Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Orientation and Direction-of-Motion Response in the Middle Temporal Visual Area (MT) of New World Owl Monkeys as Revealed by Intrinsic-Signal Optical Imaging

Intrinsic-signal optical imaging was used to evaluate relationships of domains of neurons in middle temporal visual area (MT) selective for stimulus orientation and direction-of-motion. Maps of activation were elicited in MT of owl monkeys by gratings drifting back-and-forth, flashed stationary gratings and unidirectionally drifting fields of random dots. Drifting gratings, typically used to reveal orientation preference domains, contain a motion component that may be represented in MT. Consequently, this stimulus could activate groups of cells responsive to the motion of the grating, its orientation or a combination of both. Domains elicited from either moving or static gratings were remarkably similar, indicating that these groups of cells are responding to orientation, although they may also encode information about motion. To assess the relationship between domains defined by drifting oriented gratings and those responsive to direction-of-motion, the response to drifting fields of random dots was measured within domains defined from thresholded maps of activation elicited by the drifting gratings. The optical response elicited by drifting fields of random dots was maximal in a direction orthogonal to the map of orientation preference. Thus, neurons in domains selective for stimulus orientation are also selective for motion orthogonal to the preferred stimulus orientation.
Differences in Membrane Fluidity and Fatty Acid Composition between Phenotypic Variants of Streptococcus pneumoniae

ABSTRACT Phase variation in the colonial opacity of Streptococcus pneumoniae has been implicated as a factor in the pathogenesis of pneumococcal disease. This study examined the relationship between membrane characteristics and colony morphology in a few selected opaque-transparent couples of S. pneumoniae strains carrying different capsular types. Membrane fluidity was determined on the basis of intermolecular excimerization of pyrene and fluorescence polarization of 1,6-diphenyl 1,3,5-hexatriene (DPH). A significant decrease, 16 to 26% (P ≤ 0.05), in the excimerization rate constant of the opaque variants compared with that of the transparent variants was observed, indicating higher microviscosity of the membrane of bacterial cells in the opaque variants. Liposomes prepared from phospholipids of the opaque phenotype showed an even greater decrease, 27 to 38% (P ≤ 0.05), in the pyrene excimerization rate constant compared with that of liposomes prepared from phospholipids of bacteria with the transparent phenotype. These findings agree with the results obtained with DPH fluorescence anisotropy, which showed a 9 to 21% increase (P ≤ 0.001) in the opaque variants compared with the transparent variants. Membrane fatty acid composition, determined by gas chromatography, revealed that the two variants carry the same types of fatty acids but in different proportions. The trend of modification points to the presence of a lower degree of unsaturated fatty acids in the opaque variants compared with their transparent counterparts. The data presented here show a distinct correlation between phase variation and membrane fluidity in S. pneumoniae. The changes in membrane fluidity most probably stem from the observed differences in fatty acid composition.
Multithreaded Pruned Tree Search in Distributed Systems

Although efficient support for data-parallel applications is relatively well established, it remains open how well to support irregular and dynamic problems where there are no regular data structures and communication patterns. Tree search is central to solving a variety of problems in artificial intelligence and an important subset of the irregular applications where tasks are frequently created and terminated. In this paper, we introduce the design of a multithreaded distributed runtime system. Efficiency and ease of parallel programming are the two primary goals. In our system, multithreading is used to specify the asynchronous behavior in parallel game tree search, and dynamic load balancing is employed for efficient performance.
Btn3 regulates the endosomal sorting function of the yeast Ent3 epsin, an adaptor for SNARE proteins

ABSTRACT Ent3 and Ent5 are yeast epsin N-terminal homology (ENTH) domain-containing proteins involved in protein trafficking between the Golgi and late endosomes. They interact with clathrin, clathrin adaptors at the Golgi (AP-1 and GGA) and different SNAREs (Vti1, Snc1, Pep12 and Syn8) required for vesicular transport at the Golgi and endosomes. To better understand the role of these epsins in membrane trafficking, we performed a protein–protein interaction screen. We identified Btn3 (also known as Tda3), a putative oxidoreductase, as a new partner of both Ent3 and Ent5. Btn3 is a negative regulator of the Batten-disease-linked protein Btn2 involved in the retrieval of specific SNAREs (Vti1, Snc1, Tlg1 and Tlg2) from the late endosome to the Golgi. We show that Btn3 endosomal localization depends on the epsins Ent3 and Ent5. We demonstrated that in btn3&Dgr; mutant cells, endosomal sorting of ubiquitylated cargos and endosomal recycling of the Snc1 SNARE are delayed. We thus propose that Btn3 regulates the sorting function of two adaptors for SNARE proteins, the epsin Ent3 and the Batten-disease-linked protein Btn2.
Planting the Seeds of Change: Examining the Role of a Civic Organization in Teaching Youth about citizenship in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

