Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of TCF7L2 variation with single islet autoantibody expression in children with type 1 diabetes

Background The transcription factor 7-like 2 (TCF7L2) gene has the strongest genetic association with type 2 diabetes. TCF7L2 also associates with latent autoimmune diabetes in adults, which often presents with a single islet autoantibody, but not with classical type 1 diabetes. Methods We aimed to test if TCF7L2 is associated with single islet autoantibody expression in pediatric type 1 diabetes. We studied 71 prospectively recruited children who had newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes and evidence of islet autoimmunity, that is, expressed ≥1 islet autoantibody to insulin, glutamic acid decarboxylase 65, islet cell autoantigen 512, or zinc transporter 8. TCF7L2 rs7903146 alleles were identified. Data at diagnosis were cross-sectionally analyzed. Results We found that 21.1% of the children with autoimmune type 1 diabetes expressed a single islet autoantibody. The distribution of TCF7L2 rs7903146 genotypes in children with a single autoantibody (n=15) was 40% CC, 26.7% CT and 33.3% TT, compared with children with ≥2 islet autoantibodies (50% CC, 42.9% CT and 7.1% TT, p=0.024). Furthermore, compared with children with ≥2 autoantibodies, single-autoantibody children had characteristics reflecting milder autoimmune destruction of β-cells. Restricting to lean children (body mass index<85th centile; n=36), 45.5% of those expressing a single autoantibody were rs7903146 TT homozygotes, compared with 0% of those with ≥2 autoantibodies (p<0.0001). Conclusion These results suggest that, in children with only mild islet autoimmunity, mechanisms associated with TCF7L2 genetic variation contribute to diabetogenesis, and this contribution is larger in the absence of obesity.
Comparative evaluation of chemical Profile of Chrysophyllum albidum seed Cotyledon and Leaf

The seed cotyledon and leaf of Chrysophyllum albidum were analyzed for their phytochemical and proximate compositions. The results obtained from the anaylsis of the seed cotyledon and leaves of C. albidum were compared. It was observed that, the C. albidum contain substantial amount of saponins, tannins, flavonoids, alkaloids and phenols. The alkaloids and tannins present in the seed cotyledon were higher compared with the level observed in the leaves. There was generally low percentage proximate fractions of the leaves in terms of fats, ash and fiber and lower percentage fractions of ash and fibers were observed in the seed cotyledons. Protein and carbohydrate and ash compositions of the leaves were observed to be higher compared with the compositions present in the seed cotyledon. This study has shown that C. albidum seed cotyledon and leave are good source of phytochemicals that are biologically important, thus they can be potential sources of useful drugs in the management of some ailments.
Research and practice with older adults: The picture in Australia

As the Australian ageing population expands, there is an increasing need for quality gerontological research to inform psychological practice. The analyses undertaken for this paper indicate that the volume of geropsychological research has increased substantially, both in Australia and overseas. Membership of the Australian Psychological Society (APS) Interest Group on Ageing is small, but since 1997 has not fallen as much as the membership of some other well-established groups. Further participation by trained psychologists in gerontology research is required, and psychologists' training should include stronger emphasis on ageing.
Changing organizational energy consumption behaviour through comparative feedback

The differential effects of two forms of feedback on energy consumption behaviour were examined in two units of a metallurgical company. In one unit, employees received information about energy conservation, had to set goals and received feedback on their own conservation behaviour. The same procedure was followed with employees in a second unit, but they also received information about the performance of the first unit. In accordance with predictions from social identity theory and social comparison theory, the results clearly showed that employees in the comparative feedback condition saved more energy than employees who only received information about their own performance, even half a year after the intervention. A remarkable finding was that behavioural change took place with hardly any changes in attitudes or intentions. The discussion focuses on these findings and on their implications for organizational behaviour change in general.
The Educational Experiences of Intercollegiate Student-Athletes

Critics of intercollegiate sport argue that winning, which is highly correlated with revenues, has corrupted higher education. Most specifically, at some schools the athletic performance of athletes is more important than their academic achievement. In its most virulent form, the critics charge, the athletes are exploited for their commercial value and when this is used up they are discarded without the education their scholarships promised. In the words of syndicated columnist George Will: The worst scandal does not involve cash or convertibles. It involves slipping academically unqualified young men in the back doors of academic institutions, insulating them from academic expectations, wringing them dry of their athletic-commercial usefulness, then slinging them out the back
The ANZJFT: Snapshots From the History of an Evolving Journal

