Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Natural Antibody Affects Survival of the SpirocheteBorrelia burgdorferi within Feeding Ticks

ABSTRACT Natural antibodies are those immunoglobulin molecules found in mammalian serum that arise in the absence of exposure to environmental pathogens and may comprise an early host defense against invading pathogens. The spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi first encounters natural antibodies when its arthropod vector, Ixodes scapularis, begins feeding on a mammalian host. Natural antibodies may therefore have an impact on pathogens within blood-sucking vectors, prior to pathogen transmission to the mammal. In this study, we investigated whether natural antibodies influenced the number and/or phenotype of B. burgdorferi organisms within feeding I. scapularis nymphs. Using a competitive PCR, we found that ticks ingesting a blood meal from B-cell-deficient mice, which lack all immunoglobulins, contained fivefold more spirochete DNA than ticks feeding on control mice. Spirochete DNA levels could be reduced to that of controls with passive transfer of normal mouse serum or polyclonal immunoglobulin M (IgM), but not IgG, into B-cell-deficient mice prior to placement of infected ticks. At 48 h of tick feeding, 90% of spirochetes within salivary glands of ticks removed from B-cell-deficient mice were found by confocal immunofluorescence microscopy to express outer surface protein A (OspA), compared to only 5% of salivary gland spirochetes from ticks detached from control mice. Taken together, these results show that ingestion of natural antibodies limits the spirochete burden within feeding ticks. Because OspA is normally downregulated when spirochetes moved from the tick midgut to the salivary gland, our findings suggest that OspA-expressing midgut spirochetes may be particularly susceptible to the borrelicidal effects of these molecules.
Prognostic significance of TOP2A gene dosage in HER-2-negative breast cancer.

BACKGROUND Previous studies showed the prognostic and predictive impact of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2) gene alterations analyzed separately and jointly with topoisomerase II α (TOP2A) gene alterations; however, the role of TOP2A gene abnormalities alone has not been thoroughly investigated. Additionally, TOP2A aberrations were typically studied in HER-2-positive (HER-2(+)) tumors because these genes are frequently coamplified. Therefore, the knowledge concerning the impact of TOP2A abnormalities in HER-2-negative (HER-2(-)) patients is scarce. This study aimed to investigate the clinical significance of TOP2A anomalies in breast cancer patients with HER-2(-) and HER-2(+) tumors. MATERIALS AND METHODS Snap-frozen tumor samples from 322 consecutive stage I-III breast cancer patients were analyzed for TOP2A gene dosage using quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR). RESULTS A high TOP2A gene dosage was found in 94 tumors (29%)-32% and 27% of HER-2(+) and HER-2(-) tumors, respectively. The mean TOP2A gene dosages in the HER-2(+) and HER-2(-) groups were 1.49 ± 1.03 and 1.09 ± 0.35, respectively. High TOP2A gene dosage had an inverse prognostic impact in terms of shorter disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) times in the entire group and in both the HER-2(-) and HER-2(+) subgroups. The unfavorable prognostic impact of TOP2A gene dosage was maintained in the multivariate Cox regression analysis in the entire group and in HER-2(-) patients. CONCLUSIONS A high gene dosage of TOP2A determined using qPCR occurs frequently both in HER-2(+) and HER-2(-) tumors and has a strong adverse prognostic impact.
We are family: Congruity between organizational and family functioning constructs

The common practice of characterizing organizations as having a family environment assumes that organizational and family functioning constructs are conceptually congruent. To date, this assumption has not been examined in a systematic fashion. This study examined the congruence of organizational and family functioning concepts using the Work Environment Scales and the Beavers Self-Report Family Inventory in a sample of 204 government employees. A canonical correlation analysis found a moderate amount of shared variance between these two sets of data, suggesting that there may be an underlying congruence between work and family constructs. Additionally, specific dimensions of work unit climate and group conflict were predictive of equivalent family functioning dimensions. The implications of these findings for managers and organizational development practitioners are discussed.
A window-of-opportunity biomarker study of etodolac in resectable breast cancer

