Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of Self-Preoccupation and Self-Reported Duration and Severity of Depressive Episodes

The present study investigated the relation of self-preoccupation, i.e., the tendency to focus more on the self than on external objects and to maintain this self-focused attention, with the duration and severity of depressive episodes. The hypotheses were that, compared with people low on self-preoccupation, people scoring higher on self-preoccupation may experience more long-lasting depressive episodes and during such episodes they may experience a greater number of depressive symptoms. The present study examined association of self-esteem with the severity or duration of depressive episodes. A total of 1,076 undergraduates (361 men, 700 women, 15 unknown) from nine universities in the Tokyo metropolitan area participated. Of the total, 246 undergraduates (55 men and 191 women) reported that they had experienced a depressive episode continuing four or more days; these data were analyzed and are reported here. Self-preoccupation, self-esteem, and depressive episodes within 12 mo. were measured by a self-report questionnaire. The results tentatively supported the hypotheses. Specifically, rated self-esteem was significantly correlated with the number of depressive symptoms reported in a depressive episode but not with the duration of the episode. However, rated self-preoccupation was correlated with the severity and duration of the depressive episode, although the correlation of self-preoccupation scale scores with the duration of the episode was quite weak and requires further research.
Trypacidin, a Spore-Borne Toxin from Aspergillus fumigatus, Is Cytotoxic to Lung Cells

Inhalation of Aspergillus fumigatus conidia can cause severe aspergillosis in immunosuppressed people. A. fumigatus produces a large number of secondary metabolites, some of which are airborne by conidia and whose toxicity to the respiratory tract has not been investigated. We found that spores of A. fumigatus contain five main compounds, tryptoquivaline F, fumiquinazoline C, questin, monomethylsulochrin and trypacidin. Fractionation of culture extracts using RP-HPLC and LC-MS showed that samples containing questin, monomethylsulochrin and trypacidin were toxic to the human A549 lung cell line. These compounds were purified and their structure verified using NMR in order to compare their toxicity against A549 cells. Trypacidin was the most toxic, decreasing cell viability and triggering cell lysis, both effects occurring at an IC50 close to 7 µM. Trypacidin toxicity was also observed in the same concentration range on human bronchial epithelial cells. In the first hour of exposure, trypacidin initiates the intracellular formation of nitric oxide (NO) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). This oxidative stress triggers necrotic cell death in the following 24 h. The apoptosis pathway, moreover, was not involved in the cell death process as trypacidin did not induce apoptotic bodies or a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential. This is the first time that the toxicity of trypacidin to lung cells has been reported.
Computational models of motor adaptation under multiple classes of sensorimotor disturbance

The human motor system exhibits remarkable adaptability, enabling us to maintain high levels of performance despite ever-changing requirements. There are many potential sources of error during movement to which the motor system may need to adapt: the properties of our bodies or tools may vary over time, either at a dynamic or a kinematic level; our senses may become miscalibrated over time and mislead us as to the state of our bodies or the true location of an intended goal; the relationship between sensory stimuli and movement goals may change. Despite these many varied ways in which our movements may be disturbed, existing models of human motor adaptation have tended to assume just a single adaptive component. In this thesis, I argue that the motor system maintains multiple components of adaptation, corresponding to the multiple potential sources of error to which we are exposed. I outline some of the shortcomings of existing adaptation models in scenarious where multiple kinds of disturbances may be present in particular examining how different distal learning problems associated with different classes of disturbance can affect adaptation within alternative cerebellar-based learning architectures and outline the computational challenges associated with extending these existing models. Focusing on the specific problem in which the potential disturbances are miscalibrations of vision and proprioception and changes in arm dynamics during reaching, a unified model of sensory and motor adaptation is derived based on the principle of Bayesian estimation of the disturbances given noisy observations. This model is able to account parsimoniously for previously reported patterns of sensory and motor adaptation during exposure to shifted visual feedback. However the model additionally makes the novel and surprising prediction that adaptation to a force field will also result in sensory adaptation. These predictions are confirmed experimentally. The success of the model strongly supports the idea that the motor system maintains multiple components of adaptation, which it updates according to the principles of Bayesian estimation.
Observer-Based Robust Controller Design for Active Queue Management

Abstract In this paper, an observer–based controller is designed for the problem of congestion control. In TCP/IP networks, the packets-dropping probability function is considered as a control input. Therefore, the work described here is to design robust observer controller, which is aimed at robust stabilization of network system with uncertainties, input delay and a saturated input. The controller is used to estimate online the average trasmission window and achieve the desired queue length. By applying the Lyapunov-Krasovskii function approach and the linear matrix inequality technique, control law is derived. Simulation experiments have been carrier out and the results demonstrate this scheme can achieve transient and steady-state responses. The results also show that this scheme outperformance the tradition PI controller.
Life at the oxic-anoxic interface: microbial activities and adaptations.

