Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Roles of MPBQ-MT in Promoting α/γ-Tocopherol Production and Photosynthesis under High Light in Lettuce

2-methyl-6-phytyl-1, 4-benzoquinol methyltransferase (MPBQ-MT) is a vital enzyme catalyzing a key methylation step in both α/γ-tocopherol and plastoquinone biosynthetic pathway. In this study, the gene encoding MPBQ-MT was isolated from lettuce (Lactuca sativa) by rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE), named LsMT. Overexpression of LsMT in lettuce brought about a significant increase of α- and γ-tocopherol contents with a reduction of phylloquinone (vitamin K1) content, suggesting a competition for a common substrate phytyl diphosphate (PDP) between the two biosynthetic pathways. Besides, overexpression of LsMT significantly increased plastoquinone (PQ) level. The increase of tocopherol and plastoquinone levels by LsMT overexpression conduced to the improvement of plants’ tolerance and photosynthesis under high light stress, by directing excessive light energy toward photosynthetic production rather than toward generation of more photooxidative damage. These findings suggest that the role and function of MPBQ-MT can be further explored for enhancing vitamin E value, strengthening photosynthesis and phototolerance under high light in plants.
A New History

The campaign for the ‘People’s Charter’, a democratic movement which thrived in the decade after 1838, was probably the most important mass movement in British history. Chartism captivated contemporaries and has had a magnetic attraction for historians, generating over 100 books and articles in the last decade alone. Some of the best contributions to that literature have come from Malcolm Chase, whose superb new book provides the first modern account of Chartism in its entirety. Sweeping across the whole of the British Isles and covering the entire duration of the movement, Chase has written a work of genuine importance and interest.
Mídia e democracia no Brasil: relações entre o sistema de mídia e o sistema político

Using Hallim and Mancini’s models of analysis to compare media and political systems, the article describes, classifies and discusses the brazilian case in the recent democratic period, having as focus the political jornalism behaviour. The electoral press coverage during the presidential elections (1989, 1994, 1998 and 2002) and the changes in regard to external and internal diversity of the media system are emphasized, as well as its capacity to promote a pluralist debate.
Psychological Distress in Staff of a Social Services District Office: A Pilot Study

Jacqueline Caughey worked in a social services department as a fleldworker for 15 years before returning to full-time education. She graduated from the University of Plymouth in 1993 with a B.Sc. (Hons) degree in Psychology. She now works as Team Manager for Community Services, in a division of a social services department. She is currently undertaking an M.Sc. in Organisational Psychology at the University of Bristol.
Political Opinion Expressed in Social Media and Election Outcomes -US Presidential Elections2012

That media is the mirror of the society is more an indisputable fact than a communication theory. But do online social media, too, reflect public opinion to an extent which can be called accurate, given the intricacies of the network and complexity of the communication? With an assumption that they do, this research ventured to test the theory by consolidating political opinion expressed on online social media platforms preceding the 2012 US presidential elections and comparing it with the election results. That way, the strength of the correlation between the two variables the political opinion and sentiments expressed on online social media and the election result which is a representative of the general public opinion—can be deduced. Though it could be claimed logical to think that opinions expressed on the social media reflect public sentiments—since the content is generated by the public—there was a need to conduct a scientific study to test the strength of the correlation, that is, how far the consolidated social media opinion tallies with the electoral outcome, which will be the measurement of the general political lineation. The researchers chose Facebook and Twitter—the top two social networking websites—to conduct the research. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were the leading candidates contesting the US presidential elections. The researchers collected statistical data on the frequencies at which the terms ‘Obama’ and ‘Romney’ were mentioned on Twitter during a month preceding the elections. They also collected “tweets” at regular intervals during the above-said period with the mentions of the two terms and a manual sentiment analysis was performed on them. Based on the examination, the tweets were categorised as positive, negative and neutral for both the terms. On Facebook, the rate at which the number of ‘likes’ increased on the official fan pages of these two candidates was calculated. Sets of comments posted on their Facebook pages were also analysed and categorised as positive, negative and neutral. A consolidated political opinion was formed based on the data collected and compared with the election results, where the mandate was in favour of Obama. The study results pointed to a strong and positive correlation between the two variables, giving credence to the theory that online social
The impact on student performance of altering the assessment criteria around formative computer based assessments

Computer Based Assessment (CBA) is propounded as a technique which seeks to meet competing pressures within higher education, both economic and pedagogic. There is, however, a need to better understand the use of CBA across different subject areas and levels, identifying barriers and enablers to its efficacy whilst also ensuring its fit with other learning frameworks. This article considers, between two student cohorts, the impact of altering a CBA from a zero-staked formative to a low-stake summative instrument on a level one module for non-accounting specialists. The results show that whilst the student participation in the different elements of the module changed with a highly significant uptake of the assessment, there was a significant drop-off in seminar attendance, suggesting a substitutionary rather than a complementary learning resource. The performance of the students was not seen to change as a result of the revised assessment strategy. The results are discussed with suggestions made for further research.
Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users' Comments

