Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tryptophan‐rich basic protein (WRB) mediates insertion of the tail‐anchored protein otoferlin and is required for hair cell exocytosis and hearing

The transmembrane recognition complex (TRC40) pathway mediates the insertion of tail‐anchored (TA) proteins into membranes. Here, we demonstrate that otoferlin, a TA protein essential for hair cell exocytosis, is inserted into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) via the TRC40 pathway. We mutated the TRC40 receptor tryptophan‐rich basic protein (Wrb) in hair cells of zebrafish and mice and studied the impact of defective TA protein insertion. Wrb disruption reduced otoferlin levels in hair cells and impaired hearing, which could be restored in zebrafish by transgenic Wrb rescue and otoferlin overexpression. Wrb‐deficient mouse inner hair cells (IHCs) displayed normal numbers of afferent synapses, Ca2+ channels, and membrane‐proximal vesicles, but contained fewer ribbon‐associated vesicles. Patch‐clamp of IHCs revealed impaired synaptic vesicle replenishment. In vivo recordings from postsynaptic spiral ganglion neurons showed a use‐dependent reduction in sound‐evoked spiking, corroborating the notion of impaired IHC vesicle replenishment. A human mutation affecting the transmembrane domain of otoferlin impaired its ER targeting and caused an auditory synaptopathy. We conclude that the TRC40 pathway is critical for hearing and propose that otoferlin is an essential substrate of this pathway in hair cells.
A Smart ECG Measurement System Based on Web-Service-Oriented Architecture for Telemedicine Applications

The opportunity for cardiac patients to have constantly monitored their health state at home is now possible by means of telemedicine applications. In fact, today, portable and simple-to-use devices allow one to get preliminary domestic diagnoses of the heart status. In this paper, the authors present an original ECG measurement system based on web-service-oriented architecture to monitor the heart health of cardiac patients. The projected device is a smart patient-adaptive system able to provide personalized diagnoses by using personal data and clinical history of the monitored patient. In the presence of a pathology occurrence, the system is able to call the emergency service for assistance. An ECG sensor has the task to acquire, condition, and sample the heart electrical impulses, whereas a personal digital assistant (PDA) performs the diagnosis according to the measurement uncertainty and, in case of a critical situation, calls the medical staff. The system has two removable and updatable memory devices: the first memory device stores the clinical and personal data of the patient, and the second memory device stores information on the metrological status of the measurement system. This way, according to the personal data and historical information of the patient, the measurement system adapts itself by selecting the best fitted ECG model as a reference to configure the computing algorithm. Further information on the measurement uncertainty is used to qualify the reliability of the final clinical response to reduce the occurrence of a faulty diagnosis. Through the PDA graphic interface, the user can display his personal data, observe the graph of his ECG signal, and read diagnosis information with the relative reliability level. Moreover, the patient can choose to print his ECG graph through a Bluetooth printer or to send it to a specialist by a General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) modem.
Comparing Stewardship Across Faith-Based Organizations

Nonprofits theory on the role of organizational context focuses on generalizing principles such as neoinstitutionalism and institutional isomorphism. Organizational culture theory focuses on internal organizational culture, ignoring the larger community culture that influences nonprofit behavior. Relying on anthropological understandings of culture as comprising both the values and symbols of a community and its structures and practices, this article describes three support systems for faith-based nonprofits that come out of founding religious traditions. Using comparative case studies across 81 faith communities and FBOs in the United States, research suggests that systems are generalizable across religions and localities, but they come out of specific religious cultures adapted to fit the U.S. system.
Strategic Transformation: Cultural and Gender Identity Negotiation in First-Generation Vietnamese Youth

This article explores the various ways in which recent Vietnamese immigrant students form cultural and gender identities as they transition to U.S. schooling. Using data from a 2-year qualitative study that tracked the social and academic adjustment processes of recent Vietnamese immigrant youth, this article examines the tensions that students struggle with as they bring their own values and practices into the school site. The findings suggest that gender functions as a complex social category for recent immigrants that shifts across social contexts. The authors argue that accounting for a full picture of gender identity more accurately captures the manner in which recent immigrant students adapt to U.S. schooling.
English Language Teaching in Malaysia Today

Abstract This article examines the changes in English Language teaching in Malaysia since its independence in 1957. It traces the problems encountered as the methodology for teaching English changed from a structural‐situational approach to a communicative approach. To illustrate the paradigmatic shift from knowledge‐based rote learning to self‐access learning that promotes independence and life‐long learning, and to produce manpower that can think creatively and critically, the Smart Schools Project and the extensive reading programmes are discussed. 1. This study is confined to aspects of English language teaching in West Malaysia only, and does not account for the development of the language in East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak).
Do we need hundreds of classifiers to solve real world classification problems?