Molecular oxygen is one of the most important reactants in biogeochemical cycles. Due to its low solubility in water, the consumption of oxygen leads to the development of oxic-anoxic interfaces, which separate aerobic from anaerobic processes in virtually all environments, ranging in scale from oceanic sediments to the fecal pellets of a small soil invertebrate. Three case studies were selected to illustrate the basic situation and the specific characteristics of oxic-anoxic interfaces: sediments, the rhizosphere of aquatic plants, and the intestinal tract of insects. Each system is governed by the same general principles, but striking differences arise from, e.g., the nature of the major microbial activities and the mechanisms controlling metabolite fluxes. Also scale and dimensional differences as well as the consequences of temporal fluctuations are of fundamental importance. Recent developments in microbial ecology, which often combine traditional and modern approaches, have significantly furthered our understanding of the specific microniches and the metabolic and behavioral adaptations of microorganisms to life at the oxic-anoxic interface. New concepts help to define the targets of future studies: the spatial organization of microbial populations, their microenvironments and in situ activities, and the functional interactions within structured microbial communities.
Brain-specific expression of an exogenous gene after i.v. administration

The treatment of brain diseases with gene therapy requires the gene to be expressed throughout the central nervous system, and this is possible by using gene targeting technology that delivers the gene across the blood–brain barrier after i.v. administration of a nonviral formulation of the gene. The plasmid DNA is targeted to brain with pegylated immunoliposomes (PILs) using a targeting ligand such as a peptidomimetic mAb, which binds to a transporting receptor on the blood–brain barrier. The present studies adapt the PIL gene targeting technology to the mouse by using the rat 8D3 mAb to the mouse transferrin receptor. Tissue-specific expression in brain and peripheral organs of different exogenous genes (β-galactosidase, luciferase) is examined at 1–3 days after i.v. injection in adult mice of the exogenous gene packaged in the interior of 8D3-PIL. The expression plasmid is driven either by a broadly expressed promoter, simian virus 40, or by a brain-specific promoter taken from the 5′ flanking sequence of the human glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) gene. The transgene is expressed in both brain and peripheral tissues when the simian virus 40 promoter is used, but the expression of the exogenous gene is confined to the brain when the transgene is under the influence of the brain-specific GFAP promoter. Confocal microscopy colocalizes immunoreactive bacterial β-galactosidase with immunoreactive GFAP in brain astrocytes. These studies indicate that tissue-specific gene expression in brain is possible after the i.v. administration of a nonviral vector with the combined use of gene targeting technology and tissue-specific gene promoters.
ACID MONOAMINE METABOLITES OF CEREBROSPINAL FLUID IN MENTAL DEPRESSION AND MANIA

IN RECENT years evidence has accumulated for the existence of monoamine neurotransmission in the central nervous system. By means of the highly specific and sensitive histochemical fluorescence method of Hillarp and co-workers (CARLSSON, FALCK and HILLARP 1962) the cellular localization of noradrenaline, dopamine and 5hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) in high concentrations has been demonstrated in different parts of the CNS (for review see HILLARP, FUXE and DAHLSTROM, 1965). The report of WEIL-MALHERBE and LIDDELL (1 954), who found considerable amounts of both adrenaline and noradrenaline in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), has hitherto not been confirmed by other investigators. On the other hand, the acid metabolites of 5-HT and dopamine, i.e. 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIM) and homovanillic acid (HVA), respectively, are rather easily demonstrated and determined in the CSF (ASHCROFT and SHARMAN, 1962; ANDBN, Roos and WERDINIUS, 1963; Roos, 1963). The acid metabolites of monoamines in the CNS seem to be eliminated via the CSF to a large extent. Many psychoactive drugs interfere with the metabolism of monoamines in the CNS. It is well known that some of these drugs can induce mental changes characterized by depressive as well as manic symptoms. Reserpine, which depletes the monoamine stores and thus causes a shortage of monoamine transmitters, may cause mental depression even when given in small doses, as in the treatment of hypertension. Chlorpromazine and haloperidol, which are believed to have a blocking action on monoaminergic receptors and thereby to inhibit monoaminergic transmission, are also reported to have an accentuating effect on mental depression. On the other hand, monoamine oxidase inhibitors as well as antidepressants chemically related to the phenothiazines, e.g. imipramine and amitryptiline, which appear to produce an accumulation of adrenergic amines at the receptor sites, can induce symptoms of mania or other acute psychosis. ASHCROFT and SHARMAN (1960) reported low values of 5-hydroxyindoles in the CSF of patients with depressive psychosis. In order to ascertain whether low values occur also in typical retardation ('endogenous') depression, and whether changes in the level of these metabolites occur also in mania, we examined the CSF from patients with these conditions. Some CSF samples were also examined for HVA.
Justice and Self-Interest: Two Fundamental Motives

