Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Critical Comment: What We Don’t Recognize Can Hurt Us: A Plea for Awareness About Cryptic Species

: We conducted an extensive literature review on studies that have used DNA sequences to detect cryptic species of parasites during the last decade. Each literature citation that included the term ‘‘cryptic’’ or ‘‘sibling’’ species was analyzed to determine the approach used by the author(s). Reports were carefully filtered to retain only those that recognized the existence of cryptic species centered on the use of DNA sequences. Based on analysis of these papers, we comment on the different ways that parasite cryptic species are discovered in studies focusing on different aspects of the host–parasite relationship, or disciplines, within parasitology. We found a lack of methodological and theoretical uniformity in the discipline for finding and delimiting cryptic species, and we draw attention to the need for standardizing these approaches. We suggest that cryptic species, in the strict sense, are always provisionally cryptic, in that the possibility does exist that new morphological studies or techniques will reveal previously unknown diagnostic structural differ- ences which will permit rapid and practical morphological diagnosis. To avoid future taxonomic confusion, we recommend that parasitologists describe (and formally name) cryptic species following standard taxonomic practice.
The determinants of tax Revenue in Kenya

Several studies have been undertaken on the responsiveness of tax revenues to changes in GDP in Kenya. These studies have found a positive relationship between tax revenues and GDP. However, the studies omit some key determinants of tax revenues, such as the nature of the tax system and institutional, demographic and structural features of the economy. Due to this omission, the estimated income elasticities of tax revenues are unreliable for planning purposes, a situation that might be responsible for recurring budget deficits. The main objective of this study was to examine the composition of tax revenues and properly estimate income elasticities of various taxes. The study is important because its results can be used to design pro-growth tax policies and implement tax changes that are
Context Effects Without a Context: Attribute Balance as a Reason for Choice

This article extends the notion of context effects beyond the relational properties of choice alternatives to include attribute balance as a reason for choice. The data reported in two experiments demonstrate that attribute balance has a significant impact on extremeness-aversion and trade-off-contrast effects reported in prior research. The proposition that consumers use attribute balance as a reason for choice is further supported by the finding that attribute balance moderates the impact of justification on the strength of extremeness aversion and trade-off contrast. These findings offer a new perspective on the decision processes underlying context effects in choice.
Tumor Suppressor DYRK1A Effects on Proliferation and Chemoresistance of AML Cells by Downregulating c-Myc

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML), caused by abnormal proliferation and accumulation of hematopoietic progenitor cells, is one of the most common malignancies in adults. We reported here DYRK1A expression level was reduced in the bone marrow of adult AML patients, comparing to normal controls. Overexpression of DYRK1A inhibited the proliferation of AML cell lines by increasing the proportion of cells undergoing G0/G1 phase. We reasoned that the proliferative inhibition was due to downregulation of c-Myc by DYRK1A, through mediating its degradation. Moreover, overexpression of c-Myc markedly reversed AML cell growth inhibition induced by DYRK1A. DYRK1A also had significantly lower expression in relapsed/refractory AML patients, comparing to newly-diagnosed AML patients, which indicated the role of DYRK1A in chemoresistance of AML. Our study provided functional evidences for DYRK1A as a potential tumor suppressor in AML.
Seroprevalence of Tissue Invading Parasitic Infections Diagnosed by ELISA in Korea

Seroprevalence of the IgG antibodies for Clonorchis sinensis, Paragonimus westermani, Taenia solium metacestode (cysticercus), and Spirometra erinacei plerocercoid (sparganum) was measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in sera of patients in Korea from 1993 to 2006. A total of 74,448 specimens referred nationwide from 121 hospitals revealed an IgG positive rate of 7.6% for the 4 parasites. The IgG positive rate (18.7%) for the 4 parasites in 1993 decreased gradually to 6.6% in 2006. Individual positive rate decreased from 5.2% (1993) to 1.6% (2006) for C. sinensis, from 2.8% (1993) to 1.1% (2006) for P. westermani, from 8.3% (1993) to 2.2% (2006) for cysticercus, and from 2.6% (1993) to 1.6% (2006) for sparganum. The positive rate was highest (21.2%) in the group of patients who ranged in age from 50-59 yr old, and in the group that was referred from the Seoul area (55.9%). In conclusion, our results suggest that tissue invading parasitic infections should always be included in differential diagnosis for patients with eosinophilia associated lesions of the central nervous system, liver, and lungs in Korea.
Function of the Shaw Potassium Channel within the Drosophila Circadian Clock

