Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Want to Know About Quality in Higher Education? Ask an Academic

Abstract How would you decide on the quality of a higher education institution? Would you (1) ask the academic registrar (or equivalent); (2) look up the most recent quality audit report; or (3) contact the teaching staff directly to discuss their perceptions about the quality of the services provided in their institution? While there is no one correct answer to the above question, the proposition underpinning the empirical research reported in this paper is: If you really want to know about quality in higher education, then ask those closest to the student‐academic interface—the academics or the students. This paper focuses on the former. Using a postal survey, the views of accounting academics from 39 Australian universities about quality in accounting education were investigated from two perspectives—beliefs (what is currently occurring) and attitudes (what ought to be occurring). The findings suggest differences in those beliefs and attitudes, and an overall view that quality in accounting education has declined over recent years.
Expression of growth differentiation factor 6 in the human developing fetal spine retreats from vertebral ossifying regions and is restricted to cartilaginous tissues

During embryogenesis vertebral segmentation is initiated by sclerotomal cell migration and condensation around the notochord, forming anlagen of vertebral bodies and intervertebral discs. The factors that govern the segmentation are not clear. Previous research demonstrated that mutations in growth differentiation factor 6 resulted in congenital vertebral fusion, suggesting this factor plays a role in development of vertebral column. In this study, we detected expression and localization of growth differentiation factor 6 in human fetal spinal column, especially in the period of early ossification of vertebrae and the developing intervertebral discs. The extracellular matrix proteins were also examined. Results showed that high levels of growth differentiation factor 6 were expressed in the nucleus pulposus of intervertebral discs and the hypertrophic chondrocytes adjacent to the ossification centre in vertebral bodies, where strong expression of proteoglycan and collagens was also detected. As fetal age increased, the expression of growth differentiation factor 6 was decreased correspondingly with the progress of ossification in vertebral bodies and restricted to cartilaginous regions. This expression pattern and the genetic link to vertebral fusion suggest that growth differentiation factor 6 may play an important role in suppression of ossification to ensure proper vertebral segmentation during spinal development. © 2015 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 34:279–289, 2016.
Inhibition of non‐vesicular glutamate release by group III metabotropic glutamate receptors in the nucleus accumbens

Previous in vitro studies have shown that group III metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) regulate synaptic glutamate release. The present study used microdialysis to characterize this regulation in vivo in rat nucleus accumbens. Reverse dialysis of the group III mGluR agonist l‐(+)‐2‐amino‐4‐phosphonobutyric acid (L‐AP4) decreased, whereas the antagonist (R,S)‐α‐methylserine‐O‐phosphate (MSOP) increased the extracellular level of glutamate. The decrease by L‐AP4 or the increase by MSOP was antagonized by co‐administration of MSOP or L‐AP4, respectively. Activation of mGluR4a by (1S,3R,4S)‐1‐aminocyclopentane‐1,2,4‐tricarboxylic acid or mGluR6 by 2‐amino‐4‐(3‐hydroxy‐5‐methylisoxazol‐4‐yl)butyric acid had no effect on extracellular glutamate. (R,S)‐4‐Phosphonophenylglycine (PPG), another group III agonist with high affinity for mGluR4/6/8, reduced extracellular glutamate only at high concentrations capable of binding to mGluR7. The increase in extracellular glutamate by MSOP was tetrodotoxin‐independent, and resistant to both the L‐type and N‐type Ca2+ channel blockers. L‐AP4 failed to block 30 mm K+‐induced vesicular glutamate release. Blockade of glutamate uptake by d,l‐threo‐β‐benzyloxyaspartate caused a Ca2+‐independent elevation in extracellular glutamate that was reversed by L‐AP4. Finally, (S)‐4‐carboxyphenylglycine, an inhibitor of cystine‐glutamate antiporters, attenuated the L‐AP4‐induced reduction in extracellular glutamate. Together, these data indicate that group III mGluRs regulate in vivo extracellular glutamate in the nucleus accumbens by inhibiting non‐vesicular glutamate release.
Personal Projects of Boys with Developmental Coordination Disorder

