Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Myocardin Regulates Vascular Response to Injury Through miR-24/-29a and Platelet-Derived Growth Factor Receptor-&bgr;

Objective—Myocardin, a potent transcriptional coactivator of serum response factor, is involved in vascular development and promotes a contractile smooth muscle phenotype. Myocardin levels are reduced during vascular injury, in association with phenotypic switching of smooth muscle cells (SMCs). However, the direct role of myocardin in vascular disease is unclear. Approach and Results—We show that re-expression of myocardin prevents the vascular injury response in murine carotid arteries, with reduced neointima formation due to decreased SMC migration and proliferation. Myocardin reduced SMC migration by downregulating platelet-derived growth factor receptor-&bgr; (PDGFRB) expression. Pdgfrb was regulated by myocardin-induced miR-24 and miR-29a expression, and antagonizing these microRNAs restored SMC migration. Furthermore, using miR-24 and miR-29a mimics, we demonstrated that miR-29a directly regulates Pdgfrb expression at the 3′ untranslated region while miR-24 has an indirect effect on Pdgfrb levels. Myocardin heterozygous-null mice showed an augmented neointima formation with increased SMC migration and proliferation, demonstrating that endogenous levels of myocardin are a critical regulator of vessel injury responses. Conclusions—Our results extend the function of myocardin from a developmental role to a pivotal regulator of SMC phenotype in response to injury, and this transcriptional coactivator may be an attractive target for novel therapeutic strategies in vascular disease.
Comparison of antimicrobial resistance patterns of Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli recovered from pet dogs from volunteer households in Ontario (2005-06).

OBJECTIVES To compare the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) patterns of Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli in the faeces of pet dogs from volunteer households in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. METHODS From October 2005 to May 2006, 138 dogs from 84 Ontario households were recruited to participate in a cross-sectional study. Five consecutive daily faecal samples were collected from each dog and cultured for Salmonella spp. and E. coli. A panel of 15 antimicrobials from seven antimicrobial classes was used for susceptibility testing. RESULTS E. coli and Salmonella spp. were recovered from 96.4% and 23.2% of dogs, respectively. In total, 515 bacterial isolates from 136 dogs from 83 households were sent for antimicrobial susceptibility testing with 80.4% of isolates being pan-susceptible. The most common resistance pattern was to amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, ampicillin, cefoxitin, ceftiofur and ceftriaxone, present in 13.3% of Salmonella isolates and 1.3% of E. coli isolates. Fifty-eight of the isolates were resistant to two or more drug classes, with 70.7% and 29.3% being E. coli and Salmonella, respectively. Based on multilevel logistic regression, the odds of resistance were greater in E. coli than Salmonella [odds ratio = 3.2; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.22-8.43]. Agreement in resistance between E. coli and Salmonella isolates from the same dog was low [prevalence-adjusted, bias-adjusted kappa (PABAK) = 0.38; 95% CI = 0.30-0.46]. CONCLUSIONS Pet dogs are a potential household source of antimicrobial-resistant Salmonella spp. and E. coli. However, extrapolating the epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance in pathogens, like Salmonella, from E. coli should be done with caution.
Government as Part of the Revolution: Using Social Media to Achieve Public Goals

