Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wolff potential estimates for elliptic equations with nonstandard growth and applications

Abstract We study superharmonic functions related to elliptic equations with structural conditions involving a variable growth exponent. We establish pointwise estimates for such functions in terms of a Wolff type potential. We apply these estimates to prove a variable exponent version of the Hedberg–Wolff theorem on the dual of Sobolev spaces with zero boundary values.
Deaf children and children with ADHD in the inclusive classroom: working memory matters

This study compared the working memory functioning of deaf children, children with ADHD and typically developing children. Working memory is involved in the storage and mental manipulation of information during classroom learning activities that are crucial for the acquisition of complex skills and knowledge. Thus, it is important to determine how these groups compare in this regard as this has implications for teaching them together in an inclusive classroom. Simple and complex visuo-spatial and verbal working memory were assessed in 24 children with ADHD and 20 control children with no diagnosed ADHD, to determine whether any differences existed between these groups. A second comparison occurred between the simple and complex visuo-spatial working memory of the latter two groups, as well as 24 deaf children, all matched on age, gender and home language. The control group scored significantly higher than the deaf children and the children with ADHD on all components of simple and complex working memory. The implications of this finding are that children with ADHD and deaf children may share similar working memory profiles, making it easier to accommodate both sets of children together in the inclusive classroom. Suggestions are given for how educators could assist these children by reducing the demands on working memory.
Disagreements in Television Discussions: How Small Can Small Screen Arguments Be

Abstract Based on a case study, this paper explores the interaction between the act of disagreeing and the contextual parameters of Greek television panel discussions. The analysis of the data reveals that in contrast to previous literature on disagreements in TV interview situations, the disagreements at hand are both (host)-unmediated and rendered less dispreferred by being delayed, indirectly posed, and/or mitigated. The discussion sheds light on the systematic ways in which the above is sequentially achieved so as to suit the parameters of the given context. It is argued that the preference features that accompany disagreements attend to the specialized floor-holding and turn-taking rights as well as to the public occasion of the interactions. As such, they index the participants' management and negotiation of their roles and identities as interviewees, interlocutors, and public speakers. Keywords: Disagreements, Mediated/institutional context, (Dis)preference, Face, Participant roles and identities
Afno Manchhe: Unequal Access to Public Resources and Institutions in Nepal

This paper highlights the informal inner circle network approach to maintaining relationships and reciprocating favors within a system that significantly affect the performance of incumbents in formal bureaucratic organizations. While this is a general sociological problem in any society, this article deals with how afno manchhe behavior is manifested in Nepal. Without afno manchhe relations, one risks marginalization, disappointments and failures in one's struggle to realize important goals in life. In such a situation, the malfunctioning of administration and dissatisfaction arise at every level. There is thus a significant relationship between one's position in afno manchhe networks and inclusion-exclusion processes. This of course has consequences for the widespread practice of corruption in Nepal. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3126/dsaj.v8i0. 10722 Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol. 8, 2014; 55-86
Selective karyotyping in recurrent miscarriage: are recommended guidelines adopted in daily clinical practice?

BACKGROUND Couples with recurrent miscarriage (RM) have an increased risk of one of the partners carrying a structural chromosome abnormality. On the basis of four independent risk factors, an evidence-based model was developed, which allows limiting karyotyping to high-risk couples. The aim of this study was to assess the level of adoption of selective karyotyping, its clinical consequences and the factors at the patient and hospital level that determine adoption. METHODS A retrospective cohort study was performed in nine Departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, the Netherlands, in 2006. Selective karyotyping was defined as offering karyotyping to high-risk couples and refraining from karyotyping in low-risk couples. Data were collected for risk factors as described in the model for selective karyotyping, cytogenetic results as a measure for clinical consequences, and information about determinants and costs. RESULTS A total of 530 couples were included; 252 (48%) high-risk couples and 278 (52%) low-risk couples. Among the high-risk couples, 186 (74%) were offered karyotyping. Although not advised, karyotyping was still performed in 198 (71%) low-risk couples. Overall, selective karyotyping was offered to 50% of the couples. The main determinants for adoption of the model were maternal age, obstetric history, treatment by specialists in RM and the number of patients per centre. If selective karyotyping was adopted adequately, a potential reduction of 34% of all karyotyping tests performed is possible. CONCLUSION Selective karyotyping is applied in only half of the couples with RM in daily practice. Implementation of selective karyotyping should be a topic of future research.
Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency

Network analysis is one of the most promising currents in sociological research, and yet it has never been subjected to a theoretically informed assessment and critique. This article outlines the theoretical presuppositions of network analysis. It also distinguishes between three different (implicit) models in the network literature of the interrelations of social structure, culture, and human agency. It concludes that only a strategy for historical explanation that synthesizes social structural and cultural analysis can adequately explain the formation, reproduction, and transformation of networks themselves. The article sketches the broad contours of such a theoretical synthesis in the conclusion.
Union Members and Voluntary Associations: Membership Overlap as a Case of Organizational Embeddedness

