Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinct Adsorption Configurations and Self-Assembly Characteristics of Fibrinogen on Chemically Uniform and Alternating Surfaces including Block Copolymer Nanodomains

Understanding protein–surface interactions is crucial to solid-state biomedical applications whose functionality is directly correlated with the precise control of the adsorption configuration, surface packing, loading density, and bioactivity of protein molecules. Because of the small dimensions and highly amphiphilic nature of proteins, investigation of protein adsorption performed on nanoscale topology can shed light on subprotein-level interaction preferences. In this study, we examine the adsorption and assembly behavior of a highly elongated protein, fibrinogen, on both chemically uniform (as-is and buffered HF-treated SiO2/Si, and homopolymers of polystyrene and poly(methyl methacrylate)) and varying (polystyrene-block-poly(methyl methacrylate)) surfaces. By focusing on high-resolution imaging of individual protein molecules whose configurations are influenced by protein–surface rather than protein–protein interactions, fibrinogen conformations characteristic to each surface are identified and statistically analyzed for structural similarities/differences in key protein domains. By exploiting block copolymer nanodomains whose repeat distance is commensurate with the length of the individual protein, we determine that fibrinogen exhibits a more neutral tendency for interaction with both polystyrene and poly(methyl methacrylate) blocks relative to the case of common globular proteins. Factors affecting fibrinogen–polymer interactions are discussed in terms of hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions. In addition, assembly and packing attributes of fibrinogen are determined at different loading conditions. Primary orientations of fibrinogen and its rearrangements with respect to the underlying diblock nanodomains associated with different surface coverage are explained by pertinent protein interaction mechanisms. On the basis of two-dimensional stacking behavior, a protein assembly model is proposed for the formation of an extended fibrinogen network on the diblock copolymer.
Mycological Society of America Cryptic Species in the Puccinia monoica Complex

The Puccinia monoica complex is an enigmatic group of rust fungi. They are flower mimics, and they greatly reduce host reproduction and survival. These fungi are relatively common, attacking approximately 960 species in 11 genera of crucifers as well as at least five genera of grasses. In modern taxonomic treatments the Puccinia monoica complex is treated as four species that are differentiated by the number of spore states in their life cycles. However, other systematic treatments have divided the group into species or forms based on host association. Within the species based on spore state there is morphological variation, but it has not been readily assignable to either host species or geographic area. We used DNA sequencing and phylogenetic analysis to determine whether there are cryptic species in this group that are not evident when only morphology is used. We sequenced the nuclear rDNA region containing the internal transcribed spacers (ITS-1 + 5.8S gene + ITS-2) of isolates from different hosts. Our results indicate that there are cryptic species in the Puccinia monoica complex, and that species in this group cannot be identified strictly by life cycle stage.
Risk Assessment for Juveniles on Probation

This article describes a study that examines the utility of separate risk assessment instruments for classifying male and female delinquents on probation. It addresses these questions: (a) Do separate instruments classify juveniles' risks for reoffending better than a combined instrument? and (b) Do risk factors differ for female and male reoffenders? These issues are explored using data gathered from a large metropolitan juvenile court. The findings indicate that separate risk assessment instruments improve classifications of risk for reoffending, especially among females. Furthermore, female risk factors differ substantially from those of their male counterparts. Implications are discussed for applied and theoretical research.
Search Reduction in Hierarchical Problem Solving

It has long been recognized that hierarchical problem solving can be used to reduce search. Yet, there has been little analysis of the problem-solving method and few experimental results. This paper provides the first comprehensive analytical and empirical demonstrations of the effectiveness of hierarchical problem solving. First, the paper shows analytically that hierarchical problem solving can reduce the size of the search space from exponential to linear in the solution length and identifies a sufficient set of assumptions for such reductions in search. Second, it presents empirical results both in a domain that meets all of these assumptions as well as in domains in which these assumptions do not strictly hold. Third, the paper explores the conditions under which hierarchical problem solving will be effective in practice.
Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cell with Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Nanotubes in the Active Layer: Effect of Nanocomposite Synthesis Technique on Photovoltaic Properties

Nanocomposites of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes (N-CNTs) have been synthesized by two methods; specifically, direct solution mixing and in situ polymerization. The nanocomposites were characterized by means of transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray dispersive spectroscopy, UV-Vis spectrophotometry, photoluminescence spectrophotometry (PL), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Raman spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, and dispersive surface energy analysis. The nanocomposites were used in the active layer of a bulk heterojunction organic solar cell with the composition ITO/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT:N-CNTS:PCBM/LiF/Al. TEM and SEM analysis showed that the polymer successfully wrapped the N-CNTs. FTIR results indicated good π-π interaction within the nanocomposite synthesized by in situ polymerization as opposed to samples made by direct solution mixing. Dispersive surface energies of the N-CNTs and nanocomposites supported the fact that polymer covered the N-CNTs well. J-V analysis show that good devices were formed from the two nanocomposites, however, the in situ polymerization nanocomposite showed better photovoltaic characteristics.
Predictors of delay in the diagnosis and treatment of suspected tuberculosis in HIV co-infected patients in South Africa.

