Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identification by Quantitative Carrier Test of Surrogate Spore-Forming Bacteria To Assess Sporicidal Chemicals for Use against Bacillus anthracis

ABSTRACT The spores of six strains of Bacillus anthracis (four virulent and two avirulent) were compared with those of four other types of spore-forming bacteria for their resistance to four liquid chemical sporicides (sodium hypochlorite at 5,000 ppm available chlorine, 70,000 ppm accelerated H2O2, 1,000 ppm chlorine dioxide, and 3,000 ppm peracetic acid). All test bacteria were grown in a 1:10 dilution of Columbia broth (with manganese) incubated at 37°C for 72 h. The spore suspensions, heat treated at 80°C for 10 min to rid them of any viable vegetative cells, contained 1 × 108 to 3 × 108 CFU/ml. The second tier of the quantitative carrier test (QCT-2), a standard of ASTM International, was used to assess for sporicidal activity, with disks (1 cm in diameter) of brushed and magnetized stainless steel as spore carriers. Each carrier, with 10 μl (≥106 CFU) of the test spore suspension in a soil load, was dried and then overlaid with 50 μl of the sporicide being evaluated. The contact time at room temperature ranged from 5 to 20 min, and the arbitrarily set criterion for acceptable sporicidal activity was a reduction of ≥106 in viable spore count. Each test was repeated at least three times. In the final analysis, the spores of Bacillus licheniformis (ATCC 14580T) and Bacillus subtilis (ATCC 6051T) proved to be generally more resistant than the spores of the strains of B. anthracis tested. The use of one or both of the safe and easy-to-handle surrogates identified here should help in developing safer and more-effective sporicides and also in evaluating the field effectiveness of existing and newer formulations in the decontamination of objects and surfaces suspected of B. anthracis contamination.
The Relationship of the World Wide Web to Thinking Skills

As access to the WWW increases in schools and classrooms it is vital for educators at all levels to examine closely its potential roles in learning. Much emphasis has been placed upon making the WWW available without enough emphasis on methods of using it so students will benefit from instruction based upon it. A continuing goal of modern pedagogy is to help students move beyond the lower order cognitive domain, knowledge and comprehension, to higher order thinking skills: application; analysis;, synthesis; and evaluation. Students also need critical thinking skills. These skills are necessary for dealing with the demands of the future information society, which will be even more complex and demanding than at present. In order to foster the skills mentioned above, teachers are urged to provide learning environments that are learner-centred, authentic, problem-based and collaborative. Les relations entre le World Wide Web et les aptitudes des pensées. Comme l'accès au WWW s'accroît dans les écoles et les classes il est vital que les enseignants À tous niveaux examinent de près son rÔle potentiel en éducation. On a mis beaucoup l'accent sur les possibilités d'accès au WWW sans mettre assez l'accent sur les méthodes d'emploi par les étudiants de facon À ce qu'ils puissent bénéficier de l'instruction qu'il permet. Un objectif constant de la pédagogie moderne est d'aider les étudiants À dépasser le domaine cognitif limité. le savoir et la compréhension vers des aptitudes de pensée d'un ordre supérieur : applications, analyses, synthèses et évaluations. Les étudiants ont aussi besoin de pensée critique - ces aptitudes sont nécessaires pour faire face aux demandes de la future société de l'information, qui sera encore plus complexe et exigeante que maintenant. De facon À favoriser les aptitudes mentionnées ci-dessus , il faut que les enseignants fournissent les environnements éducatifs qui sont centrés sur l'apprenant, authentiques, basés sur la résolution de problèmes et la collaboration. Der Zusammenhang zwischen dem World Wide Web und den Denkfähigkeiten. Mit den wachsenden Zugängen an das WWW in Schulen und Klassenräumen wird es für Lehrer auf allen Ebenen immer dringender ihre zukünftige Rolle im Unterricht zu überdenken. Es wurde sehr viel Wert auf die Verfügbarkeit des WWWs gelegt, ohne jedoch auf Anwendungsmöglichkeiten zu achten damit die Lernenden von einem auf dem Web basierenden Unterricht profitieren. Ständiges Ziel moderner Pädagogik ist, Studenten zu helfen, über die untere Stufe des kognitiven Bereichs, Wissen und Verständnis, auf eine höhere Stufe des Denkprozesses zu gelangen: nämlich Anwendung, Analyse, Synthese und Bewertung. Schüler brauchen auch kritisches Denken. Diese Fähigkeiten sind notwendig im Umgang mit den Anforderungen der zukünftigen Informationsgesellschaft, die noch komplexer und schwieriger als die jetzige sein wird. Um diese Fähigkeiten zu fördern müssen Lehrer Lernumfelder schaffen, die sich am Studenten orientieren, authentisch sind, auf Problemlösungen basieren und collaborativ sind.
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience Integrative Neuroscience Sweet Taste Signaling Functions as a Hypothalamic Glucose Sensor

