Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework

Since the 6th century B.C., Jews have created unique variants of many coterritorial non-Jewish languages with which they came in contact; Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Persian, and German are just a few examples. Widespread shifts to non-Jewish languages throughout the world and to revived spoken Hebrew in Israel are now resulting in the obsolescence of contemporary Jewish languages and putting an end to 2600 years of Jewish language creation. The present paper proposes a typology of Jewish language phenomena, explores the common linguistic components and processes attending their genesis and development, formulates urgent research tasks in comparative Jewish interlinguistics, and assesses the contribution of Jewish language study to general linguistics. A shift in the language of a community can have three effects on the identity of the speakers: (a) Language shift might be accompanied by a shift in ethnic identification; e.g., the Turkic-speaking Bulgars who emigrated to the Balkans in the late 4th century A.D. eventually assimilated fully to the local languages and cultures. (b) Language shift can take place without the loss of ethnic identity; e.g., the Egyptian Copts switched from Egyptian to Arabic, but retained some elements of a distinctive national culture, in particular a Christian identity. (c) Finally, cultural and ethnic assimilation can take place in the absence of language loss; e.g., various Balkan populations, in the wake of widespread intermingling and language contact over a millennium, have developed a large body of common ethnic, cultural, and even linguistic features, though there is little tendency to give up individual Balkan languages. ' In any typology of linguistic and cultural shift, the Jews occupy a unique position. On the surface, the original Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine who adopted Aramaic and Greek as their spoken and written media would seem straightforward representatives of the second type-language shift without full ethno-cultural submersion. However, two factors render these and most other instances of Jewish language shift distinctive from the Egyptian Coptic experience: the Jews have had a tendency (a) to create a unique variant from the adopted coterritorial non-Jewish language, while (b) retaining written forms of Hebrew (the original language of the Jewish people in Palestine) and of Aramaic (the first successor language to Hebrew) as liturgical and literary languages and as potential sources of enrichment for the new vernaculars. Hebrew-Aramaic elements take the form of adstratal borrowings and occasionally even substratal retentions, transferred through successive Jewish languages and thus partly erasing the effects of the loss of spoken Hebrew and Aramaic. Hence language shift among the Jews-unlike that of the Egyptian Copts and Balkan
Chronic stress disrupts neural coherence between cortico-limbic structures

Chronic stress impairs cognitive function, namely on tasks that rely on the integrity of cortico-limbic networks. To unravel the functional impact of progressive stress in cortico-limbic networks we measured neural activity and spectral coherences between the ventral hippocampus (vHIP) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in rats subjected to short term stress (STS) and chronic unpredictable stress (CUS). CUS exposure consistently disrupted the spectral coherence between both areas for a wide range of frequencies, whereas STS exposure failed to trigger such effect. The chronic stress-induced coherence decrease correlated inversely with the vHIP power spectrum, but not with the mPFC power spectrum, which supports the view that hippocampal dysfunction is the primary event after stress exposure. Importantly, we additionally show that the variations in vHIP-to-mPFC coherence and power spectrum in the vHIP correlated with stress-induced behavioral deficits in a spatial reference memory task. Altogether, these findings result in an innovative readout to measure, and follow, the functional events that underlie the stress-induced reference memory impairments.
Predicting Teacher Effectiveness from Graduate Admissions Predictors

An attempt to predict the teaching ability of graduate teaching assistants (as measured by student achievement and student satisfaction) from predictors of graduate-student success in graduate school suggested the following: 1) student achievement in an introductory psychology course correlates most strongly with the instructor’s GRE-Advanced score and number of psychology courses taken by the instructor as an undergraduate; 2) student satisfaction with an instructor is best predicted by the instructor’s GRE-Verbal score; and, as a result, 3) selection of the more promising graduate school applicants, as measured by the graduate predictors, may simultaneously result in the selection of better instructors.
Domain Interactions Regulating AMPA Receptor Desensitization

