Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heavy metal contamination and distribution in the Shiraz industrial complex zone soil, South Shiraz, Iran.

Concentrations of heavy metals (As, Co, Cu, Ni, Mo, Pb and Zn) are studied in the soil of Shiraz industrial complex zone, south Shiraz, Iran to asses metal contamination due to industrialization, urbanization and agricultural activity. Soil samples were collected from three different depths. The A and C depths are enriched with metals such as Ni, As, Mo, Cu, Pb and Zn, compared with the B depth. The average abundance order of heavy metal contents in soil depth are: Ni>Zn>Cu>Co>Pb>As>Mo. Soil contamination is assessed on the basis of contamination factor (CF) and modified degree of contamination (mC ). The CF and mC base of dd background values in the three sampled depths for Cu, Zn, Co, Ni, Mo and As are moderate. Pb reveals considerable contamination. The results of enrichment factor (EF) show that using Sc concentration in the average shale produces higher average EF values for Ni, Co and Mo as compared to average values determined using the actual Sc content in lower core baseline values (background). The results of the principal component analysis (PCA) show Zn, Co, Ni, Sc, Cu, Al and Fe come from a similar source and are not influenced by anthropogenic sources. High loading of Zn, Co, Cu and Ni with clay, Al and Fe indicate the active role played by Al and Fe hydroxides and clay content on distribution and sorption of the studied heavy metals in soil. Also, PCA results indicate that As, Mo and Pb behave differently at different depths.
The Chlamydomonas cell cycle

Summary The position of Chlamydomonas within the eukaryotic phylogeny makes it a unique model in at least two important ways: as a representative of the critically important, early‐diverging lineage leading to plants; and as a microbe retaining important features of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) that has been lost in the highly studied yeast lineages. Its cell biology has been studied for many decades and it has well‐developed experimental genetic tools, both classical (Mendelian) and molecular. Unlike land plants, it is a haploid with very few gene duplicates, making it ideal for loss‐of‐function genetic studies. The Chlamydomonas cell cycle has a striking temporal and functional separation between cell growth and rapid cell division, probably connected to the interplay between diurnal cycles that drive photosynthetic cell growth and the cell division cycle; it also exhibits a highly choreographed interaction between the cell cycle and its centriole–basal body–flagellar cycle. Here, we review the current status of studies of the Chlamydomonas cell cycle. We begin with an overview of cell‐cycle control in the well‐studied yeast and animal systems, which has yielded a canonical, well‐supported model. We discuss briefly what is known about similarities and differences in plant cell‐cycle control, compared with this model. We next review the cytology and cell biology of the multiple‐fission cell cycle of Chlamydomonas. Lastly, we review recent genetic approaches and insights into Chlamydomonas cell‐cycle regulation that have been enabled by a new generation of genomics‐based tools.
The effects of feedback protocol and learning environment perceptions on self-regulated learning

The Effects of Feedback Protocol and Learning Environment Perceptions on SelfRegulated Learning by Kevin D. Biesinger Dr. Kent Crippen, Examination Committee Co-Chair Associate Professor of Curriculum & Instruction University of Nevada, Las Vegas Dr. Randall Boone, Examination Committee Co-Chair Professor of Curriculum & Instruction University of Nevada, Las Vegas The current research investigated the effects of differing feedback protocols in a multimedia learning environment to determine if changes would occur over time in goal orientation, self-regulation, self-efficacy or achievement. Subjects from an traditional undergraduate chemistry course were assigned to either a norm-referenced or self­ referenced feedback group. Goal orientation and self-efficacy were measured via selfreport surveys pre-post instruction, self-regulation was measured as the cumulative number of times each subject opened a worked example/self-explanation prompt while engaged in weekly web-based quizzes, and achievement was measured using final semester course grades. Perceptions of the learning environment were also probed as a potential mediating variable via self-report surveys by using a median split to assign subjects to either a class-task group, where learners believed that the instructor valued
On the Complexity of Linear Prediction: Risk Bounds, Margin Bounds, and Regularization

This work characterizes the generalization ability of algorithms whose predictions are linear in the input vector. To this end, we provide sharp bounds for Rademacher and Gaussian complexities of (constrained) linear classes, which directly lead to a number of generalization bounds. This derivation provides simplified proofs of a number of corollaries including: risk bounds for linear prediction (including settings where the weight vectors are constrained by either L2 or L1 constraints), margin bounds (including both L2 and L1 margins, along with more general notions based on relative entropy), a proof of the PAC-Bayes theorem, and upper bounds on L2 covering numbers (with Lp norm constraints and relative entropy constraints). In addition to providing a unified analysis, the results herein provide some of the sharpest risk and margin bounds. Interestingly, our results show that the uniform convergence rates of empirical risk minimization algorithms tightly match the regret bounds of online learning algorithms for linear prediction, up to a constant factor of 2.
Generating New Business Ideas: The Ability of Category Combination and Reorganization