Prevailing conceptions of organizational embeddedness emphasize linkages to exchange partners via elites and contracts. What is neglected, the authors argue, is the nature and potential impact from the voluntary associations of rank-and-file members with the panoply of organizations in their daily lives, including churches, PTAs, and sports teams. The functions of these organizations provide contexts in which individuals trade information and form opinions about organizations and their members. By participating, individuals embed their own organizations in a broader organizational culture. This article treats the embeddedness of unions in the interorganizational network as a factor that has impacted and varied with the decline of organized labor. Organizational affiliation networks containing 18,263 individuals, drawn from the 1974-1994 General Social Survey data, show the isolation of unions in American organizational culture despite their relatively high rates of membership. Chronic aspects of the problem include union members' lack of nonunion voluntary association membership in general and the particularly low embeddedness of the organizations with which they affiliate.
Allometry cannot be ignored in brain evolution studies

We review the evidence for the concept of the "initial" or prototype brain. We outline four possible modes of brain evolution suggested by our new findings on the evolutionary status of the dolphin brain. The four modes involve various forms of deviation from and conformity to the hypothesized initial brain type. These include examples of conservative evolution, progressive evolution, and combinations of the two in which features of one or the other become dominant. The four types of neocortical organization in extant mammals may be the result of selective pressures on sensory/motor systems resulting in divergent patterns of brain phylogenesis. A modular "modification/multiplication" hypothesis is proposed as a mechanism of neocortical evolution in eutherians. Representative models of the initial ancestral group of mammals include not only extant basal Insectivora but also Chiroptera; we have found that dolphins and large whales have also retained many features of the archetypal or initial brain. This group evolved from the initial mammalian stock and returned to the aquatic environment some 50 million years ago. This unique experiment of nature shows the effects of radical changes in environment on brain-body adaptations and specializations. Although the dolphin brain has certain quantitative characteristics of the evolutionary changes seen in the higher terrestrial mammals, it has also retained many of the conservative structural features of the initial brain. Its neocortical organization is accordingly different, largely in a quantitative sense, from that of terrestrial models of the initial brain such as the hedgehog.
DETERMINANTS OF OUTCOME AMONG SMOKERS IN A SMOKING CESSATION PROGRAM

Background: Tobacco consumption is now one of the most serious problems in the world and is receiving renewed attention in the current health promotion. Objectives: This study was carried out to elucidate the psychosocial and behavioural aspects of smokers associated with participation, attrition and outcome in smoking cessation programs. Methodology: This prospective cohort design included three hundred and twenty six smokers from the antismoking center - King Fahd Specialist Hospital, Buraydah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The selected patients were subjected to a history taking, the assessment of causes of smoking, motives for quitting and belief problems arising from quitting; then they were made to join the clinic's antismoking program and were followed up after six months to assess the success of the program, which was measured by the rate of recidivism. Results and conclusion: The results showed that the important psychosocial and behavioural factors affecting the success in quitting smoking were: previous history of an attempt to stop tension, anxiety, anger, health beliefs and attitudes, importance of quitting, duration of smoking, period of last attempt to stop and the method used. These factors can be modified in order to increase the likelihood of success in quitting smoking.
Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China

Using a model of "fragmented authoritarianism," this volume sharpens our view of the inner workings of the Chinese bureaucracy. The contributors' interviews with politically well-placed bureaucrats and scholars, along with documentary and field research, illuminate the bargaining and maneuvering among officials on the national, provincial, and local levels.
What Is the System in Systemic Reform?

policy. State and federal policy is not the only way to pursue improved instruction-The Coalition for Essential Schools, Accelerated Schools, and the New Standards Project all do so largely outside the framework of policy-but systemic reformers have viewed government as their chief vehicle. The leading examples of changed state and national policy include the California and Vermont reforms, Goals 2000, the NSF State Systemic Reform Initiative, and the Kentucky reforms. Systemic reform focuses in two arenas: creating new policy instruments that seem necessary to enact systemic reform, and reducing the inherited tangles of regulation, bureaucracy, proliferating policy, and incoherent governance that would impede reform (Smith & O'Day). 1 The new policy instruments are commonly thought to include:
The Ethico‐politics of Teacher Identity

