Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perceived injunctive norms and cannabis-related problems: The interactive influence of parental injunctive norms and race

ABSTRACT Cannabis use among college students is associated with negative consequences, including those that can negatively affect academic functioning. Perceived descriptive and injunctive norms are among the strongest predictors of college cannabis use and related problems, and perceived norms differentially relate to cannabis outcomes depending on the reference group (e.g., close friends, family members). However, no known studies have examined the effect of race on these relationships. Yet, given that African American students are more strongly affected by parental influence than Caucasian students and that they endorse more social motives for cannabis use, African American students may be affected by perceived norms regarding parents and friends differentially from Caucasian students. The current study tested the moderational role of race on the relationship between perceived norms and cannabis use and related problems. Cannabis-using undergraduates (N = 103; 78.6% female) completed an online survey. Race moderated the relationship between injunctive norms regarding parents and cannabis-related problem severity such that among African American students (but not Caucasian students), endorsement of more permissive perceived parental injunctive norms was related to greater cannabis-related problem severity (but not cannabis use frequency). Interactions were not significant between race and descriptive norms or between race and peer injunctive norms. African American students who perceive that their parents are more accepting of cannabis use may be especially at risk for cannabis-related problems. Results underscore the importance of considering cultural factors in identification of vulnerability factors related to cannabis problems.
Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences Discussion Paper Series a Structural Analysis of Disappointment Aversion in a Real Effort Competition a Structural Analysis of Disappointment Aversion in a Real Effort Competition

We develop a novel computerized real effort task, based on moving sliders across a screen, to test experimentally whether agents are disappointment averse when they compete in a real effort sequential-move tournament. We predict that a disappointment averse agent, who is loss averse around her endogenous choice-acclimating expectations-based reference point, responds negatively to her rival's effort. We find significant evidence for this discouragement effect, and use the Method of Simulated Moments to estimate the strength of disappointment aversion on average and the heterogeneity in disappointment aversion across the population.
Mechanism of the stabilization of ribonuclease a by sorbitol: Preferential hydration is greater for the denatured than for the native protein

The effect of interactions of sorbitol with ribonuclease A (RNase A) and the resulting stabilization of structure was examined in parallel thermal unfolding and preferential binding studies with the application of multicomponent thermodynamic theory. The protein was stabilized by sorbitol both at pH 2.0 and pH 5.5 as the transition temperature, Tm, was increased. The enthalpy of the thermal denaturation had a small dependence on sorbitol concentration, which was reflected in the values of the standard free energy change of denaturation, δΔG° = ΔG°(sorbitol) ‐ ΔG°(water). Measurements of preferential interactions at 48 °C at pH 5.5, where protein is native, and pH 2.0, where it is denatured, showed that sorbitol is preferentially excluded from the denatured protein up to 40%, but becomes preferentially bound to native protein above 20% sorbitol. The chemical potential change on transferring the denatured RNase A from water to sorbitol solution is larger than that for the native protein, ΔμN 2 > Δμ N 2, which is consistent with the effect of sorbitol on the free energy change of denaturation. The conformity of these results to the thermodynamic expression of the effect of a co‐solvent on denaturation, ΔG° w + Δμ D 2 = ΔG° S + Δμ D 2 indicates that the stabilization of the protein by sorbitol can be fully accounted for by weak thermodynamic interactions at the protein surface that involve water co‐solvent exchange at thermodynamically non‐neutral sites. The protein structure stabilizing action of sorbitol is driven by stronger exclusion from the unfolded protein than from the native structure.
Brane-World Gravity

The observable universe could be a 1+3-surface (the “brane”) embedded in a 1+3+d-dimensional spacetime (the “bulk”), with Standard Model particles and fields trapped on the brane while gravity is free to access the bulk. At least one of the d extra spatial dimensions could be very large relative to the Planck scale, which lowers the fundamental gravity scale, possibly even down to the electroweak (∼ TeV) level. This revolutionary picture arises in the framework of recent developments in M theory. The 1+10-dimensional M theory encompasses the known 1+9-dimensional superstring theories, and is widely considered to be a promising potential route to quantum gravity. At low energies, gravity is localized at the brane and general relativity is recovered, but at high energies gravity “leaks” into the bulk, behaving in a truly higher-dimensional way. This introduces significant changes to gravitational dynamics and perturbations, with interesting and potentially testable implications for high-energy astrophysics, black holes, and cosmology. Brane-world models offer a phenomenological way to test some of the novel predictions and corrections to general relativity that are implied by M theory. This review analyzes the geometry, dynamics and perturbations of simple brane-world models for cosmology and astrophysics, mainly focusing on warped 5-dimensional brane-worlds based on the Randall-Sundrum models. We also cover the simplest brane-world models in which 4-dimensional gravity on the brane is modified at low energies — the 5-dimensional Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati models. Then we discuss co-dimension two branes in 6-dimensional models.
Protective effects of cysteine, methionine and vitamin C on the stomach in chronically alcohol treated rats

