Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Communicating Air Quality Information: Experimental Evaluation of Alternative Formats

A long‐running effort in environmental communication is daily publication of a report on local air pollution in many American newspapers based on the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI). A 1998 proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) to change the PSI prompted a survey experiment with 1,100 adults in Philadelphia, evaluating the proposed change's ability to better inform the populace. The effects of exposure to the old and new versions of the PSI, as well as health cautions and information about groups sensitive to air pollution, were compared with evaluation criteria suggested by Weinstein and Sandman (1993) . Sample respondents had strong baseline concerns about air pollution. Descriptors of air quality (e.g., “good; ”“unhealthy”) were difficult to discriminate, particularly in the New format. Concern rose as hypothetical air pollution levels rose, but the New format (as well as PSI versions without health cautions or sensitive‐group information) evoked a sharp discontinuity in concern between below‐ and above‐standard pollution levels. Both Old and New formats reduced concern relative to no provision of PSI information at all, but the New format reduced concern significantly more than the Old version. No PSI format did particularly well at increasing knowledge of air pollution or decreasing intentions to be active outdoors during high pollution, contrary to the agency's aim. Although U.S. EPA has since adopted the new proposal as a national “Air Quality Index” requirement, the experiment's results illuminate the strengths and limitations of the new PSI as a means of informing citizens and motivating them to protect themselves.
Neuroimaging of Stroke: A Review

Advances in neuroimaging technology during the past 30 years have resulted in a virtual explosion in the amount of pathologic information that can be obtained in the clinical stroke setting. This neuroimaging revolution has led to a much better understanding of cerebrovascular and tissue pathology, creating a wide array of opportunities for acute treatment and secondary prevention. Advances include early and accurate detection of ischemic and infarcted tissue and the ability to reveal hypoperfused tissue at risk. Clinicians are increasingly able to noninvasively detect embolic and atherothrombotic intravascular lesions. Vascular lesions associated with stroke can be characterized through endovascular neuroimaging techniques and repaired by various means. In this article, we provide an overview and update on the various techniques used in the neuroimaging of stroke and intracranial hemorrhage, including computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, and catheter angiography. We outline the specific role of each modality in clinical practice.
Fluorescence in Situ Hybridization: Molecular Probes for Diagnosis of Pediatric Neoplastic Diseases

Abstract Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) has become an important tool for diagnosing neoplasia in children. With probes designed to identify specific chromosomes and chromosomal regions, FISH is commonly used to detect the specific chromosomal abnormalities associated with hematologic diseases and solid tumors. Variations of FISH currently being investigated, such as comparative genomic hybridization, multicolor FISH, and microchip arrays, will probably result in additional uses of FISH in both research and clinical cytogenetic laboratories. Although FISH has disadvantages when compared with conventional cytogenetics and molecular methods, FISH will continue to be important in analyzing chromosomal abnormalities of tumors in children.
Chinese‐white differences in the distribution of occlusive cerebrovascular disease

The distribution of cerebrovascular lesions is affected by race. Blacks and Japanese have more intracranial occlusive cerebrovascular disease, while whites have more extracranial disease. Despite a high incidence of stroke in China, there are few formal studies of the distribution of vascular occlusive disease in Chinese populations. We compared clinical and angiographic features of 24 white and 24 Chinese patients with symptomatic occlusive cerebrovascular disease. In symptomatic vascular territories, whites had more severe (≥50% stenosis) extracranial lesions, while Chinese had more severe intracranial lesions. When we counted mild and severe lesions in a symptomatic territory, whites had more extracranial lesions while Chinese had more intracranial lesions. When we combined symptomatic and asymptomatic temtories, whites had more extracranial lesions, while Chinese had more intracranial lesions. White patients reported more transient ischemic attacks. The distribution of lesions, however, was not explained by differences in incidence of transient ischemia, hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterol-emia, or ischemic heart disease between the groups. The preponderance of intracranial vascular lesions in Chinese patients is similar to that seen in blacks and Japanese. Racial differences in the occurrence of extracranial and intracranial lesions raise the possibility of a different underlying pathophysiology for the 2 locations.
Correction of ultra wide-band radio frequency interference in SAR data using nonnegative matrix factorization

