Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wnt‐3a‐activated human fibroblasts promote human keratinocyte proliferation and matrix destruction

Aberrant Wnt regulation, detectable by nuclear translocation of beta‐catenin, is a hallmark of many cancers including skin squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs). By analyzing primary human skin SCCs, we demonstrate that nuclear beta‐catenin is not restricted to SCC cells but also detected in stromal fibroblasts, suggesting an important role for aberrant Wnt regulation also in the tumor microenvironment. When human keratinocytes and fibroblasts were treated with Wnt‐3a, fibroblasts proved to be more responsive. Accordingly, Wnt‐3a did not alter HaCaT cell functions in a cell‐autonomous manner. However, when organotypic cultures (OTCs) were treated with Wnt‐3a, HaCaT keratinocytes responded with increased proliferation. As nuclear beta‐catenin was induced only in the fibroblasts, this argued for a Wnt‐dependent, paracrine keratinocyte stimulation. Global gene expression analysis of Wnt‐3a‐stimulated fibroblasts identified genes encoding interleukin‐8 (IL‐8) and C‐C motif chemokine 2 (CCL‐2) as well as matrix metalloproteinase‐1 (MMP‐1) as Wnt‐3a targets. In agreement, we show that IL‐8 and CCL‐2 were secreted in high amounts by Wnt‐3a‐stimulated fibroblasts also in OTCs. The functional role of IL‐8 and CCL‐2 as keratinocyte growth regulators was confirmed by directly stimulating HaCaT cell proliferation in conventional cultures. Most important, neutralizing antibodies against IL‐8 and CCL‐2 abolished the Wnt‐dependent HaCaT cell hyperproliferation in OTCs. Additionally, MMP‐1 was expressed in high amounts in Wnt‐3a‐stimulated OTCs and degraded the stromal matrix. Thus, our data show that Wnt‐3a stimulates fibroblasts to secrete both keratinocyte proliferation‐inducing cytokines and stroma‐degrading metalloproteinases, thereby providing evidence for a novel Wnt deregulation in the tumor‐stroma directly contributing to skin cancer progression.
Disabled students: identity, inclusion and work-based placements

Research about disabled identity reflects diverse perspectives on the merits and challenges associated with such an identity. This paper explores the impact of disabled identity on the inclusion of disabled students in higher education and employment contexts. It considers their experiences of inclusion in a university setting and its associated work-based placements and discusses the extent to which students had to negotiate a range of experiences of disabled identity. The paper suggests that many disabled students, especially those with behaviour-related impairment labels, are subject to continued exclusion in university and, more particularly, work settings, and this contributes to an employment disadvantage compared with their peers. To this end, the paper highlights the importance of enhancing inclusion for disabled students, especially in employment settings, through a focus on reducing destructive identities.
Millennial‐scale dynamics of staghorn coral in Discovery Bay, Jamaica

Populations of the staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, collapsed throughout the Caribbean region from the late 1970s through the 1990s. We tested the hypothesis that this recent, multidecadal interruption in coral growth was a novel event in the late Holocene. Eight cores, extracted from a lagoonal reef in Discovery Bay, Jamaica dated to 440–1260 CalBP and consisted almost entirely of A. cervicornis rubble. The A. cervicornis in the cores showed significantly less internal bioerosion than A. cervicornis from modern death assemblages in Discovery Bay, indicating generally shorter post-mortem exposure at the sediment–water interface in the past. A. cervicornis grew continuously and was buried rapidly during the millennium preceding the 1980s, with the exception of a possible hiatus in growth and burial at some point 300–600 years ago. In the 1980s, a combination of perturbations, which included overfishing and (possibly) other forms of human interference, caused an unprecedented disruption in the growth and burial of staghorn coral populations in Discovery Bay.
Children's cultural background knowledge and story telling performance

The cultural context in which a child is raised influences her cognitive system and language behavior. In this paper, we explored the influence of cultural back ground knowledge on story telling performance of two groups of children living in the Netherlands: (1) bilingual ethnic minority children from immigrant families of Islamic background(2) monolingual Dutch children. Using a within-subject design, all children retold, continued, and finished three story beginnings: One story dealt with a topic related to the ethnic minority children's cultural background(Ramadan), one story dealt with a topic related to the Dutch children's cultural background(Carnival), and one story dealt with a topic both groups of children were familiar with (playing at the schoolyard). All children spoke in Dutch, which implies that the ethnic minority children performed all tasks in a language other than their family language, whereas the Dutch children performed the same tasks in their native language. It appeared that both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the stories were influenced by the children's cultural background knowledge. Measurements of story length showed that ethnic minority children's Ramadan stories were longer than their Carnival stories, whereas Dutch children's Carnival stories were longer than their Ramadan stories. Likewise, the ethnic minority children's Ramadan stories containedmore connective ties(as indexed by the number of conjunctions used) than their Carnival stories, whereas the reverse pattern was observed in Dutch children. These findings indicate that cultural familiarity with a topic influences story telling performance in terms of story length and coherence.
Accuracy in self-perception: The ‘fallacy of personal validation’