We evaluate 179 classiﬁers arising from 17 families (discriminant analysis, Bayesian, neural networks, support vector machines, decision trees, rule-based classiﬁers, boosting, bagging, stacking, random forests and other ensembles, generalized linear models, nearest-neighbors, partial least squares and principal component regression, logistic and multinomial regression, multiple adaptive regression splines and other methods), implemented in Weka, R (with and without the caret package), C and Matlab, including all the relevant classiﬁers available today. We use 121 data sets , which represent the whole UCI data base (excluding the large-scale problems) and other own real problems, in order to achieve signiﬁcant conclusions about the classiﬁer behavior, not dependent on the data set collection. The classiﬁers most likely to be the bests are the random forest (RF) versions, the best of which (implemented in R and accessed via caret) achieves 94.1% of the maximum accuracy overcoming 90% in the 84.3% of the data sets. However, the difference is not statistically signiﬁcant with the second best, the SVM with Gaussian kernel implemented in C using LibSVM, which achieves 92.3% of the maximum accuracy. A few models are clearly better than the remaining ones: random forest, SVM with Gaussian and polynomial kernels, extreme learning machine with Gaussian kernel, C5.0 and avNNet (a committee of multi-layer perceptrons implemented in R with the caret package). The random forest is clearly the best family of classiﬁers (3 out of 5 bests classiﬁers are RF), followed by SVM (4 classiﬁers in the top-10), neural networks and boosting ensembles (5 and 3 members in the top-20, respectively).
Deeply Improved Sparse Coding for Image Super-Resolution

Deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in many areas of computer vision, including low-level image restoration problems. For image super-resolution, several models based on deep neural networks have been recently proposed and attained superior performance that overshadows all previous handcrafted models. The question then arises whether large-capacity and data-driven models have become the dominant solution to the ill-posed super-resolution problem. In this paper, we argue that domain expertise represented by the conventional sparse coding model is still valuable, and it can be combined with the key ingredients of deep learning to achieve further improved results. We show that a sparse coding model particularly designed for super-resolution can be incarnated as a neural network, and trained in a cascaded structure from end to end. The interpretation of the network based on sparse coding leads to much more efficient and effective training, as well as a reduced model size. Our model is evaluated on a wide range of images, and shows clear advantage over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both restoration accuracy and human subjective quality.
A factorial study of salt restriction and a low-fat/high-fibre diet in hypertensive subjects

Objective: To compare the independent and additive effects of sodium restriction and a low-fat, high polyunsaturated: saturated fatty acids (P:S) ratio, high-fibre diet upon blood pressure. Design: A randomized, parallet, double-blind, placebo-controlled (for sodium) 2x2 factorial trial. Setting: Clinical. Participants: Ninety-five hypertensive subjects (mean blood pressure, 137/83 mmHg), mean age 53.5 years, consuming<30 ml ethanol/day were selected from community volunteers. Sevevty-nine treated and twelve untreated hypertensives completed the trial. Intervention: Subjects followed either a low-sodium, low-fat/high-fibre diet (<60mmol sodium/day; 30% fat energy; P:S ratio=1; 30-50g fibre/day) or a low-sodium, normal-fat/normal-fibre diet (<60 mmol sodium/day; 40% fat energy; P:S ratio=0.3; 15 g fibre/day) for 8 weeks. Half of each group received 100 mmol/day NaCI and the remainder received placebo. Main outcome measures: Blood pressure and blood lipids. Results: Sodium restriction significantly reduced standing and supine systolic blood pressure, with no effect upon diastolic blood pressure. The low-fat/high-fibre diet had no effect upon blood pressure, but significantly reduced total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Conclusions: Sodium restriction reduced blood pressure and did not raise low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. A low-fat/high-fibre diet did not reduce blood pressure but lowered cholesterol levels. A combination of the two regimes has the greater potential for reducing cardiovascular risk in hypertensives.
The Convergence of Information about Rewarding and Aversive Stimuli in Single Neurons

Neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, and economists have long been interested in how individuals weigh information about potential rewarding and aversive stimuli to make decisions and to regulate their emotions. However, we know relatively little about how appetitive and aversive systems interact in the brain, as most prior studies have investigated only one valence of reinforcement. Previous work has suggested that primate orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) represents information about the reward value of stimuli. We therefore investigated whether OFC also represents information about aversive stimuli, and, if so, whether individual neurons process information about both rewarding and aversive stimuli. Monkeys performed a trace conditioning task in which different novel abstract visual stimuli (conditioned stimuli, CSs) predicted the occurrence of one of three unconditioned stimuli (USs): a large liquid reward, a small liquid reward, or an aversive air-puff. Three lines of evidence suggest that information about rewarding and aversive stimuli converges in individual neurons in OFC. First, OFC neurons often responded to both rewarding and aversive USs, despite their different sensory features. Second, OFC neural responses to CSs often encoded information about both potential rewarding and aversive stimuli, even though these stimuli differed in both valence and sensory modality. Finally, OFC neural responses were correlated with monkeys' behavioral use of information about both rewarding and aversive CS-US associations. These data indicate that processing of appetitive and aversive stimuli converges at the single cell level in OFC, providing a possible substrate for executive and emotional processes that require using information from both appetitive and aversive systems.
Survival skills: the impact of change and the ERA on Australian researchers