In the context of post-revolutionary Egypt, many civic organizations arose for the purpose of preparing youth to be citizens of a new Egypt. The role of such organizations in equipping youth with civic knowledge and skills remains to be unexplored. This study looks at one civic organization, Bokra, in Egypt after the Revolution. It aims to explore the civic discourses that the organization promotes through its annual summer school. It also aims to find out how the youth participants in the school perceived such discourses and how their understanding of citizenship changed in light of the socio-political change in Egypt. Multiple data sources such as document analysis, interviews, observation and video-recordings are used in order to provide a clear picture of how the school helps its students re-invent Egyptian citizenship. Findings from this study offer practical implications for educators, social science researchers and community organizers. A civic organization such as Bokra creates a democratic climate for youth to experience aspects of citizenship that are essential for active participation outside the classroom such as social responsibility and agency. It does not only help youth develop affective aspects of citizenship such as love, belongingness and loyalty to Egypt but also attempts to change youth mindset about civic engagement. The end goal of the school is to help youth utilize the skills they learn in the classroom to initiate projects to develop their local communities. The study highlights the potential role that civic organizations can play in promoting a form of citizenship suitable for a country in transition.
Adipose Tissue Plasticity in Catch-Up–Growth Trajectories to Metabolic Syndrome

In the mid-1980s, at a time when the concept of syndrome X was being introduced by Reaven (1) to draw attention to the cardiovascular risks associated with insulin resistance and compensatory hyperinsulinemia, Tanner (2) was emphasizing a fundamental property of human growth as a target-seeking function: Children, no less than rockets, have their trajectories, governed by control systems of their genetic constitution and powered by the energy absorbed from the environment. Deflect the child from its natural growth trajectory (by acute malnutrition or a sudden lack of a hormone), and a restoring force develops, so that as soon as the missing food or the absent hormone is supplied again, the child hastens to catch-up toward its original growth curve. When it gets there, the child slows again, to adjust its path onto the old trajectory once more. How the child does this we do not know. What was also unknown (and unforeseen) then was that the “restoring force” that drives catch-up growth—long viewed as an essential feature of recovery from the deleterious effects of poor growth on development and health—could emerge as a major risk factor for disease entities of syndrome X, now more commonly known as the insulin resistance syndrome or metabolic syndrome. There is now compelling evidence, from both epidemiological and clinical studies, that suggests that people who had low birth weight (often a marker for fetal growth constraints) or who showed reduced growth rate during infancy and childhood, but who subsequently showed catch-up growth, have higher susceptibility to abdominal obesity, glucose intolerance, type 2 diabetes, or cardiovascular diseases later in life (3–7). The risks for later obesity and type …
The type 3 nonuniform FFT and its applications June -

The nonequispaced or nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) arises in a variety of application areas, including imaging processing and the numerical solution of partial differential equations. In its most general form, it takes as input an irregular sampling of a function and seeks to compute its Fourier transform at a nonuniform sampling of frequency locations. This is sometimes referred to as the NUFFT of type 3. Like the fast Fourier transform, the amount of work required is of the order O(N log N), where N denotes the number of sampling points in both the physical and spectral domains. In this short note, we present the essential ideas underlying the algorithm in simple terms. We also illustrate its utility with application to problems in magnetic resonance imagin and heat flow. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Determinants of Court-Martial Decisions: An Empirical Investigation into the Air Force's Criminal Court Process

Title of Document: THE DETERMINANTS OF COURTMARTIAL DECISIONS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE AIR FORCE’S CRIMINAL COURT PROCESS Patricia D. Breen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Professor Brian D. Johnson, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice In spite of many similarities with civilian criminal courts, public debate continues about further “civilianizing” the modern court-martial process to enhance legitimacy and reduce unwarranted disparities. Unfortunately, researchers and policymakers know very little about the determinants of court-martial decisions and the influence of military culture in the process. The current study begins to address this void in the empirical literature and informs contemporary reform discussions with its examination of the legal and extra-legal factors for court-martial decision outcomes at different stages of the process. With an extension of modern courts and sentencing theoretical perspectives, this study utilized multi-level modeling techniques with Air Force court-martial data from 2005-2008 to investigate the effects of individual-level factors as well as inter-court community and inter-judge disparities. The results revealed a number of findings that were contrary to civilian court research and theoretical expectations particularly for military-specific outcomes. Additionally, the analysis detected some evidence of disparities consistent with the influence of traditional military culture for decisions earlier in the court-martial process. The implications for the current public policy debate, courts and sentencing theoretical development, and future research are discussed. THE DETERMINANTS OF COURT-MARTIAL DECISIONS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE AIR FORCE’S CRIMINAL COURT PROCESS
The NRRC reliable information access (RIA) workshop