SETTING In South Africa, the majority of tuberculosis (TB) patients are co-infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and delays in diagnosis and treatment likely exacerbate morbidity and mortality. OBJECTIVE To determine predictors of delays in the diagnosis and treatment of hospitalised suspected pulmonary TB patients co-infected with HIV. DESIGN Post-analysis of data collected in a three-centre prospective cohort of in-patients clinically diagnosed with active TB in three hospitals in South Africa between 2006 and 2009 during the first 24 h of admission. Delay was assessed by asking time of first symptoms and any prior health-seeking behaviour for this episode of illness. RESULTS Data from a total of 891 participants with a median age of 36 years and a CD4 count of 67 cells/mm(3) were analysed. Median patient, system and total delays were respectively 28, 1 and 28 days. Unemployment, treatment at Tshepong Hospital, alcohol consumption, crowding index, seeking prior treatment, cotrimoxazole treatment and WHO Stage 4 disease predicted prolonged total delay. CONCLUSION Patient delay in seeking care for TB in this high HIV prevalence setting is substantial. Factors identified with delay could be used to develop interventions to improve care seeking and earlier diagnosis of TB.
PCR Assay Using Cerebrospinal Fluid for Diagnosis of Cerebral Toxoplasmosis in Brazilian AIDS patients

ABSTRACT Highly active antiretroviral therapy has decreased the incidence of opportunistic infections in the central nervous system in AIDS patients. However, neurological abnormalities still remain important causes of mortality and morbidity in developing countries. In Brazil, cerebral toxoplasmosis is the most common cerebral mass lesion in AIDS patients. For these reasons, early, inexpensive, and sensitive diagnostic tests must be evaluated. The aim of this study was to evaluate PCR, using cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples to detect Toxoplasma gondii DNA, and to determine if the association of PCR with immunological assays can contribute to a timely diagnosis. We studied two sample groups. First, we analyzed stored CSF samples from 29 newborns and from 39 adults with AIDS without a definitive diagnosis of toxoplasmosis. The goal of this step was to standardize the methodology with a simple and economical procedure to recover the T. gondii DNA. Next, we prospectively evaluated CSF samples from 12 AIDS patients with a first episode of cerebral toxoplasmosis and 18 AIDS patients with other neurological opportunistic diseases and without previous cerebral toxoplasmosis. In all PCR samples, an indirect immunofluorescent assay and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay were performed. Samples from all patients with cerebral toxoplasmosis presented positive PCR results (sensitivity, 100%), and a sample from one of the 18 AIDS patients with other neurological diseases also presented positive PCR results (specificity, 94.4%). These findings suggest the clinical utility of PCR in the diagnosis of cerebral toxoplasmosis in developing countries.
Pathophysiology of immune‐mediated demyelinating neuropathies—part I: Neuroscience

This first article of this review deals with neuroscientific aspects of immune‐mediated demyelinating neuropathies. It describes the anatomy and physiology of normal myelinated axons, methods of studying peripheral nerve physiology, pathophysiological consequences of demyelination or damage at the node of Ranvier, and the mechanisms that may lead to impaired axonal membrane dysfunction or axonal degeneration. This article (part I) will be followed by a second (part II) dealing with clinical aspects of these neuropathies. Muscle Nerve 48: 851–864, 2013
Neighborhood Residents' Production of Order: The Effects of Collective Efficacy on Responses to Neighborhood Problems

Community policing agencies seek to engage communities to build working partnerships, solicit the input of neighborhood residents, and stimulate informal control of crime. A common barrier to these efforts is a lack of citizen participation. The purpose of this article is to assess the relationship between neighborhood-level variables and citizen response to neighborhood problems. The authors'predictions are guided by recent research on collective efficacy and the relationship between neighborhood conditions and citizen actions. Accordingly, the authors expect neighborhood variables will affect residents'responses to perceived problems. Results show that residential-unit variables do not have significant effects on the likelihood that residents respond to neighborhood problems they identified. Methodological limitations must be overcome before it can be concluded that collective efficacy is not predictive of citizen responses to neighborhood problems, but research must consider this important outcome variable.
Binary Linear Locally Repairable Codes