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a major issue for synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and would affect the image quality and image interpretation. The majority of existing methods are applied on each azimuth echoes along range direction with the assumption that bandwidth of RFI is less than that of SAR. However, if SAR echoes are contaminated by ultra wide-band RFI, i.e., the bandwidth of RFI is relatively larger than the transmitted signal, traditional methods would fail due to large signal loss. In this paper, we discussed the characteristics of ultra wide-band RFI, and proposed a mitigation method using nonnegative matrix factorization along azimuth direction. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Preclinical factors affecting the pharmacokinetic behaviour of tanshinone IIA, an investigational new drug isolated from Salvia miltiorrhiza for the treatment of ischaemic heart diseases

Tanshinone IIA (TSIIA) is a major active triterpenoid isolated from Salvia miltiorrhiza. The purposes of this study were to investigate various preclinical factors that determined the pharmacokinetics of TSIIA. After oral dosing at 6.7, 20, and 60 mg kg−1, TSIIA was detected mainly as glucuronidated conjugate (TSIIAG) with only small amounts of the unchanged in the plasma. TSIIA was predominantly excreted into the bile and faeces as TSIIAG, and urine to a minor extent. The Cmax and AUC0−t of TSIIAG after i.p. administration were significantly lower than those after intragastric administration. The plasma concentration–time profiles of TSIIA following oral dosing of TSIIA showed multiple peaks. The Cmax and AUC0−t of TSIIA and its glucuronides in rats with intact bile duct were significantly lower than those of rats with bile duct cannulation. Studies from the linked-rat model and intraduodenal injection of bile containing TSIIA and its metabolites indicate that TSIIA glucuronides underwent hydrolysis and the aglycone was reabsorbed from the gut and excreted into the bile as conjugates. TSIIA had a wide tissue distribution, with a very high accumulation in the lung, but very limited penetration into the brain and testes. TSIIA was metabolized by rat CYP2C, 3A and 2D, as ticlopidine, ketoconazole and quinidine all inhibited TSIIA metabolism in rat liver microsomes. Taken collectively, these findings indicate that multiple factors play important roles in determining the pharmacokinetics of TSIIA.
An empirical analysis on SVD based recommendation techniques

Recommender systems are used to accurately provide users with information or services of their interest. Collaborative filtering is a widely used recommendation approach. However, the data sparsity and cold-start user problems, often limit the recommendation performance and quality. To address such issues, matrix factorization techniques based on Singular Value Decomposition have well emerged. These techniques map users and items into low dimensional latent feature spaces, and use them for recommendation tasks. Matrix factorization techniques have evolved from utilizing simpler user-item rating information to utilizing auxiliary information of time or trust, to improvise the predictive accuracy of recommenders. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis on such techniques and explore the changes observed in recommendation performance by the usage of auxiliary information.
Does Monitoring Improve Labor Standards?: Lessons from Nike

Using a unique data set based on factory audits of working conditions in over 800 of Nike's suppliers in 51 countries, this paper seeks to explore whether or not monitoring for compliance with corporate codes of conduct - currently the principal way both global corporations and labor rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) address poor working conditions in global supply chain factories - actually lead to remediation in terms of improved working conditions and enforced labor rights. The evidence presented suggests that notwithstanding the significant efforts and investments by Nike and its staff to improve working conditions among its suppliers, monitoring alone appears to produce only limited results. Instead, our research indicates that when monitoring efforts are combined with other interventions focused on tackling some of the root causes of poor working conditions - by improving the ability of suppliers to better schedule their work and improve their quality and efficiency - working conditions appear to significantly improve. This suggests that the current (highly polarized) debates over monitoring and labor standards need to be recast and new, more systemic approaches towards tackling these problems need to be pursued.
A study of the applicability of recommender systems for the Production and Distributed Analysis system PanDA of the ATLAS Experiment

