An Adaptive Load Balance and Handoff Management Strategy for Hierarchical Infrastructure Networks

Hierarchical cellular networks that employ microcells with overlaying macrocells have been proposed to increase the traffic-carrying capacity and circuit quality. Variations in the traffic loads among cells will lessen the traffic-carrying capacity. Moreover, the handoff procedure usually takes place when the call crosses the cell boundary. An ineffective management will increase the system overheads, such as channel switch, data switch, and even network switch. The invetigation proposes an effective load balance and handoff management strategy. This strategy are implemented to solve traffic-adaption problem that can enhance the traffic-carrying capacity for variations in traffic. For the management of handoff procedure, our strategy considers the mobility of mobile hosts and the bandwidth utilization in macrocells. It can descrease the number of handoffs and, accordingly, lessen the system overhead. Furthermore, the simulation results are presented to confirm the efficiency of the proposed strategy

How Does Social Media Interactivity Affect Brand Loyalty?

As social media has become a prominent platform for networking, many organizations have begun to establish more than one brand community, as a set of supplements to their branded websites. Once most online brand interactions take place on social networking sites rather than branded sites, such customer-oriented interactions will become much more complicated and unpredictable. It is a real challenge for organizations to build successful customer-brand relationships through social networking sites. Hence, organizations that wish to enhance brand loyalty by running brand communities face the challenge of effectively conducting social customer relationship management (CRM) tactics. As social media users are susceptible to highly interactive features, understanding the nature of social media interactivity in brand communities is the key to building successful social CRM. The aim of the study is to investigate not only the effect of social media interactivity on community benefits, but also the effect of community benefits on brand loyalty. In addition to measuring the direct effects of social influence and media richness on brand loyalty, the study assessed the indirect effect of responsiveness on brand loyalty by means of community benefits, including knowledge gains and sense of membership. The results, based on data collected from 229 social media users who are followers of a Super Basketball League (SBL) team’s Facebook page, indicated that media richness had a strong, positive, and direct effect on brand loyalty, and that responsiveness had direct effects on their knowledge gains and their sense of membership, which in turn affected brand loyalty indirectly

Albumin fibrillization induces apoptosis via integrin/FAK/Akt pathway

[[abstract]]Background: Numerous proteins can be converted to amyloid-like fibrils to increase cytotoxicity and induce apoptosis, but the methods generally require a high concentration of protein, vigorous shaking, or fibril seed. As well, the detailed mechanism of the cytotoxic effects is not well characterized. In this study, we have developed a novel process to convert native proteins into the fibrillar form. We used globular bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a model protein to verify the properties of the fibrillar protein, investigated its cellular effects and studied the signaling cascade induced by the fibrillar protein. Results: We induced BSA, a non-cytotoxic globular protein, to become fibril by a novel process involving Superdex-200 column chromatography in the presence of anionic or zwittergenic detergent(s). The column pore size was more important than column matrix composite in fibril formation. The fibrillar BSA induced apoptosis in BHK-21 cell as well as breast cancer cell line T47D. Pre-treating cells with anti-integrin antibodies blocked the apoptotic effect. Fibrillar BSA, but not globular BSA, bound to integrin, dephosphorylated focal adhesion kinase (FAK), Akt and glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β). Conclusion: We report on a novel process for converting globular proteins into fibrillar form to cause apoptosis by modulating the integrin/FAK/Akt/GSK-3β/caspase-3 signaling pathway. Our findings may be useful for understanding the pathogenesis of amyloid-like fibrils and applicable for the development of better therapeutic agents that target the underlying mechanism(s) of the etiologic agents. ? 2009 Huang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

Antioxidant activity and growth inhibition of human colon cancer cells by crude and purified fucoidan preparations extracted from Sargassum cristaefolium

AbstractFucose-containing sulfated polysaccharides, also termed “fucoidans”, which are known to possess antioxidant, anticoagulant, anticancer, antiviral, and immunomodulating properties, are normally isolated from brown algae via various extraction techniques. In the present study, two methods (SC1 and SC2) for isolation of fucoidan from Sargassum cristaefolium were compared, with regard to the extraction yields, antioxidant activity, and inhibition of growth of human colon cancer cells exhibited by the respective extracts. SC1 and SC2 differ in the number of extraction steps and concentration of ethanol used, as well as the obtained sulfated polysaccharide extracts, namely, crude fucoidan preparation (CFP) and purified fucoidan preparation (PFP), respectively. Thin layer chromatography, Fourier transform infrared analysis, and measurements of fucose and sulfate contents revealed that the extracts were fucoidan. There was a higher extraction yield for CFP, which contained less fucose and sulfate but more uronic acid, and had weaker antioxidant activity and inhibition of growth in human colon cancer cells. In contrast, there was a lower extraction yield for PFP, which contained more fucose and sulfate but less uronic acid, and had stronger antioxidant activity and inhibition of growth in human colon cancer cells. Thus, since the difference in bioactive activities between CFP and PFP was not remarkable, the high extraction yield of SC1 might be favored as a method in industrial usage for extracting fucoidan

Efficient (k, n) : threshold secret sharing method with cheater prevention for QR code application