This article presents a series of 'snapshots' of the history of the journal now known as the ANZJFT (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy). While a full, detailed history of the journal from its inception is beyond the scope of this paper, the authors offer glimpses of the journal at key points in its 25-year history, and from these, readers can reconstruct some of the changes that have occurred, and the continuities in values and attitudes that the ANZJFT has attempted to preserve, throughout its existence. The authors comment, from their own recent experience, on particular dilemmas, which they have faced, and use their own data to update a bibliometric survey of the journal originally carried out by Davis and Lipson (1996).
Structured Teaching for individuals with visual impairments

'Structured Teaching', as advocated by the TEACCH approach (Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication handicapped CHildren) is widely used to promote independence and facilitate teaching and learning for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Key principles underpinning the approach include assessment and individualisation. As a result Structured Teaching is a flexible approach which can be adapted to meet a variety of individual needs, regardless of the age or cognitive ability of the learner. The components of Structured Teaching, physical structure, schedules, work systems and visual structure, combine to provide structure that is tailor-made for the individual. For those with sensory impairments, assessment of preferred sensory modalities enables us to develop a 'multi-sensory approach to Structured Teaching'. This paper reflects upon acknowledged practice of the approach for individuals with ASD and its potential use for those with a visual impairment, with the intention of stimulating further discussion.
Trust and Creativity: Identifying the Role of Trust in Creativity-Oriented Joint-Developments

In this article we report on the design, prototyping and results of a research effort aimed at identifying if and how trust affects the creativity of a partnership between two economic agents. The methodology combines an experiment and two questionnaires. The purpose of the research is to increase our understanding of trust and its impact on the outcome of cooperation, and to derive some guidance for economic actors, namely R&D managers and executives who want to build trustful innovation oriented relationships with their business partners. Specifically, we investigate the effect of trust on partners’ creativity and willingness to invest financially in a joint development. Our results show that more trustful partners invest higher amounts in the alliance, while there seems to be an optimum amount of mutual trust between partners to maximize their joint creativity; if the level of mutual trust is below or above this threshold; their joint creativity seems to decrease.
Clinical Interventions in Aging Dovepress Association between Previously Identified Loci Affecting Telomere Length and Coronary Heart Disease (chd) in Han Chinese Population

Purpose: To replicate previously confirmed telomere-length loci in a Chinese Han population with coronary heart disease (CHD), and investigate these loci and the possibility of and age at onset of CHD. Patients and methods: 1514 CHD patients and 2470 normal controls were recruited. Medical data including age, sex, body mass index, lipid profiles, history of hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and dyslipidemia were collected from all the participants. Seven previously identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) related to leucocyte telomere length were genotyped, Results: No significant difference in genotype frequencies from the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium test was noted for all tested SNPs both in the CHD patients and the normal controls. No polymorphism was observed for rs9420907, and AA genotype was noted in both the CHD patients and the controls. Neither the genotype nor the allele frequencies of rs2736100, rs8105767, rs11125529, and rs2967374 were significantly different between the CHD patients and the normal controls. For rs10936599 and rs755017, statistical difference was found for the allele frequency but not genotype. Distributions of genotype and allele were significantly different between the two groups for rs7675998. The odds ratio for carriers of CHD was 2.127 (95% confidence interval: 1.909–2.370) for the A allele of rs7675998. By one-way analysis of variance test, rs7675998 was associated with the onset age of CHD. CHD patients with the AA genotype of rs7675998 had significantly lower onset age (P,0.05). Conclusion: In a Chinese Han population, NAF1 gene encod ing proteins with known function in telomere biology may influence both the possibility of and the age at onset of CHD, as previously reported in European studies.
The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision

The paper opens with an evaluation of the BIA model of bilingual word recognition in the light of recent empirical evidence. After pointing out problems and omissions, a new model, called the BIA+, is proposed. Structurally, this new model extends the old one by adding phonological and semantic lexical representations to the available orthographic ones, and assigns a different role to the so-called language nodes. Furthermore, it makes a distinction between the effects of non-linguistic context (such as instruction and stimulus list composition) and linguistic context (such as the semantic and syntactic effects of sentence context), based on a distinction between the word identification system itself and a task/decision system that regulates control. At the end of the paper, the generalizability of the BIA+ model to different tasks and modalities is discussed.
SWAP-Assembler 2: Optimization of De Novo Genome Assembler at Extreme Scale