A chronic intake of high dose alcohol may cause oxidative stress and inflammation in the stomach. It is hypothesized that cysteine‐methionine and vitamin C may neutralize harmful compounds while potentiating the antioxidant capacity of the cell or tissue. The experimental animals were fed regular diets and were maintained for 90 days in the control group, the alcoholic group, which was given 2.5 g of 50% ethanol kg−1 body wt. administered intragastrically every other day, or the alcoholic with antioxidant supplement group, to whom 2.5 g of 50% ethanol kg−1 body wt. + a solution that contained 200 mg vitamin C, 100 mg cysteine and 100 mg methionine was administered intragastrically every other day. After the treatments, the stomach was taken for pathological and biochemical analysis. The stomach of the alcoholic group rats had higher scores of pathological findings compared with the control group, whereas the scores of the antioxidant‐supplemented group were lower than the alcoholic group. In addition, the oxidized protein and lipid content in the stomachs of the alcoholic group were significantly higher than the control, but antioxidant supplementation lowered the amount of oxidation in the antioxidant supplemented group. The amount of stomach glutathione in the alcoholic group was higher than that of the control and antioxidant‐supplemented groups. Interestingly, the level of total thiol in the stomach tissue of rats with antioxidant supplement was statistically higher than that of the control and alcoholic groups. In conclusion, the scores of the pathological findings in the stomach of rats with the antioxidant supplement were lower than the chronic alcohol‐treated rats, albeit the amount of total thiol was increased in this group. Moreover, chronic alcohol treatment led to an increase in the level of lipid and protein oxidation in the stomach tissue of rats. A simultaneous intake of ascorbate/l‐cys/l‐met along with ethanol attenuated the amount of oxidation which suggested that cysteine‐methionine and vitamin C could play a protective role in the stomach against oxidative damage resulting from chronic alcohol ingestion. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
What's the Evidence on Evidence-Based Management?

Executive Overview In this article, we respond to recent calls for increased use of evidence-based management (EBMgt) by conducting a systematic review of the literature to answer the following questions: (1) Is there a substantial literature concerning the concept of evidence-based management? (2) What is the quality of evidence (where it exists) regarding evidence-based management? and (3) Is there evidence that employing evidence-based management will improve organizational performance? We applied an assessment rubric based on ranking systems developed in evidence-based medicine to evaluate the strength of evidence. We found that a large number of articles are published on the topic, but most provide encouragement to adopt EBMgt based on opinion and anecdotal information. We call for increased research to generate stronger evidence related to the impact of EBMgt on organizational performance.
A structural determinant required for RNA editing

RNA editing by adenosine deaminases acting on RNAs (ADARs) can be both specific and non-specific, depending on the substrate. Specific editing of particular adenosines may depend on the overall sequence and structural context. However, the detailed mechanisms underlying these preferences are not fully understood. Here, we show that duplex structures mimicking an editing site in the Gabra3 pre-mRNA unexpectedly fail to support RNA editing at the Gabra3 I/M site, although phylogenetic analysis suggest an evolutionarily conserved duplex structure essential for efficient RNA editing. These unusual results led us to revisit the structural requirement for this editing by mutagenesis analysis. In vivo nuclear injection experiments of mutated editing substrates demonstrate that a non-conserved structure is a determinant for editing. This structure contains bulges either on the same or the strand opposing the edited adenosine. The position of these bulges and the distance to the edited base regulate editing. Moreover, elevated folding temperature can lead to a switch in RNA editing suggesting an RNA structural change. Our results indicate the importance of RNA tertiary structure in determining RNA editing.
Toward Refining the Stress-Buffering Model: Comparing Social Support and Friendship Satisfaction

Author(s): Smith, Anna Marie | Advisor(s): Greenberger, Ellen | Abstract: Social relations may provide young adults with both direct health benefits and indirect benefits by mitigating stress. Research on social relations generally has focused on the benefits of social support, and little is known about whether having satisfying friendships, independent of receiving social support, may confer benefits to mood and health. In this study, survey data from 1,851 undergraduates was analyzed to determine whether social support and friendship satisfaction have a direct or moderated relationship with mental (e.g., anxiety and depressive symptoms) and physical health (e.g., number and frequency of physical symptoms). Results suggested that both friendship satisfaction and social support made independent contributions to mental and physical health, but friendship satisfaction was more consistently and strongly associated with the outcome measures than was social support. Although stress--both overall and academic- specific--was associated with poorer mental and physical health, individuals with high levels of social support or friendship satisfaction were protected from some of the associations between stress and mental health. Results highlight the importance of both social support and friendship satisfaction in the lives of college students and suggest that friendship satisfaction may be an important pathway through which social ties influence psychological well-being and health.
Increased Ectonucleotidase Expression and Activity in Regulatory T Cells of Patients with Head and Neck Cancer

