Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Participatory Communication: A Practical Guide

Many communication practitioners and development workers face obstacles and challenges in their practical work. A participatory communication strategy offers a very specific perspective on how to articulate social processes, decision-making processes, and any change process for that matter. Participatory approaches are nothing new. However, what is new is the proliferation of institutions, especially governmental but also nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that seek participatory approaches in their development initiative. This guide concerns to provide perspectives, tools and experiences regarding how to go about it with participatory communication strategies. It is conceived as a guide to be of relevance and utility for development workers in the field. It is targeted at both at government and their officials, the World Bank staff, and at civil society. The particular relevance of this guide is three-fold: 1) placing the practitioner debate about participatory communication within a conceptual framework, allowing the practitioner who reads this to position him or herself conceptually, understanding some of the possible implications of opting for one or another strategic approach in their use of communication; 2) providing an introduction to the use of a participatory communication approach to specific development projects as well as illustrating the use of participatory communication in broader social change processes; and 3) drawing generic lessons learned from the experiences with participatory communication.
Bacterial carbohydrate-degrading capacity in foal faeces: changes from birth to pre-weaning and the impact of maternal supplementation with fermented feed products

The present study aimed at (1) describing age-related changes in faecal bacterial functional groups involved in carbohydrate degradation and in their activities in foals (n 10) from birth (day (d) 0) to 6 months (d180) and (2) investigating the effect of maternal supplementation (five mares per treatment) from d − 45 to d60 with fermented feed products on response trends over time of the foal bacterial carbohydrate-degrading capacity. Maternal supplementation with fermented feed products stimulated foal growth from d0 to d60 and had an impact on the establishment of some digestive bacterial groups and their activities in foals from d0 to d5 but not in the longer term. Irrespective of the maternal treatment, total bacteria, total anaerobic, lactate-utilising and amylolytic bacteria were established immediately after birth (P< 0·05) and were active as shown by the significant increase in total volatile fatty acids. In the foals of supplemented mares, total anaerobes and lactate utilisers were established rapidly between d0 and d2 (P= 0·021 and 0·066, respectively) and the increase in the percentage of propionate occurred earlier (P= 0·013). Maternal supplementation had no effect on the establishment of fibrolytic bacteria and their activity. Cellulolytic bacteria and Fibrobacter succinogenes first appeared at d2 and d5, and increased progressively, reaching stable values at d30 and d60, respectively. From the second week of life, the increase in the molar percentage of acetate and the ratio (acetate+butyrate):propionate (P< 0·05) suggested that fibrolytic activity had begun. From d60, only minor changes in bacterial composition and activities occurred, showing that the bacterial carbohydrate-degrading capacity was established at 2 months of age.
Changes and function of circulating endothelial progenitor cells in patients with cerebral aneurysm

Endothelial dysfunction is a trigger for the formation of cerebral aneurysm (CA). The circulating endothelial progenitor cell (EPC) plays an important role in postnatal vasculogenesis and reduction of endothelial injury. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that decreased number and impaired function of circulating EPCs correlate with CA formation in patients. Blood circulating EPCs were identified by flow cytometry. The level of plasma vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) was measured by ELISA. Circulating EPCs from patients (n = 27) were cultured in vitro, and the function of EPCs was evaluated by cell migration and senescence‐associated β‐galactosidase activity. The number of circulating EPCs was significantly decreased in both unruptured and ruptured CA patients compared with healthy control subjects. Impaired migratory capacity and elevated cellular senescence of cultured EPCs were observed in patients with CA (ruptured and unruptured). The percentages of EPC senescence in patients with CAs were significantly and negatively correlated with the number of circulating EPCs. In addition, there were higher levels of plasma VEGF in CA patients compared with healthy control subjects. Our results show that the numbers and functions of circulating EPCs are reduced in patients with CAs. These findings suggest that the decreased number and impaired function of circulating EPCs in CA patients may contribute to the pathophysiological process of aneurysm formation. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Sources and the news from Africa: Why are there no skyscrapers in Nigeria?

Abstract This article advances the discussion on the effect of mediated communication in cultural appreciation and integration, by examining one of the most important factors in news and how it impacts on media representation. Specifically, it interrogates the representation of Nigeria in the UK news media, to gauge the perception of global news media towards the strides made by African nations in adopting a democratic and more open and accountable form of governance. It identifies the role of sources, expert opinions and travel guides in representation, arguing that to appropriately understand the representation of Africa, a critical account must be taken of the nature and characteristics of sources accessed by international news media. It considers the wider social and economic implications of media–sources relations, and gives insight into the extent to which mediated communication can contribute to cultural understanding and global development.
Insensitive test for keratins.

