Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Monocytes Loaded with Indocyanine Green as Active Homing Contrast Agents Permit Optical Differentiation of Infectious and Non-Infectious Inflammation

Distinguishing cutaneous infection from sterile inflammation is a diagnostic challenge and currently relies upon subjective interpretation of clinical parameters, microbiological data, and nonspecific imaging. Assessing characteristic variations in leukocytic infiltration may provide more specific information. In this study, we demonstrate that homing of systemically administered monocytes tagged using indocyanine green (ICG), an FDA-approved near infrared dye, may be assessed non-invasively using clinically-applicable laser angiography systems to investigate cutaneous inflammatory processes. RAW 264.7 mouse monocytes co-incubated with ICG fluoresce brightly in the near infrared range. In vitro, the loaded cells retained the ability to chemotax toward monocyte chemotactic protein-1. Following intravascular injection of loaded cells into BALB/c mice with induced sterile inflammation (Complete Freund’s Adjuvant inoculation) or infection (Group A Streptococcus inoculation) of the hind limb, non-invasive whole animal imaging revealed local fluorescence at the inoculation site. There was significantly higher fluorescence of the inoculation site in the infection model than in the inflammation model as early as 2 hours after injection (p<0.05). Microscopic examination of bacterial inoculation site tissue revealed points of near infrared fluorescence, suggesting the presence of ICG-loaded cells. Development of a non-invasive technique to rapidly image inflammatory states without radiation may lead to new tools to distinguish infectious conditions from sterile inflammatory conditions at the bedside.
‘Many’, ‘Half’ or ‘One out of Two’?: Assessing the Effectiveness of Counter-Biasing Techniques in Reducing Self-Reported Turnout

When asked in surveys about their voting record, many respondents tend to report having gone to the polls, although they have not. The consequence is a large and significant turnout overreporting, with negative consequences upon the validity of many investigations in the field of voting behaviour. An individual’s tendency to exaggerate his/her voting record is usually the combined effect of several factors: social desirability bias, limitations of human memory, and acquiescence response bias. This article assesses the effectiveness of counter-biasing techniques in compensating for the social desirability bias and, consequently, reducing self-reported turnout. It compares the effects of three alternatives of ‘loaded’ turnout questions, providing variable information on the occurrence of non-voting behaviour (many people/around half of the people/one out of two people did not vote) and invariant face-saving response options. Self-reported turnout is compared against externally validated turnout. We employ a split-ballot survey experiment included in the 2009 Romanian Presidential Election panel study. Our analyses show that the ‘half’ counter-biasing formula is systematically more effective in reducing the social desirability bias than the alternatives, which perform rather similarly. When compared to validated turnout, it appears that, after applying the counter-biasing techniques, turnout overreporting due to social desirability remains at 5.7 to 8.6 percent.
The Relationship Between Perceptual Motor Skills and Attention

Aunque la literatura informe sobre la relacion entre la habilidad perceptomotora y la atencion, pocos estudios han explorado empiricamente esta asociacion. El objetivo de este trabajo fue investigar la relacion entre esos constructos, a traves de los instrumentos Test Gestaltico de Bender: Sistema de Puntuacion Gradual (B-SPG) y la bateria de Psicologia para la Evaluacion de la Atencion (BPA). Los participantes fueron 320 ninos de cuatro escuelas publicas de una ciudad situada en el sur del estado de Minas Gerais, con edades que variaron de siete a 10 anos (M = 8,39, DE = 1,10), siendo 196 (55,9 %) ninas. Los resultados mostraron correlaciones negativas, moderadas y significativas entre las puntuaciones totales de los instrumentos, lo que indica la relacion entre los constructos. Aunque los datos han confirmado la existencia de relacion entre habilidad perceptomotora y atencion, se considera necesario realizar nuevos estudios con muestras de otras regiones.
Mental control and language selection

A surprisingly large part of the population of the world is at least bilingual. The question as to how people are able to control their language system is an important one and has been a topic for highly active research in recent years. Until now, models have been quite simplistic, but Green places his model in a wider framework of attention and control, drawing our attention to the fact that the mechanisms involved in language control share basic properties with the systems in other cognitive domains. Green introduces the (not language-specific) supervisory attentional system in combination with language task schemas which make it possible to adapt to the situation in which the bilingual system is functioning. Models of bilingual processing should be able to explain how lexical processing is affected by, among others, task demands (see also Dijkstra, van Jaarsveld, and ten Brinke, 1998). By adding a general mechanism of attentional control that is independently motivated by general cognitive mechanisms, Green has enriched his previous model considerably. In what follows we will first make some general remarks about the model Green proposes. In the second part we will discuss some recent results from our group that nicely tie in with some of the basic properties of the model outlined by Green.
Speech Melody Properties in English, Czech and Czech English: Reference and Interference