Many scholars argue that from a cognitive perspective the creative act of opportunity recognition can be conceptualized as a transformation process of bringing together previously unrelated knowledge in order to create a new means-ends framework. Along these lines, the present paper empirically investigates whether the basic cognitive process of category combination and reorganisation can help to explain individual differences in conceiving business ideas. An empirical test on 114 business students supports the proposition that individuals with a higher ability of category combination and reorganisation conceive more original and more promising business ideas in a given situation. The paper also comments on possible applications in entrepreneurship education and potential future research arising from the fact that category combination and reorganisation is already a well-established cognitive concept in general psychology.
Drug addiction and mothers: does parenting get better with treatment?

Concetta Arabia DRUG ADDICTION AND MOTHERS: DOES PARENTING GET BETTER WITH TREATMENT 2005/06 Dr. Mary Louise E. Kerwin Master of Arts in Mental Health Counseling and Applied Psychology Objective: To examine the parenting skills and attitudes of substance abusing mothers in a comprehensive drug treatment facility in Camden, NJ. Methods: Giving three selfreport measures and urine analysis to 14 mothers at intake, 2-months, and 6-months. Participants were reimbursed for their time and travel. Results: Mothers parenting skills and attitudes at intake were found to lack the confidence and enjoyment in their parenting and to have high levels of perceived stress. Bigger sample sizes are needed. Discussion: Progress towards incorporating parenting skills training in in-patient and out-patient treatment facilities has been made. However, a distinction between bad parenting and drug abuse needs to be investigated further.
Theoretical analysis of external noise and bistability in the catalytic CO oxidation on Pd(111)

We theoretically study the impact of an external noise on a kinetic mean-field model for the bistable catalytic CO oxidation on Pd111 surfaces. A spatially homogeneous Gaussian white noise is imposed on the fraction of CO in the constant gas flow directed at the surface and the resulting stochastic system is analyzed by a set of Langevin equations. Using an adiabatic elimination technique, we are able to analyze the interplay between the noise and the kinetic bistability reported for this surface reaction in recent experimental studies. The analytical results predict a strong impact on the bistability phase diagram. The stochastic effects are analyzed by computing stationary solutions of the probability distribution functions and the transition times between the active and inactive states of the bistable region. We also introduce an effective potential description that allows us to analyze the impact of noise.
Determinants of foreign reserves in Nigeria: An autoregressive distributed lag approach

David Irefin 1 and Baba N. Yaaba On global scale, central banks’ holdings of foreign reserves have escalated sharply in recent years. World international reserves holdings have risen significantly from US$1.2 trillion in 1995 to nearly US$10.0 trillion in June 2011. Dominant among these reserves are concentrated in the hands of few countries. Ten major holders of foreign reserves are mostly from Asia. Oil exporting countries in Africa and the Middle East are not left out in this trend. Nigeria’s foreign reserves rose from US$5.5 billion in 1999 to US$62.40 billion in July 2008, making Nigeria the twenty-fourth largest reserves holder in the world. This pace of reserves accumulation is occurring without regard to its diminishing marginal benefits and rising marginal costs. This study used an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to run a slightly modified econometrics ‘Buffer Stock Model’ of Frenkel and Jovanovic (1981) to estimate the determinants of foreign reserves in Nigeria with focus on income, monetary policy rate, imports and exchange rate. The results debunked the existence of buffer stock model for reserves accumulation and provide strong evidence in support of income as the major determinant of reserves holdings in Nigeria.
Facilitating Deep Learning in an Information Systems Course through Application of Curriculum Design Principles

This article reports on the incremental improvement of assessment, learning, and teaching activities in a large first-year undergraduate course. The changes, made over 3 years, resulted in the implementation of a student-centered (though individual) assessment strategy that included students in developing and applying the assessment criteria themselves. The outcome was a student-centered course design that required students to engage in deep approaches to learning. Using an action research framework, Meyers and Nulty's (2008) five curriculum design principles for facilitating deep approaches to learning (the development of which was guided by Biggs's [2003] 3P model) are used to illustrate how the course was incrementally improved to facilitate deep learning approaches. The article provides an illustration of how others may pursue similar curriculum design improvements adapted for their own contexts.
Summertime ENSO–North African–Asian Jet teleconnection and implications for the Indian monsoons

Recent findings indicate that ENSO may modulate the strength of the Indian monsoons by altering the meridional tropospheric temperature gradient between Asia and the equatorial Indian Ocean. Here we show that during northern hemisphere summertime El Niño events both colder upper tropospheric temperatures and increased vorticity anomalies are observed within the North African‐Asian (NAA) jet. The temperature response within the NAA jet is the dominant ENSO‐related change to the meridional tropospheric temperature gradient between Asia and the equatorial Indian Ocean. Forced solutions of the linearized barotropic vorticity equation indicate that these anomalies within the NAA jet are a response to northern hemisphere summertime El Niño‐related convective activity over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Additional experiments indicate that westward propagating anomalies in both the tropics and middle latitudes produce the anomaly response within the NAA jet. These findings suggest that the teleconnection linking ENSO and the monsoons is mediated by the response of the NAA jet to westward propagating Rossby waves.
Editorial: is thalidomide a good option for patients with refractory Crohn's disease?