Desensitization is a common property of glutamate and other ligand-gated ion channels, yet its molecular mechanism is unknown. For glutamate receptors, agonist binding involves interactions with identified amino acids from two lobes and may result in stabilizing the lobes in a closed “clamshell” conformation. The present studies demonstrate that two structures, β-strands 7 and 8 and α-helices J and K, functionally interact with each other and likely form hinges between the two lobes, influencing the coupling between agonist binding and desensitization. Two amino acids identified within these regions form a solvent-exposed interface with a third amino acid, a mutation of which was shown previously to block receptor desensitization (L507 in glutamate receptor 3). This interface may regulate a concerted conformational shift of the AMPA subtype of glutamate receptor subunits to the desensitized state.
You Have to Hit Some People! Measurement and Criminogenic Nature of Violent Sentiments in Australia

Criminal sentiments are the highest risk factor for recidivism. Although criminal sentiments have been reliably measured, there are few scales measuring violent sentiments. The aim of this study was to report on three studies exploring the theory and psychometrics of a new Justification for Violence Scale (JFV). The JFV items have high ecological validity in that they were drawn from in-depth interviews with violent men. Psychometric analysis showed that the JFV was unifactorial with high criterion-related validity differentiating three distinct groups (sample N = 530): male offenders, men and women from the community, and university undergraduates. In a further study of 250 community adults, high correlations with self-reported physical aggression and violent fantasies, and negative correlations with social desirability supported the JFV's convergent and discriminant validity. The JFV can be used by researchers or clinicians as a single measure or the items can be inserted into the Criminal Sentiments Scale to enhance the measurement of violent and criminal attitudes and beliefs.
Bone cancer.

Overview Primary bone cancers are extremely rare neoplasms, likely accounting for fewer than 0.2% of all cancers, although its true incidence is difficult to determine secondary to the rarity of these tumors.1,2 In 2009, an estimated 2570 new cases will be diagnosed in the United States and 1470 people will die of the disease.3 Primary bone cancers show wide clinical heterogeneity and are often curable with proper treatment. Osteosarcoma (35%), chondrosarcoma (30%), and Ewing’s sarcoma (16%) are the 3 most common forms of bone cancer. Malignant fibrous histiocytoma (MFH) and fibrosarcoma of the bone constitute fewer than 1% of all primary bone tumors. Chondrosarcoma is usually found in middle-aged and older adults; osteosarcoma and Ewing’s sarcoma The NCCN
Uncritical reverence in CM reporting: Assessing the scientific quality of Australian news media reports

Abstract Objectives: The study is an exploratory study of a media event in Australia based on the publication of two separate systematic analyses of complementary medicine (CM) therapies. The objective of the study was to measure the scientific quality of Australian newspaper media reports about two international peer-reviewed research papers reporting results on complementary medicines published in biomedical journals during Feb/March 2007. For purposes of clarity, we refer to the papers as the ‘Antioxidant Study’ (Bjelakovic et al 2007) and the ‘Prenatal Multivitamin Study’ (Goh et al 2007). Methods: We sourced articles that were published about the two research papers in mainstream metropolitan and national Australian newspapers during February and March 2007. We then applied a model of analysis called the Index of Scientific Quality (ISQ) to measure the scientific quality of the news reports. Results: We identified 14 newspaper articles and one newswire article about the Antioxidant Study and two newspaper articles about the Prenatal Multivitamin Study. Of the seven ISQ criteria, ‘validity’ and ‘precision’ were rated the least adequate, ‘important consequences’ of the research were reported partially in the Antioxidant Study and wholly in the Prenatal Multivitamin Study, and ‘opinion from fact’ was adequate in the majority of articles. Conclusion: This exploratory study conveyed an overall inadequacy in the scientific quality of the newspaper reporting about the two CM studies in major metropolitan and national Australian newspapers. Whilst we found that journalists were careful to attribute opinions to their sources, their reports conveyed a very limited understanding of biomedical research methodologies and a subsequent incapacity to scrutinise these methodologies with rigour.
Responsiveness of measures of attentional bias to clinical change in social phobia