Scientific computing has advanced in the ways it deals with massive amounts of data, since the production capacities have increased significantly for the last decades. Most large science experiments require vast computing and data storage resources in order to provide results or predictions based on the data obtained. For scientific distributed computing systems with hundreds of petabytes of data and thousands of users it is important to keep track not just of how data is distributed in the system, but also of individual users’ interests in the distributed data (reveal implicit interconnection between user and data objects). This however requires the collection and use of specific statistics such as correlations between data distribution, the mechanics of data distribution, and mainly user preferences. This work focuses on user activities (specifically, data usages) and interests in such a distributed computing system, namely PanDA (Production ANd Distributed Analysis system). PanDA is a high-performance workload management system originally designed to meet production and analysis requirements for a data-driven workload at the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid for the ATLAS Experiment hosted at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). In this work we are going to investigate whether data collection that was gathered in the past in PanDA shows any trends indicating that users could have mutual interests that would be kept for the next data usages (i.e., data usage patterns), using data mining techniques such as association analysis, sequential pattern mining, and basics of the recommender system approach. We will show that such common interests between users indeed exist and thus could be used to provide recommendations (in terms of the collaborative filtering) to help users with their data selection process.
The Interaction of Acanthamoeba spp. with Activated Macrophages and with Macrophage Cell Lines

Acanthamoeba spp. are free‐living amebae associated with amebic keratitis and chronic granulomatous amebic encephalitis. The present studies were undertaken to compare the pathogenicity of three species of Acanthamoeba in B6C3F1 mice after intranasal challenge with Acanthamoeba‐induced cytopathogenicity for different macrophage populations. The ability of murine macrophage cell lines and activated murine peritoneal macrophages to lyse Acanthamoeba has been assessed by coincubating macrophages with 3H‐uridine labeled amebae. Conversely, destruction of macrophages by Acanthamoeba was determined by measuring the release of chro‐mium‐51 from radiolabeled macrophages. Acanthamoeba culbensoni, which is highly pathogenic for mice, destroys macrophage cultures in vitro. Activated primary peritoneal macrophages were more resistant to Acanthamoeba‐mediated destruction than macrophage cell lines activated in vitro. Activated macrophages were capable of limited destruction of Acanthamoeba polyphaga and Acanthamoeba castellanii. Acanthamoeba‐specific antibodies increased the amebicidal activity of activated macrophages. Macrophage‐mediated destruction was by contact‐dependent cytolysis and by ingestion of amebae. Conditioned medium obtained from macrophage cultures after treatment with lipopolysaccharide and interferon gamma was neither cytolytic nor cytostatic for Acanthamoeba spp. Purified recombinant cytokines including tumor necrosis factor α. interleukin 1α, and interleukin 1β, alone or in combination, were not cytolytic for Acanthamoeba trophozoites.
IL-9 Is a Susceptibility Factor in Leishmania major Infection by Promoting Detrimental Th2/Type 2 Responses1

IL-9 is a cytokine produced by Th2 cells, induced during Leishmania major infection. Because the role of IL-9 in leishmaniasis is currently unknown, IL-9-deficient mice were generated by immunization with mouse IL-9 coupled to OVA. This produced strong and long-lasting neutralizing anti-IL-9 Abs in vivo. Anti-IL-9 vaccination showed protective effects, because it enabled L. major-infected nonhealer BALB/c mice to better resist to leishmaniasis with doubling the time span until pathological disease progression occurred. Increased resistance was also demonstrated by moderate footpad swelling and histopathology due to reduced parasite burden compared with sham-immunized BALB/c mice. Mechanistically, IL-9 neutralization in BALB/c mice resulted in a reduction of detrimental Th2/type 2 responses with an observed shift toward protective Th1 immune responses. This led to an alteration from alternative to classical macrophage activation with subsequent enhanced killing effector functions, as demonstrated by increased NO production but reduced arginase 1-mediated macrophage responses. Conclusively, the data show that IL-9 is a susceptible factor in leishmaniasis. They further suggest that IL-9 is able to influence Th dichotomy in leishmaniasis by promoting detrimental Th2/type 2 responses in BALB/c mice. The results extend efforts made to generate autoantibodies capable of regulating biological processes, with IL-9 a potential drug target against leishmaniasis.
Optimisation and validation of a medium-throughput electrophysiology-based hNav1.5 assay using IonWorks.