Identity is a contemporary buzzword in education, referencing the individual and the social, the personal and the political, self and other. Following Maggie MacLure, we can think of identity in terms of teachers ‘arguing for themselves’, or giving an account of themselves. Yet in the wake of poststructuralism's radical de‐centering of the subject and its highlighting of a number of impediments to agency, we might well ask how teachers are to give an account of themselves? This paper offers reading of identity that recognizes its paradoxical aspects, yet also contains scope for ethical agency. The latter is explored via a ‘diagram’ that utilizes Foucault's four axes of ethics to elaborate a framework for thinking about teacher identity as ethical self‐formation and for engaging in what I refer to here as ‘identity work’. This approach to thinking about teacher identity recognizes our discursive determination, yet also offers scope for recognizing and building ethical agency.
Spatial organization of episodic memory

When a human subject recalls specific information about some discrete, personal experience from the past, the recall process often involves a covert reconstruction of a spatially organized complex scene. This happens even when the specific information sought from memory is not overtly spatial. For example, if a colleague inquires what questions were asked after a lecture you gave, you will usually retrieve the nonspatial target information (the questions) by a process of recall that reconstructs the whole scene in which certain events took place: the lecture theater as viewed from the podium, the position in the audience of the woman who asked about the statistics, and so on. This whole-scene memory allows you to differentiate between the memories of similar events that might otherwise be confused with each other. If you ask me what I ate for lunch last Sunday I will make use of a whole set of features of the event, apparently irrelevant in themselves to the question of what was eaten. in order to be sure that my answer accurately relates to the specific meal you have asked about and not to any one of a great number of similar meals in my life. Following the lead of Tulving (1983), 1 will refer to memory of discrete, personally cxperienced events a s “episodic memory” in order to distinguish it from other kinds of acquired information. Human amnesic patients are impaired in episodic memory, and their impairment is caused by damage to the hippocampal system. In animals, damage to the hippocampal system causes spatial learning impairments. I will show that these two impairments, in humans and animals, are two different manifestations of a single underlying deficit in spatially organized memory. In the first section, I show that monkeys with lesions similar to those of human amnesics are impaired in remembering complex scenes in tasks that are not overtly spatial. In the second section, I show that the impairment in complex scene memory can be ascribed to a specific impairment in memory of the spatial organization of the scenes.
A New Approach to Modeling Multiport Systems From Frequency-Domain Data

This paper addresses the problem of modeling systems from measurements of their frequency response. For multiport devices, currently available techniques are expensive. We propose a new approach which is based on a system-theoretic tool, the Loewner matrix pencil constructed in the context of tangential interpolation. Several implementations are presented. They are fast, accurate, they build low order models and are especially designed for a large number of terminals. Moreover, they identify the underlying system, rather than merely fitting the measurements. The numerical results show that our algorithms yield smaller models in less time, when compared to vector fitting.
microRNA regulation in an ancient obligate endosymbiosis

Although many insects are associated with obligate bacterial endosymbionts, the mechanisms by which these host/endosymbiont associations are regulated remain mysterious. While microRNAs (miRNAs) have been recently identified as regulators of host/microbe interactions, including host/pathogen and host/facultative endosymbiont interactions, the role miRNAs may play in mediating host/obligate endosymbiont interactions is virtually unknown. Here, we identified conserved miRNAs that potentially mediate symbiotic interactions between aphids and their obligate endosymbiont, Buchnera aphidicola. Using small RNA sequence data from Myzus persicae and Acyrthosiphon pisum, we annotated 93 M. persicae and 89 A. pisum miRNAs, among which 69 were shared. We found 14 miRNAs that were either highly expressed in aphid bacteriome, the Buchnera‐housing tissue, or differentially expressed in bacteriome vs. gut, a non‐Buchnera‐housing tissue. Strikingly, 10 of these 14 miRNAs have been implicated previously in other host/microbe interaction studies. Investigating the interaction networks of these miRNAs using a custom computational pipeline, we identified 103 miRNA::mRNA interactions shared between M. persicae and A. pisum. Functional annotation of the shared mRNA targets revealed only two over‐represented cluster of orthologous group categories: amino acid transport and metabolism, and signal transduction mechanisms. Our work supports a role for miRNAs in mediating host/symbiont interactions between aphids and their obligate endosymbiont Buchnera. In addition, our results highlight the probable importance of signal transduction mechanisms to host/endosymbiont coevolution.
Some Reflections on Intracytoplasmic Morphologically Selected Sperm Injection

Although intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) allows proper fertilization in most cases of male sub fertility, it is one of the most unphysiological techniques in assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Thus, over the last decade, researchers have tried to improve sperm observation with higher-resolution microscopy techniques such as the intracytoplasmic morphologically selected sperm injection (IMSI) technique. In order to identify literatures for this review, the PubMed database was searched from 2000 onwards using the terms IMSI, motile sperm organelle morphology examination (MSOME) and sperm vacuole. Approximately 10 years after the introduction of the MSOME and IMSI procedures, several questions related to the prevalence, origin, location, and clinical consequences of sperm vacuoles have not yet been clarified. It seems that IMSI as a routine application is not state of the art and the only confirmed indications for IMSI are recurrent implantation failure following ICSI and severe male factor.
The role of voltage dependence of the NMDA receptor in cellular and network oscillation

