of background to dark matter searches, is extensively calculated. The impact of new contributions to CEνNS due to neutrino magnetic moments and Z′ mediators at direct dark matter detection experiments is also examined and discussed. The results show that the neutrino-floor constitutes a crucial source of background events for multi-ton scale detectors with sub-keV capabilities.
Turid Åvitsland The welfare effects of housing taxation in a distorted economy : A general equilibrium analysis

Efficient capital taxation has been one of the most important objectives for large tax reforms implemented in several countries during the last decades. The Norwegian Tax reform of 1992 took a large step towards tax neutrality between the different capital types and uses. However, housing capital is still an exception. The marginal effective tax rate on housing is substantially lower than the marginal effective tax rates on other capital types and uses. In this paper the welfare effects of imposing a neutral system of housing taxation are analyzed by using an intertemporal disaggregated numerical model for the Norwegian economy. The tax reform implies a substantial increase in the tax revenue from housing taxation, and the welfare effects of different rebating alternatives for the additional tax revenue as lump sum rebating or reductions in other distortionary taxes, are considered.
The Effect of Task Complexity Influencing Bilateral Transfer.

International Journal of Exercise Science 10(8): 1174-1183, 2017. Bilateral transfer is a well-known phenomenon whereby training one limb results in improvement in the untrained homologous limb. However, despite evidence across a range of motor skill paradigms, the influence of motor skill complexity on the magnitude of bilateral transfer has not yet been fully explored. The aim of this preliminary study was to compare bilateral transfer effects between three dexterity tasks with the hypothesis that the complexity of the task, the volume of time training, and the amount of improvement in the trained hand would positively influence bilateral transfer. Using a randomized cross-over design, 14 young healthy participants (mean age of 22.6 ± 6.6 years; eight female) completed three finger dexterity tasks (O’Connor dexterity, Purdue pegboard, and Mirror Purdue pegboard tasks) with one week rest between each task. Each task required training with the participant’s dominant hand with pre and post testing in both the dominant and non-dominant hands. The Mirrored Purdue pegboard task showed the greatest rate of improvement in the dominant hand. Similarly, the greatest bilateral transfer effect was found in the Mirrored Purdue task. Interestingly, the amount of time training was not a factor associated with bilateral transfer. In conclusion, this study has demonstrated that the value of task complexity, but not the volume of practice, correlated with the magnitude of bilateral transfer to the non-dominant hand.
A Hybrid Algorithm for Influence Maximization of Social Networks

Influence Maximization is an important research content in the dissemination process of information and behavior in social networks. Because Hill Climbing and Greedy Algorithm have good dissemination effect on this topic, researchers have used it to solve this NP problem for a long time. These algorithms only consider the number of active nodes in each round, ignoring the characteristic that the influence will be accumulated, so its effect is still far from the optimal solution. Also, the time complexity of these algorithms is considerable. Aiming at the problem of Influence Maximization, this paper improves the traditional Hill Climbing and Greedy Algorithm. We propose a Hybrid Distribution Value Accumulation Algorithm for Influence Maximization, which has better activation effect than Hill Climbing and Greedy Algorithm. In the first stage of the algorithm, the region is numerically accumulating rapidly and is easy to activate through value-greed. Experiments are conducted on two data sets: the voting situation on Wikipedia and the transmission situation of Gnutella node-to-node file sharing network. Experimental results verify the efficiency of our methods.