Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Regulation of Chemerin and CMKLR1 Genes Expression by TNF-α, Adiponectin, and Chemerin Analog in Bovine Differentiated Adipocytes

Adipokines, adipocyte-derived protein, have important roles in various kinds of physiology including energy homeostasis. Chemerin, one of adipocyte-derived adipokines, is highly expressed in differentiated adipocytes and is known to induce macrophage chemotaxis and glucose intolerance. The objective of the present study was to investigate the changes of chemerin and the chemokine-like-receptor 1 (CMKLR1) gene expression levels during differentiation of the bovine adipocyte and in differentiated adipocytes treated with tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), adiponectin, leptin, and chemerin (peptide analog). The expression levels of the chemerin gene increased at d 6 and 12 of the differentiation period accompanied by increased cytoplasm lipid droplets. From d 6 onward, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ2 (PPAR-γ2) gene expression levels were significantly higher than that of d 0 and 3. In contrast, CMKLR1 expression levels decreased at the end of the differentiation period. In fully differentiated adipocytes (i.e. at d 12), the treatment of TNF-α and adiponectin upregulated both chemerin and CMKLR1 gene expression levels, although leptin did not show such effects. Moreover, chemerin analog treatment was shown to upregulate chemerin gene expression levels regardless of doses. These results suggest that the expression of chemerin in bovine adipocyte might be regulated by chemerin itself and other adipokines, which indicates its possible role in modulating the adipokine secretions in adipose tissues.
Classification performance analysis of MNIST Dataset utilizing a Multi-resolution Technique

Here, we propose a method for recognition of handwritten English digit utilizing discrete cosine space-frequency transform known as the Discrete Cosine S-Transform (DCST). Experiments have been conducted on the publicly availabe standard MNIST handwritten digit database. The DCST features along with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier is utilized for solving the classification issues of written by hand digit. The Discrete Cosine S-Transform coefficients are extracted from the standard images of MNIST handwritten isolated digit database. The database consists of a total of 70000 including 60000 training samples and 10000 test samples. To overcome the computational overhead, we have normalized all the images of the MNIST dataset from 28 × 28 to 20 × 20 image size by eliminating the unsought boundary pixels up to width four. Further, the classification of digits has been made by using a back propagation neural network (BPNN). This work has achieved precisely 98.8% of success rate for MNIST database.
Women living with HIV tell their stories with photovoice

ABSTRACT 23 women shared stories of the realities of living with HIV through photographic documentation and critical dialogue with peers about the challenges they face, how they have overcome these challenges and what hopes they have for their future. Qualitative analysis of group session transcripts revealed seven major themes; medication adherence, substance abuse, criminal history, relationships with children, ending unhealthy relationships, reframing and helping others. Participants made use of their HIV diagnosis to find meaning in life and focus on the actions that they can take to better themselves, contributing to each one’s growth and development. Understanding what women view as important aspects of their experience living with HIV may provide valuable information for developing more efficacious interventions and policies for this population. Implications for social work practice include offering women with HIV mental health and substance use treatment, providing gender-specific peer support services, and eliminating the criminalization of HIV.
Perceptions of integrity, competence and trust in senior management as determinants of cynicism toward change

As Public Sector organizations continue to undergo transformational change, it is important to identify organizational factors that impact on employee attitudes to change. There is limited empirical evidence about the determinants of cynicism toward change. In this paper, a model is proposed which identifies three key trust-related antecedents of cynicism toward change: perceptions of integrity, competence, and trust in senior management. Data were collected from two Public Sector organizations to identify levels and correlates of cynicism toward change and to test the proposed model. The results of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling suggest that perceptions of integrity and trust in senior management influence cynicism toward change. Integrity, as an element of trustworthiness, was found to directly influence trust in senior management as well as cynicism toward change. Contrary to expectations, employee perceptions of the competence of senior management did not to have a direct influence on trust nor on cynicism toward change. Collectively the antecedent variables accounted for approximately forty percent of the variance in cynicism toward change. In general terms, the findings will prove helpful to human resource practitioners interested in diagnosing and managing organizational trust and attitudes toward organizational change.
Physiotherapists enabling school children's physical activity using social cognitive theory, empowerment and technology

