Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MEMBUKA RUANG PARTISIPASI PEREMPUAN DALAM PEMBANGUNAN

It is a crucial matter for unchaining female participation scope in development when female themselves are always marginalized not only in the process but also the share of portion in development as well. This will give positive impact in order to amplify the quality of development application, especially which relates to female empowerment and gender. Hence, it may have high replication, not only in the impact of qualified family development but also in heaving female roles while taking decision. The next implication is to be able to encourage national development products in order to be well shared among males and females.
Statistical analysis of a signal separation method based on second order statistics

This paper explores an existing method for signal separation, which is based on second order statistics. Here, statistical analysis of a generalized version of the original algorithm is given. The generalized method includes a weighting matrix, and a result of the statistical analysis is that the best possible weighting is found. The problem of initialization of the involved non-linear optimization is also discussed.
CEO compensation as tournament and social comparison: A tale of two theories.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful criticisms and comments of Glenn Carroll, Ron Ehrenberg, Edward Lazear, David Levine, George Milkovich, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Frances Van Loo on an earlier version of this manuscript. We also acknowledge the help of Jim Wade in data collection and analysis and the Institute of Industrial Relations for research support. Obviously, all errors in the paper remain those of the authors. This study examined economic and psychological factors that may influence the setting of CEO compensation levels and tested both a tournament model and a social comparison model. Using data from 105 Fortune 500 firms, conventional economic determinants such as size and profitability were found to be only weakly related to CEO compensation. A test of a tournament model examined the difference in compensation between the top executive and those in the next hierarchical level. Controlling for other potential economic determinants, no support was found for this theory. Consistent with social comparison theory, however, strong associations were found between CEO compensation and the compensation level of outside members of the board of directors, especially those who serve on the compensation committee. "
Coccidiosis Immunization: Effects of Mushroom and Herb Polysaccharides on Immune Responses of Chickens Infected with Eimeria tenella

Abstract An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of polysaccharide extracts (E) of two mushrooms, Lentinus edodes (LenE) and Tremella fuciformis (TreE), and an herb, Astragalus membranaceus (AstE), on the immune responses of chickens infected with Eimeria tenella. A total of 180 broiler chickens were assigned to nine groups: three groups were fed with each of the extracts (LenE, TreE, and AstE), three groups were fed with the extracts and immunized with live oocyst vaccine (LenE+V, TreE+V, and AstE+V), a group was immunized with the vaccine only, and there were two controls (E. tenella–infected and noninfected groups). The oocyst vaccine was given at 4 days of age, and the extracts (1 g/kg of the diet) were supplemented from 8 to 14 days of age. At 18 days of age, all birds except those in the noninfected group were infected with 9 × 104 sporulated oocysts. The results showed that at 7 days postinfection (p.i.), birds fed the extracts without vaccination had lower body weight (BW) gain than those given the vaccine only. However, the extracts in conjunction with the vaccine significantly enhanced BW gain of the infected chickens compared with the vaccine group. Of the three extracts, LenE and TreE showed a better growth-promoting effect. The extracts largely increased oocyst excretion of droppings during the primary response postvaccination. The cecal peak oocyst output and lesion scores measured at 7 days p.i. were higher in the groups fed the extracts than in the group immunized with the vaccine only, whereas those of the groups fed with the extracts and immunized with the vaccine were not significantly different from the vaccine group. Of the three extracts, both LenE- and AstE-fed groups showed lower cecal oocyst output. Thus, as compared with the extracts, the live, attenuated vaccine showed better results with significantly increased immune response in coccidial infected birds. The polysaccharide extracts may prove useful against avian coccidiosis, and, particularly when they are used in conjunction with vaccine, they have shown preliminary promise against the experimental coccidial infection.
Ethanol Excitation of Dopaminergic Ventral Tegmental Area Neurons Is Blocked by Quinidine

The dopaminergic (DA) neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) are important for the reinforcing effects of ethanol. We have shown that ethanol directly excites DA VTA neurons and reduces the afterhyperpolarization (AHP) that follows spontaneous action potentials in these neurons. These data suggested that ethanol may be increasing the firing rate of DA VTA neurons by modulating currents that contribute to the AHP, either by reducing a K+ current or by increasing the inward current Ih. In the present study, different blockers of K+ channels and Ih were tested to determine whether any could prevent the ethanol excitation of DA VTA neurons. Extracellular single-unit recordings and whole-cell patch-clamp recordings were made from DA VTA neurons in brain slices from Fischer-344 rats and ethanol (40–120 mM) and channel blockers were applied in the bath. Ethanol excitation was not reduced by blockade of Ih with cesium (5 mM) or ZD7288 (30 μM), or by block of G-protein-coupled inwardly rectifying K+ channels with barium (500 μM). Tetraethylammonium (TEA) ion (2–10 mM), which blocks the large conductance calcium-dependent potassium K+ current and some types of delayed rectifier currents, had no effect on the ethanol-induced excitation. Interestingly, ethanol excitation of DA VTA neurons was blocked by quinidine (20–80 μM), a drug that blocks many types of delayed rectifier K+ channels, including some insensitive to TEA. This effect of quinidine was concentration-dependent and reversible. These results suggest that ethanol excites DA VTA neurons by reducing a quinidine-sensitive K+ current.
Urotensin II and Cardiomyopathy in End-Stage Renal Disease

