Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AgonistsCell Death after TCR Ligation with Partial Lck Is Required for Activation-Induced T

TCR engagement can induce either T cell proliferation and differentiation or activation-induced T cell death (AICD) through apoptosis. The intracellular signaling pathways that dictate such a disparate fate after TCR engagement have only been partially elucidated. Non-FcR-binding anti-CD3 mAbs induce a partial agonist TCR signaling pattern and cause AICD on Ag-activated, cycling T cells. In this study, we examined TCR signaling during the induction of AICD by anti-CD3 fos, a non-FcR-binding anti-CD3 mAb. This mAb activates Fyn, Lck, and extracellular signal-regulated kinase, and induces phosphorylation of Src-like adapter protein, despite the inability to cause calcium mobilization or TCR polarization. Anti-CD3 fos also fails to effectively activate (cid:1) -associated protein of 70 kDa or NF- (cid:2) B. Using Ag-speciﬁc T cells deﬁcient for Fyn or Lck, we provide compelling evidence that activation of Lck is required for the induction of AICD. Our data indicate that a selective and distinct TCR signaling pattern is required for AICD by TCR partial agonist ligands. The Journal of Immunology, 2004, 172: 1437–1443.
Isolation and characterization of a CO2-tolerant Lactobacillus strain from Crystal Geyser, Utah, U.S.A.

When CO2 is sequestered into the deep subsurface, changes to the subsurface microbial community will occur. Capnophiles, microorganisms that grow in CO2-rich environments, are some organisms that may be selected for under the new environmental conditions. To determine whether capnophiles comprise an important part of CO2-rich environments, an isolate from Crystal Geyser, Utah, U.S.A. , a CO2- rich spring considered a carbon sequestration analogue, was characterized. The isolate was cultured under varying CO2, pH, salinity, and temperature, as well as different carbon substrates and terminal electron acceptors (TEAs) to elucidate growth conditions and metabolic activity. Designated CG-1, the isolate is related (99%) to Lactobacillus casei in 16S rRNA gene identity, growing at PCO2 between 0 to 1.0 MPa. Growth is inhibited at 2.5 MPa, but stationary phase cultures exposed to this pressure survive beyond 5 days. At 5.0 MPa, survival is at least 24 hours. CG-1 grows in neutral pH, 0.25 M NaCl, and between 25° to 45°C andconsumes glucose, lactose, sucrose, or crude oil, likely performing lactic acid fermentation. Fatty acid profiles between 0.1 MPa to 1.0 MPa suggests decreases in cell size and increases in membrane rigidity. Transmission electron microscopy reveals rod shaped bacteria at 0.1 MPa. At 1.0 MPa, cells are smaller, amorphous, and produce abundant capsular material. Its ability to grow in environments regardless of the presence of CO2 suggests we have isolated an organism that is more capnotolerant than capnophilic. Results also show that microorganisms are capable of surviving the stressful conditions created by the introduction of CO2 for sequestration. Furthermore, our ability to culture an environmental isolate indicates that organisms found in CO2 environments from previous genomic and metagenomics studies are viable, metabolizing, and potentially affecting the surrounding environment.
Do Interviews Really Play an Important Role in the Medical School Selection Decision

Background: Despite the widespread use of the interview in the medical school admission process, many questions remain about its value and impact on the admissions decision. Are interviews merely a tradition and formality, or do they carry an important weight in the selection decision? The dynamics, potential bias associated with interviews, and their relative weight in the selection process are ongoing and important concerns of admissions committees. Purposes: To investigate the relative weight that the interview carries in the selection process and whether valid interviews can be conducted without the potential bias associated with prior knowledge of the applicants' academic record. Methods: Interrater agreement was calculated for interviewer pairs, one of whom had reviewed the applicant file and one of whom had not. Interview ratings and selection votes for 2 consecutive years were also analyzed using a multiple regression model. Results: Interrater agreement was found to be high, indicating that the t.
Putting the Pieces Together: The Construction of a Reliable Virtualizing Object-Based Storage Stack

The operating system storage stack is an important software component, but it faces several reliability threats. The research community has come up with many solutions to address individual parts of this reliability problem. However, when considering the bigger picture of constructing a highly reliable storage stack out of these individual solutions, new questions arise regarding the feasibility, complexity, reliability, and performance of such a combination. In previous works, we have designed a new storage stack called Loris, and developed several individual reliability improvements for it. In this work, we investigate the integration of these improvements with each other and with new functionality, in two steps. First, we add new virtualization extensions to Loris which challenge assumptions we made in our previous work on reliability. Second, we combine all our extensions to form a reliable, virtualizing storage stack. We evaluate the resulting stack in terms of performance and reliability.
Doctoral Preparation of Scientifically Based Education Researchers

