Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Children's Descriptions of Their Peer Interactions: Useful Information for Clinical Child Assessment

In two studies, children responded to 8 open-ended questions and 32 behavioral-rating items concerning the quality and quantity of their peer interactions in home and school settings. In Study 1, the responses of 33 emotionally disturbed children were compared with teacher and staff behavioral ratings, parent ratings, two other self-rating instruments, and with the responses of a control group of 33 nondisturbed children. In Study 2, 173 children in a normative sample were interviewed and their responses compared with sociometric ratings. A factor analysis of children's descriptions revealed three factors — Positive Interactions, Negative Interactions, and Extensiveness of Peer Network. Emotionally disturbed children scored less favorably than nondisturbed children on all three dimensions, and rejected children in the normative sample reported more negative interactions than did peer-accepted or neglected children. Reports of negative interactions were strongly correlated with teacher, staff, and parent r.
The effect of fenofibric acid on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of warfarin in rats

Abstract 1. Case reports have shown that coadministration of fenofibric acid (FA) could increase bleeding risks of warfarin, but the mechanisms remained unknown. We therefore investigated the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic interaction between warfarin and FA in rats. 2. Rats received warfarin alone (2 mg/kg) or coadministered with FA (100 mg/kg). FA significantly increased the exposure to warfarin, and decreased that to 7-hydroxywarfarin in rats nearly by two-fold, meanwhile increased Cmax and prolonged t1/2 of warfarin. Anticoagulant activity significantly increased, with prothrombin time (PT) up to 199 ± 33 s in coadministered group (approximately ten-fold compared with rats received warfarin alone). Incubation experiments illustrated FA inhibited CYP2C6 and CYP3A1/2 with the IC50 values of 6.98 and 16.14 μM, and inhibited the metabolism of warfarin (Ki value of 2.21 μM). Meanwhile, FA decreased the plasma protein binding of warfarin in vitro. 3. Our data suggested that the altered pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of warfarin in rats was primarily attributed to the inhibition of metabolism. Anticoagulant activity monitoring or warfarin dose lowering needs to be considered when patients are coadministered with FA.
Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor-&agr; Activation Reduces Salt-Dependent Hypertension During Chronic Endothelin B Receptor Blockade

Endothelin B (ETB) receptor stimulation inhibits sodium transport in a similar fashion as 20-HETE. Clofibrate, a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-&agr; (PPAR-&agr;) agonist, increases protein expression of cytochrome P450 4A (CYP4A), which is responsible for 20-HETE synthesis in the kidney. Experiments were designed to determine whether clofibrate reduces hypertension associated with chronic ETB receptor blockade. Male Sprague–Dawley rats received either normal-salt (0.8% NaCl) or high-salt (8% NaCl) diet for 10 days. Female rats were fed a high-salt (8% NaCl) diet for 10 days. During the last 7 days, rats of both sexes were divided into 3 treatment groups: (1) clofibrate in drinking water (80 mg per day), (2) ETB receptor antagonist A-192621 in food (10 mg/kg per day), or (3) clofibrate and A-192621. During ETB receptor blockade, clofibrate had no effect on mean arterial pressure (MAP) under normal salt conditions. In contrast, clofibrate significantly inhibited the increase in MAP produced by A-192621 in rats fed a high-salt diet (34±3 versus 19±4 mm Hg; P<0.05). Similar results were observed in female rats administered A-192621 and fed a high-salt diet. ETB receptor blockade significantly decreased CYP4A protein expression in the renal cortex of rats on high salt. Clofibrate significantly increased renal cortical and medullary CYP4A protein expression in A-192621–treated male rats on high salt. Therefore, chronic PPAR-&agr; agonist treatment reduces salt-dependent hypertension produced by ETB receptor blockade in male and female Sprague–Dawley rats. This suggests a possible relationship between ETB receptor activation and the maintenance of CYP4A protein expression in the kidney of rats fed a high-salt diet.
Going to university in England between the wars: access and funding