To the Editor:—The paper by Kawai el al, "Immunohistochemical Study of Pulmonary Adenocarcinoma," in my opinion, may be misleading to your readers. Their findings of keratin in only 29% of well differentiated adenocarcinomas clearly indicates that they have used an insensitive technique (or antibody). In our hands, and in those of others, virtually all adenocarcinomas, regardless of site of origin or degree of differentiation can be shown to express keratins if proper technique and antibodies to low-molecular-weight keratins are used. Furthermore, it is now clear that a fixed period of protease digestion, when formalin-fixed tissues are used, is responsible for considerable variation in the immunostaining for keratins because it is necessary to adjust the digestion according to the type of tissue and duration of fixation. Thus, the results obtained by Kawai et al. may simply reflect technical differences that would be difficult to reproduce from laboratory to laboratory.
Prevalence of sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity in the Korean population based on the Fourth Korean National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys.

BACKGROUND Sarcopenia is an important factor of functional impairment related to aging. This study is conducted to investigate the prevalence of sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity in Korean population. METHODS Representative Korean men (4,486) and women (5,999) aged 20 years or older were analyzed from the Fourth Korean National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys. Sarcopenia was classified into Class I defined relative skeletal muscle mass loss within 1-2 SD of the gender-specific mean for healthy young adults and Class II below 2 SD. Relative skeletal muscle mass was represented by the appendicular skeletal muscle mass adjusted by height and body weight. Sarcopenic obesity was considered present in Class II sarcopenic participants whose waist circumference was more than or equal to 90 cm for men and more than or equal to 85 cm for women, respectively. RESULTS The prevalence of Class II sarcopenia in the Korean elderly population was 12.4% for men and 0.1% for women by height-adjusted definition and 9.7% for men and 11.8% for women by weight-adjusted definition. The prevalence of sarcopenic obesity was 7.6% for men and 9.1% for women by weight-adjusted definition but nearly zero for men and women by height-adjusted definition. The prevalence of sarcopenia increased with age for men but for women only when applied with weight-adjusted definition. CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity differs by gender and definition criteria. The height-adjusted definition may tend to underestimate the prevalence of sarcopenia and sarcopenic obesity, especially in women.
Variation in Lignin Content and Composition (Mechanisms of Control and Implications for the Genetic Improvement of Plants)

Lignin, a complex phenolic polymer, is important for mechanical support, water transport, and defense in vaseular plants. Compressive strength and hydrophobicity of xylem cell walls are imparted by the lignin polymer, which is deposited during the terminal differentiation of tracheids and other cell types. The resistance of xylem to compressive stresses imposed by water transport and by the mass of the plants is important to growth and development. In addition, the insolubility and complexity of the lignin polymer makes it resistant to degradation by most microorganisms. Therefore, lignin serves an important function in plant defense. Variation in lignin content, composition, and location is likely to affect these essential processes. The constraints on the amount, composition, and localization of lignin for normal xylem function and plant defense are not known. Lignin composition, quantity, and distribution also affect the agroindustrial uses of plant material. Digestibility and dietary conversion of herbaceous crops are affected by differences in lignin content and composition (Akin et al., 1986, 1991). Lignin is an undesirable component in the conversion of wood into pulp and paper; remova1 of lignin is a major step in the paper making process. Furthermore, the resistance of lignin to microbial degradation enhances its persistence in soils. Lignin is, therefore, a significant component in the global carbon cycle. The mechanisms of control of lignin composition and quantity have wide implications regarding the adaptation and evolution of land plants and provide a basis for improved genetic manipulation of lignin for agroindustrial end uses. In this Update, we will focus on the levels of control of lignin variation, including (a) metabolic control, (b) regulation of individual enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway, and (c) regulation of gene expression. These levels of regulation affect variation in lignin content, quality, and distribution. Finally, the implications of these regulatory mechanisms for the genetic improvement of lignin for
MIPS: An Efficient Global Parametrization Method

Abstract : The problem of parametrizing 3D data points is fundamental for many applications in computer-aided geometric design, e.g., surface fitting, texture mapping, and remeshing. We present a new method for constructing a global parametrization of a triangulated (topologically disk-like) surface over a planar region with minimal distortion. In contrast to many existing approaches which need the boundary of the parametrization to be fixed in advance, the boundary develops naturally with this new algorithm.
Massively-Parallel Neuromonitoring and Neurostimulation Rodent Headset With Nanotextured Flexible Microelectrodes