INTRODUCTION The safety implications of blocking the human cardiac Na(+) channel (hNav1.5) make it prudent to test for this activity early in the drug discovery process and design-out any potential liability. This needs a method with adequate throughput and a demonstrable predictive value to effects in native cardiac tissues. Here we describe the validation of a method that combines the ability to screen tens of compounds a day, with direct assessment of channel function. METHODS The electrophysiological and pharmacological properties of hNav1.5 were compared using two methods: conventional, low-throughput electrophysiology and planar-array-based, medium-throughput electrophysiology (IonWorks HT). A pharmacological comparison was also made between IonWorks HT and canine cardiac Purkinje Fibre action potential upstroke data. RESULTS Activation curve parameters for hNav1.5 in IonWorks HT were not statistically different (p>0.05) from those generated using conventional electrophysiology. IonWorks HT V(1/2)=-22+/-0.8 mV, slope=6.9+/-0.2 (n=11); conventional electrophysiology V(1/2)=-20+/-1.6 mV, slope=6.4+/-0.3 (n=11). Potency values for a range of hNav1.5 blockers determined using IonWorks HT correlated closely with those obtained using conventional electrophysiology (R=0.967, p<0.001). The assay was able to distinguish between highly use-dependent blockers (e.g. tetracaine) and blockers that do not display strong use-dependence (e.g. quinidine). Comparison of the degree of hNav1.5 inhibition and decrease in canine Purkinje fibre action potential upstroke velocity (V(max)) showed that the IonWorks HT assay would have predicted the outcome in Purkinje fibres in the majority of cases, with false negative and positive rates estimated at 8 and 7%, respectively. Finally, hNav1.5 pharmacology was similar when determined using either IonWorks HT or IonWorks Quattro, although the latter yielded more consistent data. DISCUSSION The assay described combines a functional assessment of hNav1.5 with medium-throughput. Furthermore the assay was able to reveal information on the use-dependency of compound block, as well as predicting Na(+) channel effects in more integrated systems such as the cardiac Purkinje fibre action potential. This makes it possible to determine quantitative potency data, and mechanistic information about use-dependence, in a timeframe short enough to influence medicinal chemistry.
Retrieval of Emissivity and Temperature Profile in Polar Regions

Polar regions are composed of different surface types, e.g., open water, land ice and different types of sea ice. As a consequence the retrieval of near surface atmospheric parameters (temperature, humidity etc.) is restricted due to the high and highly variable surface emissivity except for open water. The surface emissivities are retrieved using the brightness temperatures at window channels of the cross-track scanning advanced microwave sounding unit (AMSU) satellite radiometer. The emissivities are practically constant up to local zenith angles of 45deg. Comparison of temperature profiles retrieved from AMSU is done with the radiosonde measurements. The root mean square deviations from the measurements is 2 K. Near the surface it increases up to 6 K.
Détection de changements de distribution dans un flux de données : une approche supervisée

Résumé. L’analyse de flux de données traite des données massives grâce à des algorithmes en ligne qui évitent le stockage exhaustif des données. La détection de changements dans la distribution d’un flux est une question importante dont les applications potentielles sont nombreuses. Dans cet article, la détection de changement est transposée en un problème d’apprentissage supervisé. Nous avons choisi d’utiliser la méthode de discrétisation supervisée MODL car celle-ci présente des propriétés intéressantes. Notre approche est comparée favorablement à une méthode de l’état-de-l’art sur des flux de données artificiels.
Temperature Independent Optical Amplification in Uncooled Quantum Dot Optical Amplifiers

