Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calpain inhibitors prevent nitric oxide-triggered excitotoxic apoptosis

The pathogenesis of some neurodegenerative disorders has been linked to excitotoxicity, excess generation of nitric oxide (NO) and apoptosis. Here, we used a model of NO-triggered neuronal apoptosis that was strictly dependent on autocrine NMDA receptor (NMDA-R) activation and intracellular Ca2+ increase. We investigated the efficiency and potentially beneficial effects of calpain inhibition. Three calpain inhibitors that prevented intracellular fodrin proteolysis also blocked apoptotic features such as decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential, chromatin breakdown, and subsequent death of cerebellar granule neurons exposed to NO donors (S-nitroso-L-glutathione, S-nitroso-N-acetyl-d,l-penicillamine, and diethylamino-diazenolate-2-oxide). Since inhibitors did not interfere with NMDA-R activation, we suggest that block of calpains blunts NO-triggered neuronal apoptosis by stopping the cascade downstream of primary autocrine excitotoxic events.
Purchase Behaviour Determinants on Online Mobile Game in Indonesia

This study aimed to examine the determinants of purchase behaviour in online mobile game. This study was conducted based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology second version (UTAUT2) with additional customization and advancement. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Model (SEM-PLS) was applied to examine this research model. The samples were collected using online surveys to the users of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and then there were 457 respondents obtained. The result of this study revealed that performance expectancy, payment ability, hedonic motivation, price value, habit, customization and advancement had a positive effect on purchase intention, and the intention also had a positive effect on actual purchase. However, it was found that effort expectancy and social influence did not significant on purchase intention. The result of this study can be used as a reference for game develovers so that in-game purchases can be accepted by users.
The Effect of Succession Taxes on Family Firm Investment: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

type="main"> This paper provides causal evidence on the impact of succession taxes on firm investment decisions and transfer of control. Using a 2002 policy change in Greece that substantially reduced the tax on intrafamily transfers of businesses, I show that succession taxes lead to a more than 40% decline in investment around family successions, slow sales growth, and a depletion of cash reserves. Furthermore, succession taxes strongly affect the decision to sell or retain the firm within the family. I conclude by discussing implications of my findings for firms in the United States and Europe.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS: EVIDENCE FROM A RANDOMIZED POLICY EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a dataset we collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically, leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Because There Was a Cause for Concern: an Investigation into a Word-specific Prediction Account of the Implicit-causality Effect

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The effect of physical training on hormonal status and exertional hormonal response in patients with chronic congestive heart failure.

BACKGROUND Physical training improves exercise capacity in patients with chronic heart failure. It decreases plasma noradrenaline at rest, which may be prognostically favourable. The effect on atrial natriuretic peptide, another prognostic factor, and on catabolic and anabolic hormones remains unknown. Furthermore, to our knowledge, the contribution of exertional hormonal responses to the improved exercise capacity has not been evaluated. METHODS 27 patients with stable chronic heart failure (New York Heart Association class II-III) were randomized to training (n=12) and control (n=15) groups. The training group exercised on a bicycle ergometer for 30 min three times a week for 3 months. The load corresponded to 50-60% of their peak oxygen consumption. For the next 3 months they exercised at home according to personal instructions. The control group did not change its physical activities. The levels of hormones regulating the cardiovascular system and metabolism were determined at rest and after graded maximal exercise and during exercise with constant submaximal workload. RESULTS Submaximal exercise capacity increased significantly and peak oxygen consumption tended to improve by 12% in the training group. The plasma noradrenaline at rest tended to decrease by 19%. The plasma level of N-terminal pro atrial natriuretic peptide did not change. Serum cortisol, a catabolic hormone, was normal at baseline and remained unchanged. The serum levels of anabolic hormones, growth hormone and insulin, as well as dehydroepiandrosteronesulfate and free testosterone were within a normal range at baseline. They were not altered by training. The dehydroepiandrosteronesulfate/cortisol, and the free testosterone/cortisol ratios, reflecting anabolic/catabolic balance, did not change, either. Training resulted in a higher peak noradrenaline response during graded maximal exercise. The rise in serum cortisol during exercise tended to attenuate. CONCLUSION Physical training, which improves exercise capacity, does not have an unfavourable effect on anabolic/catabolic balance or neurohumoral activation in patients with congestive heart failure. It decreases plasma noradrenaline at rest. Minor changes in hormonal responses during exercise emerged after physical training which unlikely contribute to the improved exercise capacity.
Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Rhizosphere Oxygen Profiles in the Emergent Plant Species Acorus calamus