Social media is growing rapidly because it supports some important social needs. Government will need to understand how social media support these social needs if government is to use social media well. Social media supports the increased reliance on human networks, the need for rapid interactive communications, the need to blur what is private and public, and the need for engaging multimedia. Whether government can use social media will depend upon how well government can see, understand, and attend to these needs. Can government move from hierarchical, controlled communications to where it is just an (important) node within a network? Social media is about fast, interactive communications. How will bureaucracies adapt to the increased pressures for timely responses? Social media, therefore, presents novel and challenging strategic, policy, and managerial issues for many US governments. This paper reports on an environmental scan of the important issues facing US governments and the creative ways in which they are adapting to the challenges. This is supplemented by an in-depth participant-observation study of the use of social media by several departments within the City of Columbus, State of Ohio, USA. Proponents of social media, like those of the early days of the Internet, are wildly enthusiastic about how much social media can do to improve government. Claims are made that this technology is paradigm-shifting, like the printing press, which put knowledge into the hands of the ordinary person. Given the many policy and managerial issues yet to be resolved, it is clear that there is no technology imperative that will necessarily drive government to become more democratic. Early web government pages could have been made more interactive, yet they primarily took on the task of broadcasting a one way instead of a two way flow of information. There is no reason to believe that Twitter would not follow the same path. It could easily become an application whose only benefit is in more quickly broadcasting information to a mobile phone. A better way to think about social media is that it merely provides a small window of opportunity, which for a short period of time, allows government to comprehensively reexamine how it does things, and thereby, provides the opportunity to change policies and procedures in a way that improves government. Governments typically ask how can we adapt social media to the way in which we do business? A very different question is how can social media provide us a way to do things in way that we have not done before? The question that is asked will determine whether a revolution will actually place.
Altered Sporulation and Respiratory Patterns in Mutants of Bacillus subtilis Induced by Acridine Orange

Bott, K. F. (The University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.), and R. Davidoff-Abelson. Altered sporulation and respiratory patterns in mutants of Bacillus subtilis induced by acridine orange. J. Bacteriol. 92:229–240. 1966. —The addition of acridine orange to vegetative cultures of Bacillus subtilis induces the formation of sporulation mutants at a frequency of 20% or greater. These mutants are grouped into seven categories which reflect their different morphological properties. They are altered in their vegetative metabolism, as indicated by abnormal growth on synthetic media. Sporulation of these mutants is impaired at several levels, all of which are stable upon repeated subculturing. The initial stages of sporulation which require no increased metabolic activity (proteolytic enzyme activity and antibiotic production) are functional in all strains, but glucose dehydrogenase activity, an enzyme associated with early synthetic functions in spore synthesis, is significantly reduced. Reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide oxidase is slightly depressed. It is suggested that acridine orange interacts with a cellular constituent controlling respiration and consequently prevents an increased metabolic activity that may be associated with normal spore synthesis.
Aerobic, Anaerobic, and Skill Performance With Regard to Classification in Wheelchair Rugby Athletes

The purpose of the study was to examine the sport-specific performance of wheelchair rugby players with regard to their classification. A group of 30 male athletes from the Polish Wheelchair Rugby League participated in the study. The seven International Wheelchair Rugby Federation classes were collapsed into four groups. Standardized measures of aerobic, anaerobic, and skill performance were examined to identify performance differences among the four groups. Major findings were that most differences were between Group I players and all others and that anaerobic performance was the most sensitive to classification differences. Another important finding was that for all other groups, with one exception, adjacent groups did not differ in anaerobic, aerobic, and sport-specific skill performance. The results of this study demonstrate the need to investigate other performance measures that will help in evaluating the current wheelchair rugby classification system.
Selection of Unknown Objects Specified by Speech Using Models Constructed from Web Images

To select an object requested by human voice among several unknown objects is one of the important tasks for household robots that assist human's daily lives. In this paper, we propose a method that can achieve this task. Using image models which are constructed by Web images collected from the results of speech recognition, the proposed method enables a robot to select an object specified by a speech from several unknown objects in a real environment.
Improving the performance of turbo codes via sub-optimal rate allocation

This paper looks at the problem of the implicit unequal error protection observed in the asymptotic performance of most turbo codes. In particular we propose a new formulation of the rate allocation problem associated with the distribution of a fixed quota of coded bits in the trellis sections of the upper and lower recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) codes of the turbo code structure. The main goal of this work is the design of an effective greedy approach for solving this rate allocation problem via a two phase process of puncturing and repetition coding. Sample simulation results confirm that the asymptotic performances in terms of error floor are improved confirming the potential gain of this approach.
Carotid bodies are required for ventilatory acclimatization to chronic hypoxia.

