Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Specific IgE Levels to Cicer arietinum (Chick Pea) in Tolerant and Nontolerant Children: Evaluation of Boiled and Raw Extracts

The chick pea, Cicer arietinum, is a legume commonly consumed in Spain and other Mediterranean countries. The sera of 29 children (mean age: 8.4 years) with a current or past history of allergic reactions after ingestion of chick pea, and positive skin tests to this legume, were used to study the allergenic composition of raw and boiled chick pea extracts. The patient population was divided into 2 groups: group 1 consisted of 19 patients with clinical sensitivity confirmed by either positive oral challenges or a convincing recent history of anaphylaxis after eating chick peas, and group 2 consisted of 10 patients with clinical sensitivity in the past, but tolerant at the time of blood extraction. Six atopic children, not allergic to legumes, were included as controls. Specific IgE to the raw and boiled extracts was measured by ELISA. The allergenic composition of both extracts was analyzed by SDS-PAGE and immunoblots. There were no significant differences between specific IgE levels to the raw and boiled extracts (p = 0.23). The mean levels in group 1 were significantly higher than in group 2 and controls (p = 0.0001). Multiple IgE binding proteins/peptides were detected in both extracts in the molecular weight range of 10–106 kD. Only nontolerant patients recognized a similar number of bands in both extracts. Chick pea extracts contain a majority of heat-stable allergens, which could be responsible for the clinical sensitivity to chick pea. Patients with a current clinical allergy to chick pea have statistically higher specific IgE levels than tolerant patients and controls.
Biracial Females' Reflections on Racial Identity Development in Adolescence

Abstract As the number of biracial youth grows, understanding their experience becomes increasingly important. A qualitative study was conducted to learn about the experience of racial identity development in biracial adolescent females. Nine Black-White biracial college-age women participated in focus groups, reflecting on their adolescence. Results indicated the most prevalent experience was a feeling of being marginal between two cultures. Further, competing messages over standards of beauty in the two cultures complicated the normal identity struggle of adolescence. Implications for parents and practitioners include recognizing the unique issues biracial girls experience and how race and gender combine to affect their identity development.
Estimating Risk Preferences in the Field

We survey the literature on estimating risk preferences using field data. We concentrate our attention on studies in which risk preferences are the focal object and estimating their structure is the core enterprise. We review a number of models of risk preferences—including both expected utility (EU) theory and non-EU models—that have been estimated using field data, and we highlight issues related to identification and estimation of such models using field data. We then survey the literature, giving separate treatment to research that uses individual-level data (e.g., property-insurance data) and research that uses aggregate data (e.g., betting-market data). We conclude by discussing directions for future research. ( JEL C51, D11, D81, D82, D83, G22, I13)
TRANSATLANTIC VIEWS ON JOURNALISM EDUCATION BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II

This article provides a transnational perspective on the development of journalism education in the United States and Europe. It embraces the founding of the first journalism schools in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century to the establishment of new university-based programs in significant Western European countries during the late 1960s and 1970s. Both before and after World War II, academic training for the profession of journalism versus on-the-job apprenticeship system of “learning by doing” became a frequent dilemma and controversial topic. Beyond a comparative study of the state of the art in different countries, we attempt to show how the so-called “American model” in journalism education was viewed from Europe and vice versa. As a result, some conclusions about the accuracy or distortion of those views are reached. Special emphasis is placed on the origins of some misconceptions resulting from certain oversimplifications rooted on both sides of the Atlantic.
COMPARISON OF A GENETIC ALGORITHM AND A GRADIENT BASED OPTIMISATION TECHNIQUE FOR THE DETECTION OF SUBSURFACE INCLUSIONS

An inverse problem is considered to identify the geometry of discontinuities in a conductive material Ω 2 R ⊂ with anisotropic conductivity (I+(K-I)χD from Cauchy data measurements taken on the boundary ∂Ω, where Ω ⊂ D , K is a symmetric and positive definite tensor not equal to the identity tensor and χD is the characteristic function of the domain D. In this study we use a real coded genetic algorithm in conjunction with a boundary element method to detect an anisotropic inclusion D, such as a circle, by a single boundary measurement. Numerical results are presented for both isotropic and anisotropic inclusions. The results obtained using the genetic algorithm are compared with the results obtained using a gradient based method. The genetic algorithm based method developed in this paper is found to be a robust, efficient method for detecting the size and location of subsurface inclusions.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi MAC address based crowd data collection and monitoring: benefits, challenges and enhancement