Circulating urotensin (UTN) is increased in patients with heart failure and in patients with renal diseases, and UTN antagonism is currently considered as a potential treatment for these conditions. Contrary to this contention, studies in end-stage renal disease suggest that, perhaps because of interference with sympathetic and NO systems, UTN may be cardioprotective. Therefore, we investigated the relationship between circulating UTN and echocardiographic parameters of left ventricular function (midwall fractional shortening), left atrial volume, and myocardial geometry (mean wall thickness and relative wall thickness) in 191 patients with end-stage renal disease. UTN was associated directly (r=0.39; P<0.001) with left ventricular systolic function and inversely with left atrial volume (r=−0.40; P<0.001) and the muscular component of the left ventricular (UTN versus mean wall thickness: r=−0.30, P<0.001; UTN versus relative wall thickness: r=−0.32, P<0.001). Adjustment for a series of 11 risk factors produced a relatively small change in the strength of these relationships. However, further adjustment for plasma norepinephrine or, particularly so, for the endogenous inhibitor of NO synthase asymmetrical dimethyl arginine produced a 33% to 50% decrease in the strength of such associations. Of note, there was a strong UTN-asymmetrical dimethyl arginine interaction in determining midwall fractional shortening (P=0.001) and mean wall thickness (P=0.006). These data support the hypothesis that high UTN is cardioprotective in end-stage renal disease and that interference by UTN with sympathetic activity and NO synthesis represents an intermediate mechanism mediating the favorable echocardiographic profile of patients with high UTN. Additional mechanistic insights may be needed before launching long-term clinical trials with UTN antagonists in patients with end-stage renal disease.
Futhark: purely functional GPU-programming with nested parallelism and in-place array updates

Futhark is a purely functional data-parallel array language that offers a machine-neutral programming model and an optimising compiler that generates OpenCL code for GPUs. This paper presents the design and implementation of three key features of Futhark that seek a suitable middle ground with imperative approaches. First, in order to express efficient code inside the parallel constructs, we introduce a simple type system for in-place updates that ensures referential transparency and supports equational reasoning. Second, we furnish Futhark with parallel operators capable of expressing efficient strength-reduced code, along with their fusion rules. Third, we present a flattening transformation aimed at enhancing the degree of parallelism that (i) builds on loop interchange and distribution but uses higher-order reasoning rather than array-dependence analysis, and (ii) still allows further locality-of-reference optimisations. Finally, an evaluation on 16 benchmarks demonstrates the impact of the language and compiler features and shows application-level performance competitive with hand-written GPU code.
Can A High Sense of Control and John Henryism be Bad for Mental Health?

Social stratification profoundly affects mental health. Specifically, substantial empirical evidence finds that higher status promotes mental health via a higher sense of control and a propensity to cope actively with problems. An unresolved issue, though, is whether the effects of sense of control and active coping on mental health are uniformly beneficial across levels of socioeconomic status. Perceived control and John Henryism, an active coping style, may undermine mental health, especially for lower-status persons, who lack resources. Using data from the National Comorbidity Survey for African Americans, Hispanics, and whites, we find that both sense of control and John Henryism tend to be monotonically related to positive mental health regardless of socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity.
Task as a Context of Information Seeking: An Investigation of Daily Life Tasks on the Web

This study examines how tasks influence information seeking behavior in the World Wide Web. There are three primary reasons for considering this issue: to understand the nature of people's information seeking tasks, to investigate the ways in which they attempt to execute tasks in their user-system interactions, and to facilitate the development and design of a system that serves people's task goals and supports their task-related information seeking behavior. Thirty students with backgrounds in library and information science participated in this study in a laboratory setting. Three different types of tasks were assigned. Significant differences were found in searching behavior on the Web among task types. Furthermore, the relationship of searching behavior with task difficulty, prior knowledge, and searchers' demographic characteristics varied by task types. The results suggest that information systems should be structured in ways that support users' tasks. Future study should focus on such issues and then propose how information systems and services can be tailored to the task in context.
An analysis of the causes of increased error rates in children²s speech recognition