We have compared the ventilatory responses of intact and carotid body-denervated (CBD) goats to moderate [partial pressure of O2 in arterial blood; (Pao2) approximately 44 Torr] and severe (Pao2 approximately 33 Torr) many time points for up to 7 days of hypobaria. In the intact group there were significant time-dependent decreases in partial pressure of CO2 in arterial blood (PaCO2) in both moderate and severe hypoxemia (approximately-7 and -11 Torr) that were largely complete by 8 h of hypoxemia and maintained throughout. Acute restoration of normoxia in chronically hypoxic intact animals produced time-dependent increases in Paco2 over 2 h, but hypocapnia persisted relative to sea-level control. Arterial plasma [HCO3-] and [H+] decreased, and [Cl-] increased with a time course and magnitude consistent with developing hypocapnia. Chronic CBD, per se, resulted in a sustained, partially compensated respiratory acidosis, as PaCO2 rose 6 Torr and base excess rose 3 mEq/1, [Cl-] fell 1 mEq/1, and pHa fell 0.01 units. During exposure to identical levels of arterial hypoxemia as in the intact group. CBD animals showed no significant changes in PaCO2, [H+]a, or [HCO3-]a at any time during moderate or severe hypoxemia. Plasma [C1-] remained within the normal range throughout exposure to moderate hypoxia and increased in severe hypoxia. In a few instances some hypocapnia was observed, but this was highly inconsistent and was always less than one-third of that observed in intact goats. In contrast to intact goats, acute restorations of normoxia in the chronically hypoxic CBD goats always caused hyperventilation. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Does Shared Responsibility Breed Unfairness? DRAFT

We conduct an online experiment in Denmark designed to explore responsibility attribution and how it shapes the strategic decisions of parties making up a governing coalition. In particular, we are interested in coalition decisions that result in unfair policies, i.e., policies that generate inequitable outcomes that are unpopular with a large component of the general electorate. We believe this provides important insight into the trade-offs elected decision makers confront between the benefits of adopting Pareto efficient policies, that frequently have the effect of increasing inequality, and the costs associated with voters punishing the government for what are likely to be unpopular policies for a significant element of the electorate. We implement a game resembling a collective Dictator game with punishment. The experimental results presented here confirm that Voter subjects do in fact punish unfair allocations by Party subjects. As allocations become increasingly unfair in regards to the recipients, the level of punishment increases -- a result consistent with much of the work on games of this nature. And there is some evidence that this punishment will be greater for decision makers with majority, as opposed to equally shared, voting power. Finally there is support for the conjecture posed in the title of this paper: Decision makers anticipate two features of the voters' punishment strategies: First they anticipate that voters will punish decision makers for unfair decisions -- and the more unfair the decision, the higher the punishment. Second, decision makers with more concentrated voting power anticipate that they will be held disproportionately responsible for unfair allocation decisions and therefore are less likely to support allocations -- or policies -- that may be Pareto efficient but result in inequitable outcomes.
The Design and Implementation of the Synchronous Language CÉU

CéU is a synchronous language targeting soft real-time systems. It is inspired by Esterel and has a simple semantics with fine-grain control over program execution. CéU uses an event-triggered notion of time that enables compile-time checks to detect conflicting concurrent statements, resulting in deterministic and concurrency-safe programs. We present the particularities of our design in comparison to Esterel, such as stack-based internal events, concurrency checks, safe integration with C, and first-class timers. We also present two implementation back ends: one aiming for resource efficiency and interoperability with C, and another as a virtual machine that allows remote reprogramming.
Long-Period Pulses in Broadband Records of Near Earthquakes

