Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Glutamate and Aspartate on Serum Antioxidative Enzyme, Sex Hormones, and Genital Inflammation in Boars Challenged with Hydrogen Peroxide

Background. Oxidative stress is associated with infertility. This study was conducted to determine the effects of glutamate and aspartate on serum antioxidative enzymes, sex hormones, and genital inflammation in boars suffering from oxidative stress. Methods. Boars were randomly divided into 4 groups: the nonchallenged control (CON) and H2O2-challenged control (BD) groups were fed a basal diet supplemented with 2% alanine; the other two groups were fed the basal diet supplemented with 2% glutamate (GLU) or 2% aspartate (ASP). The BD, GLU, and ASP groups were injected with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on day 15. The CON group was injected with 0.9% sodium chloride solution on the same day. Results. Dietary aspartate decreased the malondialdehyde (MDA) level in serum (P < 0.05) compared with the BD group. Additionally, aspartate maintained serum luteinizing hormone (LH) at a relatively stable level. Moreover, glutamate and aspartate increased transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) and interleukin-10 (IL-10) levels in the epididymis and testis (P < 0.05) compared with the BD group. Conclusion. Both glutamate and aspartate promoted genital mRNA expressions of anti-inflammatory factors after oxidative stress. Aspartate more effectively decreased serum MDA and prevented fluctuations in serum sex hormones after H2O2 challenge than did glutamate.
Thompson Sampling for Stochastic Bandits with Graph Feedback

We present a simple set of algorithms based on Thompson Sampling for stochastic bandit problems with graph feedback. Thompson Sampling is generally applicable, without the need to construct complicated upper confidence bounds. As we show in this paper, it has excellent performance in problems with graph feedback, even when the graph structure itself is unknown and/or changing. We provide theoretical guarantees on the Bayesian regret of the algorithm, as well as extensive experi- mental results on real and simulated networks. More specifically, we tested our algorithms on power law, planted partitions and Erdo's–Rényi graphs, as well as on graphs derived from Facebook and Flixster data and show that they clearly outperform related methods that employ upper confidence bounds.
INTESTINAL HELMINTHES AMONG CHILDREN IN ORPHANAGES IN SOME PARTS OF KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA

This study was carried out in four orphanage homes in Kaduna and Zaria, Nigeria to determine the prevalence of intestinal helminth infections among the subjects aged 0-16 years. Stool specimens and Scotch tape swabs were collected and processed according to standard parasitological techniques. Out of the ninety (90) specimens collected, 57 (63.3%) were positive for intestinal helminthes and 33(36.7%) were negative. The age group of 4-10 years had the highest prevalence of 43.8% while the children less than 1 year had the least prevalence of 5.27%. Infection with Ascaris lumbricoides was the highest (45.6%) while the least was observed for Ancylostoma spp and Taenia spp respectively(1.75%). Other helminthes recovered were Schistosoma mansoni (7.01%) , Trichuris trichiura (22.8%) , and Vampirolepsis nana ((7.01%) , . Polyparasitism was observed among the children with Ascaris lumbricoides + Trichuris trichiura (3.3%), the TRIAD- Ascaris lumbricoides + Trichuris trichiura + Hookworm (3.3%), Trichuris trichiura and hookworm (2.2% ). Others included Schistosoma mansoni + Trichuris trichiura (1.1%) , Hookworm and Trichuris trichiura (1.1%). Prevalence rates of intestinal helminth infections among the males were higher (54.3%) than in females (45.6%). Routine examination of stool specimens of children in orphanage homes will significantly benefit the orphans by encouraging appropriate health authorities to embark on mass for this vulnerable group in the Nigerian communities.
DIFFERENCES IN HALO-SCALE ENVIRONMENTS BETWEEN TYPE 1 AND TYPE 2 AGNs AT LOW REDSHIFT

Using low-redshift ( ) samples of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), normal galaxies and groups of galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we study the environments of Type 1 and Type 2 AGNs, both on small and large scales. Comparisons are made for galaxy samples matched in redshift, r-band luminosity, [O iii] luminosity, and also the position in groups (central or satellite). We find that Type 2 AGNs and normal galaxies reside in similar environments. Type 1 and Type 2 AGNs have similar clustering properties on large scales ( ), but at scales smaller than , Type 2s have significantly more neighbors than Type 1s (3.09 ± 0.69 times more for central AGNs at ). These results suggest that Type 1 and Type 2 AGNs are hosted by halos of similar masses, as can also be seen directly from the mass distributions of their host groups ( for centrals and for satellites). Type 2s have significantly more satellites around them, and the distribution of their satellites is also more centrally concentrated. The host galaxies of both types of AGNs have similar optical properties, but their infrared colors are significantly different. Our results suggest that the simple unified model based solely on torus orientation is not sufficient, but that galaxy interactions in dark matter halos must have played an important role in the formation of the dust structure, which obscures AGNs.
Miscommunication Among Children Through Text-Based Media and Its Relation to Social Anxiety

