Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ZnO-Based Amperometric Enzyme Biosensors

Nanostructured ZnO with its unique properties could provide a suitable microenvironment for immobilization of enzymes while retaining their biological activity, and thus lead to an expanded use of this nanomaterial for the construction of electrochemical biosensors with enhanced analytical performance. ZnO-based enzyme electrochemical biosensors are summarized in several tables for an easy overview according to the target biosensing analyte (glucose, hydrogen peroxide, phenol and cholesterol), respectively. Moreover, recent developments in enzyme electrochemical biosensors based on ZnO nanomaterials are reviewed with an emphasis on the fabrications and features of ZnO, approaches for biosensor construction (e.g., modified electrodes and enzyme immobilization) and biosensor performances.
Externally disposed plasma membrane proteins. I. Enzymatic iodination of mouse L cells

The enzymatic iodination technique has been utilized in a study of the externally disposed membrane proteins of the mouse L cell. Iodination of cells in suspension results in lactoperoxidase-specific iodide incorporation with no loss of cell viability under the conditions employed, less than 3% lipid labeling, and more than 90% of the labeled species identifiable as monoiodotyrosine. 90% of the incorporated label is localized to the cell surface by electron microscope autoradiography, with 5-10% in the centrosphere region and postulated to represent pinocytic vesicles. Sodium dodecylsulfate-polyacrylamide gels of solubilized L-cell proteins reveals five to six labeled peaks ranging from 50,000 to 200,000 daltons. Increased resolution by use of gradient slab gels reveals 15-20 radioactive bands. Over 60% of the label resides in approximately nine polypeptides of 80,000 to 150,000 daltons. Various controls indicate that the labeling pattern reflects endogenous membrane proteins, not serum components. The incorporated 125-I, cholesterol, and one plasma membrane enzyme marker, alkaline phosphodiesterase I, are purified in parallel when plasma membranes are isolated from intact, iodinated L cells. The labeled components present in a plasma membrane-rich fraction from iodinated cells are identical to those of the total cell, with a 10- to 20-fold enrichment in specific activity of each radioactive peak in the membrane.
Altered Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Amygdalar Neuronal Activity in Adult Mice with Repeated Experience of Aggression

Repeated experience of winning in a social conflict setting elevates levels of aggression and may lead to violent behavioral patterns. Here, we use a paradigm of repeated aggression and fighting deprivation to examine changes in behavior, neurogenesis, and neuronal activity in mice with positive fighting experience. We show that for males, repeated positive fighting experience induces persistent demonstration of aggression and stereotypic behaviors in daily agonistic interactions, enhances aggressive motivation, and elevates levels of anxiety. When winning males are deprived of opportunities to engage in further fights, they demonstrate increased levels of aggressiveness. Positive fighting experience results in increased levels of progenitor cell proliferation and production of young neurons in the hippocampus. This increase is not diminished after a fighting deprivation period. Furthermore, repeated winning experience decreases the number of activated (c-fos-positive) cells in the basolateral amygdala and increases the number of activated cells in the hippocampus; a subsequent no-fight period restores the number of c-fos-positive cells. Our results indicate that extended positive fighting experience in a social conflict heightens aggression, increases proliferation of neuronal progenitors and production of young neurons in the hippocampus, and decreases neuronal activity in the amygdala; these changes can be modified by depriving the winners of the opportunity for further fights.
Preclinical Trials for Prevention of Tumor Progression of Hepatocellular Carcinoma by LZ-8 Targeting c-Met Dependent and Independent Pathways

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is among the most lethal cancers. Mounting studies highlighted the essential role of the HGF/c-MET axis in driving HCC tumor progression. Therefore, c-Met is a potential therapeutic target for HCC. However, several concerns remain unresolved in c-Met targeting. First, the status of active c-Met in HCC must be screened to determine patients suitable for therapy. Second, resistance and side effects have been observed frequently when using conventional c-Met inhibitors. Thus, a preclinical system for screening the status of c-Met signaling and identifying efficient and safe anti-HCC agents is urgently required. In this study, immunohistochemical staining of phosphorylated c-Met (Tyr1234) on tissue sections indicated that HCCs with positive c-Met signaling accounted for approximately 46% in 26 cases. Second, many patient-derived HCC cell lines were established and characterized according to motility and c-Met signaling status. Moreover, LZ8, a medicinal peptide purified from the herb Lingzhi, featuring immunomodulatory and anticancer properties, was capable of suppressing cell migration and slightly reducing the survival rate of both c-Met positive and negative HCCs, HCC372, and HCC329, respectively. LZ8 also suppressed the intrahepatic metastasis of HCC329 in SCID mice. On the molecular level, LZ8 suppressed the expression of c-Met and phosphorylation of c-Met, ERK and AKT in HCC372, and suppressed the phosphorylation of JNK, ERK, and AKT in HCC329. According to receptor array screening, the major receptor tyrosine kinase activated in HCC329 was found to be the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Moreover, tyrosine-phosphorylated EGFR (the active EGFR) was greatly suppressed in HCC329 by LZ8 treatment. In addition, LZ8 blocked HGF-induced cell migration and c-Met-dependent signaling in HepG2. In summary, we designed a preclinical trial using LZ8 to prevent the tumor progression of patient-derived HCCs with c-Met-positive or -negative signaling.
Ambiguous Correlation

