Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential effects of forskolin on tyrosine hydroxylase gene transcription in identified brainstem catecholaminergic neuronal subtypes in organotypic culture

The regulation of gene expression of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), the rate‐limiting enzyme in catecholamine synthesis, was studied in brainstem noradrenergic nuclei, locus coeruleus (LC), A2 and A1, in vitro. Several novel experimental approaches employed in this study included: (i) the development of a slice‐explant model in which these brainstem nuclei maintained a high survival of the noradrenergic neurons, an organotypic topology and the coexpression of two identifying markers in addition to TH, i.e. norepinephrine transporter (NET) and vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2); (ii) quantitative analysis of TH transcription in these nuclei was made using a labelled intronic probe to measure TH heteronuclear RNA (hnRNA) and (iii) the use of tetrodotoxin in the media to eliminate spontaneous neural activity in these nuclei, thereby providing a basal state as the starting point for the study of TH transcription under various pharmacological perturbations. In the presence of TTX, the adenylcyclase stimulator, forskolin, produced a 155% increase in LC, a 130% increase in A1, and a 220% increase in A2 in TH hnRNA as compared to control nuclei. This effect of forskolin was abolished in the LC and A1 by the PKA inhibitor, H89 (5 µm), but not by the MAP kinase pathway (MEK) inhibitor, PD98059 (75 µm). In contrast, the robust increase in TH transcription produced by forskolin in A2 neurons, was completely inhibited by PD98059, and only partially inhibited by H89, showing that induced TH transcription is mediated by different kinase pathways in specific central noradrenergic neuronal subtypes.
A Model of Moderation: Finding Skiba Points on a Slippery Slope

A simple model is considered that rewards ”moderation” finding the right balance between sliding down either of two ”slippery slopes”. Optimal solutions are computed as a function of two key parameters: (1) the cost of resisting the underlying uncontrolled dynamics and (2) the discount rate. Analytical expressions are derived for bifurcation lines separating regions where it is optimal to fight to stay balanced, to give in to the attraction of the ”left” or the ”right”, or to decide based on one’s initial state. The latter case includes situations both with and without so-called DechertNishimura-Skiba (DNS) points defining optimal solution strategies. The model is unusual for having two DNS points in a one-state model, having a single DNS point that bifurcates into two DNS points, and for the ability to explicitly graph regions within which DNS points occur in the 2-D parameter space. The latter helps give intuition and insight concerning conditions under which these interesting points occur. Running Head: Skiba Points in a Model of Moderation
Motivational interpretations of hindsight bias: An individual difference analysis

When individuals learn the outcome of an event or the correct answer to a question, they overestimate its prior predictability: that is, they tend to believe they “knew it all along. ” Cognitive and motivational interpretations of hindsight bias are briefly reviewed and a study designed to test the motivational interpretation is reported. Specifically, it was hypothesized that individual differences in the strengths of two motives, a need for predictability and a self-presentation motive, should be positively related to individual differences in the magnitude of hindsight bias. Sixty-eight subjects completed a Dogmatism Scale and an Intolerance for Ambiguity Scale (the predictability motive) and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (the self-presentation motive) before participating in a standard hindsight-bias paradigm. Measures of both motives, as well as a self-reported ego-involvement measure, were positively associated with the amount of hindsight bias exhibited. Implications of this result for interpretations of hindsight and other conceptually related phenomena are discussed.
Rosiglitazone and glimeperide: review of clinical results supporting a fixed dose combination

Type 2 diabetes has become a major burden to the health care systems worldwide. Among the drugs approved for this indication, glimepiride and rosiglitazone have gained substantial importance in routine use. While glimepiride stimulates β-cell secretion and leads to reduction of blood glucose values, rosiglitazone activates PPARγ and improves insulin resistance, at the vascular and metabolically active cells. Therefore, the combination of the two drugs may be an interesting approach to improve glycemic control and lower cardiovascular risk. A fixed combination of both drugs has been approved for clinical use in the US and EU. The combination of glimepiride and rosiglitazone is generally well tolerated and the use of a fixed combination may lead to improved adherence of the patients to their therapy. The purpose of this review is to evaluate the clinical data that have been published on this combination, appearing to represent a convenient way to obtain therapeutic targets in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.
The effects of marital and nonmarital union transition on health

This study examines the effects of marital and nonmarital union transition on health. Utilizing Canadian longitudinal data, we find that exiting both marriage and cohabitation seems to have similar effects: Dissolving either union tends to be associated with a decrease in physical health, mental health, or both. With possible selection effects eliminated and protection effects held constant, we find that remaining in either type of union generally is associated with poorer health. We speculate that decreased union quality may account for this inverse relationship, and that protection effects may explain much of the reported health gains associated with union life.
Innovation 101: Promoting Undergraduate Innovation Through a Two-Day Boot Camp