Understanding the leisure perspectives of preadolescent boys with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) requires more than documenting time-use patterns. This study explored the use of the Personal Projects Analysis for Children (PPA-C) to improve depth of understanding about personally meaningful leisure participation for this population. Sixty boys with DCD and 113 boys without DCD completed the PPA-C. Boys with DCD reported significantly fewer personal projects involving physical activities; fewer friends with whom to complete personal projects; more solitary leisure projects; and fewer personally meaningful personal projects in total than the comparison group. The PPA-C findings provided ecologically sensitive and personally salient information about leisure time participation from the perspectives of boys with and without DCD. The low frequency of self-reported social and physical activity personal projects for boys with DCD has not been previously detailed in this way. Occupational therapists are challenged to be vigilant regarding restricted leisure portfolios and expectations about activity participation in boys with DCD, with further research and advocacy for balanced portfolios of personally meaningful leisure.
Cyberbullying and traditional bullying in adolescence: Differential roles of moral disengagement, moral emotions, and moral values

The aim of this study was to investigate whether different aspects of morality predict traditional bullying and cyberbullying behaviour in a similar way. Students between 12 and 19 years participated in an online study. They reported on the frequency of different traditional and cyberbullying behaviours andcompleted self-report measures on moral emotions and moral values. A scenario approach with open questions was used to assess morally disengaged justifications. Tobit regressions indicated that a lack of moral values and a lack of remorse predicted both traditional and cyberbullying behaviour. Traditional bullying was strongly predictive for cyberbullying. A lack of moral emotions and moral values predicted cyberbullying behaviour even when controlling for traditional bullying. Morally disengaged justifications were only predictive for traditional, but not for cyberbullying behaviour. The findings show that moral standards and moral affect are important to understand individual differences in engagement in both traditional and cyberforms of bullying.
AN EMPIRICAL EVALUATION OF INTEREST POINT DETECTORS

Image interest point extraction and matching across images is a commonplace task in computer vision–based applications, across widely diverse domains, such as 3D reconstruction, augmented reality, or tracking. We present an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art interest point detection algorithms measuring several parameters, such as efficiency, robustness to image domain geometric transformations—that is, similarity—affine or projective transformations, as well as invariance to photometric transformations such as light intensity or image noise.
Exact queueing asymptotics for multiple heavy-tailed on-off flows

We consider a fluid queue fed by multiple on-off flows with heavy-tailed (regularly varying) on-periods. Under fairly mild assumptions, we prove that the workload distribution is asymptotically equivalent to that in a reduced system. The reduced system consists of a dominant subset of the flows, with the original service rate subtracted by the mean rate of the other flows. We describe how a dominant set may be determined from a simple knapsack formulation. We exploit a powerful intuitive argument to obtain the exact asymptotics for the reduced system. Combined with the reduced-load equivalence, the results for the reduced system provide an asymptotic characterization of the buffer behavior.
Interleukin-1&agr; and Interleukin-6 Enhance the Antibacterial Properties of Cultured Composite Keratinocyte Grafts