Many decisions are made in environments where outcomes are determined by the realization of multiple random events. A decision maker may be uncertain how these events are related. We identify and experimentally substantiate behavior that intuitively reects a lack of con dence in their joint distribution. Our ndings suggest a dimension of ambiguity which is di¤erent from that in the classical distinction between risk and Knightian uncertainty.  Boston University, lepstein@bu.edu and University of Toronto, yoram.halevy@utoronto.ca. We are grateful for discussions with Kyoungwon Seo and Chew Soo Hong, for detailed comments from Aurelien Baillon and especially Peter Wakker, for insightful and thoughtful suggestions by two referees and the editor Dimitri Vayanos, and for comments from audiences in several conferences and workshops. We are grateful also for the nancial support of the National Science Foundation award SES1216339 (Epstein) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant 435-2012-0577 (Halevy). Anujit Chakraborty, David Freeman, Terri Kneeland and students from UBCs ECON490 classes of 2013, 2014 and 2015 (Experimental Economics section) provided excellent research assistance. Earlier versions of this paper were titled No Two Experiments Are Identical. First version: February 2014.
expression OF MODALITY AND EVALUATION IN HILLARY CLINTON’S SPEECH

The study entitled “expression of Modality and Evaluation in Hillary Clinton’s Speech” aims to find out the types of modality and evaluation that were used by Clinton and to identify how the use of modality and evaluation reveals the speakers’ commitment toward human rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people. The study is qualitative with textual analysis approach. However, some descriptive quantitative is also conducted. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic is the tool analysis in this study. The result shows that the modality occurs in terms of epistemic and deontic. Moreover, the evaluation occurs in terms of desirable and undesirable. The occurrence of epistemic and deontic modality in speech shows Clinton’s commitment. Meanwhile, in terms of desirable and undesirable, the occurrence of Assumed Value shows that Clinton tends to deliver her thought implicitly.
Cellular stress response, redox status, and vitagenes in glaucoma: a systemic oxidant disorder linked to Alzheimer’s disease

Amyloid deposits, constituted of amyloid beta (Aβ) aggregates, are a characteristic feature of several neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment and Parkinson’s disease. They also have been recently implicated in the pathogenesis of retinal damage, as well as age-related macular degeneration and glaucoma. Glaucoma is a progressive optic neuropathy characterized by gradual degeneration of neuronal tissue due to retinal ganglion cell loss, associated to visual field loss over time resulting in irreversible blindness. Accumulation of Aβ characterizes glaucoma as a protein misfolding disease, suggesting a pathogenic role for oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of retinal degenerative damage associated to glaucoma. There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating a link between Alzheimer’s disease and glaucoma. Further, several heat shock proteins (HSPs) members have been implicated both in neurodegenerative diseases and glaucomatous apoptosis. To maintain redox homeostasis vitagenes, as integrated mechanisms, operate actively to preserve cell survival under condition of stress. Vitagenes encode for sirtuin, thioredoxin and HSPs. The present study was designed to investigate cellular stress response mechanisms in the blood of patients with glaucoma, compared to control subjects. Levels of vitagenes HSP-72, heme oxygenase-1, as well as F2-isoprostanes were significantly higher in the blood of patients with glaucoma than in controls. Furthermore, in the same experimental group increased expression of Trx and sirtuin 1 were measured. Our results sustain the importance of redox homeostasis disruption in the pathogenesis of glaucoma and highlights the opportunity that new therapies that prevents neurodegeneration through non-immunomodulatory mechanisms might be synergistically associated with current glaucoma therapies, thus unraveling important targets for novel cytoprotective strategies.
Evaluating regional differences in breast-feeding in French maternity units: a multi-level approach

