Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biobehavioral Examination of Religious Coping, Psychosocial Factors, and Executive Function in Homebound Older Adults

Introduction: Although many homebound older adults cope well using various resources, including religious coping strategies, some experience prolonged and unresolved psychosocial distress resulting in biological disruptions, such as hypercortisolism and increased inflammation, which are suggested mechanisms of decreased executive function. Purpose: To examine relationships of religious coping, psychosocial factors (stress, depression, loneliness), salivary biomarkers (cortisol, C-reactive protein (CRP), Interleukin-1β), and executive function. Methods: Data were collected cross-sectionally from 88 older adults (mean age 75.3). Religious coping, stress, depression, loneliness, and cognitive function were measured with standardized instruments, and saliva samples were collected for salivary cortisol, CRP, and IL-1β. Results: Negative religious coping significantly and positively correlated with stress, depression, and loneliness (r = 0.46, r = 0.21, r = 0.47, all p < 0.05); positive religious coping significantly and negatively correlated with depression and loneliness (r = −0.29, r = −0.23, both p < 0.05); and greater loneliness significantly predicted greater CRP (p < 0.05). For executive function, IL-1β showed a significant positive correlation (r = 0.23, p = < 0.05). Discussion: Our findings fill gaps related to biobehavioral interactions of religious coping and cognitive health in the aging population. Future research should include additional psychosocial and biobehavioral variables in larger samples of diverse and vulnerable populations. Collective findings may be able to identify particularly vulnerable subgroups of population, ultimately with tailored interventions to prevent cognitive decline.
SYSSOMO: A Pedagogical Tool for Analyzing Movement Variants Between Different Pianists

The visualization of arm movement can provide valuable additional information for piano teaching. However, movement visualizations are often difficult to understand for musicians. SYSSOMO uses scorefollowing to synchronize two performances of the same piece in order to overlay motion data, MIDI, and video. Using this technique, the user can easily compare the differences between the performances of a teacher and a student. To capture arm movement, sensors have to be unobtrusive for good user acceptance, and lightweight to minimize independent movement of the sensor. We have developed and built sensing hardware, called MotionNet, to capture arm movements. MotionNet is composed of a set of sensor units and a host unit, which communicate via CAN. This architecture helps us to reduce size and weight of the sensor units.
In vitro characterization of a spontaneously immortalized human Müller cell line (MIO-M1).

PURPOSE To characterize a spontaneously immortalized human Müller cell line and to determine whether it retains the characteristics of primary isolated cells without undergoing differentiation in vitro. METHODS An immortalized cell line obtained from human retina was investigated for the expression of known markers of Müller cells, including cellular retinaldehyde binding protein (CRALBP), glutamine synthetase, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGF-R), alpha-smooth muscle actin (alpha-SMA), and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). Also examined were the morphologic features of these cells, by scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and their functional characteristics, by electrogenic responses to glutamate. In addition, comparative studies were made of these cells with primary cultures of freshly isolated human Müller cells. RESULTS The cells expressed CRALBP, EGF-R, glutamine synthetase, and alpha-SMA, as judged by confocal microscopy and Western blot analysis of cell lysates. Western blot analysis did not detect GFAP in cell lysates, but confocal microscopy showed that occasional cells expressed GFAP after detachment from the monolayer. The morphologic features of the cells examined, as judged by scanning and transmission electron microscopy, resemble those of cells derived from primary cell cultures. They possess villous projections on their apical surfaces and contain loose bundles of microtubules aligned parallel to one another and the long axis of the cell process. Characteristically, they contain abundant deposits of glycogen particles that do not differ from those seen in primary isolated cells. Preliminary recordings with intracellular electrodes revealed that these cells have properties similar to those described for mammalian Müller cells and depolarize in response to L-glutamate without significant change in membrane resistance, consistent with the well-established electrogenic uptake of this amino acid. CONCLUSIONS A spontaneously immortalized Müller cell line was characterized that retains the characteristics of primary isolated cells in culture. To the authors' knowledge, it constitutes the first human Müller cell line reported in the literature. It has been named MIO-M1 (Moorfields/Institute of Ophthalmology-Müller 1) after the authors' institution. Availability of this human cell line will facilitate studies designed to obtain a better understanding of the role of Müller cells in normal and pathologic conditions.
Social Security Privatization: What it Can and Cannot Accomplish