Previous studies have found that subjects rate randomly selected astrological statements as highly accurate descriptions of themselves and this has been held to show a ‘fallacy of personal validation’. Three experiments are reported which investigate possible explanations. Subjects do not appear to accept such statements because of demand characteristics or social desirability effects. Evidence is presented to support an alternative hypothesis: subjects can distinguish true from false personality descriptions and perceive astrological statements as accurate descriptions of most people including themselves.
Police Practice in Hong Kong and New York: A Comparative Analysis

Despite their geographic and national differences, there are remarkable similarities between the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) and the New York City Police Department (NYPD). The purpose of this study is to compare contemporary police practices in these two police organisations and thereby to obtain a better understanding of current policing issues in general. We offer this comparative assessment within the context of our descriptions of the overall organisation and operations of the HKPF and the NYPD. While we find some differences, these differences are eclipsed by the similarities between the two police forces in their hierarchical structure and their core police activities such as crime control, emergency response, order maintenance and community relations. We end the paper with a brief discussion of the implications of these structures and operations for policing in general.
Out Of The Quagmire Of Plant Defense Hypotheses

Several hypotheses, mainly Optimal Defense (OD), Carbon:Nutrient Balance (CNB), Growth Rate (GR), and Growth‐Differentiation Balance (GDB), have individually served as frameworks for investigating the patterns of plant defense against herbivores, in particular the pattern of constitutive defense. The predictions and tests of these hypotheses have been problematic for a variety of reasons and have led to considerable confusion about the state of the “theory of plant defense. ” The primary contribution of the OD hypothesis is that it has served as the main framework for investigation of genotypic expression of plant defense, with the emphasis on allocation cost of defense. The primary contribution of the CNB hypothesis is that it has served as the main framework for investigation of how resources affect phenotypic expression of plant defense, often with studies concerned about allocation cost of defense. The primary contribution of the GR hypothesis is that it explains how intrinsic growth rate of plants shaped evolutionarily by resource availability affects defensive patterns. The primary contribution of the expanded GDB hypothesis is that it recognizes the constant physiological tradeoff between growth and differentiation at the cellular and tissue levels relative to the selective pressures of resource availability, including explicitly taking into account plant tolerance of damage by enemies. A clearer understanding of these hypotheses and what we have learned from investigations that use them can facilitate development of well‐designed experiments that address the gaps in our knowledge of plant defense.
Unsupervised Learning of Acoustic Unit Descriptors for Audio Content Representation and Classification

In this paper, we attempt to represent audio as a sequence of acoustic units using unsupervised learning and use them for multi-class classiﬁcation. We expect the acoustic units to represent sounds or sound sequences to automatically create a sound alphabet. We use audio from multi-class Youtube-quality multimedia data to converge on a set of sound units, such that each audio ﬁle is represented as a sequence of these units. We then try to learn category language models over sequences of the acoustic units, and use them to generate acoustic and language model scores for each category. Finally, we use a margin based classiﬁcation algorithm to weight the category scores to predict the class that each test data point belongs to. We compare different settings and report encouraging results on this task.
Novel Mutation in Desmoplakin Causes Arrhythmogenic Left Ventricular Cardiomyopathy

Background—Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) is a familial heart muscle disease characterized by structural, electrical, and pathological abnormalities of the right ventricle (RV). Several disease loci have been identified. Mutations in desmoplakin have recently been isolated in both autosomal-dominant and autosomal-recessive forms of ARVC. Primary left ventricular (LV) variants of the disease are increasingly recognized. We report on a large family with autosomal-dominant left-sided ARVC. Methods and Results—The proband presented with sudden cardiac death and fibrofatty replacement of the LV myocardium. The family was evaluated. Diagnosis was based on modified diagnostic criteria for ARVC. Seven had inferior and/or lateral T-wave inversion on ECG, LV dilatation, and ventricular arrhythmia, predominantly extrasystoles of LV origin. Three had sustained ventricular tachycardia; 7 had late potentials on signal-averaged ECG. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging in 4 patients revealed wall-motion abnormalities of the RV and patchy, late gadolinium enhancement in the LV, suggestive of fibrosis. Linkage confirmed cosegregation to the desmoplakin intragenic marker D6S2975. A heterozygous, single adenine insertion (2034insA) in the desmoplakin gene was identified in affected individuals only. A frameshift introducing a premature stop codon with truncation of the rod and carboxy terminus of desmoplakin was confirmed by Western blot analysis. Conclusions—We have described a new dominant mutation in desmoplakin that causes left-sided ARVC, with arrhythmias of LV origin, lateral T-wave inversion, and late gadolinium enhancement in the LV on magnetic resonance images. Truncation of the carboxy terminus of desmoplakin and consequent disruption of intermediate filament binding may account for the predominant LV phenotype.
Selective adaptation to noxious foods by a herbivorous insect.