This paper firstly presents the benefits and critical challenges on the use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for crowd data collection and monitoring. The major challenges include antenna characteristics, environment’s complexity and scanning features. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are compared in this paper in terms of architecture, discovery time, popularity of use and signal strength. Type of antennas used and the environment’s complexity such as trees for outdoor and partitions for indoor spaces highly affect the scanning range. The aforementioned challenges are empirically evaluated by “real” experiments using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Scanners. The issues related to the antenna characteristics are also highlighted by experimenting with different antenna types. Novel scanning approaches including Overlapped Zones and Single Point Multi-Range detection methods will be then presented and verified by real-world tests. These novel techniques will be applied for location identification of the MAC IDs captured that can extract more information about people movement dynamics.
Development, Characterization, and Application of Monoclonal Antibodies against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Nucleocapsid Protein

ABSTRACT Five monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) against recombinant nucleocapsid protein (NP) of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-causing coronavirus (CoV) were developed by hybridoma technology. Epitope mapping by Western blotting showed that these anti-SARS-CoV NP MAbs bind to distinct domains of NP. These anti-SARS-CoV NP MAbs, with their high specificity, are potentially ideal candidates for developing early and sensitive diagnostic assays for SARS-CoV.
Do all countries follow the same growth process?

We estimate finite-mixture models in which countries are sorted into groups based on the similarity of the conditional distributions of their growth rates. We observe countries growth experiences over the 1970–2000 period and find evidence for a model in which there are two classes of countries, each with its own distinct growth regime. Group membership does not conform to the usual categories used to address parameter heterogeneity such as region or income. We find strong evidence that the quality of institutions and specifically, the degree of law and order, helps to sort countries into different regimes. Once we control for institutional features of the economy, we find no evidence that geographic features such as latitude and being landlocked play a role in determining the country groupings.
Articulating Scientific Practice: Understanding Dean Hamer's “Gay Gene” Study as Overlapping Material, Social and Rhetorical Registers

Rhetoricians have tried to develop a better understanding of the connection between words and things, but these attempts often employ a logic of representation that undermines a full examination of materiality and the complexity of scientific practice. A logic of articulation offers a viable alternative by focusing attention on the linkages between the competing material, social, and rhetorical registers in which scientific knowledge is produced and discovered. An examination of extant criticism of Dean Hamer's “gay gene” study illustrates the utility of articulation theory as a guide to the rhetorical criticism of science.
Analysis of nephric duct specification in the avian embryo

Vertebrate kidney tissue exhibits variable morphology that in general increases in complexity when moving from anterior to posterior along the body axis. The nephric duct, a simple unbranched epithelial tube, is derived in the avian embryo from a rudiment located in the anterior intermediate mesoderm (IM) adjacent to somites 8 to 10. Using quail-chick chimeric embryos, the current study finds that competence to form nephric duct is fixed when IM precursor cells are still located in the primitive streak, significantly before the onset of duct differentiation. In the primitive streak, expression of the gene HoxB4 is associated with prospective duct IM, whereas expression of the more posterior Hox gene HoxA6 is associated with more posterior, non-duct-forming IM. Misexpression of HoxA6, but not of HoxB4, in prospective duct-forming regions of the IM resulted in repression of duct formation, suggesting a mechanism for the restriction of duct formation to the anterior-most IM. The results are discussed with respect to their implications for anterior-posterior patterning of kidney tissue and of mesoderm in general, and for the loss of duct-forming ability in more posterior regions of the IM that has occurred during vertebrate evolution.
DNA Methylation Profiling of the Fibrinogen Gene Landscape in Human Cells and during Mouse and Zebrafish Development

The fibrinogen genes FGA, FGB and FGG show coordinated expression in hepatocytes. Understanding the underlying transcriptional regulation may elucidate how their tissue-specific expression is maintained and explain the high variability in fibrinogen blood levels. DNA methylation of CpG-poor gene promoters is dynamic with low methylation correlating with tissue-specific gene expression but its direct effect on gene regulation as well as implications of non-promoter CpG methylation are not clear. Here we compared methylation of CpG sites throughout the fibrinogen gene cluster in human cells and mouse and zebrafish tissues. We observed low DNA methylation of the CpG-poor fibrinogen promoters and of additional regulatory elements (the liver enhancers CNC12 and PFE2) in fibrinogen-expressing samples. In a gene reporter assay, CpG-methylation in the FGA promoter reduced promoter activity, suggesting a repressive function for DNA methylation in the fibrinogen locus. In mouse and zebrafish livers we measured reductions in DNA methylation around fibrinogen genes during development that were preceded by increased fibrinogen expression and tri-methylation of Histone3 lysine4 (H3K4me3) in fibrinogen promoters. Our data support a model where changes in hepatic transcription factor expression and histone modification provide the switch for increased fibrinogen gene expression in the developing liver which is followed by reduction of CpG methylation.
The role of orienting attention for learning novel phonetic categories

