Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chinese values and health: A cultural-level examination

Abstract Previous research has identified two factors from the Chinese Value Survey, Integration vs Inwardness and Reputation vs Morality. In an effort to further establish their validities, the scores of a student sample on these two dimensions were calculated for each of 23 countries. These value profiles were then used as predictors of a number of health indices, after partialing out the confounding influence of per capita GNP. This country-level analysis revealed many relationships between the two value dimensions and 1. longevity measures, 2. modes of death, 3. health endangering behaviors, and 4. indicators of social well-being. These findings were related to theorizing about cultural emphases on individualism and on material success. It is hoped that this research will stimulate more comprehensive within-and cross-cultural research on the link between values and health.
Expression of Ectolipid Phosphate Phosphohydrolases in 3T3F442A Preadipocytes and Adipocytes

Because of its production by adipocytes and its ability to increase preadipocyte proliferation, lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) could participate in the paracrine control of adipose tissue development. The aim of the present study was to determine which enzyme activities are involved in exogenous LPA hydrolysis by preadipocytes and adipocytes. Using a quantitative method, we observed that extracellular LPA rapidly disappeared from the culture medium of 3T3F442A preadipocytes. This disappearance was strongly slowed down in the presence of the phosphatase inhibitors, sodium vanadate and sodium pervanadate. By using [33P]LPA on intact 3T3F442A preadipocytes, we found that 90% of LPA hydrolysis resulted from LPA phosphatase activity biochemically related to previously described ectolipid phosphate phosphohydrolases (LPPs). Quantitative real time reverse transcriptase-PCR revealed that 3T3F442A preadipocytes expressed mRNAs of three known Lpp gene subtypes (1, 2, and 3), with a predominant expression of Lpp1 andLpp3. Differentiation of 3T3F442A preadipocytes into adipocytes led to an 80% reduction in ecto-LPA phosphatase activity, with a concomitant down-regulation in Lpp1,Lpp2, and Lpp3 mRNA expression. Despite this regulation, treatment of 3T3F442A adipocytes with sodium vanadate increased LPA production in the culture medium, suggesting the involvement of ecto-LPA phosphatase activity in the control of extracellular production of LPA by adipocytes. In conclusion, these data demonstrate that hydrolysis of extracellular LPA by preadipocytes and adipocytes mainly results from a dephosphorylation activity. This activity (i) occurs at the extracellular face of cell membrane, (ii) exhibits biochemical characteristics similar to those of the LPP, (iii) is negatively regulated during adipocyte differentiation, and (iv) plays an important role in the control of extracellular LPA production by adipocytes. Ecto-LPA phosphatase activity represents a potential target to control adipose tissue development.
Polyethylene Glycol-Conjugated Superoxide Dismutase Improves Recovery of Postischemic Hypercapnic Cerebral Blood Flow in Piglets

ABSTRACT: We tested the hypothesis that administering polyethylene glycol-conjugated superoxide dismutase (PEG-SOD) either before global cerebral ischemia or at the time of reperfusion would alter recovery of cerebral blood flow (CBF; microspheres) response to alteration in arterial Pco2 in pentobarbital-anesthetized, mechanically ventilated piglets (1 to 2-wk old). CBF was measured at an arterial Pco2 of approximately 3.3, 5.3, and 8.7 kPa before and 2 h after ischemia (10 min aortic cross clamp). To determine the effect of preischemic versus postischemic treatment with PEG-SOD, each piglet received two i. v. drug injections of either 30 000 U PEG-SOD or an equal volume of PEG diluent in a randomized, blinded fashion before ischemia and just before reperfusion. Cerebral oxygen consumption and somatosensory evoked potentials were measured during reperfusion as an assessment of brain function. During reperfusion, no group demonstrated delayed hypoperfusion. Hypercapnic CBF was less during reperfusion (48 ± 6 mL/min/100 g) compared with preischemia (69 ± 10 mL/min/100 g) in PEG/PEG-treated piglets. However, hypercapnic CBF during reperfusion was not different from preischemic values with either preischemic or postischemic PEG-SOD treatment. Improved return of hypercapnic CBF in PEG-SOD-treated piglets was not attributable to improved postischemic cerebral oxygen consumption. Somatosensory evoked potential amplitude was decreased similarly during reperfusion (approximately 25% of preischemic values) in all groups. We conclude that PEG-SOD alters CBF response to hypercapnia after transient global cerebral ischemia in piglets via a mechanism that is not related to altered oxygen consumption or electrical activity.
Alcohol and the Cardiovascular System

