Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integration Tutorials and Seminars: Examining the Integration of Academic and Fieldwork Learning by Student Occupational Therapists

This paper, the second of two companion papers, describes a collaborative research study conducted by academic and fieldwork educators of an undergraduate educational programme in occupational therapy. The study examined the perception of student occupational therapists' ability to integrate and apply academic and theoretical knowledge in fieldwork education sites following the introduction of Integration Tutorials and Seminars to the curriculum. The literature review supports the need to develop educational strategies to improve this integration process. The qualitative research design consisted of guided interviews with preceptors and students during two consecutive fieldwork education experiences. Inductive data analysis revealed three themes that contribute to understanding students' ability to integrate academic learning during their fieldwork education: the fieldwork learning environment; preceptor influence on student learning; and the student learning process over time. The discussion section raises implications for academic and fieldwork education approaches.
Bandwidth allocation and pricing for SDN-enabled home networks

In this paper, we propose to combine the emerging software defined networking (SDN) paradigm with the existing residential broadband infrastructure to enable home users to have dynamic control over their traffic flows. The SDN centralized control technology enables household devices to have virtualized services with quality of service (QoS) guarantee. SDN-enabled open application programming interfaces (APIs) allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to perform bandwidth slicing in home networks and implement time-dependent hybrid pricing. Given the requests from household devices for virtualized and non-virtualized services, we formulate a Stackelberg game to characterize the pricing strategy of ISP as well as bandwidth allocation strategy in home networks. In the Stackelberg game, the leader is the ISP and the followers are the home networks. We determine the optimal strategies which provide maximal payoff for the ISP. Numerical results show that our proposed SDN-enabled home network technology with the hybrid pricing scheme provides a better performance than a usage-based pricing scheme tailored for best-effort home networks.
Changes in Selected Characteristics of Pre-Service Teachers Following Variable, Semi-Variable, and Non-Variable Field Experiences.

In this study 65 preservice physical education teachers were randomly assigned to a variable, semi-variable, and nonvariable field experience group. All subjects completed observational, instructional, and student teaching field experiences. The variable group completed experiences in urban and suburban schools at different educational levels. Semi-variable group members completed experiences in one setting at different levels or at one level in different settings. No variety was experienced by the non-variable group. Subjects were preand posttested on selected personality and attitudinal factors. Significant increases were found in the degree of authoritarianism for the semiand non-variable groups and in preference for psychomotor objectives-for the semi-variable group. No changes were revealed in teaching style preference Comparisons at the conclusion of the field experiences indicated o significant difference between groups in degree of authori rianism, educational objectives preference, and teaching style eference. Degree of field experience variability had no effect on changes in the selected personality and attitudinal factors among reservice physical education teachers. (Author) *****************2****************************************************** Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished * materials not available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort * * to _obtain the best copy available. Nevertheless, items of marginal * ieprOd'uCibility are often encountered and this affects the quality * * of the microfiche and hardcopy -reproductions ERIC makes available * * via the ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS). EDRS is not * responsible for the quality of the original document. Reproductions * * supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original. * ***********************************************************************
Amplification of the Streptococcus faecalis proton-translocating ATPase by a decrease in cytoplasmic pH

When Streptococcus faecalis was grown in the presence of protonophores , an ATPase activity of the membrane was increased at a pH below 8.0 but not at a pH above 8.0. Characteristics of this increased ATPase were identical to those of a proton-translocating ATPase (H+-ATPase) located on the membrane of normal cells. The cytoplasmic pH was regulated at 7.6 to 7.8 but was not regulated in the presence of protonophores . The increase in the H+-ATPase was observed when the cytoplasmic pH was lowered to less than 7.6 by the addition of protonophores and was not related to the dissipation of the proton motive force. Thus, we suggest that the H+-ATPase of the membrane is amplified when the cytoplasmic pH is lowered below the pH at which it is regulated under normal conditions.
ASSOCIATION OF MTHFR A1298C POLYMORPHISM WITH BREAST CANCER AND/OR OVARIAN CANCER RISK: AN UPDATED META-ANALYSIS

