Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Religious problem-solving styles : Three styles revisited

As previously found, three styles of religious problem solving were hypothesized. In a sample of 272 male clergy and spouses, factor analysis was used to assess the dimensionality of the Religious ProblemSolving Scale using a short form consisting of 18 of the original 36 items. Factor analysis pointed to a three-factor solution with six items each loading on each factor corresponding to three styles of religious problem solving. These three styles suggest a manner of problem solving in which the individual is in a partnership with God in coping (Collaborative), one in which the individual assumes total responsibility for problem solving (Self-Directing), and one in which the individual abandons responsibility for problem solving, leaving it up to God (Deferring). The study also found high internal consistency among the items forming the three subscales. The study substantiates three distinct scales of religious problem solving and supports a fuller consideration of the religiosity variable in problem solving and coping for clergy. The value of parsimony in scale design or usage in research is implied. A survey of scholarly work on religious attribution theory in the psychology of religion suggested that religion influences the meaning given to many problems and situations (Gorsuch and Smith 1983; Spilka and Schmidt 1993; Pargament, Sullivan, Tyler, and Steele 1982). Earlier research supported the conclusion that religion appeared to provide guidance for the selection of solutions to problems and in providing emotional support (Pargament and Hahn 1986; Pargament 1990). Unidimensional and global indicators such as religious participation, attendance, and beliefs do not capture the complexity and multidimensional nature of religion (Williams 1994). More complex conceptualization of the religiosity variable has been proposed (Schaefer and Gorsuch 1991). More specific dimensions of religiosity are needed to describe its influence when an individual faces times of crisis (Pargament 1995). Consistent with the tenets of religious attribution theory, Pargament, Kendell, Hathaway, Gravengoed, Newman, and Jones (1988) hypothesized three styles of religious problem solving: Deferring, Collaborative and Self-Directing. These styles reflect positions on a continuum of locus of responsibility and level of activity of the individual in the resolution of problems. With the Deferring style, the responsibility for problem solving is focused on God, with the individual remaining relatively inactive in the process. With the Collaborative style, the locus of responsibility is on both the individual and God, with both being active in the problem-solving process. With the Self-Directing style, the responsibility for problem solving is assumed almost exclusively by the individual who plays the active role in the implementation of solutions.
Development and Characterization of a Gene Expression Reporter System for Clostridium acetobutylicumATCC 824

ABSTRACT A gene expression reporter system (pHT3) for Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC 824 was developed by using thelacZ gene from Thermoanaerobacterium thermosulfurogenes EM1 as the reporter gene. In order to test the reporter system, promoters of three key metabolic pathway genes,ptb (coding for phosphotransbutyrylase), thl(coding for thiolase), and adc (coding for acetoacetate decarboxylase), were cloned upstream of the reporter gene in pHT3 in order to construct vectors pHT4, pHT5, and pHTA, respectively. Detection of β-galactosidase activity in time course studies performed with strains ATCC 824(pHT4), ATCC 824(pHT5), and ATCC 824(pHTA) demonstrated that the reporter gene produced a functional β-galactosidase in C. acetobutylicum. In addition, time course studies revealed differences in the β-galactosidase specific activity profiles of strains ATCC 824(pHT4), ATCC 824(pHT5), and ATCC 824(pHTA), suggesting that the reporter system developed in this study is able to effectively distinguish between different promoters. The stability of the β-galactosidase produced by the reporter gene was also examined with strains ATCC 824(pHT4) and ATCC 824(pHT5) by using chloramphenicol treatment to inhibit protein synthesis. The data indicated that the β-galactosidase produced by the lacZgene from T. thermosulfurogenes EM1 was stable in the exponential phase of growth. In pH-controlled fermentations of ATCC 824(pHT4), the kinetics of β-galactosidase formation from theptb promoter and phosphotransbutyrylase formation from its own autologous promoter were found to be similar.
Behavioral / Systems / Cognitive Differential Encoding Mechanisms for Subsequent Associative Recognition and Free Recall

Recent neuroimaging studies have successfully identified encoding mechanisms that support different forms of subsequent episodic recognition memory. In our everyday lives, however, much of our episodic memory retrieval is accomplished by means of free recall, i.e., retrieval without an external recognition cue. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the encoding mechanisms that support later free recall and their relationship to those that support different forms of later recognition memory. First, in agreement with previous work, we found that activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus and hippocampus correlated with later associative/relational recognition. In these regions, activation was further enhanced for items later freely recalled, pointing to shared underlying relational encoding mechanisms whose magnitude of activation differentiates later successful free recall from successful associative recognition. Critically, we also found evidence for free recall-specific encoding mechanisms that did not, in our paradigm, support later associative recognition compared with item recognition. These free recall-specific effects were observed in left mid/dorsolateral prefrontal (DLPFC) and bilateral posterior parietal cortices (PPC). We speculate that the higher-level working memory operations associated with DLPFC and attention to internal mnemonic representations perhaps mediated via PPC may serve to embed an item into a rich associative network during encoding that facilitates later access to the item. Finally, activation in the perirhinal cortex correlated with successful associative binding regardless of the form of later memory, i.e., recognition or free recall, providing novel evidence for the role of the perirhinal cortex in episodic intra-item encoding.
Assessing single- and dual-process accounts of recognition memory using hierarchical Bayesian models

