Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the Construct Validity of the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale in China

The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale is an efficient measure of psychopathy with promising psychometric properties. However, the cross-cultural utility of the LSRP has not been well documented, and no study has explored measurement invariance of the LSRP across East Asian and North American samples. We translated the LSRP into Chinese (Study 1) and investigated the validity and reliability of the Chinese LSRP using a sample of 226 university students in China (Study 2). Confirmatory factor analyses supported Brinkley, Diamond, Magaletta, and Heigel’s (2008) three-factor model (Egocentricity, Callousness, and Antisocial). Evidence for configural and partial metric (but not scalar) invariance of the factor structure was observed when comparing Chinese and U.S. university samples. However, response thresholds were significantly different between the two samples. The Chinese LSRP scores also demonstrated encouraging convergent and discriminate validity in terms of their associations with external criteria. We discuss the implications for cross-cultural assessment of psychopathy.
Programmed cell death in Giardia

SUMMARY Programmed cell death (PCD) has been observed in many unicellular eukaryotes; however, in very few cases have the pathways been described. Recently the early divergent amitochondrial eukaryote Giardia has been included in this group. In this paper we investigate the processes of PCD in Giardia. We performed a bioinformatics survey of Giardia genomes to identify genes associated with PCD alongside traditional methods for studying apoptosis and autophagy. Analysis of Giardia genomes failed to highlight any genes involved in apoptotic-like PCD; however, we were able to induce apoptotic-like morphological changes in response to oxidative stress (H2O2) and drugs (metronidazole). In addition we did not detect caspase activity in induced cells. Interestingly, we did observe changes resembling autophagy when cells were starved (staining with MDC) and genome analysis revealed some key genes associated with autophagy such as TOR, ATG1 and ATG 16. In organisms such as Trichomonas vaginalis, Entamoeba histolytica and Blastocystis similar observations have been made but no genes have been identified. We propose that Giardia possess a pathway of autophagy and a form of apoptosis very different from the classical known mechanism; this may represent an early form of programmed cell death.
Is man doomed to progress

This paper is dedicated to the empirical exploration of the welfare effect of expectations and progress per se. Using ten waves of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a panel household survey rich in subjective variables, the analysis suggests that for a given total stock of inter-temporal consumption, agents are more satisfied with an increasing time-profile of consumption: they seem to have a strong “taste for improvement”. This contributes to qualify the “Easterlin paradox” that income growth does not make people happy.
THE CHALLENGE OF FINANCIAL SERVICES BRANDING: MAJORING ON CATEGORY OR BRAND VALUES?

Research suggests that emotional values are more sustainable than functional values. It is argued that in the services sector the key to sustainable brand differentiation is a unique set of emotional values. This paper examines the nature of financial services brands’ values and finds that they tend to focus on functional category values rather than unique emotional brand values. A lack of congruency between brand team members’ perceptions of their brands’ values and a lack of correspondence with their brands’ espoused values were also noted.
B cells as a therapeutic target in autoimmune diseases

Historically, the pathogenic role of B cells in autoimmune disease has been attributed to the formation of autoantibodies which, as soluble immunoglobulins or immunocomplexes, can trigger cellular damage and initiate the inflammatory cascade. Recent results from clinical trials applying B cell-directed therapeutics in rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus have challenged such traditional views and encouraged novel ideas about the disease involvement of B cells. Suppression of disease activity, often disconnected from effects on autoantibody titers, has supported the notion that B cells may promote autoimmune disease by serving as antigen-presenting cells that sustain T cell activation. Likewise, B cells have been implicated in supporting the process of ectopic lymphoid neogenesis, a mechanism that stabilises pathogenic immune responses in target tissues and thus contributes to disease chronicity. As a general rule, clinical effects of B cell-directed therapeutics have often been unanticipated and unpredicted by experimental models, emphasis-ing the need to explore and verify disease principles in the patient.
Tipos polínicos em amostras de méis de abelhas sem ferrão de municípios do semiárido baiano.