Brain glucosensing is essential for normal body glucose homeostasis and neuronal function. However, the exact signaling mechanisms involved in the neuronal sensing of extracellular glucose levels remain poorly understood. Of particular interest is the identifi cation of candidate membrane molecular sensors that would allow neurons to change fi ring rates independently of intracellular glucose metabolism. Here we describe for the fi rst time the expression of the taste receptor genes Tas1r1, Tas1r2 and Tas1r3, and their associated G-protein genes, in the mammalian brain. Neuronal expression of taste genes was detected in different nutrient-sensing forebrain regions, including the paraventricular and arcuate nuclei of the hypothalamus, the CA fi elds and dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, the habenula, and cortex. Expression was also observed in the intra-ventricular epithelial cells of the choroid plexus. These same regions were found to express the corresponding gene products that form the heterodimeric T1R2/T1R3 and T1R1/T1R3 sweet and L-amino acid taste G-protein coupled receptors, respectively, along with the taste G-protein α-gustducin. Moreover, in vivo studies in mice demonstrated that the hypothalamic expression of taste-related genes is regulated by the nutritional state of the animal, with food deprivation signifi cantly increasing expression levels of Tas1r1 and Tas1r2 in hypothalamus, but not in cortex. Furthermore, exposing mouse hypothalamic cells to a low-glucose medium, while maintaining normal L-amino acid concentrations, specifi cally resulted in higher expression levels of the sweet-associated gene Tas1r2. This latter effect was reversed by adding the non-metabolizable artifi cial sweetener sucralose to the low-glucose medium, indicating that taste-like signaling in hypothalamic neurons does not require intracellular glucose oxidation. Taken together, our fi ndings suggest that the heterodimeric G-protein coupled sweet receptor T1R2/T1R3 is a candidate membrane-bound brain glucosensor. pancreatic islets, glucose is carried into the cell through facilitated transport via GLUT proteins, resulting in equilibration between extracellular and cytosolic glucose (McCrimmon, 2008). In these cells, intracellular glucose metabolism is controlled by glucokinase (GK), the rate-limiting factor in glycolysis (Matschinsky, 1996; Schuit et al., 2001). The action of GK on glucose results in a series of intracellular events eventually leading to rises in the cytosolic ATP:ADP ratio and subsequent closure of ATP-sensitive potassium (K ATP) channels, which in turn causes cell depolarization (Gonzalez et al., 2008; McCrimmon, 2008). The discovery that both GK and K ATP are expressed in glucosensing regions of the brain then naturally led to the hypothesis that GK and K ATP , like …
Is lexical selection in spoken word production competitive? Introduction to the special issue on lexical competition in language production

A common assumption in research on spoken word production is that lexical selection is a competition-based process among co-activated lexical representations. This assumption of competitive lexical selection has been challenged by an alternative account, which places competition at a postlexical response selection stage. A complex pattern of empirical findings from picture-word interference and other tasks has emerged which constrains current thinking about word production. In this article we provide an overview over the main positions, empirical findings, and put the various contributions to this Special Issue into a wider context. The theoretical debate is far from closed, but it has drawn attention to some critical points that we emphasise in this Editorial: The speech production process needs an element of competition, but this competition need not necessarily take place during lexical selection. Behavioural interference effects are caused by a combination of facilitation and interference, but there is discord about the processing levels at which these mechanisms are located. Finally, we stress the necessity to use findings from different experimental paradigms for theory-building and advocate a shift from the narrow focus on the picture-word paradigm that has dominated the theoretical discussion in this Special Issue and elsewhere.
What is Technology? Investigating Student Conceptions about the Nature of Technology

The science education literature clearly shows that knowledge of the nature of technology is an educational goal; however there is a lack of research on student conceptions about the nature of technology. To address this gap in the literature, this research began with a thorough review of the literature on scientific and technological literacy, the philosophy of technology, and the history of technology to develop a conceptual framework for the nature of technology. This review of the literature led to the identification of five dimensions of knowledge that completely characterise the nature of technology. Then, the conceptual framework was used to analyse data collected from an exploratory survey distributed to a small group of middle school students. All of the student responses were able to be coded using the conceptual framework; however, the results suggest that the students sampled possess some naïve understandings of the nature of technology.
EFL College Students’ Perceptions of the Difficulties in Oral Presentation as a Form of Assessment