Unraveling the mechanisms underlying oscillatory behavior is critical for understanding normal and pathological brain processes. Here we used electrophysiology in mouse neocortical slices and principles of nonlinear dynamics to demonstrate how an increase in the N‐methyl‐d‐aspartic acid receptor (NMDAR) conductance can create a nonlinear whole‐cell current–voltage (I–V) relationship which leads to changes in cellular stability. We discovered two behaviorally and morphologically distinct pyramidal cell populations. Under control conditions, both cell types responded to depolarizing current injection with regular spiking patterns. However, upon NMDAR activation, an intrinsic oscillatory (IO) cell type (n = 44) showed a nonlinear whole‐cell I–V relationship, intrinsic voltage‐dependent oscillations plus amplification of alternating input current, and these properties persisted after disabling action potential generation with tetrodotoxin (TTX). The other non‐oscillatory (NO) neuronal population (n = 24) demonstrated none of these behaviors. Simultaneous intra‐ and extracellular recordings demonstrated the NMDAR’s capacity to promote low‐frequency seizure‐like network oscillations via its effects on intrinsic neuronal properties. The two pyramidal cell types demonstrated different relationships with network oscillation – the IO cells were leaders that were activated early in the population activity cycle while the activation of the NO cell type was distributed across network bursts. The properties of IO neurons disappeared in a low‐magnesium environment where the voltage dependence of the receptor is abolished; concurrently, the cellular contribution to network oscillation switched to synchronous firing. Thus, depending upon the efficacy of NMDAR in altering the linearity of the whole‐cell I–V relationship, the two cell populations played different roles in sustaining network oscillation.
Intensifying Antiretroviral Therapy With Raltegravir and Maraviroc During Early Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Infection Does Not Accelerate HIV Reservoir Reduction

Background. Persistent human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) within the CD4+ T-cell reservoir is an obstacle to eradication. We hypothesized that adding raltegravir and maraviroc to standard combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) during early HIV infection could substantially reduce viral reservoirs as a step towards eradication. Methods. A prospective, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled pilot trial enrolled 32 participants with documented early (<6 months) HIV infection to either standard cART (emtricitabine/tenofovir/lopinavir/ritonavir) or intensive cART (standard regimen + raltegravir/maraviroc). Human immunodeficiency virus reservoirs were assessed at baseline and at 48 weeks by (1) proviral DNA, (2) cell-associated RNA, and (3) replication-competent virus, all from purified blood CD4+ T cells, and (4) gut proviral DNA. A multiassay algorithm (MAA) on baseline sera estimated timing of infection. Results. Thirty individuals completed the study to the 48-week endpoint. The reduction in blood proviral burden was −1.03 log DNA copies/106 CD4+ T cells versus −. 84 log in the standard and intensive groups, respectively (P = .056). Overall, there was no significant difference in the rate of decline of HIV-associated RNA, replication-competent virus in blood CD4+ T cells, nor proviral gut HIV DNA to 48 weeks. Individuals who presented with more recent HIV infection had significantly lower virus reservoirs, and cART tended to reduce their reservoirs to a greater extent. Conclusions. Intensive cART led to no additional reduction in the blood virus reservoir at 48 weeks compared with standard cART. Human immunodeficiency virus reservoir size is smaller earlier in HIV infection. Other novel treatment strategies in combination with early cART will be needed to eliminate the HIV latent reservoir.
Rivalry and the Industry Model of Scottish Knitwear Producers

The authors thank all of the managers who gave freely of their time in helping to complete this study. Ian Watson was particularly helpful. Thanks also go to Peter Grinyer of St. Andrews Management Institute, Roy Payne, Tony Berry, Pam Lewis, and to Manchester Business School. This research was partially funded by an Economic and Social Research Council grant to the Manchester Business School and by a grant from the Hewlitt Foundation to the first author. In this paper we argue that market boundaries are socially constructed around a collective cognitive model that summarizes typical organizational forms within an industry. This model is produced when firms observe each other's actions and define unique product positions in relation to each other. Our study examines the question of how firms define a reference group of rivals when market cues are ambiguous and interorganizational variety is high and identifies the industry model underlying rivalry among Scottish knitwear producers. The data suggest that a six-category model of organizational forms best describes the common sense of competition in the industry and that an ensemble of attributes involving size, technology, product style, and geographic location forms the foundation for this ordering. The results also show how this industry model is reproduced within the rivalry network structuring imperfect competition in the industry. '