Recognition memory refers to a person’s ability to recognize something that has been previously encountered. For several decades recognition memory has been thought to be governed by a single process whereby the strength of a memory for an item dictates whether people judge the item as having been previously encountered or not. More recently, it has been proposed that recognition memory is governed by two, independent processes: Sometimes a memory judgement is based on strength, sometimes it is based on explicit recollection. Whereas this two-process theory has been embraced by many researchers, others claim that only one process is necessary to explain recognition memory. Here, I argue that all previous evidence for both the one and the two-process theories is questionable — because all models of recognition memory are non-linear models, averaging data over factors that vary (e.g., items) will distort the conclusions drawn. In all previous work it has been necessary to average data over items in order to fit formal models. To avoid the distortions from averaging, I develop hierarchical versions of popular recognition memory models that simultaneously account for person and item variability. These models are fit to data from several experiments to assess the veracity of previous claims. The results of this hierarchical modeling suggest that 1) ROC asymmetry, which has served as strong evidence for particular one and two-process model, is not an artifact of averaging, 2) The Yonelinas two-process model provides a superior account of recognition memory data when compared with the unequal-variance signal detection model via the DIC model-fit statistic, and 3) Two-process model fits reveal that estimates of recollection and familiarity co-vary across items and people. Moreover, manipulations of depth-of-processing, perceptual match-mismatch, response deadline, and list length all affect both recollection and familiarity to some degree. This result implies that, although the two-process model is the best-fitting parametric model, the data are x being generated from a yet-to-be specified one-process model.
Investigation of the neuronal marker N-acetylaspartate as a potential biomarker for neurological diseases

N-acetylaspartate (NAA) is known to be present in high concentrations throughout the whole CNS. It is believed to have four basic functions in the brain; an organic osmolyte, a source of acetate for myelin synthesis, an energy source and a precursor for N-acetylaspartate-glutamate (NAAG). Because of NAA? s ability to be measured both in vivo and ex vivo as well as its high concentration it is believed that it has potential to be used as a biomarker for neuronal loss/dysfunction.The present studies were utilised to develop the potential of NAA as a biomarker using a variety of techniques and neurological diseases both in pre-clinical and human post-mortem studies.Using phencyclidine (PCP) to induce schizophrenia-like symptoms we showed that reductions in the levels of NAA in the frontal cortex and ventral hippocampus are observed in a post-mortem analysis of rat brain tissue. This reduction is not ameliorated following chronic administration of the atypical antipsychotic olanzapine. A deficit in cell density in the frontal cortex was also found following cresyl violet staining. Again this deficit was not ameliorated following chronic administration of atypical antipsychotic olanzapine.With in vivo analysis using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) we replicated these findings 6 weeks post PCP treatment. This neuronal dysfunction was supported with behavioural data showing a deficit in the PCP group in the novel object recognition (NOR) task. Following behavioural testing a post-mortem analysis was undertaken on the cohort mirroring the reduction in NAA using the HPLC method of analysis in the frontal cortex.Following High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis of human brain samples provided by the Stanley Foundation we found a reduction in the level of NAA in human schizophrenic brain tissue when compared to controls. These deficits were found in the frontal cortex and further support the findings in the preclinical experiments.In the final studies we focused on a preclinical rat model of relevance to Alzheimer? s disease. Using acute administration of soluble Amyloid Beta(A? )1-42 oligomers we demonstrated a model of early stage Alzheimer? s. We observed a cognitive deficit in the NOR task however no reduction in NAA in the brain regions examined. These finding are indicative of a synaptic dysfunction however no neuronal dysfunction at the early stage of the disease.Taken together, these findings suggest that NAA shows promise as a biomarker for neuronal dysfunction in neurological diseases that can be used in pre-clinical and clinical setting with both in vivo and ex vivo applications. We also demonstrate the potential translational use of NAA as a biomarker for assessing treatment efficacy in relation to the underlying pathological changes in the brain.
Making Sense of The Research on Gender and Ethics in Business: A Critical Analysis and Extension