Background: Recent years have witnessed the discovery of similar gene variations between breast cancer and ovarian cancer, inherited breast and ovarian cancer in particular. A large number of case-control studies have been conducted to explore the association of Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase (MTHFR) A1298C polymorphism with breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer risk. However, the results are still inconsistent and inconclusive. Consequently, we performed a meta-analysis to evaluate the association between MTHFR A1298C polymorphism and breast, ovarian cancer risk. Materials and Methods: A comprehensive retrieval was conducted in the electronic database of PubMed, Web of Science and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) until June 2015 to identify eligible studies. A total of 35 studies which examined the association of MTHFR A1298C polymorphism with breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer were identified. The pooled odds ratios (ORs) with 95 % confidence intervals (CIs) were used to assess the effect of gene polymorphism. And allele model, homozygous model, co-dominant model, dominant model, recessive model were applied. Result: In the overall analysis, significantly increased breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer risk was found (for allele model A VS C OR = 1.05, CI: 1.02-1.08, P = 4χ10-3; for homozygous model AA VS CC OR = 1.11, CI: 1.03-1.19, P = 5χ10-3; for recessive model (AC +AA) VS CC: OR = 1.10, CI: 1.03-1.18, P = 7χ10-3). Conclusion: In the subgroup analysis, significantly increased breast cancer risk was identified among Caucasians. MTHFR A1298C polymorphism might contribute to an increased risk of breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer susceptibility. In addition, MTHFR A1298C polymorphism had a significant association with breast cancer in Caucasians.
Genetic Analysis of Two Bile Salt Hydrolase Activities in Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM

ABSTRACT Two genes, bshA and bshB, encoding bile salt hydrolase enzymes (EC 3.5.1.24) were identified in the genome sequence of Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM. Targeted inactivation of these genes via chromosomal insertion of an integration vector demonstrated different substrate specificities for these two enzymes.
Patient outcomes at a traditional Chinese medicine teaching clinic: a prospective data collection project.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to describe patients who seek treatment at an acupuncture and Oriental medicine teaching clinic in the United States, and to systematically measure and describe patients' responses after treatment using a prospective study design. DESIGN This is a prospective survey of clinic patients at intake and one month following the initial treatment. SETTINGS AND LOCATION: Data were collected in an acupuncture and Oriental medicine teaching clinic located in Bloomington, Minnesota. SUBJECTS Of 661 new patients who met eligibility criteria, 485 consented to participate. INTERVENTIONS Patients were administered two self-report questionnaires: one prior to their initial treatment, and a second sent by mail one month later. OUTCOME MEASURES Data collected at intake included demographics such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and employment, as well as main presenting complaint and chronicity. Patients were also asked at intake whether they had consulted with another health care provider, if they were under continued care, and if they had previous experience with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) treatment. Outcome measures included severity, improvement, and satisfaction. Patients were additionally asked if they continued with TCM care for their presenting condition. RESULTS Demographics of patients presenting to this teaching clinic were similar to those reported in other outpatient TCM settings. The majority of patients had no previous experience with TCM, and a large percentage was referred by students. Pain was the most common presenting condition, followed closely by wellness care. One month following treatment, most patients reported improvement and satisfaction with care. CONCLUSIONS Standardized data collection and follow-up resulted in a description of patients and outcomes in an acupuncture and Oriental medicine teaching clinic, which can be used for research, educational, quality assurance, and marketing purposes.
Novel glucocorticoid effects on acute inflammation in the CNS

The CNS can mount an inflammatory reaction to excitotoxic insults that contributes to the emerging brain damage. Therefore, anti‐inflammatory drugs should be beneficial in neurological insults. In contrast, glucocorticoids (GCs), while known for their anti‐inflammatory effects, can exacerbate neurotoxicity in the hippocampus after excitotoxic insults. We investigated the effect of GCs on the inflammatory response after a neurological insult. Intact control (INT; intact stress response GC profile), adrenalectomized/GC‐supplemented (ADX; low basal GC profile) and GC‐treated (COR; chronically high GC profile) rats were injected with kainic acid into the hippocampal CA3 region. Lesion size was determined 8–72 h later. The inflammatory response was characterized using immunohistochemistry, RNAse protection assay and ELISA. The INT and COR rats developed larger CA3 lesions than ADX rats. We found that GCs surprisingly caused an increase in relative numbers of inflammatory cells (granulocytes, monocytes/macrophages and microglia). Additionally, mRNA and protein (IL‐1β and TNF‐α) levels of the pro‐inflammatory cytokines IL‐1α, IL‐1β and TNF‐α were elevated in COR rats compared with INT and ADX rats. These data strongly question the traditional view of GCs being uniformly anti‐inflammatory and could further explain how GCs worsen the outcome of neurological insults.
Cytopathic effect of whole cells and purified membranes of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae

Marked cytopathic effect was produced in both porcine lung fibroblasts and MRC-5 human lung fibroblasts with doses of 7.5 X 10(6) and 1.5 X 10(7) CFU of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae J per ml, respectively. M. hyopneumoniae VPP11, at a concentration as low as 1.25 X 10(7) CFU/ml, was capable of causing cytopathic effect in MRC-5 monolayers also. The infected monolayers developed patches of detached or lysed cells within 48 h. At a protein concentration of 2 micrograms/ml, M. hyopneumoniae membranes, prepared from freeze-thaw lysed cells, were capable of inducing cytopathic effect in MRC-5 fibroblasts within 24 h. The cytoplasm did not contain any cytotoxic activity. This indicates that the cytopathic factor is located in the cell membrane. This factor appears to be protein in nature. It was heat labile (100 degrees C, 15 min) and was destroyed by pronase (1 mg of pronase per 1 mg of membrane protein). It appears to be antigenic, since rabbit anti-M. hyopneumoniae serum was capable of neutralizing its cytopathic activity.
Minimum generation error training for HMM-based prediction of articulatory movements

