Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AVOIDING PROGENITOR BIAS: THE STRUCTURAL AND MASS EVOLUTION OF BRIGHTEST GROUP AND CLUSTER GALAXIES IN HIERARCHICAL MODELS SINCE z ≲ 1

The mass and structural evolution of massive galaxies is one of the hottest topics in galaxy formation. This is because it may reveal invaluable insights into the still debated evolutionary processes governing the growth and assembly of spheroids. However, direct comparison between models and observations is usually prevented by the so-called progenitor bias, i.e., new galaxies entering the observational selection at later epochs, thus eluding a precise study of how pre-existing galaxies actually evolve in size. To limit this effect, we here gather data on high-redshift brightest group and cluster galaxies, evolve their (mean) host halo masses down to z = 0 along their main progenitors, and assign as their “descendants” local Sloan Digital Sky Survey central galaxies matched in host halo mass. At face value, the comparison between high redshift and local data suggests a noticeable increase in stellar mass of a factor of ≳ 2 since z ∼ 1, and of ≳ 2.5 in mean effective radius. We then compare the inferred stellar mass and size growth with those predicted by hierarchical models for central galaxies, selected at high redshifts to closely match the halo and stellar mass bins as in the data. Only hierarchical models characterized by very limited satellite stellar stripping and parabolic orbits are capable of broadly reproducing the stellar mass and size increase of a factor of ∼2–4 observed in cluster galaxies since z ∼ 1. The predicted, average (major) merger rate since z ∼ 1 is in good agreement with the latest observational estimates.
Caffeic acid protects tissue antioxidants and DNA content in methamphetamine induced tissue toxicity in Sprague Dawley rats

Caffeic acid (CA) (3,4-dihydroxycinnamic acid) is among the major hydroxycinnamic acids. Hydroxycinnamic acid is the major subgroup of phenolic compounds. Methamphetamine (METH) is a potent addictive psychostimulant. Chronic use and acute METH intoxication can cause substantial medical consequences, including spleen, kidney, liver and heart. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the antioxidant activity of CA to protect against oxidative stress and DNA damage to various organs in METH toxicity. Thirty-two male Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were divided into four equal groups: group 1 was injected (i.p) with saline (1 mL/kg) while groups 2,3 and 4 were injected (i.p) with METH (10 mg/kg) twice a day over five days period. Where 100 & 200 mg/kg of CA were injected (i.p) into groups 3 and 4, respectively one day before exposure to METH injections. Tissue antioxidants and DNA content were evaluated in different tissues. METH decreased glutathione (GSH) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) levels while increased malondialdehyde (MDA), catalase (CAT) and protein carbonyl levels in brain (hypothalamus), liver, and kidney tissues of rats. METH increased hyperdiploidy in these tissues and DNA damage results. Prior treatment of CA to animals exposed to METH restores the above parameters to the normal levels and preserves the DNA content of these tissues. These results were supported by histopathological investigations. In conclusion, METH induced oxidative stress and DNA damage and pretreatment of CA before METH injections prevented tissue oxidative stress and DNA damage in METH-treated animals.
Twice Challenged: Differentiating Between English Language Acquisition and Learning Disabilities