This paper examines users' comments on the Facebook pages of 20 American academic libraries and subdivides them into 22 categories. A total of 3,513 posts were examined and analyzed in various ways, including how many of the posts included user comments and how many had none; how many comments were included in each post; and what the percentage of user participation was on the library walls, in terms of "likes" and comments. The most significant findings are that approximately 91% of the posts do not include any comments, over 82% of user participation is expressed via the "like" functionality and most comments on academic libraries' Facebook pages are not uploaded by prospective users (i.e., college and university faculty and students) but rather by library personnel, employees affiliated with the same institution as the library, and alumni.
Children's implicit and explicit weight-related attitudes

This study examined attitudes towards overweight peers among children in both middle (6–8 years) and late (9–13 years) childhood using implicit and explicit measures. Thirty-three children (17 middle group and 16 late group) completed a child-oriented version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), explicit rating scales and the Shared Activities Questionnaire (SAQ). Children in both age groups showed bias against overweight peers on both the implicit and explicit measures. Implications of these findings are discussed.
TEtranscripts: a package for including transposable elements in differential expression analysis of RNA-seq datasets

MOTIVATION Most RNA-seq data analysis software packages are not designed to handle the complexities involved in properly apportioning short sequencing reads to highly repetitive regions of the genome. These regions are often occupied by transposable elements (TEs), which make up between 20 and 80% of eukaryotic genomes. They can contribute a substantial portion of transcriptomic and genomic sequence reads, but are typically ignored in most analyses. RESULTS Here, we present a method and software package for including both gene- and TE-associated ambiguously mapped reads in differential expression analysis. Our method shows improved recovery of TE transcripts over other published expression analysis methods, in both synthetic data and qPCR/NanoString-validated published datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The source code, associated GTF files for TE annotation, and testing data are freely available at http://hammelllab.labsites. cshl.edu/software. CONTACT mhammell@cshl.edu. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Declined Guideline Adherence in Older Breast Cancer Patients: A Population‐Based Study in The Netherlands

Abstract: Older women with primary operable breast cancer might receive suboptimal care due to their advanced age. Although several studies reported age as an independent determinant for receiving none or less treatment according to accepted standards, prospective data are lacking. This study evaluates the adherence to a consensus protocol in unselected women aged 80 years and older in the Netherlands. Data were derived from the Dutch population‐based Cancer Registry held by the Comprehensive Cancer Centre East. In this study all female patients, 60 years and older, diagnosed with breast cancer TNM stage I–IIIa in the period 2001 until 2006 were selected. Applied treatment according to the Dutch guideline was compared for different age groups. Differences between age groups were evaluated using a chi‐square test. In total, 2336 breast cancer patients were studied. Treatment adherence was significantly lower for surgery, radiation therapy and systemic therapy in women aged 80 years and older, and all modalities were applied much less frequently, except for endocrine therapy which was more frequently applied in the oldest old. This study shows a sharp decline in guideline adherence for unselected women aged 80 years and older with primary operable breast cancer, with an observed shift from appropriate locoregional treatment toward endocrine therapy. Whether this approach is justified or not should preferably be tested prospectively.
A Comparison of Preferences for Instructional Objectives Between Teachers and Students

The preferences of a group of 92 fifth-grade students were compared with the preferences of a group of 14 music teachers for 20 common instructional objectives. Each objective was demonstrated for the students, who indicated on Likert-type scales how much they would like to achieve that objective. Teachers' responses on similar scales were obtained through written questionnaires. Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests revealed significant disparities between students and teachers for 10 of the objectives. The students' most favored objectives included instrumental playing within a tune context. Teacher-preferred objectives for which students' attitudes were generally negative included those that required listening and knowledge of harmonic and melodic rhythm and formal structure. In order that achievement may be demonstrated through student-preferred activities, it seems that restatement of objectives low in preference is desirable.
Estimating HIV-1 Transmission Routes for Patients With Unknown Risk Histories by Viral Sequence Phylogenetic Analyses