Rhizosphere oxygen profiles are the key to understanding the role of wetland plants in ecological remediation. Though in situ determination of the rhizosphere oxygen profiles has been performed occasionally at certain growing stages within days, comprehensive study on individual roots during weeks is still missing. Seedlings of Acorus calamus, a wetland monocot, were cultivated in silty sediment and the rhizosphere oxygen profiles were characterized at regular intervals, using micro-optodes to examine the same root at four positions along the root axis. The rhizosphere oxygen saturation culminated at 42.9% around the middle part of the root and was at its lowest level, 3.3%, at the basal part of the root near the aboveground portion. As the plant grew, the oxygen saturation at the four positions remained nearly constant until shoot height reached 15 cm. When shoot height reached 60 cm, oxygen saturation was greatest at the point halfway along the root, followed by the point three-quarters of the way down the root, the tip of the root, and the point one-quarter of the way down. Both the internal and rhizosphere oxygen saturation steadily increased, as did the thickness of stably oxidized microzones, which ranged from 20 µm in younger seedlings to a maximum of 320 µm in older seedlings. The spatial patterns of rhizosphere oxygen profiles in sediment contrast with those from previous studies on radial oxygen loss in A. calamus that used conventional approaches. Rhizosphere oxygen saturation peaked around the middle part of roots and the thickness of stably oxidized zones increased as the roots grew.
Cohort effects, spousal incomes and female labour force participation in Japan: A panel data analysis

In this paper, I estimate labour supply functions for married women in Japan. In particular, I attempt to capture the differences between three cohorts of women regarding their choice of employment status: full-time employment or part-time employment. I also consider whether there are any cohort-related differences in the choice of working or non-working status. For this purpose, Waves 1-15 (1993-2007) of the Japanese Panel Survey on Consumers (JPSC) are used. The estimation reveals that younger cohorts have higher log odds ratios of full-time employment to not working and of part-time employment to not working. The estimation also reveals that younger cohorts exhibit significantly higher log odds ratios of working to not working compared with older cohorts. For both estimations, the negative effect of having children aged three to five years on both full-time and part-time employment is weaker among the younger cohorts. On the other hand, the negative effect of having children less than two years of age on full-time and part-time employment is common to both older and younger cohorts.
Effective Scheduling Algorithms for I/O Blocking with a Multi-Frame Task Model

A task that suspends itself to wait for an I/O completion or to wait tor an event from another node in distributed environments is called an I/O blocking task. Conventional hard real-time scheduling theories use framework of rate monotonic analysis (RMA) to schedule such I/O blocking tasks. However, most of them are pessimistic. In this paper, we propose effective algorithms that can schedule a task set which has I/O blocking tasks under dynamic priority assignment. We present a new critical instant theorem for the multi-frame task set under dynamic priority assignment. The schedulability is analyzed under the new critical instant theorem. For the schedulability analysis, this paper presents saturation summation which is used to calculate the maximum interference function (MIF). With saturation summation, the schedulability of a task set having I/O blocking tasks can be analyzed more accurately. We propose an algorithm which is called Frame Laxity Monotonic Scheduling (FLMS). A genetic algorithm (GA) is also applied. From our experiments, we can conclude that FLMS can significantly reduce the calculation time, and GA can improve task schedulability ratio more than is possible with FLMS.
Investigating the opportunities of using mobile learning by young children in Bulgaria

This paper provides an analysis of literature related to the use of mobile devices in teaching young children. For this purpose, the most popular mobile operating systems in Bulgaria are considered and the functionality of the existing mobile applications with Bulgarian interface is discussed. The results of a survey of parents' views regarding the mobile devices as a learning tool are presented and the ensuing conclusions are provided.
USE OF VOICING AND PITCH INFORMATION FOR SPEAKER RECOGNITION