The current study examines the role of attention in phonetic category formation by experimentally manipulating endogenous orienting of attention. Two native English speaking participant groups were trained with an identical set of novel Hindi words containing unfamiliar consonants produced by multiple native Hindi speakers. Via instructions, the sound-attending group (N=37) was oriented toward phonetic information and the meaning-attending group (N=39) was oriented toward semantic information. A pretest and posttest assessed their learned ability to differentiate Hindi consonants and acquisition of word meaning. Participants oriented to phonetic information demonstrated greater learning of trained novel phonetic categories; whereas participants oriented to semantic information demonstrated greater learning of meaning. These results call for integration of attentional mechanisms into models of phonetic category formation (acquisition) as well as category modification (sound change). Different allocations of attentional resources by children and adult learners may account for much of their different success rates.
Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases

Cue phrases are linguistic expressions such as now and well that function as explicit indicators of the structure of a discourse. For example, now may signal the beginning of a subtopic or a return to a previous topic, while well may mark subsequent material as a response to prior material, or as an explanatory comment. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each also has one or more alternate uses. While incidentally may be used sententially as an adverbial, for example, the discourse use initiates a digression. Although distinguishing discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases is critical to the interpretation and generation of discourse, the question of how speakers and hearers accomplish this disambiguation is rarely addressed.This paper reports results of empirical studies on discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases, in which both text-based and prosodic features were examined for disambiguating power. Based on these studies, it is proposed that discourse versus sentential usage may be distinguished by intonational features, specifically, pitch accent and prosodic phrasing. A prosodic model that characterizes these distinctions is identified. This model is associated with features identifiable from text analysis, including orthography and part of speech, to permit the application of the results of the prosodic analysis to the generation of appropriate intonational features for discourse and sentential uses of cue phrases in synthetic speech.
Trends in the Treatment of Hypertension from the Perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Hypertension is a major public-health issue. Much consensus has been reached in the treatment, and considerable progress has been made in the field of antihypertensive drugs. However, the standard-reaching rate of blood pressure is far from satisfaction. Considering these data and the seriousness of the effects of hypertension on the individual and society as a whole, both economically and socially, physicians must look for more effective and alternative ways to achieve the target blood pressure. Could treatment of hypertension be improved by insights from traditional Chinese medicine? As one of the most important parts in complementary and alternative therapies, TCM is regularly advocated for lowering elevated blood pressure. Due to the different understanding of the pathogenesis of hypertension between ancient and modern times, new understanding and treatment of hypertension need to be reexplored. Aiming to improve the efficacy of Chinese herbal medicine in treating hypertension, the basis of treatment is explored through systematically analyzing the literature available in both English and Chinese search engines. This paper systematically reviews the trends in emerging therapeutic strategies for hypertension from the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine.
Bioenergetic and Functional Consequences of Cellular Therapy: Activation of Endogenous Cardiovascular Progenitor Cells

Rationale: The mechanism by which endogenous progenitor cells contribute to functional and beneficial effects in stem cell therapy remains unknown. Objective: Utilizing a novel 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy–2-dimensional chemical shift imaging method, this study examined the heterogeneity and bioenergetic consequences of postinfarction left ventricular (LV) remodeling and the mechanisms of endogenous progenitor cell contribution to the cellular therapy. Methods and Results: Human embryonic stem cell–derived vascular cells (hESC-VCs) that stably express green fluorescent protein and firefly luciferase (GFP+/Luc+) were used for the transplantation. hESC-VCs may release various cytokines to promote angiogenesis, prosurvival, and antiapoptotic effects. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments demonstrated that hESC-VCs effectively inhibit myocyte apoptosis. In the mouse model, a fibrin patch–based cell delivery resulted in a significantly better cell engraftment rate that was accompanied by a better ejection fraction. In the swine model of ischemia-reperfusion, the patch-enhanced delivery of hESC-VCs resulted in alleviation of abnormalities including border zone myocardial perfusion, contractile dysfunction, and LV wall stress. These results were also accompanied by a pronounced recruitment of endogenous c-kit+ cells to the injury site. These improvements were directly associated with a remarkable improvement in myocardial energetics, as measured by a novel in vivo 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy–2-dimensional chemical shift imaging technology. Conclusions: The findings of this study demonstrate that a severely abnormal heterogeneity of myocardial bioenergetics in hearts with postinfarction LV remodeling can be alleviated by the hESC-VCs therapy. These findings suggest an important therapeutic target of peri-scar border zone and a promising therapeutic potential for using hESC-VCs together with the fibrin patch–based delivery system.
Microstructure and Properties of Polypropylene/Carbon Nanotube Nanocomposites