A regiao semiarida do Nordeste brasileiro tem se destacado como uma das mais promissoras para a producao de mel de abelhas. No entanto, o estudo sobre aspectos da origem botânica desse mel ainda e muito restrito, principalmente, sobre aquele utilizado pelas abelhas nativas. Objetivou-se com o presente trabalho analisar os tipos polinicos presentes nos meis de abelhas sem ferrao oriundos de municipios do semiarido da Bahia. Dezessete amostras de meis foram coletadas no periodo de agosto de 2007 a junho de 2008, provenientes dos municipios de Andarai, Itaberaba, Manoel Vitorino, Santa Teresinha e Sao Gabriel. O material foi submetido a analise quantitativa e qualitativa por meio da contagem de 500 graos de polen, os quais foram identificados e agrupados por especie ou tipo polinico de acordo com a literatura especializada. Foram identificados 43 tipos polinicos, pertencentes a 18 familias. A familia Mimosaceae apresentou 32,30% dos polens, com as especies Mimosa bimucronata M. arenosa M. acutistipula.
Capital Allocation and Timely Accounting Recognition of Economic Losses

This paper explores direct relations between corporate investment behavior and the timeliness of accounting recognition of economic losses (TLR) reflected in a country’s accounting regime. We explicitly investigate the extent to which TLR influences investment decisions of firm managers. Given the asymmetric emphasis on negative outcomes inherent in TLR, we hypothesize that TLR will most strongly influence investment behavior when managers face deteriorating investment environments. We conjecture that TLR will have an asymmetric impact on investment behavior whereby TLR impacts firms’ investment decisions in the face of declining investment opportunities, but not in the face of increasing in investment opportunities. Using firm-level investment decisions spanning twenty five countries, we find that investment responses to declining opportunities increases with TLR, while we find no evidence that TLR influences the sensitivity of investment to increasing investment opportunities. Our results are robust to alternative estimates of TLR, alternative estimates of investment responses to changing investment opportunities, and to controls for important country-level, industry-level, and firm-level variables that may impact firms’ investment decisions.
Routine dental visits are associated with tooth retention in Brazilian adults: the Pró-Saúde study.

OBJECTIVE This study investigates the effect of routine visits for dental check-up on tooth loss. METHODS In a cross-sectional study of university employees, the Rio de Janeiro Pró-Saúde Study, tooth loss was measured as the reported number of missing teeth and routine dental visit as the reported pattern and frequency of visits to the dentist. RESULTS Data were obtained from 4,030 individuals (91% of eligible subjects). Odds ratio of excessive tooth loss ("many" or "all" teeth lost) was 2.20 (95% confidence interval [CI]=1.79, 2.72) for subjects who reported visiting the dentist only when in trouble and 1.17 (95% CI=0.90, 1.51) for subjects who reported visiting for routine dental checks every two years or less frequently, compared with those who reported visiting for dental checks at least annually, after controlling for age, sex, education, income, race, smoking, and diet. CONCLUSIONS There was a positive effect of routine visits for dental check-up on maintaining teeth. This effect was the same for one year and two years or longer intervals between check-ups.
URBE: Web Service Retrieval Based on Similarity Evaluation

In this work, we present UDDI registry by example (Urbe), a novel approach for Web service retrieval based on the evaluation of similarity between Web service interfaces. Our approach assumes that the Web service interfaces are defined with Web service description language (WSDL) and the algorithm combines the analysis of their structures and the analysis of the terms used inside them. The higher the similarity, the less are the differences among their interfaces. As a consequence, Urbe is useful when we need to find a Web service suitable to replace an existing one that fails. Especially in autonomic systems, this situation is very common since we need to ensure the self-management, the self-configuration, the self-optimization, the self-healing, and the self-protection of the application that is based on the failed Web service. A semantic-oriented variant of the approach is also proposed, where we take advantage of annotations semantically enriching WSDL specifications. Semantic Annotation for WSDL (SAWSDL) is adopted as a language to annotate a WSDL description. The Urbe approach has been implemented in a prototype that extends a universal description, discovery and integration (UDDI) compliant Web service registry.
Chaotic Red Queen coevolution in three-species food chains