This study examined how social anxiety, gender, and mode of presentation influenced miscommunication and perception of negativity in children’s interpretation of computermediated messages. The initial phase of the research involved developing and validating the stimuli for emotion recognition via presentation of various emotionally toned messages. Following preparation of the stimuli, the 98 participants (aged 8-12 years) in the main study were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: audio-visual, audioonly, and text message. The same emotionally toned messages were presented in each of these three conditions. Participants were instructed to select from a list of six emotions (happy, sad, disgusted, angry, surprised, scared) which emotion each message conveyed. Participants then rated how positively or negatively they perceived each sentence, using a 5-point Likert scale that ranged from very negative to very positive. Following the emotion recognition and Likert rating task, participants completed questionnaires that gathered information about social anxiety and attribution bias. Findings revealed that additional nonverbal and paralinguistic, as in the audio-visual or audio-only condition, allowed participants to more accurately identify the emotion being conveyed in the message, compared to the text message condition. This advantage was found for all emotions with the exception of happiness. For happy messages, participants were able to identify the intended emotion at above-chance levels regardless of mode of presentation. When making interpretations about angry messages, a significant three-way interaction was observed between sex, condition and social anxiety. Likert rating analyses revealed that condition, sex, and social anxiety played important roles in the interpretation of both ambiguous and unambiguous emotions, such as surprise and happiness.
PHASE TRANSITION IN THE CONNES-MARCOLLI GL2-SYSTEM

We develop a general framework for analyzing KMS-states on C -algebras arising from actions of Hecke pairs. We then specialize to the system recently introduced by Connes and Marcolli and classify its KMS-states for inverse temperatures 6 0; 1. In particular, we show that for each 2 (1; 2) there exists a unique KMS -state.
WORKING PAPER SERIES COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE , INTERNATIONAL TRADE , AND FERTILITY

We are grateful to the editor (Nathan Nunn), two anonymous referees, Raj Arunachalam, Martha Bailey, Francesco Caselli, Francisco Ferreira, Elisa Gamberoni, Gene Grossman, David Lam, Carolina Sanchez-Paramo, and seminar participants at various institutions for helpful suggestions. Ça atay Bircan, Aaron Flaaen, Dimitrije Ruzic, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar provided outstanding research assistance. The project has been funded in part by the World Bank's Research Support Budget. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and need not represent either the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors or the countries they represent, or those of the Central Bank of Chile or the members of its board. This document is an output from a project funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) for the benefit of developing countries. The views expressed are not necessarily those of DFID, IZA, or the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cancer-Specific Stress and Mood Disturbance: Implications for Symptom Perception, Quality of Life, and Immune Response in Women Shortly after Diagnosis of Breast Cancer

Purpose. To determine the levels of cancer-specific stress and mood disturbance in women shortly after diagnosis of breast cancer and to assess their associations with symptom perception, quality of life, and immune response. Design. Descriptive and correlational. Sample and Setting. One hundred women with newly diagnosed breast cancer were recruited from interdisciplinary breast clinics. Methods. Baseline data were collected using standardized questionnaires and established bioassay prior to the initiation of cancer adjuvant therapy. Blood samples were collected about the same time of day. Results. High cancer-specific stress was significantly correlated with high mood disturbance, which, in turn, was correlated with high symptom perception, poor quality of life, and an immune profile indicating high neutrophils and low lymphocytes. Conclusions. High cancer-specific stress and related mood disturbance show extensive negative relationships with multiple behavioral, clinical, and biological factors. Implications for Nursing. Routine screening for cancer-related stress and mood disturbance should be incorporated into nursing practice for all patients diagnosed with cancer. Given broad negative associations with other biobehavioral factors, early identification of patients at risk and provision and evaluation of stress and mood management programs may have a beneficial effect on subsequent health outcomes over time.
Making meaning of the virginity experience: young men's perceptions in the United States

ABSTRACT A qualitative grounded theory approach was used to analyze 34 narratives from young men about their experience of retaining, losing, or giving away their virginity, where 7 said they were virgins, 26 said they were non-virgins, and one did not mention his virginity status. We found that virginity is a multidimensional concept, with two distinct dimensions: the experiential and the developmental. The experiential dimension refers to young men's perception and understanding of their virginity in four overlapping areas: physical, spiritual, relational, and emotional. The developmental dimension refers to young men's perception of their underlying sexual identity growth processes and the gendered and sexual double standards that influence this understanding. Clinical implications of this study are useful in education and counseling. They seek to empower young men with information relating to the multidimensional nature of virginity experience, and minimize the negative effects on romantic relationships, sexual adjustment, and self-identity development. The findings are helpful in designing interventions for young men and women who are at high risk for sexually transmitted infections and can help them negotiate mutually safe and pleasurable experiences regarding their virginity.
Interactive image retrieval using self-organizing maps