Abstract: This article represents an attempt to organize, critique, and extend research findings on gender differences in business ethics. The focus is on two dependent variables—ethical judgment and behavioral intent. Differences in findings between student and professional groups are noted and theoretical implications are discussed. The new research provided for this article contains two benchmark studies undertaken with identical stimuli and identical measures. These studies were followed by two additional studies, using the same measures but different stimuli, as a partial replication and extension of the first two. Findings suggest that little difference exists between the genders on behavioral intent for professional groups and only minimal differences for the ethical judgment measures. Student results, however, produced more substantial differences for behavioral intention.
Lesions of the Orbitofrontal but Not Medial Prefrontal Cortex Affect Cognitive Judgment Bias in Rats

Neuroimaging studies in humans have recently shown that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) mediate bias in the judgment of forthcoming events. In the present study, we sought to determine whether cognitive judgment bias (CJB) is also dependent on these prefrontal regions in non-human animals. For this, we trained a cohort of rats in the ambiguous-cue interpretation (ACI) paradigm, subjected them to excitotoxic lesions in the medial PFC (mPFC) and OFC, and tested the effects of neuronal loss within these regions on CJB. Comparison of the lesions’ behavioral effects in the ACI paradigm revealed that neuronal loss within the OFC but not within the mPFC influences the interpretation of ambiguous cues by animals. Our findings demonstrate the specific involvement of the OFC in CJB in rats.
Efferent connections of the centromedian and parafascicular thalamic nuclei: An autoradiographic investigation in the cat

The efferent projections of the centromedian and parafascicular (CM‐Pf) thalamic nuclear complex were analyzed by the autoradiographic method. Our findings show that the CM‐Pf complex projects in a topographic manner to specific regions of the rostral cortex. These fibers distribute primarily to cortical layers I and III; however, the projection to layer I is more extensive.
Antihypertensive drugs clonidine, diazoxide, hydralazine and furosemide regulate the production of cytokines by placentas and peripheral blood mononuclear cells in normal pregnancy

Background Antihypertensive drugs such as clonidine, diazoxide, hydralazine and furosemide are used in the hypertensive disorders of pregnancy to control blood pressure, but it is not clear if they modulate the production of placental or circulating cytokines. Objective To examine the effect of pharmaceutical doses of well known antihypertensive drugs used for blood pressure control on the production of the cytokines interleukin (IL)-6, IL-10 and tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α in placental tissue and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in normal pregnancy. Design Placental biopsies were taken from the decidual surface of placentas after delivery of normal pregnancies (n = 6) and PBMCs were separated from the whole blood of normal term pregnant women (n = 7). Both villous explants and PBMCs were cultured with increasing concentrations of antihypertensive drugs. The dose effect of drugs on the production of placental and circulating cytokines (IL-6, IL-10 and TNF-α) were examined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results Placental production of IL-10 was not affected by clonidine, but decreased significantly after incubation of the tissue with diazoxide, hydralazine or furosemide. Production of IL-10 by PBMCs increased significantly: by from 3.4 ± 2.7% [16.3 pg/ml (range 6.1–21.5 pg/ml)] to 24.5 ± 3.3% [30.4 pg/ml (range 16.9–34.8 pg/ml)] with increasing concentrations of clonidine (0.08–1.3 μg/ml), and by 8.8 ± 3.5% [4.1 pg/ml (range 3.0–17.8 pg/ml)] and 17.2 ± 1.9% [22.6 pg/ml (range 13.2–23.2 pg/ml)] with lower doses of hydralazine (6.3 and 12.5 μg/ml) (all P values < 0.05). There was a stepwise reduction in production of TNF-α and IL-6 with increasing doses of diazoxide, hydralazine and furosemide by placentas and PBMCs from these women with normal pregnancies. Conclusion Our data suggest that the antihypertensive drugs clonidine and hydralazine can stimulate production of the circulating anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10, whereas furosemide and diazoxide inhibit the production of this cytokine and the proinflammatory cytokines TNF-α and IL-6 by placentas and PBMCs.
MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS OF NINTH GRADE STUDENTS: THE CASE OF THE PROPERTIES OF THE MAGNETIC FIELD