In the last few years, great attention has been paid to the preparation of polypropylene (PP) nanocomposites using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) due to the tremendous enhancement of the mechanical, thermal, electrical, optical and structural properties of the pristine material. This is due to the unique combination of structural, mechanical, electrical, and thermal transport properties of CNTs. However, it is well-known that the properties of polymer-based nanocomposites strongly depend on the dispersion of nanofillers and almost all the discussed properties of PP/CNTs nanocomposites are strongly related to their microstructure. PP/CNTs nanocomposites were, mainly, prepared by melt mixing and in situ polymerization. Young’s modulus, tensile strength and storage modulus of the PP/CNTs nanocomposites can be increased with increasing CNTs content due to the reinforcement effect of CNTs inside the polymer matrix. However, above a certain CNTs content the mechanical properties are reduced due to the CNTs agglomeration. The microstructure of nanocomposites has been studied mainly by SEM and TEM techniques. Furthermore, it was found that CNTs can act as nucleating agents promoting the crystallization rates of PP and the addition of CNTs enhances all other physical properties of PP. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature related to PP/CNTs nanocomposite preparation methods and properties studies.
Photospheric‐Phase Spectropolarimetry and Nebular‐Phase Spectroscopy of the Peculiar Type Ic Supernova 2002ap

The early‐time optical spectrum of the Type Ic supernova (SN) 2002ap was characterized by unusually broad features, leading some authors to designate it a “hypernova. ” We present optical spectropolarimetry of this object 16 and 37 days after the estimated date of explosion. After correcting for interstellar polarization, we find evidence for a high level of intrinsic continuum polarization at both epochs: p≳1.3% on day 16 and p≳1.0% on day 37. Prominent line polarization is also seen, especially in the trough of the Ca ii near‐infrared triplet during the second epoch. When interpreted in terms of the oblate, electron‐scattering model atmospheres of Höflich, our results imply an asymmetry of at least 20% (day 16) and 17% (day 37). The data suggest a fair degree of axisymmetry, although the polarization angle of the dominant polarization axes are different by about 55° between the two epochs, implying a complex morphology for the thinning ejecta. In particular, there exists some spectropolarimetric evidence for a different distribution of Ca relative to iron‐group elements. We also present flux spectra of SN 2002ap taken 131 and 140 days after the explosion. The spectra are characterized by a very weak continuum and broad emission lines, indicating that SN 2002ap has entered the nebular phase. The spectral features are substantially similar to those of “normal” SNe Ic in the nebular phase, and the emission lines are not significantly broader. However, some of the broad lines are very sharply peaked and may possess a narrow component (probably unresolved by our spectra, FWHM≲400 km s-1) that is redshifted by ∼580 km s-1 with respect to the systemic velocity of the host galaxy.
RESEARCH: A Research Note on the Relation Between Religiosity and Racism: The Importance of the Way in Which Religious Contents Are Being Processed

According to Wulff (1991, 1997), the various approaches to religion can be located in a 2-dimensional space along the bipolar dimensions Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs. Symbolic. Previous research has suggested that these dimensions are differently related to racism. Racism would be unrelated to the Exclusion vs. Inclusion of Transcendence dimension, whereas it would be negatively related to the Literal vs. Symbolic dimension. Results of the present study, using the Post-Critical Belief Scale (Duriez, Fontaine, & Hutsebaut, 2000) as a measure of Wulff's concepts in 3 different samples (total N = 2,171) gathered in Flanders (Belgium), support these hypotheses. The Literal vs. Symbolic dimension was found to significantly contribute to the prediction of racism, even after differences in right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance, and empathy were taken into account.
The Utility of Breast MRI in the Management of Breast Cancer

Abstract: Breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is increasingly used in the evaluation of breast cancer. The impact of this modality on patient management at a single institution is evaluated in this paper. A retrospective review was performed for 114 breast cancer patients who had breast MRI as part of their diagnostic evaluation. Clinical information, mammograms, breast ultrasounds and MRI scans were reviewed to determine whether the MRI findings led to a change in patient management. Outcomes as the result of breast MRI were stratified as favorable and unfavorable. Ninety‐five patients who had complete clinical, radiologic, and pathologic data were identified. The indications for breast MRI included: high risk screening (n = 3), diagnostic evaluation of disease after neo‐adjuvant chemotherapy (n = 24) or prior to re‐excision (n = 8), extent of in situ ductal, infiltrating ductal or infiltrating lobular disease histology (DCIS n = 3, IDC n = 24, ILC n = 17), identification of unknown primary (n = 2), assessment of contralateral breast (n = 4), recurrence surveillance (n = 5), and other (n = 5). MRI was concordant with clinical findings and other modalities in 70.5% of cases. MRI altered planned clinical management in 28 of 95 patients (29.5%). Management changes were favorable in 21 patients (75%). Diagnostic evaluation of the breast by MRI alters patient management in 30% of cases depending upon the indications. Alteration in patient management is favorable in 75% of cases. Evaluation of the breast by MRI alters the clinical management of nearly one‐third of patients. Changes are favorable for the majority of these cases. Patients undergoing evaluation for contralateral disease, invasive lobular carcinoma and assessment of chemotherapeutic response may derive a more meaningful benefit from MRI.