Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activation of ATP‐sensitive K+ channels by epoxyeicosatrienoic acids in rat cardiac ventricular myocytes

1 We examined the effects of epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs), which are cytochrome P450 metabolites of arachidonic acid (AA), on the activities of the ATP‐sensitive K+ (KATP) channels of rat cardiac myocytes, using the inside‐out patch‐clamp technique. 2 In the presence of 100 μm cytoplasmic ATP, the KATP channel open probability (Po) was increased by 240 ± 60% with 0.1 μm 11,12‐EET and by 400 ± 54% with 5 μm 11,12‐EET (n= 5)–10, P < 0.05 vs. control), whereas neither 5 μm AA nor 5 μm 11,12‐dihydroxyeicosatrienoic acid (DHET), which is the epoxide hydrolysis product of 11,12‐EET, had any effect on Po. 3 The half‐maximal activating concentration (EC50) was 18.9 ± 2.6 nm for 11,12‐EET (n= 5)) and 19.1 ± 4.8 nm for 8,9‐EET (n= 5), P= n.s. vs. 11,12‐EET). Furthermore, 11,12‐EET failed to alter the inhibition of KATP channels by glyburide. 4 Application of 11,12‐EET markedly decreased the channel sensitivity to cytoplasmic ATP. The half‐maximal inhibitory concentration of ATP (IC50) was increased from 21.2 ± 2.0 μm at baseline to 240 ± 60 μm with 0.1 μm 11,12‐EET (n= 5), P < 0.05 vs. control) and to 780 ± 30 μm with 5 μm 11,12‐EET (n= 11), P < 0.05vs. control). 5 Increasing the ATP concentration increased the number of kinetically distinguishable closed states, promoting prolonged closure durations. 11,12‐EET antagonized the effects of ATP on the kinetics of the KATP channels in a dose‐ and voltage‐dependent manner. 11,12‐EET (1 μm) reduced the apparent association rate constant of ATP to the channel by 135‐fold. 6 Application of 5 μm 11,12‐EET resulted in hyperpolarization of the resting membrane potential in isolated cardiac myocytes, which could be blocked by glyburide. 7 These results suggest that EETs are potent activators of the cardiac KATP channels, modulating channel behaviour by reducing the channel sensitivity to ATP. Thus, EETs could be important endogenous regulators of cardiac electrical excitability.
Transaction Costs and Institutional Arrangements in Potato Marketing by Small Producers in Rural Peru.

In order to address the question of what kind of marketing relations induce producers to invest more and/or target their production to specific markets, this study assesses small-scale potato growers’ access to dynamic markets. This study defines dynamic markets as those capable of absorbing increasing quantities of farmers’ produce, either because of the scale of the market, or because demand is rising rapidly. Using potato marketing in the most important producing region for this crop in Peru – the Mantaro Valley, which is located in Peru’s central mountains – as a case study, the dynamic markets considered in this study are the processing (potato chip) market and the seed potato market; both are generally considered more profitable than the traditional potato market aimed for direct consumption. This study examines the features and conditions governing sales in the various markets where potato growers place their produce. We have employed two consecutive surveys of same producers, one focusing on transactions and the other on the socio-economic attributes of individual producers. Quantitative results were supplemented by in-depth interviews with a variety of participants in the marketing chain, in order to better understand how these producers connect with different markets, and what contractual modalities and conditions enable them to create solid, successful market arrangements. The research shows that the most complex marketing arrangements are the most profitable. However, these arrangements also involve greater transaction costs, since they take place in markets that demand higher product quality and more product differentiation, requirements that can only be met if growers invest more in the production process. It should be noted that institutional costs play a dominant role in these markets due to information asymmetries. The high transaction costs entailed are a barrier to access for producers with fewer resources, preventing them from entering these more dynamic and hence potentially more profitable markets. The study also explores the main bottlenecks that producers face in attempting to enter more complex markets, and examines the role that these barriers play in informing producers’ choices and decisions regarding activity in given markets and investment. The study found that any isolated actions do not suffice to solve these problems; only a series of interventions (involving education and training, risk management, and organization) can increase the probability of access to these markets under favourable conditions for the growers in question. conTenTs Page
The Nature of Elementary Student Science Discourse in the Context of the Science Writing Heuristic Approach