Finding improved ways to train education researchers has taken on new urgency as federal legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 call for “scientifically based research in education. ” The authors of this article suggest an approach to socializing doctoral students to a common “culture of science” (a set of norms for scientific inquiry) and preparing them for interdisciplinary studies that span the natural and social sciences. Drawing on developments in the fields of neuroscience, sociology of natural science, and the learning sciences, the authors argue for an approach to doctoral training that is consistent with a broad definition of scientifically based research.
Low-cost Virtual Rehabilitation of the Hand for Patients Post-Stroke

We are witnessing the convergence of game technology (both software and hardware) with rehabilitation science to form a second-generation virtual rehabilitation framework. This is fortunate in view of the need to reduce system costs and thus facilitate adoption in clinical practice. This paper presents an Xbox-based physical rehabilitation system currently under development at Rutgers University. Unlike its high-end precursor aimed at hand training for patients post-stroke, the experimental system described here uses an inexpensive P5 game glove and Java 3D simulations. This results in significant cost savings, albeit with some tradeoff in functionality
Outcome Feedback, Incentives, and Performance: Evidence from a Relatively Complex Forecasting Task

ABSTRACT: This study extends prior research by examining a fairly common sequence of business events: numeric outcome information is produced and reviewed, decisions are influenced by this information, and the process repeats (i.e., a feedback loop occurs). We find that incentivized decision makers exhibit substantial decision improvement after only one iteration of summary outcome feedback. In contrast, other between-subjects groups fail to improve performance across iterations of Luft and Shields' (2001) forecasting task. Our results suggest that financial incentives and outcome feedback are both critical to performance improvement in relatively complex iterative tasks. When either incentives or feedback is absent, performance suffers. While prior research has found outcome feedback relatively ineffective at improving complex task performance, our results indicate that outcome feedback and incentives complement each other to improve performance. We believe exploring the interaction of incentives and fe.
Vnitřní periferie v České republice jako mechanismus sociální exkluze

Peripheral regions are most often described in terms of economic geography. However, this study stresses more the sociological aspects of peripheries, studying not only the causes, but also the social effects of life in peripheral regions. The authors use the term ‘inner peripheries’ because most of the peripheral regions detected in their analyses are located in the inner parts of the country, mainly along the borders of the administrative regions (kraje). Their approach combines the concept of the life world (espace vecu) as defined by A. Fremont and A. Giddens when describing the social and cultural consequences of living in peripheries, and a modified version of G. Myrdal´s theory of cumulative circular causation when trying to explain the origin and growth of peripheries. In the Czech Republic inner peripheries are usually the peripheral zones of metropolitan areas and regional centre areas. In the mid-1990s population numbers stopped declining in some peripheries as a result of suburbanisation processes, but in other peripheries depopulation processes continued. This last category of inner peripheries can be described as the hard core of Czech peripheral regions and in the authors’ opinion they warrant the development of specific regional policy measures, stressing the creation of new jobs, the improvement of public transport, greater accessibility of service centres, and co-operation among communities.
Agent-Based Model for Automaticity Management of Traffic Flows across the Network

This paper presents an agent-based model that performs the management of traffic flows in a network with the purpose of observing in a simulation of distinctive congestion scenarios how the automation of the monitoring task improves the network performance. The model implements a decision-making algorithm to determine the path that the data flows will follow to reach their destination, according to the results of the negotiation between the agents. In addition, we explain how the behavior of the network is affected by its topology. The aim of this paper is to propose an agent-based model that simplifies the management of the traffic flows in a communications network towards the automaticity of the system.
Integrated self‐calibration via electrokinetic solvent proportioning for microfluidic immunoassays

On‐board generation of a set of calibration standards was demonstrated within a microfluidic device designed to perform immunoassay. Electrokinetic flow was used to proportionally mix the antibody (Ab) to bovine serum albumin (BSA) and a diluting buffer, to provide varying Ab concentrations for downstream mixing with fluorescently labeled BSA (BSA*). Mixing ratios were determined from electrical impedance modeling of the fluidic network using P‐SPICE software, and peak heights for the labeled species were analyzed relative to the concentration calculated from the model. For dilution and separation of fluorescently labeled amino acids, a linear calibration curve was obtained for mixing ratios of 0.118 to 7.46. A linear calibration curve was obtained for the immunoassay calibration using dilution ratios between 0.197 and 5.077. Deviations were observed at larger extremes, possibly due to leakage effects at intersections. Peak height reproducibility was ±3% for the immunoassay, using diluted monoclonal Ab in mouse ascites fluid as the analyte. Recovery for on‐chip calibration was 92 ± 6% versus calibrants prepared off‐chip, indicating a small bias.
Mean depth-width ratio of extrema as textural feature for automated cell proliferation analysis

