Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Nogo-A Silencing on TNF-α and IL-6 Secretion and TH Downregulation in Lipopolysaccharide-Stimulated PC12 Cells

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common degenerative disease that lacks efficient treatment. Myelin-associated neurite outgrowth inhibitor A (Nogo-A) is relevant with inhibition of nerve regeneration and may play vital role in pathogenesis of PD. The study aimed to establish the shRNA expression plasmids of Nogo-A gene and explore the regulatory effects of Nogo-A silencing on the expression of inflammation factor tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) as well as tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) in lipopolysaccharide- (LPS-) stimulated rat PC12 cells. The results showed that both mRNA and protein levels of Nogo-A in pGenesil-nogoA-shRNA group were downregulated. The viabilities of PC12 cells decreased with increase of LPS concentrations. LPS significantly increased the supernatant TNF-alpha and IL-6 concentrations and reduced TH protein expression in PC12 cells, while silencing Nogo-A could block these effects. These results suggested that LPS can activate PC12 cells to secrete inflammatory cytokines and lower the TH expression, which can be regulated by Nogo-A gene silencing. Nogo-A silencing might provide new ideas for PD treatment in the future.
Symmetric and complementary fit based on prototypical attributes of soccer teams

Research suggests that symmetry and complementarity are able to predict fit between an individual and a group. To date, fit has been described using knowledge, abilities, skills, values, personality, and the congruence between needs and their satisfaction. The aim of this study was to describe and analyze person–group fit based on the symmetric and complementary fit of prototypical attributes. Furthermore, we analyzed the mediating effects between symmetric and complementary fit as independent variables and the ability to perform, and well-being as dependent variables. The sample consisted of N = 20 soccer teams with a total of N = 294 athletes (age M = 23.6 years, SD = 4.4). Results demonstrated that symmetric and complementary fit are two distinct though correlated constructs. Moreover, identification is able to mediate the relation between symmetric fit and well-being as well as the relation between symmetric fit and an individual’s ability to perform.
Slot and frame patterns and the development of the determiner category

ABSTRACT There has been a growing trend in recent years toward the attribution of adultlike syntactic categories to young, language-learning children. This has derived support from studies which claim to have found positive evidence for syntactic categories in the speech of young children (e.g., Valian, 1986). However, these claims contradict the findings of previous research which have suggested that the categories underlying children's early multiword speech are much more limited in scope (e.g., Braine, 1976). The present study represents an attempt to differentiate and test these models of early multiword speech: focusing on the syntactic category of determiner, we investigated the extent to which 11 children showed overlap in the contexts in which they used different determiner types in their early multiword corpora. The results demonstrated that, although children do use determiners with a semantically heterogeneous collection of different noun types, there is very little evidence that they know anything about the relationship between the different determiner types, and thus there is no real case for the attribution of a syntactic determiner category. Indeed, this pattern of determiner use seems perfectly consistent with a limited-scope formula account of children's early multiword speech, as proposed by Braine (1976). These findings suggest that the development of an adultlike determiner category may be a gradual process, one involving the progressive broadening of the range of lexically specific frames in which different determiners appear, and are broadly consistent with a number of recent constructivist models of children's early grammatical development.
The logic of evaluation professionalism

This article draws on the sociological literature to (i) explore the intersection between evaluation and professionalism; (ii) identify the extent to which evaluation fulfills the main attributes of professionalism; (iii) apply logical models of professionalism to the practice of independent and self-evaluation; and (iv) speculate about the future of the discipline. It rests the case for evaluation professionalism on the imperative of occupational self-management without which specialized evaluation knowledge is highly vulnerable to capture by vested interests.
Deciding to Discipline: Race, Choice, and Punishment at the Frontlines of Welfare Reform