Broadband records of weak local earthquakes occasionally exhibit long-period, pulselike signals, appearing exclusively on horizontal components. Such signals have been recorded at station Sergoula in the Corinth Gulf by Guralp CMG-3T (100-sec) and Wielandt-Streckeisen STS-2 (120-sec) instruments. The pulses can be perfectly matched by the instrumental responses to a small step of acceleration. Similar pulses, observed during moderate near earthquakes at stations of the Greek National Network equipped with Lennartz Le-3D/20s (20-sec) sensors, can be explained in the same way. Numerical simulation of the pulses allows their removal, thus making the records fully utilizable for waveform inversion in seismic source studies. Prerequisite for that is precise knowledge of the instrument transfer function. We found that poles and zeros of the CMG-3T and STS-2 sensors were consistent with those given by the manufacturer, whereas those of the LE-3D/20s were not. We identified the latter by inversion of spontaneous pulses incidentally appearing in LE-3D/20s records without relation to any earthquake. What actually generates the earthquake-related horizontal acceleration steps remains unclear. Rapid and permanently lasting tilt is a very likely candidate. When we numerically model a coseismic near-field static displacement, we actually find a tilt step, but its amplitude is several orders below the observed values. We therefore rather speculate that it is a very local tilt, triggered by high-frequency ground vibrations.
[Return to work following work-related orthopaedic rehabilitation: a cluster randomized trial].

BACKGROUND Since the 1990s work-related programmes became more important in orthopaedic rehabilitation. However, in Germany orthopaedic rehabilitation initially focussed on improvements in evaluating functional capacity and on the development of appropriate modules of exercise therapy while psychosocial work demands have been less considered in the rehabilitation process so far. OBJECTIVE Aims of the study were implementation and efficacy evaluation of an intensified multimodal work-related programme following a cognitive behavioural approach. METHODS Participants were patients with substantial work-related problems. Included patients were randomized in groups either to the work-related programme or to the common orthopaedic rehabilitation (cluster randomization). Primary outcome was return to work. Analyses were based on post-treatment data and data after six months. RESULTS 236 (86.8%) patients consented to participate. Questionnaires at post-treatment were completed by 155 (65.7%) persons and after six months by 169 (71.6%) persons. The medical performance evaluation given in the discharge letters documented a better performance of the intervention group (positive capacity: p=0.037; negative capacity: p=0.016). This evaluation was also reflected by the patients' evaluation at post-treatment. Participants of the intervention group reported higher work-related self-efficacy (p<0.001) and felt that they are better prepared for the time after their rehabilitation (p=0.006). After six months participants of the intervention group had a 2.4-fold higher chance (p=0.007) of returning to work, reported a better mental condition (HADS depression: p=0.014; SF-36 Mental Health Index: p=0.026) and a more salutary work-related behaviour (AVEM striving for perfection: p=0.012). Regarding physical outcomes both groups achieved moderate to high effects. CONCLUSIONS Results of the trial confirm that an intensified work-related programme with a well-defined multimodal composition like the one presented here is able to enhance the chances of participation in working life for patients with substantial work-related problems.
Effect of 5-HT1 agonist (sumatriptan) on anorectal function in irritable bowel syndrome patients.

AIM To evaluate the effect of sumatriptan, a selective 5-HT1 agonist, on anorectal function in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients. METHODS Twenty-two IBS patients selected according to the Rome II criteria (F 15, M 7; mean age 29.3+/-6.8, range 22-44 years) were examined. The study was blind, randomized and placebo-controlled with a crossover design. Anorectal manometry and rectal balloon distension test were performed before and after the administration of placebo and sumatriptan. RESULTS The administration of sumatriptan caused a significant increase in the resting anal canal pressure from 9.2+/-2.0 kPa to 13.1+/-3.3 kPa (P<0.0001) connected with the increase in the anal sphincter length and high pressure zone. After sumatriptan injection a remarkable increase in the threshold for the first sensation from 27+/-9 mL to 34+/-12 mL (P<0.05) and urge sensation from 61+/-19 mL to 68+/-18 mL (P<0.01) was observed. Sumatriptan did not affect either the volume evoking the rectoanal inhibitory reflex or the results of the straining test. CONCLUSION 5-HT1 receptors participate in the regulation of anorectal function. Elucidation of the role of 5-HT1 receptors in the pathophysiological mechanisms of IBS may have some therapeutic implications.
A novel strategy for preventing PERV transmission to human cells by remodeling the viral envelope glycoprotein