Oral presentation skills are considered one of the most important proficiencies needed for higher education and future careers. Thus, the present study is interested in eliciting English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students’ perceptions of the difficulties they face in oral presentation as a form of assessment. Participants were 500 female EFL college students from different grade levels enrolled in a four-year pre-service teacher education program at the College of Basic Education (CBE) in Kuwait City, Kuwait. A five-point Likert Scale questionnaire was used and divided into three main sections: personal traits, oral presentation skills, and instructor and audience. Independent variables measured were students’ ages, year at college, Grade Point Average (GPA), and nationality. In addition, a structured interview to solicit instructors’ opinions was carried out. Results showed students’ perceptions of the difficulties they experienced at a medium level (M=3.10). However, significant differences in the results were found when students’ nationalities and GPAs were taken into account.
The gingival platinum line. A new finding following CIS‐dichlorodiammine platinum (II) treatment

Cis‐dichlorodiammine platinum (II) (DDP) is the salt of a heavy metal with a wide spectrum of antineoplastic activity. Its toxicity is multisystem and similar to that of other heavy metals, including lead and thallium. A young man being treated with primary adjuvant Adriamycin and DDP for osteogenic sarcoma is described who developed a gingival line which temporally was related to DDP administration. Although not chemically or histologically analyzed, we believe this to be a new finding related to DDP which corresponds to the lead line of plumbism and other heavy metal intoxication.
Living in the Fast Lane: Evidence for a Global Perceptual Timing Deficit in Childhood ADHD Caused by Distinct but Partially Overlapping Task-Dependent Cognitive Mechanisms

Dysfunctions in perceptual timing have been reported in children with ADHD, but so far only from studies that have not used the whole set of timing paradigms available from the literature, with the diversity of findings complicating the development of a unified model of timing dysfunctions and its determinants in ADHD. Therefore, we employed a comprehensive set of paradigms (time discrimination, time estimation, time production, and time reproduction) in order to explore the perceptual timing deficit profile in our ADHD sample. Moreover, we aimed to detect predictors responsible for timing task performance deficits in children with ADHD and how the timing deficits might be positively affected by methylphenidate. Male children with ADHD and healthy control children, all aged between 8 and 13 years, participated in this longitudinal study with three experimental sessions, where children with ADHD were medicated with methylphenidate at the second session but discontinued their medication at the remaining sessions. The results of our study reveal that children with ADHD were impaired in all timing tasks, arguing for a general perceptual timing deficit in ADHD. In doing so, our predictor analyses support the notion that distinct but partially overlapping cognitive mechanisms might exist for discriminating, estimating/producing, and reproducing time intervals. In this sense, working memory deficits in terms of an abnormally fast internal counting process might be common to dysfunctions in the time estimation/time production tasks and in the time reproduction task, with attention deficits (e.g., in terms of disruptions of the counting process) additionally contributing to time estimation/time production deficits and motivational alterations additionally contributing to time reproduction deficits. Methylphenidate did not significantly alter performance of the ADHD sample, presumably due to limited statistical power of our study. The findings of our study demonstrate a pivotal role of disturbed working memory processes in perceptual timing task performance in childhood ADHD, at the same time broadening the view for additional attentional and motivational determinants of impaired task performance.
Localisation of Abundant and Organ-Specific Genes Expressed in Rosa hybrida Leaves and Flower Buds by Direct In Situ RT-PCR

In situ PCR is a technique that allows specific nucleic acid sequences to be detected in individual cells and tissues. In situ PCR and IS-RT-PCR are elegant techniques that can increase both sensitivity and throughput, but they are, at best, only semiquantitative; therefore, it is desirable first to ascertain the expression pattern by conventional means to establish the suitable conditions for each probe. In plants, in situ RT-PCR is widely used in the expression localisation of specific genes, including MADS-box and other function-specific genes or housekeeping genes in floral buds and other organs. This method is especially useful in small organs or during early developmental stages when the separation of particular parts is impossible. In this paper, we compared three different labelling and immunodetection methods by using in situ RT-PCR in Rosa hybrida flower buds and leaves. As target genes, we used the abundant β-actin and RhFUL gene, which is expressed only in the leaves and petals/sepals of flower buds. We used digoxygenin-11-dUTP, biotin-11-dUTP, and fluorescein-12-dUTP-labelled nucleotides and antidig-AP/ streptavidin-fluorescein-labelled antibodies. All of the used methods gave strong, specific signal and all of them may be used in localization of gene expression on tissue level in rose organs.
Police legitimacy, ideology and qualitative methods: A critique of procedural justice theory