Welfare sanctions are financial penalties applied to individuals who fail to comply with welfare program rules. Their widespread use reflects a turn toward disciplinary approaches to poverty management. In this article, we investigate how implicit racial biases and discrediting social markers interact to shape officials' decisions to impose sanctions. We present experimental evidence based on hypothetical vignettes that case managers are more likely to recommend sanctions for Latina and black clients—but not white clients—when discrediting markers are present. We triangulate these findings with analyses of state administrative data. Our results for Latinas are mixed, but we find consistent evidence that the probability of a sanction rises significantly when a discrediting marker (i.e., a prior sanction for noncompliance) is attached to a black rather than a white welfare client. Overall, our study clarifies how racial minorities, especially African Americans, are more likely to be punished for deviant behavior in the new world of disciplinary welfare provision.
Quality of Life Measured in a Practice‐Based Hypertension Trial of an Angiotensin Receptor Blocker

Effectiveness of antihypertensive treatment depends not only on drugs that avoid or minimize symptomatic side effects but also on therapy that has a positive effect on quality of life. This study assessed the effect on quality of life of a contemporary agent (an angiotensin receptor blocker) and evaluated the validity and practicality of using a quality‐of‐life instrument in the practice‐based setting. A total of 2716 hypertensive patients, either untreated or on single‐agent therapy, were started on or switched to 40 mg telmisartan for 6 weeks; in patients whose blood pressures remained above 130/85 mm Hg after 2 weeks, the dose was increased to 80 mg for the remaining 4 weeks of treatment. Quality of life was measured by patient self‐administration of the Psychological General Well‐Being Index (GWBI) at baseline and at the end of the study. Sixty‐eight percent (n=1858) of patients treated with telmisartan fully completed both GWBI tests; the test score increased by 5.2±0.3 (p<0.0001) from 77.7±0.4. This improvement was observed across all six emotional and health subscales of the GWBI. White and black patients, those aged <65 or >65 years, and men and women had similar increases, though the baseline value in women was sharply lower (p<0.001) than in men. The GWBI rose more in patients whose blood pressure was controlled by treatment (<140/90 mm Hg) than in noncontrolled patients (6.1 vs. 4.1, p<0.0001); for all patients the decreases in systolic and diastolic blood pressures produced by telmisartan correlated significantly (p<0.001 for each) with the increases in the GWBI scores. Controlling blood pressure appears to be an important element in improving subjective health perceptions of hypertensive patients.
Antihypertensive therapy and adaptive mechanisms in peripheral ischemia.

In the present experiments the effect of long-term peripheral ischemia on the capillary of two hind limb skeletal muscles was investigated in spontaneously hypertensive rats. Furthermore, the effect of antihypertensive therapy on changes in capillarity and on the previously observed hyperreactivity of the ischemic vascular bed to vasoconstrictors was investigated in perfused hind limbs of rats after long-term treatment with the angiotensin I converting enzyme inhibitors captopril (0.5 mg/kg.h) or zabiciprilate (0.025 mg/kg.h), the angiotensin II type 1 receptor antagonist losartan (0.625 mg/kg.h), or the calcium antagonist felodipine (0.042 or 0.42 mg/kg.h). Skeletal muscle ischemia in the left hind limb was induced by partial ligation of the left common iliac artery. Long-term (4 weeks) ischemia increased significantly the capillary-to-fiber ratio in the soleus muscle, composed predominantly of type I fibers in spontaneously hypertensive rats, of the ischemic hind limb, whereas capillarity in the contralateral muscle was not affected. Furthermore, capillarity in the gastrocnemius muscle (type II muscle fiber part) of both the ischemic and contralateral hind limb did not change. Long-term treatment with the angiotensin I converting enzyme inhibitors during ischemia abolished the increase in the capillary-to-fiber ratio in the soleus muscle, whereas a comparable antihypertensive dose of felodipine had no effect. Greater blood pressure reductions by both losartan and felodipine prevented increases in capillarization in skeletal muscle ischemia. With respect to vascular hyperreactivity during ischemia, only treatment with losartan normalized reactivity of the ischemic vascular bed to vasoconstrictors. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Creation of Mice Bearing a Partial Duplication of HPRT Gene Marked with a GFP Gene and Detection of Revertant Cells In Situ as GFP-Positive Somatic Cells