The socialist politician Jennie Lee is probably best remembered for her vision of expanding popular access to university education in Britain through the establishment of the Open University in the 1960s. Writing as a young woman, some 20 years before this event, she re ̄ected on her own educational experiences and entry into political life in a volume of autobiography entitled This Great Journey. She noted that she had often been asked how it had been possible for her, as the daughter of a coalminer, to go to university (she had studied at the University of Edinburgh between 1922 and 1926). This had been possible, she explained, through a combination of `public’ support and private (i.e. parental) self-sacri®ce. Fife Educational Authority provided schooling up to university entrance, and then presented her with a maintenance allowance of £45 per annum whilst at university. The Carnegie Trust took care of half of her class fees. She lived in a rented room rather than a women’s hostel, a much more economical option at the time. Her parents struggled to help. There is a moving account of how her mother, normally cautious and risk averse, de®ed her father’s strict opposition to gambling in any form by putting a shilling each way on the Derby one year `with a view to assisting Providence’. Clothes suitable for college had to be obtained on creditÐequally against the grain. Patricia Hollis, Jennie Lee’s recent biographer, describes how on Saturdays, when Jennie’s father was free from work, he would cycle the twenty miles from the family home to Edinburgh, bringing home cooked food supplies and freshly laundered clothes, and taking back clothes to be washed or mended. Scottish universities have long prided themselves on their `democratic’ tradition, and on having been able to oŒer access to talented youngsters from impecunious homes. Fees might be considered to have been less of a deterrent after the Carnegie bequest in 1901±02, which guaranteed the fees for students of Scottish birth attending universities in Scotland. By 1938 the `age participation ratio’ (i.e. the proportion of the age group attending university) in Scotland was 3.1%, as compared with only 1.5% in England and Wales. Although there were diŒerences in the recruitment pattern between institutionsÐGlasgow, for instance, seems to have drawn from a wider social base than did EdinburghÐR. D. Anderson has suggested that the Scottish `democratic myth’ did indeed have substance, in that `perhaps twenty per
Gun Attitudes and Fear of Crime

ABSTRACT The relationship between attitudes toward guns and fear of crime was examined in three studies. In Study 1,73 items about guns were administered to subjects to determine if the construct “Gun Attitudes” contained sub-constructs, possibly causing the confusion in the literature on gun attitudes and fear of crime. Nine factors were revealed, which were grouped into Socio-cultural and Personal Indices. In Study 2, the 65 gun items that showed reasonable variance in Study 1 were paired with measures of fear of crime, local crime rate, and experience with guns. The same nine factors as in Study 1 emerged, and further analyses showed that, after controlling for gender, personal experience, and risk of crime, a significant relationship existed between fear of crime and attitudes toward guns, with people higher in fear of crime reporting attitudes more favorable to gun control. Study 3 was based on telephone interviews with Chicago residents, and once again a positive relationship was revealed between fe.
Tracks and Transitions—A Comparison of Adolescent Future-oriented Goals, Explorations, and Commitments in Australia, Israel, and Finland

Abstract It has been suggested that age-related normative demands and institutional tracks play an important role in the development of adolescent future orientation, identity explorations, and Commitments. In order to study this, 71 Australian boys and 49 girls, 23 Israeli boys and 23 girls, and 36 Finnish boys and 66 girls aged between 16 and 17 were investigated. They filled in the Hopes and Fears Questionnaire measuring the content and temporal extension of goals, and the Exploration and Commitment Inventory. The results showed that developmental tasks, role transitions, and institutional tracks play an important role in the development of adolescent future orientation, explorations, and commitments. Due to earlier school transitions, Australian adolescents expected that their hopes related to education and work, and education-related concerns, would be realized earlier than Finnish and Israeli youths. In turn, because of military service commitments of several years, Israeli youths expected that both.
Three additions to passive dynamic walking; actuation, an upper body, and 3D stability

