Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epilysin (MMP‐28) – structure, expression and potential functions

Abstract: Epilysin (MMP‐28) is the newest member of the matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) family of extracellular proteases. Together the MMPs can degrade almost all components of the extracellular matrix (ECM). MMPs also regulate cell behaviour by releasing growth factors and biologically active peptides from the ECM by modulating cell surface receptors and adhesion molecules and by regulating the activity of mediators of the inflammatory pathways. Epilysin differs from most other MMPs as it is expressed in a number of normal tissues, suggestive of functions in tissue homeostasis. The epilysin homologue in Xenopus laevis (XMMP‐28) is expressed in neural tissues, where it cleaves the neural cell adhesion molecule. Enhanced expression of epilysin has been observed in basal keratinocytes during wound healing and in different forms of cancer. There are, however, also reports on the downregulation of epilysin in malignant cells. The roles of epilysin in cancer seem to vary based on tumor type and stage of the disease. Importantly, epilysin can induce stable epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) when overexpressed in epithelial lung carcinoma cells. Transforming growth factor β (TGF‐β) is a crucial mediator of this process, which was characterized by the loss of E‐cadherin and increased cell migration and invasion. Current results suggest a plausible interaction between epilysin and TGF‐β also under physiological circumstances, where epilysin activity may not induce EMT but, instead, trigger less permanent changes in TGF‐β signalling and cell motility.
Dysfunctional error-related processing in female psychopathy.

Neurocognitive studies of psychopathy have predominantly focused on male samples. Studies have shown that female psychopaths exhibit similar affective deficits as their male counterparts, but results are less consistent across cognitive domains including response modulation. As such, there may be potential gender differences in error-related processing in psychopathic personality. Here we investigate response-locked event-related potential (ERP) components [the error-related negativity (ERN/Ne) related to early error-detection processes and the error-related positivity (Pe) involved in later post-error processing] in a sample of incarcerated adult female offenders (n = 121) who performed a response inhibition Go/NoGo task. Psychopathy was assessed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). The ERN/Ne and Pe were analyzed with classic windowed ERP components and principal component analysis (PCA). Consistent with previous research performed in psychopathic males, female psychopaths exhibited specific deficiencies in the neural correlates of post-error processing (as indexed by reduced Pe amplitude) but not in error monitoring (as indexed by intact ERN/Ne amplitude). Specifically, psychopathic traits reflecting interpersonal and affective dysfunction remained significant predictors of both time-domain and PCA measures reflecting reduced Pe mean amplitude. This is the first evidence to suggest that incarcerated female psychopaths exhibit similar dysfunctional post-error processing as male psychopaths.
The Effect of Gender and Organizational Level on How Survivors Appraise and Cope with Organizational Downsizing

This study examined the influence of gender and organizational level on how survivors appraise, cope with, and emotionally react to organizational downsizing involving across-the-board workforce reductions. Study participants included female clerical employees, male and female technicians, and male first-level supervisors employed at a facility of a major corporation in the telecommunications industry. When male and female technicians were compared, the only significant difference was for perceived injustice, with the female technicians perceiving greater procedural and distributive injustice. There were significant differences across organizational levels for procedural injustice, sense of powerlessness, positive thinking, direct action, and help-seeking coping. The findings indicate that intervention strategies designed to help survivors adjust to organizational downsizing should be tailored to meet the diverse needs of different groups of survivors.
Evaluation of an English as a Second Language Program for Southeast Asian Students

This report summarizes an evaluation of the ESL program in the Des Moines, Iowa, public schools. Five hundred seventy-seven students in Grades 2 through 10 were included in the study. Background data such as age, place of birth, ethnic group, primary language, number of months in Des Moines schools, amount of ESL instruction per week, and reading ability in native language were gathered. At the same time, teachers rated the students on progress in learning English, and the Bilingual Syntax Measure (BSM) was administered as a measure of oral English proficiency. Correlational analyses and multiple regression were used to examine the relationships of background variables and the learning of English. Results showed that length of time in Des Moines schools was the single best predictor of how well students performed on the BSM. An interaction effect was found between amount of English instruction and length of time in the district. The authors conclude that more instruction in English appeared to be beneficial during the first year of schooling but had diminishing effects during the second and third years. Implications for ESL programs involving Southeast Asian students are discussed.
Headline Generation Based on Statistical Translation

Extractive summarization techniques cannot generate document summaries shorter than a single sentence, something that is often required. An ideal summarization system would understand each document and generate an appropriate summary directly from the results of that understanding. A more practical approach to this problem results in the use of an approximation: viewing summarization as a problem analogous to statistical machine translation. The issue then becomes one of generating a target document in a more concise language from a source document in a more verbose language. This paper presents results on experiments using this approach, in which statistical models of the term selection and term ordering are jointly applied to produce summaries in a style learned from a training corpus.
Deformable model-based face shape and motion estimation