Background In addition to the molecular feedback loops, electrical activity has been shown to be important for the function of networks of clock neurons in generating rhythmic behavior. Most studies have used over-expression of foreign channels or pharmacological manipulations that alter membrane excitability. In order to determine the cellular mechanisms that regulate resting membrane potential (RMP) in the native clock of Drosophila we modulated the function of Shaw, a widely expressed neuronal potassium (K+) channel known to regulate RMP in Drosophila central neurons. Methodology/Principal Findings We show that Shaw is endogenously expressed in clock neurons. Differential use of clock gene promoters was employed to express a range of transgenes that either increase or decrease Shaw function in different clusters of clock neurons. Under LD conditions, increasing Shaw levels in all clock neurons (LNv, LNd, DN1, DN2 and DN3), or in subsets of clock neurons (LNd and DNs or DNs alone) increases locomotor activity at night. In free-running conditions these manipulations result in arrhythmic locomotor activity without disruption of the molecular clock. Reducing Shaw in the DN alone caused a dramatic lengthening of the behavioral period. Changing Shaw levels in all clock neurons also disrupts the rhythmic accumulation and levels of Pigment Dispersing Factor (PDF) in the dorsal projections of LNv neurons. However, changing Shaw levels solely in LNv neurons had little effect on locomotor activity or rhythmic accumulation of PDF. Conclusions/Significance Based on our results it is likely that Shaw modulates pacemaker and output neuronal electrical activity that controls circadian locomotor behavior by affecting rhythmic release of PDF. The results support an important role of the DN clock neurons in Shaw-mediated control of circadian behavior. In conclusion, we have demonstrated a central role of Shaw for coordinated and rhythmic output from clock neurons.
The role of case and animacy in bi-and monolingual children’s sentence interpretation in German: a developmental perspective

Abstract German-speaking children appear to have a strong N1-bias when interpreting non-canonical OVSsentences. During sentence interpretation, especially unambiguous accusative and dative case markers (den ‘the-ACC’ and dem ‘the-DAT’) weaken the N1-bias and help building up sentence interpretation strategies on the basis of morphological cues. Still, the N1-bias prevails beyond the age of five (Brandt et al. 2016, Cristante 2016, Dittmar et al. 2008) and remains until puberty (Lidzba et al. 2013). This paper investigates whether prototypical case-animacy coalitions (denACC + NINANIMATE and demDAT + NANIMATE ) strengthen a morphologically based sentence interpretation strategy in German. The experiment discussed in this paper tests for effects of such case-animacy coalitions in mono- and bilingual primary school children. 20 German monolinguals, 12 Dutch-German and 17 Russian-German bilinguals with a mean age of 9;6 were tested in a forced-choice off-line experiment. Results indicate that case-animacy coalitions weaken the N1-bias in OVS-conditions in German monolinguals and Dutch-German bilinguals, while no effects were found for Russian-German bilinguals. Together with an analysis of individual differences, these group-specific effects are discussed in terms of a developmental approach that represents a gradual cue strength adjustment process in mono- and bilingual children.
The economic consequences of accounting for derivatives

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Trois essais sur les finances publiques dans les pays en voie de développement

Cette these s'interesse aux finances publiques dans les pays en voie de developpement. Le premier chapitre, ecrit avec Julia Cage, s'interesse a la baisse des revenus fiscaux sur PIB dans les pays les plus pauvres entre 1970 et 2000. Nous montrons que ceci est la consequence d'une baisse des revenus douaniers et utilisons l'hypothese qu'une capacite fiscale preexistante est necessaire au prelevement d'impots domestiques mais pas a la collecte des tarifs douaniers pour expliquer ce que nous observons dans les donnees. Le deuxieme chapitre considere la cyclicalite des politiques publiques en Afrique sub-saharienne. Ce chapitre tente de mesurer l'impact du changement des conditions politiques et macro-economiques auxquels sont confrontes les gouvernements africains depuis 1970 sur la cyclicalite de leurs depenses publiques. Le troisieme et dernier chapitre etudie par l'hypothese que plus les gouvernements sont finances par l'impot, plus ils doivent satisfaire les attentes de leurs citoyens dans leurs choix de depenses publiques. Je compare les municipalites bresiliennes depensent des augmentations de leurs revenus fiscaux et de leurs revenus de transfert, et montre qu'une augmentation des impots finance une plus large croissance de la provision de biens publics, et moins de corruption, qu'une augmentation des revenues de transfert.
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—The contention resolution scheme is a key component in carrier sense based wireless MAC protocols. It has a major impact on the MAC's performance metrics such as throughput, delay, and jitter. The IEEE 802.11 DCF adopts a simple contention resolution scheme, namely Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) scheme. The BEB achieves a reasonable performance for transmitting best-effort packets in small-size wireless networks. However, as the network size increases, it suffers from inefficiency because of the medium contention, which leads to reduced performance. The main reason is that the BEB mechanism incurs an ever-increasing collision rate as the number of contending nodes increases. We devise a novel contention resolution scheme, a k-round elimination contention (k-EC) scheme. The k-EC scheme exhibits high efficiency and robustness during the collision resolution. More importantly, it is insensitive to the number of contending nodes. This feature makes it feasible for use in networks of different sizes. The simulation results show that the k-EC scheme offers a powerful remedy to medium contention resolution. It significantly outperforms the IEEE 802.11 DCF scheme in all the MAC's performance metrics, and also exhibits better fairness.
Dynamical encoding by networks of competing neuron groups: winnerless competition.