It is becoming clear that apparently normal somatic cells accumulate mutations. Such accumulations or propagations of mutant cells are thought to be related to certain diseases such as cancer. To better understand the nature of somatic mutations, we developed a mouse model that enables in vivo detection of rare genetically altered cells via GFP positive cells. The mouse model carries a partial duplication of 3’ portion of X-chromosomal HPRT gene and a GFP gene at the end of the last exon. In addition, although HPRT gene expression was thought ubiquitous, the expression level was found insufficient in vivo to make the revertant cells detectable by GFP positivity. To overcome the problem, we replaced the natural HPRT-gene promoter with a CAG promoter. In such animals, termed HPRT-dup-GFP mouse, losing one duplicated segment by crossover between the two sister chromatids or within a single molecule of DNA reactivates gene function, producing hybrid HPRT-GFP proteins which, in turn, cause the revertant cells to be detected as GFP-positive cells in various tissues. Frequencies of green mutant cells were measured using fixed and frozen sections (liver and pancreas), fixed whole mount (small intestine), or by means of flow cytometry (unfixed splenocytes). The results showed that the frequencies varied extensively among individuals as well as among tissues. X-ray exposure (3 Gy) increased the frequency moderately (~2 times) in the liver and small intestine. Further, in two animals out of 278 examined, some solid tissues showed too many GFP-positive cells to score (termed extreme jackpot mutation). Present results illustrated a complex nature of somatic mutations occurring in vivo. While the HPRT-dup-GFP mouse may have a potential for detecting tissue-specific environmental mutagens, large inter-individual variations of mutant cell frequency cause the results unstable and hence have to be reduced. This future challenge will likely involve lowering the background mutation frequency, thus reducing inter-individual variation.
Acidosis Activation of the Proton-Sensing GPR4 Receptor Stimulates Vascular Endothelial Cell Inflammatory Responses Revealed by Transcriptome Analysis

Acidic tissue microenvironment commonly exists in inflammatory diseases, tumors, ischemic organs, sickle cell disease, and many other pathological conditions due to hypoxia, glycolytic cell metabolism and deficient blood perfusion. However, the molecular mechanisms by which cells sense and respond to the acidic microenvironment are not well understood. GPR4 is a proton-sensing receptor expressed in endothelial cells and other cell types. The receptor is fully activated by acidic extracellular pH but exhibits lesser activity at the physiological pH 7.4 and minimal activity at more alkaline pH. To delineate the function and signaling pathways of GPR4 activation by acidosis in endothelial cells, we compared the global gene expression of the acidosis response in primary human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) with varying level of GPR4. The results demonstrated that acidosis activation of GPR4 in HUVEC substantially increased the expression of a number of inflammatory genes such as chemokines, cytokines, adhesion molecules, NF-κB pathway genes, and prostaglandin-endoperoxidase synthase 2 (PTGS2 or COX-2) and stress response genes such as ATF3 and DDIT3 (CHOP). Similar GPR4-mediated acidosis induction of the inflammatory genes was also noted in other types of endothelial cells including human lung microvascular endothelial cells and pulmonary artery endothelial cells. Further analyses indicated that the NF-κB pathway was important for the acidosis/GPR4-induced inflammatory gene expression. Moreover, acidosis activation of GPR4 increased the adhesion of HUVEC to U937 monocytic cells under a flow condition. Importantly, treatment with a recently identified GPR4 antagonist significantly reduced the acidosis/GPR4-mediated endothelial cell inflammatory response. Taken together, these results show that activation of GPR4 by acidosis stimulates the expression of a wide range of inflammatory genes in endothelial cells. Such inflammatory response can be suppressed by GPR4 small molecule inhibitors and hold potential therapeutic value.
Costume and the Perception of Identity and Role

This study was designed to examine college students' perceptions of themselves when wearing Halloween costumes. Students from two colleges were surveyed over a 5-yr. period (1978–1982). The sample included 805 women and 448 men, for a total of 1,253 respondents. Analysis indicates significant associations between the perceptions of one's role and identity at Halloween and dressing in costume. College women were less likely than men to disguise their identity. The women were also less likely than the men to believe they had new identities with their costumes or to believe they could play different roles at Halloween.
Bundles to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia: how valuable are they?