Alcohol can be beneficial or harmful to the cardiovascular system, depending on the amount consumed and the characteristics of the consumer. Of the numerous cellular and molecular mechanisms that are thought to explain the beneficial effects of moderate drinking, this article discusses four, involving (1) high density lipoproteins, (2) cellular signaling, (3) platelet function in blood clot formation, and (4) stimulation of blood clot dissolution. Although light-to-moderate drinking can protect against coronary artery disease, heavy alcohol consumption can damage the cardiovascular system, resulting in maladies such as heart muscle disorders, irregular heart rhythms, high blood pressure, and strokes. This article summarizes representative epidemiological and animal studies on these cardiovascular consequences of chronic heavy alcohol consumption and reviews mechanisms that have been suggested to explain alcohol’s effects.
The Capital Jury and Empathy: The Problem of Worthy and Unworthy Victims

Much debate and speculation has taken place over whether juries should be allowed to consider evidence concerning the victim in making their capital punishment decision. While an understanding of how capital juries use victim evidence cannot by itself resolve the debate, such an understanding can help better focus the moral and legal issues that are at stake. A review of the Capital Jury Project data from California suggests that capital juries are influenced by victim evidence, at least to the extent that the evidence pertains to the victim's actions leading up to the crime. A randomly chosen victim appears to tilt the jury towards a death sentence, both because juries see a defendant who preys upon a randomly chosen victim as the most dangerous and depraved of criminals, and because jurors are most likely to empathize with a victim who is engaged in everyday activities. By contrast, a victim who is engaged in high-risk or anti-social behavior leading up to the crime is less likely to invoke an empathetic response from the jury or to provoke a sense of outrage, which, in turn, appears to make the jury less inclined to impose a sentence of death. These findings suggest, therefore, that even without the formal admission of Victim Impact Evidence (VIE) at the penalty phase, victim evidence from the guilt phase will play a role in the sentencing decision, an effect that Justice Souter predicted in his Booth concurrence. Further research is needed to determine whether VIE has its own independent effect on the jury's sentencing decision or mainly serves to reinforce the jury's sentencing inclination coming out of the guilt phase. The indication that jurors are likely to empathize with certain victims also highlights the need to determine whether such empathy is limited to the victim's role in the crime (a factor the criminal law has traditionally accepted as legitimate) or extends further to illegitimate factors such as race and socioeconomic status.
From Victim to Perpetrator: Evolution of Risk Frames Related to Human–Cormorant Conflict in the Great Lakes

To better understand media coverage and perceptions of risk associated with human–cormorant conflicts, we adapted the notions of “victim” and “perpetrator” to the context of cormorant-related risks and applied them as risk frames in a content analysis. We characterized stories about cormorants in 140 U.S. and Canadian newspaper articles published between 1978 and 2007 to document how coverage has changed through time. The total number of stakeholder groups and risks perpetrated by cormorants identified in coverage increased over our study period, shifting the predominant risk frame applied to cormorants from victim to perpetrator. We discuss the implications of this shift and the use of risk frames in content analyses to inform risk communication.
American Campaign Techniques Worldwide

