Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Radioprotective Effects of Heat-Killed Mycobacterium Tuberculosis in Cultured Cells and Radiosensitive Tissues

Background: Exposure to ionizing radiation (IR) often causes severe damage to radiosensitive tissues, which limits the use of radiotherapy in cancer patients. Novel safe and effective radioprotectant is urgently required. It has been reported toll like receptor 2 (TLR2) plays a critical role in radioresistance. In this study, we demonstrated the protective effects of Heat-Killed Mycobacterium tuberculosis (HKMT), a potent TLR2 agonist, against IR. Methods: Cell survival and apoptosis were determined by CCK-8 assay and Annexin V assay, respectively. An immunofluorescence staining assay was used to detect the translocation of nuclear faktor-kappa beta (NF-kB) p65. Tissue damage was evaluated by Haematoxilin-Eosin (HE) staining assay. We also used a flow cytometry assay to measure the number of nucleated cells and CD34+ hemopoietic stem cells in bone marrow. A western blot assay was used to detect the changes of proteins involving TLR signaling pathway. Results: We found that HKMT increased cell viability and inhibited cell apoptosis after irradiation. HKMT induced NF-kB translocation and activated Erk1/2, p38 signaling pathway. HKMT also protected bone marrow and testis from destruction. Radiation-induced decreases of nucleated cells and CD34+ hemopoietic stem cells in bone marrow were also inhibited by HKMT treatment. We found that radiation caused increase of inflammatory cytokines was also suppressed by HKMT. Conclusion: Our data showed that HKMT exhibited radioprotective effects in vivo and in vitro through activating NF-kB and MAPK signaling pathway, suggesting a potential of HKMT as novel radioprotector.
Is a perceptual monitor needed to explain how speech errors are repaired?

Kolk & Postma proposed, following Dell & O'Seaghdha, that when a speaker chooses a word, phonologically-related words as well as the intended word are activated. Initially, the activations of all these words are similar, though eventually the intended word reaches a higher asymptotic value when activation is complete. According to Kolk & Postma, if a response is made in the phase where activation is building up (rather than at full activation), there is a higher chance of the competing, rather than the intended, word being selected (i.e. an error). They propose that a speaker detects such errors when they are produced overtly using the perceptual system, and a monitor in the linguistic system responds by interrupting and initiating the correction. Word repetition and hesitation (not errors in themselves) have been regarded as signifying underlying errors that are detected and interrupted before speech is output in a similar way to overt errors. An assumption in is that activation for a word stops (or, if it continues, is ignored) immediately a candidate word is selected. The brain processes responsible for speech production have massive parallel capacity. Consequently, activation for all the candidates for a word slot could continue beyond the point where a word is selected in cases where a word is responded to prematurely. When the selected word reaches asymptote, the relative activations of this and the other candidate words indicate when an error has occurred (when the selected word has a lower activation than one of the competing words), and what correction is appropriate (the word with the highest activation). This provides the basis for error detection and correction without the need for a perceptual monitor. Continuing the buildup of activation after a word has been selected, implies that activation of nearby words in its phrase overlaps. It is shown, with some realistic assumptions about how activation builds up and decays across different words in a phrase
Sharing books with babies: evaluation of an early literacy intervention

This paper reports an evaluation of an early book reading literacy initiative, the Kirklees 'Babies into Books' project. Baby Book Bags, including a free book and other literacy information, were given to 40 care givers in two targeted areas when their baby was 7 months old, together with an invitation to join a literacy support group. All care givers were interviewed to assess book-related activity in the home when given the Baby Book Bag. Second interviews two months later with 20 care givers revealed significant differences in terms of increases in the number of books owned by the baby, frequency of baby reaching for books and mother and baby looking at children's books and catalogues. These results, and comparison with a control group, confirm the value of this type of very early intervention.
The Latent Structure of Trait Curiosity: Evidence for Interest and Deprivation Curiosity Dimensions

To evaluate Litman and Jimerson's (2004) Interest/Deprivation (I/D) model of curiosity, 355 students (269 women, 86 men) responded to 6 trait curiosity measures including the Curiosity/Interest in the World scale (C/IW; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; Kashdan, Rose, & Fincham, 2004), the Perceptual Curiosity scale (PC; Collins, Litman, & Spielberger, 2004), the Epistemic Curiosity scale (EC; Litman & Spielberger, 2003), and the Curiosity as a Feeling-of-Deprivation scales (CFD; Litman & Jimerson, 2004). Consistent with expectations, the results of confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the C/IW, CEI, PC, EC scales defined an Interest (I) curiosity factor, whereas the CFD scales formed a Deprivation (D) curiosity factor. However, as compared to the other interest-based curiosity measures, one of the EC subscales was found to be less differentiated from the CFD scales, presumably because these instruments assess overlapping aspects of Berlyne's (1954) concept of epistemic curiosity. The results of this study indicated that I and D curiosity are related but differentiated curiosity dimensions, providing evidence for the validity of the I/D model.
Successful Latina Scientists and Engineers

