Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of glucocorticoid therapy on the inflammatory and Dendritic cells in muscular dystrophies

Various clinical trials have documented the therapeutic benefit of glucocorticoids (GCs) in enhancing muscle strength and slowing disease progression of Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies (DMD/BMD). We hypothesized that GCs may have relevance to the differential anti‐inflammatory effect on mononuclear inflammatory cells (MICs) and Dendritic cells (DCs) infiltrating the dystrophic muscles. In this prospective study, two muscle biopsies were obtained (before and after 6‐month prednisone therapy) from 30 patients with dystrophies (DMD = 18; BMD = 6; and limb girdle muscular dystrophies (LGMD) = 6). MICs and DCs infiltrating the muscles were examined using mouse monoclonal antibodies and immunoperoxidase staining methods. Muscle strength was evaluated monthly by manual testing, motor ability and timed tests. Prednisone therapy was associated with: (i) functional improvement of overall motor disability, in upper limbs of DMD (P < 0.001) and BMD (P < 0.01) and lower limbs of DMD (P < 0.001) and BMD (P < 0.05); (ii) histological improvement such as fibre size variation (DMD, P < 0.01; BMD, P < 0.05), internalization of nuclei (DMD, P < 0.05), degeneration and necrosis (DMD and BMD, P < 0.01), regeneration (DMD, P < 0.001; BMD, P < 0.01) and endomysial connective tissue proliferation (DMD, P < 0.01; BMD, P < 0.05) and (iii) reduction of total MICs (P < 0.01) and DCs (P < 0.01). There was a positive correlation between the degree of improvement in overall motor disability and reduction of DCs numbers (In upper limbs; r = 0.638, P < 0.01 for DMD and r = 0.725, P < 0.01 for BMD, in Lower limbs; r = 0.547, P < 0.05 for DMD and r = 0.576, P < 0.05 for BMD). Such improvements and changes of MICs/DCs were absent in LGMD. In DMD/BMD, prednisone therapeutic effect was associated with reduced MICs and DCs numbers. Whether this therapeutic effect reflects targeting of the deleterious immune response produced by these cells mandates further investigations.
Effect of Opuntia ficus indica on symptoms of the alcohol hangover.

BACKGROUND The severity of the alcohol hangover may be related to inflammation induced by impurities in the alcohol beverage and byproducts of alcohol metabolism. An extract of the Opuntia ficus indica (OFI) plant diminishes the inflammatory response to stressful stimuli. METHODS In this double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial, 64 healthy, young adult volunteers were randomly assigned to receive OFI (1600 IU) and identical placebo, given 5 hours before alcohol consumption. During 4 hours, subjects consumed up to 1.75 g of alcohol per kilogram of body weight. Hangover severity (9 symptoms) and overall well-being were assessed on a scale (0-6), and blood and urine samples were obtained the following morning. Two weeks later, the study protocol was repeated with OFI and placebo reversed. RESULTS Fifty-five subjects completed both the OFI and placebo arms of the study. Three of the 9 symptoms-nausea, dry mouth, and anorexia-were significantly reduced by OFI (all P<.05). Overall, the symptom index was reduced by 2.7 points on average (95% confidence interval, -0.2 to 5.5; P =.07), and the risk of a severe hangover (>/=18 points) was reduced by half (odds ratio, 0.38; 95% confidence interval, 0.16-0.88; P =.02). C-reactive protein levels were strongly associated with hangover severity; the mean symptom index was 4.1 (95% confidence interval, 1.2-7.1; P =.007) higher in subjects with morning C-reactive protein levels greater than 1.0 mg/L. In addition, C-reactive protein levels were 40% higher after subjects consumed placebo compared with OFI. CONCLUSIONS The symptoms of the alcohol hangover are largely due to the activation of inflammation. An extract of the OFI plant has a moderate effect on reducing hangover symptoms, apparently by inhibiting the production of inflammatory mediators.
Negative and Depressive Symptoms in Schizophrenia

Ninety-five schizophrenic patients were assessed using the Present State Examination, the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale and the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms. Negative and depressive symptoms were frequent, and significant relationships among negative symptom complexes and depressive syndromes were noted. Retardation, lack of energy, slowness, and other symptoms of depression were significantly associated with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Depressed affect per se did not have a significant correlation with negative symptoms.
Determinants of Postadoption Behaviors of Mobile Communications Applications: A Dual-Model Perspective