Digital image libraries are becoming more common and widely used as visual information is produced at a rapidly growing rate. Creating and storing digital images is nowadays easy and getting more affordable all the time as the needed technologies are maturing and becoming eligible for general use. As a result, the amount of data in visual form is increasing and there is a strong need for effective ways to manage and process it. In many settings, the existing and widely adopted methods for text-based indexing and information retrieval are inadequate for these new purposes. Content-based image retrieval addresses the problem of finding images relevant to the users’ information needs from image databases, based principally on low-level visual features for which automatic extraction methods are available. Due to the inherently weak connection between the high-level semantic concepts that humans naturally associate with images and the low-level visual features that the computer is relying upon, the task of developing this kind of systems is very challenging. A popular method to improve retrieval performance is to shift from single-round queries to navigational queries where a single retrieval instance consists of multiple rounds of user–system interaction and query reformulation. This kind of operation is commonly referred to as relevance feedback and can be considered as supervised learning to adjust the subsequent retrieval process by using information gathered from the user’s feedback. In this thesis, an image retrieval system named PicSOM is presented, including detailed descriptions of using multiple parallel Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) for image indexing and a novel relevance feedback technique. The proposed relevance feedback technique is based on spreading the user responses to local SOM neighborhoods by a convolution with a kernel function. A broad set of evaluations with different image features, retrieval tasks, and parameter settings demonstrating the validity of the retrieval method is described. In particular, the results establish that relevance feedback with the proposed method is able to adapt to different retrieval tasks and scenarios. Furthermore, a method for using the relevance assessments of previous retrieval sessions or potentially available keyword annotations as sources of semantic information is presented. With performed experiments, it is confirmed that the efficiency of semantic image retrieval can be substantially increased by using these features in parallel with the standard low-level visual features.
Exploring new approaches to professional learning: Deepening pedagogical understanding of Singapore CET trainers through meta-cognition and practitioner-based research

The Tools for Learning Design (TLD) research project aimed to explore how a professional learning model of integrating meta-cognitive processes with practitioner-based research might deepen the pedagogical understanding of the Continuing Education and Training (CET) training leaders, thus leading to greater innovation within their work contexts.
Journal of Globalization and Development Aid , Growth , and Development : Have We Come Full Circle ?

The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the microand meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature and, taking inspiration from the program evaluation literature, we re-examine key hypotheses. In our findings, aid has a positive and statistically significant causal effect on growth over the long run, with confidence intervals conforming to levels suggested by growth theory. Aid remains a key tool for enhancing the development prospects of poor countries.
Temperature- and pH-sensitive wearable materials for monitoring foot ulcers

Foot ulcers account for 15% of comorbidities associated with diabetes. Presently, no device allows the status of foot ulcers to be continuously monitored when patients are not hospitalized. In this study, we describe a temperature and a pH sensor capable of monitoring diabetic foot and venous leg ulcers developed in the frame of the seventh framework program European Union project SWAN-iCare (smart wearable and autonomous negative pressure device for wound monitoring and therapy). Temperature is measured by exploiting the variations in the electrical resistance of a nanocomposite consisting of multiwalled carbon nanotubes and poly(styrene-b-(ethylene-co-butylene)-b-styrene). The pH sensor used a graphene oxide (GO) layer that changes its electrical potential when pH changes. The temperature sensor has a sensitivity of ~85 Ω/°C in the range 25°C–50°C and a high repeatability (maximum standard deviation of 0.1% over seven repeated measurements). For a GO concentration of 4 mg/mL, the pH sensor has a sensitivity of ~42 mV/pH and high linearity (R2=0.99).
Mortality, mobility, and schooling outcomes among orphans: Evidence from Malawi