Previous studies have shown that children’s speech is more difficult to recognize by machine than adults’ speech. This paper presents the results of experiments which investigate recognition performance variation within a small population of children. Results suggest that recogniser performance on a child’s speech is well correlated with a teacher’s assessment of the child’s speaking proficiency. For children whose speech is judged to be good, performance is close to that of adults, but error rates increase by a factor of 4 for children with ‘poor’ speech. An analysis of actual pronunciations for children with poor speech shows significant divergence from the ‘idealised’ baseforms in a pronunciation dictionary. It is demonstrated that some improvements can be gained through the use of customized dictionaries. Finally, the effects of bandwidth reduction on recogniser performance are investigated for a range of children with differing speaking styles.
High throughput screening of small molecule libraries for modifiers of radiation responses

Purpose: An unbiased approach of drug discovery through high-throughput screening (HTS) of libraries of chemically defined and bioactive small molecule compounds was used to identify modulators of radiation injury with an emphasis on radioprotectors and mitigators rather than radiosensitisers. Assay system endpoints included radiation-induced genotoxicity and DNA damage in yeast and apoptosis in murine lymphocytes. Large-scale data mining of chemically diverse libraries identified agents that were effective with all endpoints. HTS of bioactive compound libraries against murine lymphocytes profiled tetracycline and fluoroquinolone antibiotics and cyclopiazonic acid as having activity, and structure-activity analysis showed a common pharmacophore. Purine nucleosides, the interferon inducer tilorone, and linoleic acid were also identified as potential mitigators of radiation damage that often were also radioprotective. Many of these compounds enhance DNA repair, have anti-inflammatory activity, and stimulate hematopoiesis. Selected compounds within these initial verified hits from both types of libraries identified potent mitigators of lethal whole body irradiation (WBI) in mice. Conclusion: In spite of the fact that in vitro HTS has limitations and is unable to fully recapitulate all aspects of the complex in vivo acute radiation response, it identified several classes of molecules that had activity as radioprotectors and radiomitigators of the hematopoietic system in vivo. In the future, addition of 3-dimensional (3-D) or stem cell cultures or pathway analysis, may improve the power of HTS, but our findings indicate that common, evolutionary conserved, canonical pathways can be identified that could be exploited to mitigate radiation-induced defects.
Priming in-group favoritism: The impact of normative scripts in the minimal group paradigm.

Results of experiments employing the minimal group paradigm (MGP) (Tajfel et al., 1971) have provided evidence that mere categorization can—at least on average—lead to in-group favoritism, i.e., allocating more resources to in-group members than to out-group members. This effect is often explained by sociomotivational processes in which persons favor their own group in order to enhance their social self-esteem (e.g., Tajfel & Turner, 1986). However, in-group favoritism in the MGP can alternatively be explained by assuming that persons simply follow social norms or scripts that are currently accessible and provide behavioral prescriptions for the task at hand. This explanation was tested by experimentally varying the accessibility of behavior scripts with a priming procedure within a MGP. As expected, priming of “loyalty” compared to priming of “equality” led to (a) higher perceptions that loyalty is expected by in-group members, (b) increased in-group favoritism, (c) increased expression of in-group identification. Moreover, while self-esteem ratings were positively correlated with in-group favoritism after priming of loyalty, this relation was reversed after priming of equality.
Resveratrol prevents cadmium activation of Erk1/2 and JNK pathways from neuronal cell death via protein phosphatases 2A and 5

Cadmium (Cd), a toxic environmental contaminant, induces neurodegenerative disorders. Resveratrol, a natural product, has been found to exert neuroprotective effects. However, little is known regarding the effect of resveratrol on Cd‐evoked neurotoxicity. Here, we show that resveratrol effectively reversed Cd‐elicited cell viability reduction, morphological change, nuclear fragmentation and condensation, as well as activation of caspase‐3 in neuronal cells, implying neuroprotection against Cd‐poisoning by resveratrol. Further research revealed that both c‐Jun N‐terminal kinase (JNK) and extracellular signal‐regulated kinases 1/2 (Erk1/2) were involved in the inhibitory effect of resveratrol on Cd‐induced cell death, as selective inhibitors of Erk1/2 (U0126) and JNK (SP600125), or over‐expression of dominant negative mitogen‐activated protein kinase kinase 1 (MKK1) or dominant negative c‐Jun potentiated resveratrol's prevention of Cd‐induced phosphorylation of JNK and Erk1/2, as well as cell death in neuronal cells. Interestingly, resveratrol potently rescued the cells from Cd‐induced suppression of protein phosphatases 2A (PP2A) and 5 (PP5) activity. Over‐expression of PP2A or PP5 strengthened the inhibitory effects of resveratrol on Cd‐induced activation of Erk1/2 and/or JNK, as well as cell death. The results indicate that resveratrol prevents Cd‐induced activation of Erk1/2 and JNK pathways and neuronal cell death in part via activating PP2A and PP5. Our findings strongly support the notion that resveratrol may serve as a potential therapeutic agent in the prevention of Cd‐induced neurodegenerative diseases.
Role engagement and anonymity in synchronous online role play