An action research study of practices used to nominate English Learners (ELs) for special education services was conducted to examine the disproportionate representation of ELs in special education. The experiences of district administrators and teaching staff were examined to identify existing practices used to nominate and identify ELs for English language services. Findings revealed ELs were referred to special education due in part to linguistic and cultural differences. Teachers developed deficit-oriented frameworks, nominating ELs students for special education at higher rates. Child study teams concentrated on qualifying students for special education. Once identified for special education, ELs received services using a pullout model (involving concentrated language supports outside of the general education class). The pullout model limited the potential to ELs for academic success. An analysis conducted through the theoretical lens of critical pedagogy uncovered organizational frameworks necessary for improving EL achievement, solving academic problems, and adequately considering linguistic and cultural factors when considering referrals to special education. Specifically, frameworks promoting inclusive English language services, collaboration across professional assignments, opportunities for teachers to engage in critical reflection, and increased capacity to provide early intervention within the general education setting. Finally, this study offers a systematic method for addressing ELs presenting with persistent academic problems to account for linguistic and cultural differences without assuming the presence of a disability. The study offers a decision making model to differentiate between the challenges associated with English language acquisition and learning disabilities.
Ultrasound Assessment of Carotid Plaque Echogenicity Response to Statin Therapy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objective: To evaluate in a systematic review and meta-analysis model the effect of statin therapy on carotid plaque echogenicity assessed by ultrasound. Methods: We have systematically searched electronic databases (PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane Center Register) up to April, 2015, for studies evaluating the effect of statins on plaque echogenicity. Two researchers independently determined the eligibility of studies evaluating the effect of statin therapy on carotid plaque echogenicity that used ultrasound and grey scale median (GSM) or integrated back scatter (IBS). Results: Nine out of 580 identified studies including 566 patients’ carotid artery data were meta-analyzed for a mean follow up of 7.2 months. A consistent increase in the echogenicity of carotid artery plaques, after statin therapy, was reported. Pooled weighted mean difference % (WMD) on plaque echogenicity after statin therapy was 29% (95% CI 22%–36%), p < 0.001, I2 = 92.1%. In a meta-regression analysis using % mean changes of LDL, HDL and hsCRP as moderators, it was shown that the effects of statins on plaque echogenicity were related to changes in hsCRP, but not to LDL and HDL changes from the baseline. The effect of statins on the plaque was progressive; it showed significance after the first month of treatment, and the echogenicity continued to increase in the following six and 12 months. Conclusions: Statin therapy is associated with a favorable increase of carotid plaque echogenicity. This effect seems to be dependent on the period of treatment and hsCRP change from the baseline, independent of changes in LDL and HDL.
Goal Setting Support in Alternative Math Classes: Effects on Motivation and Engagement.

Helping low-achieving students with learning disabilities and/or emotional-behavioural diffic ulties to develop the component skills for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), such as sett ing and monitoring learning goals, is important for their success, both in and beyond school. Thi s study examined the effe cts of a goal sett ing intervention on self-effica cy, motivational beliefs, and academic engagement in alternative Grade 10 mathematics classes for learners with special needs. The t eacher modeled and scaffo lded students’ writing of daily learning goals throughout a one-semester mathematics course, with the goal of increasing student engagement and self-effica cy in mathematics. Research questions focused on changes in students’ engagement, learning behaviours, and math-related motivational beliefs during the course, as their goal statements became more focused and descriptive. Although individual variability in responses to motivation and self-effica cy measures typifie d the data from this small sample of learners, the goal-sett ing intervention appeared to help most students to stay engaged in achievement-oriented classroom behaviour. ISSN 1918-5227 Pages 35- 66 Follow this and additional works at: htt p://ir.lib. uwo.ca/eei
Semi-oblivious routing: lower bounds

We initiate the study of semi-oblivious routing, a relaxation of oblivious routing which is first introduced by Räcke and led to many subsequent improvements and applications. In semi-oblivious routing like oblivious routing, the algorithm should select only a polynomial number of paths between the source and the sink of each commodity, but unlike oblivious routing, the flow from each source to its sink is not just a scalar multiple of the single-commodity flow; any amount of flow can be sent along each selected path. Semi-oblivious routing has several applications in traffic engineering and VLSI routing. Trivially, any competitive ratio ρ for oblivious routing (includling the polylogarthimic ratio in undirected graphs obtained by Räcke) also implies competitive ratio ρ for semi-oblivious routing. In this paper, we focus on lower bounds. We rule out the possibility of O(1) competitive ratio for semi-oblivious routing in undirected graphs by providing a lower bound of Ω(log n/log log n) in grids or even series-parallel graphs. More strongly in directed graphs, we rule out the possibility of sub-polynomial competitive ratio when the number of paths between each source and its sink is in O(n1/5). The proof of our lower bound on the grid uses a non-Markovian random walk on the integers with a mixing property which may be of independent interest. Last but not least, our lower bounds on the grid can be significantly strengthened to show that with paths of at most b bends, the competitive ratio is in Ω(n1/2b+1). This answers negatively a long-standing open problem on b-bend routing schemes in grids posed e.g. in [10, 6].
Structure of T 7 RNA polymerase complexed to the transcriptional inhibitor T 7 lysozyme