This case study aimed to determine the nature of student interactions in small groups in an elementary classroom utilizing the Science Writing Heuristic approach. Fifth grade students were audio‐recorded over four units of study while working in small groups to generate knowledge claims after conducting student‐directed investigations. Analysis consisted of (1) identifying amount of on/off task talk, (2) categorizing on‐task talk as generative (talk associated with generating an argument) or representational (talk associated with representing an argument in a final written form), (3) characterizing the generative components of argument, and (4) determining the functions of language used. Results indicate that students were on task 98% of the time. Students engaged in generative talk an average of 25% of the time and representational talk an average of 71% of the time. Students engaged in components of Toulmin’s model of argument, but challenging of each other’s ideas was not commonplace. Talk was dominated by the informative function (representing one’s ideas) of language as it was found 78.3% of the time and to a lesser extent (11.7%) the heuristic function (inquiring through questions). These functions appear to be intimately tied to the task of generating knowledge claims in small groups. The results suggest that both talking and writing are critical to using science discourse as an embedded strategy to learning science. Further, nature and structure of the task are important pedagogical considerations when moving students toward participation in science discourse.
Haptic telemanipulation with dissimilar kinematics

This work addresses some practical issues regarding development of a telerobotic system for 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) tasks. The system consists of a hyper redundant haptic input device ViSHaRD10, a redundant 7DoF manipulator and a stereo vision system. The redundancy of the devices is exploited to assure large convex workspace and singularity-free operation. The anthropomorphic construction of the telemanipulator enables intuitive manipulation and increases the "user-friendliness" of the overall system. As a practical benchmark an assembly experiment in 6DoF for a case of a negligible time delay was successfully performed. Issues regarding inverse kinematics, spatial interaction control, transparency, and intuitiveness of teleoperation are discussed.
Visual analysis of contagion in networks

Contagion is a process whereby the collapse of a node in a network leads to the collapse of neighboring nodes and thereby sets off a chain reaction in the network. It thus creates a special type of time-dependent network. Such processes are studied in various applications, for example, in financial network analysis, infection diffusion prediction, supply-chain management, or gene regulation. Visual analytics methods can help analysts examine contagion effects. For this purpose, network visualizations need to be complemented with specific features to illustrate the contagion process. Moreover, new visual analysis techniques for comparison of contagion need to be developed. In this paper, we propose a system geared to the visual analysis of contagion. It includes the simulation of contagion effects as well as their visual exploration. We present new tools able to compare the evolution of the different contagion processes. In this way, propagation of disturbances can be effectively analyzed. We focus on financial networks; however, our system can be applied to other use cases as well.
BOOK REVIEW of What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fourth-Grade Education

for Educational Reform. http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/title.html Ravitch, Diane. 1983. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980. New York: Basic Books. Tyack, David B. 1974. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wraga, William G. 2001. “A Progressive Legacy Squandered: The Cardinal Principles Report Reconsidered. ” History of Education Quarterly 41:494–519.
Amoxicillin-clavulanate vs ciprofloxacin for the treatment of uncomplicated cystitis in women: a randomized trial.

CONTEXT The high prevalence of resistance to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and other antimicrobials among Escherichia coli causing acute cystitis in women has led to increased use of alternative antibiotics. One such antibiotic, amoxicillin-clavulanate, has not been well studied. OBJECTIVE To compare the efficacy of a 3-day regimen of amoxicillin-clavulanate to that of a 3-day regimen of ciprofloxacin in the treatment of acute cystitis in women. The primary study hypothesis was that the amoxicillin-clavulanate and ciprofloxacin treatment groups would differ in clinical cure. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Randomized, single-blind treatment trial of 370 women, aged 18 to 45 years, with symptoms of acute uncomplicated cystitis and a urine culture with at least 10(2) colony-forming units of uropathogens per milliliter from a university student health center or a health maintenance organization. INTERVENTIONS Women were randomly assigned to receive amoxicillin-clavulanate (500 mg/125 mg twice daily) or ciprofloxacin (250 mg twice daily) for 3 days and were followed up for 4 months. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The main outcome measure was clinical cure. Secondary study outcomes of interest were microbiological cure and vaginal E coli colonization at the 2-week follow-up visit. RESULTS Clinical cure was observed in 93 (58%) of 160 women treated with amoxicillin-clavulanate compared with 124 (77%) of 162 women treated with ciprofloxacin (P<.001). Amoxicillin-clavulanate was not as effective as ciprofloxacin even among women infected with strains susceptible to amoxicillin-clavulanate (65 [60%] of 109 women in the amoxicillin-clavulanate group vs 114 [77%] of 149 women in the ciprofloxacin group; P = .004). The difference in clinical cure rates occurred almost entirely within the first 2 weeks after therapy. Microbiological cure at 2 weeks was observed in 118 (76%) of 156 women treated with amoxicillin-clavulanate compared with 153 (95%) of 161 women treated with ciprofloxacin (P<.001). At this visit, 45% of women in the amoxicillin-clavulanate group compared with 10% in the ciprofloxacin group had vaginal colonization with E coli (P<.001). CONCLUSIONS A 3-day regimen of amoxicillin-clavulanate is not as effective as ciprofloxacin for the treatment of acute uncomplicated cystitis, even in women infected with susceptible strains. This difference may be due to the inferior ability of amoxicillin-clavulanate to eradicate vaginal E coli, facilitating early reinfection.
Facial Action Unit Detection by Cascade of Tasks