Following studies of olfactory processing in insects and fish, we investigate neural networks whose dynamics in phase space is represented by orbits near the heteroclinic connections between saddle regions (fixed points or limit cycles). These networks encode input information as trajectories along the heteroclinic connections. If there are N neurons in the network, the capacity is approximately e(N-1)! , i.e., much larger than that of most traditional network structures. We show that a small winnerless competition network composed of FitzHugh-Nagumo spiking neurons efficiently transforms input information into a spatiotemporal output.
Equity in Fertiliser Subsidy Distribution

This paper examines the issue of inter-crop, inter-regional and inter-class equity in fertiliser subsidy distribution in terms of shares of different farm classes, crops and states in total fertiliser use as well as per hectare fertiliser use on different size categories of farms. The paper shows that paddy and wheat cultivators are the major beneficiaries of fertiliser subsidy. Interstate disparity in fertiliser consumption still remains high, though it has been falling over the years. More significant is the finding that there prevails a fair degree of inter-class equity in distribution of fertiliser subsidy, contrary to the widely prevalent impression. A uniform approach to reduction of all types of subsidies is not justified. Instead a well thought out, properly sequenced, gradualist and regionally differentiated approach to subsidy reduction needs to be adopted.
Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC San Diego Peer Reviewed Title : A novel critical period for inhibitory plasticity in rat somatosensory cortex

18 Introduction. 19 Methods . 22 Results. 25 Discussion . 31 III. Conclusions and future directions. 61 Targeting specific neuron classes. 61 Investigating synaptic mechanisms . 62 Determining the role for competition in driving plasticity . 63 Studying excitatory/inhibitory balance. 64
A fuzzy model of the MSCI EURO index based on content analysis of European Central Bank statements

In this paper we investigate whether the MSCI EURO index can be predicted based on the content of European Central Bank (ECB) statements. We propose a new model to retrieve information from free text and transform it into a quantitative output. For this purpose, we first identify all adjectives in an ECB statement by using the Stanford Part-of-Speech Tagger and feed these to the General Inquirer (GI) content analysis tool. From GI we obtain a matrix that provides for each document and for each content category the percentage of words in the document that fall under each category. After normalizing the data, we develop a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy model using fuzzy c-means clustering. The TS fuzzy system is used to model the levels of the MSCI EURO index. To determine the performance of the model, we focus on the accuracy of predicting upward or downward movement in the index, and obtain, on average, an accuracy of 66%, that corresponds to an improvement of 16% over a random classifier.
Factors Influencing School Counselor Involvement in Partnerships With Families of Color: A Social Cognitive Exploration

Using a national sample of 155 school counselors, we examined the relationships between school counselors’ personal and environmental factors and their involvement in partnerships with families of color. We found positive correlations between school counselor self-efficacy, multicultural competence, and involvement in partnerships. Multiple regression analysis indicated that self-efficacy about partnerships and multicultural knowledge served as predictors of school counselor involvement in partnerships with families of color. We discuss implications for school counselor efforts in establishing these partnerships.
Bereavement and the Oregon Death with Dignity Act: How does assisted death impact grief?

Abstract This qualitative study explores bereavement experiences with an assisted death. Thematic analysis of data from interviews with 22 people who had a family member die under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act revealed the following five themes: (a) general grief reactions, (b) anticipating the death, (c) sense of control, (d) level of agreement with assisted death, and (e) grief expression and stigma. Grief from an assisted death is a varied experience, including aspects that are unique to this mode of death, and aspects that can both ease and bring challenges to the grieving process.
Comparing Self-Report Measures of Internalized Weight Stigma: The Weight Self-Stigma Questionnaire versus the Weight Bias Internalization Scale