Purpose of review To review the value of care bundles to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). Recent findings The Ventilator Bundle contains four components, elevation of the head of the bed to 30–45°, daily ‘sedation vacation’ and daily assessment of readiness to extubate, peptic ulcer disease prophylaxis, and deep venous thrombosis prophylaxis, aimed to improve outcome in mechanically ventilated patients, but not all are associated with VAP prevention. Daily spontaneous awakening and breathing trials are associated with early liberation from mechanical ventilation and VAP reduction. Although a small prospective, randomized clinical study documented that the semirecumbent position was associated with a significant reduction in VAP, more recent studies have documented that the semirecumbent position is difficult to maintain in mechanically ventilated patients and may not impact VAP reduction. Prophylaxis for peptic ulcer disease and deep venous thrombosis do not directly impact VAP reduction. Other methods to reduce VAP, such as oral care and hygiene, chlorhexidine in the posterior pharynx, and specialized endotracheal tubes (continuous aspiration of subglottic secretions, silver-coated), should be considered for inclusion in a revised Ventilator Bundle more specifically aimed at VAP prevention. Summary The Ventilator Bundle is an effective method to reduce VAP rates in ICUs. The ventilator bundle should be modified and expanded to include specific processes of care that have been definitively demonstrated to be effective in VAP reduction or a specific VAP bundle created to focus on VAP prevention.
How Entrepreneurs Become Skilled Cultural Operators

Cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management perspectives portray entrepreneurs as skilled cultural operators and often assume them to be capable from the outset to purposefully use ‘cultural resources’ in order to motivate resource-holding audiences to support their new ventures. We problematize this premise and develop a model of how entrepreneurs become skilful cultural operators and develop the cultural competences necessary for creating and growing their ventures. The model is grounded in a case study of an entrepreneur who set up shop and sought to acquire resources in a culturally unfamiliar setting. Our model proposes that two adaptive sensemaking processes – approval-driven sensemaking and autonomy-driven sensemaking – jointly facilitate the gradual development of cultural competences. These processes jointly enable entrepreneurs to gain cultural awareness and calibrate their symbolic enactments. Specifically, while approval-driven sensemaking facilitates recognizing cultural resources to symbolically couple a venture’s identity claims more tightly with the cultural frames of targeted audiences and gain legitimate distinctiveness, autonomy-driven sensemaking enables recognizing cultural constraints and more effective symbolic decoupling to shield the venture from constraining cultural frames and defend the venture’s autonomy and resources. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the theoretical implications of our study for cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management research.
Deep Speech 2 : End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin

We show that an end-to-end deep learning approach can be used to recognize either English or Mandarin Chinese speech-two vastly different languages. Because it replaces entire pipelines of hand-engineered components with neural networks, end-to-end learning allows us to handle a diverse variety of speech including noisy environments, accents and different languages. Key to our approach is our application of HPC techniques, enabling experiments that previously took weeks to now run in days. This allows us to iterate more quickly to identify superior architectures and algorithms. As a result, in several cases, our system is competitive with the transcription of human workers when benchmarked on standard datasets. Finally, using a technique called Batch Dispatch with GPUs in the data center, we show that our system can be inexpensively deployed in an online setting, delivering low latency when serving users at scale.
LIMITS OF WEIGHT SPACES, LUSZTIG'S q-ANALOGS, AND FIBERINGS OF ADJOINT ORBITS

