Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE HISTORY OF A NEARCTIC COLONIZATION: MOLECULAR PHYLOGENETICS AND BIOGEOGRAPHY OF THE NEARCTIC TOADS (BUFO)

Abstract Previous hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships among Nearctic toads (Bufonidae) and their congeners suggest contradictory biogeographic histories. These hypotheses argue that the Nearctic Bufo are: (1) a polyphyletic assemblage resulting from multiple colonizations from Africa; (2) a paraphyletic assemblage resulting from a single colonization event from South America with subsequent dispersal into Eurasia; or (3) a monophyletic group derived from the Neotropics. We obtained approximately 2.5 kb of mitochondrial DNA sequence data for the 12S, 16S, and intervening valine tRNA gene from 82 individuals representing 56 species and used parametric bootstrapping to test hypotheses of the biogeographic history of the Nearctic Bufo. We find that the Nearctic species of Bufo are monophyletic and nested within a large clade of New World Bufo to the exclusion of Eurasian and African taxa. This suggests that Nearctic Bufo result from a single colonization from the Neotropics. More generally, we demonstrate the utility of parametric bootstrapping for testing alternative biogeographic hypotheses. Through parametric bootstrapping, we refute several previously published biogeographic hypotheses regarding Bufo. These previous studies may have been influenced by homoplasy in osteological characters. Given the Neotropical origin for Nearctic Bufo, we examine current distributional patterns to assess whether the Nearctic-Neotropical boundary is a broad transition zone or a narrow boundary. We also survey fossil and paleogeographic evidence to examine potential Tertiary and Cretaceous dispersal routes, including the Paleocene Isthmian Link, the Antillean and Aves Ridges, and the current Central American Land Bridge, that may have allowed colonization of the Nearctic.
Possible role of IL-6 and TIE2 gene polymorphisms in predicting the initial high transport status in patients with peritoneal dialysis: an observational study

Objectives The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of interleukin (IL)-6 and TIE2 gene polymorphisms on baseline peritoneal transport property. Design An observational study. Setting Renji Hospital in Shanghai, China. Participants This study included 220 patients with continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (PD). Outcome measures Patients were divided into 2 groups based on the results of an initial peritoneal equilibration test performed within 3 months of starting PD therapy: group 1 consisted of low/low average transporters (n=123), and group 2 consisted of high/high average transporters (n=97). We genotyped TIE2 and IL-6 polymorphisms and analysed their effects on baseline transport status. Results The genotype AT in IL-6 Rs13306435 and the genotype CC in TIE2 Rs639225 were both negatively associated with a higher initial peritoneal transport status (IL-6 Rs13306435: OR=0.408, 95% CI 0.227 to 0.736; TIE2 Rs639225: OR=0.188, 95% CI 0.044 to 0.806). Conclusions IL-6 and TIE2 polymorphisms are associated with baseline peritoneal transport property.
Humor as a coping mechanism: Lessons from POWs

Abstract The repatriated Vietnam prisoners of war are suffering almost no mental illness, and the effective use of humor seems to be one of the reasons for their health. The literature by and about prisoners of war from several recent wars indicates prisoners often found humor to be an effective coping mechanism, a way of fighting back and taking control. By defining humor as an element of communication and by thinking of resilience as a communication phenomenon, the links between humor and resilience become more apparent. This was a qualitative study that consisted of interviewing approximately 50 Vietnam POWs in unstructured interviews and 12 Vietnam POWs in a structured, topical format. Chronicling the subjective accounts of these men and framing them as communication allowed an examination of the results. Knowing that human connection contributed to the survival and resilience of these men implies that resilience is contagious, as humor seems to be. Through the creation of humor in a well-defined system of social support, these fiercely independent men learned to rely on their own power and to draw a sense of mastery from each other.
The Entrepreneur in Economic Theory