We describe a model-based approach to human face shape and motion estimation using a deformable model framework in which optical flow information has been integrated. Our 3-D deformable face model uses a small number of parameters to describe a rich variety of face shapes and facial expressions. A detailed face model allows for the handling of self-occlusion and the correction of error accumulation in tracking by aligning the expected location of face features with those found in the input images. We present experiments in which we employ Kalman filtering to estimate the shape and motion of a face from image sequences of four subjects. The face is successfully tracked even in the presence of large head rotations.
The accuracy of myocardial perfusion SPECT imaging in the evaluation of coronary artery disease in women and men.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to compare sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of myocardial perfusion SPECT for the detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) in women and men. MATERIAL AND METHODS 588 patients (455 males and 133 females, 273 after a previous myocardial infarction) underwent stress myocardial perfusion SPECT. The accuracy of myocardial perfusion SPECT was proved by coronary angiography (stenosis > 50% was considered as a CAD). RESULTS The sensitivity of SPECT was slightly higher, but statistically not significant, in men than in women (94% versus 91%, p > 0.05). The specificity was higher in women than in men (93% versus 82%), but this difference was not statistically significant either (p > 0.05). The accuracy of SPECT was the same for both sexes (92%). In angiographically verified group of patients the selection bias was obvious--patients with CAD dominated (74%) and the fraction of patients with CAD in men's group (83%) was significantly higher than in women's group (50%), p < 0.05. CONCLUSIONS No significant difference was revealed in the accuracy of myocardial perfusion SPECT in men and women. Our results are in accordance with the prevailing opinion in literature that discovered differences in sensitivity, specificity and diagnostic accuracy are usually not statistically significant or that they can be explained by the selection bias of patients in angiographically verified groups (significantly higher fraction of patients with CAD in men's group).
Israeli men in nursing: social and personal motives.

AIM This paper intends to explore what leads Israeli men to choose nursing as their profession. BACKGROUND In the early years of nursing education in Israel, like in other western societies, men were excluded from the profession. Shortage in nursing personnel and urgent needs led to recruitment of men into the profession for a short period of time. Only since the early 1990s the nursing profession is experiencing a gradual but steady influx of men. Yet, nursing is generally perceived as women's work, and men have to cope with the stereotypes attributed to them as a prominent minority in a profession primarily occupied by women. Currently, no study had examined who are the Israeli men who are willing to enter the profession and why. METHODS A 52-item questionnaire was distributed among all registered female and male nurses in three general and three psychiatric hospitals during 1997-98. The questionnaire covered sociodemographic characteristics, exposure to the profession and reasons for choosing the profession. The response rate of 74% included 123 male and 137 female registered nurses. CONCLUSIONS Early exposure to the profession and the fact that the majority of male nurses belong to ethnic minorities and recent immigrants to the Israeli society were the most prominent factors in the selection of the nursing profession by these men. Surprisingly, economic considerations did not constitute a compelling motive in this population.
Factors Influencing Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors

Three waste management behaviors (waste reduction, reuse, and recycling) were examined with the use of a conceptual framework developed by the author. It was posited that environmental values, situational characteristics, and psychological factors all play a significant role in the prediction of waste management behavior, within the context of a core intention-behavior relationship. The framework was tested in a self-report questionnaire of 673 residents of Exeter, UK. It was found that the predictors of reduction, reuse, and recycling behavior differed significantly, with reduction and reuse being predicted by underlying environmental values, knowledge, and concern-based variables. Recycling behavior was, in contrast, characterized as highly normative behavior. The use of the approach taken for investigating other environmental behaviors is examined.
Entity Came to Rescue - Leveraging Entities to Minimize Risks in Web Search

Abstract : We present the summary of our work in the TREC 2014 Web Track. We participated both the ad hoc task and risk- sensitive task and explored two entity-based approaches to evaluate the performance of leveraging entities to improve retrieval effectiveness and robustness. Our proposed approaches are based on the integration of related entities of queries and the entity model from knowledge base to the retrieval model. The first approach is called as entity-centric query expansion, in which we integrate the related entities into the original query model to perform query expansion. Documents are then retrieved based on the expanded query model. In the second approach, we leverage the publicly available Freebase annotation on ClueWeb12 as well as Freebase API to estimate the entity model. It is called Latent Entity Space (LES), in which we model the relevance between query and document in a latent space. Each dimension of the latent space is represented by an entity and the query-document relevance is estimated based on their projections to each dimension. The evaluation results on ad hoc task show that entities can indeed bring further improvements on the performance of Web document retrieval when combined with axiomatic retrieval model with semantic expansion, one of the state-of- the-art methods. Furthermore, results on risk-sensitive task demonstrate that our proposed model also have advantage on minimizing the retrieval risk.
Prevalence of eight molecular markers associated with thrombotic diseases in six Amerindian tribes and two African groups of Costa Rica