Abstract Objectives To study how individual and regional characteristics might explain regional variations in breast-feeding rates in maternity units and to identify outlier regions with very low or high breast-feeding rates. Design Individual characteristics (mother and infant) were collected during hospital stay. All newborns fed entirely or partly on breast milk were considered breast-fed. Regional characteristics were extracted from census data. Statistical analysis included multi-level models and estimation of empirical Bayes residuals to identify outlier regions. Setting All births in all administrative regions in France in 2003. Subjects A national representative sample of 13 186 live births. Results Breast-feeding rates in maternity units varied from 43 % to 80 % across regions. Differences in the distribution of individual characteristics accounted for 55 % of these variations. We identified two groups of regions with the lowest and highest breast-feeding rates, after adjusting for individual-level characteristics. In addition to maternal occupation and nationality, the social characteristics of regions, particularly the population’s educational level and the percentage of non-French residents, were significantly associated with breast-feeding rates. Conclusions Social characteristics at both the individual and regional levels influence breast-feeding rates in maternity units. Promotion policies should be directed at specific regions, groups within the community and categories of mothers to reduce the gaps and increase the overall breast-feeding rate.
Flexible consistency checking

The problem of managing the consistency of heterogeneous, distributed software engineering documents is central to the development of large and complex systems. We show how this problem can be addressed using xlinkit, a lightweight framework for consistency checking that leverages standard Internet technologies. xlinkit provides flexibility, strong diagnostics, and support for distribution and document heterogeneity. We use xlinkit in a comprehensive case study that demonstrates how design, implementation and deployment information of an Enterprise JavaBeans system can be checked for consistency, and rechecked incrementally when changes are made.
THE EFFECT OF TALKER FAMILIARITY ON WORD SEGMENTATION IN NOISE

Perceptual learning about voices is known to facilitate speech perception, but it is unclear exactly which phonetic representations are altered to cause this facilitation. This study examines perceptual learning for a non-segmental phonetic property, talker-specific cues to word boundaries. An experiment tested intelligibility in noise of sentences that contained hard-to-segment sequences (e.g. / pats��d /, which can correspond to Pat sawed or Pat’s awed ). Testing occurred before and after training with a voice; improvement in performance after training was measured. Subjects who heard the same voice during training as during testing showed more improvement than those who heard a different voice. Implications for exemplar theories of speech perception are discussed.
Discrimination and Cardiovascular Disease in Blacks

This thesis is comprised of three studies conducted to further understand the role of racial discrimination in the increased risk of hypertension among individuals of African descent in North America. These studies extend previous research by testing the proposed link between racism and cardiovascular functioning in a laboratory setting and by quantitatively summarizing research findings. The pool of studies having estimated the association between perceived discrimination and blood pressure has yielded mixed results. As well, previous literature reviews have been qualitative and thus did not ascertain the magnitude of the relationship nor have they quantified the effect of moderator variables. To fill this gap in the literature, in the first study a meta-analysis of previous research examining the link between perceived racism and blood pressure was conducted. Results revealed a small relation between perceived racism and hypertension, but not with resting blood pressure. Blacks also experience a higher degree of stress than Whites due to racial discrimination and its consequences. Over time, sustained activation from stress has been posited to lead to structural changes in the vascular system resulting in disease. Exaggerated cardiovascular reactivity to stress has been found to be predictive of future cardiovascular disease (Chida & Steptoe, 2010). Several studies have demonstrated increased vascular reactivity to stress in Blacks as compared to Whites. This line of research, however, has exclusively been tested on American samples. The second study therefore sought to examine reactivity in a Canadian population, where the macro culture for Blacks differs from the U.S. in important ways. Black men were shown to exhibit greater vascular response to laboratory stress. A direct association between perceived racism and reactivity to stress was, however, not observed. Several researchers have proposed that other factors moderate the relation between discrimination and cardiovascular functioning. Anger has extensively been studied in relation to cardiovascular disease but few studies have looked at its relation to perceiving racism. The final study revealed that the influence of perceived racism on blood pressure reactivity depends on how anger is typically expressed. Taken together, these explain the increased risk of cardiovascular disease among Blacks.
Chimpanzees and the mathematics of battle

Recent experiments have demonstrated the importance of numerical assessment in animal contests. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to model explicitly the relationship between the relative number of combatants on each side and the costs and benefits of entering a contest. One framework that may be especially suitable for making such explicit predictions is Lanchester's theory of combat, which has proved useful for understanding combat strategies in humans and several species of ants. We show, with data from a recent series of playback experiments, that a model derived from Lanchester's ‘square law’ predicts willingness to enter intergroup contests in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Furthermore, the model predicts that, in contests with multiple individuals on each side, chimpanzees in this population should be willing to enter a contest only if they outnumber the opposing side by a factor of 1.5. We evaluate these results for intergroup encounters in chimpanzees and also discuss potential applications of Lanchester's square and linear laws for understanding combat strategies in other species.
Understanding motivations for facebook use: usage metrics, network structure, and privacy