This study examined responsiveness of the dot probe measure of attentional bias to standard cognitive-behaviour group therapy (CBGT) for social phobia. People who met criteria for social phobia were randomly allocated to either an immediate treatment condition or a waiting list control (WLC). All participants completed self-report measures of social anxiety, depression, and anxiety sensitivity, a verbal dot probe and a facial dot-probe task before and after eight weeks of standard CBGT was undertaken by the treatment group. On the first measurement occasion the two groups had similar scores on all measures. On the second measurement occasion the self-report scores for the CBGT group were lower than those of the WLC group. Performance on the dot-probe tasks for the CBGT group had also changed. The treatment group appeared to direct their attention away from social threat words and threatening faces after CBGT.
On the Futility of Learning Complex Frame-Level Language Models for Chord Recognition

Chord recognition systems use temporal models to post-process frame-wise chord preditions from acoustic models. Traditionally, first-order models such as Hidden Markov Models were used for this task, with recent works suggesting to apply Recurrent Neural Networks instead. Due to their ability to learn longer-term dependencies, these models are supposed to learn and to apply musical knowledge, instead of just smoothing the output of the acoustic model. In this paper, we argue that learning complex temporal models at the level of audio frames is futile on principle, and that non-Markovian models do not perform better than their first-order counterparts. We support our argument through three experiments on the McGill Billboard dataset. The first two show 1) that when learning complex temporal models at the frame level, improvements in chord sequence modelling are marginal; and 2) that these improvements do not translate when applied within a full chord recognition system. The third, still rather preliminary experiment gives first indications that the use of complex sequential models for chord prediction at higher temporal levels might be more promising.
Chronic hyperglycemia modulates osteoblast gene expression through osmotic and non‐osmotic pathways

Insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM; type I) is a chronic disease stemming from little or no insulin production and elevated blood glucose levels. IDDM is associated with osteoporosis and increased fracture rates. The mechanisms underlying IDDM associated bone loss are not known. Previously we demonstrated that osteoblasts exhibit a response to acute (1 and 24 h) hyperglycemia and hyperosmolality. Here we examined the influence of chronic hyperglycemia (30 mM) and its associated hyperosmolality on osteoblast phenotype. Our findings demonstrate that osteoblasts respond to chronic hyperglycemia through modulated gene expression. Specifically, chronic hyperglycemia increases alkaline phosphatase activity and expression and decreases osteocalcin, MMP‐13, VEGF and GAPDH expression. Of these genes, only MMP‐13 mRNA levels exhibit a similar suppression in response to hyperosmotic conditions (mannitol treatment). Acute hyperglycemia for a 48‐h period was also capable of inducing alkaline phosphatase and suppressing osteocalcin, MMP‐13, VEGF, and GAPDH expression in differentiated osteoblasts. This suggests that acute responses in differentiated cells are maintained chronically. In addition, hyperglycemic and hyperosmotic conditions increased PPARγ2 expression, although this increase reached significance only in 21 days chronic glucose treated cultures. Given that osteocalcin is suppressed and PPARγ2 expression is increased in type I diabetic mouse model bones, these findings suggest that diabetes‐associated hyperglycemia may modulate osteoblast gene expression, function and bone formation and thereby contribute to type I diabetic bone loss. J. Cell. Biochem. 99: 411–424, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Polymorphism at Position 400 in the Connection Subdomain of HIV-1 Reverse Transcriptase Affects Sensitivity to NNRTIs and RNaseH Activity

