Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Atrazine in Fish, Amphibians, and Reptiles: An Analysis Based on Quantitative Weight of Evidence

Abstract A quantitative weight of evidence (WoE) approach was developed to evaluate studies used for regulatory purposes, as well as those in the open literature, that report the effects of the herbicide atrazine on fish, amphibians, and reptiles. The methodology for WoE analysis incorporated a detailed assessment of the relevance of the responses observed to apical endpoints directly related to survival, growth, development, and reproduction, as well as the strength and appropriateness of the experimental methods employed. Numerical scores were assigned for strength and relevance. The means of the scores for relevance and strength were then used to summarize and weigh the evidence for atrazine contributing to ecologically significant responses in the organisms of interest. The summary was presented graphically in a two-dimensional graph which showed the distributions of all the reports for a response. Over 1290 individual responses from studies in 31 species of fish, 32 amphibians, and 8 reptiles were evaluated. Overall, the WoE showed that atrazine might affect biomarker-type responses, such as expression of genes and/or associated proteins, concentrations of hormones, and biochemical processes (e.g. induction of detoxification responses), at concentrations sometimes found in the environment. However, these effects were not translated to adverse outcomes in terms of apical endpoints. The WoE approach provided a quantitative, transparent, reproducible, and robust framework that can be used to assist the decision-making process when assessing environmental chemicals. In addition, the process allowed easy identification of uncertainty and inconsistency in observations, and thus clearly identified areas where future investigations can be best directed.
TEAD Transcription Factors Mediate the Function of TAZ in Cell Growth and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition*

The TAZ transcription co-activator has been shown to promote cell proliferation and to induce epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Recently we have demonstrated that TAZ is phosphorylated and inhibited by the Hippo tumor suppressor pathway, which is altered in human cancer. The mechanism of TAZ-mediated transcription is unclear. We demonstrate here that TEAD is a key downstream transcription factor mediating the function of TAZ. Disruption of TEAD-TAZ binding or silencing of TEAD expression blocked the function of TAZ to promote cell proliferation and to induce epithelial-mesenchymal transition, demonstrating TEAD as a key downstream effector of TAZ. We also identified CTGF, a gene that regulates cell adhesion, proliferation, and migration, as a direct target of TAZ and TEAD. Our study establishes a functional partnership between TAZ and TEAD under negative regulation by the Hippo signaling pathway.
The neural processes underpinning visual associative memory : a comparison of young grapheme-colour synaesthetes, older adults and young controls

The traditional modular account of memory segregates visual associative memory and visual perception, with the former underpinned by the medial temporal lobes (MTL) and the latter by posterior visual regions. By contrast, the representational account of memory envisages visual associative memory as a perceptual-mnemonic continuum that can be traced from early visual cortex to anterior MTL structures. In this thesis, we tested these fundamentally different memory models by using a novel between-group design with young grapheme-colour synaesthetes, older adults and young controls, each of whom have their respective strengths and weaknesses in memory and perception. Specifically, grapheme-colour synaesthetes possess enhanced perceptual mechanisms, allowing them to experience black letters, words or digits as inherently coloured. They also show enhanced early visual cortex sensitivity in response to non-synaesthesia inducing stimuli (Barnett et al., 2008) as well as enhanced memory for verbal and visual stimuli. Using psychophysical techniques and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we compared these three groups on a range of cognitive processes involved in visual associative memory: encoding, working memory, associative retrieval and recognition.
Improving OLTP Scalability using Speculative Lock Inheritance

Transaction processing workloads provide ample request level concurrency which highly parallel architectures can exploit. However, the resulting heavy utilization of core database services also causes resource contention within the database engine itself and limits scalability. Meanwhile, many database workloads consist of short transactions which access only a few database records each, often with stringent response time requirements. Performance of these short transactions is determined largely by the amount of overhead the database engine imposes for services such as logging, locking, and transaction management. This paper highlights the negative scalability impact of database locking, an effect which is especially severe for short transactions running on highly concurrent multicore hardware. We propose and evaluate Speculative Lock Inheritance, a technique where hot database locks pass directly from transaction to transaction, bypassing the lock manager bottleneck. We implement SLI in the Shore-MT storage manager and show that lock inheritance fundamentally improves scalability by decoupling the number of simultaneous requests for popular locks from the number of threads in the system, eliminating contention within the lock manager even as core counts continue to increase. We achieve this effect with only minor changes to the lock manager and without changes to consistency or other application-visible effects.
SEEDSTICK is a Master Regulator of Development and Metabolism in the Arabidopsis Seed Coat

