Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Item Response Theory in Scale Development Research

As scale development researchers, we have followed Mallinckrodt and colleagues’ work over recent years with significant interest. The scale development process can be challenging and typically demands a large investment of time. However, the end of the process is rewarding when the resulting scale is psychometrically sound. Mallinckrodt, Miles, and Recabarren’s contribution in this volume of The Counseling Psychologist attempted to help integrate the use of item response theory in the scale development process. Although they are to be commended for this endeavor, there are some limitations inherent in their contribution. This reaction provides a critical evaluation of their work to augment their recommendations.
Testing Group Differences in Brain Functional Connectivity: Using Correlations or Partial Correlations?

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging allows one to study brain functional connectivity, partly motivated by evidence that patients with complex disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, may have altered functional brain connectivity patterns as compared with healthy subjects. A functional connectivity network describes statistical associations of the neural activities among distinct and distant brain regions. Recently, there is a major interest in group-level functional network analysis; however, there is a relative lack of studies on statistical inference, such as significance testing for group comparisons. In particular, it is still debatable which statistic should be used to measure pairwise associations as the connectivity weights. Many functional connectivity studies have used either (full or marginal) correlations or partial correlations for pairwise associations. This article investigates the performance of using either correlations or partial correlations for testing group differences in brain connectivity, and how sparsity levels and topological structures of the connectivity would influence statistical power to detect group differences. Our results suggest that, in general, testing group differences in networks deviates from estimating networks. For example, high regularization in both covariance matrices and precision matrices may lead to higher statistical power; in particular, optimally selected regularization (e.g., by cross-validation or even at the true sparsity level) on the precision matrices with small estimation errors may have low power. Most importantly, and perhaps surprisingly, using either correlations or partial correlations may give very different testing results, depending on which of the covariance matrices and the precision matrices are sparse. Specifically, if the precision matrices are sparse, presumably and arguably a reasonable assumption, then using correlations often yields much higher powered and more stable testing results than using partial correlations; the conclusion is reversed if the covariance matrices, not the precision matrices, are sparse. These results may have useful implications to future studies on testing functional connectivity differences.
Anthropogenic Aerosols and the Weakening of the South Asian Summer Monsoon

Changes in monsoon rainfall are caused by human-produced aerosols slowing the tropical atmospheric circulation. Observations show that South Asia underwent a widespread summertime drying during the second half of the 20th century, but it is unclear whether this trend was due to natural variations or human activities. We used a series of climate model experiments to investigate the South Asian monsoon response to natural and anthropogenic forcings. We find that the observed precipitation decrease can be attributed mainly to human-influenced aerosol emissions. The drying is a robust outcome of a slowdown of the tropical meridional overturning circulation, which compensates for the aerosol-induced energy imbalance between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. These results provide compelling evidence of the prominent role of aerosols in shaping regional climate change over South Asia.
How Relevant is Infrastructure to Growth in East Asia?

This paper seeks to shed some light on the extent to which infrastructure sub-sectors - energy, telecommunications, water supply, sanitation, and transport - contributed to growth in East Asia during 1985-2004. It also attempts to provide additional insights on whether the relationship between infrastructure and growth depends on five additional variables: the degree of private participation in infrastructure, the quality of governance, the extent of rural-urban inequality in access to infrastructure services, country income levels, as well as geography. The findings show that greater stocks of infrastructure were indeed associated with higher growth. However, a more nuanced look at the sensitivity of infrastructure impacts on the five additional variables yields different results, with some sectors supporting conventional expectations and others yielding mixed or counter-intuitive results. In particular, the telecom and sanitation sectors yield statistically significant results supporting the a priori hypotheses; electricity and water infrastructure provide mixed results; and road infrastructure consistently contradicts a priori expectations. The results are consistent with the widely-accepted idea in policy research that infrastructure plays an important role in promoting growth, as well as with the viewpoint that certain countries'endowments influence the growth-related impacts of infrastructure.
Excitotoxic neuronal death in the immature brain is an apoptosis‐necrosis morphological continuum

Glutamate‐induced excitotoxicity is a clinically relevant degenerative process that causes selective neuronal death by mechanisms that remain unclear. Cell death is usually classified as apoptotic or necrotic based on biochemical and morphological criteria. Excitotoxic lesions in the adult rat striatum result in neuronal death associated with apoptotic DNA laddering despite a necrotic appearance of neurons ultrastructurally. This suggests that apoptosis and necrosis may not be mutually exclusive modes of cell death. Here, we characterized normal developmental cell death in the newborn rat brain with respect to DNA fragmentation patterns and ultrastructural morphology to establish a standard for apoptosis in the nervous system, and we concluded that it is essentially indistinguishable from apoptosis described in other tissues. We then investigated whether brain maturity could influence the morphology of neuronal death in vivo in the excitotoxically lesioned newborn rat forebrain. Kainic acid induced DNA laddering and death of neurons exhibiting a variety of morphologies, ranging from necrosis to apoptosis. In neurons that were dying by apoptosis, morphologic changes were characterized by a highly ordered sequence of organelle abnormalities, with swelling of endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi vesiculation preceding most nuclear changes and mitochondrial disruption. We concluded that brain maturity influences the morphologic phenotype of neurodegeneration and that excitotoxic neuronal death in the immature brain is not a uniform event but, rather, a continuum of apoptotic, necrotic, and overlapping morphologies. This excitotoxic paradigm might prove useful for analyzing the mechanisms that govern cell death under physiological and pathological conditions. J. Comp. Neurol. 378:70–87, 1997. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Analysis of parenchymal density on mammograms in 1353 women 25-79 years old.

