Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Zinc administration modulates radiation-induced oxidative injury in lens of rat

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the antioxidant role of zinc (Zn) against radiation-induced cataract in the rat lens after total cranial irradiation with a single 5 Gray (Gy) dose of gamma irradiation. Materials and Methods: Twenty-one Sprague-Dawley rats were used for the experiment. The control group did not receive Zn or irradiation but received 1-ml saline orally plus sham-irradiation. The irradiation (IR) group received 5 Gy gamma irradiation to the total cranium as a single dose plus 0.1 ml physiological saline intraperitoneally. The IR plus Zn group received irradiation to total cranium plus 10 mg/kg/day Zn intraperitoneally. Biochemical parameters measured in rat lenses were carried out using spectrophotometric techniques. Results: Lens total (enzymatic plus non-enzymatic) superoxide scavenger activity (TSSA), glutathione reductase (GRD), and glutathione-S-transferase (GST) activities significantly increased in the IR plus Zn groups when compared with the IR group. However, TSSA, GRD and GST activities were significantly lower in the IR group when compared with the control group. Lens non-enzymatic superoxide scavenger activity (NSSA) in the IR plus Zn group was significantly increased compared to that of the IR group. Lens xanthine oxidase (XO) activity in the IR group significantly increased compared to that of both the control and IR plus Zn groups. Conclusion: Zn has clear antioxidant properties and prevented oxidative stress by scavenging free radicals generated by ionizing radiation in rat lenses.
Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self

Gender Articulated is a groundbreaking work of sociolinguistics that forges new connections between language-related fields and feminist theory. Refuting apolitical, essentialist perspectives on language and gender, the essays presented here examine a range of cultures, languages and settings. They explicitly connect feminist theory to language research. Some of the most distinguished scholars working in the field of language and gender today discuss such topics as Japanese women's appropriation of "men's language," the literary representation of lesbian discourse, the silencing of women on the Internet, cultural mediation and Spanish use at New Mexican weddings and the uses of silence in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings.
Home movies in participatory research: children as movie-makers

Visual methods with children have gained interest as social researchers search for participatory methods that align with the current conceptualisation of children as social agents. This paper describes the reflections and experiences of using the home movie as an innovative vehicle allowing access to children’s everyday life. This method was adapted and used to encourage high levels of child-led participation and minimise researcher input. This paper explores practical and methodological strengths, challenges, and ethical questions arising from the production of home movies by the children and suggests that the home movie is an acceptable means for generating insight into children’s perspectives and to produce and reflect visual representations of children’s social worlds.
Factors associated with absenteeism, presenteeism and activity impairment in patients in the first years of RA.

OBJECTIVES To understand the impact of the early years of RA on all aspects of work productivity, and determine how this is related to clinical markers. Previous research on work productivity has examined predominantly early retirement and absenteeism. The impact of reduced work performance (presenteeism) and activity impairment is less well understood in early RA populations. METHODS Working patients enrolled in an RA inception cohort were recruited into a nested study. A questionnaire incorporating the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment (WPAI) instrument was administered with a number of clinical outcomes, including the Multidimensional Health Assessment Questionnaire (MD-HAQ) and scales for pain, fatigue and patient assessment of disease patient global assessment (PtGA). RESULTS Analysis included 150 RA patients, with the mean age at onset being 48 years (s.d. 10 years) and disease duration from symptom onset being 49 months. Patients had relatively mild disease: MD-HAQ (0.6), pain (3.6), PtGA (3.6) and fatigue (4.6). Of the 92% patients working for pay, 19% reported missing work (absenteeism) in the past week due to their health, accounting for 46% of their working time. Even while at work, ∼25% of actual hours was lost due to poor health, while outside work 33% of patients' regular daily activities were prevented. In multivariate analyses, disease severity was associated with the presence of absenteeism, presenteeism and activity impairment. Patients able to self-schedule their work had lower presenteeism and activity impairment. CONCLUSIONS Productivity loss is common in patients in the first years of RA who are in paid work and was associated with work characteristics and adverse clinical outcomes.
Creative histories: Memories of past lives and measures of creativity.

