Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcriptional profiling of the chick pineal gland, a photoreceptive circadian oscillator and pacemaker.

The avian pineal gland contains both circadian oscillators and photoreceptors to produce rhythms in biosynthesis of the hormone melatonin in vivo and in vitro. The molecular mechanisms for melatonin biosynthesis are largely understood, but the mechanisms driving the rhythm itself or the photoreceptive processes that entrain the rhythm are unknown. We have produced cDNA microarrays of pineal gland transcripts under light-dark and constant darkness conditions. Rhythmic transcripts were classified according to function, representing diverse functional groups, including phototransduction pathways, transcription/translation factors, ion channel proteins, cell signaling molecules, and immune function genes. These were also organized relative to time of day mRNA abundance in light-dark and constant darkness. The transcriptional profile of the chick pineal gland reveals a more complex form of gene regulation than one might expect from a gland whose sole apparent function is the rhythmic biosynthesis of melatonin. The mRNAs encoding melatonin biosynthesis are rhythmic as are many orthologs of mammalian "clock genes. " However, the oscillation of phototransductive, immune, stress response, hormone binding, and other important processes in the transcriptome of the pineal gland, raises new questions regarding the role of the pineal gland in circadian rhythm generation, organization, and avian physiology.
Assessing optimization based strategies for t-way test suite generation: The case for flower-based strategy

Exhaustive testing is extremely difficult to perform owing to the large number of combinations. Thus, sampling and finding the optimal test suite from a set of feasible test cases becomes a central concern. Addressing this issue, the adoption of t-way testing (where t indicates the interaction strength) has come into the limelight. In order to summarize the achievements so far and facilitate future development, the main focus of this paper is, first, to present a critical comparison of adoption optimization algorithms (OA) as a basis of the t-way test suite generation strategy and, second, to propose a new t-way strategy based on Flower Pollination Algorithm, called Flower Strategy (FS). Analytical and experimental results demonstrate the applicability of FS for t-way test suite generation.
Assessment of Reporting, Attitudes and Knowledge About the Stab Incidents and Professional Risk of Viral Infection among Health Care Professionals in Primary Health Care

Conflict of interest: none declared. Goal The goal of the research is to determine the relationship between frequency and reporting of stab incidents, attitudes and knowledge about stab incidents and occupational risk for transmission of viral infection with HBV, HCV or HIV among health care professionals employed in primary health care. Material and methods Conducted is prospective, cross-section study by questionnaires in 2012. The survey included health professionals in Primary Health Care Center in Tuzla. The final sample has 131 respondents (85% women). Statistical analysis was performed using the statistical package SPSS version 20.0. Results The prevalence rate of stab incidents throughout their career in our study was 66%; while the rate of reported incidents was 4.83 ˜ 5 times lower than the actual prevalence. In 49 out of 87 cases this was a case of hollow needle prick. The most common causes of stab incidents are the time pressure, unforeseen reactions of patients and lack of concentration. Conclusion Stab incidents are often not reported in in developing countries. Training in order to raise awareness and knowledge about the problem, proper procedures, good organization of work and anti-stress program, safer disposal, conducting prophylaxis before and after exposure monitored by the relevant institutions of occupational medicine should contribute to solving this problem.
Strategic Narratives and Essentialising Visualisations: A Decade of the Affective, Embodied Activism of FEMEN

Activist organisations worldwide have long struggled with attaining recognition. Feminist activists, in particular, struggle with attaining recognition without essentialisation. Female activists, especially those arguing for women’s rights and equality amidst other civil and human rights arguments, are often grouped together and essentialized, allowing women’s voices to build strategic coalition narratives but simultaneously defining and limiting their identities as “feminine” (Arfaoui & Moghadam, 2016; Moghadam, 2014a, 2014b; Newsom, 2004). Significantly, this type of activist strategic essentialism is often coopted within larger nationalist and international strategic narratives as a type of commodification of soft power. A recent example of this is the promotion of women’s “new” rights to drive in Saudi Arabia by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a means of gaining international, particularly US support for his “moderninsation” efforts, while simultaneously still remaining one of the most oppressive regimes for women (Newsom, 2018) and while still arresting many of the leaders of the women’s right to drive movement within that nation (El Sirgany & Clarke, 2018; Yaakoubi, 2018). Feminist activists are therefore challenged to create narratives of femininity and resistance
Stronger Bounds on Braess's Paradox and the Maximum Latency of Selfish Routing