Given the rapid development of mobile technologies and the high adoption rates of mobile devices, mobile communications applications (MCAs) are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. In the highly competitive and rapidly changing MCA market, it is becoming important to understand users’ postadoption behaviors toward MCAs. Previous postadoption studies have focused on continuous use, but the success of MCAs is also affected by positive word of mouth. To deepen our understanding of postadoption behaviors in the MCA environment, this study examined the key determinants of continuance intention and recommendation intention, two critical postadoption behaviors. Moreover, this study investigated the effects of dedication and constraint factors on MCA postadoption phenomena from a dual-model perspective. Data collected from 250 users experienced with an MCA were empirically tested against a theoretical framework using partial least squares. The results confirm that the proposed model substantially predicted the postadoption behaviors of MCA users. These findings indicate that both user satisfaction and perceived switching costs play an important role in enhancing users’ continuance and recommendation intentions. Learning and habit were found to be the key antecedents of perceived switching costs. Implications for research and practice are described.
A Longitudinal Study of the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion

The longitudinal study of religious transmission or influence across generations is an important but underexamined area of research, particularly in terms of the religious influence of grandparents. How much influence do grandparents have on grandchildren's religious beliefs and practices, and has this changed over the past 30 years? As grandparents have become increasingly important in multigenerational families, do they exert an influence on their grandchildren's religiosity that is distinct from that of parents? Drawing on the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG), this article uses grandparent—parent—grandchild triads and a generational sequential design to examine the transmission of three dimensions of religiosity — religious service attendance, religiousness and religious ideology — across generations from 1971 to 2000. Results indicate that in 1971 grandparents significantly influenced grandchildren's religious service attendance and religiousness, but these effects had weakened by 2000. The opposite pattern occurred for the transmission of conservative religious beliefs where there was a significant grandparent on grandchild effect in 2000, but not in 1971. Grandparents were also found to influence all three dimensions of grandchildren's religiosity independent of that of parents, suggesting that religious beliefs and practices formed within nuclear and extended families persist into adulthood with parents and grandparents simultaneously serving as independent and joint agents of religious socialization. In these analyses it was found that the influence of grandmothers on granddaughters' religiosity was especially pronounced. In general, the study shows a significant degree of religious influence across three generations in the family, and offers an expanded view of religious socialization by considering grandparents as active contributors to the religiosity of young adults.
Linguistic description moderates the evaluations of counterstereotypical people.

The present research investigated linguistic description as a moderator of biased evaluations of counterstereotypical individuals. Members of an online participant pool (N = 237) indicated their liking for stereotypical and counterstereotypical individuals who were described using adjectives or behaviors. There was a significant interaction between target typicality and linguistic description: People liked counterstereotypical individuals more than stereotypical individuals when target individuals were described using adjectives. In contrast, they showed no bias or a negative bias against counterstereotypical individuals who were described using behaviors. This interaction effect generalized across gender targets (men/women) and sexuality targets (gay/straight), and it was partially mediated by subjective processing fluency. Implications for the backlash effect and prejudice reduction are discussed.
Children’s Views on Children’s Right to Work

The purpose of this article is to examine children’s attitudes regarding the right to work. The article is based on comments made by 245 15-year-old children on child employment and is supported by focus group interviews with 56 boys and 38 girls and tape-recorded interviews with 15 working pupils. One of most dominant themes to emerge from the data is children’s perception that they have a right to work. The article examines the legislation regarding child employment in Northern Ireland and the role of the state in determining the legislation. The author suggests that within this legislation, children are seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. Traditionally the protection of children in the workforce has been achieved by limiting the hours they can work and the occupations they can enter. Yet when children’s own views are taken into account, they move beyond the limits of protecting them through exclusion to suggesting frameworks whereby their protection may be achieved by empowering them within the labour market.
The relationship between higher order models and everyday conceptions of personality

Two studies are reported. The first one is concerned with an examination of the degree to which higher order models of personality differ from everyday social representations of personality. The second study consists in an analysis of intersubjective variations in the organization of everyday personality theories through an examination of the semantic field in which trait terms are represented. It is argued that hypothetico-deductive models of personality rely primarily on ordinary language descriptions of persons and do not constitute higher order models. Further, it is suggested that the development of such models relies primarily on a linguistic context, rather than extralinguistic considerations to social interaction in which person terms feature centrally. The two studies provide empirical support for both contentions. Finally, a cross-cultural comparison of the semantic representation of trait terms is provided.
Online Learning Needs in Technology Education

Introduction The number of distance education courses, degree programs, and enrollment in the US nearly doubled from 1995 to 1998 (US Department of Education, 1999). As universities provide more courses online, possibly to a different population of students, it is important to assess the perceived needs of learners and potential learners. In the field of technology education, some (e.g. Davis, 2000, Ndahi, 1999) have studied university distance education programs, but a characterization of potential learners and their needs has not been performed. The goal of this article is to inform those considering offering online technology education, especially at the graduate level, of the perceived need for and appeal of online educational opportunities in technology education, as discovered through a needs assessment survey. An educational needs assessment “has been increasingly recognized as a necessary part of curriculum design” (Pratt, 1980, p.79). Stewart and Cuffman (1998) noted that, “the integration of needs assessment as part of a total distance education system should benefit all stakeholders (e.g., faculty, administrators, students). ”
Encouraging Consistent Translation Choices

