Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conditional Müller Cell Ablation Causes Independent Neuronal and Vascular Pathologies in a Novel Transgenic Model

Müller cells are the major glia of the retina that serve numerous functions essential to retinal homeostasis, yet the contribution of Müller glial dysfunction to retinal diseases remains largely unknown. We have developed a transgenic model using a portion of the regulatory region of the retinaldehyde binding protein 1 gene for conditional Müller cell ablation and the consequences of primary Müller cell dysfunction have been studied in adult mice. We found that selective ablation of Müller cells led to photoreceptor apoptosis, vascular telangiectasis, blood–retinal barrier breakdown and, later, intraretinal neovascularization. These changes were accompanied by impaired retinal function and an imbalance between vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A) and pigment epithelium-derived factor. Intravitreal injection of ciliary neurotrophic factor inhibited photoreceptor injury but had no effect on the vasculopathy. Conversely, inhibition of VEGF-A activity attenuated vascular leak but did not protect photoreceptors. Our findings show that Müller glial deficiency may be an important upstream cause of retinal neuronal and vascular pathologies in retinal diseases. Combined neuroprotective and anti-angiogenic therapies may be required to treat Müller cell deficiency in retinal diseases and in other parts of the CNS associated with glial dysfunction.
Sociodemographic factors associated with physical activity in Mexican adults

Abstract Objective To estimate the physical activity level among Mexican adults and to establish the sociodemographic variables that may be linked to active lifestyles. Design Data from a cross-sectional survey were analysed. Physical activity was assessed using the short version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. The independent variables were sex, age, socio-economic status and size of town. Ordinal regression models were fitted to assess the association of physical activity levels with sociodemographic factors. Setting Fieldwork was conducted from November 2002 through April 2003; the non-response rate was 3·1 %. Subjects Data from a national representative sample (n 38 746) of Mexican adults aged >18 years old were analysed. Results Almost 60 % of the population was classified into the high physical activity level. Women were less active than men in rural areas; in urban areas, the opposite trend was observed. In women, higher socio-economic status was associated with less physical activity, while among men there were no differences. People from rural and urban areas had a higher probability of engaging in physical activity than those from cities. In urban localities and cities, respondents of low socio-economic status had a lower probability of engaging in physical activity. Conclusions Using a validated instrument to measure physical activity, we found that the prevalence of active lifestyle among Mexican adults was high. The socio-economic and gender inequalities are different according to size of town (i.e. an effect modifier), which must be considered in the design of policies and programmes to promote physical activity.
Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor Type 1 Increases Neointima Formation in Balloon-Injured Rat Carotid Arteries

Background—Elevated plasma levels of plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 (PAI-1) are associated with myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, and restenosis. PAI-1 is increased in atherosclerotic arteries and failed vein grafts. No experimental data, however, support a causal relationship between elevated PAI-1 expression and vascular lesions. Paradoxically, data generated in PAI-1 knockout mice suggest that PAI-1 might decrease lesion formation after arterial injury and that PAI-1 gene transfer might prevent restenosis. Methods and Results—Using the rat carotid balloon injury model and a PAI-1-expressing adenoviral vector, we tested whether elevated arterial PAI-1 expression would alter neointima formation. Compared with control-transduced arteries, neointima formation in PAI-1-transduced arteries was initially retarded. By 14 days, however, the intimas of PAI-1-transduced arteries were significantly larger than intimas of control-transduced arteries (1.6±0.1×105 versus 1.2±0.1×105 &mgr;m2, n=18 to 19, P <0.03). PAI-1 expression in individual arteries correlated with increased cell proliferation at 4 and 8 days after injury (R =0.6, P <0.02 and P <0.006). PAI-1 expression also correlated with fibrin(ogen) accumulation (R =0.77, P <0.001), and fibrin(ogen) accumulation correlated strongly with proliferation (R =0.86, P <0.00001). Conclusions—Increased expression of PAI-1 in the artery wall promotes neointima growth after balloon injury. Therefore, despite encouraging data generated in other animal models, PAI-1 is not a promising agent for gene therapy to prevent restenosis. Moreover, our data associate elevated PAI-1 expression with fibrin(ogen) accumulation and increased cell proliferation. These data suggest a mechanism to explain the association between elevated PAI-1 expression and the progression of arterial disease.
The Effect of Repeated Reading on the Pronunciation of Young EFL Learners