Locally repairable codes (LRCs) are a class of codes designed for the local correction of erasures. They have received considerable attention in recent years due to their applications in distributed storage. Most existing results on LRCs do not explicitly take into consideration the field size q, i.e., the size of the code alphabet. In particular, for the binary case, only a few results are known. In this paper, we present an upper bound on the minimum distance d of linear LRCs with availability, based on the work of Cadambe and Mazumdar. The bound takes into account the code length n, dimension k, locality r, availability t, and field size q. Then, we study the binary linear LRCs in three aspects. First, we focus on analyzing the locality of some classical codes, i.e., cyclic codes and Reed-Muller codes, and their modified versions, which are obtained by applying the operations of extend, shorten, expurgate, augment, and lengthen. Next, we construct LRCs using phantom parity-check symbols and multi-level tensor product structure, respectively. Compared with other previous constructions of binary LRCs with fixed locality or minimum distance, our construction is much more flexible in terms of code parameters, and gives various families of high-rate LRCs, some of which are shown to be optimal with respect to their minimum distance. Finally, the availability of LRCs is studied. We investigate the locality and availability properties of several classes of one-step majority-logic decodable codes, including cyclic simplex codes, cyclic difference-set codes, and 4-cycle free regular low-density parity-check codes. We also show the construction of a long LRC with availability from a short one-step majority-logic decodable code.
Deep Alternative Neural Network: Exploring Contexts as Early as Possible for Action Recognition

Contexts are crucial for action recognition in video. Current methods often mine contexts after extracting hierarchical local features and focus on their high-order encodings. This paper instead explores contexts as early as possible and leverages their evolutions for action recognition. In particular, we introduce a novel architecture called deep alternative neural network (DANN) stacking alternative layers. Each alternative layer consists of a volumetric convolutional layer followed by a recurrent layer. The former acts as local feature learner while the latter is used to collect contexts. Compared with feed-forward neural networks, DANN learns contexts of local features from the very beginning. This setting helps to preserve hierarchical context evolutions which we show are essential to recognize similar actions. Besides, we present an adaptive method to determine the temporal size for network input based on optical flow energy, and develop a volumetric pyramid pooling layer to deal with input clips of arbitrary sizes. We demonstrate the advantages of DANN on two benchmarks HMDB51 and UCF101 and report competitive or superior results to the state-of-the-art.
The Impact of Organizational Identification on the Relationship Between Procedural Justice and Employee Work Outcomes

Drawing on a sample of 212 supervisor-subordinate dyads from 3 branches of an air transportation group in the People’s Republic of China, we examined the mediating effect of organizational identification on the relationship between perceived procedural justice and work outcomes, including extrarole behavior and turnover intention. Results showed that organizational identification fully mediated the relationship between procedural justice and extrarole behavior as well as that between procedural justice and turnover intention. Implications for future research and limitations of the present findings are discussed.
Educational Psychology and Pedagogical Expertise: New Findings and New Opportunities for Thinking About Training

Studies of the way expert and novice teachers differ yield implications about the substantive and methodological training programs needed for educational psychologists who wish to study teaching. There appears to be a greater need for the next generation of educational psychologists to have knowledge of a subject matter field and to have a developmental perspective. They also need an awareness of the social context of learning. They should have training in the methodologies uniquely associated with cognitive psychology and qualitative research and experience with alternative forms of student and teacher assessment. They will also need to better understand how case and procedural knowledge are acquired and develop.
Crime as a Price of Inequality?The Gap in Registered Crime between Childhood Immigrants, Children of Immigrants and Children of Native Swedes

We examine the gap in registered crime between the children of immigrants and the children of native Swedes. We follow all individuals who completed compulsory schooling during the period 1990-93 in the Stockholm Metropolitan area (N = 63,462) up to their thirties and analyse how family of origin and neighbourhood segregation during adolescence, subsequent to arriving in Sweden, influence the gap in recorded crimes. For males, we are able to explain between half and three-quarters of the gap in crime by reference to parental socio-economic resources and neighbourhood segregation. For females, we can explain even more, sometimes the entire gap. In addition, we tentatively examine the role of co-nationality or culture by comparing the crime rates of randomly chosen pairs of individuals originating from the same country. We find only a small correlation in the crime of individuals who share the same origin, indicating that culture is unlikely to be a strong cause of crime among immigrants.
Effect of Cracked Section on Lateral Response of Reinforced Concrete Flanged Beams

