Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serum creatine kinase activity is not a reliable marker for muscle damage in conditions associated with low extracellular glutathione concentration.

Creatine kinase (CK, EC 2.7.3.2) assays usually contain thiol-reducing compounds to restore the enzyme activity. In this study, we investigated the effect of endogenous extracellular glutathione on serum CK activity. We examined CK activity and glutathione concentrations in serum from 200 healthy subjects (107 males, 93 females) and 38 patients with multiple organ failure, muscle wasting, and low serum CK activity (<50 U/L) (24 males, 14 females). Muscle damage was further evaluated using serum myoglobin concentrations and aldolase activity. In the overall group, serum glutathione concentrations correlated with serum CK activity (r = 0.791) but not with myoglobin concentrations and aldolase activity. In patients with multiple organ failure, low serum CK activities were accompanied by extremely low serum glutathione concentrations (<0.5 ,micromol/L, P <0.001). Endogenous glutathione can be regarded as a CK-preserving agent during the lifetime of the enzyme in the circulation (22 h on average). Serum CK activity should be interpreted with caution in patients with liver disease and multiple organ failure. In these conditions, the loss of CK activity due to extracellular glutathione depletion cannot be restored by the presence of thiol-reducing compounds in the CK assays.
Cross-lagged associations between study and work engagement dimensions during young adulthood

The present four-wave longitudinal study investigated the cross-lagged associations between three study and work engagement dimensions (e.g. energy, absorption, and dedication) over the transition from post-comprehensive studies to higher education or work. Various antecedents (e.g. gender, GPA) and consequences (e.g. satisfaction in life, education and work, well-being, and educational outcomes) of the three engagement dimensions were also examined. The study is part of the longitudinal Finnish Educational Transitions (FinEdu) study, and followed 851 participants from age 17 to 23. The developmental dynamics showed that, in particular, students’ study- and work-related energy predicted feelings of absorption and dedication during their post-comprehensive education and after the transition to higher education or work. Moreover, high dedication in one’s studies or work resulted in high satisfaction in life, studies, and work and increased well-being. No differences related to academic track emerged in the developmental dynamics of study/work engagement.
Setting an Agenda for Women Entrepreneurship in Nigeria: A Commentary on Faseke's Journey Through Time for 'The Nigerian Woman'

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to bring the Nigerian woman from the margins of international obscurity by acknowledging the contributions of reputable academics from an emerging market context on a subject that has pervaded the global podium in recent years – i.e. women in management. Design/methodology/approach – The paper's approach is strictly qualitative in nature – a narrative analysis of a single book on women written by “a woman of status” – Dr (Mrs.) Faseke, a graduate of the University of Ibadan and one time Head of the Department of History at the Lagos State University (Nigeria). Findings – This paper acknowledges the “silent voices” of African women, drawing upon a publication that was encountered purely by chance – Modupe Faseke's The Nigerian Woman published by Agape Publications (Ibadan, Nigeria) in 2001. Research limitations/implications – Although this paper reads very much like an extended book review, it does offer some critical theoretical and practical insight coming from a book published by a local and largely obscure publishing house – Agape Publishers based in the remote city of Ibadan in Southwestern Nigeria. Originality/value – It is envisaged that after reading this paper, scholars of gender-themed studies may begin probing a bit deeper into the roots of the Nigerian woman and especially in situations where their voices have been muffled.
Half-Remembered Quotations from Mostly Forgotten Speeches: The Limits of Labour's European Policy Discourse

This article uses discourse analysis to study the continuities in British foreign policy thinking within the Labour party from the 1960s to the present day. Using representative extracts from speeches by Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it identifies the ideational consistencies in the leaders' attitudes to: Empire; federalism in the EEC/EU; and laying down conditions that have to be met before any constructive engagement with ‘Europe’ can be countenanced. We argue that these consistencies, spanning a 50-year period, exemplify a certain stagnation both within Labour's European discourses and within British foreign policy thinking more widely. We develop the idea that Labour party thinking has been crucially framed by both small ‘c’ conservative and upper-case Conservative ideology, popularised by Winston Churchill in his ‘three circles’ model of British foreign policy.
Joint Assignment, Scheduling, and Routing Models to Home Care Optimization: A Pattern-Based Approach