espanolEste estudio pretende analizar si el metodo de Lectura Repetitiva (Repeated Reading) mejorala pronunciacion de ninos de Educacion Primaria. Sepractico con ocho ni- nos de quinto curso queleyeronsistematicamente distintos pasajesdel mismo libro durante seis semanas. Los datos fueron recogidos con un pretesty tres post-tests, incluyendo una relectura del primer texto, lectura de un fragmento nuevo y entrevista oral.Los datos fueron analizados usando una clasificacion de tipos de errores en pronunciacion incluyendo vocales, consonantes y acentuacion. Los resultados indicaron que los ninos mejoraron su pronunciacion en los tres post-tests, especialmente al producir lengua oral libremente. EnglishThis study explores whether the Repeated Reading (RR) method can help young Spanish EFL learners improve their pronunciation. The study was carried out with eight 10-to-11year old children who systematically read different passages from the same storybook for six weeks. Data were collected in a pretest and three post-tests involving the re-reading of the original text, reading of an unknown textand an oral interview. Data were analyzed with a classification of pronunciation error types focusing on vowels and consonants. The results indicated that the children improved their pronunciation on the three posttests, especially when producing free speech.
Formation learning algorithms for mobile agents subject to 2-D dynamically changing topologies

In this paper, we consider a two-dimensional (2-D) formation problem for multi-agent systems subject to switching topologies that dynamically change along both a finite time axis and an infinite iteration axis. We present a distributed iterative learning control (ILC) algorithm via the nearest neighbor rules. By employing the 2-D approach, we develop both the asymptotic and exponentially fast convergence of our formation ILC, which can be guaranteed by conditions in terms of the spectral radius and the matrix norms, respectively.
Climate Engagement in a Digital Age: Exploring the Drivers of Participation in Climate Discourse Online in the Context of COP21

ABSTRACT Various scholars underscore the importance of public engagement with climate change to successfully respond to the challenges of global warming. However, although online media provide various new opportunities to actively engage in climate discourse so far very little is known about the drivers of this form of engagement. Against this background, this study tested a theoretical model on the effects of media and interpersonal communication on participation in climate discourse online using data from a representative online survey of German citizens (n = 1392) carried out while COP21. Overall, the results show that receiving information on climate change from social media (social networks, Twitter, blogs), active information seeking online and interpersonal conversations about COP21 strongly encourage participation in climate discourse online. Moreover, results provide relevant insights on the role of interest in climate politics, personal issue relevance and climate scepticism as preconditions of communication effects.
Neurosci Steven Laureys and Vincent Bonhomme

Major clinical endpoints of general anesthesia, such as the alteration of consciousness, are achieved through effects of anesthetic agents on the central nervous system, and, more precisely, on the brain. Historically, clinicians and researchers have always been interested in quantifying and characterizing those effects through recordings of surface brain electrical activity, namely electroencephalography (EEG). Over decades of research, the complex signal has been dissected to extract its core substance, with significant advances in the interpretation of the information it may contain. Methodological, engineering, statistical, mathematical, and computer progress now furnishes advanced tools that not only allow quantification of the effects of anesthesia, but also shed light on some aspects of anesthetic mechanisms. In this article, we will review how advanced EEG serves the anesthesiologist in that respect, but will not review other intraoperative utilities that have no direct relationship with consciousness, such as monitoring of brain and spinal cord integrity. We will start with a reminder of anesthestic effects on raw EEG and its time and frequency domain components, as well as a summary of the EEG analysis techniques of use for the anesthesiologist. This will introduce the description of the use of EEG to assess the depth of the hypnotic and anti-nociceptive components of anesthesia, and its clinical utility. The last part will describe the use of EEG for the understanding of mechanisms of anesthesia-induced alteration of consciousness. We will see how, eventually in association with transcranial magnetic stimulation, it allows exploring functional cerebral networks during anesthesia. We will also see how EEG recordings during anesthesia, and their sophisticated analysis, may help corroborate current theories of mental content generation.
Chapter 11: Swine FACILITIES AND ENVIRONMENT

S wine readily adapt to a variety of production sys-The level of management applied should be commensurate with the requirements of the production system to assure pig comfort. In certain systems, more stockmanship may be necessary to meet the needs of pigs. Specific attention should be paid to management of effective environmental temperature (Table 11-1), prevention of lengthy exposure to sun, ventilation, vapor pressure, floor condition, area per pig, manure management, quantity and quality of feed and water, and prevention of disease and distress. A predictable daily management routine allows pigs to develop a routine of their own. Animal care personnel should plan for swine management under climatic extremes and emergency conditions; personnel should be able to provide appropriate husbandry to minimize environmental stressors and animal distress. Animal care staff should be familiar with the behavior of normal pigs and of pigs experiencing stress or reduced well-being so that timely intervention can be applied. Attention should be given to pig dunging and resting preferences during both the design phase and the daily operation of swine facilities. Movement of manure and urine between pens should be minimized. Similarly, animal care personnel should take necessary precautions to prevent transmission of pathogens between pens and between facilities, even at the same location. Microenvironment The microenvironment consists of all factors external to the animal, which includes thermal environment (air temperature, air movement, and moisture); physical environment (pens, walls, and floors); social environment; and microbial environment. The thermal environment is probably one of the most difficult components to manage at times because pigs of different ages have different thermal requirements. Hence, it is important that pigs be managed based on their thermal needs during each stage of production. The lower critical temperature for younger pigs is higher than that of older pigs, thus a higher effective environmental temperature is required. The thermal environment should be managed so that the microenvironment is maintained as close to the zone of thermal neutrality for the age of the pig being housed (Table 11-1). Ventilation goals differ with changing seasons. A properly ventilated building is free of drafts and provides clean, fresh air without chilling the pigs. A minimal ventilation rate should be achieved in the winter, with air exchange being at its lowest rate but still efficient enough to remove moisture. Excessive moisture (>80%) provides a vehicle for microorganisms, wets the pigs, and damages insulation. As a rule …
A decision procedure for unitary linear quantum cellular automata