We present a compact wireless headset for simultaneous multi-site neuromonitoring and neurostimulation in the rodent brain. The system comprises flexible-shaft microelectrodes, neural amplifiers, neurostimulators, a digital time-division multiplexer (TDM), a micro-controller and a ZigBee wireless transceiver. The system is built by parallelizing up to four 0.35 μm CMOS integrated circuits (each having 256 neural amplifiers and 64 neurostimulators) to provide a total maximum of 1024 neural amplifiers and 256 neurostimulators. Each bipolar neural amplifier features 54 dB-72 dB adjustable gain, 1 Hz-5 kHz adjustable bandwidth with an input-referred noise of 7.99 μVrms and dissipates 12.9 μW. Each current-mode bipolar neurostimulator generates programmable arbitrary-waveform biphasic current in the range of 20-250 μA and dissipates 2.6 μW in the stand-by mode. Reconfigurability is provided by stacking a set of dedicated mini-PCBs that share a common signaling bus within as small as 22×30×15 mm3 volume. The system features flexible polyimide-based microelectrode array design that is not brittle and increases pad packing density. Pad nanotexturing by electrodeposition reduces the electrode-tissue interface impedance from an average of 2 MΩ to 30 kΩ at 100 Hz. The rodent headset and the microelectrode array have been experimentally validated in vivo in freely moving rats for two months. We demonstrate 92.8 percent seizure rate reduction by responsive neurostimulation in an acute epilepsy rat model.
Conditional accuracy in response interference tasks: Evidence from the Eriksen flanker task and the spatial conflict task

Two well-known response interference tasks are the Eriksen flanker task and the spatial conflict task. The tasks are logically equivalent, and comparable effects of current and previous stimulus type (congruent or incongruent) have been shown with regard to reaction time (RT). Here, we investigated whether interference and sequential trial effects also had comparable effects on accuracy. We specifically tested whether these effects interacted with the speed of responding using conditional accuracy functions (CAFs). The CAFs revealed that in both tasks congruency and sequential trial effects on accuracy are found only in trials with fast responses (< 600 ms). Sequential trial effects on accuracy were weaker for the flanker task than for the spatial conflict task. In very fast trials (< 400 ms) response activation by distracting flankers led to below-chance performance in the flanker task, but response activation by incongruent spatial location did not lead to below-chance performance in the spatial conflict task. The pattern of results hints at subtle differences in processing architecture between the tasks.
Ready to Practise?: Social Workers and Probation Officers: Their Training and First Year in Work

The foundations of the study social work students and their courses theoretical influences and perspectives placements and supervision in training value issues the match between specialism, course and work courses and readiness, practioner and senior views ending courses, the beginning practise - the matching of expectations supervision in the first year at work induction and in-service training the changing nature of social work developing professional education in social work.
Mercedes, a Term-in-Context Highlighter

It happens very often that researchers in Terminology need to know about the terms included in a given LSP corpus. One possibility is to run a term extractor but in this case such a tool provides just term candidates, but not valid terms. Therefore, it is mandatory a term validation process that is not always easy and affordable. A different option is to take profit of the public lexical resources (dictionaries and glossaries) that are increasingly freely available through the Internet. To accept only such a terms as the valid ones is usually enough for most of the researches. Mercedes, a term recogniser developed at the IULA, has been designed to fulfil this need. It integrates different public available lexical resources in order to provide researchers with a tool to show and highlight the valid terms (and its contexts) found in a certain text from a given domain. Mercedes consists of two main modules, the recogniser program and the dictionaries module. The recogniser can be run on specialised texts that have been previously tagged and lemmatised as part of the IULA’s Corpus Tecnic. After running the recogniser, the user can then navigate the output with any web browser.
Optimal risk-aware power procurement for data centers in day-ahead and real-time electricity markets

With the growing trend in the amount of power consumed by data centers, finding ways to cut their electricity bills has become an important and challenging problem. In this paper, our focus is on the cost reduction that data centers may achieve by exploiting the diversity in the price of electricity in day-ahead and real-time electricity markets. Based on a stochastic optimization framework, we propose to jointly select a data center's service rate and its power demand bids to the day-ahead and real-time electricity markets. In our analysis, we take into account service-level-agreements, risk management constraints, and statistical characteristics of workload and electricity prices. Using empirical electricity price and Internet workload data and through computer simulations, we show that by directly participating in the day-ahead and real-time electricity markets, data centers can significantly reduce their energy expenditure.
Missing the message: HIV/AIDS interventions and learners in South African Schools

In the last decade AIDS has become identified as the major factor threatening South African democracy and its people. Only in the last five years however has the impact of the epidemic on education been appreciated and interventions to prevent the spread of HIV initiated. In this article we examine the discourses of AIDS interventions in schools. We show how these discourses ignore gender and then examine how school learners make sense of the messages. We argue that the learners "hear" the messages in gender-distinctive ways and that the interventions "miss" their target. (excerpt)
Students and Teachers