The T7 RNA polymerase–T7 lysozyme complex regulates phage gene expression during infection of Escherichia coli. The 2.8 Å crystal structure of the complex reveals that lysozyme binds at a site remote from the polymerase active site, suggesting an indirect mechanism of inhibition. Comparison of the T7 RNA polymerase structure with that of the homologous pol I family of DNA polymerases reveals identities in the catalytic site but also differences specific to RNA polymerase function. The structure of T7 RNA polymerase presented here differs significantly from a previously published structure. Sequence similarities between phage RNA polymerases and those from mitochondria and chloroplasts, when interpreted in the context of our revised model of T7 RNA polymerase, suggest a conserved fold.
Genome-Wide Linkage Analysis of the Acute Coronary Syndrome Suggests a Locus on Chromosome 2

A positive family history is a recognized cardiovascular risk factor, and genome-wide scans may reveal susceptibility loci for coronary artery disease. The acute coronary syndrome, consisting of myocardial infarction and unstable angina, is the most important manifestation of coronary disease and is characterized by atherosclerotic plaque disruption and coronary thrombosis. From ≈6000 hospital admissions to cardiology units, we identified affected sibling pairs (n=61) who had documented acute coronary syndrome before the age of 70 years. A 10-cM resolution genetic map and MAPMAKER/SIBS were used for genome-wide linkage analysis. One locus on chromosome 2q36-q37.3 showed linkage with a lod score of 2.63 (P <0.0001). Separate multipoint fine-mapping of this locus with independent markers replicated the linkage results (lod 2.64). Two other regions on chromosomes 3q26-q27 and 20q11-q13 showed lod scores in excess of 1.5 (P <0.005). This genome scan in acute coronary syndrome suggests 1 locus that encompasses the gene encoding the insulin receptor substrate-1 gene. Two other potential loci were identified. These data imply that a limited number of potent susceptibility genes exist for the acute coronary syndrome. Such genes are likely to be relevant to the combined processes of atherosclerosis, plaque instability, and coronary thrombosis.
A Test and Extension of Lane and Terry’s (2000) Conceptual Model of Mood-Performance Relationships Using a Large Internet Sample

The present study tested and extended Lane and Terry (2000) conceptual model of mood-performance relationships using a large dataset from an online experiment. Methodological and theoretical advances included testing a more balanced model of pleasant and unpleasant emotions, and evaluating relationships among emotion regulation traits, states and beliefs, psychological skills use, perceptions of performance, mental preparation, and effort exerted during competition. Participants (N = 73,588) completed measures of trait emotion regulation, emotion regulation beliefs, regulation efficacy, use of psychological skills, and rated their anger, anxiety, dejection, excitement, energy, and happiness before completing a competitive concentration task. Post-competition, participants completed measures of effort exerted, beliefs about the quality of mental preparation, and subjective performance. Results showed that dejection associated with worse performance with the no-dejection group performing 3.2% better. Dejection associated with higher anxiety and anger scores and lower energy, excitement, and happiness scores. The proposed moderating effect of dejection was supported for the anxiety-performance relationship but not the anger-performance relationship. In the no-dejection group, participants who reported moderate or high anxiety outperformed those reporting low anxiety by about 1.6%. Overall, results showed partial support for Lane and Terry’s model. In terms of extending the model, results showed dejection associated with greater use of suppression, less frequent use of re-appraisal and psychological skills, lower emotion regulation beliefs, and lower emotion regulation efficacy. Further, dejection associated with greater effort during performance, beliefs that pre-competition emotions did not assist goal achievement, and low subjective performance. Future research is required to investigate the role of intense emotions in emotion regulation and performance.
Emergency Spatiotemporal Shift: The Response of Protein Kinase D to Stress Signals in the Cardiovascular System