"A tremendous increase in the number of orphans associated with a sharp rise in prime-age adult mortality due to AIDS has become a serious problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, more than 30 percent of school-aged children have lost at least one parent in Malawi. Lack of investments in human capital and adverse conditions during childhood are often associated with lower living standards in the future. Therefore, if orphans face an increased risk of poverty, exploitation, malnutrition, and poorer access to health care and schooling, early intervention is critical so as to avoid the potential poverty trap. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of orphanhood/parental death on children's mortality risks, migration behaviors, and schooling outcomes, by using household panel data from Malawi, which has the eighth-highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. A number of studies have analyzed the relationship between parental death and children's school enrollment, but very few have considered mortality and mobility of orphans. This study uses the Malawi Complementary Panel Survey (CPS) conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and another institution between January 2000 and July 2004. Since these panel data do not track individuals that move to other households, we take into account sample attritions of children. This study uses three estimation methodologies to explore different aspects of impacts. First, we analyze regression models with controls for various sets of household and child characteristics and for village fixed effects to examine heterogeneous impacts of orphanhood across different types of households. Second, we employ household fixed-effect models to test the differential effects of orphanhood on welfare outcomes among different types of orphans living in the same household. Third, we examine the impact of recent parental death—parental death between 2000 and 2004—on schooling outcomes. Empirical results show that maternal orphans, as well as double orphans, tend to face higher mortality risks and lower schooling outcomes than paternal and non-orphans do. This is especially so for boys. Similarly, maternal and double orphans tend to move to other households more frequently. Compared to adolescent orphans, the impact on younger orphans who enrolled in school after the introduction of universal free primary education in 1994 is more muted, suggesting that free primary education policies may have mitigated adverse shocks from parental death. More interestingly, the impacts of orphanhood on schooling outcomes are significantly gender-dependent: boys face severer negative impacts of being orphans than girls do. These empirical results are robust to sample attrition due to mortality and mobility. " from Authors' Abstract
Infrared dark cloud cores in the SCUBA Legacy Catalogue

We present an investigation of candidate Infrared Dark Cloud cores as identified by Simon et al. (2006) located within the SCUBA Legacy Catalogue. After applying a uniform noise cut to the Catalogue data we identify 154 Infrared Dark Cloud cores that were detected at 850 µm and 51 cores that were not. We derive column densities for each core from their 8 µm extinction and find that the IRDCs detected at 850 µm have higher column densities (a mean of 1.7×10 22 cm 2 ) compared to those cores not detected at 850 µm (a mean of 1.0×10 22 cm 2 ). Combined with sensitivity estimates, we suggest that the cores not detected at 850 µm are low mass, low column density and low temperature cores that are below the sensitivity limit of SCUBA at 850 µm. For a subsample of the cores detected at 850 µm those contained within the MIPSGAL area) we find that two thirds are associated with 24 µm sources. Cores not associated with 24 µm emission are either “starless” IRDC cores that perhaps have yet to form stars, or contain low mass YSOs below the MIPSGAL detection limit. We see that those “starless” IRDC cores and the IRDC cores associated with 24 µm emission are drawn from the same column density population and are of similar mass. If we then assume the cores without 24 µm embedded sources are at an earlier evolutionary stage to cores with embedded objects we derive a statistical lifetime for the quiescent phase of a few 10 3 –10 4 years. Finally, we make conservative predictions for the number of observed IRDCs that will be observed by the Apex Telescope Galactic Plane Survey (ATLASGAL), the Herschel Infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL), the JCMT Galactic Plane Survey (JPS) and the SCUBA-2 “All Sky” Survey (SASSy).
Discovery of an optical bow-shock around pulsar B0740-28

We report the discovery of a faint H α pulsar wind nebula (PWN) powered by the radio pulsar B0740-28. The characteristic bow-shock morphology of the PWN implies a direction of motion consistent with the previously measured velocity vector for the pulsar. The PWN has a flux density more than an order of magnitude lower than for the PWNe seen around other pulsars, but, for a distance 2 kpc, it is consistent with propagation through a medium of atomic density $n_{\rm H} \sim 0.25$ cm -3 , and neutral fraction of 1%. The morphology of the PWN in the area close to the pulsar is distinct from that in downstream regions, as is also seen for the PWN powered by PSR B2224+65. In particular, the PWN associated with PSR B0740–28 appears to close at its rear, suggesting that the pulsar has recently passed through a transition from low density to high density ambient gas. The faintness of this source underscores that deep searches are needed to find further examples of optical pulsar nebulae.
“The cuts, they trimmed the people” – School children, precarity and European citizenship

Recently, the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (2012) have funded programmes designed to advance European citizenship and citizen competences through education. This paper reports on the findings from one project, Creative Connections, designed to encourage the “voices” of young people in exploring European identities. Children (aged 9–16) in 25 schools in six European Union (EU) countries (UK, Finland, Spain, Czech Republic, Portugal and Ireland) developed artworks that explored perceptions of European citizenship. Their art was posted on a secure website and they discussed images with peers using automatic online translated blogs. The project facilitated representations of identity/belonging using a range of media. However, some artworks suggested that children were alienated from “Europe”, particularly EU responses to global austerity. This paper uses the theory of precarity to examine the ways in which the children expressed their concerns. Some artworks suggest that recent economic and political decisions have had the effect of challenging a sense of shared European citizenship; they resist a positive sense of identification with Europe and demonstrate fear for their future based on their current lives. This indicates that the EU’s educational goals to promote citizenship competences may require revision to account for the challenges of contemporary societies.