ObjectiveTo determine whether the antibacterial properties of cultured composite keratinocyte grafts can be enhanced by cytokines that stimulate the innate immune response. Summary Background DataUse of composite grafts of cultured keratinocytes has been limited because of their susceptibility to burn wound microorganisms as a result of their lack of a vasculature and immune cells when transplanted. Moreover, use of topical antimicrobial agents is limited with these composite grafts because of cytotoxic effects. Keratinocytes, like all epithelial cells in the body, maintain a natural defense mechanism called the innate immune system. Some components of this system can be induced by cytokines. MethodsThe innate immune response of cultured composite keratinocyte grafts treated with various cytokines was assessed indirectly by measuring the levels of mRNA encoding antimicrobial peptides (human beta defensin-1 and -2, LL-37, and antileukoprotease) and antimicrobial proteins (lysozyme, bactericidal/permeability-inducing protein, and phospholipase A2) by reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction and directly by measuring the ability of keratinocytes to inhibit the growth of added bacteria (Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus). ResultsTreatment with interluekin-1&agr; increased mRNA levels of antimicrobial peptides in keratinocytes on plastic dishes and in composite grafts. Interleukin-6 increased mRNA levels of antimicrobial proteins in composite grafts only. When added to composite grafts, both cytokines increased antibacterial activity against E. coli, P. aeruginosa, and S. aureus. Moreover, interleukin-1&agr; and interleukin-6 did not impair the formation of a differentiated epidermis in vitro or after transplantation of the composite grafts. ConclusionsTreatment with interleukin-1&agr; or interleukin-6 of cultured composite keratinocyte grafts stimulates the innate immune response of keratinocytes, enhances the antibacterial properties of these grafts, and may better prepare them to combat infections in contaminated burn wounds.
Use of Agro-Industrial Wastes in Solid-State Fermentation Processes

Large amount of wastes is generated every year from the industrial processing of agricultural raw materials. Most of these wastes are used as animal feed or burned as alternative for elimination. However, such wastes usually have a composition rich in sugars, minerals and proteins, and therefore, they should not be considered “wastes” but raw materials for other industrial processes. The presence of carbon sources, nutrients and moisture in these wastes provides conditions suitable for the development of microorganisms, and this open up great possibilities for their reuse in solid-state fermentation (SSF) processes, for example. Agro-industrial wastes can be used as solid support, carbon and/or nutrient source in SSF processes for the production of a variety of value-added compounds.
Postviral fatigue syndrome.

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or post-viral fatigue syndrome is a common disorder, which has been known previously under a variety of different names, i.e., Iceland disease or Royal Free disease. It may occur in epidemics or sporadically. The cause is unknown, with patients complaining of exhaustion, fatigue, muscle aches and pains, and invariable psychiatric symptoms such as emotional lability, poor memory/concentration, and depression. Present-day research points to the cause as a metabolic disorder secondary to persistent viral infection.
Temporal lobe asymmetries as the key to the etiology of schizophrenia.

With evidence that determinants of psychosis are present early and influence brain development, and in the absence of a significant environmental contribution, schizophrenia may be regarded as a genetic encephalopathy. Morphological abnormalities are particularly apparent in the temporal lobe and on the left side of the brain, and in a number of studies significant diagnosis x side interactions have been detected. Such interactions suggest an intimate relationship between the disease process and the mechanisms that determine asymmetrical brain development. These mechanisms presumably relate to the human capacity for speech and communication, and they may have played a critical role in the evolution of the human brain. A candidate locus for an asymmetry determinant and the psychosis gene within the exchange region of the sex chromosomes is proposed. Some sex differences in schizophrenia (e.g., with respect to age of onset and brain structure) may relate to subtle differences in the rate of asymmetry development in the two sexes.
Effect of Interictal Epileptiform Discharges on Nocturnal Plasma Prolactin Concentrations in Epileptic Patients with Complex Partial Seizures

Summary: To investigate the effect of interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) on plasma prolactin (PRL) level, we studied 18 epileptic patients with complex partial seizures (CPS) who did not experience clinical or subclinical ictal events during all‐night monitoring with polygraphic recording and video imaging. The density of IEDs peaked during non‐REM stages and was significantly reduced during REM stage. Mean plasma PRL concentrations in epileptic patients, when sampled at 30‐min intervals, showed a moderate but significant elevation during non‐REM (p < 0.001) and awake stages (p < 0.005), but not during REM stage, when compared with 10 nonepileptic control subjects studied in a similar fashion. The data obtained in this physiologically controlled environment indicate that the cumulative effect of IEDs may modify PRL regulatory mechanisms, resulting in a modest elevation of plasma concentrations independent of ictal discharges.
Improving the discovery of IXP peering links through passive BGP measurements