Objective:To estimate routes of transmission among HIV-infected persons with unknown-risk histories in China. Design/Method:All newly reported cases of HIV infection between year 1985 and 2009 were obtained from the National Databank of Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC). A large number of unknown-risk HIV-positive samples were found. To estimate the transmission routes, HIV gag sequences were amplified by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and phylogenetically analyzed. The cases with unknown-risk history were compared with those with known-risk histories from the same local region and time period. A statistical model was developed to predict the transmission routes and was validated on known-risk samples, before testing 324 unknown-risk samples collected from 1996 to 2006. Results:Newly reported cases of HIV infection in China increased steadily between 1985 and 2009, from just a handful of cases to 30,340 in 2009. Injecting drug use (IDU) was the dominant route of transmission among reported cases in the early years and decreased from 83.4% in 1985–2001 to 28.2% in 2009. Conversely, sexual transmission increased from 6.9% in 1985–2001 to 60.9% in 2009. Among the 324 unknown-risk HIV sequences collected from 1996 to 2006, our model identified 100 samples most likely transmitted by blood, 114 by IDU, and 110 by sexual transmission. Our validation samples showed that our model has 90.8%, 94.8%, and 69.6% sensitivity and 87.3%, 87.5%, and 85.5% specificity, for blood, IDU, and sexual transmission, respectively. Conclusions:We developed a model to estimate transmission route of unknown-risk HIV-positive samples and found that these unknown-risk patients could be transmitted by blood, IDU, or sex.
Meeting report of the international liver transplantation society's 18th annual international congress: Hilton San Francisco Hotel, San Francisco, CA, May 16‐19, 2012

From May 16–19, 2012, the International Liver Transplantation Society held its annual congress in San Francisco, CA. More than 1300 registrants attended the meeting, which included a premeeting conference entitled Balancing Risk in Liver Transplantation, focused topic sessions, and a variety of oral and poster presentations. This report is not all‐inclusive and focuses on specific research abstracts on key topics in liver transplantation. As always, the new data herein are presented in the context of the published literature to further enhance knowledge in the field. Liver Transpl 19:27–35, 2013. © 2012 AASLD.
Motion sickness symptoms in a ship motion simulator: effects of inside, outside, and no view.

INTRODUCTION Vehicle motion characteristics differ between air, road, and sea environments, both vestibularly and visually. Effects of vision on motion sickness have been studied before, though less systematically in a naval setting. It is hypothesized that appropriate visual information on self-motion is beneficial in a naval setting and that task performance is likely reduced as sickness increases. METHODS Using a within-subjects design, 24 subjects were exposed to 30 min of motion in a ship's bridge motion simulator with 3 visual conditions: an Earth-fixed outside view; an inside view that moved with the subjects; and a blindfolded condition. Subjective sickness symptoms and severity were rated repeatedly before, during, and after motion exposure. During the motion, subjects performed a mental task. RESULTS Though not excessive, sickness was highest in the inside viewing condition, intermediate in the outside viewing condition, and least in the blindfolded condition. The blindfolded condition was equally as bad as the inside viewing condition during the first 5-10 min of motion exposure. The overall temporal increase of sickness during motion was about equal to the decrease during recovery. No effect of sickness on task performance was observed. DISCUSSION Most sickness in a naval setting is observed when the visual environment moves with the subjects, as has been reported in other environments, such as cars. Only mild sickness, caused by moderate motions, was provoked in this study and was alleviated by the performance task. A non-linear brain mechanism integrating visual and vestibular information may explain why the least sickness was observed when subjects were blindfolded.
Peptidyl transferase: protein, ribonucleoprotein, or RNA?

Peptide bonds in proteins are formed on the ribosome by an enzymatic activity called peptidyl transferase (11). The first era of peptidyl transferase research began with the demonstration that this enzyme is an integral part of the ribosome itself (11). Monro and collaborators (18) went on to devise the fragment reaction, a simple peptidyl transferase assay in which the P-site tRNA is replaced by an oligonucleotide, such as CAACCA-(fMet), and the A-site tRNA is replaced by the antibiotic puromycin (Fig. 1). Puromycin contains an aminoacyl-adenosine analog resembling the 3' terminus of an aminoacylated tRNA and donates its amino group to the carbonyl radical of the peptidyl substrate to form a product containing a peptide bond, in this case fMet-puromycin. Although the fragment reaction requires the presence of 33% ethanol or methanol, the authenticity of the fragment reaction is established by the fact that in Escherichia coli ribosomes, it is specifically inhibited by antibiotics, such as chloramphenicol, carbomycin, and lincomycin, which are known to inhibit peptide bond formation specifically under physiological conditions in vitro and in vivo (6). The fragment reaction has very simple requirements; besides the Aand P-site substrates and alcohol, it needs only the 50S ribosomal subunit and magnesium and potassium ions. No mRNA, 30S subunits, translational factors, GTP, ATP, or even intact tRNAs are required. Thus, this system allows one to separate the relatively simple task of peptide bond formation from the highly complex process of translation. More importantly, it is reasonable to expect that catalysis of this model reaction could eventually be carried out with only a small substructure of the 50S ribosomal subunit. Experiments by Staehelin and Monro in the late 1960s showed that even complete 50S particles were not required. By banding subunits in cesium chloride density gradients, Staehelin et al. (24) were able to show that core particles lacking several ribosomal proteins retained high levels of peptidyl transferase activity. Removal of additional proteins, however, eventually resulted in loss of activity, which could be restored by reconstitution of the cores with the split proteins. Similar results were obtained by other groups, stripping proteins with LiCl (17, 19). It was shown that a single split protein, L16, was responsible for restoration of the activity to the protein-depleted cores (17). Moreover, nearly half of the 30-odd large-subunit proteins were completely absent in the resulting active reconstituted particles. Excitement over the possible catalytic role of L16 diminished when it was shown that this protein was required for maintaining the correct three-dimensional folding of the particles (28). In fact, no isolated protein or mixture of RNA-free ribosomal proteins has ever been shown to catalyze the peptidyl transferase reaction. By reconstitution of rRNA with various partial mixtures of 50S proteins, Nierhaus and coworkers (10) narrowed the essential proteins down to a relatively small cadre that included L2, L3, L4, L15, and L16.
Are Urban Black Families Nuclear? A Comparative Study of Black and White South African Family Norms