It has long been observed that monolingual text exhibits a tendency toward "one sense per discourse," and it has been argued that a related "one translation per discourse" constraint is operative in bilingual contexts as well. In this paper, we introduce a novel method using forced decoding to confirm the validity of this constraint, and we demonstrate that it can be exploited in order to improve machine translation quality. Three ways of incorporating such a preference into a hierarchical phrase-based MT model are proposed, and the approach where all three are combined yields the greatest improvements for both Arabic-English and Chinese-English translation experiments.
Blood flow and filtration rate responses to alterations in renal arterial osmolarity.

YOUNG, DAVID B. , AND HOWARD I-L ROSTORFER. BloodJEow and filtration rate responses to alterations in mal arterial osmolarity. Am. J. Physiol. 225(5) : 1003-1008. 19 73 . -By infusing small volumes of hypertonic or hypotonic solutions of NaCl, dextrose, or urea into the renal arteries of anesthetized dogs, renal arterial plasma osmolarity was changed over a range of + 56 to 34 mOsm/liter. Within seconds of the start of infusions, renal blood Aow (RBF), measured by an electromagnetic flowmeter, and glomerular fiitration rate (GFR), measured by the creatinine extraction-ratio technique, varied directly with renal arterial osmolarity. The RBF responses were consistent; the correlation coefficients of the regressions between percent changes of RBF and percent changes of osmolarity were 0.9 for all three compounds, while the slopes of the regressions were 0.35, 0.30, and 0.22 for NaCI, dextrose, and urea, respectively, Filtration rate responses were variable. GFR and RBF both responded to changes in renal arterial plasma osmolarity of less than 5 mOsm/liter. The results suggest that plasma osmolarity may be a factor affecting renal hemodynamics under physioIogic conditions.
‘Blacks and bubbas’: Stereotypes, ideology, and categorization processes in restaurant servers' discourse

Individuals employ general, cognitively grounded categorization processes to form expectations for interactions with members of other social groups. Such categorizations sometimes surface in the form of racial, ethnic, or other stereotypes. But although much literature describes and/or tests the cognitive nature of stereotyping and categorization, less investigates how stereotypes and categories are formed in casual interaction, through casual discourse. This article analyzes data from 15 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with restaurant servers to investigate how they categorize customers by drawing on racial stereotypes and stereotypes related to class and/or cultural capital to produce two types of discriminatory discourse: ‘racetalk’ and what we term ‘regiontalk’. Our analyses suggest potential differences in the servers’ processes of categorization according to patron type, which we interpret with regard to the larger context of racism and classism in contemporary U.S. society.
Does the Continuum of Care Influence Time in Treatment?

Using data from the Fort Bragg Evaluation, this article determines whether the continuum of care treatment philosophy extends the length of treatment episodes among children and adoles cents receiving mental health services. This article is the first to examine either the length of treatment episodes for children and adolescents receiving mental health services or the relation ship between time in treatment and the continuum of care. Using hazard modeling, the author finds that children at the Fort Bragg Demonstration are less likely to leave treatment at a point in time and thus remain in treatment longer.
Reaching for objects: a neural process account in a developmental perspective

Reaching and grasping objects is an evolutionarily late achievement. Throughout the animal kingdom, much object oriented action is achieved with the whole body, in mammals often with the head and snout. Because the vision sensor is anchored in the head, such object-oriented movements can be achieved with simple control strategies, such as visual servoeing (Ruf & Horaud, 1999), that make limited demands on perception, estimation, and movement planning. Reaching with an actuator that is separate from the main visual sensor is prevalent in primates. Humans excel at object oriented manipulation tasks, much exceeding the skills of other primates. This is a developmental achievement as witnessed by the long and intense period of learning to reach (von Hofsten, 1984, 1991; Thelen, Corbetta, & Spencer, 1996; Berthier & Keen, 2006) Spatial orientation and navigation may be achieved based on unsegmented visual information (Schöne, 1984; Hermer & Spelke, 1994). In contrast, reaching makes considerable demands on object perception. (1) To reach and grasp an object, that object must be visually segmented against the background and its pose be estimated. (2) Spatial information about the object must be transformed from a visual reference frame into a reference frame in which motor commands to the hands may be formed. Such coordinate transforms are computationally demanding (Pouget & Snyder, 2000; Schneegans, 2015) and learning them is a challenge (Chao, Lee, & Lee, 2010; Sandamirskaya & Conradt, 2013). (3) Motor commands must be generated that drive the hand toward the object and bring it into contact with the object with a small enough terminal velocity that enables grasping. This is particularly challenging as infants are weak relative to the mass of their limbs. Because the force/weight relationship changes during growth, the motor commands must be updated over development. (4) Generating and controlling successful reaches also entails solving the degree of freedom problem, that is, distributing to the many muscles that contribute to arm movement a
Political skill and influence effectiveness: Testing portions of an expanded Ferris and Judge (1991) model