Coevolution between two antagonistic species follows the so-called ‘Red Queen dynamics’ when reciprocal selection results in an endless series of adaptation by one species and counteradaptation by the other. Red Queen dynamics are ‘genetically driven’ when selective sweeps involving new beneficial mutations result in perpetual oscillations of the coevolving traits on the slow evolutionary time scale. Mathematical models have shown that a prey and a predator can coevolve along a genetically driven Red Queen cycle. We found that embedding the prey–predator interaction into a three-species food chain that includes a coevolving superpredator often turns the genetically driven Red Queen cycle into chaos. A key condition is that the prey evolves fast enough. Red Queen chaos implies that the direction and strength of selection are intrinsically unpredictable beyond a short evolutionary time, with greatest evolutionary unpredictability in the superpredator. We hypothesize that genetically driven Red Queen chaos could explain why many natural populations are poised at the edge of ecological chaos. Over space, genetically driven chaos is expected to cause the evolutionary divergence of local populations, even under homogenizing environmental fluctuations, and thus to promote genetic diversity among ecological communities over long evolutionary time.
A comparison of two different culture methods for use in the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis.

OBJECTIVE Tuberculosis (TB) continues to be a significant health problem worldwide. Pulmonary TB is a contagious disease. To control the spread of TB, the disease must be diagnosed early and treated effectively. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this study, we determined the rates and periods of TB bacterial reproduction using the Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ) and the Mycobacterium Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT) culture systems in respiratory specimens obtained from 105 suspected TB cases that applied to our service. RESULTS Using either the LJ or MGIT method, the reproduction rates of TB cultures from 91 positively diagnosed cases were determined to be 69.2% and 92.3% (p=0.116), respectively. The reproduction period for these same cultures was determined to be 29.7±10.0 days and 12.1±6.1 days (p<0.0001), respectively. The culture positivity rate determined using both the LJ and MGIT methods together was found to be significantly higher than the rate determined using either LJ or MGIT separately (p<0.0001). CONCLUSION For the early diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, which is essential for controlling the spread of TB, the routine use of the MGIT system, which is a rapid, automated and non-radiometric method, combined with the LJ method would effectively increase the diagnosis rate in order to control tuberculosis outbreaks.
The complete chloroplast genome of Artemisia fukudo Makino (Asteraceae): providing insight of intraspecies variations

Abstract Artemisia fukudo Makino is a salt tolerant species and contains diverse useful compounds. Here, we completed chloroplast genome of A. fukudo to understand intraspecies variations producing better useful compounds. Its length is 151,021 bp long and has four subregions: 82,761 bp of large single copy (LSC) and 18,348 bp of small single copy (SSC) regions are separated by 24,956 bp of inverted repeat (IR) regions including 125 genes (88 protein-coding genes, eight rRNAs, and 37 tRNAs). The overall GC content of this chloroplast genome is 37.5% and those in the LSC, SSC, and IR regions are 35.6, 30.7, and 43.1%, respectively. Seven single nucleotide polymorphisms and 11 insertions and deletions are identified between A. fukudo isolated in different islands in the same county. Phylogenetic trees show that two A. fukudo are clustered in one clade. In addition, phylogenetic position of Artemisia annua is different from the previous study caused by lack of enough taxa. This chloroplast genome will contribute understanding of both intraspecies variations of A. fukudo andmolecular phylogeny of Artemisia genus.
Biosynthesis of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles Using Escherichia coli