Abstract The debate over whether black South Africans are in the process of transition from an extended lineage-based consanguinal family system to a Western style nuclear conjugal system has focused primarily on household composition. Another way of assessing this supposed transition is to examine the strength of verbal commitment to Western conjugal family norms. A set of statements about appropriate family behaviour was devised and used to compare the responses of three groups of South Africans: urban whites, urban blacks and rural blacks. We found that urban blacks respond to some statements like rural blacks but to others like urban whites. In matters of family and kinship, urban blacks are still influenced by a distinctive African cultural approach to kinship as well as adapting their views in light of new urban experiences.
Dimensions of Psychological Capital in a U.S. Suburb and High School: Identities for Neoliberal Times

In this article, we describe the identities of U.S. suburban high school students as they attempt to ensure their “market relevance” in a neoliberal era. The data are drawn from a four-year ethnographic study of the construction of educational advantage conducted by a diverse five-person research team. These identities were characterized by strong agentic beliefs, predispositions to exert control, deeply held attachments to individual success, highly developed self-advocacy skills, precociously circumscribed aspirations, keen awareness of new forms of cultural capital, self-consciously cultivated work ethics, and habituation to stress and fatigue. The study uncovered gender and racial differences in the acquisition of specific components of these identities, which are attributed in part to larger contextual factors, such as the subordination of the school's efforts to meet the needs of minority students to its broader goals of remaining competitive. Overall, we interpret these identity characteristics as components of psychological capital that these young people developed to manage risks: in particular, their ability to achieve “success” in a future characterized by acute competition, declining social support, and uncertainty. [identity, neoliberalism, social stratification, high school, United States]
Absolute Geometry Calibration of Distributed Microphone Arrays in an Audio-Visual Sensor Network

Joint audio-visual speaker tracking requires that the locations of microphones and cameras are known and that they are given in a common coordinate system. Sensor self-localization algorithms, however, are usually separately developed for either the acoustic or the visual modality and return their positions in a modality specific coordinate system, often with an unknown rotation, scaling and translation between the two. In this paper we propose two techniques to determine the positions of acoustic sensors in a common coordinate system, based on audio-visual correlates, i.e., events that are localized by both, microphones and cameras separately. The first approach maps the output of an acoustic self-calibration algorithm by estimating rotation, scale and translation to the visual coordinate system, while the second solves a joint system of equations with acoustic and visual directions of arrival as input. The evaluation of the two strategies reveals that joint calibration outperforms the mapping approach and achieves an overall calibration error of 0.20m even in reverberant environments.
Effect size matters: the role of language statistics and perceptual simulation in conceptual processing

The cognitive science literature increasingly demonstrates that perceptual representations are activated during conceptual processing. Such findings suggest that the debate on whether conceptual processing is predominantly symbolic or perceptual has been resolved. However, studies too frequently provide evidence for perceptual simulations without addressing whether other factors explain dependent variables as well, and if so, to what extent. The current paper examines effect sizes computed from 126 experiments in 51 published embodied cognition studies to clarify the conditions under which perceptual simulations are most important. Results showed that effects of language statistics tend to be as large or larger than those of perceptual stimulation. Moreover, factors that can be associated with immediate processing (button press, word processing) tend to reduce the effect size of perceptual simulation. These findings are considered in respect to the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis, which argues that language encodes perceptual information, with language statistics explaining quick, good-enough representations and perceptual simulation explaining more effortful, detailed representations.