At the beginning of our science stands the great discovery of un? planned regularity in the affairs of the market. This was Adam Smith's conception of the "invisible hand" which pushes every man in every one of his actions? pursued only in the furtherance of personal affairs, ? and known only to his Maker and to himself? into the proper place in the grand scheme. Perception of this unplanned regularity in the affairs of men was not altogether lacking among the ancients, nor among the medieval moralists. The Romans conceived a natural law quod per aeque apud omnes gentes custoditur, and they contrasted this regularity with the planned regularity of the civil law. The jus gentium was another recog? nition of such an unplanned regularity as it was placed in juxtaposition to the moral law. In fact, it may be said that from its beginnings juris? prudence is the great attempt to discover the relationships between the unplanned social regularities and the moral law. However, neither the ancients nor the medieval moralists concerned themselves directly with the unplanned order of the economic sphere, although they sometimes did so indirectly. They were preoccupied with another problem, viz. with the fact of deviation from regularity, or the fact that the individual buyer or seller can do many different things. They did not ask the question, how can there be order if each man can pursue seemingly unco-ordinated aims ? To ask this question, and thus to found a new science, is the merit of the 18th century. I have likened unplanned economic order to the jus gentium mainly to indicate as forcefully as I can that in economics as in international law the great problem remains: what are the relations between the un? planned regularities and the moral law? In economics we must know: how can there possibly be an economic policy, if there is economic law? What is the relation between economics and morality ? I propose to show that the answer to these questions has been in the making by those who have studied the concept of the entrepreneur, after they received from the classics the conception of the unplanned economic order.
An Examination of the Four-Part Theory of the Chinese Self: The Differentiation and Relative Importance of the Different Types of Social-Oriented Self

Because culture has a deep and far-reaching influence, individuals who grew up within different cultures tend to develop different basic self-constructions. With respect to the Chinese under the influence of Chinese culture, Yang proposed the concepts of individual-oriented self and social-oriented self. He argued that, besides the individual-oriented self, the social-oriented self of the Chinese contains three types of self: the relationship-oriented self, the familistic (group)-oriented self, and the other-oriented self. The theory proposed that the Chinese self is appropriately covered only through this four-part theory of the Chinese self. However, this remains to be tested; whether these three types of sub-level “selves” can be effectively triggered, along with their relative importance. This study examines the four-part theory of the Chinese self. Through photo priming, Experiment 1 shows that the three types of social-oriented self are differentiated from each other and can be individually triggered. In Experiment 2, the importance of the three types of self was investigated, adopting the concept of limited self-regulation resources to design scenarios. The participants were asked to make counterarguments about the notion of each of the three types of self, with performance in the subsequent task serving as the main dependent variable. In Experiment 3, the relative importance of the three types of self was examined by investigating the choices made by individuals within the context of conflict under the three orientations of the social-oriented self. Overall, results of the experiments showed that the Chinese have a four-part self with the importance of the other-oriented self as the most remarkable.
Optimal decisions that reduce flood damage along the Meuse: an uncertainty analysis

In December 1993, the river Meuse ooded and caused a damage of about 250 million Dutch guilders. This prompted the Dutch government to initiate a project to investigate and compare strategies that can reduce future losses due to ooding on the basis of several criteria, including some concerning uncertainties. To obtain decisions that reduce ood damage, one should account for the following uncertainties: the river discharge, the ood damage given the discharge, the downstream water level given the discharge, the costs and the yields of extracting sand and gravel, and the costs of constructing embankments. These uncertainties can best be represented by probability distributions, where Bayes' theorem can be used to update subjective prior information with observations. When the loss is deened as the net present discounted value of the costs of decisions minus the yields of decisions plus the remaining mean ood damage over an unbounded time-horizon, decision theory can be used to obtain optimal decisions with respect to the following three decision criteria: the criterion of minimal expected loss, the criterion of minimal uncertainty in the loss, and the criterion of maximal safety. By using simulation, the present situation and ve strategies have been analysed. The strategy with minimal expected loss and maximal safety is based on widening the summer bed in the south of Limburg, lowering the summer bed in the middle and north of Limburg, and constructing 62 km of embankments around the remaining bottlenecks along the Meuse.
A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures

NE of the most important recent developments in the area of "applied economic theory" has been the work of Musgrave and Samuelson in public finance theory.2 The two writers agree on what is probably the major point under investigation, namely, that no "market type" solution exists to determine the level of expenditures on public goods. Seemingly, we are faced with the problem of having a rather large portion of our national income allocated in a "non-optimal" way when compared with the private sector. This discussion will show that the Musgrave-Samuelson analysis, which is valid for federal expenditures, need not apply to local expenditures. The plan of the discussion is first to restate the assumptions made by Musgrave and Samuelson and the central problems with which they deal. After looking at a key difference between the federal versus local cases, I shall present a simple model. This model yields a solution for the level of expenditures for local public goods which reflects the preferences of the population more adequately than they can be reflected at the national level. The assumptions of the model will then be relaxed to see what implications are involved. Finally, policy considerations will be discussed.
Cognitive Mapping in a Complex Building