Utilizing a phenomenological perspective and method, this study aimed to reveal the lived career mentoring experiences of Latinas in science and engineering and to understand how selected Latina scientists and engineers achieved high-level positions. Our in-depth interviews revealed that (a) it is important to have multiple mentors for Latinas’ success; (b) various types of mentoring can be effective in career development; (c) the support and encouragement of mentors is essential; and (d) mentoring relationships should be a mutual agreement. Findings also suggest that implementing formal and informal mentoring programs can encourage Latinas to pursue careers in science and engineering and have a positive influence on career success. The commonly shared characteristics and experiences that promote career success are trailblazer, mentoring types, networking, professional opportunities, support and encouragement, goal orientation, and passion and belief.
Flexible Modeling of Latent Task Structures in Multitask Learning

Multitask learning algorithms are typically designed assuming some fixed, a priori known latent structure shared by all the tasks. However, it is usually unclear what type of latent task structure is the most appropriate for a given multitask learning problem. Ideally, the "right" latent task structure should be learned in a data-driven manner. We present a flexible, nonparametric Bayesian model that posits a mixture of factor analyzers structure on the tasks. The nonparametric aspect makes the model expressive enough to subsume many existing models of latent task structures (e.g, mean-regularized tasks, clustered tasks, low-rank or linear/non-linear subspace assumption on tasks, etc.). Moreover, it can also learn more general task structures, addressing the shortcomings of such models. We present a variational inference algorithm for our model. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets, on both regression and classification problems, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Exploring the role of target specificity in the facilitation of vocational teachers’ innovative work behaviour

The aim of this study was to investigate how employees� innovative work behaviour is determined by the level of target specificity of innovation tasks, which refers to the concreteness of a task regarding the realization of an innovation. This issue was addressed in a study with 239 vocational teachers. The study investigated the assumption that employees have different task-related needs depending on whether they engage in innovation tasks with low or high target specificity. That is, with increasing target specificity, innovation-specific resources, such as perceived social support, become more important compared with general, work-related resources such as perceived impact. In addition, the study aimed to show that intrinsic motivation for innovation is a crucial requirement at all levels of target specificity. By applying structural equation and path modelling, we found that (1) the engagement in innovation tasks with low target specificity (i.e., opportunity exploration) depended on perceived impact, (2) the engagement in innovation tasks with high target specificity (i.e., idea generation, idea promotion, and reflection) was facilitated by perceived social support, and (3) intrinsic task motivation enhanced the engagement in innovation tasks at all levels of target specificity and mediated the effects of perceived impact and perceived social support.
Switching Codes, Switching Code: Bilinguals' Emotional Responses in English and Greek

This paper investigates the verbal construction of emotions in a bilingual/bicultural setting, the target languages and cultures being American English and Cypriot Greek. To examine whether bilingual speakers express different emotions in their respective languages, a study was carried out with 10 bilingual/bicultural professionals. A scenario was presented to them first in English and a month later in Greek and their verbal reactions were recorded. The participants' responses were then analysed through three questions: (1) whether they translate from one language to the other; (2) whether and when codeswitching occurs; (3) whether there is a pattern in the use of emotion words. The analysis of the results shows that respondents displayed different reactions to the same story depending on the language it was read to them in. The paper argues that participants changed their social code, i.e. sociocultural expectations, with the change in linguistic code. These findings raise interesting questions about the relationship between language, emotions and cognition, and the formation of the bilingual self.
English to Persian transliteration using attention-based approach in deep learning

In this paper, transliteration is carried out by using the attention-based approach in deep learning. Unlike the previous works which randomly initialize the weights in the encoder, word vector representation of the source vocabulary has been used as an initial value for the weights. The representation is computed by counting the co-occurrences between different characters. Experimental results on an English to Persian transliteration corpus with more than 14000 word pairs show the superior performance of the proposed method (up to 4.21 BLEU points improvement) over the basic attention-based approach.
Regulation of tyrosinase in human melanocytes grown in culture

Tyrosinase, the enzyme that controls the synthesis of melanin, is a unique product of melanocytes. Normal and malignant human melanocytes grown in culture were used to study the factors that regulate the expression of tyrosinase. Immunoprecipitation experiments showed that newly synthesized tyrosinase appeared as a protein with an apparent molecular weight of 70,000 that was processed to a protein with an apparent molecular weight of 80,000. Neither tunicamycin nor 2-deoxy-D- glucose inhibited this conversion, suggesting that O-glycosylation is the major biochemical event in the posttranslational modification of tyrosinase. Agents that stimulated the proliferation of normal melanocytes also stimulated tyrosinase activity. Melanocytes with low levels of tyrosinase activity synthesized less tyrosinase, processed the enzyme more slowly, and degraded it more rapidly than melanocytes with high levels of tyrosinase activity. We conclude that tyrosinase activity in cultures of human melanocytes derived from different donors is determined predominantly by its abundance.
Progress and Current Status of Percutaneous Aortic Valve Replacement: Results of Three Device Generations of the CoreValve Revalving System