This study proposed to synthesize iron oxide by biological method nanoparticles. The E.coli is used to reduce Ferric chloride salt into iron particles. The formation of iron oxide nanoparticle was initially monitored by visual observation and then characterized with the help of various characterization techniques such as Uv-vis spectroscopy, (AFM) and (FTIR) analysis, which revealed that the biosynthesized iron oxide nanoparticles were spherical within size 27.7 nm. Optimization of iron oxide nanoparticle biosynthesis by E.coli was performed for parameters (temperature and pH) and the results revealed that temperature 37°C and pH 5 were the optimum conditions for iron oxide nanoparticales biosynthesis by E.coli.
Fast Shapelets: A Scalable Algorithm for Discovering Time Series Shapelets

Time series shapelets are a recent promising concept in time series data mining. Shapelets are time series snippets that can be used to classify unlabeled time series. Shapelets not only provide interpretable results, which are useful for domain experts and developers alike, but shapelet-based classifiers have been shown by several independent research groups to have superior accuracy on many datasets. Moreover, shapelets can be seen as generalizing the lazy nearest neighbor classifier to an eager classifier. Thus, as a deployed classification tool, shapelets can be many orders of magnitude faster than any rival with comparable accuracy. Although shapelets are a useful concept, the current literature bemoans the fact that shapelet discovery is a time-consuming task. In spite of several efforts to speed up shapelet discovery algorithms, including the use of specialist hardware, the current state-of-the-art algorithms are still intractable on large datasets. In this work, we propose a fast shapelet discovery algorithm that outperforms the current state-of-the-art by two or three orders of magnitude, while producing models with accuracy that is not perceptibly different.
Fat feeding impairs glycogen synthase activity in mice without effects on its gene expression.

To examine whether the effects of high-fat feeding on glycogen synthase (GS) activity and mRNA levels differ between diabetes-prone (C57BL/6J) and diabetes-resistant mice (NMRI), we measured GS activity and mRNA levels in muscle from C57BL/6J and NMRI mice fed a high-fat or normal chow diet for 3, 6, and 15 months. As compared with chow feeding, fat feeding increased plasma insulin levels in C57BL/6J mice at 15 months (464 +/- 29 v 267 +/- 47 pmol/L, P =.005), which was associated with elevated plasma glucose levels at 15 months (5.3 +/- 0.3 v 3.8 +/- 0.2 mmol/L, P =.001). Fat feeding increased plasma insulin levels also in NMRI mice at 15 months (705 +/- 145 v 275 +/- 64 pmol/L, P =.01) without, however, a rise of plasma glucose levels. In parallel with increased insulin levels, decreased muscle GS fractional velocity (FV) was observed at 6 (49.0% +/- 2.6% v 69.1% +/- 7.3%, P =.04) and 15 (45.8% +/- 1.8% v 53.4% +/- 1.6 %, P <.01) months but not at 3 months in the fat-fed C57BL/6J mice. Similarly, there was a significant decrease in GS fractional activity at 3 (57.9% +/- 4.3% v 70.4% +/- 2.6 %, P <.03) and 15 (47.3% +/- 2.4% v 56.4% +/- 2.1%, P =.02) but not at 6 months in the fat-fed NMRI mice. The decrease in GS activity was not associated with changes in mRNA levels at any time points. We conclude that (1) fat feeding results in similar elevation of plasma insulin levels and impairs GS activity in C57BL/6J and NMRI mice, and (2) the changes in GS activity do not involve effects on gene expression.
MUVI: automatically inferring multi-variable access correlations and detecting related semantic and concurrency bugs

Software defects significantly reduce system dependability. Among various types of software bugs, semantic and concurrency bugs are two of the most difficult to detect. This paper proposes a novel method, called MUVI, that detects an important class of semantic and concurrency bugs. MUVI automatically infers commonly existing multi-variable access correlations through code analysis and then detects two types of related bugs: (1) inconsistent updates--correlated variables are not updated in a consistent way, and (2) multi-variable concurrency bugs--correlated accesses are not protected in the same atomic sections in concurrent programs.We evaluate MUVI on four large applications: Linux, Mozilla,MySQL, and PostgreSQL. MUVI automatically infers more than 6000 variable access correlations with high accuracy (83%). Based on the inferred correlations, MUVI detects 39 new inconsistent update semantic bugs from the latest versions of these applications, with 17 of them recently confirmed by the developers based on our reports.We also implemented MUVI multi-variable extensions to tworepresentative data race bug detection methods (lock-set and happens-before). Our evaluation on five real-world multi-variable concurrency bugs from Mozilla and MySQL shows that the MUVI-extension correctly identifies the root causes of four out of the five multi-variable concurrency bugs with 14% additional overhead on average. Interestingly, MUVI also helps detect four new multi-variable concurrency bugs in Mozilla that have never been reported before. None of the nine bugs can be identified correctly by the original race detectors without our MUVI extensions.
Fluids and electrolytes: physiology.