Linear quantum cellular automata were introduced recently as one of the models of quantum computing. A basic postulate of quantum mechanics imposes a strong constraint on any quantum machine: it has to be unitary, that is its time evolution operator has to be a unitary transformation. In this paper we give an efficient algorithm to decide if a linear quantum cellular automaton is unitary. The complexity of the algorithm is O(n(4r-3)/(r+1))=O(n/sup 4/) if the automaton has a continuous neighborhood of size r.
Inapproximability of Nash Equilibrium

We prove that finding an ε-approximate Nash equilibrium is PPAD-complete for constant ε and a particularly simple class of games: polymatrix, degree 3 graphical games, in which each player has only two actions. As corollaries, we also prove similar inapproximability results for Bayesian Nash equilibrium in a two-player incomplete information game with a constant number of actions, for relative ε-Nash equilibrium in a two-player game, for market equilibrium in a non-monotone market, for the generalized circuit problem defined by Chen et al. [4], and for approximate competitive equilibrium from equal incomes with indivisible goods.
Classifiers in Shiwilu (Kawapanan) in Northwestern Amazonian Perspective

Kawapanan is a little-known linguistic family from northwestern Amazonia composed of two languages, Shiwilu and Shawi. This article offers the first detailed account of a Kawapanan classifier system. Shiwilu classifying morphemes are analyzed in terms of their semantics, morphosyntax, and functions. In addition to describing a central property of a vanishing language, this work seeks to contribute to the discussion on the nominal categorization mechanisms of northwestern Amazonia, a topic especially relevant for linguistic typology and our understanding of language contact and areality in South America.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Effects of Daily Stress on Negative Mood

This article examines the influence of daily stressors on mental health in a community sample. Ss were 166 married couples who completed diaries each day for 6 weeks. In pooled within-person analyses, daily stressors explained up to 20% of the variance in mood. Interpersonal conflicts were by far the most distressing events. Furthermore, when stressors occurred on a series of days, emotional habituation occurred by the second day for almost all events except interpersonal conflicts. Contrary to certain theoretical accounts, multiple stressors on the same day did not exacerbate one another's effects; rather, an emotional plateau occurred. Finally, on days following a stressful event, mood was better than it would have been if the stressor had not happened. These results reveal the complex emotional effects of daily stressors, and in particular, they suggest that future investigations should focus primarily on interpersonal conflicts. In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that minor , everyday stressors influence health and psychological well-As a result, there has been a reorientation in stress research from a nearly exclusive emphasis on major events to an appreciation of the significance of minor environmental stressors. These minor stressors (e.g., work deadlines, marital arguments) are an important focus of research because they provide a means of describing the stressful features of enduring relationships (e.g., spouse, friend) and roles (e.g., worker, student). Despite the growing research interest in minor stressors, work to date has implicitly assumed that all minor stressors are equivalent. This is exemplified by the almost universal practice of aggregating these stressors into a summary measure for analytic purposes. Thus, with one notable exception (Stone, 1987), ~ there have been no studies of the differential effects of minor stressors on health and well-being. This type of aggrega-tion may obscure important variation in the microprocesses underlying psychological well-being. Previous studies of major stressors have demonstrated that stressor disaggregation reveals important variability in effects (e.Authors' names are listed alphabetically. 808 cesses show strong variability in responses as a function of stres-Therefore, there is reason to suspect that daily stressors have similarly varied effects. Minor stressors are a recurrent feature of daily life. For this reason it is difficult to establish that they lead to the onset of mood disturbance. Often all that can be shown in conventional nonexperimental research is that enduring everyday stress is associated with enduring poor mental health (e.g., people with poor social relationships tend to …
Adjusting to Trade Policy Reform

This paper presents theory and evidence on the determinants of the size of the informal sector. We propose a simple theoretical model in which the informal sector's size is negatively related to institutional quality and positively related to income inequality. These predictions are then empirically validated using different proxies of the size of the informal sector, income inequality, and institutional quality. The results are shown to be robust with respect to a variety of econometric specifications.
Empirical study of topic modeling in Twitter

Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have been a crucial source of information for a wide spectrum of users. In Twitter, popular information that is deemed important by the community propagates through the network. Studying the characteristics of content in the messages becomes important for a number of tasks, such as breaking news detection, personalized message recommendation, friends recommendation, sentiment analysis and others. While many researchers wish to use standard text mining tools to understand messages on Twitter, the restricted length of those messages prevents them from being employed to their full potential. We address the problem of using standard topic models in micro-blogging environments by studying how the models can be trained on the dataset. We propose several schemes to train a standard topic model and compare their quality and effectiveness through a set of carefully designed experiments from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. We show that by training a topic model on aggregated messages we can obtain a higher quality of learned model which results in significantly better performance in two real-world classification problems. We also discuss how the state-of-the-art Author-Topic model fails to model hierarchical relationships between entities in Social Media.
Altered Expression of the Glutamate Transporter EAAC1 in Neurons and Immature Oligodendrocytes after Transient Forebrain Ischemia

Glutamate uptake is reduced during ischemia because of perturbations of ionic gradients across neuronal and glial membranes. Using immunohistochemical and Western blot analyses, the authors examined the expression of the glutamate transporters EAAC1, GLAST, and GLT-1 in the rat hippocampus and cerebral cortex 8 hours and 1 to 28 days after transient forebrain ischemia. Densitometric analysis of immunoblots of CA1 homogenates showed a moderate increase in EAAC1 protein levels early after the insult. Consistently, it was observed that EAAC1 immunostaining in CA1 pyramidal neurons was more intense after 8 hours and 1 day of reperfusion and reduced at later postischemia stages. A similar transient increase of EAAC1 immunolabeling was detected in layer V pyramidal neurons of the cerebral cortex. In addition, the authors observed that EAAC1 also was located in oligodendroglial progenitor cells in subcortical white matter. The number of EAAC1-labeled cells in this region was increased after 3 and 28 days of reperfusion. Finally, changes in GLAST and GLT-1 expression were not observed in the CA1 region after ischemia using immunohistochemical study or immunoblotting. Enhanced expression of EAAC1 may be an adaptive response to increased levels of extracellular glutamate during ischemia.
Revisiting Hudson’s (1992) OO = O2 hypothesis: a usage-based variationist approach to the English ditransitive construction

Abstract In an important paper on the English “double-object”, or ditransitive, construction, Richard Hudson proposes a hypothesis that conflates the ditransitive direct object, or O2, and the monotransitive direct object, or OO, into the same syntactic functional category. While making important departures from a number of unfortunate assumptions within mainstream formal theories of linguistics at the time, the OO = O2 hypothesis itself is problematic in the perspective of contemporary cognitive linguistics. This paper addresses the hypothesis from the perspective of usage-based construction grammar. Applying simple collexeme analysis and multifactorial heatmap analysis to instances of OOs and O2s in ICE-GB, this paper shows that the usage-patterns of both are far too complex, displaying cross-register variation, for the OO = O2 hypothesis to be tenable. The findings provide support for a usage-based variationist account in defining syntactic functional categories.
Optimum Stimulation Level Theory and the Differential Impact of Olfactory Stimuli on Consumer Exploratory Tendencies

Consumer response to ambient scent was examined by testing a comprehensive structural equation model derived from optimum stimulation level theory. Pleasantness of ambient scent was manipulated in a laboratory setting, using pre-tested aroma components. Previously suggested direct effects of pleasantness on consumer stimulation could not be confirmed. Instead, the pleasantness of an ambient scent was found to moderate effects of consumer actual stimulation on exploratory tendencies. Effects were stronger in the unpleasantly scented condition, where consumer stimulation affected sensory stimulation-seeking (risk taking, variety-seeking) positively and cognitive stimulation-seeking (curiosity-motivated behavior) negatively. In addition, exploratory tendencies were influenced by consumer optimum stimulation level, regardless of scent pleasantness.
ROSSITER–MCLAUGHLIN OBSERVATIONS OF 55 Cnc e

We present Rossiter–McLaughlin observations of the transiting super-Earth 55 Cnc e collected during six transit events between 2012 January and 2013 November with HARPS and HARPS-N. We detect no radial velocity signal above 35 cm s−1 (3σ) and confine the stellar v sin i⋆ to 0.2 ± 0.5 km s−1. The star appears to be a very slow rotator, producing a very low amplitude Rossiter–McLaughlin effect. Given such a low amplitude, the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect of 55 Cnc e is undetected in our data, and any spin–orbit angle of the system remains possible. We also performed Doppler tomography and reach a similar conclusion. Our results offer a glimpse of the capacity of future instrumentation to study low amplitude Rossiter–McLaughlin effects produced by super-Earths.