In this paper, we analyze and optimize the most time-consuming steps of the SWAP-Assembler, a parallel genome assembler, so that it can scale to a large number of cores for huge genomes with sequencing data ranging from terabyes to petabytes. Performance analysis results show that the most time-consuming steps are input parallelization, k-mer graph construction, and graph simplification (edge merging). For the input parallelization, the input data is divided into virtual fragments with nearly equal size, and the start position and end position of each fragment are automatically separated at the beginning of the reads. In k-mer graph construction, in order to improve the communication efficiency, the message size is kept constant between any two processes by proportionally increasing the number of nucleotides to the number of processes in the input parallelization step for each round. The memory usage is also decreased because only a small part of the input data is processed in each round. With graph simplification, the communication protocol reduces the number of communication loops from four to two loops and decreases the idle communication time. The optimized assembler is denoted SWAP-Assembler 2 (SWAP2). In our experiments using a 1000 Genomes project dataset of 4 terabytes (the largest dataset ever used for assembling) on the supercomputer Mira, the results show that SWAP2 scales to 131,072 cores with an efficiency of 40%. We also compared our work with both the HipMer assembler and the SWAP-Assembler. On the Yanhuang dataset of 300 gigabytes, SWAP2 shows a 3X speedup and 4X better scalability compared with the HipMer assembler and is 45 times faster than the SWAP-Assembler. The SWAP2 software is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/swapassembler.
Hindcast and validation of Hurricane Ike (2008) waves, forerunner, and storm surge

Hurricane Ike (2008) made landfall near Galveston, Texas, as a moderate intensity storm. Its large wind field in conjunction with the Louisiana-Texas coastline's broad shelf and large scale concave geometry generated waves and surge that impacted over 1000 km of coastline. Ike's complex and varied wave and surge response physics included: the capture of surge by the protruding Mississippi River Delta; the strong influence of wave radiation stress gradients on the Delta adjacent to the shelf break; the development of strong wind driven shore-parallel currents and the associated geostrophic setup; the forced early rise of water in coastal bays and lakes facilitating inland surge penetration; the propagation of a free wave along the southern Texas shelf; shore-normal peak wind-driven surge; and resonant and reflected long waves across a wide continental shelf. Preexisting and rapidly deployed instrumentation provided the most comprehensive hurricane response data of any previous hurricane. More than 94 wave parameter time histories, 523 water level time histories, and 206 high water marks were collected throughout the Gulf in deep water, along the nearshore, and up to 65 km inland. Ike's highly varied physics were simulated using SWAN? +? ADCIRC, a tightly coupled wave and circulation model, on SL18TX33, a new unstructured mesh of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and western Atlantic Ocean with high resolution of the Gulf's coastal floodplain from Alabama to the Texas-Mexico border. A comprehensive validation was made of the model's ability to capture the varied physics in the system.
Marital Self-Disclosure and Marital Satisfaction.

This study examined relationships between self-disclosure and marital satisfaction. On selfreport measures, husbands' disclosure to wives was positively related to, and predictive of, husbands' marital satisfaction; wives' disclosure to husbands was a positive predictor of husbands' marital satisfaction; wives' disclosure to husbands was positively related to, and predictive of, wives' marital satisfaction; and the amount of discrepancy between disclosure of husbands and wives was negatively related to, and a negative predictor of, husbands' marital satisfaction. Behaviorally, the duration of time that husbands spent disclosing to wives was a negative predictor of husbands' and wives' marital satisfaction.
Object Classification in Visual Surveillance Using Adaboost

In this paper, we present a method of object classification within the context of visual surveillance. Our goal is the classification of tracked objects into one of the two classes: people and cars. Using training data comprised of trajectories tracked from our car-park, a weighted ensemble of Adaboost classifiers is developed. Each ensemble is representative of a particular feature, evaluated and normalised by its significance. Classification is performed using the sub-optimal hyper-plane derived by selection of the N-best performing feature ensembles. The resulting performance is compared to a similar Adaboost classifier, trained using a single ensemble over all dimensions.
Synthesis & Evaluation of a Mobile Notification Dataset

Open-source mobile notification datasets are a rarity in the research community. Due to the sensitive nature of mobile notifications it is difficult to find a dataset which captures their features in such a way that their inherently personal information is kept private. For this reason, the majority of research in the domain of Notification Management requires ad-hoc software to be developed for capturing the data necessary to test hypotheses, train algorithms and evaluate proposed systems. As an alternative, this paper discusses the process, advantages and limitations with harnessing a large-scale mobile usage dataset for deriving a synthetic mobile notification dataset used in testing and improving an intelligent Notification Management System (NMS).
Angular measures for feature selection in text categorization