The role of secondary metabolites in the determination of cell identity has been an area of particular interest over recent years, and studies strongly indicate a connection between cell fate and the regulation of enzymes involved in secondary metabolism. In Arabidopsis thaliana, the maternally derived seed coat plays pivotal roles in both the protection of the developing embryo and the first steps of germination. In this regard, a characteristic feature of seed coat development is the accumulation of proanthocyanidins (PAs - a class of phenylpropanoid metabolites) in the innermost layer of the seed coat. Our genome-wide transcriptomic analysis suggests that the ovule identity factor SEEDSTICK (STK) is involved in the regulation of several metabolic processes, providing a strong basis for a connection between cell fate determination, development and metabolism. Using phenotypic, genetic, biochemical and transcriptomic approaches, we have focused specifically on the role of STK in PA biosynthesis. Our results indicate that STK exerts its effect by direct regulation of the gene encoding BANYULS/ANTHOCYANIDIN REDUCTASE (BAN/ANR), which converts anthocyanidins into their corresponding 2,3-cis-flavan-3-ols. Our study also demonstrates that the levels of H3K9ac chromatin modification directly correlate with the active state of BAN in an STK-dependent way. This is consistent with the idea that MADS-domain proteins control the expression of their target genes through the modification of chromatin states. STK might thus recruit or regulate histone modifying factors to control their activity. In addition, we show that STK is able to regulate other BAN regulators. Our study demonstrates for the first time how a floral homeotic gene controls tissue identity through the regulation of a wide range of processes including the accumulation of secondary metabolites.
Crime and the Transition to Marriage The Role of the Spouse’s Criminal Involvement

Influential perspectives in life course criminology maintain that marriage leads to desistance from crime, and the mechanisms are largely related to spousal social control. Whether and to what degree marriage represents a break from a criminal past might depend on the spouse’s criminal attitude. We study how changes in offending are related to marriage, and how the patterns vary by the wife’s criminal record. We use data from Norwegian administrative registers that cover the total population of all persons who married in Norway between 1997 and 2001 (N = 80,064). We use information on these persons’ criminal records in two five-year periods before and after marriage as well as information on their wives’ criminal records in the same period, to estimate the probability of offending across an 11-year period around the time of marriage. We do so in a way that takes premarital changes in criminal behaviour into account. We find that the desistance process tend to start up to several years before marriage, and that the decline is greater for those who marry a wife with a criminal record.
Permutation testing of orthogonal factorial effects in a language‐processing experiment using fMRI