As a step towards automation of Mitotic Index estimation for cell proliferation studies, we introduce in this work a roughness feature of surface-intensity images: the mean depth-width ratio of extreme, (MDWRE). This feature allowed identification of variable-shaped metaphases and interphase nuclei in the presence of many artifacts (one metaphase per hundreds of nuclei and thousands of artifacts). The texture of the cytological objects (seen as rough surfaces) was quantified by scanning in one dimension the lines contained in a closed contour. MDWRE resulted suitable for image magnifications as low as (x10), making possible a faster scanning of the slides. The use of this feature gave + 14%, +65%, +133% and +133% better performance figures than classical textural features derived from cooccurrence matrices such as Contrast, Energy, Entropy and Angular 2nd Moment respectively, and +51% better than the Relative Extrema Density (RED). The MDWRE per object and the shape of the histogram of the depth-width ratio of gray-level roughs, have shown to be very useful as textural features for the classification of metaphase images.
Laterally asymmetric particle arrays for one-way guiding

A general theory for one-way optical guiding in periodic particle arrays is developed. Conditions on the asymmetry properties of the structure's period that are necessary to obtain asymmetric dispersion are derived. The two-type rotation principle, presented and studied in previous works on one-way guiding in particle chains, is viewed as a special design that achieves the necessary violation of the period's symmetries. Specific examples of periodic strips that consist of circular particles and support one way guiding, are provided.
rs2841277 (PLD4) is associated with susceptibility and rs4672495 is associated with disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is one of the most common autoimmune diseases, can lead to long-term joint damage, chronic pain, and loss of motor function in the hands, and may share some common genetic factors with other autoimmune disorders, such as ankylosing spondylitis (AS). Many single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were reported by genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of RA, but some of them have not been examined in the Taiwanese population. In this study, for 15 SNPs reported in previous RA and AS GWASs, we investigated their association with RA in a Taiwanese population. Based on 334 RA patients recruited from the Taichung Veterans General Hospital and 16,036 healthy subjects from the Taiwan Biobank (TWB) project, we observed that subjects having minor allele C at rs2841277 (phospholipase D family, member 4 (PLD4)) have lower susceptibility of RA, compare to those having genotype TT (Odds ratio (OR) = 0.6, p = 3.0 × 10−6). Among the RA patients, we observed that subjects having GG at rs4672495 have a lower proportion of severe RA, compare to other subjects (OR = 0.09, p = 5.6 × 10−3). Results of a bioinformatics approach showed that rs2841277 is able to influence expression of LINC00638 and AHNAK2 and rs4672495 is able to influence the expression of B3GNT2. In summary, this study replicated an association of rs2841277 with RA susceptibility and showed an AS-associated SNP, rs4672495, is associated with RA activity in the Taiwanese population.
Depicting urban boundaries from a mobility network of spatial interactions: a case study of Great Britain with geo-located Twitter data

ABSTRACT Existing urban boundaries are usually defined by government agencies for administrative, economic, and political purposes. However, it is not clear whether the boundaries truly reflect human interactions with urban space in intra- and interregional activities. Defining urban boundaries that consider socioeconomic relationships and citizen commute patterns is important for many aspects of urban and regional planning. In this paper, we describe a method to delineate urban boundaries based upon human interactions with physical space inferred from social media. Specifically, we depicted the urban boundaries of Great Britain using a mobility network of Twitter user spatial interactions, which was inferred from over 69 million geo-located tweets. We define the non-administrative anthropographic boundaries in a hierarchical fashion based on different physical movement ranges of users derived from the collective mobility patterns of Twitter users in Great Britain. The results of strongly connected urban regions in the form of communities in the network space yield geographically cohesive, nonoverlapping urban areas, which provide a clear delineation of the non-administrative anthropographic urban boundaries of Great Britain. The method was applied to both national (Great Britain) and municipal scales (the London metropolis). While our results corresponded well with the administrative boundaries, many unexpected and interesting boundaries were identified. Importantly, as the depicted urban boundaries exhibited a strong instance of spatial proximity, we employed a gravity model to understand the distance decay effects in shaping the delineated urban boundaries. The model explains how geographical distances found in the mobility patterns affect the interaction intensity among different non-administrative anthropographic urban areas, which provides new insights into human spatial interactions with urban space.
How positive and negative frames influence the decisions of persons in the United States and Australia