Abstract Two major objectives were set for the present study: to provide reference data for the description of Czech and English F0 contours, and to investigate the limits of the ‘interference hypothesis’ on Czech English data. Altogether, the production of 40 speakers in 2392 breath-group F0 contours was analyzed. The speech of 32 professional speakers of English and Czech provides reference values for various acoustic correlates of pitch level, pitch span and downtrend gradient. These values were subsequently used as a benchmark for a confirmation of the interference hypothesis through comparison with a further sample of 8 non-professional speakers of English and Czech-accented English. The native English speakers of both genders produced significantly higher pitch level indicators, wider pitch span and a steeper downtrend gradient than the reference native speakers of Czech. Although the pitch level of the Czech-accented material lies in between the two reference groups, the pitch span of this group is the narrowest, which indicates that factors of foreign-accentedness other than simply interference are in effect.
An accretion disc model for quasar optical variability

Some different correlations between optical-ultraviolet (UV) variability and other quasar properties, such as luminosity, black hole mass and rest-frame wavelength, were discovered. The positive correlation between optical-UV variability amplitude and black hole mass was first found by Wold et al., and this was confirmed by Wilhite et al. We suggest that the accretion disc model can explain these correlations, provided the optical-UV variability is triggered by the change of accretion rate. The disc temperature of accretion discs decreases with increasing black hole mass, which leads to systematical spectral shape difference with black hole mass even if the black hole is accreting at the same rate m (m = M/M(Edd)). The observed positive correlation between optical-UV variability and black hole mass can be well reproduced by our model calculations, if the mean accretion rate m(0) similar to 0.1 with variation of delta m similar to 0.4-0.5m(0). We also found that the observed correlations of optical-UV variability mplitude with luminosity or rest-frame wavelength can be qualitatively explained by this accretion disc model.
Identification of Tympanic Border Cells as Slow-Cycling Cells in the Cochlea

Mammalian cochlear sensory epithelial cells are believed to possess minimal regenerative potential because they halt proliferation during late stage of embryogenesis and never regenerate after birth. This means that sensorineural hearing loss caused by the death of cochlear sensory epithelial cells is a permanent condition. However, stem cells were recently identified in neonatal mice following dissociation of their inner ear organs. This suggests that regenerative therapy for sensorineural hearing loss may be possible. Unfortunately, dissociation distorts the microanatomy of the inner ear, making it difficult to determine the precise location of stem cells in unaltered specimens. To develop new therapeutic approaches based on sensory epithelial cell regeneration, the location of these stem cells must be elucidated. Stem cells normally proliferate at a slow rate in adult organs. In fact, so-called label-retaining cells, or slow-cycling cells, of the brain and skin are recognized as stem cells. In this study, using the exogenous proliferation marker, 5′-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine (BrdU) in combination with the endogenous proliferation marker Ki-67, we identified tympanic border cells. These cells, which are located beneath the basilar membrane in vivo, represent slow-cycling cells of the murine cochlea. Immunohistochemically, these cells stained positive for the immature cell marker Nestin. But it will be difficult to achieve regeneration of the cochlear function because these slow-cycling cells disappear in the mature murine cochlea.
Relación entre motivación, actividad física realizada en el tiempo libre y la intención futura de práctica de actividad física. Estudio comparativo entre adolescentes argentinos y españoles.

The aim of the present work is to study differences in motivational orientation, intrinsic motivation, current physical activity and intention to be physically active between students from Argentina and from Spain, as well as to analyze the influence that the first three of these variables have on the last one. Some validated questionnaires were administered to a sample composed of 1597 physical education students from Argentina and Spain aged 14 to 18. Results suggest slightly differences between subjects from both of the participants’ countries while regression analyses reveal the emergency of intrinsic motivation and current physical activity as the main predictors of the intention to be physically active in both contexts. Results are discussed from the tenets of the main theories which have been considered in the study of motivation within physical activity settings and in the framework of other cross-cultural studies.
Are Scale-Free Networks Functionally Robust ?