Over the years, many training methods for creativity and innovation have been developed. Despite these programs and research, further improvement is necessary, particularly in schools of technology and engineering education, where previous efforts have focused on developing solutions to defined problems, not in identifying and defining the problems themselves in ways that promote creative outcomes. This study presents initial efforts to develop an instructional program designed to teach innovation to undergraduate technology and engineering students. Results from a pre/posttest analysis using both the Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking and a survey with self-reported data indicate that the Innovation Boot Camp was successful because it (a) encapsulated innovation into a process that students could learn and apply, (b) engaged students in multidisciplinary groups, and (c) provided a hands-on, activities-oriented curriculum explicitly designed to enhance innovation. Notwithstanding, ideas for improvement and further research and development of the curriculum are described.
Attention-based LSTM with Semantic Consistency for Videos Captioning

Recent progress in using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for image description has motivated the exploration of their applications for automatically describing video content with natural language sentences. By taking a video as a sequence of features, LSTM model is trained on video-sentence pairs to learn association of a video to a sentence. However, most existing methods compress an entire video shot or frame into a static representation, without considering attention which allows for salient features. Furthermore, most existing approaches model the translating error, but ignore the correlations between sentence semantics and visual content. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named aLSTMs, an attention-based LSTM model with semantic consistency, to transfer videos to natural sentences. This framework integrates attention mechanism with LSTM to capture salient structures of video, and explores the correlation between multi-modal representations for generating sentences with rich semantic content. More specifically, we first propose an attention mechanism which uses the dynamic weighted sum of local 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and 3D CNN representations. Then, a LSTM decoder takes these visual features at time $t$ and the word-embedding feature at time $t$-$1$ to generate important words. Finally, we uses multi-modal embedding to map the visual and sentence features into a joint space to guarantee the semantic consistence of the sentence description and the video visual content. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method than the state-of-the-art baselines for video captioning in both BLEU and METEOR.
Effects of Feedforward Video Self-Modelling on Reading Fluency and Comprehension

Being able to read at a fluent rate confers many advantages on an individual in both educational and wider social contexts throughout life. To be a fluent reader means that the individual can sustain high accuracy while reading at a rate appropriate to the material and the setting, and implies the development of automaticity in the cognitive processes involved in reading. Fluency has not, however, been the focus of much research. In this study, an observational learning technique — feedforward video self-modelling (FFVSM) — was used to improve children's reading fluency. Eleven primary (elementary) school children aged between 72 and 108 months, four girls and seven boys, viewed edited video footage of themselves seemingly reading a difficult text at a fluent rate six times over a 2-week period. Reading performance (accuracy, comprehension and rate) was measured at pre- and post-test using the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, and fluency and comprehension scores were measured across the intervention period using the Science Research Associates Reading Laboratory (SRA) graded reading texts. The results showed that the majority of the children improved their reading fluency, comprehension and accuracy as well as reader self-perception (a proxy measure of self-efficacy). These positive results suggest that FFVSM could be a rapid, cost-effective intervention to be used within educational settings to promote fluent reading.
Dendritic Cell-Directed Vaccination with a Lentivector Encoding PSCA for Prostate Cancer in Mice

Many studies have demonstrated that prostate stem cell antigen (PSCA) is an attractive target for immunotherapy based on its overexpression in prostate tumor tissue, especially in some metastatic tissues. In this study, we evaluated dendritic cell (DC)-directed lentiviral vector (DCLV) encoding murine PSCA (DCLV-PSCA) as a novel tumor vaccine for prostate cancer in mouse models. We showed that DCLV-PSCA could preferentially deliver the PSCA antigen gene to DC-SIGN-expressing 293T cells and bone marrow-derived DCs (BMDCs). Direct immunization with the DCLV-PSCA in male C57BL/6 mice elicited robust PSCA-responsive CD8+ and CD4+ T cells in vivo. In a transgenic adenocarcinoma mouse prostate cell line (TRAMP-C1) synergetic tumor model, we further demonstrated that DCLV-PSCA-vaccinated mice could be protected from lethal tumor challenge in a prophylactic model, whereas slower tumor growth was observed in a therapeutic model. This DCLV-PSCA vaccine also showed efficacy in inhibiting tumor metastases using a PSCA-expressing B16-F10 model. Taken together, these data suggest that DCLV is a potent vaccine carrier for PSCA in delivering anti-prostate cancer immunity.
Is the Truth in Your Words? Distinguishing Children’s Deceptive and Truthful Statements