Cites the existence of information framing effects as an interesting phenomenon in the area of human judgements and decision‐making. Uses three distinct types of framing effect and the hypothesis identified by Leven et al (1998). Studies the reliability of these effects across samples of subjects in the USA and Australia. Shows that, for two of the three types, attribute framing and risky choice framing, the effects were strong and almost identical in the two samples. Highlights a significant effect for the US sample, but not the Australian sample, for the third type, goal framing. Discusses results in terms of the reliability of the effects and their potential for revealing cross‐cultural differences in values.
The myelodysplastic syndromes: predictive value of eight prognostic systems in 143 cases from a single institution.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Despite the fact that several prognostic systems for myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) have been proposed, few studies have been designed to test their effectiveness in independent patient populations. The aim of this study was to compare the prognostic value of 8 previously described prognostic systems in a series of consecutive MDS patients observed at a single institution over a 10-year period. DESIGN AND METHODS One hundred and forty-three patients were diagnosed as having myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) according to the French-American-British (FAB) criteria. They were studied retrospectively in order to assess the prognostic value of the FAB classification and 7 other prognostic systems. RESULTS On the basis of data at diagnosis, all investigated systems effectively stratified patients into groups with different life expectancies and identified a subset of patients with poor clinical outcome. However, the systems had different outcomes concerning median survival of patients classified as low-risk, ranging from less than 3 years for the Mufti scoring system to more than 8 years for the FAB classification modified according to Rosati et al. Moreover, patient distribution into different risk categories was quite different with the different prognostic systems. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSIONS When applied to our case series, some of the prognostic systems had a much lower prognostic value than in the patient population from which they derived. This evidence suggests that testing of prognostic systems in independent case series is necessary before using the systems in clinical practice.
Racism and Disparities in Women’s Use of the Depo-Provera Injection in the Contemporary USA

In the 1960s and 1970s widespread reports of sterilization abuse directed at women of color in the USA emerged. While such cases involved coercive or deceptive surgical sterilizations, new contraceptive technologies that temporarily sterilize women (Norplant and Depo-Provera) were approved for use in the US market by the state in the 1990s. In this study, I offer the concept of sterilization racism to explain the pattern and prevalence of ‘racial’/ethnic disparities in Depo-Provera use among non-sterile US women age 18 to 44. The data used for the statistical analyses come from the 2002 and 2004 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. After adjustment for potential confounders, I find that African American and American Indian women are more likely to use Depo-Provera than European American women. I also include a discussion of the complexities of studying racism with data on ‘racial’/ethnic disparities that were not designed for this purpose.
A Pilot Study of a Support Group for Children in Divorcing Families: Aiding Community Program Development and Marking Pathways to Resilience

The effectiveness of a community-based group for children with divorcing parents was evaluated. Using seven parent–child dyads, children's perceptions were assessed pre- and postprogram and parents' perspectives were assessed at group culmination. Results demonstrate a significant increase in children's perceptions of their family situation as “normal. ” Better coping ability, fewer feelings of self-blame, and feeling less triangulated by parents was also reported postprogram, although these results were not statistically significant. Parents reported the intervention to be effective. Initial evidence for the effectiveness of the program was demonstrated by balancing community program goals, using children's and parents' perspectives, and considering clinical versus statistical significance.
A Generative Theory of Tonal Music

This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple levels of structure from brain to behavior to culture; the semantics of internal and external worlds and the role of emotion; and the evolution and development of language. The book offers specially commissioned expositions of current research accessible both to experts across disciplines and to non-experts. These chapters provide the background for reports by groups of specialists that chart current controversies and future directions of research on each theme. The book looks beyond mere auditory experience, probing the embodiment that links speech to gesture and music to dance. The study of the brains of monkeys and songbirds illuminates hypotheses on the evolution of brain mechanisms that support music and language, while the study of infants calibrates the developmental timetable of their capacities. The result is a unique book that will interest any reader seeking to learn more about language or music and will appeal especially to readers intrigued by the relationships of language and music with each other and with the brain. ContributorsFrancisco Aboitiz, Michael A. Arbib, Annabel J. Cohen, Ian Cross, Peter Ford Dominey, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Leonardo Fogassi, Jonathan Fritz, Thomas Fritz, Peter Hagoort, John Halle, Henkjan Honing, Atsushi Iriki, Petr Janata, Erich Jarvis, Stefan Koelsch, Gina Kuperberg, D. Robert Ladd, Fred Lerdahl, Stephen C. Levinson, Jerome Lewis, Katja Liebal, Jonatas Manzolli, Bjorn Merker, Lawrence M. Parsons, Aniruddh D. Patel, Isabelle Peretz, David Poeppel, Josef P. Rauschecker, Nikki Rickard, Klaus Scherer, Gottfried Schlaug, Uwe Seifert, Mark Steedman, Dietrich Stout, Francesca Stregapede, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Laurel Trainor, Sandra E. Trehub, Paul Verschure