The Health Sciences Centre is a five-story hospital in which each floor is designed with a unique configuration. There are no main corridors in the hospital, nor any corridors that run the complete length of the hospital. Rooms are not rectangular and fail to follow any set pattern. Consequently it is easy to become disoriented in this building. The series of studies reported in this article examined the cognitive mapping systems of student nurses who had worked in the hospital for various periods of time. After inspecting several different measures, it was concluded that the student nurses had failed to form "survy"- type cognitive maps of the building even after traversing it for two years. A control experiment was tested, using naive subjects who were first asked to memorize floor plans of the building. These naive subjects performed significantly better on objective measures of cognitive mapping than did the nurses with two years' experience working at the hospital. It was concluded that mental representations of survey maps do not develop automatically in the complex spatial environment.
Efficacy Towards Negative Symptoms and Safety of Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Treatment for Patients with Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review

Background Negative symptoms are one of the most difficult areas in the treatment of schizophrenia because antipsychotics are often less effective towards them. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a new technique for cerebral cortex stimulation and is believed to be a safe and promising method for the treatment of mental disorders. As the clinical research and new treatment models have increased in recent years, the efficacy towards negative symptoms and safety evaluation of rTMS treatment should also be updated. Aims To explore the efficacy and safety of rTMS in the treatment of negative symptoms for patients with schizophrenia. Methods We searched for relevant controlled clinical trials from the following databases: PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, EBSCO, Web of Science, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), VIP, Wanfang Data, SINOMED, and Airiti Library. The retrieval time went up to January 2, 2017. The research literature was screened according to the predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. After data extraction, statistical analysis was conducted by using RevMan 5.3 and Stata 14. Quality evaluation was done on the included research articles. The Cochrane risk of bias assessment tool was adopted for assessing risk of bias. The GRADE (Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) system recommendation grading method was used as the reference standard. Results A total of 3500 articles were retrieved. In the end, there were 29 articles included in the metaanalysis with a total sample size of 1440. After the meta-analysis, it was found that the use of antipsychotic treatment combined with rTMS could improve the negative symptoms of patients (SMD=-0.40, 95% CI= -0.62~-0.18). Based on the bias of the efficacy evaluation assessed by the Cochrane risk of bias assessment tool, there were 6 studies rated as having “high risk of bias” and the rest were rated as “unable to determine”. According to the assessment, development and evaluation criteria of the GRADE classification, the evidence quality for the efficacy evaluation index was “moderate”. The acceptability of rTMS treatment was better (RR= 0.75, 95% CI= 0.49~1.15, based on the 1492 samples from the 28 studies), however, the patients who received the rTMS treatment had a higher rate of mild adverse effects (RR= 2.20, 95% CI= 1.53~ 3.18, based on the 1296 samples from the 23 studies). Conclusions The use of the antipsychotic treatment incorporated with rTMS treatment can slightly improve the negative symptoms of patients with schizophrenia and has better acceptability and fewer adverse effects. Nevertheless, there is publication bias in this study and the heterogeneity of the study is relatively high. Therefore, we need to be cautious when interpreting the results
Appetite regulation and seasonality: implications for obesity

High circulating concentrations of leptin in obesity are associated with an apparent loss of its characteristic anorexic action within the hypothalamic region of the brain. Central insensitivity to leptin may therefore contribute to the aetiology of this disease, and an increased understanding of the underlying mechanisms will identify potential means of prevention and/or therapeutic targets. Seasonal animals such as sheep and Siberian hamsters (Phodopus sungorus) exhibit annual photoperiod-driven cycles of appetite and body weight. Increased food intake and weight gain in long days (summer) are associated with high circulating leptin, and decreased intake and weight loss in short days (winter) with low leptin. Critically, these cycles are associated with reversible changes in sensitivity to leptin. High sensitivity is seen in short days and relative insensitivity in long days, demonstrated both in sheep given leptin centrally via intracerebroventricular cannulas and in hamsters given leptin peripherally. In addition, primary hypothalamic appetite-regulating targets for leptin (i.e. neuropeptide Y, melanocortin and cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript pathways) respond differently in these species to changes in circulating leptin and nutritional status induced by photoperiod as opposed to such changes induced by food restriction. Studies of seasonal animals will help to resolve causes of altered sensitivity to leptin and whether these changes reflect altered transport into the brain and/or altered signalling at the receptor or post-receptor level. Increased knowledge of the mechanism(s) and time-course for development and reversal of reduced central leptin sensitivity will provide new insights into the development and control of obesity.
Stronger Synaptic Connectivity as a Mechanism behind Development of Working Memory-related Brain Activity during Childhood