The ongoing process of professionalization and internationalization of electioneering and campaign practices in media-centered democracies is the central topic of this comparative study. Only recently have scholars in the United States begun to study the professional norms and standards of a new power elite: the professional political consultants. Prominent figures of the U.S. political consultancy business have worked as overseas consultants since the 1970s. In the 1980s, they concentrated on Latin America and Western Europe. Since 1989, Russia and the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe, as well as newly democratized countries in Asia and Africa, have become competitive marketplaces for American overseas consultants. Between 1998 and 1999, a sample of 502 political consultants and leading party managers in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, Russia, and Eastern Europe were interviewed about their professional experience and their concepts of campaigning, with the main focus on their professional evaluation of various campaign techniques and communication strategies. This article deals with the market-driven proliferation of American campaign techniques from a global perspective.
From clan narratives to clan politics

This essay focuses on clan narratives as cultural tools in a particular sociocultural setting where mass literacy meets mass media. It shows how the interactions between different producers of clan narratives – the news media, the academic establishment and an intellectualist movement for the recovery of Kyrgyz history and culture – have resulted in a profound reshaping of the content of clan genealogies, of the claims of their compilers and, more significantly, of the ways various social actors relate to clan identities. Based on these analyses, it is argued that social representations and social practices related to genealogy and clans have undergone significant changes over the last 15 years, and that the production and consumption of clan narratives have played a crucial role in this transformation.
Annotating and searching web tables using entities, types and relationships

Tables are a universal idiom to present relational data. Billions of tables on Web pages express entity references, attributes and relationships. This representation of relational world knowledge is usually considerably better than completely unstructured, free-format text. At the same time, unlike manually-created knowledge bases, relational information mined from "organic" Web tables need not be constrained by availability of precious editorial time. Unfortunately, in the absence of any formal, uniform schema imposed on Web tables, Web search cannot take advantage of these high-quality sources of relational information. In this paper we propose new machine learning techniques to annotate table cells with entities that they likely mention, table columns with types from which entities are drawn for cells in the column, and relations that pairs of table columns seek to express. We propose a new graphical model for making all these labeling decisions for each table simultaneously, rather than make separate local decisions for entities, types and relations. Experiments using the YAGO catalog, DB-Pedia, tables from Wikipedia, and over 25 million HTML tables from a 500 million page Web crawl uniformly show the superiority of our approach. We also evaluate the impact of better annotations on a prototype relational Web search tool. We demonstrate clear benefits of our annotations beyond indexing tables in a purely textual manner.
Identification of English Primary Stress and Bias toward Strong Word-initial Syllables: Native vs. Japanese Listeners

Identification of English primary stress in trochaic and iambic words was compared between English native listeners and Japanese listeners in an environment where the two stress patterns were not distinguished by pitch while other acoustic contrasts were kept intact. Native listeners and Japanese listeners showed opposite response patterns when the pitch pattern of the stimuli was made into flat: native listeners preferred more word-initial primary stress while Japanese listeners preferred more word-final primary stress. English listeners’ preference for word-initial stress can be accounted for by a language-specific factor, i.e., the most probable stress pattern in their native language vocabulary. On the other hand, Japanese listeners’ result can be explained that they are so sensitive to F0 information that they even interpret the flat contour as carrying an informative cue for prominence difference between the two syllables by assuming the presence of “declination”.
Suitability of endoscopic submucosal dissection for treatment of submucosal gastric cancers

Endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is not considered appropriate for all submucosal cancers owing to the risk of lymph node metastasis and difficulty estimating the deep margin status. This study aimed to determine predictive factors for lymph node metastases in submucosal cancer and to explore in which patients ESD might be feasible.
Genome sequence of the Asian Tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, reveals insights into its biology, genetics, and evolution