This paper assesses the effect of social security privatization on the government budget, economic efficiency, national savings, and the distribution of resources across generations. It is shown that the benefits of privatization most often touted by privatization advocates can be achieved by simply altering taxes and social security pensions and leaving the basic structure of social security unchanged. In the conclusion, two simple arguments are given for why privatization might be a good idea nonetheless.
Distributed data mining in a chain store database of short transactions

In this paper, we broaden the horizon of traditional rule mining by introducing a new framework of causality rule mining in a distributed chain store database. Specifically, the causality rule explored in this paper consists of a sequence of triggering events and a set of consequential events, and is designed with the capability of mining non-sequential, inter-transaction information. Hence, the causality rule mining provides a very general framework for rule derivation. Note, however, that the procedure of causality rule mining is very costly particularly in the presence of a huge number of candidate sets and a distributed database, and in our opinion, cannot be dealt with by direct extensions from existing rule mining methods. Consequently, we devise in this paper a series of level matching algorithms, including Level Matching (abbreviatedly as LM), Level Matching with Selective Scan (abbreviatedly as LMS), and Distributed Level Matching (abbreviatedly as Distibuted LM), to minimize the computing cost needed for the distributed data mining of causality rules. In addition, the phenomena of time window constraints are also taken into consideration for the development of our algorithms. As a result of properly employing the technologies of level matching and selective scan, the proposed algorithms present good efficiency and scalability in the mining of local and global causality rules. Scale-up experiments show that the proposed algorithms scale well with the number of sites and the number of customer transactions.Index Terms: knowledge discovery, distributed data mining causality rules, triggering events, consequential events
Functional Performance and Associations between Performance Tests and Neurological Assessment Differ in Men and Women with Parkinson's Disease

Background. Neurological assessment of a patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) is expected to reflect upon functional performance. As women are known to report more limitations even for same observed functional performance level, present study was designed to examine whether associations between neurological assessments and functional performance differ across genders. Methods. 14 men and 14 women with PD participated. Functional performance was assessed by measuring walking speeds on 10-meter walk test (10MWT) and by performing timed-up-and-go-test (TUG). Neurological assessment included Hoehn and Yahr Scale (HY), Movement Disorders Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), Schwab and England Activities of Daily Living Scale (S-E), and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). Results. In women with PD, Kendall's tau-b correlation analyses revealed significant correlations between functional performance tests and neurological assessment measures, with the exception in MMSE. No corresponding associations were found for men, although they demonstrated better functional performance, as expected. Conclusion. Men in similar clinical stage of the PD perform better on functional tests than women. Disease severity reflects upon functional performance differently in men and women with PD. Results indicate that when interpreting the assessment results of both functional performance and neurological assessment tests, the gender of the patient should be taken into consideration.
Substrate Arrays of Microelectrodes for in vitro Electrophysiology

The collective electrical phenomena emerging in a network of interacting neurons represent one of the most advanced and technically challenging research issues in the neurosciences. Under these perspectives, in recent years, experimental neurophysiologists have taken greater advantage of novel tools offered by micro- and nano-fabrication technologies. Such techniques, originally developed for the microelectronic industry, can be employed to build extremely small multisite bidirectional signal probes, either for in in vitro or in in vivo studies in cellular electrophysiology. As a result, an original research area emerged at the interface between network-level neuroscience and engineering. In particular, the thin-film-based substrate arrays of microtransducers (MEAs) represent an important outcome of this field. This chapter will review the fabrication techniques and the applications with respect to in vitro brain tissue slices and cultured dissociated neuronal networks electrophysiology. We mention the alternative and complementary techniques and we report some experimental results. We conclude by underlying the important contributions of the MEAs to the network-level neurosciences and neuroengineering, and to the design of neuroprosthetic devices. Keywords: neuroengineering; nanotechnology; cellular electrophysiology; extracellular recordings
The Essential Instability of Self-Deception