This paper presents a minimum generation error (MGE) training method for hidden Markov model (HMM) based prediction of articulatory movements when both text and audio inputs are given. In this method, MGE criterion is adopted to replace the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion to estimate model parameters for the unified acoustic-articulatory HMMs. Different from the MGE training for HMM-based acoustic speech synthesis, the generation error used here is defined as the distance between the generated and natural articulatory features. Experimental results show that our proposed method can improve the accuracy of articulatory movement prediction significantly. The average root mean square (RMS) error reduces from 1.002 mm to 0.913 mm on the test set.
Regulation of cyclooxygenase-2 expression in renal medulla by tonicity in vivo and in vitro

Yang, Tianxin, Jurgen B. Schnermann, and Josephine P. Briggs. Regulation of cyclooxygenase-2 expression in renal medulla by tonicity in vivo and in vitro. Am. J. Physiol. 277 (Renal Physiol. 46): F1–F9, 1999. —Renal medullary prostaglandins are believed to exert an important functional role in antagonizing vasopressin effects in dehydration. Studies were undertaken to determine the effect of hyperosmolality on cyclooxygenase (COX) isoform expression in the renal medulla. COX-1 and COX-2 mRNA and protein levels were determined by RT-PCR or Western blotting in SpragueDawley rats on varying water intakes, in Brattleboro rats and in Long-Evans controls. Over a wide range of urinary tonicity, COX-2 expression correlated closely with urine osmolality levels (R 5 0.872). COX-1 levels did not vary. Immunolocalization showed that the stimulation of COX-2 expression by dehydration occurred predominantly in the collecting duct. Hypertonicity caused by addition of NaCl produced a doseand time-dependent stimulation of COX-2 expression in mIMCD-K2 cells as well as in MDCK cells. COX-1 was unaffected. In the same cell lines, mannitol, sucrose, and raffinose also had a stimulatory effect. The tonicity-stimulated COX-2 expression in mIMCD-K2 cells was almost completely blocked by a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, genistein at 100 μM. In MDCK cells transfected with a 2.7-kb COX-2 promoter and lacZ reporter construct, NaCl induced a twofold increase in b-galactosidase activity. Using mIMCD-K2 cells, hypertonic NaCl (600 mosmol/kgH2O for 24 h) induced a 33-fold increase in PGE2 release determined by enzyme immunoassay, an effect completely blocked by 3 μM indomethacin or the COX-2-specific blocker N-(2-cyclohexy-4nitrophenyl)methanesulfonamide (NS-398). We conclude that in inner medulla, COX-2 but not COX-1 is upregulated by hyperosmolality.
Performance Models of An Interconnection Network for Broadcast Communication

1. Abstract Due to advances in fiber-optics and VLSI technology, interconnection networks which allow multiple simultaneous broadcasts are becoming feasible. The performance of a multiprocessor system based on a broadcast interconnection network is examined using analytical models and simulation under the message-passing and distributed-shared-memory paradigms and is compared to similar performance measures on multicomputer systems based on the crossbar and the torus. The effect of collective communications due to synchronization, data multicast and cache coherence is examined. Results reveal that the performance of a broadcast interconnection network is the least affected by large message communication times, compared to the other two architectures considered here. Even in the presence of intense synchronization, processor utilization remains practically unaffected while it drops quite dramatically in the other architectures.
Antimicrobial resistance in Campylobacter jejuni from humans and broilers in Norway

SUMMARY In this study comprising isolates from 2001 to 2003, resistance was considerably more widespread among Campylobacter jejuni from humans infected abroad than infected within Norway. The discrepancy was particularly notable for fluoroquinolone resistance (67·4% vs. 6·5%). This is probably a reflection of a low resistance prevalence in Norwegian broiler isolates (1·2% fluoroquinolone resistant).
Towards Understanding Malware Behaviour by the Extraction of API Calls