Significance Aedes albopictus is a highly adaptive species that thrives worldwide in tropical and temperate zones. From its origin in Asia, it has established itself on every continent except Antarctica. This expansion, coupled with its ability to vector the epidemic human diseases dengue and Chikungunya fevers, make it a significant global public health threat. A complete genome sequence and transcriptome data were obtained for the Ae. albopictus Foshan strain, a colony derived from mosquitoes from its historical origin. The large genome (1,967 Mb) comprises an abundance of repetitive DNA classes and expansions of the numbers of gene family members involved in insecticide resistance, diapause, sex determination, immunity, and olfaction. This large genome repertory and plasticity may contribute to its success as an invasive species. The Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is a highly successful invasive species that transmits a number of human viral diseases, including dengue and Chikungunya fevers. This species has a large genome with significant population-based size variation. The complete genome sequence was determined for the Foshan strain, an established laboratory colony derived from wild mosquitoes from southeastern China, a region within the historical range of the origin of the species. The genome comprises 1,967 Mb, the largest mosquito genome sequenced to date, and its size results principally from an abundance of repetitive DNA classes. In addition, expansions of the numbers of members in gene families involved in insecticide-resistance mechanisms, diapause, sex determination, immunity, and olfaction also contribute to the larger size. Portions of integrated flavivirus-like genomes support a shared evolutionary history of association of these viruses with their vector. The large genome repertory may contribute to the adaptability and success of Ae. albopictus as an invasive species.
Staphylococcal Enterotoxin B Stimulates Expansion of Autoreactive T Cells That Induce Apoptosis in Intestinal Epithelial Cells: Regulation of Autoreactive Responses by IL-101

T cell responses to self Ags and normal microbial flora are carefully regulated to prevent autoreactivity. Because IL-10-deficient mice develop colitis, and this response is triggered by luminal flora, we investigated whether IL-10 regulates the ability of microbial Ags to induce autoreactive T cells that could contribute to intestinal inflammation. T cells from wild-type mice were primed with staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) in vitro, which induced an autoreactive proliferative response to syngeneic feeder cells. The cells were predominately CD3+ and CD4+. T cells from IL-10-deficient mice were constitutively autoreactive, and SEB priming enhanced this further. The autoreactive, proliferative response of T cells from wild-type mice was suppressed by IL-10 in the primary or secondary culture, and this effect was inhibited by neutralizing Abs to the IL-10R. To confirm that an autoreactive repertoire was expanded after SEB priming, we used CBA/J mice (Mls-1a) in which autoreactive T cells recognizing the endogenous viral superantigen are depleted (Vβ6, 7, 8.1 TCR-bearing cells). However, SEB rescued these autoreactive T cell repertoires. Adding anti-MHC class II Ab blocked the autoreactive response. SEB-primed splenic or colonic T cells also induced apoptosis in syngeneic intestinal epithelial cells that was blocked significantly by IL-10. Thus, microbial Ags have the potential to abrogate self tolerance by stimulating autoreactive T cells that become cytolytic to target cells. IL-10 plays a protective role in maintaining self tolerance after microbial stimulation by preventing the activation of T cells that contribute to epithelial cell damage.
Tectonic stress and magma chamber size as controls on dike propagation : Constraints from the 1975-1984 Krafla rifting episode