The design of efficient home care services is a quite recent and challenging field of study. We propose an integrated approach that jointly addresses: i the assignment of operators to patients so as to guarantee the compatibility between skills associated with operators and patient visits; ii the scheduling of the visits in a given planning horizon; and iii the determination of the operator tours in every day of the planning horizon. The main home care problem we investigate refers to providers dedicated to palliative care and terminal patients. In this context, balancing objective functions are particularly relevant. Therefore, two balancing functions are studied, i.e., maxmin, which maximizes the minimum operator utilization factor, and minmax, which minimizes the maximum operator utilization factor. In both cases, the concept of pattern is introduced as a key tool to jointly address assignment, scheduling, and routing decisions, where a pattern specifies a possible schedule for skilled visits. The approach we propose is, however, able to cope with peculiarities from other home care contexts. Model extensions to handle scenarios other than the palliative one are discussed in the paper. Extensive computational results are reported both on palliative home care instances based on real data, and on two real-world data sets from the literature, related to contexts very different from the palliative one. For both data sets the proposed approach is able to find solutions of good quality. In the palliative context, the results show that the selection of the pattern generation policy is crucial to solve large instances efficiently. Furthermore, the maxmin criterion is able to return more balanced solutions; i.e., the difference between the maximum and the minimum operator utilization factors is very small. On the other hand, the minmax criterion is more suitable for minimizing the operating costs, since it computes solutions with smaller total traveled time.
Reflection in intercultural learning: examining the international experience through a critical incident approach

Professionals are increasingly being required to work in diverse, multicultural environments. Accordingly, skills in intercultural practice are a prerequisite to professional knowledge and competence. Ensuring that these are developed is increasingly part of the core business of universities. Currently, however, there is a gap in the knowledge base as to the learning processes that underpin the acquisition of such intercultural understandings, knowledge and competence. This article represents an attempt to address this gap through describing some of the findings of a qualitative, interdisciplinary study undertaken by the authors with students at Charles Sturt University, Australia. The purpose of the study was to illuminate key processes in the development of cultural knowledge and intercultural competence through exploring the experiences of education and health professional students undertaking fieldwork and study in Indonesia and Vietnam. In this article we illustrate and discuss a continuum of learning to be interculturally competent, grounded in the data, and conclude with a series of recommendations for future practice and research.
Single-trial classification of parallel pre-attentive and serial attentive processes using functional magnetic resonance imaging

Theories of perception have proposed a basic distinction between parallel pre-attentive and serial attentive modes of processing. However, chronometric measures are often ambiguous in separating parallel and serial processes. We have used the activity of attention-related regions of the human brain, measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging, to separate parallel from serial processes at the single-trial level in a visual quantification task. In this task, some have suggested the deployment of two qualitatively different processes, a fast parallel ‘subitizing’ for sets of one, two or three objects and a slow serial counting for larger sets. Our results indicate that attention-related regions of the posterior parietal and frontal cortices show a sudden increase in activity only from numerosity four onwards, confirming the parallel-serial dichotomy of subitizing and counting. Moreover, using the presence or absence of attentional shifts, as inferred from the activation of posterior parietal regions, we successfully predict whether, on a given trial, subjects deployed a serial exploration of the display or a parallel apprehension. Beyond the subitizing/counting debate, this approach may prove useful to probe the attentional demands of other cognitive tasks.
Impulse Electrical Breakdown Fields of Short Vacuum Gaps

Prebreakdown currents for a long-duration impulse voltage were measured as a function of a wide range of gap spacing using a . air of plane-parallel copper electrodes in a vacuum of 3xlO Pa. The field-emitted component of the prebreakdown current was found to follow the Fowler-Nordheim field emission theory and the field enhancement factor at the cathode was determined from the Fowler-Nordheim plot. The B was found to increase from 15 to 230 with increasing electrode separation in the range from 0.003 to 2.5 mm. The breakdown voltage and the average field strength were also measured in the same gap range. It was found that the average field strength decreased from 700 kV/mm to 33 kV/mm with increasing electrode separation, however, the critical microscopic electric field at breakdown is determined to be (10.2±1.5) X107 V/cm in the range investigated.
Association of the HLA-DRB1 epitope LA(67, 74) with rheumatoid arthritis and citrullinated vimentin binding.