Individuals belonging to six different Amerindian tribes and two African groups of Costa Rica were genotyped for factor V Leiden (FV), factor V haplotype HR2 (FV HR2), Factor II 20210G>A (FII), the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR), factor VII polymorphisms (FVII IVS7, FVII R353Q), factor XIII (FXIII V34L), and the insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphism of the gene of angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE). Clear differences in the prevalence were found and are first reported. The prevalence of some of the established genetic risk factors was low in Amerindians of Costa Rica (ACE) or even absent (FVL, FII), and others (MTHFR, FVHR2) had an extremely high prevalence. People of African origin carried very rare FVL or FII polymorphisms, but the DD genotype of ACE is the highest reported. Concerning the protective factors, the QQ genotype of FVII R353Q was absent in Amerindians, but the protective 7/7 genotype of FVII IVS7 frequently found. Novel alleles of FVII IVS7 (4, 8, and 9 monomers) were found. Intertribal heterogeneity was observed that may reflect the evolutionary history of these tribal groups and their admixture with other populations. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 16:82–86, 2004. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Multivariate Approach to Functional Neuro Modeling

This Ph D thesis A Multivariate Approach to Functional Neuro Modeling deals with the analysis and modeling of data from functional neuro imaging experiments A multivariate dataset description is provided which facilitates e cient representation of typical datasets and more importantly provides the basis for a generalization theoretical framework re lating model performance to model complexity and dataset size Brie y summarized the major topics discussed in the thesis include An introduction of the representation of functional datasets by pairs of neuronal activity patterns and overall conditions governing the functional experiment via associated micro and macroscopic variables The description facilitates an e cient microscopic re representation as well as a handle on the link between brain and behavior the latter is obtained by hypothesizing variations in the micro and macroscopic variables to be manifestations of an underlying system A review of two microscopic basis selection procedures namely principal component analysis and independent component analysis with respect to their applicability to functional datasets Quantitative model performance assessment via a generalization theoretical frame work centered around measures of model generalization error Only few if any examples of the application of generalization theory to functional neuro modeling currently exist in the literature Exempli cation of the proposed generalization theoretical framework by the ap plication of linear and more exible nonlinear microscopic regression models to a real world dataset The dependency of model performance as quanti ed by gener alization error on model exibility and training set size is demonstrated leading to the important realization that no uniformly optimal model exists Model visualization and interpretation techniques The simplicity of this task for linear models contrasts the di culties involved when dealing with nonlinear models Thus a novel visualization technique for nonlinear models is proposed A single observation emerges from the thesis as particularly important optimal model exibility is a function of both the complexity and the size of the dataset at hand This is something that has not received appropriate attention by the functional neuro modeling community so far The observation implies that optimal model performance rarely is achieved with black box models rather model exibility must be matched to the speci c functional dataset The potential advantage is a model that more precisely approximates the true nature of the relationship between brain and behavior thus paving the way for increased insight into the function of the human brain
Limb-Specific Representation for Reaching in the Posterior Parietal Cortex

To reach for something we see, the brain must integrate the target location with the limb to be used for reaching. Neuronal activity in the parietal reach region (PRR) located in the posterior parietal cortex represents targets for reaching. Does this representation depend on the limb to be used? We found a continuum of limb-dependent and limb-independent responses: some neurons represented targets for movements of either limb, whereas others represented only contralateral-limb targets. Only a few cells represented ipsilateral-limb targets. Furthermore, these representations were not dependent on preferred direction. Additional experiments provide evidence that the PRR is specifically involved in contralateral-limb movements: firing rates are correlated with contralateral- but not ipsilateral-limb reaction times. The current study therefore provides novel evidence that the PRR operates as a limb-dependent stage that lies further along the sensory–motor transformation for visually guided reaching than previously expected.
Do hybrid flexible delivery teaching methods improve accounting students' learning outcomes?