Miyagawa S, Nakatsu S, Hazama K, Nakagawa T, Kondo A, Matsunami K, Yamamoto A, Yamada J, Miyazawa T, Shirakura R. A novel strategy for preventing PERV transmission to human cells by remodeling the viral envelope glycoprotein. Xenotransplantation 2006; 13: 258–263. © Blackwell Munksgaard, 2006
Whole body and brain distribution of [3H]cyclic [D-Pen2,D-Pen5] enkephalin after intraperitoneal, intravenous, oral and subcutaneous administration.

The route of administration of a given drug can have a significant influence upon whole body distribution. The present study examined whole body distribution of the delta opioid receptor-selective peptide [3H]DPDPE in male CD1 mice after administration by several routes. Additionally, we describe regional brain distribution of [3H]DPDPE after i.v. administration with and without pretreatment with naloxone or the selective delta receptor antagonist naltrindole. Finally, characterization of the inherent enzymatic stability of DPDPE was also examined. Intravenous administration results in a significantly large amount of [3H]DPDPE in the small intestine and flush at 15 and 30 min postadministration, suggesting rapid biliary excretion. The highest level in the brain after i.v. administration occurred at 60 min (0.08%). After i.p. and s.c. administration, large amounts of [3H]DPDPE were found in the small intestine and flush, but not until 60 min postadministration, suggesting a slower rate of absorption from the site of administration. The i.p. and s.c. groups' brain levels peaked at 120 min (0.07 and 0.09%, respectively). The highest levels in the brain after p.o. administration were seen at 240 min (0.03%). Examination of regional brain distribution data showed no significant difference in the levels of [3H]DPDPE between brain regions at any time point studied. However, naloxone pretreatment resulted in significant reductions of [3H]DPDPE in all brain regions at 5 and 10 min. Naltrindole pretreatment resulted in significant reductions in the frontal cortex and striatum at 5 and/or 10 min postadministration, but had no effect on [3H]DPDPE levels in cerebellum, hippocampus or brain stem. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Why do we need a statin trial in hemodialysis patients?

BACKGROUND The risk of cardiovascular complications is markedly increased in patients on dialysis treatment. This includes cardiac disease, stroke, and peripheral vascular disease. The mortality in dialysis patients is markedly higher compared to a nonuremic population. There are several cardiovascular (CV) risk factors that are unique to this population, one of which is dyslipidemia. Uremic patients do not usually develop hypercholesterolemia, but rather are characterized by high levels of very low density lipoprotein (VLDL) triglycerides, low high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and elevated levels of modified low density lipoprotein (LDL) particles, which are particularly harmful to the vascular wall. HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins) have been proven to be very efficient in reducing CV events in a nonrenal population. There are several landmark trials that have demonstrated that statins reduce the mortality in cardiovascular disease (CVD) in populations with normal, or close to normal, renal function. There are some observational registry data indicating that this may also be true in hemodialysis (HD) patients, but no prospective controlled trial has been performed to date. METHODS We present the rationale for, and a brief outline of, a randomized placebo-controlled trial using a novel drug, rosuvastatin, in HD patients, to target cardiovascular events (the AURORA study). This study will include close to 3000 male and female HD patients, aged 50-80 years. The study is event driven and it has been estimated that it will run for a follow-up time close to four years. CONCLUSION There is a sound rationale for making a randomized placebo-controlled statin trial in HD patients, with the objective to demonstrate an effect on CV mortality and morbidity.