Text Categorization, which consists of automatically assigning documents to a set of categories, usually involves the management of a huge number of features. Most of them are irrelevant or introduce noise which misleads the classifiers. Thus, feature reduction is often performed in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the classification. In this paper we propose to select relevant features by means of what we call Angular Measures, which are simpler than other usual measures applied for this purpose. We carry out experiments over two different corpora and find that the proposed measures perform equal or better than some of the existing ones.
Gray Whales and the Value of Monitoring Data in Implementing the U.S. Endangered Species Act

Abstract: Many scientists lament the absence of data for endangered species and argue that more funds should be spent acquiring basic information about population trends. Using 19 years of abundance estimates for the eastern North Pacific gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus), we sampled subsets of the original survey data to identify the number of years of data required to remove the population from the U.S. Endangered Species Act's (ESA) list of endangered and threatened wildlife. For any given duration of monitoring, we selected all possible combinations of consecutive counts. To incorporate variability in growth rates, we extracted a maximum likelihood estimator of growth rate and confidence interval about that growth rate on the assumption that the population changes can be approximated by a simple diffusion process with drift. We then applied a new approach to determine ESA status for each subset of survey data and found that a quantitative decision to delist is unambiguously supported by 11 years of data but is precariously uncertain with fewer than 10 years of data. The data needed to produce an unequivocal decision to delist gray whales cost the National Marine Fisheries Service an estimated U.S. $660,000, a surprisingly modest expense given the fact that delisting can greatly simplify regulatory constraints. This example highlights the value of population monitoring in administering the ESA and provides a compelling example of the utility of such information in identifying both imperiled and recovered species. The economic value of such data is that they provide the foundation for delisting, which could ultimately save much more money than the collection of the data would ever cost.
Berberine Reduces Fibronectin Expression by Suppressing the S1P-S1P2 Receptor Pathway in Experimental Diabetic Nephropathy Models

The accumulation of glomerular extracellular matrix (ECM) is one of the critical pathological characteristics of diabetic renal fibrosis. Fibronectin (FN) is an important constituent of ECM. Our previous studies indicate that the activation of the sphingosine kinase 1 (SphK1)-sphingosine 1- phosphate (S1P) signaling pathway plays a key regulatory role in FN production in glomerular mesangial cells (GMCs) under diabetic condition. Among the five S1P receptors, the activation of S1P2 receptor is the most abundant. Berberine (BBR) treatment also effectively inhibits SphK1 activity and S1P production in the kidneys of diabetic models, thus improving renal injury. Based on these data, we further explored whether BBR could prevent FN production in GMCs under diabetic condition via the S1P2 receptor. Here, we showed that BBR significantly down-regulated the expression of S1P2 receptor in diabetic rat kidneys and GMCs exposed to high glucose (HG) and simultaneously inhibited S1P2 receptor-mediated FN overproduction. Further, BBR also obviously suppressed the activation of NF-κB induced by HG, which was accompanied by reduced S1P2 receptor and FN expression. Taken together, our findings suggest that BBR reduces FN expression by acting on the S1P2 receptor in the mesangium under diabetic condition. The role of BBR in S1P2 receptor expression regulation could closely associate with its inhibitory effect on NF-κB activation.
Communication Processes and the Latino Health Paradox: Exploring Relationships among Loneliness, Cultural Values, and Health across the Lifespan

6 CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. 7 Theoretical Contexts.13 Loneliness and Health. 13 Socioemotional Selectivity Theory . 21 Social Support and Health. 23 Loneliness and Social Support. 25 Cultural Values and Health . 26 Familism. 26 Gender Roles: Marianismo and Machismo. 28 Marianismo and Machismo as Health Risk Factors . 31 Marianismo and Machismo as Protective Factors . 34 Religiosity, Spirituality, and Health. 35 General Link Between Religiosity/Spirituality and Health. 37 Religiosity/Spirituality, Health and Latinos . 38 Focal Dependent Variable: Health.42 Hypotheses and Research Questions . 43 Loneliness. 43 Familism. 44 Marianismo and Machismo. 45 Spiritual Well-Being . 47 Ethnicity . 49 CHAPTER II. METHODS . 51 Power Analysis . 51 Participants . 51 Instrument . 54 Measures . 55 Key Independent Variables. 55 Key Dependent Variables. 59 Key Mediating Variable . 63 Additional Variables . 63 CHAPTER III. ANALYSIS AND RESULTS . 68 CHAPTER IV. DISCUSSION . 94 Theoretical Implications . 102 Limitations and Future Research . 104 Conclusion . 107 APPENDIX A. TABLES . 108 APPENDIX B. BASIC MEDIATION AND MODERATION MODELS . 131 APPENDIX C. INSTRUMENT . 132 REFERENCES . 191