Speech signal can be decomposed into two parts: the source part and the system part. The system part corresponds to the smooth envelope of the power spectrum and is used in the form of cepstral coef£cients in almost all the automatic speaker recognition systems reported in the literature. The source part contains information about voicing and pitch. Though this information is very important for human beings to identify a person from his/her voice, it is rarely used for automatic speaker recognition. In this paper, we propose a simple and reliable method to derive acoustic features based on voicing and pitch information and use them for automatic speaker recognition. We evaluate these features for speaker identi£cation using TIMIT, NTIMIT and IISC databases and demonstrate their effectiveness. INTRODUCTION A speech signal can be decomposed into two parts: the source part and the system part. The system part consists of the smooth envelope of the power spectrum and is represented in the form of cepstrum coef£cients, which can be computed by using either the linear prediction analysis or the mel £lter-bank analysis. Most of the automatic speaker recognition systems reported in the literature utilise the system information in the form of cepstral coef£cients. These systems perform reasonably well. The source information has been rarely used in the past for speaker recognition systems. The source contains information about pitch and voicing. This information is very important for humans to identify a person from his/her voice. A few studies have been reported where pitch information is used as a feature for speaker recognition. However results are not very encouraging. The main reason for this is that pitch estimation is always very much prone to errors. That is the pitch estimation methods are not very reliable, they introduce errors which affect the performance of the speaker recognition system. In this paper we propose a simple method for extracting the voicing and pitch information from the speech signal in a reliable manner. This is done by uniformly dividing the higher portion of the autocorrelation function in a number of parts and computing the maximum autocorrelation value in each of these parts. These maximum autocorrelation values (MACVs) are used as features for speaker recognition. We evaluate these MACV features on TIMIT, NTIMIT and IISC databases for speaker identi£cation task. In order to put these features in proper perspective, we compare their speaker identi£cation performance with that of pitch feature. COMPUTATION OF PITCH FEATURE As mentioned earlier, we compare the speaker identi£cation performance of the MACV features with the pitch feature. For determining the pitch value, we use two different methods: 1) the autocorrelation method and 2) the average magnitude difference function (AMDF) method. Consider a speech frame {s(n), n = 0, 1, . , N − 1}. In the autocorrelation method, the autocorrelation function of the speech signal {s(n)} is computed as follows:
Application-specific architecture for fast transforms based on the successive doubling method

The successive doubling method is an efficient procedure for the design of fast algorithms for orthogonal transforms of length N=r/sup n/, where the radix r is a power of 2. A partitioned systolic architecture is presented for the two standard radix successive doubling algorithms: decimation in time (DIT) and decimation in frequency (DIF). The index space of the data is projected onto the index space associated with a column of processors, interconnected using a perfect unshuffle (DIT) or shuffle (DIF) interconnection network, defined by permutations of the order log/sub 2/r. The result is a partitioned systolic array with Q processors (Q=r/sup i/, 0 >
Polymorphisms in the Perilipin Gene May Affect Carcass Traits of Chinese Meat-type Chickens

Improved meat quality and greater muscle yield are highly sought after in high-quality chicken breeding programs. Past studies indicated that polymorphisms of the Perilipin gene (PLIN1) are highly associated with adiposity in mammals and are potential molecular markers for improving meat quality and carcass traits in chickens. In the present study, we screened single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in all exons of the PLIN1 gene with a direct sequencing method in six populations with different genetic backgrounds (total 240 individuals). We evaluated the association between the polymorphisms and carcass and meat quality traits. We identified three SNPs, located on the 5′ flanking region and exon 1 of PLIN1 on chromosome 10 (rs315831750, rs313726543, and rs80724063, respectively). Eight main haplotypes were constructed based on these SNPs. We calculated the allelic and genotypic frequencies, and genetic diversity parameters of the three SNPs. The polymorphism information content (PIC) ranged from 0.2768 to 0.3750, which reflected an intermediate genetic diversity for all chickens. The CC, CT, and TT genotypes influenced the percentage of breast muscle (PBM), percentage of leg muscle (PLM) and percentage of abdominal fat at rs315831750 (p<0.05). Diplotypes (haplotype pairs) affected the percentage of eviscerated weight (PEW) and PBM (p<0.05). Compared with chickens carrying other diplotypes, H3H7 had the greatest PEW and H2H2 had the greatest PBM, and those with diplotype H7H7 had the smallest PEW and PBM. We conclude that PLIN1 gene polymorphisms may affect broiler carcass and breast muscle yields, and diplotypes H3H7 and H2H2 could be positive molecular markers to enhance PEW and PBM in chickens.
Perceptions of Turkish Pre-Service EFL Teachers on Their Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