Protein Kinase D isoforms (PKD 1-3) are key mediators of neurohormonal, oxidative, and metabolic stress signals. PKDs impact a wide variety of signaling pathways and cellular functions including actin dynamics, vesicle trafficking, cell motility, survival, contractility, energy substrate utilization, and gene transcription. PKD activity is also increasingly linked to cancer, immune regulation, pain modulation, memory, angiogenesis, and cardiovascular disease. This increasing complexity and diversity of PKD function, highlights the importance of tight spatiotemporal control of the kinase via protein–protein interactions, post-translational modifications or targeting via scaffolding proteins. In this review, we focus on the spatiotemporal regulation and effects of PKD signaling in response to neurohormonal, oxidant and metabolic signals that have implications for myocardial disease. Precise targeting of these mechanisms will be crucial in the design of PKD-based therapeutic strategies.
African American Males Pursuing STEM Degrees: A Phenomenological Case Study

A disturbing epidemic in the United States is there are too few African American males that graduate from high school and go on to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (Harper, 2012). An explanation as to why this is so may reside in their experiences while in high school. By using attribution theory as a theoretical framework, this study allowed its participants to identify those events that led them to pursue STEM degrees as undergraduates. Applying a phenomenological case study as a methodology uncovered the essence of the phenomenon of four African American males’ lived experiences in secondary mathematics who went on to pursue STEM degrees as undergraduates: self-confidence. Other important factors that where identified but were not the essence include happiness, financial aid, college preparatory activities, the role of influential teachers, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics themed secondary schools and religion. INDEX WORDS: STEM, African American, males AFRICAN AMERICAN MALES PURSUING STEM DEGREES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL CASE STUDY
Comparison of sEMG-Based Feature Extraction and Motion Classification Methods for Upper-Limb Movement

The surface electromyography (sEMG) technique is proposed for muscle activation detection and intuitive control of prostheses or robot arms. Motion recognition is widely used to map sEMG signals to the target motions. One of the main factors preventing the implementation of this kind of method for real-time applications is the unsatisfactory motion recognition rate and time consumption. The purpose of this paper is to compare eight combinations of four feature extraction methods (Root Mean Square (RMS), Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA), Weight Peaks (WP), and Muscular Model (MM)) and two classifiers (Neural Networks (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM)), for the task of mapping sEMG signals to eight upper-limb motions, to find out the relation between these methods and propose a proper combination to solve this issue. Seven subjects participated in the experiment and six muscles of the upper-limb were selected to record sEMG signals. The experimental results showed that NN classifier obtained the highest recognition accuracy rate (88.7%) during the training process while SVM performed better in real-time experiments (85.9%). For time consumption, SVM took less time than NN during the training process but needed more time for real-time computation. Among the four feature extraction methods, WP had the highest recognition rate for the training process (97.7%) while MM performed the best during real-time tests (94.3%). The combination of MM and NN is recommended for strict real-time applications while a combination of MM and SVM will be more suitable when time consumption is not a key requirement.
Discriminative Reranking for Spelling Correction

This paper proposes a novel approach to spelling correction. It reranks the output of an existing spelling corrector, Aspell. A discriminative model (Ranking SVM) is employed to improve upon the initial ranking, using additional features as evidence. These features are derived from stateof-the-art techniques in spelling correction, including edit distance, letter-based n-gram, phonetic similarity and noisy channel model. This paper also presents a new method to automatically extract training samples from the query log chain. The system outperforms the baseline Aspell greatly, as well as previous models and several off-the-shelf spelling correction systems (e.g. Microsoft Word 2003). The results on query chain pairs are comparable to that based on manually-annotated pairs, with 32.2%/32.6% reduction in error rate, respectively.
Current progress in proteomic study of hepatitis C virus-related human hepatocellular carcinoma