Observational data show that nonsteroidal anti‐inflammatory drug (NSAID) use is associated with a lower rate of breast cancer. We evaluated the effect of etodolac, an FDA‐approved NSAID reported to inhibit cyclooxygenase (COX) enzymes and the retinoid X receptor alpha (RXR), on rationally identified potential biomarkers in breast cancer. Patients with resectable breast cancer planned for initial management with surgical resection were enrolled and took 400 mg of etodolac twice daily prior to surgery. Protein and gene expression levels for genes related to COX‐2 and RXRα were evaluated in tumor samples from before and after etodolac exposure. Thirty subjects received etodolac and 17 subjects were assayed as contemporaneous or opportunistic controls. After etodolac exposure mean cyclin D1 protein levels, assayed by immunohistochemistry, decreased (P = 0.03). Notably, pre‐ versus post cyclin D1 gene expression change went from positive to negative with greater duration of etodolac exposure (r = −0.64, P = 0.01). Additionally, etodolac exposure was associated with a significant increase in COX‐2 gene expression levels (fold change: 3.25 [95% CI: 1.9, 5.55]) and a trend toward increased β‐catenin expression (fold change: 2.03 [95% CI: 0.93, 4.47]). In resectable breast cancer relatively brief exposure to the NSAID etodolac was associated with reduced cyclin D1 protein levels. Effect was also observed on cyclin D1 gene expression with decreasing levels with longer durations of drug exposure. Increased COX‐2 gene expression was seen, possibly due to compensatory feedback. These data highlight the utility of even small clinical trials with access to biospecimens for pharmacodynamic studies.
The sense of entitlement in romantic relationships—Scale construction, factor structure, construct validity, and its associations with attachment orientations

Based on clinical evidence and theoretical writings that pointed to the importance and uniqueness of the sense of entitlement in couple relationships, two studies were designed to develop and validate the Sense of Relational Entitlement (SRE) scale. A factor analysis performed on the scale’s items yielded five factors that identified three basic entitlement-related attitudes toward a romantic partner. Findings indicated that both exaggerated and restricted forms of relational entitlement seem to be maladaptive and put people at risk for emotional problems. Findings also indicated that excessive and restricted forms of relational entitlement were significantly associated with attachment insecurities. In addition, the SRE scale was found to tap a unique psychological construct that moderately overlapped with constructs of narcissism and global entitlement. The discussion focuses on the developmental and psychodynamic sources of the sense of relational entitlement.
Thorax and Pelvis Kinematics Change During Sustained Cycling

Abstract The aim of this study was to evaluate time dependent changes in 3 dimensional (3D) thorax and pelvis kinematics during an intense 60 min bike ride. 10 experienced male road cyclists pedalled for 60 min at workloads based on previous onset of blood lactate accumulation (OBLA) testing. The 60 min cycle was divided into six 10 min periods consisting of 8 min of steady state cycling (88% of OBLA) followed by 90 s at 140% of OBLA and a 30 s recovery phase (60% of OBLA). Thorax and pelvis kinematic data were recorded from 20 consecutive pedal revolutions using a 3D motion capture system (200 Hz) during each steady state phase. Repeated measures ANOVA with Bonferroni corrections were used to test for effects of test duration on segmental kinematics. Results indicated an effect for test duration on the mean thorax (p<0.001) and pelvic tilt (p=0.042), pelvic lateral tilt velocity (p=0.006) and the ROM in thoracic lateral tilt (p<0.001). These changes all occurred between the 4th and 5th work periods. Findings indicated that during the latter stages of a high intensity ride cyclists changed the sagittal plane thorax and pelvis orientation, increased lateral thoracic movements and pelvic lateral tilt velocities.
Abusive Supervision and Employee Emotional Exhaustion

The authors examined the relationship between subordinates' core self-evaluations and supervisors' abusive supervision. Furthermore, they examined whether subordinates' perceived coworker support and subordinates' susceptibility to emotional contagion moderated the relationship between supervisors' abusive supervision and subordinates' emotional exhaustion. They analyzed data from 290 subordinates who had immediate supervisors using hierarchal multiple regression. Results show that core self-evaluations were negatively related to abusive supervision, whereas abusive supervision was positively related to emotional exhaustion. Both perceived coworker support and susceptibility to emotional contagion moderated the relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion. It is surprising that the moderating effect of perceived coworker support showed an unexpected pattern such that a stronger relationship between abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion existed when coworker social support was high. The authors conclude with a discussion of these findings.
Psychology: A Closed System of Self-Evident Information?

To estimate the self-evidence of basic principles of psychology, 50 UCLA introductory psychology students answered 21 multiple-choice questions each embodying one learning or memory phenomenon. 71% of the items were answered correctly more often than chance. The probability of an item being answered correctly was unrelated to the subjects' familiarity with the names of the phenomena and unrelated to professional psychologists' ratings of the importance of the phenomena. The possibility that we may spend an inordinate amount of item dealing with self-evident principles, because we do not seek outside evaluation of our work, is discussed.
Sizing it up: Cellular MRI using micron‐sized iron oxide particles