The purpose of this study is to investigate perceptions of Turkish pre-service EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers related to their level of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), the factors affecting their perceptions of TPACK, and their beliefs related to technology integration into EFL classrooms. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis procedures. A total of 94 Turkish pre-service EFL teachers answered two questionnaires designed to gather information about their combining technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge in the ways of both learning and teaching processes. Six of the participants were also interviewed about their perceptions on TPACK competences and their beliefs related to technology use in language teaching. Quantitative data were analyzed by calculating descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean score, standard deviation), and qualitative data were analyzed by using content analysis. The findings related to quantitative data revealed high levels of perceptions on TPACK competences, and the findings related to qualitative data supported the high level of perceived TPACK competences and further revealed that participants emphasized the place of personal interest, experience, knowledge and access while singling out educational support by their own instructors on the development of TPACK. In the light of the findings of the study, it has been suggested that courses offered to pre-service teachers should include how to combine technology, content and pedagogy together for effective instruction in their subject field; and teacher education programs should provide pre-service teachers with the opportunities of becoming the designers of technologically mediated materials.
Lercanidipine in Hypertension

Lercanidipine is a lipophilic, dihydropyridine calcium antagonist with a long receptor half-life. Its slow onset of action helps to avoid reflex tachycardia associated with other dihydropyridines (DHPs). It produces even and sustained blood pressure lowering with once-daily dosing. It has equivalent antihypertensive efficacy to many other agents and is effective as initial monotherapy or in combination. Efficacy has been demonstrated in elderly as well as younger patients and also in the presence of other risk factors. Lercanidipine is well tolerated with DHP-associated adverse effects occurring early in treatment. The incidence of pedal edema and subsequent withdrawals has been found to be lower with lercanidipine than with amlodipine or nifedipine gastrointestinal transport system. Preclinical and preliminary clinical findings suggest lercanidipine may have beneficial effects on atherosclerosis and left ventricular hypertrophy. The efficacy and tolerability profiles of lercanidipine make it a suitable choice for treating hypertension in a wide range of affected patients.
Development of Surinamese Javanese: Language contact and change in a multilingual context

Between 1890 and 1939, around 30,000 Javanese contract laborers were brought to Suriname. Alongside their own language, Javanese, they soon also started speaking the Surinamese lingua franca Sranantongo, and later on Dutch. Nowadays, their language has developed into a variety in its own right: Surinamese Javanese. It is spoken in a highly multilingual context. Surinamese Javanese speakers are usually also fluent in Dutch and Sranantongo. As a heritage language, it is expected to have undergone changes due to this intense language contact. Has Surinamese Javanese indeed diverged from Indonesian Javanese and to what extent? Words have changed, but is this also true for morphology, syntax and pragmatics? Which factors account for the changes encountered? The thesis comprises four case studies, which cover a wide range of linguistic domains: the expression of locative constructions, the use of multi-verb motion constructions, the expression of transfer events and the use and expression of voice. The results are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the use of statistics where possible. Apart from clearly being influenced by Dutch and Sranantongo in terms of borrowings and frequent code-switching, Surinamese Javanese is different from Indonesian Javanese in all four components analyzed in the case studies. In most cases, these divergences are manifested as changes in frequency: a formerly marginal pattern becomes more frequent. Other observed results of divergence are simplification, reanalysis and convergence to Sranantongo and Dutch. The results show that there is a relationship between fluency measures and signs of contact-induced change on the one hand, and measures of code-switching on the other, meaning that speakers who are less fluent and show more changes also code-switch more frequently. Differences between speakers are also reflected in the amount of contact-induced change they show.