The block‐paradigm of the Functional Image Analysis Contest (FIAC) dataset was analysed with the Brain Activation and Morphological Mapping software. Permutation methods in the wavelet domain were used for inference on cluster‐based test statistics of orthogonal contrasts relevant to the factorial design of the study, namely: the average response across all active blocks, the main effect of speaker, the main effect of sentence, and the interaction between sentence and speaker. Extensive activation was seen with all these contrasts. In particular, different vs. same‐speaker blocks produced elevated activation in bilateral regions of the superior temporal lobe and repetition suppression for linguistic materials (same vs. different‐sentence blocks) in left inferior frontal regions. These are regions previously reported in the literature. Additional regions were detected in this study, perhaps due to the enhanced sensitivity of the methodology. Within‐block sentence suppression was tested post‐hoc by regression of an exponential decay model onto the extracted time series from the left inferior frontal gyrus, but no strong evidence of such an effect was found. The significance levels set for the activation maps are P‐values at which we expect <1 false‐positive cluster per image. Nominal type I error control was verified by empirical testing of a test statistic corresponding to a randomly ordered design matrix. The small size of the BOLD effect necessitates sensitive methods of detection of brain activation. Permutation methods permit the necessary flexibility to develop novel test statistics to meet this challenge. Hum Brain Mapp27:425–433, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Within-Session and Between-Session Reproducibility of Cerebral Sensorimotor Activation: A Test–Retest Effect Evidenced with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The aim of the current study was to assess the reproducibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain activation signals in a sensorimotor task in healthy subjects. Because random or systematic changes are likely to happen when movements are repeated over time, the authors searched for time-dependent changes in the fMRI signal intensity and the extent of activation within and between sessions. Reproducibility was studied on a sensorimotor task called “the active task” that includes a motor output and a sensory feedback, and also on a sensory stimulation called “the passive task” that assessed the sensory input alone. The active task consisted of flexion and extension of the right hand. The subjects had performed it several times before fMRI scanning so that it was well learned. The passive task consisted of a calibrated passive flexion and extension of the right wrist. Tasks were 1 Hz-paced. The control state was rest. Subjects naïve to the MRI environment and non–MRI-naïve subjects were studied. Twelve MRI-naïve subjects underwent 3 fMRI sessions separated by 5 hours and 49 days, respectively. During MRI scanning, they performed the active task. Six MRI-naïve subjects underwent 2 fMRI sessions with the passive task 1 month apart. Three non–MRI-naïve subjects performed twice an active 2-Hz self-paced task. The data were analyzed with SPM96 software. For within-session comparison, for active or passive tasks, good reproducibility of fMRI signal activation was found within a session (intra-and interrun reproducibility) whether it was the first, second, or third session. Therefore, no within-session habituation was found with a passive or a well-learned active task. For between-session comparison, for MRI-naïve or non–MRI-naïve subjects, and with the active or the passive task, activation was increased in the contralateral premotor cortex and in ispsilateral anterior cerebellar cortex but was decreased in the primary sensorimotor cortex, parietal cortex, and posterior supplementary motor area at the second session. The lower cortical signal was characterized by reduced activated areas with no change in maximum peak intensity in most cases. Changes were partially reversed at the third session. Part of the test–retest effect may come from habituation of the MRI experiment context. Less attention and stress at the second and third sessions may be components of the inhibition of cortical activity. Because the changes became reversed, the authors suggest that, beyond the habituation process, a learning process occurred that had nothing to do with procedural learning, because the tasks were well learned or passive. A long-term memory representation of the sensorimotor task, not only with its characteristics (for example, amplitude, frequency) but also with its context (fMRI), can become integrated into the motor system along the sessions. Furthermore, the pattern observed in the fMRI signal changes might evoke a consolidation process.
An Evaluation of Speaking Anxiety for Learners of Turkish as A Foreign Language

Language, a tool for maintaining transmission of feelings, thoughts and desires, has two dimensions, such as understanding and * Yrd. Doç. Dr. Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi DavutpaĢa Kampüsü. Eğitim Fakültesi Türkçe Eğitimi Bölümü, El-mek: sallabas@gmail.com 2200 Muhammed Eyyüp SALLABAŞ Turkish Studies International Periodical For the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic Volume 7/3, Summer, 2012 telling. Talking, which is oral transmission of information, opinions and impressions of the mankind over his life to the opposing person, is within the telling dimension of the language and composing the basic tool of self-expressing. Oral expression has an important position in language training both for society and as a skill. Speaking skill is least studied language skill and it is of great importance in teaching Turkish as a foreign language. The aim of this study is to determine anxieties of learners of Turkish as a foreign language and to assess them in terms of various variables. The study was carried out with survey model. The study group is composed of 68 students attending C level (High Turkish) courses at Taksim branch of Ankara University Center for Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language. Data for the study was collected via Speaking Anxiety Scale, which was developed by Özdemir and Personal Information Form. Data collected in line with the aims of the study was analyzed with analysis techniques suitable for the characteristics of the data using SPSS 16.0 program. Findings were presented in tables and interpreted. T-test was administrated to find out if data show significant difference in terms of two variables and one way variance analysis (ANOVA) was used to test if data show significant difference in terms of more than two variables. In this study, it was determined that anxiety levels of learners who think that Turkish is not a difficult language were significant lower than those of learners who think that it is a difficult language and that there was not a significant difference in terms of other variables.
Projection Theorems for the Rényi Divergence on  $\alpha $ -Convex Sets