Reverse transcriptase (RT) plays an essential role in HIV-1 replication, and inhibition of this enzyme is a key component of HIV-treatment. However, the use of RT inhibitors can lead to the emergence of drug-resistant variants. Until recently, most clinically relevant resistance mutations were found in the polymerase domain of RT. Lately, an increasing number of resistance mutations has been identified in the connection and RNaseH domain. To further explore the role of these domains we analyzed the complete RT sequence of HIV-1 subtype B patients failing therapy. Position A/T400 in the connection subdomain is polymorphic, but the proportion of T400 increases from 41% in naïve patients to 72% in patients failing therapy. Previous studies suggested a role for threonine in conferring resistance to nucleoside RT inhibitors. Here we report that T400 also mediates resistance to non-nucleoside RT inhibitors. The susceptibility to NVP and EFV was reduced 5-fold and 2-fold, respectively, in the wild-type subtype B NL4.3 background. We show that substitution A400T reduces the RNaseH activity. The changes in enzyme activity are remarkable given the distance to both the polymerase and RNaseH active sites. Molecular dynamics simulations were performed, which provide a novel atomistic mechanism for the reduction in RNaseH activity induced by T400. Substitution A400T was found to change the conformation of the RNaseH primer grip region. Formation of an additional hydrogen bond between residue T400 and E396 may play a role in this structural change. The slower degradation of the viral RNA genome may provide more time for dissociation of the bound NNRTI from the stalled RT-template/primer complex, after which reverse transcription can resume.
What Matters in the Measurement of Mattering?

This study evaluates the psychometric properties of a measure of mattering to other people. A confirmatory factor analysis supported a four-factor model. In addition, mattering was positively related to measures of well-being and negatively related to measures of worry. The four factors related differently to these variables, providing additional support for their distinctiveness.
Does Pregnancy Induce the Shedding of Premalignant Ovarian Cells?

Background. High parity is associated with reduced risk of ovarian cancer. One hypothesis is that pregnancy is associated with clearance of a fraction of the genetically modified (premalignant) cells from the ovaries. Methods. We evaluated this hypothesis using a model that estimates the cell clearance fraction at first and second pregnancy according to age at pregnancy. The model was fitted using reproductive history data from a cohort of 1.5 million Danish women born between 1935 and 1978 and followed for 28.7 million person-years. During this follow-up period, 2,035 developed invasive ovarian cancer. Results. We found the model to have a satisfactory fit despite the very few parameters involved. The model estimated similar cell clearance fractions for the first and second pregnancy and decreasing clearance with later age at pregnancy. Conclusion. The relation of pregnancy history to risk of ovarian cancer can be well described by a cell clearance model that allows the cell clearance fraction to decrease with age at pregnancy.
Sticky platelets syndrome in a young patient with massive pulmonary embolism

Patient: Female, 51 Final Diagnosis: Sticky platelets syndrome Symptoms: Pulmonary embolism Medication: — Clinical Procedure: Thrombolysis Specialty: Hematology Objective: Disease of unknown ethiology Background: Sticky platelets syndrome (SPS) is an inherited thrombophilia characterized by platelet hyperaggregability, which can lead to the higher risk of thrombosis. The etiology of SPS remains unclear, but several gene polymorphisms have been recently studied and autosomal dominant heredity is suspected. Although SPS is traditionally connected with arterial thrombosis, several cases of SPS as a cause of venous thromboembolism have been described. Case Report: We report the case of a 51-year-old apparently healthy woman with massive pulmonary embolism, who required thrombolytic therapy. In this patient SPS was identified as the only condition leading to higher risk of developing thromboembolic disease. Conclusions: Although at present few physicians have practical experience with SPS, this syndrome may lead to serious health problems or even death. The presented case points to the benefit of SPS diagnostics in standard screening of inherited thrombophilia for effective prophylaxis and treatment in patients with venous thromboembolism.
Activity of Thalamic Reticular Neurons during Spontaneous Genetically Determined Spike and Wave Discharges