Children’s (N = 48) and adults’ (N = 28) truthful and deceptive statements were compared using a linguistics-based computer software program. Children (4 to 7 years of age) and adults (18 to 25 years of age) participated in a mock courtroom experiment, in which they were asked to recount either a true or fabricated event. Testimonies were then analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Software (LIWC; Pennebaker et al. 2007). This software has been previously used to detect adults’ deceptive statements (e.g., Bond and Lee, 2005). To date, no research has used this method on children’s narratives, nor has this software been used to compare those narratives to adult counterparts. Markers generated through the LIWC program achieved detection rates of 72.40% for samples of both children’s and adults’ narratives combined. In contrast, adult laypersons’ (N = 48) detection rates, for the same narratives (i.e., both children and adults) were close to chance. More specifically, detection rates were above chance for truth (65.00%) and below chance for lies (45.00%). Thus, the linguistic profile provided through LIWC yielded greater accuracy for evaluating the veracity of children’s and adults’ narratives compared to adult laypersons’ detection accuracy.
Patterns of calretinin, calbindin, and tyrosine‐hydroxylase expression are consistent with the prosomeric map of the frog diencephalon

This paper re‐examines a previously published segmental map of the frog diencephalon (Puelles et al. [ 1996 ] Brain Behav.Evol. 47:279–310) by means of immunocytochemical mapping of calretinin, calbindin, and tyrosine hydroxylase. The distribution of neuronal populations, axon tracts, and neuropils immunoreactive for these markers was studied in adult specimens of Rana perezi and Xenopus laevis sectioned sagittally or horizontally. Emphasis was placed on study of the relationship of observed chemoarchitectural boundaries with the postulated overall prosomeric organization and the schema of nuclear subdivisions we reported previously, based on acetylcholinesterase histochemistry and Nissl pattern in Rana. The data reveal a large‐scale correspondence with the segmental map in both species, although some differences were noted between Rana and Xenopus. Notably, retinorecipient neuropils were generally immunoreactive for calretinin only in Rana. Importantly, calretinin immunostaining underlines particularly well the transverse prosomeric boundaries of the dorsal thalamus. A number of nuclear subdivisions noted before with AChE were corroborated, and some novel subdivisions became apparent, particularly in the anterior nucleus of the dorsal thalamus and in the habenular complex. The mapping of tyrosine hydroxylase clarified the segmental distribution of the catecholaminergic cell groups in the frog forebrain, which is comparable to that observed in other vertebrates. J. Comp. Neurol. 419:96–121, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Jobs with Equality

can tolerate views and practices that are different from their own, especially when a society promotes individualism. The book excels in its examination of individualism in multiple areas and its engagement with multiple literatures. The most revealing studies examine how individual persons and institutions, particularly hierarchical and symbolic ones, contend with the contemporary ethos of individualism. The book would benefit from a concluding chapter that discusses the implications of its chapters’ findings, such as apparent rifts among citizenry or the present or anticipated destabilization of institutions such as organized religion. Moreover, such a conclusion could have proposed a cohesive agenda for future inquiry, rather than relegating these to the end of chapters. Alternatively, a conclusion could have shown how concurrent lines of inquiry in various subdisciplines help us to understand individualism in increasingly heterogeneous societies seeking to meld multiple interests. In particular, complementary research includes neoinstitutionalist studies of how individuals and institutions adjudicate between the individual and the larger collective, as well as work and occupations studies about how the New Economy has intensified conceptions of careers in individualistic and entrepreneurial rather than collective terms. At times, additional contextual details in the substantive chapters could have helped readers who are less familiar with the Netherlands. For example, when referring to the impact of the 1960s counterculture in Chapter One, more explication and references could help readers understand to what extent these were similar to shifts in their own countries. Students in specialty courses in culture, consumption, media, technology, religion, political sociology, and deviance may benefit from the chapters’ findings and discussion of the research methodologies used, including interviews, focus groups, survey data, and content analysis. Some may find the book appropriate for introductory courses about the relation between individuals and society or a graduate-level class in theory. The book can also inform discussions comparing other texts about the rationalization of society, such as George Ritzer’s (2000, 2005) works on McDonaldization. Overall, readers will find this book’s assortment of studies helpful for understanding individualization in several areas of society. These findings can help unpack curious puzzles elsewhere, such as the afore-mentioned Tea Partiers’ simultaneous disdain and embrace of government, as well as their scapegoating of immigrants, as opposed to business interests, for economic woes. The concept of individualism can unpack simmering tensions in cultural beliefs that conceive of individuals as self-reliant and selfexpressive versus embedded in a larger collective.
Comparative animal study of the antinociceptive efficacy of lamotrigine and gabapentin for the management of pain.