One of the main challenges in the design of human-like walking robots (useful for service or entertainment applications as well as the study of human locomotion) is to obtain dynamic locomotion, as opposed to the static form of locomotion demonstrated by most of the current prototypes. A promising concept is the idea of passive dynamic walking; even completely unactuated and uncontrolled mechanisms can perform a stable gait when walking down a shallow slope. This concept enables the construction of dynamically walking prototypes that are simpler yet more natural in their motions than the static bipeds. This paper presents three additions to the concept of passive dynamic walking. First, hip actuation is added to increase the fore-aft stability and to provide power to the system, removing the need for a downhill floor. Second, a reciprocating hip mechanism is introduced to allow the addition of a passive upper body without compromising the simplicity, efficiency and naturalness of the concept of passive dynamic walking. Third, skate board-like ankle joints are implemented to provide 3D stability. These ankles couple the unstable sideways lean motion to yaw (steering), a kinematic coupling which provides sideways stability when walking with sufficient forward velocity. The three additions are investigated both with elementary simulation models and with prototype experiments. All three prototypes demonstrate an uncannily natural and stable gait while requiring only two foot switches and three on/off actuators.
The Dementia Rating Scale (DRS) in the diagnosis of vascular dementia

The Dementia Rating Scale (DRS) is considered a very useful instrument to assess patients with dementia. The tasks are grouped into five subscales, each one evaluating different cognitive areas, namely: Attention, Initiation/Perseveration (I/P), Construction, Conceptualization and Memory. Objective To verify the ability of the DRS in discriminating vascular dementia (VaD) patients from healthy controls and VaD from Alzheimer disease (AD) patients. Methods The DRS was applied to 68 patients with mild dementia (12 with VaD and 56 with AD) and 60 healthy controls. The clinical diagnosis was made by two neurologists based on the patients´ history, laboratory and neuroimaging results and neuropsychological tests. Results In the comparison between VaD patients and controls, the subscales I/P, Memory, Conceptualization and Attention were those displaying best discrimination between the two groups. The cutoff <124 yielded 93.3% of sensitivity and 91.7% of specificity for the diagnosis of VaD. Only the I/P subscale differentiated VaD from AD patients. Conclusions The DRS was found to be a useful instrument to discriminate VaD patients from controls. VaD patients showed worse performance in tasks of executive functions than AD patients. Executive dysfunction, evaluated through the I/P subscale of the DRS, might be useful in differentiating between VaD and AD patients.
Decision Directed Estimation of Threshold Voltage Distribution in NAND Flash Memory

High-density NAND flash memory suffers from the data retention problem because even small charge leakage incurs a large threshold voltage shift as the transistor size shrinks. In this paper, we develop a decision directed estimation (DDE) algorithm to know the effects of charge leakage in NAND flash memory using the error pattern of the accessed data. While the conventional sensing directed estimation (SDE) method demands extra memory sensing to know the signal distribution, the proposed DDE algorithm induces no sensing overheads. The proposed algorithm approximates the threshold voltage distribution as a Gaussian mixture and also assumes that the increase of standard deviation is linearly proportional to the amount of mean shift. Since the threshold voltage distribution in real devices is not a perfect Gaussian mixture, we conduct error analysis of the proposed algorithm to examine the sources of estimation errors and quantify their impact on the estimation accuracy. We also present a combined estimation scheme that employs the DDE and the SDE algorithms to minimize the number of memory sensing operations while maintaining high estimation accuracy. The developed algorithm is applied to both simulated and real NAND flash memory, and the estimation errors are measured.
Localization of a Neural System for Error Detection and Compensation

Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, and Donchin (1993) have reported electrophysiological evidence for a brain mechanism dedicated to monitoring performance and compensating for errors (see also Falkenstein, Hohnsbein, Hoormann, & Blanke, 1990). They have described a component of the human event-related potential, called the error-related negativity (ERN), which is characterized by a negative peak about 100 ms following the onset of electromyographic (EMG) activity when the subject is in error on that trial. The amplitude of the ERN is larger when the subject strives for response accuracy than when the subject concentrates on speed. It is also correlated with several error-compensation variables. The larger the ERN, the smaller the force with which the erroneous key is pressed, the higher the probability of correcting the error by immediately depressing the other key, and the slower the reaction time on the next trial. These correlations suggest that the neural system whose activity is reflected by the ERN is involved in the active inhibition and correction of an error as soon as it is detected. Gehring et aI. (1993) noted that the data from their study did not allow for the localization of this neural system in the brain. They recorded from five electrode sites and observed only that the ERN was largest over the front and middle of the scalp. They did, however, offer some speculation, based on animal evidence, pointing toward "a system involving the anterior cingulate cortex and supplementary motor areas" (p. 389). Our own data allow for a direct confirmation of this localization in humans. We recorded high-density event-related potentials using a 64-channel geodesic electrode net (Tucker, 1993), with an interelectrode spacing of about 4 cm. This methodology enabled us to fully characterize the scalp topography of the ERN in two different experiments. In the first experiment (Dehaene, 1994), 12 subjects were presented on each trial with a single Arabic or spelled-out numeral. They had to press one key with one hand if the target was larger than 5 and another key with the other hand if it was smaller than 5. In the second experiment (Dehaene, unpublished data), 12 other subjects were presented with lists of words, which they had to classify as belonging or not to a target semantic category (e.g., an-
Reliability of GaN-Based HEMT devices

This paper reviews the main problems characterizing the past and present of GaN-based HEMT reliability. Some general considerations on the maturity of this technology and published lifetesting extrapolations are followed by a review of physical degradation mechanisms, subdivided between temperature-activated and electrical ones, the latter generally linked with the much-debated ldquocurrent collapserdquo. The paper ends with some conclusive remarks on what has been achieved and what still lies ahead.
Vicarious Traumatisation as a Consequence of Jury Service

Recent research on past-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has highlighted the adverse consequences of trauma, not just for victims, but also for those who interact with them: vicarious traumatisation. British citizens are required to sit on juries, where they may be exposed to gruesome exhibits and harrowing testimony: can such experiences also lead to vicarious traumatisation? Previous studies have demonstrated that some jurors do suffer both short- and longer-term trauma from jury service, both from hearing evidence and deliberation in the jury room. A first exploratory survey of British jurors confirms that a minority of jurors are so affected. The article calls for modifications to the current arbitrary allocation of jurors and for greater provision of information and guidance to minimise the negative consequences of an essential civic duty.
Phosphorylation of Eukaryotic Initiation Factor 4E Markedly Reduces Its Affinity for Capped mRNA*

In eukaryotes, a key step in the initiation of translation is the binding of the eukaryotic initiation factor 4E (eIF4E) to the cap structure of the mRNA. Subsequent recruitment of several components, including the small ribosomal subunit, is thought to allow migration of initiation complexes and recognition of the initiation codon. Mitogens and cytokines stimulate the phosphorylation of eIF4E at Ser209, but the functional consequences of this modification have remained a major unresolved question. Using fluorescence spectroscopy and surface plasmon resonance techniques, we show that phosphorylation of eIF4E markedly reduces its affinity for capped RNA, primarily due to an increased rate of dissociation. Variant eIF4E proteins harboring negatively charged acidic residues at position 209 also showed decreased binding to capped RNA. Furthermore, a basic residue at position 159 was shown to be essential for cap binding. Although eIF4E-binding protein 1 greatly stabilized binding of phosphorylated eIF4E to capped RNA, in the presence of eIF4E-binding protein 1 the phosphorylated form still dissociated faster compared with nonphopshorylated eIF4E. The implications of our findings for the mechanism of translation initiation are discussed.
Adrenal vein sampling for primary aldosteronism: the assessment of selectivity and lateralization of aldosterone excess baseline and after adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) stimulation