To protect secret message, secret sharing technique divides it into n shares and distributes them to n involved participants. However, it is hardly to prevent a dishonest participant to cheat other by providing a fake share. To overcome this weakness, this paper presents an efficient (k, n)-threshold secret sharing approach with the functionality of cheater identification using meaningful QR codes. The secret message would be split into k pieces, and used as the coefficients of polynomial function to generate n shares. These shares would be concealed into cover QR codes based on its fault tolerance to generate meaningful QR code shares. The meaningful QR code shares are helpful to reduce the curiosity of unrelated persons when transmitted in public channel. The legitimacy of QR code share would be verified before secret reconstruction to prevent cheater in secret revealing procedure. Some experiments were done to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is efficient, highly secure and highly robust, and it also achieves a higher embedding capacity compared to previous methods

Spontaneous Dissecting Aneurysm of the Renal Artery: A Case Report

Primary dissecting aneurysms of the renal artery are exceedingly rare. The triad of flank pain, hematuria, and hypertension of acute onset in the absence of urinary obstruction should suggest this rare condition. We report a case of spontaneous dissecting aneurysm of the renal artery treated using conservative medical treatment. The diagnosis, therapeutic management, and outcome are discussed

Inhibitory effects of armepavine against hepatic fibrosis in rats

Activation of hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) plays a crucial role in liver fibrogenesis. armepavine (Arm, C19H23O3N), an active compound from Nelumbo nucifera, has been shown to exert immunosuppressive effects on T lymphocytes and on lupus nephritic mice. The aim of this study was to investigate whether Arm could exert anti-hepatic fibrogenic effects in vitro and in vivo. A cell line of rat HSCs (HSC-T6) was stimulated with tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) or lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to evaluate the inhibitory effects of Arm. An in vivo therapeutic study was conducted in bile duct-ligated (BDL) rats. BDL rats were given Arm (3 or 10 mg/kg) by gavage twice daily for 3 weeks starting from the onset of BDL. Liver sections were taken for fibrosis scoring, immuno-fluorescence staining and quantitative real-time mRNA measurements. In vitro, Arm (1-10 μM) concentration-dependently attenuated TNF-α- and LPS-stimulated α-SMA protein expression and AP-1 activation by HSC-T6 cells without adverse cytotoxicity. Arm also suppressed TNF-α-induced collagen collagen deposition, NFκB activation and MAPK (p38, ERK1/2, and JNK) phosphorylations. In vivo, Arm treatment significantly reduced plasma AST and ALT levels, hepatic α-SMA expression and collagen contents, and fibrosis scores of BDL rats as compared with vehicle treatment. Moreover, Arm attenuated the mRNA expression levels of col 1α2, TGF-β1, TIMP-1, ICAM-1, iNOS, and IL-6 genes, but up-regulated metallothionein genes. Our study results showed that Arm exerted both in vitro and in vivo antifibrotic effects in rats, possibly through anti-NF-κB activation pathways

Super-resolution generative adversarial network based on the dual dimension attention mechanism for biometric image super-resolution

There exist many types of intelligent security sensors in the environment of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. Among them, the sensor for biometrics is one of the most important types. Biometric sensors capture the physiological or behavioral features of a person, which can be further processed with cloud computing to verify or identify the user. However, a low-resolution (LR) biometrics image causes the loss of feature details and reduces the recognition rate hugely. Moreover, the lack of resolution negatively affects the performance of image-based biometric technology. From a practical perspective, most of the IoT devices suffer from hardware constraints and the low-cost equipment may not be able to meet various requirements, particularly for image resolution, because it asks for additional storage to store high-resolution (HR) images, and a high bandwidth to transmit the HR image. Therefore, how to achieve high accuracy for the biometric system without using expensive and high-cost image sensors is an interesting and valuable issue in the field of intelligent security sensors. In this paper, we proposed DDA-SRGAN, which is a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based super-resolution (SR) framework using the dual-dimension attention mechanism. The proposed model can be trained to discover the regions of interest (ROI) automatically in the LR images without any given prior knowledge. The experiments were performed on the CASIA-Thousand-v4 and the CelebA datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to learn the details of features in crucial regions and achieve better performance in most cases

Analgesic and Anti-Inflammatory Activities of the Methanol Extract from Pogostemon cablin

Pogostemon cablin (PC) is a herbal medicine traditionally applied to treat not only common cold, nausea and diarrhea but also headache and fever. The aim of this study was to investigate the analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties of standardized PC methanol extract (PCMeOH) in vivo. Investigations were performed in mice with two analgesic models. One was acetic acid-induced writhing response and the other formalin-induced paw licking. The anti-inflammatory effect was tested by λ-carrageenan (Carr)-induced mice paw edema. These analgesic experimental results indicated that PCMeOH (1.0 g/kg) decreased the acetic acid-induced writhing responses and PCMeOH (0.5 and 1.0 g/kg) decreased the licking time in the second phase of the formalin test. Moreover, Carr-induced paw edema inflammation was significantly reduced in a dose-dependent manner when PCMeOH (0.5 and 1.0 g/kg) was administered 3 and 4 h after the Carr injection. Mechanistic studies showed that PCMeOH decreased the levels of malondialdehyde in the edema paw by increasing the activities of anti-oxidant enzymes, such as superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase, in the liver and decreasing the cyclooxygenase 2 and tumor necrosis factor-α activities in the edema paw. This study has demonstrated the analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects of PCMeOH, thus verifying its popular use in traditional medicine