UNLABELLED Pain relief using drugs with high efficacy provides significant improvement in the patients' lives. Drugs like lamotrigine (LTG) and gabapentin (GBP) have the ability to overcome the symptoms of neuropathic pain. AIM The present study offers a comparative analysis of LTG and GBP efficacy in a rat model of nociceptive pain after single administration. METHOD Sixty-three Wistar-Bratislava rats randomized into 7 groups were included: a control group treated with saline solution and 6 groups treated with different doses of LTG and GBP. Nociceptive responses to thermal and mechanical stimulations were evaluated before and after drug administration, at different time intervals, using paw pressure and hot plate tests. The obtained data were statistically analyzed, with significance at p value < 0.05. RESULTS LTG 100 mg/kg and 50 mg/kg presented a significant analgesic effect in both mechanical and thermal tests, 1 and 2 hours after administration. GBP 100 mg/kg increased latency time in hot plate test. The effect of both anticonvulsant drugs occurred rapidly after administration, but had a short duration. CONCLUSIONS LTG and GBP had an analgesic effect in a single dose administration. The effect of LTG was more evident since it was observed in both tests. Their effect was dose dependent.
Embryonic Stem Cells Promoting Macrophage Survival and Function are Crucial for Teratoma Development

Stem cell therapies have had tremendous potential application for many diseases in recent years. However, the tumorigenic properties of stem cells restrict their potential clinical application; therefore, strategies for reducing the tumorigenic potential of stem cells must be established prior to transplantation. We have demonstrated that syngeneic transplantation of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) provokes an inflammatory response that involves the rapid recruitment of bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDMs). ESCs are able to prevent mature macrophages from macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) withdrawal-induced apoptosis, and thus prolong macrophage lifespan significantly by blocking various apoptotic pathways in an M-CSF-independent manner. ESCs express and secrete IL-34, which may be responsible for ESC-promoted macrophage survival. This anti-apoptotic effect of ESCs involves activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)1/2 and PI3K/Akt pathways and thus, inhibition of ERK1/2 and PI3K/AKT activation decreases ESC-induced macrophage survival. Functionally, ESC-treated macrophages also showed a higher level of phagocytic activity. ESCs further serve to polarize BMDMs into M2-like macrophages that exhibit most tumor-associated macrophage phenotypic and functional features. ESC-educated macrophages produce high levels of arginase-1, Tie-2, and TNF-α, which participate in angiogenesis and contribute to teratoma progression. Our study suggests that induction of M2-like macrophage activation is an important mechanism for teratoma development. Strategies targeting macrophages to inhibit teratoma development would increase the safety of ESC-based therapies, inasmuch as the depletion of macrophages completely inhibits ESC-induced angiogenesis and teratoma development.
Beyond city limits: Regional journalism and social capital

This article reports a pilot study which investigated the relationship between regional journalism and social capital in two regional locations in the Australian state of South Australia, and one in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The study aimed to explore the role of local media in facilitating community communication and understanding, and, through this, to shed light on their possible contribution to regional social capital. Although social capital is a contested notion, the article argues that most definitions can be placed into one of three broad categories, and that the results of the study suggest that local media facilitate connectivity in terms of each of these understandings. A number of themes emerged during the study which help to clarify and illuminate the role of regional media in setting the communication context for social capital. At the same time, however, the ways in which local journalists approached their work raised a number of professional and ethical issues. The article concludes that, despite these difficulties, local media at the sites studied appear to facilitate communication between different sections of the community to the benefit of that community, and to contribute to the development of social capital.
Conflict Diamonds: A New Dataset

Natural resources, and diamonds especially, are commonly believed to play a significant role in the onset and duration of armed civil conflict. Although there is ample case study evidence that diamonds and similar resources have been used by rebel groups to finance fighting, there are few systematic empirical studies assessing the role of lootable resources in civil conflict. This is largely due to lack of reliable data on production and location. In this article we discuss priorities for the collection of data on conflict-relevant resources and introduce a new dataset, DIADATA, that provides a comprehensive list of diamond deposits accompanied by geographic coordinates throughout the world. The dataset includes characteristics relevant to conflict such as production status and geological form of the deposit. Particularly important is the distinction between primary and secondary diamonds, because the latter are more easily lootable. The dataset incorporates a spatial as well as a temporal dimension.