Abstract Aim: To contribute knowledge concerning how physiotherapists using social cognitive theory, empowerment and information and communication technology can promote children’s physical activity in a school context. Methodology: Four studies were conducted in the northern part of Sweden and a qualitative discourse analysis of the results from all four studies was performed to enable a more comprehensive understanding. Three of the studies involved children, and one study involved parents. Major findings: The findings formed three themes: A, Acknowledging empowerment; B, Bonded forces overcame barriers; and C, Competence and motivation enable change. The first theme includes the act of creating the intervention using an empowerment approach. The second theme concerns barriers to being physically active and social support from parents and peers regarding physical activity promotion. The third theme concerns motivation and associated personal factors, such as self-efficacy. Principal conclusion: This course of action might be a way for physiotherapists to promote children’s physical activity using social cognitive theory, empowerment and information and communication technology in a school context. An empowerment approach that includes the formation of partnerships with children is a promising avenue for developing physical activity interventions in schools. In addition, physical activity interventions should attempt to build on children’s self-efficacy and make physical activity opportunities fun and enjoyable.
Ensembles for supervised classification learning

This dissertation studies the use of multiple classifiers (ensembles or committees) in learning tasks. Both theoretical and practical aspects of combining classifiers are studied. First we analyze the representational ability of voting ensembles. A voting ensemble may perform either better or worse than each of its individual members. We give tight upper and lower bounds on the classification performance of a voting ensemble as a function of the classification performances of its individual members. Boosting is a method of combining multiple "weak" classifiers to form a "strong" classifier. Several issues concerning boosting are studied in this thesis. We study SBA, a hierarchical boosting algorithm proposed by Schapire, in terms of its representation and its search. We show that if the weak learner has low representational complexity, SBA's search may fail to boost or may give a sub-optimal solution. We present a rejection boosting algorithm that trades-off exploration and exploitation: It requires fewer pattern labels at the expense of lower boosting ability. Ensembles may be useful in gaining information. We study their use to minimize labeling costs of data and to enable improvements on performance over time. For that purpose a model for on-site learning is presented. The system learns by querying "hard" patterns while classifying "easy" ones. This model is related to query-based filtering methods, but takes into account that, in addition to labeling, filtering through the data has a cost. The Query-By-Committee algorithm is used as a good approximator of the model space for real-world domains. Results using this algorithm on a synthesized problem and a real-world OCR task using both a back-propagation network and a nearest neighbor classifier show that an on-site learner can perform as well as a classifier trained off-site, while achieving significant cost reduction.
Black Male Success in STEM: A Case Study of Morehouse College

The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of how a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) is cultivating Black male achievement in STEM. In this in-depth qualitative case study, we explore 2 resource-intensive and successful STEM pathway programs at Morehouse College, the only all-male HBCU in this country, as an opportunity to examine the cultivation of Black male STEM scholars. Our study was guided by 2 overarching questions: What opportunities for participation in a rigorous STEM education do the programs provide? What individual and institutional practices contribute to STEM student persistence and learning?
A primate dictionary? decoding the function and meaning of another species' vocalizations

Decoding the function and meaning of a foreign culture’s sounds and gestures is a notoriously difficult problem. It is even more challenging when we think about the sounds and gestures of nonhuman animals. This essay provides a review of what is currently known about the informational content and function of primate vocalizations, emphasizing the problems underlying the construction of a primate “dictionary. ” In contrast to the Oxford English Dictionary, this dictionary provides entries to emotional expressions as well as potentially referential expressions. It therefore represents a guide to what animals do with their vocalizations, as well as how they are represented by signalers and perceivers. I begin by a discussion of the unit problem, of how an acoustic space is carved up into functionally significant components leading to a species-specific repertoire or lexicon of sorts. This section shows how little we know about the units of organization within animal vocal repertoires, and how such lack of information constrains our ability to tackle the problem of syntactic structure. In Section III, I review research on the production and perception of vocal signals that appear to be functionally referential. This work shows that several nonhuman primates produce vocalizations that share some of the key properties of reference, but certainly not all; the components that are missing raises questions about their role as precursors to human words. In Section IV, I explore the social uses of vocalizations, assessing whether the signal contains sufficient information for listeners to judge a caller’s credibility; ultimately, caller credibility determines how receivers select an appropriate response. Results show that individuals can use calls to assess whether someone is reliable or unreliable, and that such attributes are associated with individuals and particular contexts. I conclude by synthesizing the issues presented and then raise some directions for future conceptual and methodological progress.
Can the job demand-control-(support) model predict disability support worker burnout and work engagement?