Current statistical approaches to IR have shown themselves to be effective and reliable in both research and commercial settings. However, experimental environments such as TREC show that retrieval results vary widely according to both topic (question asked) and system [2]. This is true for both the basic IR systems and for any of the more advanced implementations using, for example, query expansion. Some retrieval approaches work well on one topic but poorly on a second, while other approaches may work poorly on the first topic, but succeed on the second. If it could be determined in advance which approach would work well, then a guided approach could strongly improve performance. Unfortunately, despite many efforts no one knows how to choose good approaches on a per topic basis [1, 3]. The major problem in understanding retrieval variability is that the variability is due to a number of factors. There are topic factors due to the topic (question) statement itself and to the relationship of the topic to the document collection as a whole, and then there are system dependent factors including the approach algorithm and implementation details. In general, any researcher working with only one system finds it very difficult to separate out the topic variability factors from the system variability. In the summer of 2003 NIST organized a 6-week workshop as part of the ARDA NRRC Summer Workshop series. The goal of this workshop (RIA) was to understand This research was funded by the Advanced Research and Development Activity in Information Technology (ARDA), a U.S. Government entity which sponsors and promotes research of import to the Intelligence Community which include but is not limited to the CIA, DIA, NSA, NIMA and NRO
An Automated Annotation Process for the SciDocAnnot Scientific Document Model

Answering precise and complex queries on a corpus of scien- tific documents requires a precise modelling of the document contents. In particular, each document element must be characterised by its dis- course type (hypothesis, definition, result, method, etc.). In this paper we present a scientific document model (SciAnnotDoc) that takes into account the discourse types. Then we show that an automated process can effectively analyse documents to determine the discourse type of each element. The process, based on syntactic rules (patterns), has been evaluated in terms of precision and recall on a representative corpus of more than 1000 articles in Gender studies. It has been used to create a SciDocAnnot representation of the corpus on top of which we built a faceted search interface. Experiments with users show that searching with this interface clearly outperforms standard keyword search for com- plex queries.
Paraoxonase-1 and Simvastatin Treatment in Patients with Stable Coronary Artery Disease

Background. Paraoxonase-1 (PON1) is the crucial antioxidant marker of high-density lipoproteins. The present study is aimed at assessing the effect of simvastatin treatment on PON1 activity and its relationship to Q192R and M55L polymorphisms in subjects with stable coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods. The patient group was composed of 53 individuals with stable CAD, and the control group included 53 sex-matched police officers without CAD. CAD patients were treated with simvastatin 40mg/day for 12 months. Respectively, flow mediated dilatation (FMD), serum hs-CRP and TNF-α levels, urinary 8-iso-PGF2α concentrations, and PON1 activity were evaluated in definitive intervals. Results. There was no effect of simvastatin treatment on urinary 8-iso-PGF2α. Simvastatin treatment significantly increased FMD value, decreased CRP and TNF-α concentration. After adjusting for PON1 genotypes, significantly higher PON1 activity was noted in the 192R allele carriers, in both groups. Regardless of genotype, PON1 activity remained stable after simvastatin treatment. Conclusions. The present study confirms a positive effect of simvastatin therapy on endothelial function and inflammatory markers in secondary prevention. Simvastatin treatment shows no effects on PON1 activity and 8-isoprostanes level. The effect of simvastatin therapy on PON1 activity is not modulated by Q192R and M55L polymorphisms.
Iterative path optimisation for personalised dressing assistance using vision and force information

We propose an online iterative path optimisation method to enable a Baxter humanoid robot to assist human users to dress. The robot searches for the optimal personalised dressing path using vision and force sensor information: vision information is used to recognise the human pose and model the movement space of upper-body joints; force sensor information is used for the robot to detect external force resistance and to locally adjust its motion. We propose a new stochastic path optimisation method based on adaptive moment estimation. We first compare the proposed method with other path optimisation algorithms on synthetic data. Experimental results show that the performance of the method achieves the smallest error with fewer iterations and less computation time. We also evaluate real-world data by enabling the Baxter robot to assist real human users with their dressing.
Link between Intestinal CD36 Ligand Binding and Satiety Induced by a High Protein Diet in Mice