Let G be a connected complex semisimple algebraic group, and T a maximal torus inside a Borel subgroup B , with g, t, and b their Lie algebras. Let V be a representation in the category & for g. The t-decomposition V = E9 JlEt* V Jl of V into a direct sum of finite-dimensional weight spaces is central in the representation theory of g. In this paper, we introduce on weight spaces a new structure, the principal filtration Je(VJl ) , where e is a principal nilpotent in g chosen to be compatible with t; for example, e can be the sum of the simple root vectors relative to (t, b). This filtration is constructed in a very simple way by taking J:(VJl ) to be the space of vectors annihilated by the (p + 1 )th power of e, for p ~ O. Our approach is motivated by Kostant's fundamental work [Kl, K2] on actions of the principal TDS (three-dimensional subalgebra) and coordinate rings of regular adjoint orbits. In Theorem 3.4, we give a new description, in terms of the dimension jumps of the principal filtration of the weight space, of Lusztig's [L] q-analog mf(q) of dominant . u-weight multiplicity in a finite-dimensional irreducible g-representation V;. The polynomial mf (q) was defined algebraically as an alternating sum over the Weyl group, through a q-analog of Kostant's weight multiplicity formula. We prove that mf(q) is equal to the jump polynomial
On Morning Sickness and the Neolithic Revolution1

A topic that has been long been of interest to anthropologists, neurobiologists, and reproductive biologists is nausea and vomiting in pregnancy (NVP), commonly referred to as “morning sickness. ” NVP was first reported by the Greeks nearly 4,000 years ago (Fairweather 1968), but until recently it was difficult to judge its prevalence outside the Western world. We now know that NVP is more or less ubiquitous, although its frequency of occurrence varies considerably across populations (Fessler, CA 43:19–61; Flaxman and Sherman 2000). Hence the real question: Since it is axiomatic that a pregnant woman must “eat for two,” why should a condition that restricts food intake occur at the same time as this dramatic rise in nutritional and caloric requirements? One possibility is that NVP is linked to an evolutionary advantage, and indeed it has been shown that women who experience NVP are significantly less likely to miscarry than women who do not (Petitti 1986, Weigel and Weigel 1989). Along these lines, much of the current research on NVP has focused on the potential role of nausea and vomiting in protecting an individual from the harmful effects of ingested toxins and the pathogens that produce them. In a pregnant woman, those toxins and pathogens put two humans at risk. Therefore, a condition that protects a pregnant woman and thus her fetus from harmful substances should confer an adaptive advantage. The curious feature of NVP is that many pregnant women experience nausea and vomiting before ingestion. As Fessler (CA 43:19) points out, the “striking differences between the circumstances of normal nausea and vomiting and those of pregnancy . sickness call for explanation. ” To this end, he has examined 73 societies in the Human Relations Area Files to determine if there were cross-cultural patterns in the kinds of foods targeted by taboos. His findings, which mirror those of other investigators (e.g., Dye, Jones, and Hill 1998, Flaxman and
Development and Psychometric Properties of the Homophobic Bullying Scale

The study aimed to develop the Homophobic Bullying Scale and to investigate its psychometric properties. The items of the Homophobic Bullying Scale were created to measure high school students’ bullying behaviors motivated by homophobia, including verbal bullying, relational bullying, physical bullying, property bullying, sexual harassment, and cyberbullying. Five scales were developed from viewpoints of bullies (toward supposed gay men and lesbians), victims, and witnesses (toward supposed gay men and lesbians). A sample of 863 students enrolled in Grades 9 to 13 in 10 Italian public high schools were involved in this study. The coefficients of internal consistency were greater than . 80 for all the scales. Construct validity of its factor structure was demonstrated using confirmatory factor analysis. Discriminant validity was demonstrated by comparatively low correlations with homophobic attitudes and the Homophobic Content Agent Target scale. Results showed the existence of homophobic bullying in various forms other than the use of homophobic epithets. Future research should examine the experience of bullying behaviors motivated by homophobia in schools.
Learning to Learn: A Hidden Dimension within Community Dance Practice

Abstract This article explores ways of learning experienced by university dance students participating in a community dance project. The students were unfamiliar with community-based practices and found themselves needing to remediate held attitudes about dance. How the students came to approach their learning within the dance-making process drew on characteristics of collaboration, inclusion, and process. To uncover the divergent ways of learning that took place, student reflective writings and dialogues occurring throughout the project are examined.