Experiencing memories of past lives is anomalous in Western culture. Such experiences may signify an overinclusive cognitive style, associated with creative ability. Accordingly, are reports of past life memory (PLM) associated with creativity? Is PLM associated with measures of overinclusiveness? To investigate these issues, we conducted two studies. In study one, we recruited subjects who reported having recovered memories of previous lives, and compared them to demographically matched comparison subjects on measures of creativity and latent inhibition (LI). Relative to comparison subjects, those reporting PLM had significantly higher scores on a variety of creativity measures, but not significantly higher scores on creative achievement (p .10). The PLM subjects were significantly more likely to have low LI, an indicator of overinclusive cognition associated with creativity in high-IQ subjects (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2003). Partly replicating Carson et al.’s findings, low LI scores in subjects with high IQ scores predicted high scores on measures of divergent thinking and creativity, but not on a measure of creative achievement. In study two, we investigated the prevalence of past life beliefs and PLM among high-creative versus low-creative students. Relative to low-creative subjects, those high on creative achievement were significantly more likely to endorse both past life beliefs and report PLM. Further, both high(relative to low-) creative achievers and those with PLM (relative to those with no PLM) scored significantly higher on a schizotypal personality measure of overinclusive thinking.
Systemic Streptococcus dysgalactiae Subspecies equisimilis Infection in a Yorkshire Pig with Severe Disseminated Suppurative Meningoencephalomyelitis

ABSTRACT An 18-week-old female breeding Yorkshire pig displayed symptoms of astasia and subsequently died. Histologically, severe disseminated suppurative meningoencephalomyelitis was detected, as were numerous myocardial microabscesses. Gram-positive cocci were detected in these suppurative lesions, and these cocci reacted with an antibody against Streptococcus C group species. Gram-positive cocci were isolated from the liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lungs, pleural abscess and articular fluid of the right tarsal joint. The isolates were β-hemolytic, categorized into Lancefield group C and were identified as Streptococcus dysgalactiae subspecies equisimilis by analysis of the 16S ribosomal DNA sequence. This is the first report of systemic S. equisimilis infection in a pig with severe disseminated suppurative meningoencephalomyelitis.
Public Space

Drawing on William Dawes’ unpublished notebooks on the Indigenous languages spoken around Sydney Cove at the time of white settlement, this article hopes to provoke critical reflection on the limits of the law. Dawes’ record of communication with Patyegarang documents a transaction that was both political and erotic, both about the law and in defiance of it. In performances that were gestural as well as verbal, they marked out a middle ground where the laws governing both of them were placed in parentheses and new, provisional, rules of exchange improvised. This article notices the existence of this middle ground, and marks its disappearance in subsequent legal discourse about the status of Indigenous people. Ultimately, it offers a reflection on the laws that govern the meeting place which the middle ground underwrites. That is, before public space became fixed for the legally binding discourse of politics, it was mobile and self- constituting. Is this simply a myth or is it a mythopoetic mechanism for rethinking the grounding of law in Australia? If it is the latter, then the next step will be to establish a middle ground of exchange with Indigenous law-giving systems.
Toward Understanding New Sales Employees’ Participation in Marketing-Related Technology: Motivation, Voluntariness, and Past Performance

Firms want sales representatives to use social media technologies to connect with relational partners, including customers, suppliers, and other employees. As a result, firms attempt to recruit business students who are experienced with different forms of social media. The focus of this research is on high self-disclosure, low media-richness social media, such as blogging, that works well for central route persuasion. To better understand sales employee participation in blogging, we consider motivation to use sales- and marketing-related technology. This study extends the research on motivation by (1) distinguishing between three forms of motivation—intrinsic, extrinsic, and apathetic—and (2) exploring the potential moderating effects of (a) voluntariness on intention-to-use to actual use and (b) past performance on use to objective outcome. We collected data at two time periods for voluntary and involuntary respondents, and analyzed the data using PLS regression. We find that apathetic motivation appears independent of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Including apathetic motivation improves the explanatory power of motivation and extends the understanding of the moderating influence of voluntariness and individuals’ past performance in the model.
Threshold survey evaluating transmitted HIV drug resistance among public antenatal clinic clients in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Background Expanded access to HIV therapy in the developing world raises serious concerns regarding the potential emergence and transmission of drug-resistant HIV strains. Although HIV drug resistance surveillance is recommended to track transmitted HIV drug resistance among newly infected individuals, the financial constraints in resource-limited countries prohibit such surveillance on a regular basis. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently introduced guidelines to address this issue. Methods A survey was conducted in Ethiopia following the WHO guidelines to assess transmitted HIV drug resistance among recently HIV-infected individuals in Addis Ababa. Antiretroviral drug usage started 3 years earlier than commencement of the current expanded access to antiretroviral therapy in Ethiopia. Results Of 75 eligible samples, 39 (52%) were successfully sequenced and genotyped in the protease and reverse transcriptase region, using both the ViroSeq® and TrueGene® genotyping systems, and analysed for drug resistance mutations using an algorithm from the Stanford HIV Reverse Transcriptase and Protease Database. The analysis revealed that transmitted HIV drug resistance in Addis Ababa is below the 5% threshold level for all three classes of antiretrovirals. Conclusions The current first-line antiretroviral therapy strategy can be used with confidence in Ethiopia at this time; however, Ethiopia should conduct similar periodic surveys that include the capitals of Ethiopia's larger regional states to ensure early detection of any changes in the country's HIV drug resistance trend.
Circulating Liver-Specific miR-122 as a Novel Potential Biomarker for Diagnosis of Cholestatic Liver Injury