One of the recent trends adopted by malware authors is to use packers or software tools that instigate code obfuscation in order to evade detection by antivirus scanners. With evasion techniques such as polymorphism and metamorphism malware is able to fool current detection techniques. Thus, security researchers and the anti-virus industry are facing a herculean task in extracting payloads hidden within packed executables. It is a common practice to use manual unpacking or static unpacking using some software tools and analyse the application programming interface (API) calls for malware detection. However, extracting these features from the unpacked executables for reverse obfuscation is labour intensive and requires deep knowledge of low-level programming that includes kernel and assembly language. This paper presents an automated method of extracting API call features and analysing them in order to understand their use for malicious purpose. While some research has been conducted in arriving at file birthmarks using API call features and the like, there is a scarcity of work that relates to features in malcodes. To address this gap, we attempt to automatically analyse and classify the behavior of API function calls based on the malicious intent hidden within any packed program. This paper uses four-step methodology for developing a fully automated system to arrive at six main categories of suspicious behavior of API call features.
MOUSE ISOANTIGENS: SEPARATION OF SOLUBLE TL (THYMUS-LEUKEMIA) ANTIGEN FROM SOLUBLE H-2 HISTOCOMPATIBILITY ANTIGEN BY COLUMN CHROMATOGRAPHY

Mouse H-2 histocompatibility antigen has been extracted, solubilized, and partly purified from the cells of an A strain spontaneous leukemia carrying TL (thymus-leukemia) antigens. H-2 and TL. 1, 2, 3 activities were measured by inhibition of the cytotoxic effect of the corresponding isoantibodies. TL activity was associated with the H-2 active fraction obtained by solubilization and fractionation by gel filtration. TL specificity was largely separated from H-2 antigen by subsequent chromatography on DEAE Sephadex as an adjacent component in a series of fractions. The soluble H-2 antigen prepared from the leukemia cells was tested for most of the specificities determined by H-2a with no exceptional results. TL. 1, 2, 3 activities, measured as each component separately, were located in approximately the same position; there is no clear indication yet whether the three TL specificities are separable from one another. It appears that in addition to the close genetic linkage between the H-2 and TL loci, and their reciprocal interaction in producing H-2 and TL antigens, these antigens exhibit some similarity at the chemical level.
Barebacking and sexual position: An analysis of the personal accounts of HIV-negative and unknown status gay men who have condomless anal sex

Men who have sex with men (MSM) remain disproportionately affected by HIV and sexual infections, which are acquired predominately through condomless anal sex, known as ‘barebacking’. This thesis is concerned with the experiences of HIV-negative or unknown status gay men who have recently engaged in bareback sex. Using data obtained through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this thesis makes a unique and holistic contribution to the barebacking discourse by detailing the factors that influence HIV-negative and unknown status MSM to engage in bareback sex through the analytical lens of sexual position. MSM in London were targeted via gay press, e-mail broadcasts and leafleting, and asked to take part in in-depth qualitative interviews. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the data were managed using NVivo9™. A total of 13 MSM were interviewed; the average age of participants was 39 years (range 29-55) and all had engaged in bareback sex between 0-90 days prior to the interview. The findings are organised around a pragmatic analytical framework generated from the mens’ narratives and comprise three main themes: ‘How participants set the scene to their barebacking encounters’; ‘The act of bareback sex’ and ‘The meanings men ascribe to bareback sex’. By examining how participants locate their barebacking encounters, how bareback sex is communicated and negotiated during an encounter, and how men ascribe meaning to bareback sex, I demonstrate how participation in bareback sex is the result of a dynamic process involving different combinations of factors. These findings are presented in three separate chapters. In addition, this thesis provides new insights regarding sexual position and bareback sex. The thesis concludes with a discussion about the implications of the findings for those who work with MSM and also considers areas of possible future research.
Quality Assessment of Longissimus and Semitendinosus Muscles from Beef Cattle Subjected to Non-penetrative and Penetrative Percussive Stunning Methods

This study provides a comparative analysis of the effects of pre-slaughter penetrative and non-penetrative stunning and post-slaughter stunning on meat quality attributes in longissimus lumborum (LL) and semitendinosus (ST) muscles in heifers. Ten animals were assigned to each of four treatment groups: i) animals were subjected to conventional Halal slaughter (a clean incision through the structures at the front of the upper neck - the trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries and jugular veins) and post-cut penetrating mechanical stun within 10 to 20 s of the neck cut (Unstunned; US); ii) high power non-penetrating mechanical stunning followed by the neck cut (HPNP); iii) low power non-penetrating mechanical stunning followed by the neck cut (LPNP); and iv) penetrative stunning using a captive bolt pistol followed by the neck cut (P). For each carcass, muscle samples were removed within 45 min of slaughter, portioned and analysed for pH, cooking loss, water holding capacity (WHC), tenderness (WBS), lipid oxidation (TBARS) and color, over a two week storage period. Stunning did not affect pH and cooking loss. Significant differences in water holding capacity, tenderness, lipid oxidation and color were present at different storage time points. HPNP stunning resulted in lower WHC and color values, particularly lightness (L*), higher TBARS values and peak force values compared with those stunned using LPNP, P and US. These adverse effects on quality were mostly encountered in the ST muscle. In conclusion, the meat quality achieved using P, LPNP and US treatments was comparable, and no treatment stood out as considerably better than another.