This study investigates the association between the learning outcomes of students and two teaching models: a traditional face-to-face lecture/tutorial teaching model and a hybrid flexible delivery model. The hybrid flexible model is delivered using a combination of face-to-face seminars and electronic delivery and communication tools. It is found that academic performance is higher for students who studied under the flexible delivery model, achieved higher marks in prerequisite units, were female, or were younger. Evidence is provided that flexible delivery teaching models utilizing electronic delivery media can be used to achieve the benefits of small class sizes when teaching large student numbers. The results should be of interest to administrators and educators as they attempt to address the challenges of supplying tertiary education to an increasing number of students as well as meeting the perceived demand for flexible course delivery in a manner that can enhance students' learning outcomes. §Carlin Dowling and Jayne Godfrey were staff members at the University of Tasmania when most of this research was completed.
Chi Square Feature Extraction Based Svms Arabic Language Text Categorization System

This paper aims to implement a Support Vector Machines (SVMs) based text classification system for Arabic language articles. This classifier uses CHI square method as a feature selection method in the pre-processing step of the Text Classification system design procedure. Comparing to other classification methods, our system shows a high classification effectiveness for Arabic data set in term of F-measure (F=88.11).
Neuroanatomical substrata of amusement and sadness: a PET activation study using film stimuli

The aim of the present study was to explore the neuroanatomical substrata of film-induced amusement and sadness, aiming at maximal reliability by using strict statistics. Film-induced changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were measured using positron emission tomography and [15O]water. It appeared that many brain regions were involved similarly and symmetrically in both emotions. Activation of the occipitotemporal and anterior temporal cortex and cerebellum during both emotions agreed well with the earlier findings. Contrary to some earlier studies, the posterior cingulate gyrus and some frontal areas were deactivated in both emotions. The strict explorative analysis did not reveal activations in the limbic or subcorticai structures seen in some earlier studies. However, an additional analysis restricted to the subcortical and limbic system structures revealed bilateral activation of the amygdala in both target emotions. The outcomes of imaginal studies of emotions seem to be largely dependent on the conservativeness of the statistical analysis and very likely also on the method of emotion induction.
Bacterial lipopolysaccharides prime macrophages for enhanced release of arachidonic acid metabolites

Preincubation of resident peritoneal macrophages with 10-100 ng/ml LPS for 60 min resulted in the cells becoming primed for enhanced (three-to eightfold higher) arachidonic acid (20:4) secretion in response to a variety of triggers. The half-maximal concentration of LPS required for priming was 10 ng/ml irrespective of whether the trigger was particulate (examples: zymosan or immune complexes) or soluble (such as PMA or A23187). Similarly, the time required for half-maximal priming of macrophages was 20 min irrespective of which trigger was used. The primed state persisted for at least 30 h. LPS-priming of macrophages also affected the kinetics of 20:4 metabolite secretion. The lag phase characteristically observed when 20:4 secretion is triggered was reduced in LPS-primed cells. Furthermore, LPS-primed cells secreted 20:4 metabolites when challenged with latex beads, while unprimed cells did not. These data suggest that stimuli such as zymosan, which elicit 20:4 secretion in macrophages, promote two signals, a priming signal and a triggering signal. LPS is capable of establishing the priming signal but not the triggering signal, while latex promotes the triggering signal but is unable to prime the cells for 20:4 release. LPS did not effect the profile of 20:4 metabolites secreted in response to any of the triggers, nor did it effect the profile of products synthesized from exogenously added 20:4, suggesting that it did not regulate the 20:4 cascade at the level of either the cyclooxygenase or lipoxygenase pathways. Macrophages respond to LPS without the intervention of T lymphocytes, since the macrophages from nude mice could be primed for enhanced 20:4 secretion.
Global Asymptotic Stability of Traveling Waves in Delayed Reaction-Diffusion Equations

The existence and comparison theorem of solutions is first established for the quasi-monotone delayed reaction-diffusion equations on R by appealing to the theory of abstract functional differential equations. The global asymptotic stability, Liapunov stability, and uniqueness of traveling wave solutions are then proved by the elementary super- and subsolution comparison and squeezing methods.
Phonological short-term memory and individual differences in learning to speak: a bilingual case study

The language development of two bilingual siblings, who learned to speak at greatly different rates, is briefly described. The child with the delayed onset of speech had difficulty with articulation, syntax, function words and inflections, particularly when speaking in German. Now, as a young teenager, he has no overt speech problem in English, his preferred language, and he does well in school and on standardized achievement tests of language arts and mathematics. Nevertheless, on a storytelling task at age 12;6, he used significantly shorter, less complex sentences than his sister did at the same age. In German, his 'mother tongue' yet less preferred language, he still has major grammatical difficulties. Recent memory tests showed that his early difficulty with immediate verbal repetition is still present. His difficulty is most pronounced on a verbal short-term memory task requiring repetition of unrelated words, whereas on a task where the verbal input can be reproduced nonverbally, his short-term memory is excellent.