OBJECTIVE This study was undertaken to determine the frequency and distribution of dense mammograms. Factors that may affect parenchymal density of breasts among the diverse age groups of women who undergo mammography were also studied. MATERIALS AND METHODS Mammograms of 1353 women between 25 and 79 years old who were grouped in 5-year age cohorts were reviewed. Breast density and the presence of benign calcifications were analyzed. RESULTS Parenchymal density on mammograms decreased progressively in the patient cohorts 25-29 years old through 75-79 years old (Spearman correlation, p < .01). In the cohort of 25- through 29-year-old patients, 38% had predominantly (> 50%) fatty breasts. In the cohort of 75- through 79-year-old patients, 76% had predominantly fatty breasts. Increased parenchymal density mammograms were more common in women who had smaller breasts, had had fewer than two pregnancies, and underwent hormone replacement (p < .01). Forty-nine percent of women 50-79 years old undergoing hormone replacement had predominantly dense breasts, a percentage similar to that (48%) of the patient cohort of women 40-44 years old. Prevalence of benign calcifications also increased with age, from 8% at ages 25-29 to 86% at ages 75-79 (p < .01). CONCLUSION In our study, a significant percentage (38%) of women who were 25-39 years old had predominantly fatty breast tissue that should not impede selective mammographic screening or diagnostic efforts in this age group.
Net charge per residue modulates conformational ensembles of intrinsically disordered proteins

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) adopt heterogeneous ensembles of conformations under physiological conditions. Understanding the relationship between amino acid sequence and conformational ensembles of IDPs can help clarify the role of disorder in physiological function. Recent studies revealed that polar IDPs favor collapsed ensembles in water despite the absence of hydrophobic groups—a result that holds for polypeptide backbones as well. By studying highly charged polypeptides, a different archetype of IDPs, we assess how charge content modulates the intrinsic preference of polypeptide backbones for collapsed structures. We characterized conformational ensembles for a set of protamines in aqueous milieus using molecular simulations and fluorescence measurements. Protamines are arginine-rich IDPs involved in the condensation of chromatin during spermatogenesis. Simulations based on the ABSINTH implicit solvation model predict the existence of a globule-to-coil transition, with net charge per residue serving as the discriminating order parameter. The transition is supported by quantitative agreement between simulation and experiment. Local conformational preferences partially explain the observed trends of polymeric properties. Our results lead to the proposal of a schematic protein phase diagram that should enable prediction of polymeric attributes for IDP conformational ensembles using easily calculated physicochemical properties of amino acid sequences. Although sequence composition allows the prediction of polymeric properties, interresidue contact preferences of protamines with similar polymeric attributes suggest that certain details of conformational ensembles depend on the sequence. This provides a plausible mechanism for specificity in the functions of IDPs.
catena-Poly[[bis(2-methoxyaniline-κN)cadmium]-di-μ-thiocyanato-κ2 N:S;κ2 S:N]

The structure of the title compound, [Cd(NCS)2(C7H9NO)2]n, consists of cadmium–thiocyanate layers parallel to the ab plane. Pairs of CdII ions are bridged by two end-to-end inversely bridging μ-NCS-N:S thiocyanate groups, forming a two-dimensional network with the remaining two trans positions of the octahedrally coordinated CdII ions occupied by the N atoms of two neutral 2-methoxyaniline ligands. The crystal structure is stabilized by intralayer N—H⋯S hydrogen bonds.
GEINet: View-invariant gait recognition using a convolutional neural network

This paper proposes a method of gait recognition using a convolutional neural network (CNN). Inspired by the great successes of CNNs in image recognition tasks, we feed in the most prevalent image-based gait representation, that is, the gait energy image (GEI), as an input to a CNN designed for gait recognition called GEINet. More specifically, GEINet is composed of two sequential triplets of convolution, pooling, and normalization layers, and two subsequent fully connected layers, which output a set of similarities to individual training subjects. We conducted experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of cross-view gait recognition in both cooperative and uncooperative settings using the OU-ISIR large population dataset. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed method significantly outperformed state-of-the-art approaches, in particular in verification scenarios.
Interferon-gamma inducible protein 10 as a biomarker for active tuberculosis and latent tuberculosis infection in children: A case–control study