When animals repeatedly sample a noxious food over a period of 1-4 days, they can markedly reduce their aversive behavioral response to the diet's unpleasant taste (e.g. 'bitterness') or toxic effects. This long-term adaptation process is selective, however, permitting insects to adapt physiologically to some but not all noxious foods. We hypothesized (i) that the selective nature of this adaptation process stems from the fact that some unpalatable foods are toxic while others are harmless and (ii) that insects have more difficulty adapting to foods that are both unpalatable and toxic. Our model system consisted of Manduca sexta caterpillars and two compounds that taste bitter to humans and elicit an aversive behavioral response in this insect (salicin and aristolochic acid). We found that 2 days of exposure to a salicin diet completely adapted the aversive response of the caterpillars to salicin, but that exposure to an aristolochic acid diet failed to adapt the aversive response to aristolochic acid. We determined that M. sexta could not adapt to the aristolochic acid diet because it lacked mechanisms for reducing the compound's toxicity. In contrast, the salicin diet did not produce any apparent toxic effects, and the caterpillars adapted to its aversive taste within 12 h of exposure. We also found that the salicin adaptation phenomenon (i) was mediated by the central gustatory system, (ii) generalized to salicin concentrations that were twice those in the adapting diet and (iii) offset spontaneously when the caterpillar was transferred to a salicin-free diet. We propose that toxicity is a more significant barrier to dietary adaptation than 'bitterness' in this insect.
Views of the downward extension: comparing the Youth Version of the Psychopathy Checklist with the Youth Psychopathic traits Inventory.

Increasing interest in "juvenile psychopathy" has been met with scholarly debate about the validity of directly extending the adult construct of psychopathic personality disorder to youth. To inform this debate, this study of 160 serious adolescent offenders compared two alternative, adult-based conceptualizations of juvenile psychopathy: that of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) and the self-report Youth Psychopathic traits Inventory (YPI). The results indicate that these two conceptualizations overlap only partially, with the YPI focusing more tightly on core interpersonal and affective features than the PCL:YV. Each conceptualization is reliable and predicts different forms of short-term institutional misbehavior. However, only the YPI possesses a theoretically coherent, inverse association with anxiety. Despite this promise, these conceptualizations of psychopathy are less strongly associated with one another than they are with psychosocial markers of developmental maturity. This raises questions about their divergent validity and ability to identify a disorder that will remain stable during the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Implications for future longitudinal research on the validity, manifestations, and course of juvenile psychopathy are discussed.
Dual Fingerprint Reagents with Enhanced Sensitivity: 5‐Methoxy‐ and 5‐Methylthioninhydrin

Abstract: “Dual fingerprint reagents” are chemical formulations which produce with latent fingerprints in a single step, impressions that are both colored and fluorescent. Pre‐mixed solutions of the two commercially available ninhydrin analogues, 5‐methoxyninhydrin (MN) and 5‐methylthioninhydrin (MTN) with zinc or cadmium salts, are true dual reagents. They are much more sensitive than the parent dual reagent, ninhydrin/ZnCl2. The main advantage of the new formulations is that they can be used at room temperature, with no need to cool the sample to liquid nitrogen temperature. At 0.05% concentration, which is 10‐fold lower than the common ninhydrin working solution, MTN/ZnCl2 is as sensitive as DFO in the fluorescence mode and considerably more sensitive in the color mode. MTN is also slightly cheaper than DFO.
Student Advocacy and Research Regarding Employability with Women in an Addiction Recovery Center

This article presents a course project that allowed senior undergraduate occupational science students the opportunity to experience advocacy and leadership roles as they prepared to transition to entry-level occupational therapy programs. The students coordinated an on-site employment fair for women residents of one Alcoholics Anonymous-based substance abuse recovery center in Kentucky. This ultimately led to a preliminary qualitative program evaluation study of the participants’ perceptions of employability after participating in the fair. Following a semi-structured interview protocol, nine participants were interviewed by student investigators immediately following the fair. The resulting data were compared within and across transcripts, and coded for emergent themes within an Alcoholics Anonymous framework. The results indicated that the women considered both the students and employers to be advocates; also, the fair was seen as a practical resource for recovery. The women exited the fair poised to pursue diverse work opportunities they previously thought unobtainable. This article supports occupational therapy education efforts to promote research experiences and has implications for future occupational therapy practice in the domain of work.
Adaptive Neural Compilation