We give several new upper and lower bounds on the worst-case severity of Braess's paradox and the price of anarchy of selfish routing with respect to the maximum latency objective. In single-commodity networks with arbitrary continuous and nondecreasing latency functions, we prove that this worst-case price of anarchy is exactly $n-1$, where $n$ is the number of network vertices. For Braess's paradox in such networks, we prove that removing at most $c$ edges from a network decreases the common latency incurred by traffic at equilibrium by at most a factor of $c+1$. In particular, the worst-case severity of Braess's paradox with a single edge removal is maximized in Braess's original four-vertex network. In multicommodity networks, we exhibit an infinite family of two-commodity networks, related to the Fibonacci numbers, in which both the worst-case severity of Braess's paradox and the price of anarchy for the maximum latency objective grow exponentially with the network size. This construction demonstrates that numerous known selfish routing results for single-commodity networks have no analogues in networks with two or more commodities. We also prove an upper bound on both of these quantities that is exponential in the network size and independent of the network latency functions, showing that our construction is close to optimal. Finally, we use our family of two-commodity networks to exhibit a natural network design problem with intrinsically exponential (in)approximability.
Accounting for Quality

I n this paper we discuss the relation between school accountability policies and school quality, drawing on a range of evidence that suggests that test-based accountability policies neither lead to improved educational quality nor respect the proper role of government in education. Following a discussion of assessment and measurement issues related to test-based accountability approaches, we raise additional considerations specific to the educational context in the United States.We conclude by advocating accountability policies developed at the service of improved school quality, and which favor the initiative, freedom, and responsibility of local stakeholders—teachers, parents, and administrators—to collaboratively articulate and pursue a vision of education for the youth of their community. In the United States, students have public education provided to them universally at the primary and secondary levels, compulsory to a certain age. While this responsibility rests primarily with the individual states and local communities, the federal government also plays a role in education by guaranteeing equal access to education, and by promoting quality education. To do so, the federal government allocates funding to those school systems in need of economic resources so that they may provide access to a quality education. Consequently, it is both appropriate and important that the federal government enact policies that hold educational institutions accountable for their use of these funds. However, the ways in which government policies hold schools accountable are not neutral. The accountability process influences outcomes by delineating priorities for schools and students and consequently imposing a specific vision of education. When these priorities are defined by large-scale standardized tests that measure student
Evaluation of different egg quality traits and interpretation of their mode of inheritance in White Leghorns

Aim: The experiment was carried out to evaluate different external and internal egg quality traits and to figure out their mode of inheritance from a set of hierarchically classified data. Materials and Methods: The data collected from 548 progenies (1 egg from each progeny) of 282 dams mated to 47 sires (1 sire mated to 6 dams) of a White Leghorn flock were used in the present study. Phenotypic means and their standard errors were calculated for all the quality traits. Heritabilities were estimated for these traits separately from “sire,” “dam” and “sire+dam” (full-sib) components of variance using Statistical Package for Social Sciences-17 program. Results: External quality traits such as; egg weight, length, width, shape index, surface area, shell weight, shell thickness, shell ratio, and internal quality traits such as; length, width, height, and weight of albumen and yolk, albumen index, albumen ratio, Haugh unit (H.U.), yolk diameter, yolk index, yolk ratio, and yolk albumen ratio were measured in 548 eggs of the experimental White Leghorn flock. The eggs were found to have optimum weight (57.78±0.20 g), shape index (73.53±0.18) and shell characteristics (6 g, 0.32 mm) as per its genetic potential. Higher values for albumen height (8.41±0.04) mm and H.U. (92.00±0.19) are attributable to the freshness of eggs and proper age of hens. Heritability estimates from “sire” component of variance were higher than “dam” and “sire+dam” components for the traits like egg weight, length, width, shape index, surface area, albumen width, albumen index, H.U. , yolk width, yolk height, yolk weight, and yolk index whereas for rest of the traits the values estimated from “dam” component were higher. Estimates from “sire+dam” component were intermediate to the estimates derived from “sire” and “dam” components. Conclusion: The heritability estimates from different egg quality traits were moderate to high. Since most of the traits have high heritability values, these traits can be improved by mass selection.
Women’s prospects for career advancement: Narratives of women in core mining positions in a South African mining organisation