In an analysis of reinforced concrete structure the flexural stiffness of section is an important parameter and the change in the value of flexural stiffness may result in significant change in analysis result. The current study aims to estimate the reduction in flexural stiffness of reinforced concrete flanged beam sections subjected to lateral loading and take the cracking effect of reinforced concrete section into account. The reduction in flexural stiffness due to earthquake shaking may increase the lateral deflection and it can be significantly greater as compared to deflection estimated using gross flexural stiffness. To take this effect into consideration, the design code of some countries suggest reduction factors or equations to reduce the gross flexural stiffness to effective flexural stiffness but they have some drawbacks because not consider all important parameters in there equation. However in Indian seismic code IS 1893 (2002) and many countries there are no provisions to account for reduction in stiffness due to concrete cracking. Analytical work in present study identified the parameters and influences of these parameters on effective stiffness are determined and suggest the simplified but reasonable accurate expression for computation of effective stiffness of reinforced concrete flanged beam section. Proposed equations can be easily use by designer to estimate the effective stiffness of reinforced concrete flanged beam sections accurately.
Parental Divorce and Mother-Child Interaction

Abstract In the past few decades, researchers have become extremely interested in the effects of divorce on all those involved. One potential effect is on mother-child interaction. However, most researchers who have addressed the effects of parental divorce on mother-child interaction have failed to assess both the mother's and the child's perspectives in their measurements and have done studies based on a very negative view of divorce. The current study aims to examine both mothers' and children's behavior, specifically emotions and social scaffolding, and to look at divorce through a positive lens using data collected from the Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. Participants were 160 mothers and their eleven-year-old children. Data were collected by coding videotapes of mother-child interactions during a math task. The theoretical framework was the socio-cultural learning theory of Vygotsky and Rogoff. Results showed that there were no significant differences between divorced and intact mothers or children on either emotion or scaffolding variables, even with high power. Marginally significant differences were found in humor and zone of proximal development.
Botulinum‐induced alteration of nerve‐muscle interactions in the human orbicularis oculi following treatment for blepharospasm

To assess longstanding alterations in human muscle innervation induced by botulinum toxin, we studied motor axons in the orbicularis oculi of nine patients previously injected with botulinum toxin for treatment of benign essential blepharospasm (BEB). Compared with untreated BEB and normal orbicularis oculi, muscle exposed to botulinum toxin developed persistent and cumulative alterations of innervation, including (1) thin, unmyelinated axonal collaterals that contact muscle end plates, (2) an increased number of muscle fibers innervated by individual terminal motor axons, (3) a profusion of unmyelinated axonal sprouts that end blindly, (4) an increased range of end plate sizes, and (5) multiple end plates on individual muscle fibers. The findings suggest that axonal sprouts which develop after botulinum-toxin-induced functional denervation can form new end plates. A single muscle fiber may then be innervated at separate sites by more than one axon.
Clean Intermittent Self-Catheterization After Botulinum Neurotoxin Type A Injections: Short-Term Effect on Quality of Life

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the hypothesis that the need for clean intermittent self-catheterization after botulinum neurotoxin type A injections is outweighed by the efficacy of this treatment, so that clean intermittent self-catheterization is not a burden for patients with refractory idiopathic detrusor overactivity. METHODS: Women undergoing intradetrusor injections of 200 units botulinum neurotoxin type A for refractory idiopathic detrusor overactivity were evaluated prospectively. Clean intermittent self-catheterization was discussed with all patients and its possible need after botulinum neurotoxin type A treatment. As indicator of quality of life, lower urinary tract symptom distress and effect on daily activities were assessed using the validated Urogenital Distress Inventory (UDI-6) and Incontinence Impact Questionnaire (IIQ-7) before and 4 weeks after receiving botulinum neurotoxin type A injections. RESULTS: Mean age of the 65 women was 51 years, and all voided spontaneously before botulinum neurotoxin type A injections. After botulinum neurotoxin type A treatment, 28 (43%) required clean intermittent self-catheterization. Mean UDI-6 and IIQ-7 scores reduced from 61 to 33 (P<.001) and 62 to 30 (P<.001) in women performing clean intermittent self-catheterization and from 60 to 28 (P<.001) and 64 to 25 (P<.001) in those who did not, respectively. Comparison of quality of life in women performing clean intermittent self-catheterization and in those who did not revealed no significant differences before and after botulinum neurotoxin type A treatment. CONCLUSION: Clean intermittent self-catheterization after botulinum neurotoxin type A intradetrusor injections did not impair quality of life in appropriately informed and selected women in the short term. All patients should be informed of the potential need for clean intermittent self-catheterization after botulinum neurotoxin type A injections, and a willingness to do so should be a prerequisite for this still unlicensed off-label treatment. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: III