CD36 is a ubiquitous membrane glycoprotein that binds long-chain fatty acids. The presence of a functional CD36 is required for the induction of satiety by a lipid load and its role as a lipid receptor driving cellular signal has recently been demonstrated. Our project aimed to further explore the role of intestinal CD36 in the regulation of food intake. Duodenal infusions of vehicle or sulfo-N-succinimidyl-oleate (SSO) was performed prior to acute infusions of saline or Intralipid (IL) in mice. Infusion of minute quantities of IL induced a decrease in food intake (FI) compared to saline. Infusion of SSO had the same effect but no additive inhibitory effect was observed in presence of IL. No IL- or SSO-mediated satiety occurred in CD36-null mice. To determine whether the CD36-mediated hypophagic effect of lipids was maintained in animals fed a satietogen diet, mice were subjected to a High-Protein diet (HPD). Concomitantly with the satiety effect, a rise in intestinal CD36 gene expression was observed. No satiety effect occurred in CD36-null mice. HPD-fed WT mice showed a diminished FI compared to control mice, after saline duodenal infusion. But there was no further decrease after lipid infusion. The lipid-induced decrease in FI observed on control mice was accompanied by a rise in jejunal oleylethanolamide (OEA). Its level was higher in HPD-fed mice than in controls after saline infusion and was not changed by lipids. Overall, we demonstrate that lipid binding to intestinal CD36 is sufficient to produce a satiety effect. Moreover, it could participate in the satiety effect induced by HPD. Intestine can modulate FI by several mechanisms including an increase in OEA production and CD36 gene expression. Furthermore, intestine of mice adapted to HPD have a diminished capacity to modulate their food intake in response to dietary lipids.
Jobs for the Boys: Patronage and the State in Comparative Perspective

Patronage systems in the public service are universally reviled as undemocratic and corrupt. Yet patronage was the prevailing method of staffing government for centuries, and in some countries it still is. In "Jobs for the Boys", Merilee Grindle considers why patronage has been so ubiquitous in history and explores the political processes through which it is replaced by merit-based civil service systems. Such reforms are consistently resisted, she finds, because patronage systems, though capricious, offer political executives flexibility to achieve a wide variety of objectives. Grindle looks at the histories of public sector reform in six developed countries and compares them with contemporary struggles for reform in four Latin American countries. A historical, case-based approach allows her to take into account contextual differences between countries as well as to identify cycles that govern reform across the board. As a rule, she finds, transition to merit-based systems involves years and sometimes decades of conflict and compromise with supporters of patronage, as new systems of public service are politically constructed. Becoming aware of the limitations of public sector reform, Grindle hopes, will temper expectations for institutional change now being undertaken.
The Risk of Chronic Pancreatitis in Patients with Psoriasis: A Population-Based Cohort Study

Background Psoriasis is a chronic systemic inflammatory disorder, and studies have revealed its association with a variety of comorbidities. However, the risk of chronic pancreatitis (CP) in psoriasis has not been studied. This study aimed to investigate the risk of CP among patients with psoriasis. Methods Using the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database, this population-based cohort study enrolled 48430 patients with psoriasis and 193720 subjects without psoriasis. Stratified Cox proportional hazards models were used to compare the risks of CP between the patients with and without psoriasis. Results The incidence of CP was 0.61 per 1000 person-years in patients with psoriasis and 0.34 per 1000 person-years in controls during a mean 6.6-year follow-up period. Before adjustment, patients with psoriasis had a significantly higher risk of CP (crude hazard ratio (HR) = 1.81; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.53–2.15), and the risk remained significantly higher after adjustments for gender, age group, medications, and comorbidities (adjusted HR (aHR) = 1.76; 95% CI = 1.47–2.10). All psoriasis patient subgroups other than those with arthritis, including those with mild and severe psoriasis and those without arthritis, had significantly increased aHRs for CP, and the risk increased with increasing psoriasis severity. Psoriasis patients taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aHR = 0.33; 95% CI = 0.22–0.49) and methotrexate (aHR = 0.28; 95% CI = 0.12–0.64) had a lower risk of developing CP after adjustments. Conclusions Psoriasis is associated with a significantly increased risk of CP. The results of our study call for more research to provide additional insight into the relationship between psoriasis and CP.
Activist Doctors: Explaining Physician Activism in the Oregon Movement for Single-Payer Healthcare

This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact pdxscholar@pdx.edu. Recommended Citation Loomis, Jennifer Cullen, "Activist Doctors: Explaining Physician Activism in the Oregon Movement for Single-Payer Healthcare" (2015). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 2214.
Understanding the price puzzle

Recent developments in measuring the stance of monetary policy have highlighted an interesting puzzle--namely, that an unexpected tightening in monetary policy leads to an increase rather than a decrease in the price level. In this article, Nathan Balke and Kenneth Emery present evidence on the price puzzle and discuss possible explanations for it. ; Balke and Emery find that the most plausible explanation is that, during the 1960s and '70s, monetary policy was not implemented in a way that fully offset inflationary supply shocks. During this period, monetary policy would tighten in response to a supply shock but not by enough to prevent inflation from rising. In the data, therefore, contractionary policy is positively correlated with inflation. Since the early 1980s, however, the price puzzle has disappeared for either one, or both, of two reasons: the Federal Reserve has placed greater emphasis on achieving price stability, or there have been fewer inflationary supply shocks to the economy.