OBJECTIVE Although rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has long been associated with an HLA-DRB1 shared epitope, a systematic search for other epitopes has never been conducted. In addition, the relationship between these epitopes and the binding of citrullinated autoantigens has not been investigated. We developed a program that can analyze HLA data for all possible epitopes of up to 5 amino acids and used this program to assess the shared epitope hypothesis in RA. METHODS We analyzed high-resolution data from the International Histocompatibility Working Group, which included a group of 488 patients with RA and a group of 448 racially and ethnically balanced control subjects, for all combinations of up to 5 amino acids among polymorphic HLA-DRB1 positions 8-93. Statistical significance was determined by chi-square and Fisher's exact tests, with a false discovery rate correction. RESULTS Three residues (V(11), H(13), and L(67)) were found to have the highest degree of association with RA susceptibility (P < 10(-11)), and D(70) was found to correlate best with RA resistance (P = 2 × 10(-11)). Of >2 million epitopes examined, LA(67, 74) exhibited the highest correlation with RA susceptibility (P = 2 × 10(-20); odds ratio 4.07 [95% confidence interval 3.07-5.39]). HLA alleles containing the LA(67, 74) epitope exhibited significantly greater binding to citrullinated vimentin(65-77) than did alleles containing D(70). Only 1 allele (DRB1*16:02) contained both LA(67, 74) and D(70); it bound citrullinated vimentin weakly and was not associated with RA. CONCLUSION The findings of these studies confirm the importance of HLA-DRB1 amino acids in pocket 4 for the binding of citrullinated autoantigens and susceptibility to RA.
Does Family Intervention Work for Delinquents? Results of a Meta-Analysis

Previous meta-analyses of the correctional treatment literature have demonstrated that family intervention programs for delinquents represent some of the strongest treatment modalities available for this population. However, a recent meta-analysis by Latimer (2001) argued that, although family intervention appears to be effective at first glance, when controls are introduced for the methodological quality of the evaluation, the sizes of the effects decrease substantially, and under the strictest methodological conditions, they ultimately disappear. The present meta-analysis explored the impact of methodological rigour on the findings of evaluations of family intervention programs for young offenders, but attention was paid to the appropriateness of the programs (e.g., whether they adhered to the principles of risk, need, and general responsivity). Although the effects of the program decreased mildly under the strictest methodological conditions, appropriate treatment continued to yield significant mean re.
I–O Psychology and Intelligence: A Starting Point Established

The goal of our focal article was to initiate a conversation on how I–O psychology can reengage in research on intelligence. We are encouraged by the ways in which the commentators have furthered this conversation. We discuss 4 overarching themes in the set of commentaries: the extent that I–O psychology is contributing to the intelligence field, outsiders' impressions of I–O psychology's contributions to intelligence research, ways I–O psychology can contribute to intelligence research, and ideas about what prevents us from doing this research. We hope this collection of articles serves to truly ignite research by our field on this critical construct.
Proteome Informatics Research Group (iPRG)_2012: A Study on Detecting Modified Peptides in a Complex Mixture*

The proteome informatics research group of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities conducted a study to assess the community's ability to detect and characterize peptides bearing a range of biologically occurring post-translational modifications when present in a complex peptide background. A data set derived from a mixture of synthetic peptides with biologically occurring modifications combined with a yeast whole cell lysate as background was distributed to a large group of researchers and their results were collectively analyzed. The results from the twenty-four participants, who represented a broad spectrum of experience levels with this type of data analysis, produced several important observations. First, there is significantly more variability in the ability to assess whether a results is significant than there is to determine the correct answer. Second, labile post-translational modifications, particularly tyrosine sulfation, present a challenge for most researchers. Finally, for modification site localization there are many tools being employed, but researchers are currently unsure of the reliability of the results these programs are producing.
Gender Differences in Self-Efficacy Among Latino College Freshmen

This study examines the changes in self-efficacy among Latinos during the freshman year in a highly selective institution. Results indicate that gender differences exist during this period. Males rate themselves high in self-efficacy at the beginning of the year, while females rate themselves low. An interaction effect occurs at the end of the year, and the ratings of self-efficacy are similar for both males and females. Possible explanations for the interaction effect are discussed.
Ground Albedo Neutron Impacts to Seasonal Variations of Cosmic-Ray-Induced Neutron in Medium Geomagnetic Latitude and Antarctica: Impacts on Soft Error Rate

This paper investigates the impact of ground albedo neutrons in the terrestrial radiation field and their seasonal variations. A modeling methodology is proposed, it is based on ATMORAD (atmospheric shower modeling) and GEANT4 simulations taking into account the soil characteristics and hydrogen content. This method was validated thanks to neutron measurements performed in two high altitude stations located in medium geomagnetic latitude and Antarctica (Pic-du-Midi and Concordia, respectively). Thus, the chemical rock composition, the density, the water content and the snow pack impacts to neutron spectrum were investigated. Simulated and measured spectra were compared. Analyses show that variations are dominant in the thermal domain (i.e. En <0.5 eV) and lesser degree in epithermal and evaporation domains (i.e. 0.5 eV < En <0.1 MeV and 0.1 MeV < En <20 MeV, respectively). The last part investigates the impact induced by the evaporation neutron contribution to Single Event Rate (more impacted by the ground albedo neutron). Results show that evaporation neutrons contribution to the total SER should be assessed for high-sensitive technologies.
Comparison of Spanish morphology in monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children with and without language impairment*