Background Internalized weight stigma has gained growing interest due to its association with multiple health impairments in individuals with obesity. Especially high internalized weight stigma is reported by individuals undergoing bariatric surgery. For assessing this concept, two different self-report questionnaires are available, but have never been compared: the Weight Self-Stigma Questionnaire (WSSQ) and the Weight Bias Internalization Scale (WBIS). The purpose of the present study was to provide and to compare reliability, convergent validity with and predictive values for psychosocial health outcomes for the WSSQ and WBIS. Methods The WSSQ and the WBIS were used to assess internalized weight stigma in N = 78 prebariatric surgery patients. Further, body mass index (BMI) was assessed and body image, quality of life, self-esteem, depression, and anxiety were measured by well-established self-report questionnaires. Reliability, correlation, and regression analyses were conducted. Results Internal consistency of the WSSQ was acceptable, while good internal consistency was found for the WBIS. Both measures were significantly correlated with each other and body image. While only the WSSQ was correlated with overweight preoccupation, only the WBIS was correlated with appearance evaluation. Both measures were not associated with BMI. However, correlation coefficients did not differ between the WSSQ and the WBIS for all associations with validity measures. Further, both measures significantly predicted quality of life, self-esteem, depression, and anxiety, while the WBIS explained significantly more variance than the WSSQ total score for self-esteem. Conclusions Findings indicate the WSSQ and the WBIS to be reliable and valid assessments of internalized weight stigma in prebariatric surgery patients, although the WBIS showed marginally more favorable results than the WSSQ. For both measures, longitudinal studies on stability and predictive validity are warranted, for example, for weight-related and psychosocial outcomes.
Fast Noise Compensation and Adaptive Enhancement for Speech Separation

We propose a novel approach to improve adaptive decorrelation filtering- (ADF-) based speech source separation in diffuse noise. The effects of noise on system adaptation and separation outputs are handled separately. First, fast noise compensation (NC) is developed for adaptation of separation filters, forcing ADF to focus on source separation; next, output noises are suppressed by speech enhancement. By tracking noise components in output cross-correlation functions, the bias effect of noise on the system adaptation objective function is compensated, and by adaptively estimating output noise autocorrelations, the speech separation output is enhanced. For fast noise compensation, a blockwise fast ADF (FADF) is implemented. Experiments were conducted on real and simulated diffuse noises. Speech mixtures were generated by convolving TIMIT speech sources with acoustic path impulse responses measured in a real room with reverberation time second. The proposed techniques significantly improved separation performance and phone recognition accuracy of ADF outputs.
High-normal levels of hs-CRP predict the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver in healthy men

We performed a follow-up study to address whether high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) levels within the normal range can predict the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in healthy male subjects. Among15347 male workers between 30 and 59 years old who received annual health check-ups in 2002, a NAFLD-free cohort of 4,138 was followed through December 2009. Alcohol consumption was assessed with a questionnaire. At each visit, abdominal ultrasonography was performed to identify fatty liver disease. The COX proportional hazard model was used to evaluate the relationship between hs-CRP and incident NAFLD. During the follow-up period, 28.8% (1191 of 4138) of participants developed NAFLD. The hazard ratios of NAFLD were increased by hs-CRP categories within the normal range in the non-adjusted model and age-adjusted model. After adjusting for age, exercise, smoking, BMI, systolic BP, triglyceride, and fasting glucose, these incidences were only increased between the lowest and the highest hs-CRP categories. The risk for NAFLD increased as the hs-CRP level increased (p< 0.001). As the hs-CRP level increased within the healthy cohort, the risk of developing NAFLD increased. This trend remained true even if the hs-CRP level remained within the normal range. hs-CRP can be used as a predictor of NAFLD, as well as other obesity-associated diseases. Therefore, individuals with higher hs-CRP levels (even within the normal range) may require appropriate follow-up and management to prevent NAFLD development.
Leprosy presenting as immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome: proposed definitions and classification.

HIV infection has been strongly associated with mycobacterial infections such as tuberculosis (TB) and M. avium-intracellulare infection. In the early stages of the HIV epidemic it was predicted that leprosy might be worsened in the presence of HIV infection. It was anticipated that having HIV infection might be a risk factor for developing leprosy, and that more patients would develop the anergic, lepromatous type. However, paradoxically, leprosy in HIV infection seems to be associated with immunologically active types of disease and now may present as an immune reconstitution syndrome. Here we review the ways in which HIV and leprosy interact at the time of presentation and propose four different ways in which leprosy may present in this setting. Highly antiretroviral active therapy (HAART) is now widely used for the treatment of HIV infection in many countries, including those endemic for leprosy. HAART suppresses HIV multiplication and so permits both quantitative and functional reconstitution of the immune system. However, a dysregulated recovery of pathogen-specific immune responses may occur, especially in the first months of HAART, with the development of unusual and strong inflammatory response against pathogens, the so-called immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS). The most common pathogens implicated in IRIS are M. tuberculosis, cytomegalovirus, B and C hepatitis viruses. In 2003, the first case report of leprosy presenting as an IRIS in an HIV infected patient newly started on HAART was published and subsequently other numerous case reports have been published. Most of those cases have used the following diagnostic criteria: HIV infected patients who developed leprosy or Type 1 leprosy reaction (T1R) within 6 months of starting HAART, accompanied by a significant increase in CD4þ T cells. These different case reports have highlighted different aspects of this interaction. A systematic review of these