Purpose: Regulatory T cell (Treg) frequency and activity are increased in cancer patients and play a major role in tumor escape. Although disease progression is favored by the presence of Treg, mechanisms used by Treg to suppress antitumor immunity are unknown. The ectonucleotidases CD39 and CD73 are expressed in Treg and convert ATP into immunosuppressive adenosine. In this study, the involvement of the adenosinergic pathway in Treg-mediated suppression in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients was evaluated. Experimental Design: HNSCC patients with an active disease (n = 19) and patients with no evident disease after therapy (n = 14) were studied. Ectonucleotidase expression on CD4+ T cells and CD4+CD25high Treg was evaluated by flow cytometry and compared with normal controls. Ectonucleotidase activity was also compared within these three groups. The data were analyzed for associations of ectonucleotidase expression/function with disease stage. Results: The percentages and expression levels of CD39 and CD73 in CD4+ T cells and Treg were greater in HNSCC than in normal controls and highest in patients with no evident disease. Patients' Treg hydrolyzed ATP at higher rates and produced higher levels of adenosine than normal controls' Treg. The increased frequency and enzymatic activity of CD4+CD39+ cells corresponded to increased adenosine-mediated suppression of effector T cells, which was partly inhibited by ARL67156, an ectonucleotidase inhibitor, and by ZM241385, a selective A2a/A2b receptor antagonist. Conclusions: CD39+ Treg frequency and adenosine-mediated suppression are significantly increased in HNSCC patients. The adenosinergic pathway is involved in Treg-mediated immunosuppression in cancer and its attenuation could be a promising immunotherapeutic strategy for patients with HNSCC. (Clin Cancer Res 2009;15(20):6348–57)
Did Trade Openness Affect Income Distribution in Latin America? Evidence for the Years 1980?2010

This paper offers a medium-term perspective for analysing the trade openness–inequality relationship in Latin America. We present three contributions. The first is that we assemble a database on income distribution indicators systematically estimated from household surveys with emphasis on within-country consistency of methodology, definitions, and coverage for the years 1980-2010. This 30-year database allows observing clearly that the increases in inequality throughout the 1980s and 1990s decades have been almost totally counteracted by the improvements during the first 10 years of the twenty-first century: 75 per cent of the deterioration in income distribution was reversed in the first decade of 2000. The second is an estimation of the association between trade openness and income distribution over the 30-year period. Our central conclusion in this regard is that greater trade openness is associated with contemporaneous increases in inequality in the region. The third is that trade openness contributed––together with other factors––to the increase in inequality during the 1980s and 1990s, but once fully implemented, it did not lead to further rises in inequality, and did not represent a permanent obstacle to improvements in income distribution triggered by other factors such as greater education levels across the population.
Hand differences in the rate and variability of rapid tapping.

Hand differences in the rate and variability of rapid tapping were evaluated for the intertap interval and its constituents-the key depression and key release phases of each tap. To accentuate potential hand differences, only subjects with a clear manual superiority in one hand were included. Relative manual proficiency on Fitts' reciprocal tapping task was used to exclude individuals with less-defined hand superiority or dominance, and to categorize subjects as having a dominant left (n=13) or right (n=11) hand. Analysis of variance indicated the dominant hand to have a shorter average intertap interval and thus a faster tapping rate. This hand difference in rate was found to be significant for the key-depression phase, but not the key-release.phase, of the tap. In each handedness group the dominant hand exhibited less variability in the intertap interval and both constituents. Potential associations of these findings with hemispheric asymmetries in sequential ability are discussed.
Standard of Care and Promising New Agents for Triple Negative Metastatic Breast Cancer

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a cluster of heterogeneous diseases, all of them sharing the lack of expression of estrogen and progesterone receptors and HER2 protein. They are characterized by different biological, molecular and clinical features, including a poor prognosis despite the increased sensitivity to the current cytotoxic therapies. Several studies have identified important molecular features which enable further subdivision of this type of tumor. We are drawing from genomics, transcription and translation analysis at different levels, to improve our knowledge of the molecular alterations along the pathways which are activated during carcinogenesis and tumor progression. How this information should be used for the rational selection of therapy is an ongoing challenge and the subject of numerous research studies in progress. Currently, the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP), HSP90 and Aurora inhibitors are most used as targeting agents in metastatic setting clinical trials. In this paper we will review the current knowledge about the genetic subtypes of TNBC and their different responses to conventional therapeutic strategies, as well as to some new promising molecular target agents, aimed to achieve more tailored therapies.
Gregex: GPU Based High Speed Regular Expression Matching Engine