This study reports the first intracellular recordings obtained during spontaneous, genetically determined spike and wave discharges (SWDs) in nucleus reticularis thalami (NRT) neurons from the genetic absence epilepsy rats from Strasbourg (GAERS), a model that closely reproduces the typical features of childhood absence seizures. A SWD started with a large hyperpolarization, which was independent of the preceding firing, and decreased in amplitude but did not reverse in polarity up to potentials ≥ −90 mV. This hyperpolarization and the slowly decaying depolarization that terminated a SWD were unaffected by recording with KCl-filled electrodes. The prolonged (up to 15 action potentials), high-frequency bursts present during SWDs were tightly synchronized between adjacent neurons, correlated with the EEG spike component, and generated by a low-threshold Ca2+ potential, which, in turn, was brought about by the summation of high-frequency, small-amplitude depolarizing potentials. Fast hyperpolarizing IPSPs were not detected either during or in the absence of SWDs. Recordings with KCl-filled electrodes, however, showed a more depolarized resting membrane potential and a higher background firing, whereas the SWD-associated bursts had a longer latency to the EEG spike and a lower intraburst frequency. This novel finding demonstrates that spontaneous genetically determined SWDs occur in the presence of intra-NRT lateral inhibition. The unmasking of these properties in the GAERS NRT confirms their unique association with spontaneous genetically determined SWDs and thus their likely involvement in the pathophysiological processes of the human condition.
Knowledge, Ideology & Discourse: A Sociological Perspective

1. Introduction 2. Mannheim's sociology of knowledge 3. The interiors of Mannheim's legacy 4. The origins of the theory of ideology 5. A modern approach to ideological critique 6. From signification to discourse 7. Discourse, knowledge and critique 8. Science and language 9. Culture and the perspective of women 10. Knowledge, ideology and discourse 11. Analysing knowledge as ideological discourse 12. A future for the sociology of knowledge as discourse analysis
Effect of progesterone on the cleavage rate of mouse embryos in vitro.

The development of mouse embryos up to the blastocyst stage has been obtained in culture media without hormones (Brinster, 1963; Biggers, Whitten & Whittingham, 1970) and normal development continues when such blastocysts are transplanted into a pseudopregnant female (McLaren & Biggers, 1958). This experimental evidence suggests that hormones might not be necessary for differentiation up to the blastocyst stage, although they are required for implantation to occur. There is also evidence that the development of mouse embryos in vitro is slower than in vivo (Bowman & McLaren, 1970), perhaps because of the different physical and nutritive environment or an hormonal deficiency. The lower cleavage rates of embryos of ovariectomized pregnant mice can be restored to normal values by progesterone treatment (Roblero, 1973). Perry, Heap & Amoroso (1973) have shown the presence of progesterone in pig blastocysts and suggested a local steroid production which may have an essential role in the maternal recognition of pregnancy or in the pro¬ cess of implantation. Seamark & Lutwak-Mann (1972), however, believe that progestagens in blastocysts are not necessarily synthesized by the embryos, but may be conveyed to them by the endometrial secretions. The purpose of the present work was to study the effect of progesterone in vitro on the cleavage rate during early development of the mouse embryo.
Hybrid Data Hiding Scheme Using Right-Most Digit Replacement and Adaptive Least Significant Bit for Digital Images

The goal of image steganographic methods considers three main key issues: high embedding capacity, good visual symmetry/quality, and security. In this paper, a hybrid data hiding method combining the right-most digit replacement (RMDR) with an adaptive least significant bit (ALSB) is proposed to provide not only high embedding capacity but also maintain a good visual symmetry. The cover-image is divided into lower texture (symmetry patterns) and higher texture (asymmetry patterns) areas and these textures determine the selection of RMDR and ALSB methods, respectively, according to pixel symmetry. This paper has three major contributions. First, the proposed hybrid method enhanced the embedding capacity due to efficient ALSB utilization in the higher texture areas of cover images. Second, the proposed hybrid method maintains the high visual quality because RMDR has the closest selection process to generate the symmetry between stego and cover pixels. Finally, the proposed hybrid method is secure against statistical regular or singular (RS) steganalysis and pixel difference histogram steganalysis because RMDR is capable of evading the risk of RS detection attacks due to pixel digits replacement instead of bits. Extensive experimental tests (over 1500+ cover images) are conducted with recent least significant bit (LSB)-based hybrid methods and it is demonstrated that the proposed hybrid method has a high embedding capacity (800,019 bits) while maintaining good visual symmetry (39.00% peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)).