The Internet Autonomous System (AS) topology has important implications on end-to-end routing, network economics and security. Despite the significance of the AS topology research, it has not been possible to collect a complete map of the AS interconnections due to the difficulties involved in discovering peering links. The problem of topology incompleteness is amplified by the increasing popularity of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) and the “flattening” AS hierarchy. A recent study discovered that the number of missing peering links at a single IXP is larger than the total number of the observable peering links. As a result a large body of research focuses on measurement techniques that can alleviate the incompleteness problem. Most of these proposals require the deployment of additional BGP vantage points and traceroute monitors. In this paper we propose a new measurement methodology for improving the discovery of missing peering links through the publicly available BGP data. Our approach utilizes the traffic engineering BGP Communities used by IXPs' Route Servers to implement multi-lateral peering agreements. We are able to discover 36K additional p2p links from 11 large IXPs. The discovered links are not only invisible in previous BGP-based AS topology collections, but also 97% of those links are invisible to traceroute data from CAIDA's Ark and DIMES projects for June 2012. The advantages of the proposed technique are threefold. First, it provides a new source of previously invisible p2p links. Second, it does not require changes in the existing measurement infrastructure. Finally, it offers a new source of policy data regarding multilateral peering links at IXPs.
Job Satisfaction of Primary Health Care Physicians at Capital Health Region, Kuwait

Objectives: To evaluate the extent of job satisfaction of primary health care physicians working in Capital Health Region. Subject and Methods: A population-based study was conducted during July 2004. Out of 95 questionnaires distributed to all physicians working in primary health care centers, Capital Region during the study period, 89 questionnaires were received. An English form selfadministered questionnaire was used. The questionnaire collected information on socio-demographic characteristics and job satisfaction. Results: A total of 89 participants in the study consisted of 42 males and 47 females; 56.2% were Kuwaiti 82.0% were married and 73.0% had children. The overall satisfaction was 61.8%. Significantly the higher the age the higher the job satisfaction. There were no significant differences in overall job satisfaction for nationality, sex, marital status and number of children. The GPs were less satisfied with their rate of pay but more satisfied with their colleagues. Conclusion: Job satisfaction of primary health care physicians is critical for improvement of health systems. The results of our study showed that GPs were less satisfied with the rate of pay and the amount of variety in work. Young physicians appear to need more attention.
Glaucoma ATP-Sensitive Potassium ( KATP ) Channel Openers Diazoxide and Nicorandil Lower Intraocular Pressure In Vivo

Citation: Chowdhury UR, Holman BH, Fautsch MP. ATP-sensitive potassium (KATP) channel openers diazoxide and nicorandil lower intraocular pressure in vivo. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2013;54:4892–4899. DOI:10.1167/ iovs.13-11872 PURPOSE. To evaluate the expression of ATP-sensitive potassium (KATP) channel subunits and study the effect of KATP channel openers diazoxide and nicorandil on intraocular pressure (IOP) in an in vivo mouse model.
Faking it Even After you Make it? Exploring How Organizational Lay Theories of Intelligence Impact Cheating on Difficult Tasks

Organizational lay theories of intelligence (i.e., beliefs shared within an organization about the nature of intelligence) have been found to play an important role in shaping people’s experiences and behavior within particular settings (Emerson & Murphy, 2015a; Murphy & Dweck, 2010). In three studies, I investigated whether an organization’s entity (i.e., intelligence is fixed) or incremental (i.e., intelligence is malleable) lay theory might impact people’s cheating behavior in a demanding testing context. Results revealed that people tended to cheat more in the entity (vs. incremental) environment after failing to meet a high performance standard. In Study 2, participants perceived cheating to be more common in the entity (vs. incremental) organization and that the entity organization endorsed performance-avoidance goals more and mastery goals less; yet, these perceptions did not statistically mediate participants’ cheating. In Study 3, participants cheated more in the entity (vs. incremental) context even after being praised for their past performance; notably, the type of praise that participants received influenced the particular cheating strategy they employed.
Tubular carcinoma of the breast: sensitivity of diagnostic techniques and correlation with histopathology.