Abstract Background: Interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) release assays (IGRAs) are suboptimally sensitive to diagnose tuberculosis (TB) and latent TB infection (LTBI) in young children. In this study we compared Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigen-stimulated IFN-γ inducible protein 10 (IP-10) responses in children with active TB and LTBI to responses from children with non-tuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) lymphadenopathy and respiratory tract infection (RTI). We also assessed test agreement between IP-10 and the QuantiFERON®-TB Gold In-Tube (QFT-IT) test results, and investigated whether IP-10 release upon mitogen stimulation is associated with age. Methods: We recruited 48 children (median age 54 months) diagnosed in Germany with either active TB (n = 11), LTBI (n = 14), NTM lymphadenopathy (n = 8), or common RTI (n = 15). IFN-γ levels were measured using the QFT-IT. These plasma supernatants were used to determine IP-10 concentrations using an in-house enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Results: The median antigen-stimulated IP-10 levels in children with active TB, LTBI, NTM lymphadenopathy, and RTI were 12,702 pg/ml, 9109 pg/ml, 97 pg/ml, and 84 pg/ml, respectively. We observed a strong correlation between IP-10 and IFN-γ plasma concentration in children with active TB and LTBI (r2 = 0.69). Overall agreement between IP-10 and QFT-IT assays was high (kappa = 0.95). IP-10 levels after mitogen stimulation showed no association with age. Conclusions: IP-10 and IFN-γ were both induced with antigen stimulation in blood from children in the TB and LTBI groups, in contrast to the NTM and RTI groups. Compared to IFN-γ the IP-10 levels were higher and IP-10 was released independently of age. IP-10 therefore may represent an additional biomarker in the paediatric population.
Comparison of Parasite Burden Using Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction Assay and Limiting Dilution Assay in Leishmania major Infected Mouse

Background: Limiting dilution assay is considered as the gold standard method for quantifying the number of parasites in the animal model of Leishmania infection. Nowadays, real-time PCR is being increasingly applied to quantify infectious agents. In the present study, a real-time PCR assay was developed to estimate parasite burdens in lymph nodes of Leishmania major infected BALB/C mice. Enumeration of parasites was also performed by limiting dilution assay and compared with the results of real-time PCR based quantification. Methods: The SYBR Green based real-time PCR assay was performed to amplify a 75 bp fragment of superoxide dismutase B1 gene in the lymph nodes of L. major infected BALB/C mice 8 weeks post infection. Mice were infected subcutaneously at the base of their tail with 2 × 105 L. major promastigotes in the stationary phase of growth. To compare parasite burdens obtained by real-time PCR assay with those of limiting dilution assay, twelve 8-fold serial dilutions of the lymph node homogenates were prepared in the Schneider medium and incubated at 26°C. After 7 days, wells containing motile parasites were identified by direct observation under an inverted light microscope and the total number of parasites was estimated using the ELIDA software. Results: Spearman’s correlation coefficient of the parasite burdens between real-time PCR and limiting dilution assay was 0.72 (P value = 0.008). Conclusion: Real-time PCR assay is an appropriate replacement to existing limiting dilution assay in quantifying parasite burden in the experimental model of Leishmania infection.
Multirate zero-forcing Tx-Rx design for MIMO channel under BER constraints

This paper is concerned with communicating parallel independent streams of data, possibly of different rates, through a multiple-input multiple-output channel. Each data stream is required to satisfy a bit-error-rate (BER) constraint. This scenario arises in multimedia communications. We find the linear zero-forcing transmitter-receiver (Tx-Rx) matrix pair that requires the minimum transmitter power to achieve the BER constraints. It is well known that the Tx-Rx pair can be chosen to partition the matrix channel into scalar subchannels corresponding to singular values, and different data streams can be transmitted through different subchannels. This design is suboptimum in general. The optimum design has the following structure. The set of input data streams is partitioned into groups called signal groups. The set of subchannels is conformably partitioned into subchannel groups. Each signal group is collectively transmitted through its assigned subchannel group. With each signal/subchannel group pair is associated a unitary matrix that mixes the signals at the transmitter and unmixes them at the receiver. We derive a simple algorithm to determine the optimum signal and subchannel groups. We then use a known algorithm from majorization theory to determine the unitary matrices. Using these, we completely specify the optimum Tx-Rx pair.
Changes in the Th1 : Th2 Cytokine Bias in Pregnancy and the Effects of the Anti-Inflammatory Cyclopentenone Prostaglandin 15-Deoxy-Δ12,14-Prostaglandin J2