1. Contesting the primacy of self-interest 2. Why does justice matter? The development of a personal contract 3. Commitment to justice: the initial primary automatic reaction 4. Explaining the myth of self-interest 5. Defining the justice motive: re-integrating procedural and distributive justice 6. How people assess deserving and justice: the role of social norms 7. Integrating justice and self-interest: a tentative model 8. Maintaining the commitment to justice in a complex world 9. Bringing it closer to home: justice in another 'American tragedy' 10. Emotional aftereffects: some negative consequences and thoughts on how to avoid them.
Deficiency of glycine N‐methyltransferase results in deterioration of cellular defense to stress in mouse liver

Purpose: Previously, we reported that glycine N‐methyltransferase (GNMT) interacts with benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) and inhibits BaP‐DNA adducts formation. In addition, Gnmt knockout (Gnmt−/−) mice developed chronic hepatitis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The aims of this study were to understand the gene expression profile of Gnmt−/− mice and to study the interaction between BaP and GNMT deficiency in vivo.
Particle Swarm Optimization Applied to Parameters Learning of Probabilistic Neural Networks for Classification of Economic Activities

Automatic text classification and clustering are still very challenging computational problems to the information retrieval (IR) communities both in academic and industrial contexts. Currently, a great effort of work on IR, one can find in the literature, is focused on classification and clustering of generic content of text documents. However, there are many other important applications to which little attention has hitherto been paid, which are as well very difficult to deal with. One example of these applications is the classification of companies based on the descriptions of their economic activities, also called mission statements, which represent the business context of the companies’ activities, in other words, the business economic activities from free text description by the company’s founders. The categorization of companies according to their economic activities constitute a very important step towards building tools for obtaining correct information for performing statistical analysis of the economic activities within a city or country. With this goal, the Brazilian government is creating a centralized digital library with the business economic activity descriptions of all companies in the country. This library will serve the three government levels: Federal; the 27 States; and more than 5.000 Brazilian counties. We estimate that the data related to nearly 1.5 million companies will have to be processed every year (DNRC, 2007) into more than 1.000 possible different activities. It is important to highlight that the large number of possible categories makes this problem particularly complex when compared with others presented in the literature (Jain et al., 1999; Sebastiani, 2002). In this paper, we proposed a slightly modified version of the standard structure of the probabilistic neural network (PNN) (Specht, 1990) so that we could deal with the multi-label problem faced in this work. We compared the PNN performance trained by a canonical Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and a Bare Bones Particle Swarm Optimization (BBPSO). Our results show that, in the categorization of free text descriptions of economic activities, the PNN trained by BBPSO got slightly better results than the PNN trained by PSO.
DRUPing for interpolates

We present a method for interpolation based on DRUP proofs. Interpolants are widely used in model checking, synthesis and other applications. Most interpolation algorithms rely on a resolution proof produced by a SAT-solver for unsatisfaible formulas. The proof is traversed and translated into an interpolant by replacing resolution steps with AND and OR gates. This process is efficient (once there is a proof) and generates interpolants that are linear in the size of the proof. In this paper, we address three known weakness of this approach: (i) performance degradation experienced by the SAT-solver and the extra memory requirements needed when logging a resolution proof; (ii) the proof generated by the solver is not necessarily the "best" proof for interpolantion, and (iii) combining proof logging with pre-processing is complicated. We show that these issues can be remedied by using DRUP proofs. First, we show how to produce an interpolant from a DRUP proof, even when pre-processing is enabled. Second, we give a novel interpolation algorithm that produces interpolants partially in CNF. Third, we show how DRUP proof can be restructured on-the-fly to yield better interpolants. We implemented our DRUP-based interpolation framework in MiniSAT, and evaluated its affect using Avy - a SAT-based model checking algorithm.
Construction and Encoding of QC-LDPC Codes Using Group Rings

Quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes which are known as QC-LDPC codes, have many applications due to their simple encoding implementation by the means of cyclic shift registers. In this paper, we construct QC-LDPC codes from group rings. A group ring is a free module (at the same time a ring) constructed in a natural way from any given ring and any given group. We present a structure based on the elements of a group ring for constructing QC-LDPC codes. Some of the previously addressed methods for constructing QC-LDPC codes based on finite fields are special cases of the proposed construction method. The constructed QC-LDPC codes perform very well over the additive white Gaussian noise channel with iterative decoding in terms of bit-error probability and block-error probability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed codes have competitive performance in comparison with the similar existing LDPC codes. Finally, we propose a new encoding method for the proposed group ring-based QC-LDPC codes that can be implemented faster than the current encoding methods. The encoding complexity of the proposed method is analyzed mathematically, and indicates a significate reduction in the required number of operations, even when compared to the available efficient encoding methods that have linear time and space complexities.
Evidence-based Software Process Recovery

Developing a large software system involves many complicated, varied, and interdependent tasks, and these tasks are typically implemented using a combination of defined processes, semi-automated tools, and ad hoc practices. Stakeholders in the development process — including software developers, managers, and customers — often want to be able to track the actual practices being employed within a project. For example, a customer may wish to be sure that the process is ISO 9000 compliant, a manager may wish to track the amount of testing that has been done in the current iteration, and a developer may wish to determine who has recently been working on a subsystem that has had several major bugs appear in it. However, extracting the software development processes from an existing project is expensive if one must rely upon manual inspection of artifacts and interviews of developers and their managers. Previously, researchers have suggested the live observation and instrumentation of a project to allow for more measurement, but this is costly, invasive, and also requires a live running project. In this work, we propose an approach that we call software process recovery that is based on after-the-fact analysis of various kinds of software development artifacts. We use a variety of supervised and unsupervised techniques from machine learning, topic analysis, natural language processing, and statistics on software repositories such as version control systems, bug trackers, and mailing list archives. We show how we can combine all of these methods to recover process signals that we map back to software development processes such as the Unified Process. The Unified Process has been visualized using a time-line view that shows effort per parallel discipline occurring across time. This visualization is called the Unified Process diagram. We use this diagram as inspiration to produce Recovered Unified Process Views (RUPV) that are a concrete version of this theoretical Unified Process diagram. We then validate these methods using case studies of multiple open source software systems.
A Multistage Sulphidisation Flotation Procedure for a Low Grade Malachite Copper Ore

This study was carried out to develop a flotation procedure for an oxide copper ore from a Region in Central Africa for producing an 18% copper concentrate for downstream processing at maximum recovery from a 4% copper feed grade. The copper recoveries achieved from the test work were less than 50% despite changes in reagent conditions (multistage sulphidisation, use of RCA emulsion and mixture, use of AM 2, etc). The poor recoveries were attributed to the mineralogy of the ore from which copper silicates accounted for approximately 70% (mass) of the copper minerals in the ore. These can be complex and difficult to float using conventional flotation methods. Best results were obtained using basic sulphidisation procedures, a high flotation temperature and extended flotation residence time. Keywords— Froth flotation, Sulphidisation, Copper oxide ore, Mineralogy, Recovery
Conflict Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of E-mail Communication

In this article, we proffer new theoretical ideas regarding how the structural features of e-mail make it more likely that disputes escalate when people communicate electronically compared to when they communicate face-to-face or via the telephone. Building upon Rubin et al.’s (1994) conflict escalation model, we propose a new conceptual framework that articulates: (i) the structural properties of e-mail communication; (ii) the impact of these properties on conflict process effects; and (iii) how process effects, in turn, trigger conflict escalation. Propositions specify the nature of relationships among process effects and the components of conflict escalation. We also discuss how the extent of familiarity between individuals acts as a moderator of these relationships. Our conceptual framework, the dispute-exacerbating model of e-mail (DEME), is designed to be a foundation for future empirical research.
YOUTUBE AND PROPOSITION 8

The present study uses California's Proposition 8 campaign as a case study for an exploratory investigation of video activism online. We conducted a content analysis of a sample of Proposition 8 videos drawn at random from the results of a keyword search of YouTube. Main findings from the analysis (N = 801) show that a majority of the videos were made up of original content and took a position against Proposition 8. The results also show that video posters on different sides of the debate drew on different mixes of video forms as the election debate progressed. A greater proportion of ‘Yes on 8’ videos were scripted and professionally produced while ‘No on 8’ videos were more often amateur creations and served to witness the widespread protests in the aftermath of the election.