The study of mental representations of students of all ages and school levels within the context of Science Education points to the need for the creation of special teaching interventions in a wide spectrum of subjects in the teaching of the Natural Sciences. These teaching interventions aim at transforming the mental representations of the students into others that are compatible with the descriptive, functional and interpretive features of the scientific models (Méheut, 1997; Weil-Barais, 2001; Ergazaki, Komis & Zogza, 2005; Ravanis & Pantidos, 2008). However, the existed mental constructions as well the connections among them, in relation with the teaching context, affect the interpretations that students use to explain aspects of natural phenomena. Actually students’ understandings of a physical concept depend on what they have already mentally shaped about other relevant physical concepts (e.g., Giordan, Girault & Clement, 1994). This perspective has been undertaken to enable us in this study to draw on students’ mental representations about ‘magnetic field’ investigating how students conceptualize magnetic field in the context of Newtonian model. In particular, simple magnetic behaviours constitute a cognitive area that has not been sufficiently studied, since related research is limited. Pocovi & Finley (2002) analyzed how electric and magnetic lines of force were conceived by Faraday and how they are understood by students. Many students pose ideas similar to those of Faraday in that lines of force are conceived as real physical entities responsible for the transmission of the electric and magnetic action. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) introduced the concept of “field” in order to overcome the conceptual problem of ‘forces MentAL RePResentAtIons oF nIntH GRADe stUDents: tHe CAse oF tHe PRoPeRtIes oF tHe MAGnetIC FIeLD
Internal Force Analysis and Load Distribution for Cooperative Multi-Robot Manipulation

The load distribution strategy in cooperative manipulation tasks allocates suitable force and torque setpoints to an ensemble of manipulators in order to implement a desired action on the manipulated object. Due to the manipulator redundancy, the load distribution computed by means of a generalized inverse of the grasp matrix is not uniquely determined. Controversial results on the nonsqueezing property of specific load distributions exist in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for the analysis of internal wrenches based on the kinematic constraints imposed to the manipulator ensemble. We unify previous results by showing that there exists no unique nonsqueezing load distribution and illustrate the consequences of our findings by means of several examples. In particular, the presented results provide a new perspective on the decomposition of interaction forces into internal and external components as required for cooperative multimanipulator control schemes.
Space–Time Codes Achieving the DMD Tradeoff of the MIMO-ARQ Channel

For the quasi-static, Rayleigh-fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with n t transmit and n r receive antennas, Zheng and Tse showed that there exists a fundamental tradeoff between diversity and spatial-multiplexing gains, referred to as the diversity-multiplexing gain (D-MG) tradeoff. Subsequently, El Gamal, Caire, and Damen considered signaling across the same channel using an L -round automatic retransmission request (ARQ) protocol that assumes the presence of a noiseless feedback channel capable of conveying one bit of information per use of the feedback channel. They showed that given a fixed number L of ARQ rounds and no power control, there is a tradeoff between diversity and multiplexing gains, termed the diversity-multiplexing-delay (DMD) tradeoff. This tradeoff indicates that the diversity gain under the ARQ scheme for a particular information rate is considerably larger than that obtainable in the absence of feedback. In this paper, a set of sufficient conditions under which a space-time (ST) code will achieve the DMD tradeoff is presented. This is followed by two classes of explicit constructions of ST codes which meet these conditions. Constructions belonging to the first class achieve minimum delay and apply to a broad class of fading channels whenever nr ges nt and either L\nt or nt\L. The second class of constructions do not achieve minimum delay, but do achieve the DMD tradeoff of the fading channel for all statistical descriptions of the channel and for all values of the parameters nr, nt, L.
Effect of ileum segment and protein sources on net disappearance of crude protein and amino acids in laying hens

1. This study investigated the net disappearance of crude protein (CP) and amino acids (AA) from soybean meal and rapeseed meal in different sub-sections of the ileum of hens. A basal diet was used and in another 4 diets, maize starch contained in the basal diet was replaced with soybean meal or rapeseed meal at 140 and 280 g/kg so that changes in dietary AA concentrations resulted from the oilseed meals only. 2. A total of 250 Lohmann Brown pullets were used for this experiment at 20 weeks old and given one of the 5 diets for 7 d. The section between Meckel's diverticulum and 2 cm anterior to the ileo-caecal-colonic junction was taken after slaughtering the hens and cut into three sub-sections of equal length. Digesta were taken separately from each sub-section and then frozen. Net disappearance of AA and CP for the diets and the two protein sources was calculated based on standard equations and using a multiple linear regression approach. 3. Net disappearances of CP and all AA were significantly lower in the proximal sub-section than in the central and terminal sub-sections. Also, the net disappearance of CP and all AA from rapeseed meal was significantly lower in the proximal sub-section than in the central or terminal sub-sections. For soybean meal, only the net disappearances of arginine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid and phenylalanine were significantly lower in the proximal than in the terminal sub-section. No significant differences in the net disappearance of CP and AA were detected between protein sources within the central and terminal sub-sections or between the central and terminal sub-section within each protein source. Soybean meal had a significantly higher net disappearance of CP and AA (with the exception of cystine and methionine) than rapeseed meal in the proximal sub-section but these differences were not statistically significant in the central and terminal sub-sections. 4. Amino acids disappeared from the proximal region of the ileum. This needs consideration in standard approaches that are used for measuring AA digestibility. There is a variation in AA digestibility between soybean meal and rapeseed meal. The ranking of individual AA regarding their digestibility is different between the two oilseed meals.