Background Circulating microRNA-122 (miR-122) has been increasingly reported to be a potential biomarker for drug-, viral-, alcohol- and chemical-induced liver injury. The present study was initiated to determine the potential of circulating miR-122 as a biomarker for cholestatic liver injury. Methods Both bile-duct ligation (BDL) mice and patients with biliary calculi were employed as cholestatic liver injury models, and serum miR-122 level was determined by stem-loop real-time reverse-transcription PCR (SLqRT-PCR). All quantitative PCR values were normalized to those for U6 RNA and calculated with the 2−△Ct method. Results Serum miR-122 increased significantly after BDL-induced cholestatic injury and showed a similar time course to ALT concentrations. Compared with the sham controls, BDL mice had increased serum levels of miR-122 by 24.36±12.86, 423.63±322.89, 4.43±2.02 and 12.23±8.92 folds after 1, 3, 7 and 14 days, respectively. Moreover, serum miR-122 level was substantially higher in patients with biliary calculi than that in the healthy control group. In addition, patients with severe liver injury showed significantly higher levels of serum miR-122 when compared with healthy controls or patients with mild or moderate liver injury. Furthermore, serum miR-122 was found to show significant diagnostic value for biliary calculi by yielding an AUC (the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve) of 0.931 with 77.4% sensitivity and 96.4% specificity in discriminating biliary calculi from healthy controls. Conclusion Collectively, these data suggest that serum miR-122 has strong potential as a novel, specific and noninvasive biomarker for diagnosis of cholestasis-induced liver injury.
Self‐efficacy and independence from social influence: Discovery of an efficacy–difficulty effect

Past research has demonstrated that as tasks become more difficult, individuals tend to become more susceptible to the influence of others. This study investigates the potential of a specific self‐efficacy to moderate this effect. Participants exposed to easy maths problems were more independent of erroneous social influence on those problems than participants exposed to difficult maths problems. However, this effect was moderated by participants' mathematical self‐efficacy, with high self‐efficacy participants remaining more independent than low self‐efficacy participants under high problem difficulty. In addition, the effect of self‐efficacy on independence from social influence was mediated through participants' subjective perceptions of problem difficulty. Overall, these results demonstrate how behaviour in a social influence setting can result from the interaction of social/situational and individual difference variables. Portions of this research was presented at the 2003 annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Los Angeles, CA). I (TL) am grateful to Geoff MacDonald, Paul R. Nail, Gregory Pool, and Craig Wendorf for their contributions to this research. In addition, we thank the reviewers of this journal for their insightful thoughts and suggestions for this manuscript.
Media Frames and Cognitive Accessibility: What Do “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” Evoke in Partisan Minds?

Decades of research demonstrate that how the public thinks about a given issue is affected by how it is framed by the media. Typically, studies of framing vary how an issue is portrayed (often, by altering the text of written communication) and compare subsequent beliefs, attitudes, or preferences—taking a framing effect as evidence that a media frame (or frame in communication) instantiated a particular audience frame (or frame in thought). Less work, however, has attempted to measure frames in thought directly, which may illuminate cognitive mechanisms that underlie framing effects. In this vein, we describe a Web experiment (n = 400) in which US political partisans reported the extent to which a “global warming” or “climate change” frame brought to mind various climate-related concepts. Although the media frequently employ them interchangeably, these frames evoked distinct patterns of cognitive accessibility across partisans: Whereas conservatives associated heat-related impacts (rising temperatures, melting ice) more strongly with “global warming” than with “climate change,” liberals associated these impacts equally with both phrases. Discussion focuses on implications for media framing of climate issues and framing theory more broadly.
On the Accurate Performance Evaluation of the LTE-A Random Access Procedure and the Access Class Barring Scheme

The performance evaluation of the random access (RA) in LTE-A has recently become a major research topic as these networks are expected to play a major role in future 5G networks. Up to now, the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the RA in LTE-A have been obtained either by performing a large number of simulations or by means of analytic models that, oftentimes, sacrifice precision in exchange for simplicity. In this paper, we present an analytical model for the performance evaluation of the LTE-A RA procedure that incorporates the access class barring (ACB) scheme. By means of this model, each and every one of the KPIs suggested by the 3GPP can be obtained with minimal error when compared with results obtained by simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the most accurate analytical model, which can be easily adapted to incorporate modifications of network parameters and/or extensions to the LTE-A system. In addition, our model of the ACB scheme can be easily incorporated to other analytic models of similar nature without further modifications.
Matrix Metalloproteinase Inhibition Attenuates Left Ventricular Remodeling and Dysfunction in a Rat Model of Progressive Heart Failure

BackgroundMatrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activation contributes to tissue remodeling in several disease states, and increased MMP activity has been observed in left ventricular (LV) failure. The present study tested the hypothesis that MMP inhibition would influence LV remodeling and function in developing LV failure. Methods and ResultsLV size and function were measured in 5 groups of rats: (1) obese male spontaneously hypertensive heart failure rats (SHHF) at 9 months (n=10), (2) SHHF at 13 months (n=12), (3) SHHF rats treated with an MMP inhibitor during months 9 to 13 (PD166793 5 mg · kg−1 · d−1 PO; n=14), (4) normotensive Wistar-Furth rats (WF) at 9 months (n=12), and (5) WF at 13 months (n=12). Plasma concentrations of the MMP inhibitor (116±11 &mgr;mol/L) reduced in vitro LV myocardial MMP-2 activity by ≈100%. LV function and geometry were similar in WF rats at 9 and 13 months. LV peak +dP/dt was unchanged at 9 months in SHHF but by 13 months was reduced in the SHHF group compared with WF (3578±477 versus 5983±109 mm Hg/s, P ≤0.05). LV volume measured at an equivalent ex vivo pressure (10 mm Hg) was increased in SHHF at 9 months compared with WF (443±12 versus 563±33 mL, P ≤0.05) and increased further by 13 months (899±64 mL, P ≤0.05). LV myocardial MMP-2 activity was increased by ≈2-fold in SHHF at 9 and 13 months. With MMP inhibition, LV peak +dP/dt was similar to WF values and LV volume was reduced compared with untreated SHHF values (678±28 mL, P ≤0.05). ConclusionsMMP activity contributes to LV dilation and progression to LV dysfunction in a rodent HF model, and direct MMP inhibition can attenuate this process.
Insulin Resistance Compensation: Not Just a Matter of β-Cells?

The global epidemic of type 2 diabetes is largely secondary to insulin resistance induced by obesity and sedentary lifestyles. Most insulin-resistant subjects are able to increase β-cell secretion to meet the increased insulin demand and do not develop diabetes. However, when β-cell compensation fails, type 2 diabetes develops (1,2). Understanding the mechanisms of this compensatory response is of fundamental importance to elucidate the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes and has implications for the treatment of the disease. The capacity of β-cell mass to increase in response to insulin resistance is well established in rodents, where it has been able to prevent diabetes even in extreme conditions (3). In humans, β-cell mass expansion has been shown in normal physiological growth (4) and in insulin-resistant conditions such as pregnancy (5) and obesity (6–10). However, β-cell mass increment is more modest in obese humans than in rodents, has not been confirmed in all ethnic backgrounds (11), and shows a large variability among subjects (10,12). Current imaging techniques are not sensitive enough to accurately measure β-cell mass in vivo, and ethical considerations preclude obtaining pancreatic samples from living subjects. Thus, human β-cell mass has been determined in autopsied pancreata. The cross-sectional nature of the studies, the potential interference of pre- and postmortem processes, and the absence of …
Gender Differences In Correlates Of Marital Satisfaction

Abstract A sample of 51 couples was used to test the hypothesis that previously; reported gender differences in the utility of different predictors of marital satisfaction would not appear in dual-career couples where husbands and wives both have high commitment to their work relative to their family. From an initial sample of 89 couples, 25 dual-career couples and 26 traditional couples were selected on the basis of the relative commitments to work and family of each partner. A comparison of the correlates of marital satisfaction among husbands and wives in these two subsamples provided some support for the hypothesis. In traditional couples, discrepancy between preferred and actual roles, and appraisal of partner's performance of sex-typed roles were more highly related to females' than to males' marital satisfaction, while job satisfaction was a significant correlate of marital satisfaction among males but not among females. These gender differences were not observed in dual-career couples. Self-esteem.
HMM-Based Gain Modeling for Enhancement of Speech in Noise

Accurate modeling and estimation of speech and noise gains facilitate good performance of speech enhancement methods using data-driven prior models. In this paper, we propose a hidden Markov model (HMM)-based speech enhancement method using explicit gain modeling. Through the introduction of stochastic gain variables, energy variation in both speech and noise is explicitly modeled in a unified framework. The speech gain models the energy variations of the speech phones, typically due to differences in pronunciation and/or different vocalizations of individual speakers. The noise gain helps to improve the tracking of the time-varying energy of nonstationary noise. The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to perform offline estimation of the time-invariant model parameters. The time-varying model parameters are estimated online using the recursive EM algorithm. The proposed gain modeling techniques are applied to a novel Bayesian speech estimator, and the performance of the proposed enhancement method is evaluated through objective and subjective tests. The experimental results confirm the advantage of explicit gain modeling, particularly for nonstationary noise sources