Background—Percutaneous aortic valve replacement is a new emerging technology for interventional treatment of severe aortic valve stenosis in surgical high-risk patients. This study was intended to provide a summary of the development and current safety and efficacy status of the self-expanding CoreValve Revalving prosthesis. Method and Results—Between 2005 and 2008, we have enrolled 136 consecutive patients with percutaneous aortic valve replacement using the CoreValve prosthesis. In this prospective nonrandomized, single-center trial, we analyzed procedural outcome, complications and clinical status up to 1 year. First, second, and third generation of the CoreValve prosthesis were implanted in 10, 24, and 102 consecutive high-risk patients (logistic EuroScore: 23.1±15.0%) with severe symptomatic aortic valve stenosis. Mean transvalvular pressure gradient was 41.5±16.7 mm Hg. The procedural success rate increased from generation 1/2 to 3 from 70.0%/70.8% to 91.2% (P=0.003). The 30-day combined rate of death/stroke/myocardial infarction was 40.0%/20.8%/14.7% (P=0.11) for generation 1, 2, and 3, with no procedural death in generation 3. Pressure gradients improved significantly with a final mean gradient of 8.1±3.8 mm Hg. Overall functional status assessed by New York Heart Association class improved from 3.3±0.5 (pre) to 1.7±0.7 (post) (P<0.001) and remained stable in the follow-up. Conclusion—In experienced hands, percutaneous aortic valve replacement with the CoreValve system for selected patients with severe aortic valve stenosis has a high acute success rate associated with a low periprocedural mortality/stroke rate as well as remarkable clinical and hemodynamic improvements, which persist over time. Additional studies are now required to confirm these findings, particularly head-to-head comparisons with surgical valve replacement in different risk populations.
ACTIVISTS AND INCUMBENTS STRUCTURING CHANGE: THE INTERPLAY OF AGENCY, CULTURE, AND NETWORKS IN FIELD EVOLUTION

We examine organizational field change instigated by activists. Contrary to existing views emphasizing incumbent resistance, we suggest that collaboration between incumbents and challenger movements may emerge when a movement's cultural and relational fabric becomes moderately structured, creating threats and market opportunities but remaining permeable to external influence. We also elucidate how lead incumbents' attempts at movement cooptation may be deflected through distributed brokerage. The resulting confluence of cultural and relational “structuration” between movement and field accelerates the pace but dilutes the radicalness of institutional innovation, ensuring ongoing, incremental field change. Overall, this article contributes to the emergent literature on field dynamics by uncovering the evolution and outcomes of collaborative work at the intersection of social movements and incumbent fields.
A new modernity?

This article looks at the arrival of ‘creative industries’ within mainstream policy discourse in China. It attempts to situate this ‘modernising’ discourse within the wider historical conflicts around modernity and modernization in China, suggesting that the progressive function of the ‘creative industries’ discourse frequently claimed by its supporters cannot be taken for granted. The article ends by asking some pointed questions about the immediate future of this agenda in China, with particular reference to the large eastern cities.
Marx's Concept of Ideology

The concept of ideology plays an important part in contemporary social and political thinking. In many works which raise the question about the relationship between what men think and how their societies operate some mention of ideology is made. Since the variety of thinkers who write about this relationship have a variety of views on the subject, it is not at all surprising that they disagree about just what an ideology is. It might be helpful if we could agree on just one usage, or, failing that, understand why a variety of usages is necessary and understand them.
Heterogeneity in sales districts: Beyond individual-level predictors of satisfaction and performance

This article examines the influence of heterogeneity within a sales unit on the unit’s satisfaction and performance.Sales unit refers to a set of salespersons working out of the same office and for the same supervisor, andheterogenity refers to salespersons’ dispersion or variance on key dimensions. Specifically, drawing on theories in social psychology, the authors study the influence of sales unit heterogeneity in terms of (1) demographic characteristics (e.g., gender dispersion), (2) skills and rewards (e.g., reward dispersion), and (3) goal orientations (e.g., learning orientation dispersion) on a sales unit’s performance and job satisfaction levels. The hypotheses developed are tested using data from a study involving 476 salespeople belonging to 105 sales units in a large organization. The authors find that the focal heterogeneity variables account for nearly 25 percent of the total variance explained by the full set of independent variables included in the model.
The expression of endothelin type A and B receptors in the lateral wall of the mouse cochlea