I argue that there are unconsidered complexities to police legitimacy and use examples from my study of police–public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland to illustrate. I make a number of conceptual and methodological critiques by drawing upon Steven Lukes’ social theory on power to show how legitimacy can be a product of authority relations as much as it is a cause of authority relations. This view finds support from systems-justification theory. I also tackle Beetham’s conception of legitimacy and argue that there is evidence from police studies that the police breach his key antecedents to legitimacy without incurring the expected consequences. Furthermore, I take an original methodological approach to studying police legitimacy which reveals additional insights. For instance, Bottoms and Tankebe suggest legitimacy addresses multiple ‘audiences’; I would also add that it addresses multiple recipients as legitimacy is shown to vary among officers and positions of rank.
The deviant university student: historical discourses about student failure and ‘wastage’ in the antipodes

The emergence of academic development in Anglophone higher education was linked to post Second World War massification and concerns about student failure. These concerns were driven by increasing statistical investigations into student attrition and degree times to completion, particularly in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. There was a dominant discourse about student ‘wastage’ (the deviant student). However, if we fast-forward to the late 2000s, we can see that these discourses have been replaced by discourses about university responsibility and teaching quality. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, this paper aims to trace the historical roots of contemporary teaching and learning dilemmas and to show how the responsibility for student failure was gradually shifted from perceptions of deviant students to perceptions of teacher ‘deviance’, which academic development units were designed to ameliorate.
A New Approach to the Study of Translationese : Machine-learning the Difference between

In this article we describe an approach to the identification of ‘translationese’ based on monolingual comparable corpora and machine learning techniques for text categorization. The article reports on experiments in which support vector machines (SVMs) are employed to recognize translated text in a corpus of Italian articles from the geopolitical domain. An ensemble of SVMs reaches 86.7% accuracy with 89.3% precision and 83.3% recall on this task. A preliminary analysis of the features used by the SVMs suggests that the distribution of function words and morphosyntactic categories in general, and personal pronouns and adverbs in particular, are among the cues used by the SVMs to perform the discrimination task. A follow-up experiment shows that the performance attained by SVMs is well above the average performance of ten human subjects, including five professional translators, on the same task. Our results offer solid evidence supporting the translationese hypothesis, and our method seems to have promising applications in translation studies and in quantitative style analysis in general. Implications for the machine learning/text categorization community are equally important, both because this is a novel application and especially because we provide explicit evidence that a relatively knowledge-poor machine learning algorithm can outperform human beings in a text classification task.
Clarifying Conflict of Interest

As the debate over how to manage or discourage physicians’ financial conflicts of interest with the drug and medical device industries has become more heated, critics have questioned or dismissed the concept of “conflict of interest” itself. A satisfactory definition relates conflict of interest to concerns about maintaining social trust and distinguishes between breaches of ethical duty and temptations to breach duty. Numerous objections to such a definition have been offered, none of which prevails on further analysis. Those concerned about conflicts of interest have contributed to misunderstandings, however, by failing to demonstrate when social arrangements leading to temptations to breach duties are in themselves morally blameworthy. Clarifying “conflict of interest” is important if we are eventually going to develop productive modes of engagement between medicine and for-profit industry that avoid the serious ethical pitfalls now in evidence.
Opponent melanopsin and S-cone signals in the human pupillary light response

Significance Our eyes sense bright light using cones (L, M, and S) and recently discovered melanopsin-containing ganglion cells. Both S cones and melanopsin respond to blueish (short-wavelength) light. How does melanopsin interact with the cones in visual function? We measured the response of the human pupil to isolated stimulation of the different photoreceptors. Our work reveals a curious, opponent response to blue light in the otherwise familiar pupillary light response. Increased stimulation of S cones can cause the pupil to dilate, but this effect is usually masked by a stronger and opposite response from melanopsin-containing cells. Our results have clinical importance because the sensing of blue light is known to be related to seasonal depression, sleep, and pain from bright light. In the human, cone photoreceptors (L, M, and S) and the melanopsin-containing, intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) are active at daytime light intensities. Signals from cones are combined both additively and in opposition to create the perception of overall light and color. Similar mechanisms seem to be at work in the control of the pupil’s response to light. Uncharacterized however, is the relative contribution of melanopsin and S cones, with their overlapping, short-wavelength spectral sensitivities. We measured the response of the human pupil to the separate stimulation of the cones and melanopsin at a range of temporal frequencies under photopic conditions. The S-cone and melanopsin photoreceptor channels were found to be low-pass, in contrast to a band-pass response of the pupil to L- and M-cone signals. An examination of the phase relationships of the evoked responses revealed that melanopsin signals add with signals from L and M cones but are opposed by signals from S cones in control of the pupil. The opposition of the S cones is revealed in a seemingly paradoxical dilation of the pupil to greater S-cone photon capture. This surprising result is explained by the neurophysiological properties of ipRGCs found in animal studies.