This paper studies forward and reverse projections for the Rényi divergence of order α E (0, ∞) on α-convex sets. The forward projection on such a set is motivated by some works of Tsallis et al. in statistical physics, and the reverse projection is motivated by robust statistics. In a recent work, van Erven and Harremoës proved a Pythagorean inequality for Rényi divergences on α-convex sets under the assumption that the forward projection exists. Continuing this study, a sufficient condition for the existence of a forward projection is proved for probability measures on a general alphabet. For α ϵ (1, ∞), the proof relies on a new Apollonius theorem for the Hellinger divergence, and for α E (0, 1), the proof relies on the Banach- Alaoglu theorem from the functional analysis. Further projection results are then obtained in the finite alphabet setting. These include a projection theorem on a specific α-convex set, which is termed an α-linear family, generalizing a result by Csiszar to α ≠ 1. The solution to this problem yields a parametric family of probability measures, which turns out to be an extension of the exponential family, and it is termed an α-exponential family. An orthogonality relationship between the α-exponential and α-linear families is established, and it is used to turn the reverse projection on an α-exponential family into a forward projection on an α-linear family. This paper also proves a convergence result of an iterative procedure used to calculate the forward projection on an intersection of a finite number of α-linear families.
Correlation functions of the spin-1 analog of the XXZ model

Exact integral representations of spin one-point functions (ground state expectation values) are reported for the spin-1 analog of the XXZ model in the region $-1<q<0$. The method enables one to calculate arbitrary $n$-point functions in principle. We also report a construction of level 2 irreducible highest weight representations of $U_q(\hat{sl}_2)$ in terms of boson and fermion operators, and explicit forms of related vertex operators.
Enclosing the Subject

This paper draws from contemporary psychoanalytic theory as well as nineteenth-century crowd theory to critique Louis Althusser’s account of the ideological interpellation of the subject. I argue that rather than ideology interpellating the individual as a subject, bourgeois ideology interpellates the subject as an individual. By “bourgeois ideology” I mean the loose set of ideas and apparatuses associated with European modernity, an instrumental concept of reason, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The advantage of reversing the Althusserian account is that the subject is not pre-constrained to the individual form, a form that is itself always already as failing and impossible as it is assumed and demanded. In Althusser’s version, the individuality that emerges in history is posited as universal, a given. In mine, the individual form is itself the problem; it’s a coercive and unstable product of the enclosure of the common in never-ceasing efforts to repress, deny, and foreclose collective political subjectivity. The individual is thus a form of capture. Rather than natural or given, the individual form encloses into a singular bounded body collective bodies, ideas, affects, desires, and drives. There is nothing necessary about the link between subjectivity and individuality; it is an effect contingent to the array of processes that converge into bourgeois modernity.
Excitatory circuits in a mouse model of type I lissencephaly

Author(s): Greenwood, Joel Simeon Fogde | Advisor(s): Baraban, Scott C | Abstract: Structural abnormalities in the human brain, which result from disruption of cortical development, are often associated with neurological deficits such as mental retardation and epilepsy. Cortical malformations that result in epilepsy are often resistant to standard antiepileptic drugs leaving the patient with few options for successful treatment. A driving question in the field of epilepsy research is to understand the basis of seizure generation in the malformed brain, in the hope of providing new methods to treat this devastating condition. Lissencephaly in humans is characterized by a lack of cortical gyri and four-layered cortex, and by mental retardation and epilepsy. The Lis1 protein has been shown to interact with the dynein/dynactin complex and to be critical for neuronal migration. A mouse model of lissencephaly was created by heterozygous mutation of the Lis1 gene. The Lis1 +/- mutant mouse has neuronal disorganization of the cortex, olfactory bulb, and hippocampus. This mouse has been shown to have hyperexcitability in vitro, impairment of special learning in vivo, and an intact inhibitory system. Fifteen years after the discovery of Lis1's involvement in lissencephaly and ten years after the development of a mouse model for the disease, the basis of seizure generation remains a mystery. In this thesis I examined the excitatory system of the hippocampus, specifically CA1 pyramidal cells and their synaptic inputs. I found that the glutamatergic system is intact and functioning relatively normally; however, excitatory synaptic input onto CA1 pyramidal cells is nearly doubled in Lis1 +/- mutants. I also showed that the vesicular pool at excitatory synaptic contacts onto CA1 pyramidal cells is enlarged and importantly, the readily releasable pool (RRP) of synaptic vesicles is enlarged. I then examined the consequences of this change and found that Lis1 +/- mutants have enhanced short-term plasticity, which may underlie hyperexcitability and ultimately seizure generation in these mice. Finally, I showed that reducing calcium entry in these terminals eliminates this excitability. These data suggest a molecular basis for seizure generation in the lissencephalic brain and offer a new way to approach treatment for this disease.