The present study tested por tions of an expanded Ferris and Judge (1991) framework regarding influence processes in human resources decisions and actions. In particular, the roles of political skill and a particularly efficacious influence tactic, rationality, were examined with respect to their interactive effects on supervisor perceptions and evaluations. Online questionnaires were used to collect data from full-time, non-faculty employees of a large south-eastern US public university. To avoid problems associated with common method variance resulting from same source data, supervisors rated subordinates on outcome measures and subordinates supplied data on predictors. The final sample was comprised of a matched dyadic data set of 291 subordinates and their supervisors. Results indicated support for the hypotheses. Specifically, political skill was found to directly relate to the use of rationality and moderate the positive relationship between rationality and two supervisory perceptions known to affect supervisor ratings of job performance, notably supervisor liking of subordinates and perceived similarity to subordinates. Further, perceptions of liking and similarity were positively related to supervisor ratings of both task performance and two important contextual job performance components. Implications of the results, strengths and limitations of the research, and directions for future research are discussed.
The Relationship of Key Factors in the Process of Collaboration

The relationship of organizational factors thought to influence collaboration in school-to-work coalitions is investigated. Independent variables were identified from previous empirical research on interorganizational collaboration. Quantitative data were collected through structured telephone interviews with key informants from 150 school-to-work partnerships in 16 states. Correlation and regression analyses revealed the extent to which stakeholder diversity, interdependence, written agreements, communication, resource sharing, planning, and coordination were related to the activities and organizational climates of the partnerships. Analyses of the data revealed that planning and coordination were significantly related to stakeholder diversity, resource sharing, written agreements, communication, and interdependence. Stakeholder diversity and resource sharing also were related significantly to activities, and written agreements and communication accounted for significant variance in climate. Interdependence explained variance in both activities and climate. The results provide quantitative support for the importance of a set of key factors in the collaborative processes of coalitions and serve as a starting point for understanding the relationships between these key factors. Implications for collaboration in coalitions and future research are discussed.
Proof-of-Concept Trial of an α7 Nicotinic Agonist in Schizophrenia

CONTEXT: The alpha7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor gene, CHRNA7, is associated with genetic transmission of schizophrenia and related cognitive and neurophysiological sensory gating deficits. Cognitive dysfunction is responsible for significant psychosocial disability in schizophrenia. Nicotine, a low-potency agonist at the alpha7 receptor, has some positive effects on neurophysiological and neurocognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia, which suggests that more effective receptor activation might meaningfully enhance cognition in schizophrenia. OBJECTIVES: To determine if 3-[(2,4-dimethoxy)benzylidene]anabaseine (DMXB-A), a natural alkaloid derivative and a partial alpha7 nicotinic cholinergic agonist, significantly improves neurocognition, and to assess, by effects on P50 auditory evoked potential inhibition, whether its neurobiological actions are consistent with activation of alpha7 nicotinic receptors. DESIGN: Randomized, double-blind crossover trial of 2 drug doses and 1 placebo. SETTING: General clinical research center. PATIENTS: Twelve persons with schizophrenia who did not smoke and were concurrently treated with antipsychotic drugs. One person was withdrawn because of a transient decrease in white blood cell count. INTERVENTION: Administration of DMXB-A. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Total scale score of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status and P50 inhibitory gating. RESULTS: Significant neurocognitive improvement was found on the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status total scale score, particularly for the lower DMXB-A dose compared with placebo. Effects were greater than those of nicotine in a similar study. Significant improvement in P50 inhibition also occurred. Patients generally tolerated the drug well. CONCLUSIONS: An alpha7 nicotinic agonist appears to have positive effects on neurocognition in persons with schizophrenia. Longer trials are needed to determine the clinical utility of this novel treatment strategy.
Moderating Effect of Principal Gender on the Structural Relationship between School Principal Leadership Styles and Teachers' Organizational Commitment in Perak Lower Secondary Schools, Malaysia

This research aims to examine how the gender of principal serves as a moderating effect between the principal’s leadership traits and teachers’ organizational commitment. Using SmartPLS structural equation modeling technique, the study found that the gender of principal did serve some effects on this relationship. Principal nurturant leadership was signicantly moderated by their gender on continuance commitment. The principal gender moderated significantly on the principal transformational leadership and the teacher’s continuance and normative commitment. Organizational commitment of Muslim faith majority Malaysians were influence by gender stereotyping to certain extends in this study. Islamic faith still prefers males as their leader. Empirical studies suggest that Malaysians condone liberal faith as compared to majority of other Muslim countries by having more female principals.