There is rapidly increasing interest in the use of MRI to track cell migration in intact animals. Currently, cell labeling is usually accomplished by endocytosis of nanometer‐sized, dextran‐coated iron oxide particles. The limitations of using nanometer‐sized particles, however, are that millions of particles are required to achieve sufficient contrast, the label can be diluted beyond observability by cell division, and the label is biodegradable. These problems make it difficult to label cells other than macrophages in vivo, and to conduct long‐term engraftment studies. It was recently demonstrated that micron‐sized iron oxide particles (MPIOs) can be taken up by a number of cell types. In this study we examined the MRI properties of single MPIOs with sizes of 0.96, 1.63, 2.79, 4.50, and 5.80 μm. Furthermore, the capacity of cells to endocytose these MPIOs was investigated, and the MRI properties of the labeled cells at 7.0 and 11.7 Tesla were measured as a function of image resolution and echo time (TE). Cells labeled with MPIOs generally contained iron levels of ∼100 pg, which is approximately threefold higher than those obtained with the best strategies to label cells using nanometer‐sized particles. On occasion, some cells had levels as high as ∼400 pg. We demonstrate that these large particles and the cells labeled with them can be detected by spin echo (SE)‐based imaging methods. These measurements indicate that MPIOs should be useful for improving cell tracking by MRI. Magn Reson Med 53:329–338, 2005. Published 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
You Are Where You Go: Inferring Demographic Attributes from Location Check-ins

User profiling is crucial to many online services. Several recent studies suggest that demographic attributes are predictable from different online behavioral data, such as users' "Likes" on Facebook, friendship relations, and the linguistic characteristics of tweets. But location check-ins, as a bridge of users' offline and online lives, have by and large been overlooked in inferring user profiles. In this paper, we investigate the predictive power of location check-ins for inferring users' demographics and propose a simple yet general location to profile (L2P) framework. More specifically, we extract rich semantics of users' check-ins in terms of spatiality, temporality, and location knowledge, where the location knowledge is enriched with semantics mined from heterogeneous domains including both online customer review sites and social networks. Additionally, tensor factorization is employed to draw out low dimensional representations of users' intrinsic check-in preferences considering the above factors. Meanwhile, the extracted features are used to train predictive models for inferring various demographic attributes. We collect a large dataset consisting of profiles of 159,530 verified users from an online social network. Extensive experimental results based upon this dataset validate that: 1) Location check-ins are diagnostic representations of a variety of demographic attributes, such as gender, age, education background, and marital status; 2) The proposed framework substantially outperforms compared models for profile inference in terms of various evaluation metrics, such as precision, recall, F-measure, and AUC.
An Ontology Matching Approach Based on Affinity-Preserving Random Walks

Ontology matching is the process of finding semantic correspondences between entities from different ontologies. As an effective solution to linking different heterogeneous ontologies, ontology matching has attracted considerable attentions in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based approach to ontology matching problem. Different from previous work, we formulate ontology matching as a random walk process on the association graph constructed from the to-be-matched ontologies. In particular, two variants of the conventional random walk process, namely, Affinity-Preserving Random Walk (APRW) and Mapping-Oriented Random Walk (MORW), have been proposed to alleviate the adverse effect of the false-mapping nodes in the association graph and to incorporate the 1-to-1 matching constraints presumed in ontology matching, respectively. Experiments on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI1) datasets show that our approach achieves a competitive performance when compared with state-of-the-art systems, even though our approach does not utilize any external resources.
Use of the Leiter International Performance Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised with Hearing-Impaired Children

The educational records of 40 hearing-impaired children given both the Leiter International Performance Scale and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised, Performance Scale, were reviewed. The psychometric characteristics of and interrelationship between the two measures of intelligence are presented. The Leiter was found to have a standard deviation significantly greater than that reported in the examiner's manual. Discussion is presented of the care that must be taken when interpreting Leiter IQs of hearing-impaired children.
Habit Reversal as a Function of Length of Partial Delay of Reinforcement

While the effects of delay of reinforcement on response acquisition are well known ( 6 ) , there is comparatively little information regarding its effects upon resistance to extinction. Recently, Fehrer ( 3 ) has demonstrated that a constant delay of reinforcement produces an instrumental response that is more resistant to extinction than when reward is immediately forthcoming. In the case of partially delayed reinforcement, in which delay of reward is imposed on a fraction of the training trials, there is considerable evidence (1, 8, 9, 10, 11) that delay of reinforcement enhances resistance to extinction. In addition Logan, et al. ( 7 ) have shown that that effect of partially delayed reinforcement is directly related to the length of delay. When the magnitude of partial delay was increased to 30 sec. , the partially delayed Ss ran more rapidly during extinction than control Ss with either no delay or a partial delay of 9 sec. Since all these studies of partially delayed reinforcement have used runways, it appears desirable to investigate the generality of some of these findings in a more complex situation. In the present study a selective learning situation, a single unit T-maze, is employed, and the time required to achieve reversal in a position response constitutes the index of response strength. Some advantages of this criterion of response strength have been pointed out elsewhere ( 5 ). The purpose of the present investigation is then to determine whether or not the acquisition and reversal of a T-maze position response are affected by the length of partially delayed reinforcement.
N of One plus Some: An Alternative Strategy for Conducting Single Case Research

Case study researchers choose between single and multiple case research approaches. The literature recommends single cases for gaining in-depth understanding and multiple cases for acquiring broader understanding. This article presents the unconventional approach of a primary case informed by multiple secondary cases. It suggests that focusing on one case while following some additional secondary cases may, paradoxically and under certain conditions, be a better way of conducting in-depth, single case research. The secondary, or assisting, cases can help the researcher to identify issues to expect, questions to ask, and data to look for in the primary case.
Responses to Katie Overy's Paper, "Can Music Really 'Improve' the Mind?"