Automatic facial Action Unit (AU) detection from video is a long-standing problem in facial expression analysis. AU detection is typically posed as a classification problem between frames or segments of positive examples and negative ones, where existing work emphasizes the use of different features or classifiers. In this paper, we propose a method called Cascade of Tasks (CoT) that combines the use of different tasks (i.e., frame, segment and transition) for AU event detection. We train CoT in a sequential manner embracing diversity, which ensures robustness and generalization to unseen data. In addition to conventional framebased metrics that evaluate frames independently, we propose a new event-based metric to evaluate detection performance at event-level. We show how the CoT method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both frame-based and event-based metrics, across three public datasets that differ in complexity: CK+, FERA and RUFACS.
Estimating Uncertainty of Categorical Web Data

Web data often manifest high levels of uncertainty. We focus on categorical Web data and we represent these uncertainty levels as first or second order uncertainty. By means of concrete examples, we show how to quantify and handle these uncertainties using the Beta-Binomial and the Dirichlet-Multinomial models, as well as how take into account possibly unseen categories in our samples by using the Dirichlet Process.
Effects of Mindset on the Predictive Validity of Relationship Constructs

Les auteurs se sont penches sur les effets des attitudes ancrees deliberatives par opposition a la mises en pratique sur la validite de prediction des construits d'une relation. Des etudiants qui sortaientensemble et qui anticipaient la transition de l'universite au milieu de travail ont aborde la question d'accroitre leur engagement ou ont pense a des facons de maintenir leurs relations apres l'obtention de leur diplome. Supportant l'hypothese, cette manipulation de l'attitude ancree a interagi avec les evaluations subsequentes de la proximite de la relation et l'engagement percu du partenaire pour predire l'etat de la relation six mois plus tard. Les evaluations posees par les personnes dans un etat d'attitude deliberative etaient plus fermement associees a la survie de la relation que les evaluations semblables faites par les personnes dont l'attitude etait celle de mise en pratique. Les evaluations des relations deliberatives n'etaient positives que si leur relation suivait une trajectoire heureuse, tandis que les evaluations des personnes dont l'attitude ancree etait celle de mise en pratique, etaient positives peu importe si leurs relations suivaient une trajectoire vouee au succes ou a l'echec.
Structurally diverse c-Myc inhibitors share a common mechanism of action involving ATP depletion

The c-Myc (Myc) oncoprotein is deregulated in a large proportion of diverse human cancers. Considerable effort has therefore been directed at identifying pharmacologic inhibitors as potential anti-neoplastic agents. Three such groups of small molecule inhibitors have been described. The first is comprised of so-called “direct” inhibitors, which perturb Myc's ability to form productive DNA-binding heterodimers in association with its partner, Max. The second group is comprised of indirect inhibitors, which largely function by targeting the BET-domain protein BRD4 to prevent the proper formation of transcriptional complexes that assemble in response to Myc-Max DNA binding. Thirdly, synthetic lethal inhibitors cause the selective apoptosis of Myc over-expressing either by promoting mitotic catastrophe or altering Myc protein stability. We report here a common mechanism by which all Myc inhibitors, irrespective of class, lead to eventual cellular demise. This involves the depletion of ATP stores due to mitochondrial dysfunction and the eventual down-regulation of Myc protein. The accompanying metabolic de-regulation causes neutral lipid accumulation, cell cycle arrest, and an attempt to rectify the ATP deficit by up-regulating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). These responses are ultimately futile due to the lack of functional Myc to support the requisite anabolic response. Finally, the effects of Myc depletion on ATP levels, cell cycle arrest, differentiation and AMPK activation can be mimicked by pharmacologic inhibition of the mitochondrial electron transport chain without affecting Myc levels. Thus, all Myc inhibitors promote a global energy collapse that appears to underlie many of their phenotypic consequences.
Lack of an association between 5‐HT6 receptor gene polymorphisms and suicide victims

Abstract An association between serotonergic dysfunction in the brain and suicidal behavior has previously been suggested. The high affinity of some antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs to serotonin 6 (5‐HT6) receptors, and the predominant localization of 5‐HT6 receptors in some limbic regions, suggest that 5‐HT6 receptors play a role in the pathogenesis of suicide. The objective of the present study was to examine the association between suicide victims and two polymorphisms of the 5‐HT6 receptor gene: a biallelic polymorphism (267C/T) in exon 1 and a trinucleotide repeat polymorphism ([GCC]2/3) in the 5′‐upstream region of the gene. The two polymorphisms were genotyped in 163 suicide victims and 166 controls, and the distribution of genotype and allele frequencies between the two groups were compared. Haplotype frequencies of these two polymorphisms were estimated from genotypic data by the maximum‐likelihood method. In both polymorphisms, there were no significant differences in genotype or allele frequencies between the suicide victims and the controls. Moreover, there were no significant differences in the haplotype distributions of these polymorphisms between the two groups. These findings suggest that it is unlikely that the 5‐HT6 receptor gene is involved in the susceptibility to suicide.
Temporal instruction fetch streaming