Orientation: Even though there has been a phenomenal increase in the number of women employed in the mining industry, the figures hide many gender inequalities as the gendered impediments to career advancement persist despite South Africa’s remarkable equity policy regime. However, it is unclear, from the perspective of the women themselves, how their career advancement is encumbered.Research purpose: This study reflects on the prospects for career advancement by exploring the work and organisational experiences of women in core mining positions in an open-cast mining organisation in South Africa.Motivation for the study: To reflect on the prospects for career advancement of women in core mining positions.Research approach, design and method: Eight professional women, selected through a purposive sampling procedure, participated in in-depth unstructured interviews. Data were analysed using Creswell’s simplified version of the Stevick–Colaizzi–Keen method, guided by the lens of gendered organisations.Main findings: Three themes emerged: (1) male domination that has marginalised women and compelled them to emulate masculinity has legitimised existing gender barriers, (2) the long, awkward and unpredictable hours of work have deepened women’s time constraints because they have to combine the home or family caretaker role with work, and (3) the essence of being a woman in a mining organisation.Practical/managerial implications: The study may present South African managers with a better understanding of how work and organisational features, policies, daily practices and discourses impede career advancement of women in core mining positions. Organisations should train managers to create conditions that minimise barriers and maximise performance and advancement, and align retention strategies.Contribution/value-add: This study builds on existing knowledge about career advancement of women by providing new and valuable information specific to women in core mining positions in an open-cast mining organisation in South Africa, seen through the lens of gendered organisational theory. The findings highlight the need for organisational theory research that is responsive to the subtle issues and gendered assumptions that sustain encumbrances to women’s career trajectories.
MicroRNAs contribute to the maintenance of cell-type-specific physiological characteristics: miR-192 targets Na+/K+-ATPase β1

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in biological development and disease. Much less is known about their role in normal adult physiology. The proximal convoluted tubule (PCT) and the medullary thick ascending limb (mTAL) in the kidney consist of epithelial cells with different transport activities. We identified 55 possible miRNA-target pairs of which the miRNAs and their predicted target proteins, many of which are involved in epithelial transport, were inversely enriched in PCT and mTAL. Some miRNAs appeared to have synergistic effects on shared targets. miR-192 and its predicted target the β-1 subunit of Na+/K+-ATPase (Atp1b1), an enzyme providing the driving force for tubular transport, were inversely enriched in kidney regions. In mice, knockdown of miR-192 led to up-regulation of Atp1b1 protein. When mice were fed with a high-salt diet, knockdown of miR-192 blunted the adaptational increase of urine output. Interestingly, miR-192 appeared to target Atp1b1 through the 5′-, rather than 3′-untranslated region. The study suggests a novel physiological mechanism in which miR-192 suppresses Na+/K+-ATPase and contributes to renal handling of fluid balance. It supports an important role of miRNAs in determining cellular characteristics that may appear subtle yet are physiologically critical.
International Labour Migration, Remittances and Income Inequality in a Developing Country: The Case of Sri Lanka

International labour migration and migrants’ remittances have been tremendously increasing and diversifying during the past few decades. The reported number of Sri Lankan international migrants increased to 1.5 million persons or one out of every 19 persons in Sri Lanka by 2006. As a result, reported migrant workers remittances to Sri Lanka increased at an average annual rate of 10 percent over the past 30 year. Since the mid-1990s they constitute the largest source of foreign financing method. Meanwhile Sri Lanka has been experiencing growing income inequality trend since late 1970s. By using available macro-level and micro-level data, this paper attempted to explore relationships among international labour migration, remittances and income inequality in Sri Lanka. This paper argues that, under the present circumstances, increasing number of international migrants from Sri Lanka or increasing remittances to Sri Lanka generate higher income inequality in the country. Thus, policy makers should pay attention for these phenomena and attempts must be made to develop linkages between relatively developed regions of
Imaging and 3D morphological analysis of collagen fibrils

The recent booming of multiphoton imaging of collagen fibrils by means of second harmonic generation microscopy generates the need for the development and automation of quantitative methods for image analysis. Standard approaches sequentially analyse two‐dimensional (2D) slices to gain knowledge on the spatial arrangement and dimension of the fibrils, whereas the reconstructed three‐dimensional (3D) image yields better information about these characteristics. In this work, a 3D analysis method is proposed for second harmonic generation images of collagen fibrils, based on a recently developed 3D fibre quantification method. This analysis uses operators from mathematical morphology. The fibril structure is scanned with a directional distance transform. Inertia moments of the directional distances yield the main fibre orientation, corresponding to the main inertia axis. The collaboration of directional distances and fibre orientation delivers a geometrical estimate of the fibre radius. The results include local maps as well as global distribution of orientation and radius of the fibrils over the 3D image. They also bring a segmentation of the image into foreground and background, as well as a classification of the foreground pixels into the preferred orientations. This accurate determination of the spatial arrangement of the fibrils within a 3D data set will be most relevant in biomedical applications. It brings the possibility to monitor remodelling of collagen tissues upon a variety of injuries and to guide tissues engineering because biomimetic 3D organizations and density are requested for better integration of implants.
Exploring COBIT Processes for ITG in Saudi Organizations An empirical Study