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish–English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children. Significant differences were observed between bilingual TD and LI groups on all tasks; however, no differences were observed between bilinguals with TD and monolinguals with LI except on a sum-score across all tasks. There were no observed differences between bilinguals and monolinguals with TD; however, 60% of bilinguals with TD were misclassified as LI when using a cut score derived from monolingual-only data. Results support evidence that Spanish morphosyntax is vulnerable to error in monolingual and bilingual Spanish–English children with LI. However, the grammatical deficit seems clinically relevant only when children are compared to the same language peer group (i.e., bilinguals compared to bilinguals).
A Research Synthesis of the Evaluation Capacity Building Literature

The continuously growing demand for program results has produced an increased need for evaluation capacity building (ECB). The Integrative ECB Model was developed to integrate concepts from existing ECB theory literature and to structure a synthesis of the empirical ECB literature. The study used a broad-based research synthesis method with systematic decision rules and demonstrates the viability of the method for producing a reliable analysis of disparate data from a variety of designs. There was a high degree of consistency in what was reported in the empirical literature and the theoretical literature in terms of strategies and outcomes. Reported outcomes at the individual level included attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors and at the organizational level included practices, leadership, culture, mainstreaming, and resources. Collaborative processes and programmatic outcomes emerged as important issues for ECB models and practice. The consistency between the empirical and the theoretical literature indicates that the field is ready to develop common measures, use stronger designs, and report more systematically. This synthesis provides an overview of existing data and an empirical basis for refining strategies and common measures for enhancing the research and practice of ECB to achieve ECB and programmatic goals and outcomes.
Sociometric Nominations of Preschoolers: A Psychometric Analysis

This study investigated the psychometric properties of sociometric nominations used with preschoolers, in order to assess their potential usefulness for convergent and predictive assessment of the behavioral and affective components of social competence. Stability, convergent validity, and moderators of sociometric nominations were investigated. Teacher ratings of social and affective skills also were examined as predictors of sociometric nominations. The 36 subjects were younger than those in most similar investigations (mean age = 37 months as the study began). Good cross-time and cross-method stability were demonstrated. Gender, but not age, was identified as a moderator of nomination data in this age range. Teacher ratings and the extraction of fairly stable, coherent peer status groups confirmed the validity of using peer nomination measures to evaluate preschoolers' social competence.
LA EFECTIVIDAD DE UN MODELO DE APRENDIZAJE COMBINADO PARA LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS COMO LENGUA EXTRANJERA: ESTUDIO EMPÍRICO

En este articulo se proporcionan guias de orientacion efectiva para los investigadores que desarrollan plataformas computacionales para el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras. El objetivo principal es visualizar como los principios metodologicos provenientes de los enfoques de ensenanza de lenguas (“Ensenanza de Lenguas basada en Tareas” y “Aprendizaje Cooperativo”) pueden ser aplicados de manera efectiva en el diseno de actividades para el desarrollo de las destrezas linguisticas en ambientes no presenciales y semipresenciales. Para ello, se explora evidencia empirica acerca de la efectividad en el aprendizaje del ingles como lengua extranjera en las modalidades de ensenanza semipresencial vs. ensenanza presencial en un estudio basado en un diseno experimental pre-y post-test grupo control. Los resultados muestran que el incremento en el aprendizaje del ingles como LE fue superior en el grupo experimental que utilizo la modalidad semipresencial con respecto al grupo control que trabajo con la modalidad presencial. Se propone, entonces, que en el diseno de plataformas para la ensenanza de lenguas se incluya e implemente modelos metodologicos de Aprendizaje Combinado.
Visuospatial Deficit and Apraxia in Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA): a Single Case Follow-up Study

Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a rare neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by insidious onset and selective, gradual decline in visuospatial and visuoperceptual skills. We report a typical case of a patient with posterior cortical atrophy who presented initially with visuospatial deficit and apraxia. The aim of this report is to present this rare dementia subtype as a relevant differential diagnosis in respect to other neurodegenerative syndromes