This paper reports findings from a study that focused on the experiences of research-intensive academics in relation to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Framework. Interviews with academic staff at different career stages and across all academic faculties followed completion of a short survey in which respondents compared their publishing behaviour before and since implementation of the new Framework. Respondents were highly conscious that ERA had prompted a shift in publishing behaviour to meet often competing demands of individual research interests, institution, discipline and the international research community. Indeed, the study revealed academics to be positioned in contradictory ways in relation to their research and publishing, heightened by the instability of the Framework's assessment mechanisms. The experience of researchers up to, and including, the decision to abandon journal ranking provides valuable insights into the precarious and reactionary nature of academic research careers and the ability of both individuals and institutions to negotiate the rapid rate of change. These insights include tension between personal research priorities and ERA requirements, particularly in relation to writing for the most relevant audience, and concerns about the right to exercise academic freedom.
Plasmodium knowlesi Genome Sequences from Clinical Isolates Reveal Extensive Genomic Dimorphism

Plasmodium knowlesi is a newly described zoonosis that causes malaria in the human population that can be severe and fatal. The study of P. knowlesi parasites from human clinical isolates is relatively new and, in order to obtain maximum information from patient sample collections, we explored the possibility of generating P. knowlesi genome sequences from archived clinical isolates. Our patient sample collection consisted of frozen whole blood samples that contained excessive human DNA contamination and, in that form, were not suitable for parasite genome sequencing. We developed a method to reduce the amount of human DNA in the thawed blood samples in preparation for high throughput parasite genome sequencing using Illumina HiSeq and MiSeq sequencing platforms. Seven of fifteen samples processed had sufficiently pure P. knowlesi DNA for whole genome sequencing. The reads were mapped to the P. knowlesi H strain reference genome and an average mapping of 90% was obtained. Genes with low coverage were removed leaving 4623 genes for subsequent analyses. Previously we identified a DNA sequence dimorphism on a small fragment of the P. knowlesi normocyte binding protein xa gene on chromosome 14. We used the genome data to assemble full-length Pknbpxa sequences and discovered that the dimorphism extended along the gene. An in-house algorithm was developed to detect SNP sites co-associating with the dimorphism. More than half of the P. knowlesi genome was dimorphic, involving genes on all chromosomes and suggesting that two distinct types of P. knowlesi infect the human population in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. We use P. knowlesi clinical samples to demonstrate that Plasmodium DNA from archived patient samples can produce high quality genome data. We show that analyses, of even small numbers of difficult clinical malaria isolates, can generate comprehensive genomic information that will improve our understanding of malaria parasite diversity and pathobiology.
The influence of trazodone treatment on cognitive functions in outpatients with major depressive disorder

Eight patients suffering from major depression were treated with trazodone 150 or 200 mg bid (non‐responders) over 5 weeks, preceded and followed by a placebo week. Cognitive functioning was tested in the morning at the end of each treatment week. Before trazodone treatment commenced, patients' cognitive performance was compared with non‐depressed controls. The depressed group showed significantly slower reaction times on the memory scanning test, but did not differ from the control group on five other tests including word learning, Critical Flicker/Fusion frequency (CFF), vigilance, tracking and divided attention. CFF threshold decreased significantly during trazodone treatment. CFF returned to its initial baseline level at the end of the placebo withdrawal. During the trazodone treatment period, recall from long‐term memory of a previously learnt word list significantly improved, but at the end of the placebo withdrawal period memory performance returned to its initial baseline level. These results indicated that the subchronic influence of trazodone on cognitive functions is at least of a two‐dimensional nature: decreased CFF threshold can be interpreted in terms of lowered CNS arousal, whereas a higher cognitive function, memory, improved, possibly related to the relief of depressive symptoms. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Information-Processing Theory of Human Problem Solving