The history of thalidomide is inevitably connected with its serious teratogenicity. In recent years, however, its beneficial biological activities have led to a renaissance of its use. Thalidomide has an inhibitory activity against tumour necrosis factor-a (TNF-a), known to play an important pathophysiological role in Crohn’s disease (CD). In 1998, the FDA re-approved thalidomide for erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL) and recently for multiple myeloma. As thalidomide targets TNF and there are refractory CD patients in need of additional treatments thalidomide has been introduced in CD treatment and several reports have been published recently. Gerich and colleagues report on the outcome of 37 patients with refractory CD from a single-centre, retrospective, observational cohort from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The patients had moderate-to-severe CD that was refractory to available standard therapies. Thalidomide was administrated at a starting dose of 50–100 mg at night and increased to a maximum of 200 mg/day if necessary. A clinical response was observed in 54% and a clinical remission in 19% of patients. Given the risk of teratogenicity and the high rates of side effects these numbers are somewhat disappointing. They indicate that in each case a careful risk/benefit analysis will be necessary. In this real life open-label setting remission rates are surprisingly low, as compared with a recent RCT in paediatric patients in whom a remission rate of 46% (12% for placebo) was reported. During a median treatment time of 4.4 months adverse events occurred in 68% of patients and 38% experienced neuropathy. The latter is quite a concerning number, given the relatively short treatment time. This leads to an important consideration: long-term treatment, at least in adult patients, is not possible due to side effects. So the question arises what long-term benefits the treated patients can expect. Thalidomide cannot be used as maintenance therapy based on recent reports and the present one. So is this a desirable perspective for patients that have chronic active CD and would require a maintenance treatment? Will patients want a treatment with a remission rate of 19% without the possibility of long-term treatment? This remains questionable.
Developmental Aquatics

/( uatics is increasingly recognized as a valuable part of an educational and therapeutic program for children with developmental disabilities (Campion, 1985). Most adapted aquatics programs such as those offered by the American Red Cross or the YMCA are designed to teach basic swimming skills to individuals with mild to moderate disabilities (American National Red Cross, 1977; YMCA of the USA, 1987). However, some children with disabilities are unable to attempt these beginner skills either because they are very young (under age 6), have low cognitive functioning, or have severe motor disabilities. There is little published material to assist educators in developing appropriate individualized programs for children with these limitations. This article provides an assessment tool and guidelines for creating instructional programming for aquatic skills development for children with disabilities who are functioning at a level below that of adapted beginner programs.
Variation in cognitive functioning as a refined approach to comparing aging across countries

Comparing the burden of aging across countries hinges on the availability of valid and comparable indicators. The Old Age Dependency Ratio allows only a limited assessment of the challenges of aging, because it does not include information on any individual characteristics except age itself. Existing alternative indicators based on health or economic activity suffer from measurement and comparability problems. We propose an indicator based on age variation in cognitive functioning. We use newly released data from standardized tests of seniors' cognitive abilities for countries from different world regions. In the wake of long-term advances in countries’ industrial composition, and technological advances, the ability to handle new job procedures is now of high and growing importance, which increases the importance of cognition for work performance over time. In several countries with older populations, we find better cognitive performance on the part of populations aged 50+ than in countries with chronologically younger populations. This variation in cognitive functioning levels may be explained by the fact that seniors in some regions of the world experienced better conditions during childhood and adult life, including nutrition, duration and quality of schooling, lower exposure to disease, and physical and social activity patterns. Because of the slow process of cohort replacement, those countries whose seniors already have higher cognitive levels today are likely to continue to be at an advantage for several decades to come.
Generative Model With Coordinate Metric Learning for Object Recognition Based on 3D Models