The cellular maturational processes behind cognitive development during childhood, including the development of working memory capacity, are still unknown. By using the most standard computational model of visuospatial working memory, we investigated the consequences of cellular maturational processes, including myelination, synaptic strengthening, and synaptic pruning, on working memory-related brain activity and performance. We implemented five structural developmental changes occurring as a result of the cellular maturational processes in the biophysically based computational network model. The developmental changes in memory activity predicted from the simulations of the model were then compared to brain activity measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging in children and adults. We found that networks with stronger fronto-parietal synaptic connectivity between cells coding for similar stimuli, but not those with faster conduction, stronger connectivity within a region, or increased coding specificity, predict measured developmental increases in both working memory-related brain activity and in correlations of activity between regions. Stronger fronto-parietal synaptic connectivity between cells coding for similar stimuli was thus the only developmental process that accounted for the observed changes in brain activity associated with development of working memory during childhood.
Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning

The task of generating natural language descriptions from images has received a lot of attention in recent years. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly important to evaluate such image captioning approaches in an automatic manner. In this paper, we provide an in-depth evaluation of the existing image captioning metrics through a series of carefully designed experiments. Moreover, we explore the utilization of the recently proposed Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) document metric for the purpose of image captioning. Our findings outline the differences and/or similarities between metrics and their relative robustness by means of extensive correlation, accuracy and distraction based evaluations. Our results also demonstrate that WMD provides strong advantages over other metrics.
The Importance of Asset Maximisation in Football: Towards the Long-Term Gestation and Maintenance of Sustained High Performance

Based upon an extended case study of Bolton Wanderers Football Club, this article argues that asset management strategies need to be accompanied by human resource management (HRM) practices capable of identifying, attracting, developing and retaining strategically valuable staff (as well as skilled players) with the requisite knowledge and abilities to enact asset maximization plans. The article concludes with a range of recommendations for consideration by the strategic apex of the football department, focusing on the role of HRM in creating and maintaining these approaches to securing sustained performance.
Measuring Schwartz's values in childhood: Multidimensional scaling across instruments and cultures

The Picture-Based Value Survey for Children (PBVS-C; Döring et al., 2010) assesses children's values through self-report and thereby depicts Schwartz's theory of universal human values at an early age. Despite evidence on the PBVS-C's structural validity, there remains an open question: Does the PBVS-C measure the same values as does Schwartz's Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ; Schwartz et al., 2001), an established assessment instrument for adult and adolescent respondents? To answer this question about the PBVS-C's validity, Polish (N = 167) and German (N = 119) children's values were measured with both instruments. The multitrait–multimethod correlation matrix (Campbell & Fiske, 1959) of value items from both instruments was analysed with multidimensional scaling (MDS), as proposed by Borg and Groenen (1997). Our structural expectations for the MDS output about the distinctiveness (1) of Schwartz's higher order value types (i.e., traits) and (2) of the two assessment methods (PBVS-C and PVQ) were confirmed in both samples.
Photoperiod and Temperature Interact to Affect Immune Parameters in Adult Male Deer Mice

Nontropical rodents often experience large seasonal fluctuations in both food availability and energy demands. The energy required for thermoregulation is highest during the winter when food availability may be at an annual minimum. Failure to cope with winter probably accounts, in part, for the increased prevalence of disease and death relative to that in summer. Winter conditions may elevate circulating glucocorticosteroid levels, which can compromise immune function. To increase the odds of surviving the energetic demands of winter, individuals of some rodent species appear to enhance immune function before conditions deteriorate. Previous laboratory studies suggest that immune enhancement can be induced by short days. These findings contrast with the results of several field studies reporting suppressed immune function during the winter. To resolve this conflict, the authors hypothesized that winter stressors present in field studies counteracted the short-day enhancement of immune function reported in laboratory studies. If true, then immune function of captive mice in short days should be compromised by low temperature or reduced food availability. Both ambient temperature and photoperiod were manipulated in the present study to assess their effects on immune parameters in male deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus). Animals in short days regressed their reproductive systems and also displayed significantly higher immunoglobulin G (IgG) levels than did those in long days. Deer mice maintained in low temperatures had significantly reduced splenic masses and basal IgG levels independent of day length. Animals maintained in both short days and low temperatures displayed IgG levels comparable to those of mice in long-day/mild-temperature conditions. Animals maintained in long days and low temperatures had significantly higher serum corticosterone levels than did animals maintained in long days at mild temperatures. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that immune parameters are enhanced in short days to counteract stress-mediated immune suppression occurring during the winter.