Regular expression matching engine is a crucial infrastructure which is widely used in network security systems, like IDS. We propose Gregex, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based regular expression matching engine for deep packet inspection (DPI). Gregex leverages the computational power and high memory bandwidth of GPUs by storing data in proper GPU memory space and executing massive GPU thread concurrently to process lots of packets in parallel. Three optimization techniques, ATP, CAB, and CAT are proposed to significantly improve the performance of Gregex. On a GTX260 GPU, Gregex achieves a regular matching throughput of 126.8 Gbps, which is a speedup of 210% over traditional CPU-based implementation and a speedup of 7.9% over the state-of-the-art GPU based regular expression engine.
Minimum-Perimeter Enclosing k-gon

Introduction Let P = p1, . , pn be a simple polygon (all polygons are assumed convex throughout this paper). A fundamental problem in geometric optimization is to compute a minimum-area or a minimum-perimeter convex k-gon (denoted QA or Qp, resp.) that encloses P . While efficient algorithms for finding QA are known for more than 20 years [8, 1, 2], the problem of finding Qp has remained open; the problem is posed as open in [3, 6, 7, 9, 12, 14, 5]. 1 Chang and Yap [8] give a comprehensive classification of the incluson/enclosure problems, but do not mention the minimum-perimeter enclosing kgon problem (Enc(Pall, Pk, perimeter), in their terminology) at all. We give the first polynomial-time algorithms for computing Qp. In order to obtain our solution, we prove a structural result about an optimal polygon: Local optimality implies that it is “flush” with P (Lemma 1). As a by-product we obtain an algorithm for finding the minimum-perimeter “envelope” — a convex k-gon with a specified sequence of interior angles. Our proofs are very simple and are based on elementary geometry.2 The exact coordinates of the vertices of Qp are given by the roots of high-degree polynomials. In general, it is impossible to find the coordinates exactly in polynomial time [4]. Thus, given ε > 0 as a part of the input to the problem, we will be satisfied with a (1 + ε)-approximate solution. Finding Qp Our algorithm is based on the following lemma, whose (simple) proof we defer until the next paragraph: Lemma 1. Qp is flush with P , i.e., one of the edges of Qp contains an edge of P . By Lemma 1, we may consider each edge of P as a candidate flush edge with Qp and turn the scene into simple polygon P (Fig. 1). This reduces finding Qp to solving n instances of the problem of finding a shortest (k + 1)-link path in simple polygon P , a problem which can be solved in polynomial time [12]. Thus we have our main result: Theorem 2. Qp can be found in polynomial time.
Ju l 2 00 5 On The Mass-to-Light Ratio of Large Scale Structure

We examine the dependence of the mass-to-light (M/L) ratio of large-scale structure on cosmological parameters, in models that are constrained to match observations of the projected galaxy correlation function wp(rp) and the galaxy luminosity function. For a sequence of cosmological models with a fixed, observationally motivated power spectrum shape and increasing normalization σ8, we find parameters of the galaxy halo occupation distribution (HOD) that reproduce wp(rp) measurements as a function of luminosity from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). From these HOD models we calculate the r-band conditional luminosity function Φ(L|Mh), and from this the mean M/L ratio as a function of halo mass Mh. We also use Φ(L|Mh) to populate halos of N-body simulations with galaxies and thereby compute M/L in a range of large-scale environments, including cluster infall regions. For all cosmological models, the M/L ratio in high mass halos or high density regions is approximately independent of halo mass or smoothing scale. However, the “plateau” value of M/L depends on σ8 in addition to the obvious proportionality with the matter density parameter Ωm, and it represents the universal value 〈M/L〉= Ωmρcrit/ρlum only for models in which the galaxy correlation function is approximately unbiased, i.e., with σ8 ≈ σ8g. Our results for cluster mass halos follow the trend (M/L)cl = 577 (Ωm/0.3) (σ8/0.9) 1.7 h M⊙/L⊙. Combined with Carlberg et al.’s (1996) mean M/L ratio for CNOC galaxy clusters, this relation implies (σ8/0.9) (Ωm/0.3) 0.6 = 0.75 ± 0.06. M/L estimates for SDSS clusters and the virial regions of clusters in the CAIRNS survey imply a similar value of σ8Ω 0.6 m , while the CAIRNS estimates for cluster infall regions imply a lower value. These results are inconsistent with parameter values Ωm ≈ 0.3, σ8 ≈ 0.9 favored by recent joint analyses of cosmic microwave background measurements and other large scale structure data, though they agree with values inferred from van den Bosch et al.’s (2003) analysis of the Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 140 W. 18th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210 Institute for Advanced Study, School of Natural Sciences, Einstein Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540 Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, 933 N. Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721 Hubble Fellow