L1 instruction-cache misses pose a critical performance bottleneck in commercial server workloads. Cache access latency constraints preclude L1 instruction caches large enough to capture the application, library, and OS instruction working sets of these workloads. To cope with capacity constraints, researchers have proposed instruction prefetchers that use branch predictors to explore future control flow. However, such prefetchers suffer from several fundamental flaws: their lookahead is limited by branch prediction bandwidth, their accuracy suffers from geometrically-compounding branch misprediction probability, and they are ignorant of the cache contents, frequently predicting blocks already present in L1. Hence, L1 instruction misses remain a bottleneck. We propose temporal instruction fetch streaming (TIFS)-a mechanism for prefetching temporally-correlated instruction streams from lower-level caches. Rather than explore a programpsilas control flow graph, TIFS predicts future instruction-cache misses directly, through recording and replaying recurring L1 instruction miss sequences. In this paper, we first present an information-theoretic offline trace analysis of instruction-miss repetition to show that 94% of L1 instruction misses occur in long, recurring sequences. Then, we describe a practical mechanism to record these recurring sequences in the L2 cache and leverage them for instruction-cache prefetching. Our TIFS design requires less than 5% storage overhead over the baseline L2 cache and improves performance by 11% on average and 24% at best in a suite of commercial server workloads.
A Computational Theory of the Function of Clue Words in Argument Understanding

This paper examines the use of clue words in argument dialogues. These are special words and phrases directly indicating the structure of the argument to the hearer. Two main conclusions are drawn: 1) clue words can occur in conjunction with coherent transmissions, to reduce processing of the hearer 2) clue words must occur with more complex forms of transmission, to facilitate recognition of the argument structure. Interpretation rules to process clues are proposed. In addition, a relationship between use of clues and complexity of processing is suggested for the case of exceptional transmission strategies.
Assessing Strengths in Residential Treatment: Looking at the Whole Child

This article outlines the importance of assessing both within-child and environmental strengths for children and adolescents admitted to residential treatment facilities (RTFs). Discussed are the theoretical underpinnings behind strength-based assessment, as well as a number of organizations and initiatives that aim at raising the bar for children's care, creating a holistic viewpoint. Assessments such as the BASC-2, ASEBA, and Vineland-II are well-established measures that have moved to meet these demands, and measures like the BERS-2, RSCA, and DESSA have an overt strengths orientation. The CASA and the DCASC are omnibus strengths measures that can be utilized to fill the “intake gap. ”
Prophesy: an infrastructure for analyzing and modeling the performance of parallel and distributed applications

Efficient execution of applications requires insight into how the system features impact the performance of the application. For distributed systems, the task of gaining this insight is complicated by the complexity of the system features. This insight generally results from significant experimental analysis and possibly the development of performance models. This paper presents the Prophesy project, an infrastructure that aids in gaining this needed insight based upon experience. The core component of Prophesy is a relational database that allows for the recording of performance data, system features and application details.
Attractions and Obstacles While Considering Legally Recognized Same-Sex Marriage

ABSTRACT This study examines same-sex couples' attractions to marriage, obstacles that challenged them when considering marriage, and the ways they overcame such obstacles. Participants (N = 263) were members of same-sex couples that were either legally married or engaged to be married. A Web-based survey asked participants to describe the discussions between them and their partners when deciding to marry. Inductive coding identified categories and themes among the participants' attractions and obstacles to marriage, and strategies for overcoming obstacles to marriage. Same-sex couples were attracted to legally recognized marriage as a means of gaining civil/public and social network recognition for their relationship and for personal reasons. Couples considering marriage were challenged by the civil/public limitations of marriage, social network disapproval, and practical and symbolic issues with weddings and the institution of marriage. Strategies to overcome these obstacles varied in directness. The results contribute to a better understanding of committed same-sex couples as their relationships transition to institutionalized status.
Experimental Study of Minutiae Based Algorithm for Fingerprint Matching

In this paper, a minutiae-based algorithm for fingerprint pattern recognition and matching is proposed. The algorithm uses the distance between the minutiae and core points to determine the pattern matching scores for fingerprint images. Experiments were conducted using FVC2002 fingerprint database comprising four datasets of images of different sources and qualities. False Match Rate (FMR), False Non-Match Rate (FNMR) and the Average Matching Time (AMT) were the statistics generated for testing and measuring the performance of the proposed algorithm. The comparative analysis of the proposed algorithm and some existing minutiae based algorithms was carried out as well. The findings from the experimental study were presented, interpreted and some conclusions were drawn.