Control Objectives for Information and Related Tech nology (COBIT) has become one of the most important guidelines for information te chnology governance (ITG), which provides organizations with a useful tool to start evaluatin g their own ITG systems. COBIT introduces an ITG framework and supporting toolset that allows IT managers to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. The objective of this study is to investigate the formality, auditing, responsibility and accountabil ity of implementing COBIT processes for ITG in Saudi organizations. An empirical survey, using a s elf-administered questionnaire, was conducted to achieve these objectives. Five hundred questionn a res were distributed to a sample of Saudi organizations in a selected number of Saudi cities. One hundred and twenty seven valid questionnaires – representing a 25.4 percent respon se rate –were collected and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) vers ion 16. While the results of the study reveal that the majority of respondents reported that implement ing ITG COBIT processes and domains is the responsibility of IT departments in Saudi organizat ions, most of the respondents reported that the COBIT processes and domains are neither audited nor formally conducted in their organizations. From a practical standpoint, managers and practitio ners alike stand to gain from the findings of this study. The study provides useful information f or senior management, IT managers, accountants, auditors, and academics to understand the implementation phase and the impact of COBIT on ITG in Saudi organizations.
A Multi-View Sentiment Corpus

Sentiment Analysis is a broad task that involves the analysis of various aspect of the natural language text. However, most of the approaches in the state of the art usually investigate independently each aspect, i.e. Subjectivity Classification, Sentiment Polarity Classification, Emotion Recognition, Irony Detection. In this paper we present a Multi-View Sentiment Corpus (MVSC), which comprises 3000 English microblog posts related the movie domain. Three independent annotators manually labelled MVSC, following a broad annotation schema about different aspects that can be grasped from natural language text coming from social networks. The contribution is therefore a corpus that comprises five different views for each message, i.e. subjective/objective, sentiment polarity, implicit/explicit, irony, emotion. In order to allow a more detailed investigation on the human labelling behaviour, we provide the annotations of each human annotator involved.
On the tamagawa number conjecture for hecke characters

In this paper, we prove the weak p‐part of the Tamagawa number conjecture in all non‐critical cases for the motives associated to Hecke characters of the form $\varphi ^a\overline{\varphi }^b$ where φ is the Hecke character of a CM elliptic curve E defined over an imaginary quadratic field K, under certain restrictions which originate mainly from the Iwasawa theory of imaginary quadratic fields. © 2011 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
The Slow Afterhyperpolarization in Hippocampal CA1 Neurons Covaries with Spatial Learning Ability in Aged Fisher 344 Rats

Rodents commonly exhibit age-related impairments in spatial learning tasks, deficits widely thought to reflect cellular or synaptic dysfunction in the hippocampus. Using whole-cell recordings, we examined the afterhyperpolarization (AHP) in CA1 pyramidal cells in hippocampal slices from young (4-6 months of age) and aged (24-26 months of age) Fisher 344 male rats that had been behaviorally characterized in the Morris water maze. The slow AHP (sAHP) recorded from learning-impaired aged rats (AI) was significantly larger than that seen in either age-matched unimpaired rats or young controls. Among aged rats, sAHP amplitude was inversely correlated with both acquisition and probe performance in the water maze. Action potential parameters among the three groups were similar, except for spike accommodation, which was more pronounced in the AI group. Intracellular application of the cAMP analog 8-CPT-cAMP suppressed the sAHP but failed to reveal any age- or performance-related differences in the medium AHP. 8-CPT-cAMP abolished the age-related difference in spike accommodation, whereas instantaneous firing frequency was unchanged. Calcium spikes were of similar amplitude in all three groups but were broader and had significantly larger tails in aged rats; these age-related changes could be mimicked in young neurons after exposure to BayK8644. The calcium spike among aged rats correlated with task acquisition in the maze but, unlike the sAHP, failed to correlate with probe performance. This is the first demonstration that sAHP amplitude covaries with spatial learning ability in aged rats, implying that CA1 excitability strongly influences certain aspects of cognitive function. Our findings also indicate that multiple processes, in addition to elevated calcium influx, conspire to induce cognitive decline during aging.