One of the bottlenecks in acquiring a perfect database for deep learning is the tedious process of collecting and labeling data. In this paper, we propose a generative model trained with synthetic images rendered from 3D models which can reduce the burden on collecting real training data and make the background conditions more realistic. Our architecture is composed of two sub-networks: a semantic foreground object reconstruction network based on Bayesian inference and a classification network based on multi-triplet cost training for avoiding overfitting on the monotone synthetic object surface and utilizing accurate information of synthetic images like object poses and lighting conditions which are helpful for recognizing regular photos. First, our generative model with metric learning utilizes additional foreground object channels generated from semantic foreground object reconstruction sub-network for recognizing the original input images. Multi-triplet cost function based on poses is used for metric learning which makes it possible to train an effective categorical classifier purely based on synthetic data. Second, we design a coordinate training strategy with the help of adaptive noise applied on the inputs of both of the concatenated sub-networks to make them benefit from each other and avoid inharmonious parameter tuning due to different convergence speeds of two sub-networks. Our architecture achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of 50.5% on the ShapeNet database with data migration obstacle from synthetic images to real images. This pipeline makes it applicable to do recognition on real images only based on 3D models. Our codes are available at https://github.com/wangyida/gm-cml.
Xenogeneic immunization with human tyrosine hydroxylase DNA vaccines suppresses growth of established neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma (NB) is a challenging malignancy of the sympathetic nervous tissue characterized by a very poor prognosis. One important marker for NB is the expression of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), the first-step enzyme of catecholamine biosynthesis. We could show stable and high TH gene expression in 67 NB samples independent of the clinical stage. Based on this observation, we addressed the question of whether xenogeneic TH DNA vaccination is effective in inducing an anti-NB immune response. For this purpose, we generated three DNA vaccines based on pCMV-F3Ub and pBUD-CE4.1 plasmids encoding for human (h)THcDNA (A), hTH minigene (B), and hTHcDNA in combination with the proinflammatory cytokine interleukin 12 (C), and tested prophylactic and therapeutic efficacy to suppress primary tumor growth and spontaneous metastasis. Here we report that xenogeneic TH DNA vaccination was effective in eradicating established primary tumors and inhibiting metastasis. Interestingly, this effect could not be enhanced by adding the Th1 cytokine interleukin 12. However, increased IFN-γ production and NB cytotoxicity of effector cells harvested from vaccinated mice suggested the participation of tumor-specific CTLs in the immune response. The depletion of CD8+T cells completely abrogated the hTH vaccine–mediated anti-NB immune response. Furthermore, rechallenging of surviving mice resulted in reduced primary tumor growth, indicating the induction of a memory immune response. In conclusion, xenogeneic immunization with TH-derived DNA vaccines is effective against NB, and may open a new venue for a novel and effective immunotherapeutic strategy against this challenging childhood tumor. [Mol Cancer Ther 2009;8(8):2392–401]
The Effect of Sodium Tanshinone IIA Sulfate and Simvastatin on Elevated Serum Levels of Inflammatory Markers in Patients with Coronary Heart Disease: A Study Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background. Coronary heart disease (CHD) due to atherosclerotic inflammation remains a significant threat to global health despite the success of the lipid-lowering, anti-inflammatory statins. Tanshinone IIA, a potent anti-inflammatory compound derived from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), may be able to supplement statins by further reducing levels of circulating inflammatory markers correlated to cardiovascular risk. Here, we present the protocol of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that will investigate the synergistic effect of sodium tanshinone IIA sulfate and simvastatin on reducing elevated inflammatory markers in patients with CHD. Participants: Seventy-two inpatients with confirmed CHD, elevated serum high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (Hs-CRP) level, and a TCM diagnosis of blood stasis syndrome will be enrolled and randomized 1 : 1 into the control or experimental group. Intervention. All subjects will receive a standard Western therapy including 20 mg simvastatin orally once per evening. Patients in the experimental group will additionally receive a daily 80 mg dose of sodium tanshinone IIA sulfate intravenously, diluted into 250 mL 0.9% NaCl solution. The treatment period will be 14 days. Outcomes. Primary outcome parameter: serum Hs-CRP level. Secondary outcome parameters: other circulating inflammatory markers (including IL-6, TNFα, VCAM-1, CD40, sCD40L, MCP-1, and MMP-9), improvement in symptoms of angina and blood stasis syndrome, and safety. This trial is registered with ChiCTR-TRC-12002361.
Lab-on-a-Chip Magneto-Immunoassays: How to Ensure Contact between Superparamagnetic Beads and the Sensor Surface

Lab-on-a-chip immuno assays utilizing superparamagnetic beads as labels suffer from the fact that the majority of beads pass the sensing area without contacting the sensor surface. Different solutions, employing magnetic forces, ultrasonic standing waves, or hydrodynamic effects have been found over the past decades. The first category uses magnetic forces, created by on-chip conducting lines to attract beads towards the sensor surface. Modifications of the magnetic landscape allow for additional transport and separation of different bead species. The hydrodynamic approach uses changes in the channel geometry to enhance the capture volume. In acoustofluidics, ultrasonic standing waves force µm-sized particles onto a surface through radiation forces. As these approaches have their disadvantages, a new sensor concept that circumvents these problems is suggested. This concept is based on the granular giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect that can be found in gels containing magnetic nanoparticles. The proposed design could be realized in the shape of paper-based test strips printed with gel-based GMR sensors.