OBJECTIVE Our objective was to assess our experience in diagnosing pure tubular carcinoma of the breast and to correlate the radiologic and histopathologic features. MATERIALS AND METHODS A retrospective review of 932 consecutive cases of proven breast cancer diagnosed between 1990 and 1997 revealed 78 cases (8.4%) of tubular carcinoma in 69 patients. Clinical, imaging, cytologic, and histologic findings were analyzed. RESULTS Mammography revealed tubular carcinoma in 68 (87%) of the 78 cases. Sonography showed tubular carcinoma in all 38 cases in which it was used; nine of these lesions were mammographically occult. These nine lesions were slightly, but not significantly (p < .05), smaller than the 29 lesions that had also been detected on mammography. Large core needle biopsy was performed in 22 patients (sensitivity, 91%). At biopsy, diagnoses were malignant (n = 16 [73%]), suspicious (n = 4 [18%]), atypia (n = 1 [4.5%]), and benign (n = 1 [4.5%]). Fine-needle aspiration biopsy was used to evaluate 36 cases of tubular carcinoma (sensitivity, 50%); cytologic diagnoses were malignant (n = 15 [42%]), suspicious (n = 3 [8%]), atypia (n = 10 [28%]), and benign (n = 8 [22%]). Only 15 (19%) of the 78 tubular carcinomas were palpable. Other tumors were detected within the excised tissue in 47 of the patients (68%); of these other types of lesions, ductal carcinoma in situ was found most often. CONCLUSION Most cases of tubular carcinoma can be revealed by mammography; for mammographically occult tubular carcinoma, sonography can be performed. The rate of accuracy for determining the presence of tubular carcinoma is higher with large core needle biopsy than with fine-needle aspiration biopsy. Finally, when tubular carcinoma is diagnosed, other histologic types of carcinoma often occur in the same breast.
Randomized study on the conversion of treatment with cyclosporine to azathioprine or mycophenolate mofetil followed by dose reduction.

BACKGROUND The introduction of cyclosporine (CsA) in kidney transplantation has improved early graft survival. However, its long-term use is associated with impairment of renal function and increased cardiovascular risk factors. To avoid CsA-related long-term adverse effects, patients were converted to either azathioprine (AZA) or mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) 1 year after transplantation. METHODS Between September 1995 and January 1997, 64 stable renal transplant recipients on CsA and prednisone treatment were included in a prospective, randomized study. Patients were randomized for conversion of CsA to 2 mg/kg AZA (n=30) or 1 g of MMF twice daily (n=34). All patients remained on low-dose steroids. To decrease the total immunosuppressive load, a dose reduction in MMF and AZA was performed at 4 and again at 8 months after conversion. Mycophenolic acid trough levels were measured at regular intervals. RESULTS After conversion, a decrease in serum creatinine was found for both groups: for MMF, 132 to 109 micromol/L (P=0.016); and for AZA, 123 to 112 micromol/L (P<0.0001). After conversion, more acute rejections occurred in the AZA group (11/30) compared to the MMF group (4/34) (P=0.04). Dose reduction of MMF to 500 mg twice daily and of AZA to 1.0 mg/kg elicited three rejections in both groups. The incidence of side effects and infections were similar. CONCLUSION Discontinuation of CsA spared renal function. In patients converted to MMF significantly less rejections occurred compared to patients converted to AZA. Furthermore, dose reduction of both AZA and MMF is possible in the majority (72%) of the patients.