Background Adrenal vein sampling is crucial for identifying the primary aldosteronism subtypes, but the cutoff values for ascertaining selectivity of catheterization and lateralization of aldosterone secretion remain controversial. Objectives To investigate the safety of adrenal vein sampling, the cutoff values for the selectivity and lateralization indexes, and the effect of adrenocorticotropic hormone stimulation on selectivity index and lateralization index performance. Design We assessed the proportion of selective adrenal vein sampling at different selectivity index cutoff values in 151 consecutive patients with primary aldosteronism undergoing bilaterally simultaneous adrenal vein sampling. Aldosterone-producing adenoma was diagnosed on the basis of the evidence of primary aldosteronism and lateralized aldosterone secretion, adenoma at pathological examination, and normokalemia, and correction of primary aldosteronism and cure or improvement of hypertension at follow-up. In 44 patients with bilaterally selective adrenal vein sampling and unequivocal diagnosis of aldosterone-producing adenoma on the basis of all these criteria, we examined the cutoff values of the lateralization index for assessing the lateralization of aldosterone excess and the effect of adrenocorticotropic hormone stimulation on selectivity index and lateralization index. Results Adrenal vein rupture occurred in one case (0.7%). Bilaterally selective adrenal vein sampling decreased steadily (from 79.9 to 40.2%) with increase in the selectivity index cutoffs from 1.1 to 5.0. Likewise, the proportion of correctly identified aldosterone-producing adenomas decreased (from 95.5 to 43.2%) with increase in lateralization index cutoffs from 1.125 to 5.0. Adrenocorticotropic hormone improved the assessment of selectivity but exerted a confounding effect on lateralization index. Conclusion Adrenal vein sampling is safe; increasing the selectivity index cutoffs lowers the number of usable adrenal vein samplings; higher lateralization index cutoff values lead to missing a proportion of aldosterone-producing adenomas. The improved selectivity rate provided by adrenocorticotropic hormone stimulation should be weighed against the loss of correct lateralization.
Measuring animal welfare: what can cognition contribute?

Brydges NM, Braithwaite VA. Measuring Animal Welfare: What Can Cognition Contribute? ARBS Annu Rev Biomed Sci 2008;10:T91-T103 . In this review, we explore a variety of techniques that are currently available to investigate the welfare of non-human animals (referred to from now on as animals) with a particular focus on studies of animal cognition. We consider some of the more traditional measures of animal welfare: biological function, physiology and inference, and discuss different ways in which we might assess welfare requirements. We then consider whether cognitive assays can help us determine what animals want or prefer, and whether it is possible to use cognition to discover the mental or affective state of an animal ( i.e. positive or negative affective states). We defend that certain aspects of cognition will play a fruitful role in helping us to understand animal 'mental welfare' and, in this way, we make a case for how cognition can be usefully applied in a welfare context.
Melatonin ameliorates the adverse effects of leptin on sperm

This study examined the effects of melatonin on leptin-induced changes in sperm parameters in adult rats. Five groups of Sprague-Dawley rats were treated with either leptin or leptin and melatonin or melatonin for 6 weeks. Leptin was given daily via the intraperitoneal route (60 μg kg−1 body weight) and melatonin was given in drinking water (10 mg kg−1 or 20 mg kg−1 body weight per day). Upon completion, sperm count, sperm morphology, 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, Comet assay, TUNEL assay, gene expression profiles of antioxidant enzymes, respiratory chain reaction enzymes, DNA damage, and apoptosis genes were estimated. Data were analyzed using ANOVA. Sperm count was significantly lower whereas the fraction of sperm with abnormal morphology, the level of 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, and sperm DNA fragmentation were significantly higher in rats treated with leptin only. Microarray analysis revealed significant upregulation of apoptosis-inducing factor, histone acetyl transferase, respiratory chain reaction enzyme, cell necrosis and DNA repair genes, and downregulation of antioxidant enzyme genes in leptin-treated rats. Real-time polymerase chain reaction showed significant decreases in glutathione peroxidase 1 expression with increases in the expression of apoptosis-inducing factor and histone acetyl transferase in leptin-treated rats. There was no change in the gene expression of caspase-3 (CASP-3). In conclusion, the adverse effects of leptin on sperm can be prevented by concurrent melatonin administration.