Overy's paper, "Can Music Really 'Improve' the Mind? ", is both timely and thought-provoking. Few areas of music psychology have seen as many recent advances as research in music-induced plasticity of the brain. For example, Schlaug, Jancke, Huang and Steinmetz (1994) found that a small neural structure in the cerebral cortex that processes sound signals, the planum temporale, was larger in the left hemisphere and smaller in the right in the brains of musicians than of non-musicians, an effect which was later found to be due to musicians who possessed perfect pitch and who began their musical training before the age of seven (Schlaug, Jancke, Huang and Steinmetz, 1995). Schlaug and his colleagues also reported that the musicians, particularly those who had begun their training before the age of seven, had thicker corpus callosums (the band of nerve tissue that connects the left and right hemispheres) than the non-musicians (Schlaug et al., 1994).
Doing a group presentation: Negotiations and challenges experienced by five Chinese ESL students of Commerce at a Canadian university

This study investigated the negotiations and challenges experienced by five Chinese ESL (English as a second language) students of Commerce through their engagement in an academic presentation in a regular content course at a Canadian university. Multiple sources of data were collected, including interviews, class observations, group discussions, emails, field notes, assignment drafts, and course materials. Data analysis showed that, in their preparatory activities outside the classroom, students employed peer—peer dialogues (group discussions and email exchanges) to clarify the task requirements, generate ideas, seek peer comments, and coach rehearsals. However, the academic presentation — especially open discussion part — was a great challenge to them, related to their underdeveloped English conversation ability, their unfamiliarity with participatory communication modes in the Canadian classroom, and their limited experience with group work. To compensate for their limited sense of conversational abilities, they chose to present a thorough case analysis rather than engage the class in discussion through their presentation as expected by the instructor. The students eventually understood the norms of academic presentation in this content course through their observation of the instructor’s reaction to their presentation in class and subsequent presentations of their classmates, and they realized that they should approach assignments according to the requirements. Implications drawn from these findings are discussed.
Fast odometry and scene flow from RGB-D cameras based on geometric clustering

In this paper we propose an efficient solution to jointly estimate the camera motion and a piecewise-rigid scene flow from an RGB-D sequence. The key idea is to perform a two-fold segmentation of the scene, dividing it into geometric clusters that are, in turn, classified as static or moving elements. Representing the dynamic scene as a set of rigid clusters drastically accelerates the motion estimation, while segmenting it into static and dynamic parts allows us to separate the camera motion (odometry) from the rest of motions observed in the scene. The resulting method robustly and accurately determines the motion of an RGB-D camera in dynamic environments with an average runtime of 80 milliseconds on a multi-core CPU. The code is available for public use/test.
Are fatigue, depression and anxiety associated with labour market participation among patients diagnosed with haematological malignancies? A prospective study

The objectives of this study are to examine levels of fatigue, depression and anxiety following diagnosis of a haematological malignancy, to determine the incidence of return to work (RTW) and long‐term sickness absence (LTSA) during 1‐year follow‐up and to examine whether fatigue, depression and anxiety are associated with RTW and LTSA in this group of cancer patients.
Critical practitioners, developing researchers: the story of practitioner research in the lifelong learning sector

This article examines the growth of practitioner research in England through the creation of the Learning and Skills Research Network (LSRN) and identifies its effect on subsequent developments in what is generally known as the Lifelong Learning Sector (LLS). It offers an analysis of this development as a case study in developing practitioner research. Staff in further education (FE) and adult and community learning (ACL) are normally expected to focus on teaching and training rather than undertake research, in contrast with their counterparts in higher education (HE) where, particularly in the more traditional universities, staff are expected to undertake research as primary focus. The increasing focus on evidence‐based policy making by government provides a growing impetus to foster research capability within the LLS. The large organisational structures that comprise the LLS today demand strong management of resources, human, capital and financial. For any government targets to be met, the sector needs to be galvanised into appropriate and effective action. To best achieve this requires research and development and the practitioners could benefit from this need to develop their own research skills in the creation of, and use of, research findings. The author argues that research in the LLS needs to be designed appropriately but also needs to be undertaken where the intervention and origination of targets and goals is not a political but a sector‐led endeavour.