ABSTRACT Background Research shows that up to 43% of disability support workers (DSWs) report poor psychosocial work outcomes (e.g., stress, job burnout, low job satisfaction). This study examined whether the job demand-control-(support) model offers a valid explanation of DSW burnout and work engagement. Method 325 DSWs completed online measures of burnout, work engagement, workload, job control, and supervisor or colleague support. Results Significant three-way interactions between workload, control and colleague support were found for emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment (burnout), and vigour (work engagement). High workload, low job control and low colleague support was related to higher burnout and lower work engagement, and high colleague support or job control reduced the impact of workload on these outcomes. Conclusions Given the promising findings in relation to the job demand-control-(support) model, organisations looking to enhance DSW wellbeing in the workplace should address issues around job control, workload and support in combination as opposed to separately.
Two new methods ( haplotype-based and outlier-based ) for the detection of 1 divergent selection in pairs of populations of non-model species . 2

15 The detection of genomic regions involved in local adaptation is an important topic in 16 current population genetics. There are several detection strategies depending on the kind of 17 genetic and demographic information at hand. A common drawback is the high risk of false 18 positives. In this study, we introduce two complementary methods for the detection of 19 divergent selection from populations connected by migration. Both methods have been 20 developed with the aim of being robust to false positives. The first method combines 21 haplotype information with inter-population differentiation (FST). Evidence of divergent 22 selection is concluded only when both the haplotype pattern and the FST value support it. 23 The second method is developed for independently segregating markers i.e. there is no 24 haplotype information at hand. In this case, the power to detect selection is attained by 25 developing a new outlier test based on detecting a bimodal distribution. The test computes 26 the FST outliers and then assumes that those of interest would have a different mode which 27 is detected by a clustering algorithm. The utility of the two methods is demonstrated 28 through simulations and the analysis of real data. The simulation results show power ranging 29 from 60-94% in several of the scenarios while the false positive rate is controlled below the 30 nominal level in every scenario. The analysis of data from intertidal marine snail ecotypes 31 confirms lower number of outliers than previously estimated, maybe as a result of previous 32 false positives or, alternatively, due to our outlier method conservativeness. The software 33 HacDivSel implements both methods. 34 35 36 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi. org/10.1101/026369 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Sep. 8, 2015;
Student’s local top-up higher education choices

ABSTRACT Making decisions about education choices is challenging and difficult for students. Utilising the theory of reasoned action, we specify and estimate a conceptual framework that captures the cognitive process of decision making of students in choosing top-up higher degrees in Hong Kong. Top-up higher or bachelor’s degrees are top-up undergraduate programmes forming a progression route for sub-degree graduates to earn bachelor’s degrees. We argue that attitudes, subjective norms and perceived value influence a student’s top-up higher education choices. Our results show that family members, educators, job availability and security, social image and difficulty of curriculum play critical roles in influencing students’ decision. We also find differences between females and males, between business and non-business students and between Year 1 and Year 2 students in higher education choices. These findings underscore the importance of educational institutions developing effective policies for promoting top-up higher degree programmes by taking cognisance of gender, the field of study and year of study differences and for policy makers to understand the dynamics of higher education.
Investigating MCTS modifications in general video game playing

While Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) methods have shown promise in a variety of different board games, more complex video games still present significant challenges. Recently, several modifications to the core MCTS algorithm have been proposed with the hope to increase its effectiveness on arcade-style video games. This paper investigates of how well these modifications perform in general video game playing using the general video game AI (GVG-AI) framework and introduces a new MCTS modification called UCT reverse penalty that penalizes the MCTS controller for exploring recently visited children. The results of our experiments show that a combination of two MCTS modifications can improve the performance of the vanilla MCTS controller, but the effectiveness of the modifications highly depends on the particular game being played.
Analysis of the coupling optical fiber ultrasonic sensor for partial discharges detection

The responses of ultrasonic sensor with different structure parameters to acoustic emission of partial discharge have been investigated numerically and experimentally. By taking into account both the elasto-optic effect and the geometric effect, a comprehensive analysis of the ultrasonic sensing mechanism is presented. It is found that a direct deformation of the sensor induced by acoustic emission signals which is closely related to the sensor sensitivity is the critical factor in the sensing mechanism. Then, numerical simulations were carried out to analyze the relationships between structure parameters of the sensor and the corresponding deformation. Related simulation results show that the sensor deformation grows with the deepening of the fusion degree, and the rise of the coupling length leads to the exponential enhancement of the sensor deformation. According to theoretical analyses, sensors based on the directional coupler were fabricated and acoustic emissions of PD detection experiments were carried out. Experiments results are consistent with the theoretical analysis results. Moreover, experiment results show that the bandwidth of the sensor is in the range of 10 kHz up to 5MHz. And the frequency response of the optical sensor ranged from tens of kHz to hundreds of kHz. These analysis results could provide a useful guide to optimization design of the sensors used in practical acoustic emission detection from partial discharges.
Supervisee Art-Based Disclosure in El Duende Process Painting