Two apparent paradoxes lie at the heart of discussion of self-deception, one focusing on belief, the other on intention. The belief paradox concerns how the self-deceived can combine the belief that p and the belief that not-p. The intention paradox concerns how the self-deceived can intend to believe that p, and manage it, without knowing what they are up to and vitiating it. Both are said to be paradoxes because, on the one hand, self-deception seems possible and, on the other, it can seem to require combinations of states that render it impossible. The first choice point for debate is whether to divide or dilute. Dividing presses on the analogy with the deception of others. There is no problem with Jo believing that p and Josephine believing that not-p; nor is there a problem with Jo intending to bring it about that Josephine believe that not-p and managing to make it so. The division strategy seeks to appeal to this fact and relocate the division, in some attenuated sense, within subjects so that they can genuinely count as self-deceived. Dilution explains how the allegedly paradoxical combination of states is not required. Instead, self-deception involves something less that is not paradoxical. Both approaches suffer from a problem—in fact, the same one. Each gets rid of the paradoxical character of self-deception at the price of losing the instability that is essential to it. The problem with the self-deceived is that they seem to avoid accepting a certain proposition and have anxiety over, or lack confidence in, what they are up to. It seems as though the project may fail or requires work. I put all this in terms that are as neutral as possible. It is pretty clear how the two paradoxes with which I began involve a more precise articulation of it. Their anxiety or lack of confidence stems from the fact that, deep down, they believe the proposition and have intentionally produced a belief in the opposite whose work will be unpicked if they appreciate what they have done. Thus, I say, characterize the instability and the essential work of characterizing self-deception is done. The approach has a number of advantages that I seek to bring out in the course of the paper. The first is that it provides unity where other accounts of unity fail. As we shall see, there are a number of different ways people can be …
Sound waves excitation by jet‐inflated bubbles in clusters of galaxies

We show that repeated sound waves in the intracluster medium (ICM) can be excited by a single inflation episode of an opposite bubble pair. To reproduce this behaviour in numerical simulations, the bubbles should be inflated by jets, rather than being injected artificially as already full-blown bubbles. The multiple sound waves are excited by the motion of the bubble-ICM boundary that is caused by vortices inside the inflated bubbles and the backflow ('cocoon') of the ICM around the bubble. These sound waves form a structure that can account for the ripples observed in the Perseus cooling flow cluster. We inflate the bubbles using slow massive jets either with a very wide opening angle or that are narrow and precessing. The wide jets (or collimated fast winds) are slow in the sense that they are highly subrelativistic, ν j ∼ 0.01c- 0.1c, and they are massive in the sense that the pair of bubbles carries back to the ICM a large fraction of the cooling mass, i.e. ∼1-50 M ⊙ yr -1 . We use a two-dimensional axisymmetric (referred to as 2.5D) hydrodynamical numerical code (vH-1).
Heparin selectively inhibits a protein kinase C-dependent mechanism of cell cycle progression in calf aortic smooth muscle cells [published erratum appears in J Cell Biol 1990 Mar;110(3):863]