Role play activities provide opportunities for learners to adopt unfamiliar roles, engage in interactions with others, and get involved in realistic tasks. They are often recommended to foster the development of soft skills and a wider perspective of the world. Such activities are widely used as an online teaching approach, with examples ranging from the simple use of email to the employment of virtual worlds and Web 2.0 technologies. This paper provides a case study of a role play activity which employs real-time anonymous discussion forums and aims to improve our understanding of effective role play and the impact of anonymity. This role play has been effective in educating learners about different perspectives on the issue of Quality in Further Education. The context and implementation of the role play are outlined, and the learners’ interactions and experiences are explored using an investigative analysis of discussion transcripts and semi-structured interviews with participants. The findings suggest that role engagement and anonymity are important components for success in synchronous online role play. Evidence is presented that provides an insight into the factors which encourage role engagement, including prior experiences and contributions from peers. The impact of anonymity is also explored since many participants did not regard the study environment as real and attempted to identify their peers.
Laboratory evaluation of phenotypic detection methods of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Although conventional antibiotic susceptibility tests are most commonly performed for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the results of these phenotypic tests are dependent on the standardization of the culture conditions. The aim of the study was to evaluate the conventional phenotypic screening tests in comparison to the mecA gene polymerase chain reaction (PCR). One hundred and two clinical isolates of MRSA identified by the oxacillin disk diffusion were subjected to PCR for the mecA gene and by the cefoxitin disk diffusion test and culture on oxacillin screen agar, mannitol salt agar, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Agar (MeReSA) selective medium, for MRSA. Although all 102 isolates were resistant in oxacillin and cefoxitin disk diffusion, 92 (90.1%) isolates were positive for the mecA gene. The sensitivities of the mannitol salt agar, MeReSA agar, and oxacillin screen agar were 89.13, 97.82, and 98.91%, respectively. The oxacillin screen agar may be recommended for confirming methicillin resistance in the disk diffusion test in resource-poor settings, where molecular methods are not available.
An investigation into the prevalence of ecological misconceptions in upper secondary students and implications for pre-service teacher education

Students’ and teachers’ misconceptions are an international concern among researchers in science education; they influence how students learn and teachers’ teach knowledge and are a hindrance in the acquisition of accurate knowledge. This paper reports on a literature synthesis of existing research about ecological misconceptions. One means of improving the application of misconceptions involves using diagnostic tests. These form an important component of a broader conceptual toolkit needed to teach science in conceptually accurate ways. Analysis of the results of a diagnostic test, completed by biology students and pre-service teachers in Ireland, revealed the presence of an unacceptably high level of misconceptions and uncovered flaws in students and teachers’ understanding of ecological concepts. A clear link was observed between the misconceptions present in pre-service teachers’ knowledge base and those dominant in students. In this regard, we discuss implications of these findings for teacher education, from pre-service to continuing education.
Role of Neutrophil CD64 Index as a Screening Marker for Late-Onset Sepsis in Very Low Birth Weight Infants

Introduction The role of CD64 in late onset sepsis (LOS) in preterm infants has been described in several studies. Aim of this study was to investigate whether CD64 expression is increased in the days before clinical manifestation of LOS. Methods Patients with birth weight below 1,500g were eligible for study participation. During routine blood sampling CD64 index was determined between day of life 4 and 28. Patients were allocated to one of four groups: (1) blood-culture positive sepsis, (2) clinical sepsis, (3) symptoms of infection without biochemical evidence of infection, or (4) patients without suspected infection. Kinetics of CD64 expression were compared during a period before and after the day of infection in the respective groups. Results 50 infants were prospectively enrolled and allocated to each group as follows: group (1) n = 7; group (2) n = 10; group (3) n = 8; and group (4) n = 25. CD64 index was elevated in 57% of patients in group (1) at least two days before infection. In contrast only 20% in the clinical sepsis group and 0% in group (3) had an elevated CD64 index in the days before infection. 10 of the 25 patients in the control group (4) presented increased CD64 index values during the study period. Conclusions The CD64 index might be a promising marker to detect LOS before infants demonstrate signs or symptoms of infection. However, larger prospective studies are needed to define optimal cut-off values and to investigate the role of non-infectious inflammation in this patient group.