Abstract Although art-based supervision often leads to supervisee disclosure, little is known about the experience, process, or contributions of such disclosure. We investigated the phenomenon of supervisee disclosure during El Duende Process Painting art-based group supervision using a qualitative study. JoHari's Window was used as a grounding model to describe content and structural analysis of the phenomenon of disclosure. Participants were supervisees (N = 21) in art-based supervision groups at 2 universities. Findings indicate that supervisee disclosure occurs in the artwork prior to conscious knowledge of the supervisee, and 3 precursors to increased self-awareness arise just prior to a disclosure. This suggests that mechanisms leading to disclosure occur during art making. Disclosure mechanisms have relevance for art therapy supervision and practice.
A structure and energy dissipation efficiency of relativistic reconfinement shocks

We present a semi-analytical hydrodynamical model for the structure of reconfinement shocks formed in astrophysical relativistic jets interacting with external medium. We take into account exact conservation laws, both across the shock front and in the zone of the shocked matter, and exact angular relations. Our results confirm a good accuracy of the approximate formulae derived by Komissarov & Falle. However, including the transverse pressure gradient in the shocked jet, we predict an absolute size of the shock to be about twice larger. We calculate the efficiency of the kinetic energy dissipation in the shock and show a strong dependence on both the bulk Lorentz factor and opening angle of the jet.
Hepatic Branch Vagotomy Can Suppress Liver Regeneration in Partially Hepatectomized Rats

The role of the vagus nerve in liver regeneration after partial hepatectomy was studied by comparing the effects of hepatic branch vagotomy with those of hepatic branch sympathectomy in rats. The liver weight as a percentage of body weight decreased significantly 7 days after vagotomy compared with the controls and this was associated with a reduction in food intake. There was no difference in the liver weights between the control rats and the pair-fed vagotomized rats. Hepatic sympathectomy had no significant effect on the liver weight. The serum scores indicating hepatic function showed no difference between the control and the vagotomized rats except alkaline phosphatase. The concentration of insulin was unchanged. The number of mitotic hepatocytes remained high at 7 days after vagotomy. These observations led us to conclude that the vagus nerve stimulates liver regeneration, and its effect depends on vagal factors directly and specifically.
The inside out forehand as a tactical pattern in men’s professional tennis

Abstract The so-called inside out forehand has an active role in the baseline strategy because it offers the players new possibilities of hitting the incoming ball with their preferred shot by covering their weaker side and, at the same time, playing the ball with more open angles and directions which create more aggressive patterns of play. The purpose of this study is to analyse the use of this shot as well as its incidence on the men’s professional game both, right- and left-handed players. Eighteen matches corresponding to Grand Slam and ATP finals played between 2011 and 2014 were analysed. Eleven players (men) with ATP rankings between 1 and 14 were studied. Data show that the inside out forehand is used as a tactical weapon to counter the shots directed to the left-hand side zone of the court. The use of the inside out forehand has multiple consequences and, especially, the relationship between the use of the inside out forehand and the impact zone since it has been shown that as the player moves away laterally from the centre of the court, the percentage of transition shots is reduced, while the percentage of winners and errors increases.
Cyclin-dependent Kinases Participate in Death of Neurons Evoked by DNA-damaging Agents

Previous reports have indicated that DNA-damaging treatments including certain anticancer therapeutics cause death of postmitotic nerve cells both in vitro and in vivo. Accordingly, it has become important to understand the signaling events that control this process. We recently hypothesized that certain cell cycle molecules may play an important role in neuronal death signaling evoked by DNA damage. Consequently, we examined whether cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors (CKIs) and dominant-negative (DN) cyclin-dependent kinases (CDK) protect sympathetic and cortical neurons against DNA-damaging conditions. We show that Sindbis virus–induced expression of CKIs p16ink4, p21waf/cip1, and p27kip1, as well as DN-Cdk4 and 6, but not DN-Cdk2 or 3, protect sympathetic neurons against UV irradiation– and AraC-induced death. We also demonstrate that the CKIs p16 and p27 as well as DN-Cdk4 and 6 but not DN-Cdk2 or 3 protect cortical neurons from the DNA damaging agent camptothecin. Finally, in consonance with our hypothesis and these results, cyclin D1–associated kinase activity is rapidly and highly elevated in cortical neurons upon camptothecin treatment. These results suggest that postmitotic neurons may utilize Cdk4 and 6, signals that normally control proliferation, to mediate death signaling resulting from DNA-damaging conditions.