Pregnancy is a complex immunological state in which a bias towards T helper 2 (Th2) protects the fetus. Evidence suggests that proinflammatory cytokines increase the risk of poor neonatal outcome, independently of the direct effect of preterm labour. The anti-inflammatory prostaglandin 15-deoxy-Δ12,14-Prostaglandin J2 (15dPGJ2) inhibits nuclear factor Kappa B (NF-κB) in amniocytes and myocytes in vitro and is a ligand for the chemoattractant receptor-homologous molecule expressed on Th2 cells (CRTH2) receptor. Here we examine the Th1:Th2 cytokine bias in pregnancy and whether 15dPGJ2 could be used to inhibit the production of the proinflammatory cytokines through inhibition of NF-κB while simultaneously promoting Th2 interleukin 4 (IL-4) synthesis via CRTH2 in T helper cells. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from women at 28 weeks, term pre-labour, term labour as well as non-pregnant female controls were cultured with 15dPGJ2 or vehicle control and stimulated with phorbol myristyl acetate (PMA)/ionomycin. The percentage of CD4+ cells producing interferon gamma (IFN-γ) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) in response to PMA/ionomycin was significantly reduced in pregnancy. 15dPGJ2 reduced IFN-γ and TNF-α production in stimulated T helper cells, but did not alter IL-4 production in CRTH2+ve cells. 15dPGJ2 also reduced phospho-p65 in stimulated PBMCs. In summary, 15dPGJ2 suppresses the Th1 response of PBMCs during pregnancy and active labour whilst maintaining the Th2 response suggesting a therapeutic benefit in reducing neonatal morbidity in inflammation-induced PTL.
Glutamate receptors of ganglion cells in the rabbit retina: evidence for glutamate as a bipolar cell transmitter.

1. Intracellular and extracellular recordings were obtained from ganglion cells in the rabbit retina. The effects of glutamate analogues and antagonists were studied using a perfusion method for drug application. 2. Kainate (KA) excited all ganglion cells directly and caused a large increase in firing rate. N‐Methyl‐DL‐aspartate (NMDLA) also excited ganglion cells but it was less potent and caused burst firing. 3. Quisqualate (QQ) and (RS)‐2‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methyl‐isoxazole‐4‐propionic acid (AMPA) excited many ganglion cells and were approximately as potent as KA. Less frequently, QQ and AMPA had inhibitory effects possibly due to polysynaptic action. 4. General glutamate antagonists such as cis‐2,3‐piperidine dicarboxylic acid (PDA) and kynurenic acid blocked the light input to all ganglion cells. PDA and kynurenic acid blocked the effects of KA and NMDLA, but not carbachol, indicating that they act as glutamate antagonists in the rabbit retina. Kynurenic acid did not block the excitatory action of QQ, even though light responses were abolished. 5. Amacrine cells were depolarized by KA or QQ and less potently by NMDLA. Their light‐evoked responses were blocked by PDA. 6. We conclude that the light input to ganglion cells in the rabbit retina is predominantly mediated by KA receptors. This is consistent with the idea that ‘on’ and ‘off’ bipolar cells are excitatory and release glutamate.
Internet Technologies, ECRM Capabilities, and Performance Benefits for SMEs: An Exploratory Study

Research on large firms suggests that dedicated customer relationship management (CRM) software applications play a critical role in creating and sustaining customer relationships. CRM is also of strategic importance to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), but most of them do not employ dedicated CRM software. Instead they use generic Internet-based technologies to manage customer relationships with electronic CRM (eCRM). There has been little research on the extent to which the use of generic Internet technologies contributes to SME performance. The present study fills the gap, building upon the literature on organizational capabilities, marketing, and SMEs to develop a research model with which to explore the relationships between generic Internet technologies, eCRM capabilities, and the resulting performance benefits in the SME context. A survey across 286 SMEs in Ireland finds strong empirical evidence in support of the hypotheses regarding these benefits. The study contributes to managerial decision making by showing how SMEs can use generic Internet technologies to advance their customer relationships and contributes to theory development by conceptualizing eCRM capabilities in an SME context.
Physical Layer Integration of Private, Common, and Confidential Messages in Bidirectional Relay Networks

In order to increase spectral efficiency, it is becoming more and more important that next generation wireless networks wisely integrate multiple services such as transmissions of private, common, and confidential messages at the physical layer. This is referred to as physical layer service integration, and in this paper is being studied for bidirectional relay networks. Here, a relay node establishes a bidirectional communication between two other nodes using a decode-and-forward protocol. This is also known as two-way relaying. In the broadcast phase, the relay efficiently integrates additional common and confidential services at the physical layer, which then requires the study of the bidirectional broadcast channel (BBC) with common and confidential messages. The entire secrecy capacity regions for discrete memoryless and MIMO Gaussian channels are established. These results further unify previous partial results such as the BBC with common messages or the classical broadcast channel with common and confidential messages, where the relay node provides only some of the services.