More than 100 years ago Claude Bernard (1813-1878) pointed out that higher animals "have really two environments: a milieu exterieur in which the organism is situated, and a milieu interieur in which tissue elements live. The living organism does not really exist in the milieu exterieur (the atmosphere it breathes, salt or fresh water if that is its element) but in the liquid milieu interieur formed by the circulating organic liquid which surrounds and bathes all the tissue elements: this is the lymph or plasma.all the vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment. " Although Bernard deduced the existence of the constancy of the internal environment from relatively few facts, this basic concept has been confirmed repeatedly. Walter B. Cannon extended Bernard9s hypothesis by recognizing that "physiologic agencies" were excited to action by deviation from the constancy of the internal environment. Cannon designated the constancy of the internal environment as a homeostatic state that, when disturbed by environmental change, automatically elicits a corrective physiologic action. Although modern fluid and electrolyte physiology is based on recognition of these basic concepts, its application has been enormously enriched by detailed information on the specific mechanisms that foster the maintenance of the composition of individual cells and the regulatory processes that contribute to the overall body fluid homeostasis.
The CFHT Open Star Cluster Survey. III. The White Dwarf Cooling Age of the Rich Open Star Cluster NGC 2099 (M37)

We present deep CCD photometry of the very rich, intermediate-age (similar to the Hyades) open star cluster NGC 2099 (M37). The V, B-V color-magnitude diagram (CMD) for the cluster shows an extremely well-populated and very tightly constrained main sequence extending over 12 mag from the turnoff. Both a well-defined main-sequence turnoff and a red giant population are also clearly evident. The CFH12K photometry for this cluster is faint enough (V ∼ 24.5) to detect the remnants of the most massive progenitor cluster stars under the Type I SNe limit. Therefore, the CMD of the cluster also exhibits a well defined white dwarf "clump" caused by the decreased rate of cooling of these stars as they age, and a subsequent gap with very few objects. By using source classification to eliminate faint blue galaxies and a statistical subtraction technique to eliminate foreground/background objects, we have determined the age of the star cluster from the termination point (MV = 11.95 ± 0.30) in the white dwarf luminosity function. The white dwarf cooling age is found to be 566 ± Myr from comparisons with white dwarf cooling models and is in excellent agreement with the main-sequence turnoff isochrone age (520 Myr). After carefully accounting for the uncertainties in the white dwarf limiting magnitude, we show that the cooling age confirms that models including convective core overshooting are preferred for young–intermediate-aged clusters. This is particularly important in the case of NGC 2099 as the age is similar to that of the Hyades cluster, for which current models have difficulties in reproducing the details of the main-sequence turnoff. We also derive the reddening [E(B-V) = 0.21 ± 0.03] and distance [(m - M)V = 11.55 ± 0.13] to NGC 2099 by matching main-sequence features in the cluster to a new fiducial main sequence for the Hyades, after correcting for small metallicity differences. As a continuing part of the goals of the CFHT Open Star Cluster Survey to better understand dynamical processes of open clusters, we also fit a King model to the cluster density distribution and investigate the cluster main-sequence luminosity and mass functions in increasing concentric annuli. We find some evidence for mass segregation within the boundary of NGC 2099 as expected given the cluster's age relative to the dynamical age. The present global mass function for the cluster is found to be shallower than a Salpeter IMF.