1.3 μm QD SOAs are shown to provide 19 dB optical gain at temperatures up to 70 °C, allowing <; 0.1 dB system penalty at 10 Gb/s. The gain is constant to within ± 3.5 dB from 20°C-70°C for 10 nm spectral bandwidth.
Cigarette Smoking and Incident Chronic Kidney Disease: A Systematic Review

Background: Several studies have examined the role of cigarette smoking in the development of renal disease in human populations. However, there have been no systematic reviews on the evidence linking smoking with incident renal disease. Methods: We performed an evidence-based evaluation of peer-reviewed research published during 1966–2005, from a search of five databases, including Ovid MEDLINE and EMBASE. Results: Of the 28 studies that were reviewed, 11 were excluded from the final analysis due to poor methodological quality (n = 6), no reported risk estimate for the association between smoking and kidney disease (n = 3), inability to find a Japanese translator (n = 1), and duplicate cohort (n = 1). Seventeen studies were included in the final analysis; seven studies found an overall significant association between smoking and incident chronic kidney disease, and three studies found a significantly increased risk of chronic kidney disease in current smokers that was gender and/or dose related. An increased risk of developing chronic kidney disease among smokers was significantly associated with male gender (relative risk 2.4, 95% confidence interval 1.2–4.5), >20 cigarettes smoked/day (odds ratio 1.51, 95% confidence interval 1.06–2.15, and relative risk 2.3, 95% confidence interval 1.2–4.3), and smoking >40 years (odds ratio 1.45, 95% confidence interval 1.00–2.09). A pooled estimate of the relative risk (meta-analysis) was deemed inappropriate due to the heterogeneity in methodologies utilized by the different studies. Conclusions: This comprehensive review reveals overall evidence for current cigarette smoking as a risk factor for incident chronic kidney disease. Further investigation is needed to more carefully examine the strength of the association between cigarette smoking and incident kidney disease.
Local Canvassing: The Efficacy of Grassroots Voter Mobilization

This article offers empirical evidence supporting a relationship between social influence and voter turnout by comparing the effectiveness of face-to-face get-out-the-vote visits by canvassers living in a voter's local neighborhood against visits by canvassers from other neighborhoods. We analyze data from a randomized campaign conducted by a local community outreach group during the 2006 general election. We utilize natural variations in the assignment of canvassers to determine that the effect of being contacted by the campaign is higher in precincts where some canvassers were working in their own neighborhood. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: alternative specifications of the analysis using fixed effects (Table A1), separating out precincts where there was any local canvassing from where there was none (Table A2), a balance check for the randomization (Table A3), and descriptions of the contact rate and treatment effect excluding outliers (Figures A1 and A2). ]
Transcription of genes encoding DNA replication proteins is coincident with cell cycle control of DNA replication in Caulobacter crescentus

DNA replication in the dimorphic bacterium Caulobacter crescentus is tightly linked to its developmental cell cycle. The initiation of chromosomal replication occurs concomitantly with the transition of the motile swarmer cell to the sessile stalked cell. To identify the signals responsible for the cell cycle control of DNA replication initiation, we have characterized a region of the C. crescentus chromosome containing genes that are all involved in DNA replication or recombination, including dnaN, recF, and gyrB. The essential dnaN gene encodes a homolog of the Escherichia coli beta subunit of DNA polymerase III. It is transcribed from three promoters; one is heat inducible, and the other two are induced at the transition from swarmer to stalked cell, coincident with the initiation of DNA replication. The single gyrB promoter is induced at the same time point in the cell cycle. These promoters, as well as those for several other genes encoding DNA replication proteins that are induced at the same time in the cell cycle, share two sequence motifs, suggesting that they represent a family whose transcription is coordinately regulated.