"ARTHUR does not seem to have been brilliant at school, and at one time it seemed likely that he would spend his life working on the farm, but after he had started as a me(lical studenit his powers developed quickly. " Ihese words are taken from the appreciation of Sir Arthur Keith, written by Dr. Maurice Campbell in a recent number of the British Heart Journial. TIhe reasoni why I quote them here at the beginning of this paper is that they seem to strike a familiar note. How often has it been written of someone who achieved (leservecl fame in later life that he was not brilliant at school? And this leads us at once to the unsolved problem of how best to choose from the swarming applicants those who are the most likely to become good doctors. You will have noted that it was after Arthur Keith started as a medical student that his powers (levelope(l quickly. I like Dr. Maurice Campbell's instinctive choice of the word "powers," for it reminds me of the motto of the University of Bristol, which gives in three short words the true function of a university: VIM PROMOVET INSITrAM. "It enhances the inherent power. " In the selection of students, therefore, the first requirement appears to be to discover whether there is an inherent power already present and awaiting development. Here in Northern Ireland the problem has, at any rate until now, been less acute than in some other places. I am informed that the Medical School here can cope with the numbers of boys and girls of the school-leaving age who have been able to negotiate one or other of the academic hurdles which represent the entrance gate to the University, and also to find room for a few suitable candidates from elsewhere who have associations with Queen's and with Ulster, together with a small number of students coming from more distant parts of the Commonwealth who are recommended by the Colonial Office. Entrance to universities in general, and to the Queen's University in particular, does not become any easier as the years pass, and it will soon be required of the entrant that he will present his Senior Certificate decorated with two passes at advanced level; Much has been written, and much more will be written, about the scholastic education of the would-be medical student. Some urge the importance of a broadly-based …
Faint Infrared Flares from the Microquasar GRS 1915+105

We present simultaneous infrared and X-ray observations of the Galactic microquasar GRS 1915+105 using the Palomar 5 m telescope and Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer on 1998 July 10 UT. Over the course of 5 hr, we observed six faint infrared (IR) flares with peak amplitudes of ~0.3-0.6 mJy and durations of ~500-600 s. These flares are associated with X-ray soft-dip/soft-flare cycles, as opposed to the brighter IR flares associated with X-ray hard-dip/soft-flare cycles seen in 1997 August by Eikenberry et al. Interestingly, the IR flares begin before the X-ray oscillations, implying an "outside-in" origin of the IR/X-ray cycle. We also show that the quasi-steady IR excess in 1997 August is due to the pileup of similar faint flares. We discuss the implications of this flaring behavior for understanding jet formation in microquasars.
Patchy He ii reionization and the physical state of the intergalactic medium

We present a Monte Carlo model of He II reionization by quasi-stellar objects (QSOs, quasars) and its effect on the thermal state of the clumpy intergalactic medium (IGM). The model assumes that patchy reionization develops as a result of the discrete distribution of QSOs. It includes various recipes for the propagation of the ionizing photons, and treats photoheating self-consistently. The model predicts the fraction of He III, the mean temperature in the IGM, and the He II mean optical depth - all as a function of redshift. It also predicts the evolution of the local temperature versus density relation during reionization. Our findings are as follows. The fraction of Hem increases gradually until it becomes close to unity at z ∼ 2.8-3.0. The He II mean optical depth decreases from τ ∼ 10 at z ≥ 3.5 to τ ≤ 0.5 at z ≤ 2.5. The mean temperature rises gradually between z ∼ 4 and z ∼ 3 and declines slowly at lower redshifts. The model predicts a flattening of the temperature-density relation, with significant increase in the scatter during reionization at z ∼ 3. Towards the end of reionization, the scatter is reduced and a tight relation is re-established. This scatter should be incorporated in the analysis of the Lya forest at z ≤ 3. Comparison with observational results of the optical depth and the mean temperature at moderate redshifts constrains several key physical parameters.
ASL Skills, Fingerspelling Ability, Home Communication Context and Early Alphabetic Knowledge of Preschool-Aged Deaf Children

This article reports on a correlational study of language and home factors and their role in fostering the development of alphabetic knowledge among a national sample of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old deaf children. A structural equation model was constructed and tested in an examination of the combined impacts of student age, finger-spelling ability, and receptive American Sign Language ability on the participants’ ability to write, say, or sign letters of the English alphabet. The resulting models explained more than half of the variance in letter-writing ability and revealed significant independent effects of all three variables. Additionally, ASL skill revealed noteworthy indirect effects through its impact on fingerspelling, emphasizing the importance of the combination of signing and fingerspelling as predictors of emergent literacy in young deaf children. A follow-up analysis examined the correlations between age and letter writing, as well as those between ASL skill and letter writing, separately for subgroups (defined by parental hearing status and the use of sign in the home). This analysis revealed strong associations between ASL skill and letter writing in signing deaf and hearing families but not in nonsigning hearing families, raising a concern that deaf children in families with no early exposure to a visual language may be at greater risk for delay in their emerging reading abilities.