[1] The best-studied dike intrusion events on a divergent plate boundary occurred along the Krafla segment of the northern rift zone in Iceland from 1975–1984. Seismic and geodetic measurements there showed that a central magma chamber fed dikes that propagated laterally many times the thickness of the lithosphere. The patterns of dike length, dike width, caldera subsidence, and lava extrusion strongly suggest that dike propagation is affected by tectonic stresses that change with each dike intrusion event and that magma pressures are linked to the dike opening. These observations have inspired us to develop a quantitative model for the lateral propagation of basaltic dikes away from a magma chamber. We assume dikes propagate as long as there is sufficient driving pressure, defined as the difference between magma pressure and tectonic stress at the dike tip. The opening dike and the magma chamber are treated as a closed system for a given dike intrusion event. During an event, magma pressure is reduced linearly with the magma volume withdrawn from the chamber. Relative tectonic tension in the lithosphere is reduced linearly as the dike width increases. A dike begins propagation when the driving pressure equals the “breakout” pressure needed to force the magma out of the chamber. It stops when the driving pressure reaches a minimum value. Generally, the dike width is proportional to this “stopping” pressure, and a reasonable value gives a width of 1 m. Besides the breakout and stopping pressures, the propagation distance depends on the initial distribution of tectonic stress and the thickness of the lithosphere cut by a dike. The intrusion of a dike changes the tectonic stress distribution so that subsequent dikes may propagate different distances and directions than the first dike. After a period of magma chamber refilling, a new dike can initiate if the breakout pressure is reached. For an idealized spreading segment the tectonic stress field evolves to produce a sequence of dikes propagating in one direction followed by a sequence of dikes propagating in the opposite direction. The first dike in each sequence should be the longest followed by successively shorter dikes. When tectonic stresses close to a magma chamber have been largely relieved, then extrusion of magma may start. The model pattern of dike propagation and extrusion is consistent with data from the Krafla episode. Magma chamber size should have a major effect on magmatic systems in other tectonic settings with larger magma chambers producing longer characteristic dikes.
Optimizing efficacy of Amphotericin B through nanomodification

The polyene antibiotic Amphotericin B (AMB) is one of the first therapeutic agents to be marketed commercially as nanosized formulations in which the drug is associated with lipids as liposomes or complexes. In this way, its renal toxicity is reduced and its therapeutic index improved. This review summarizes the particular properties of AMB which justify this type of formulation and the early work leading up to their development. The clinical results obtained in the treatment of fungal infections are reviewed and their activity against leishmaniasis is also evoked. Some newer formulations of AMB, based on both lipids and polymers are described. In particular, their potential by the oral and pulmonary routes are discussed. Finally, the development of targeted systems to deliver the drug to specific cells and tissues is considered.
Engineering the Brain Tumor Microenvironment Enhances the Efficacy of Dendritic Cell Vaccination: Implications for Clinical Trial Design

Purpose: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a deadly primary brain tumor. Clinical trials for GBM using dendritic cell (DC) vaccination resulted in antitumor immune responses. Herein, we tested the hypothesis that combining in situ (intratumoral) Ad-Flt3L/Ad-TK–mediated gene therapy with DC vaccination would increase therapeutic efficacy and antitumor immunity. Experimental Design: We first assessed the immunogenicity of tumor lysates generated by Ad-TK (+GCV), temozolomide (TMZ), or freeze/thawing cycles (FTC) in a syngeneic brain tumor model. We also assessed phenotypic markers, cytokine release, and phagocytosis of bone marrow–derived DCs generated by fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 ligand (Flt3L) + IL-6 or by granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and interleukin (IL) 4. Inhibition of tumor progression and production of anti-GBM antibodies was assessed following vaccination with (i) tumor cell lysates, (ii) DCs generated with either Flt3L/IL-6 or GM-CSF/IL-4 loaded with either Ad-TK/GCV-, TMZ-, or FTC-generated tumor lysates, or (iii) DCs in combination with in situ Ad-Flt3L/Ad-TK gene therapy. Results: DCs loaded with tumor cell lysates generated with either Ad-TK/GCV or TMZ led to increased levels of phagocytosis, therapeutic efficacy, and humoral immune response. In situ immunogene therapy in combination with DC vaccination led to brain tumor regression and long-term survival in about 90% of animals, a significant increase when compared with either therapy alone. Conclusions: Our results indicate that modifying the tumor microenvironment using intratumoral Ad-Flt3L/Ad-TK–mediated gene therapy potentiates therapeutic efficacy and antitumor immunity induced by DC vaccination. These data support novel phase I clinical trials to assess the safety and efficacy of this combined approach. Clin Cancer Res; 17(14); 4705–18. ©2011 AACR.