This paper proposes an adaptive neural-compilation framework to address the problem of efficient program learning. Traditional code optimisation strategies used in compilers are based on applying pre-specified set of transformations that make the code faster to execute without changing its semantics. In contrast, our work involves adapting programs to make them more efficient while considering correctness only on a target input distribution. Our approach is inspired by the recent works on differentiable representations of programs. We show that it is possible to compile programs written in a low-level language to a differentiable representation. We also show how programs in this representation can be optimised to make them efficient on a target distribution of inputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables learning specifically-tuned algorithms for given data distributions with a high success rate.
A unified theory for optimal feedforward torque control of anisotropic synchronous machines

ABSTRACT A unified theory for optimal feedforward torque control of anisotropic synchronous machines with non-negligible stator resistance and mutual inductance is presented which allows to analytically compute (1) the optimal direct and quadrature reference currents for all operating strategies, such as maximum torque per current (MTPC), maximum current, field weakening, maximum torque per voltage (MTPV) or maximum torque per flux (MTPF), and (2) the transition points indicating when to switch between the operating strategies due to speed, voltage or current constraints. The analytical solutions allow for an (almost) instantaneous selection and computation of actual operation strategy and corresponding reference currents. Numerical methods (approximating these solutions only) are no longer required. The unified theory is based on one simple idea: all optimisation problems, their respective constraints and the computation of the intersection point(s) of voltage ellipse, current circle or torque, MTPC, MTPV, MTPF hyperbolas are reformulated implicitly as quadrics which allows to invoke the Lagrangian formalism and to find the roots of fourth-order polynomials analytically. The proposed theory is suitable for any anisotropic synchronous machine. Implementation and measurement results illustrate effectiveness and applicability of the theoretical findings in real world.
Academic Research Strengths and Multinational Firms' Foreign R&D Location Decisions: Evidence from R&D Investments in European Regions

Although an expanding literature on university–industry linkages has suggested that proximity to academia can increase the innovative performance of firms, the role of academic research in the R&D location choices of multinational firms has received surprisingly little attention. In this paper we analyze the extent to which academic research in host regions of EU-15 countries attracts R&D investments by multinational firms. We analyze the determinants of the location of 394 multinational R&D projects in NUTS-1 regions of EU-15 countries during the period 2003–08. We construct precise measures of the academic research strengths of regions from annual publication data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science. University publications are counted at the level of regions and science fields, and measure academic research relevant for investing firms by linking science fields to the industries in which firms are active. We find that the probability of R&D projects being located in a host region is positively affected by the host region's academic strength—after controlling for industry agglomeration, the technological strength of the region, R&D tax incentives, and other characteristics of host locations. Our results further suggest that a major mechanism through which academic research attracts foreign R&D is the supply of PhD graduates.
Effect of corticosterone and paroxetine on masculine mating behavior: possible involvement of neurogenesis.

INTRODUCTION Corticosterone inhibits male rodent sexual behavior while the mechanism remains obscured. Recent studies have disclosed that neurogenesis in the subventricular zone (SVZ) can be increased by pheromone exposure from the opposite sex, and neurogenesis is essential for normal mating behavior of female mice. Together with the neurogenesis-inhibiting effect of corticosterone, we hypothesize that cell proliferation in the olfactory system is essential for male rodent sexual functioning. AIM The current study explored the relationship between cell proliferation in the olfactory system and male sexual behavior. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Sexual behavior performance, proliferative cell counts, and c-fos-expressing cell counts. METHODS Adult male rats were treated with corticosterone and/or paroxetine, an antidepressant, for 2 weeks. These two drugs were shown to suppress and enhance hippocampus and SVZ cell proliferation, respectively. Mating behavior was assessed after the treatment, and proliferation of new cells and c-fos-expressing cells, activated neurons in the mating-related regions in the brain, were analyzed. To further confirm the necessity of cell proliferation in mating, inhibition of cell proliferation was performed by intracerebroventricular infusion of cytostatic cytosine arabinose (Ara-c). RESULTS Corticosterone treatment, which inhibited cell proliferation in both the SVZ and olfactory epithelium, led to inhibited male sexual performance. In contrast, paroxetine increased cell proliferation and improved the performance in corticosterone-treated animals. When cell proliferation in the brain was inhibited by Ara-c, a suppressed sexual performance was found. However, cell proliferation in olfactory epithelium was not inhibited by Ara-c and thus the sexual inhibition is unlikely to be linked to this region. Furthermore, a decrease in c-fos expression in the mating-related regions upon female pheromone stimulation was found. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that cell proliferation in the SVZ and hippocampus may be involved in the reproduction of the male rodents, and pharmacological treatments may affect sexual functioning through alteration of neurogenesis.