This paper reexamines the claim that biological networks are robust due to their scale-free (SF) architecture, by presenting a basic and simple way to assess the role that this architecture plays in determining network robustness. Studying the error tolerance of the yeast protein-protein interaction network [7] to random node removal using the pertaining knockout data we show that it is only very marginally more robust than an equivalent Erdös-Rényi (ER) network, in contradistinction to the prevalent notion in the literature [2]. Albert et al. [2, 1] investigated the robustness of the two basic network models, the ER model [5] that produces a connectivity distribution with an exponential tail, and the SF model [3] with a power law tail. They quantified a network’s tolerance to errors by characterizing the changes in its diameter and largest connected component while some of its nodes are being randomly removed. They found that SF networks display a markedly higher degree of robustness than ER ones, and reasoned that this is because power law distribution implies that the majority of nodes have only a few links, and thus nodes with small connectivity will be selected for removal with much
Transactivity as a Predictor of Future Collaborative Knowledge Integration in Team-Based Learning in Online Courses

To create a satisfying social learning experience, an emerging challenge in educational data mining is to automatically assign students into e ↵ ective learning teams. In this paper, we utilize discourse data mining as the foundation for an online team-formation procedure. The procedure features a deliberation process prior to team assignment, where participants hold discussions both to prepare for the collaboration task and provide indicators that are then used during automated team assignment. We automatically assign teams in a way that maximizes average observed pairwise transactivity exchange within teams, whereas in a control condition, teams are assigned randomly. We validate our team-formation procedure in a crowdsourced online environment that enables e ↵ ective isolation of variables, namely Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We compare group knowledge integration outcomes between the two team assignment conditions. Our re-sults demonstrate that transactivity-based team assignment is associated with signiﬁcantly greater knowledge integration ( p < . 05, e ↵ ect size 3 standard deviations).
On the multicast throughput capacity of network coding in wireless ad-hoc networks

We study the contribution of network coding (NC) in improving the multicast capacity of random wireless ad hoc networks. We consider a network with $n$ nodes distributed uniformly in a unit square, with each node acting as a source for independent information to be sent to a multicast group consisting of <i>m</i> randomly chosen destinations. We consider the physical model, and show that the per-session capacity in the presence of arbitrary NC has a tight bound of θ (1/√<i>mn</i>) when <i>m</i> = <i>O</i> (<i>n</i>/(log(<i>n</i>))<sup>3</sup>), and θ (1/<i>n</i>) when <i>m</i> = Ω(<i>n</i>/log <i>n</i>)). Prior work has shown that these same order bounds are achievable on the basis of pure routing, which utilizes only traditional store and forward methods. Therefore, our results demonstrate that the NC gain for multi-source multicast and broadcast is bounded by a constant factor.
Assessment of Undergraduate Nursing Students' Perception towards Mentally Disabled Child

Objectives: The study aims to assess undergraduate nursing students' perception towards mentally disabled child and to find out the relationships between their perceptions with their socio-demographic characteristics. Methodology: A descriptive analytical study was carried out from January 15, 2014 to July 15th, 2015 to students of Nursing College /University of Baghdad. An accidental random sample of (200) students was involved in the present study from the four academic year in College of Nursing/Baghdad. Self-administrative questionnaire was constructed by the investigator for the present study. The constructed questionnaire consisted of two parts: first one contained the socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age, marital status, income, scholastic stage, having disabled child as family member and as friend; second one contained 19 items which measure perception of the students. Content validity for the instrument was determined through the use of panel experts and the reliability estimated through the internal consistency of the instrument by the computation of Alpha Correlation Data were collected through the use of the constructed questionnaire and the process of the self-administrative report as means for data collection. Data were analyzed through the application of descriptive and inferential statistical approaches by using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 13.0. Results: The result of study indicates that (56.5%) of students were females, (53%) of them between 21-23 years old, (81%) of them were single, (98%) do not have mentally disabled child in their family, (95%) of students have no mentally disabled child as friend, while (85%) of them having low experience with mentally disabled child. Students hold moderate perception towards mentally disabled child. And they have low experience to contact with mentally disabled child. Perception of students influenced by their age, marital status, and experience with mentally disabled child, and does not affected by gender and scholastic stage. Conclusions: The study concluded that undergraduate nursing students hold moderate level of negative perception towards children with mental disability, students' age, marital status, and having disabled child as family member have significant relationship with the level of perception toward disabled child. Recommendations: The study recommended of changing students' perception positively towards mentally disabled child by increasing their knowledge and giving opportunity to contact with that group of patients. Focus on the media and scientific symposia within the college and inclusion vocabulary within mental health nursing syllabus to raise the awareness of the students about the disabled child in all its types.
Restorative justice through victim offender mediation: A multi-site assessment

The relatively new and emerging practice theory of restorative justice emphasizes the need to provide opportunities for those most directly affected by crime (victims, communities, and offenders) to be directly involved in responding to the impact of crime and restoring the losses incurred by victims. Victim-offender mediation, a process which allows crime victims to meet fact-to-face with the offender to talk about the impact of the crime and to develop a restitution plan, is the oldest and most empirically grounded restorative justice intervention. This article reports on a study of victim-offender mediation in four sites with juvenile offenders and their victims, along with related studies. High levels of victim and offender satisfaction with the mediation process have been found, along with high successful restitution completion rates and reduced fear among crime victims.
Black Female Adolescents and Racism in Schools: Experiences in a Colorblind Society