In the preceding chapter a taxonomy of pr oblem types was proposed, and some hypotheses set forth about the general kin ds of skills and knowledge needed to solve problems of each type. The p resent chapter, adopting the same information-processing point of view as the previous one, undertakes three tasks. The first part of the chapter sets forth th e general theory of human problem Solving that has emerged from research in the past two decades, especially research that has employed the methods o f computer simulation and analysis of thinking-aloud protocols. The second part examines recent and ongoing research aimed at giving an account of the role of pe rceptual processes in problem solving and a description of the processes for gen erating problem representations, and research aimed at extending the theory to problem solving in domains that are rich in semantic information and less well structured man those that have been examined in the past. The third part of the chapter discusses some of the methodological issues that must be faced in using the methodologies of simulation and protocol analysis and, in general, to test detailed processing models of human cognitive performance. Since this chapter and the preceding one both discuss their topics in information-processing terms and since bo th review essentially the same body of evidence, they reach conclusions that are Irrgely complementary. The present chapter does take, however, a somewhat m ore sanguine view than the preceding one as to how far we have already progres sed in building and testing a coherent theory of human problem solving. The th eory discussed in this chapter applies both to Grccno's category ofproblems o f transformatiort and his category of problems of arrangement. The relation o f the theory to problems of inducing structure is discussed ;n Sur.an ;m«J Lea (1 974). For the purposes of the present
The Lattice of Permutations is Bounded

The purpose of this paper is to show that the lattice Sn of permutations on a n-element set is bounded. This result strengthens the semi-distributive nature of the lattice Sn. To prove this property, we use a characterization of the class of bounded lattices in terms of arrows relations defined on the join-irreductible elements of a lattice or, more precisely, in terms of the A-table of a lattice.
Introduction international studies on educational effectiveness

Educational effectiveness research (EER) has expanded rapidly during the last three decades in many countries. Methodological advances have enabled more efficient estimates of teacher and school differences in student achievement to be obtained (Goldstein, 2003). However, Reynolds (2000) argued that EER has shown heavily ethnocentric tendencies. Although there has often been acknowledgment of the seminal studies of Coleman et al. (1966), Edmonds (1979), Brookover, Beady, Flood, Schweitzer, and Wisenbaker (1979), Rutter, Maughan, Mortimore, and Ouston (1979) and Mortimore, Sammons, Stoll, Lewis, and Ecob (1988) in virtually all school effectiveness publications in all countries, there has clearly been no science of educational effectiveness studies across countries as there has been an international reach in most branches of psychology and in all of the ‘‘applied’’ and ‘‘pure’’ sciences. In this context, the creation of the Methodology of Research and Effectiveness (MORE) Network and its first symposium at the annual ICSEI 2005 meeting was intended to initiate a network of researchers with an explicit international and comparative focus. A special issue on ‘‘international studies in educational effectiveness,’’ which provides a record of the contributions made at that event, is published here. The introductory paper of this special issue demonstrates the major benefits of establishing the international dimension of EER. Suggestions concerning the design of international studies on EER are also provided.
INFANT FEEDING IN THE MODERN WORLD: MEDICALIZATION AND THE MATERNAL BODY

While infant feeding is well-studied in health literature, sociology has not examined the social context of infant feeding thoroughly. This article discusses infant feeding practices in the theoretical contexts of medicalization and feminism. Mothers completed quantitative surveys before birthing and qualitative interviews for one year following birth regarding infant feeding, family dynamics, work environment, social support, medical treatment, and body image. Data were examined for impacts of medicalization, socioeconomic status, and other factors on infant feeding behaviors. Findings support the association between socioeconomic status, medicalization, and infant feeding methods. Mothers described a classic “double-bind,” with social settings and norms working against messages from medical authorities that “breast is best. ”
A clinical study of chronic headaches: clinical characteristics and depressive trends in migraine & tension-type headaches.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Chronic headache is commonly encountered in the neurology outpatient clinic and it is often associated with depression. In Korea, however, chronic headache has not yet been systematically investigated. We conducted this study to investigate this clinical characteristics and level of depression in patients who presented migraine, tension-type headache, or transformed migraine. METHOD Among those with chronic headache during the period from January 1, 1994 through December 31, 1994, 131 patients were diagnosed to have either migraine, tension-type headache (by IHS classification), or transformed migraine: migraine in 60 patients, tension-type headache in 49 patients, and transformed migraine in 22 patients. Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was performed in 116 of the 131 patients. RESULTS & CONCLUSION There was no significant difference in the age of onset, duration of headache, and family history among the three groups. However, patients with migraine had a more severe, unilateral, and throbbing characteristic pain than those with a tension-type headache. The mean BDI scores in the transformed migraine and the tension-type headache patients were significantly higher than those of migraine, but the level of depression did not correlate with the patient's age, duration, character, severity, and frequency of headache. These findings suggest that migraine, tension-type headache and transformed migraine may be considered clinically distinct entities in viewing their different clinical characteristics and level of depression.