The proliferation of arterial smooth muscle cells (SMCs) plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of arteriosclerosis. Previous studies have indicated that the glycosaminoglycan heparin specifically inhibited the growth of vascular SMCs in vivo and in culture, although the precise mechanism(s) of action have not been elucidated. In this study, we have examined the ability of specific mitogens (PDGF, EGF, heparin-binding growth factors, phorbol esters, and insulin) to stimulate SMC proliferation. Our results indicate that SMCs derived from different species and vascular sources respond differently to these growth factors. We next examined the ability of heparin to inhibit the proliferative responses to these mitogens. In calf aortic SMCs, heparin inhibits a protein kinase C-dependent pathway for mitogenesis. Detailed cell cycle analysis revealed several new features of the effects of heparin on SMCs. For example, heparin has two effects on the Go----S transition: it delays entry into S phase and also reduces the number of cells entering the cycle from Go. Using two separate experimental approaches, we found that heparin must be present during the last 4 h before S phase, suggesting a mid-to-late G1 heparin block. In addition, our data indicate that heparin-treated SMCs, while initially blocked in mid-to-late G1, slowly move back into a quiescent growth state in the continued presence of heparin. These results suggest that heparin may have multiple targets for its antiproliferative effect.
Development of the Conversation Participation Rating Scale: Intervention Planning Implications for Two School-Age Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Purpose: School-age children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have pervasive challenges in social interactions with peers. This study examined the feasibility of eliciting children's perceptions of their conversation participation with peers for the purposes of assessment and intervention planning. Methods: Two school-age children with ASD completed a newly developed self-report measure, the Conversation Participation Rating Scale (CPRS), designed for children and adolescents between the ages of 7 and 16 years, with social communication and peer interaction difficulties. Descriptive analyses examined agreement and discrepancy among child self-report, parent report, and standardized social language tests. Results: Both children provided a range of responses on the CPRS, revealing participation strengths as well as awareness of specific activity limitations and participation restrictions. Both children scored within the normal range on a social language test, even though parent report measures revealed significant concerns with pragmatic language and social skills. Discussion: The CPRS results contributed unique information to the assessment process. These results provide preliminary support for the feasibility of using a self-report conversation participation measure as a method for obtaining children's unique perspective of social communication activities and challenges in school settings.
Comparative Analysis of Various Routing Protocols in VANET

To make the drive safer in future Vehicular ad hoc network can ease our life. For its success, it needs efficient routing protocols for communication among vehicles. Such communication can either through road side units (RSUs) or on board units (OBUs) in the vehicles. In this paper we are exploiting various existing routing protocols like AODV, AOMDV, DSR and DSDV by varying the velocity of vehicles and then comparing their performances with respect to throughput, end to end delay, packet delivery ratio and normalized routing load during communication.
Gender differences in effects of pinacidil but not diazoxide on heart automatism in the isolated guinea pig right atria.

UNLABELLED The aim of this paper was to investigate the effects of pinacidil and diazoxide, the activators of sarcolemmal and mitochondrial ATP-sensitive K(+) channels (K(ATP)), respectively, on heart rate and force of contraction in female and male guinea pigs. Experiments were performed on the isolated, spontaneously beating, right atria obtained from guinea pigs of both genders. First series of experiments were performed in the spring and repeated in the fall. It was found that diazoxide induced similar negative chronotropic effects in females (-logIC(50) = 4.34 +/- 0.05, E(max) = -90 +/- 6 beats min(-1)) and males (-logIC(50) = 4.42 +/- 0.1, E(max) = -91 +/- 6 beats min(-1)). Additionally, significant positive inotropic effect sensitive to 5-hydroxydecanoate was noted only in males (about 30% above control level at 300 microM). No differences in effects of diazoxide in the spring and in the fall were noted. On the other hand, pinacidil induced significant decrease in heart rate in female guinea pigs only in the fall (-logIC(50) = 4.79 +/- 0.15, E(max) = -77 +/- 9 beats min(-1)), but in males similar negative chronotropic action in the spring (-logIC(50) = 4.53 +/- 0.12, E(50) = -63 +/- 5 beats min(-1)) and in the fall (-logIC(50) = 4.75 +/- 0.2, E(max) = -59 +/- 8 beats min(-1)) was observed. Glibenclamide (10 microM), but not 5-hydroxydecanoate (300 microM) reversed negative chronotropic action of both, pinacidil and diazoxide. No significant inotropic action of pinacidil was observed. CONCLUSIONS Although negative chronotropic effects of pinacidil and diazoxide are related to activation of sarcolemmal K(ATP) channels, only pinacidil affects heart rate of female and male guinea pigs in a different way. This difference is probably hormone-dependent as it appeared only in the spring.
Decay Bounds on Eigenfunctions and the Singular Spectrum of Unbounded Jacobi Matrices