This study explores the links between motives for using a social network service and numerical measures of that activity. Specifically, it identified motives for Facebook use by employing a Uses and Gratifications (U&G) approach and then investigated the extent to which these motives can be predicted through usage and network metrics collected automatically via the Facebook API. In total, 11 Facebook usage metrics and eight personal network metrics served as predictors. Results showed that all three variable types in this expanded U&G frame of analysis (covering social antecedents, usage metrics, and personal network metrics) effectively predicted motives and highlighted interesting behaviors. To further illustrate the power of this framework, the intricate nature of privacy in social media was explored and relationships drawn between privacy attitudes (and acts) and measures of use and network structure.
Forward-backward retraining of recurrent neural networks

This paper describes the training of a recurrent neural network as the letter posterior probability estimator for a hidden Markov model, off-line handwriting recognition system. The network estimates posterior distributions for each of a series of frames representing sections of a handwritten word. The supervised training algorithm, backpropagation through time, requires target outputs to be provided for each frame. Three methods for deriving these targets are presented. A novel method based upon the forward-backward algorithm is found to result in the recognizer with the lowest error rate.
Effects of Print Media: A Study of Reading Skills among University EFL Students

The present study is an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of reading materials of print media (hereinafter PM). The Quasi-experimental design and a structured questionnaire were selected to investigate the impact of PM, such as locally published English newspapers and magazines, to improve the reading competence of Preparatory Year Programme (henceforth PYP) students of English Language Centre of Taif University (hereinafter TUELC). One experimental group comprised of fifteen students was selected from PYP classes to determine the effectiveness of PM material among PYP students of TUELC. Four units were selected from the prescribed English for Academic Purposes (EAP) textbooks along with supporting reading materials adapted from PM for improving reading skills of the students. The results of the students’ performance were also substantiated by the opinions of the PYP teachers about the use of PM through a structured questionnaire. In an effort to address the issue relating to the use of PM, the present study tried to explore the role of PM in the interaction of the Saudi EFL classrooms with special reference to the PYP students of Taif University. The findings of the present study reveal that the Saudi PYP EFL teachers, as represented by the cohort this study, bear quite positive attitudes towards the use of materials adapted from local English newspapers and magazines. The present study concludes with recommendations on how PM can be employed to enhance reading skills in the Saudi PYP EFL classrooms. Keywords: Print media materials, reading competence, EFL classrooms, reading strategy use, and Saudi classroom interactants,
The New Science of Teaching and Learning: Using the Best of Mind, Brain, and Education Science in the Classroom

This book offers a definitive, scientifically grounded guide for better teaching and learning practices. Drawing from thousands of documents and the opinions of recognized experts worldwide, it explains in straight talk the new Mind, Brain, and Education Science--a field that has grown out of the intersection of neuroscience, education, and psychology. While parents and teachers are often bombarded with promises of "a better brain," this book distinguishes true, applicable neuroscience from the popular neuromyths that have gained currency in education. Each instructional guideline presented in the book is accompanied by real-life classroom examples to help teachers envision the direct application of the information in their own schools. The authors offer essential tools for evaluating new information as it flows from research and adds to what we know. Written by a teacher for teachers, this easy-to-use resource: Documents the findings of the top experts in the field of neuroscience, psychology, and education; Addresses the confusion around the misuse of concepts in brain-based education; Applies well-substantiated findings about the brain to classroom practice and teaching.
[Structural equation model for the health behaviors of university students in Korea].

PURPOSE A structural equation model was analysed to explore the determinants of health behaviors of university students in Korea. METHOD Nine hundred sixty nine university students were selected by random cluster sampling from five universities located in the central area of Korea. DATA COLLECTION The data was collected by questionnaires about demographic characteristics, stressful life events, perceived social support, perceived health status and health behaviors. RESULTS 1. Gender showed indirect effect on health behaviors. 2. Living together with(out) family had a direct effect on health behaviors: students living with family showed more positive health behaviors. 3. Stressful life events had an indirect effect on health behaviors via perceived health status; a higher score of stressful life events was the predictor for negative health behaviors. 4. A higher score of perceived health status predicted positive health behaviors. RECOMMENDATION Each university should be encouraged to develop a health behavior control program and health promotion program for their own university students. It would be more effective to develop health programs separately according to the demographic or social characteristics of the students. It is also necessary for the Ministry of Education to reform the School Health Act and school health policy to strengthen a health promotion program for university students. In conclusion, following studies should identify and promote the validity and reliability of perceived health status and health behaviors measurements.