Asthma is a chronic lung inflammation which affects many people. As current therapies for asthma mainly rely on administration of glucocorticoids and have many side effects, new therapy is needed. In this study, we investigated Nepeta bracteata Benth., a traditional Uygur Herb, for its therapeutics effect in OVA induced asthmatic mice model. Treatment of OVA sensitized asthma mice with extract ...

Pleiotropic regulatory mutations affect diverse cellular processes, posing a challenge to our understanding of genotype-phenotype relationships across multiple biological scales. Adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) allows for such mutations to be found and characterized in the context of clear selection pressures. Here, several ALE-selected single-mutation variants in RNA polymerase (RNAP) of E...

Frequency control rebalances supply and demand while maintaining the network state within operational margins. It is implemented using fast ramping reserves that are expensive and non-renewable, and which are expected to grow with the increasing penetration of renewables. The most promising solution to this problem is the use of demand response, i.e. load participation in frequency control. Yet...

Recent network analysis research has made remarkable progress on studying complex networks in a social context with machine learning techniques. One example of such a complex network is the system data of the New York Citibike bike sharing program, which consists of the data from 49 million bike trips in New York City since July 2013. By inspecting the dataset, we find out that significantly mo...

Adopting Time-to-Live (TTL) based hierarchical caching systems is considered to be a viable approach to support Web content delivery under the weak consistency paradigm. However, with a strictly hierarchical structure in these systems, a single user request may trigger multiple consecutive miss events at cache servers of different levels. This undesirable miss synchronization can cause a sudden...

Institutional fund managers generally rebalance using ad hoc methods such as calendar basis or tolerance band triggers. We propose a different framework that quantifies the cost of a rebalancing strategy in terms of risk-adjusted returns net of transaction costs. We then develop an optimal rebalancing strategy that actively seeks to minimize that cost. We use certainty equivalents and the trans...

According to the sensorimotor account, vision does not imply the construction of internally generated representations of the environment, but it is the skillful exercise of the sensorimotor contingencies obeying sense-specific laws. In this short study, I focus on the notion of “sensorimotor law” and characterize the kind of explanation provided by the sensorimotor theory as a form of covering ...

Many institutional and individual investors have an asset allocation policy that calls for investing a specified percentage of the total value of a portfolio in each of several asset classes. To conform with such a policy as market values change requires selling assets that performed relatively well and buying those that performed relatively poorly. Such a strategy is clearly contrarian and can...

In this paper we compare different data mining methods and techniques for classifying students based on their Moodle usage data and the final marks obtained in their respective courses. We have developed a specific mining tool for making the configuration and execution of data mining techniques easier for instructors. We have used real data from seven Moodle courses with Cordoba University stud...

This paper analyzes the persistence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-scores in socially responsible (SR) mutual funds. ESG-scores can be used as a measure for the level of social responsibility of an SR mutual fund. It is shown that ESG-scores persist for approximately two years. However, the persistence of the ESG-scores is terminated after approximately three years. This implies...