Endothelin (ET), originally characterized as a vasoconstrictive peptide, has been found to have many different biological functions, including acting as a local hormonal regulator of pressure, fluid, ions and neurotransmitters in the inner ear. The objective of this study was to examine and quantify the mRNA expression of the endothelin type A and B receptors (ETAR and ETBR) in the strial vascularies (StV) and non-strial tissues (NSt) of the cochlear lateral wall using the real-time quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technique. The mouse tissue samples were harvested and RNA was extracted. RT was performed to obtain cDNA, and then the mRNA expression of each gene was measured via real-time PCR. We found that both receptor subtypes were expressed in the cochlear lateral wall, with a predominance of ETAR over ETBR. We showed that the mRNA expression of the two receptor subtypes was higher in the StV with a 1.8 times higher level of ETAR and an 8.1 times higher level of ETBR mRNAs than in the adjacent NSt of the lateral wall tissue. This study shows the existence and the quantity of ET receptor subtypes in the StV and NSt of the mouse cochlea. Our results suggest that an endothelin-mediated response via two different receptors, ETAR and ETBR, may play an important role in the physiological functions of the cochlear lateral wall by maintaining the homeostatic environment of the cochlea.
Towards Corporate Semantic Web: Requirements and Use Cases

In this report, we introduce our initial vision of the Corporate Semantic Web as the next step in the broad field of Semantic Web research. We identify requirements of the corporate environment and gaps between current approaches to tackle problems facing ontology engineering, semantic collaboration, and semantic search. Each of these pillars will yield innovative methods and tools during the project runtime until 2013. Corporate ontology engineering will improve the facilitation of agile ontology engineering to lessen the costs of ontology development and, especially, maintenance. Corporate semantic collaboration focuses the human-centered aspects of knowledge management in corporate contexts. Corporate semantic search is settled on the highest application level of the three research areas and at that point it is a representative for applications working on and with the appropriately represented and delivered background knowledge. We propose an initial layout for an integrative architecture of a Corporate Semantic Web provided by these three core pillars.
"Muss leider absagen. Muss noch nen referat fertig machen." –Zur Dialogizität von Absagen und Verabredungsablehnungen in der SMS-Kommunikation

Short messages are used widely for the micro-coordination of appointments and meetings among friends – which also entails managing cancellations in writing. Based on a corpus of 63 text message dialogues, the paper sets out to describe different patterns: Rejections of invitations ("Verabredungsablehnungen") are distinguishable from cancellations of pre-confirmed appointments ("Absagen") in their turn-internal composition. Following a dialogic approach to text messaging, the author also discusses if and in how far the conversation-analytic notion of "preference" can be applied to quasi-synchronous written dialogues. It is argued that rejections of invitations show certain features of dispreference (e.g. delay, hedging, good news exits); cancellations of pre-confirmed appointments, however, lack some of these features, as the point of reference (i.e. the day and time of the appointment) has to be re-established first.
A Task Scheduling Method for Energy-Efficient Cloud Video Surveillance System Using a Time-Clustering-Based Genetic Algorithm

Demands for cloud video surveillance systems are growing rapidly. Addressing to the issue of low energy-efficiency in cloud video datacenters, a task scheduling method using a time-clustering-based genetic algorithm is proposed. Firstly, an off-line scheduling model with SLA (service level agreement) time constraint is proposed after the analysis of the constrain relationship between the SLA and surveillance tasks. Then, a time-clustering-based genetic algorithm (TCGA) is proposed to solve the model for an optimal energy-efficient solution. According to the solution, the service quality is guaranteed and the total operating time of virtual machines is minimized. Meanwhile, idle virtual machines are shut down to reduce energy consumption. Simulations of large scale tasks scheduling are conducted. Several comparison experiments verify that the proposed method can improve the resource utilization greatly and achieve energy saving extremely.
Enhancing Teachers' Motivation to Apply Humanist Information Technology Innovations

This article focuses on the following issue: How can we build a training and support system that would enhance the motivation and capacity of teachers for high-quality implementation of information technology innovations guided by humanist ideas? That is, a system that would not only increase teachers' motivation to apply Humanist Information Technology Innovations (HITI), but would also enhance their capacity and will to apply the program in a way that is true to its spirit and does not neglect its more challenging and complex goals. First, the author presents basic obstacles that are likely to undermine the motivation of many teachers to learn and apply HITI. Second, the author presents two principles of interventions addressing these obstacles. Third, the author presents the actual plan and structure of a training and support system that would enhance the motivation and capacity of teachers for high-quality implementation of HITI. Fourth, the author presents evidence from an intervention utilizing the training and support system described above. The article ends with some thoughts on the type of relationship the author develops with teachers during his work with them. This part is mainly descriptive, but also has some normative implications.