Chronic infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) is known to be a risk factor for not only cirrhosis and steatosis but also hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). A number of diagnostic and prognostic molecular markers are being identified by transcriptomic and proteomic analysis of HCC today. However, the analyses are performed on HCC in general, and the studied tissues are HCV infected, HBV infected, infected with both or neither, or the infection status may be unknown. The authors performed proteomic analysis of cancerous and noncancerous tissues from HCC patients with HCV infection, and determined that, in the cancerous tissues, HSP70 family proteins such as GRP78, HSC70, GRP75 and HSP70.1, glutaine synthetase isoforms, HSP60, α-enolase, phosphoglycerate mutase 1, ATP synthetase β chain and triosephosphate isomerase were increased whereas albumin, ferritin light chain, smoothelin, tropomyosin β chain, arginase 1, aldolase B and kietohexokinase were decreased. The aim of this study is to understand the pathogenesis of HCV-HCC using proteomic analysis of samples from HCV-HCC patients on which transcriptomics has already been performed.
Flux Balance Analysis of Mycolic Acid Pathway: Targets for Anti-Tubercular Drugs

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the focus of several investigations for design of newer drugs, as tuberculosis remains a major epidemic despite the availability of several drugs and a vaccine. Mycobacteria owe many of their unique qualities to mycolic acids, which are known to be important for their growth, survival, and pathogenicity. Mycolic acid biosynthesis has therefore been the focus of a number of biochemical and genetic studies. It also turns out to be the pathway inhibited by front-line anti-tubercular drugs such as isoniazid and ethionamide. Recent years have seen the emergence of systems-based methodologies that can be used to study microbial metabolism. Here, we seek to apply insights from flux balance analyses of the mycolic acid pathway (MAP) for the identification of anti-tubercular drug targets. We present a comprehensive model of mycolic acid synthesis in the pathogen M. tuberculosis involving 197 metabolites participating in 219 reactions catalysed by 28 proteins. Flux balance analysis (FBA) has been performed on the MAP model, which has provided insights into the metabolic capabilities of the pathway. In silico systematic gene deletions and inhibition of InhA by isoniazid, studied here, provide clues about proteins essential for the pathway and hence lead to a rational identification of possible drug targets. Feasibility studies using sequence analysis of the M. tuberculosis H37Rv and human proteomes indicate that, apart from the known InhA, potential targets for anti-tubercular drug design are AccD3, Fas, FabH, Pks13, DesA1/2, and DesA3. Proteins identified as essential by FBA correlate well with those previously identified experimentally through transposon site hybridisation mutagenesis. This study demonstrates the application of FBA for rational identification of potential anti-tubercular drug targets, which can indeed be a general strategy in drug design. The targets, chosen based on the critical points in the pathway, form a ready shortlist for experimental testing.
A Smart Camera Mote Architecture for Distributed Intelligent Surveillance

Surveillance is one of the promising applications to which smart camera motes forming a vision-enabled network can add increasing levels of intelligence. We see a high degree of in-node processing in combination with distributed reasoning algorithms as the key enablers for such intelligent surveillance systems. To put these systems into practice still requires a considerable amount of research ranging from mote architectures, pixel-processing algorithms, up to distributed reasoning engines. This paper introduces an energy-efficient smart camera mote architecture that has been designed with intelligent surveillance as the target application in mind. Special attention is given to its unique vision system: a low-resolution stereo-vision system continuously determines position, range, and size of moving objects entering its field of view. This information triggers a color camera module to acquire a high-resolution image sub-array containing the object, which can be efficiently processed. The paper also presents a basic power model that estimates lifetime of our smart camera mote in batterypowered operation for intelligent surveillance event processing.