Abstract:This article takes up the questions: (a) How do Black female adolescents define racism? , (b) What kind of experiences with racism to they report having in schools? , and (c) How can these perspectives and experiences inform educational reform efforts? The in-depth analysis of 18 student surveys and interviews revealed that most of the definitions of racism centered on prejudice, discrimination, and differential treatment; and most of the experiences the girls described regarding racism in school illustrated issues of prejudice, discrimination, and differential treatment as well as stereotypes, labels and low teacher expectations. Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Feminism, and Black Feminist Thought were used as interpretive theoretical frameworks. Implications for teacher education, secondary education and broad reform efforts are discussed.
An Investigation of the Origin of Soft X-Ray Excess Emission from Ark 564 and Mrk 1044

We investigate the origin of the soft X-ray excess emission from Ark 564 and Mrk 1044. Based on a long XMM-Newton observation of Ark 564, we find clear evidence for time delays such that the variations in the 4-10 kev band lag behind that in the 0.2-0.5 kev band by 1768 ± 122 s. The full-band power density spectrum (PDS) of Ark 564 has a break at ~1.2 × 1−3 Hz with power-law indices of ~1 and ~3 below and above the break. The hard (3-10 kev) band PDS is stronger and flatter than that in the soft (0.2-0.5) band. Based on a short XMM-Newton observation of Mrk 1044, we find no correlation between the 0.2-0.3 and 5-10 kev bands at zero lag. These observations imply that the soft excess is not the reprocessed hard X-ray emission. The EPIC-pn spectrum of Ark 564 is best described by a complex model consisting of optically thick Comptonization in a cool plasma for the soft excess and a steep power law, modified by two warm absorber media as inferred from the RGS data. The smeared wind and optically thick Comptonization models both describe the spectrum of Mrk 1044 satisfactorily, but the ionized reflection model requires extreme parameters. The data suggest two component coronas—a cool, optically thick corona for the soft excess and a hot corona for the power-law component. The existence of a break in the soft band PDS suggests a compact cool corona that can either be an ionized surface of the inner disk or an inner optically thick region coupled to a truncated disk.
Neurodegenerative Diseases of the Retina and Potential for Protection and Recovery

Recent advances in our understanding of the mechanisms in the cascade of events resulting in retinal cell death in ocular pathologies like glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration led to the common descriptive term of neurodegenerative diseases of the retina. The final common pathophysiologic pathway of these diseases includes a particular form of metabolic stress, resulting in an insufficient supply of nutrients to the respective target structures (optic nerve head, retina). During metabolic stress, glutamate is released initiating the death of neurones containing ionotropic glutamate (N-methyl-D-aspartat, NMDA) receptors present on ganglion cells and a specific type of amacrine cells. Experimental studies demonstrate that several drugs reduce or prevent the death of retinal neurones deficient of nutrients. These agents generally block NMDA receptors to prevent the action of glutamate or halt the subsequent pathophysiologic cycle resulting in cell death. The major causes for cell death following activation of NMDA receptors are the influx of calcium and sodium into cells, the generation of free radicals linked to the formation of advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and/or advanced lipoxidation endproducts (ALEs) as well as defects in the mitochondrial respiratory chain. Substances preventing these cytotoxic events are considered to be potentially neuroprotective.
A Corpus-Based Study on the Rise and Grammaticalisation of Intensifiers in British and American English

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Miriam Taverniers, for reading my drafts and giving constructive advice, which really helped me to write and structure my thesis. I am very grateful for always receiving a quick reply and useful remarks. I would also like to thank dr. Tine Defour for offering me the idea for this thesis. This topic immediately attracted my attention and really kept my interest during the entire writing process. The use of different intensifiers appears to be an omnipresent phenomenon once you make a small effort to pay attention to it and it is therefore truly interesting to examine how quickly they can change. Many thanks are also due to my family and friends for their kindness and moral support during the last couple of months. I would like to express a special word of thanks to
Boundary and interior layers in turbulent thermal convection in cylindrical containers

To simulate turbulent Rayleigh-Benard Convection (RBC) in cylindrical containers a high-order finite volume method based on the Chorin ansatz was developed. Using cylindrical staggered grids with about 107 nodes clustered in vicinity of the boundary, we performed simulations of turbulent RBC in wide cylindrical containers of the aspect ratios 5 and 10 for Rayleigh numbers from 105 to 109. The numerical method including the von Neumann stability and the adaptive mesh generation are discussed together with the simulation results. The boundary and interior layers structures and the turbulent background contribution to heat transport are investigated.