Bounds on the exponential decay of generalized eigenfunctions of bounded and unbounded selfadjoint Jacobi matrices in Graphic are established. Two cases are considered separately and lead to different results: (i) the case in which the spectral parameter lies in a general gap of the spectrum of the Jacobi matrix and (ii) the case of a lower semibounded Jacobi matrix with values of the spectral parameter below the spectrum. It is demonstrated by examples that both results are sharp. We apply these results to obtain a “many barriers-type” criterion for the existence of square-summable generalized eigenfunctions of an unbounded Jacobi matrix at almost every value of the spectral parameter in suitable open sets. In particular, this leads to examples of unbounded Jacobi matrices with a spectral mobility edge, i.e., a transition from purely absolutely continuous spectrum to dense pure point spectrum.
Fault-tolerant spanners: better and simpler

A natural requirement for many distributed structures is <i>fault-tolerance</i>: after some failures in the underlying network, whatever remains from the structure should still be effective for whatever remains from the network. In this paper we examine spanners of general graphs that are tolerant to vertex failures, and significantly improve their dependence on the number of faults <i>r</i> for all stretch bounds. For stretch <i>k</i> e 3 we design a simple transformation that converts <i>every k</i>-spanner construction with at most <i>f</i>(<i>n</i>) edges into an <i>r</i>-fault-tolerant <i>k</i>-spanner construction with at most <i>O</i>(<i>r</i><sup>3</sup> log <i>n</i>) Å <i>f</i>(2<i>n/r</i>) edges. Applying this to standard greedy spanner constructions gives <i>r</i>-fault tolerant <i>k</i>-spanners with Õ(<i>r</i><sup>2</sup> <i>n</i><sup>1+2/<i>k</i>+1</sup>) edges. The previous construction by Chechik, Langberg, Peleg, and Roddity [STOC 2009] depends similarly on <i>n</i> but <i>exponentially</i> on <i>r</i> (approximately like <i>k<sup>r</sup></i>). For the case of <i>k</i>=2 and unit edge-lengths, an <i>O</i>(<i>r</i> log <i>n</i>)-approximation is known from recent work of Dinitz and Krauthgamer [STOC 2011], in which several spanner results are obtained using a common approach of rounding a natural flow-based linear programming relaxation. Here we use a different (stronger) LP relaxation and improve the approximation ratio to <i>O</i>(log <i>n</i>), which is, notably, <i>independent</i> of the number of faults <i>r</i>. We further strengthen this bound in terms of the maximum degree by using the Lovasz Local Lemma. Finally, we show that most of our constructions are inherently local by designing equivalent distributed algorithms in the <i>LOCAL</i> model of distributed computation.
Shared Identity, Family Influence, and the Transgenerational Intentions in Family Firms

A family’s transgenerational intention (TI) to pass ownership of the firm to the next generation of family members is the defining characteristic of a family. TI reflects a family’s intention to engage in succession planning, which is the primary predictor for succession success. In this study, we draw on psychological ownership theory to develop and test a model of a family’s TI. In the model, we argue that family influence impacts TI through shared identity. We also argue that a family firm CEO’s relationship to the family (by blood vs. marriage vs. hire) moderates the relationship between shared identity and TI. We tested our hypotheses and the model on a sample of North American family firms and found support for most hypotheses.