Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Abiotic Stresses Cause Differential Regulation of Alternative Splice Forms of GATA Transcription Factor in Rice

The GATA gene family is one of the most conserved families of transcription factors, playing a significant role in different aspects of cellular processes, in organisms ranging from fungi to angiosperms. GATA transcription factors are DNA-binding proteins, having a class IV zinc-finger motif CX2CX17−20CX2C followed by a highly basic region and are known to bind a consensus sequence WGATAR. In plants, GATAs are known to be involved in light-dependent gene regulation and nitrate assimilation. However, a comprehensive analysis of these GATA gene members has not yet been highlighted in rice when subjected to environmental stresses. In this study, we present an overview of the GATA gene family in rice (OsGATA) in terms of, their chromosomal distribution, domain architecture, and phylogeny. Our study has revealed the presence of 28 genes, encoding 35 putative GATA transcription factors belonging to seven subfamilies in the rice genome. Transcript abundance analysis in contrasting genotypes of rice—IR64 (salt sensitive) and Pokkali (salt tolerant), for individual GATA members indicated their differential expression in response to various abiotic stresses such as salinity, drought, and exogenous ABA. One of the members of subfamily VII—OsGATA23a, emerged as a multi-stress responsive transcription factor giving elevated expression levels in response to salinity and drought. ABA also induces expression of OsGATA23a by 35 and 55-folds in IR64 and Pokkali respectively. However, OsGATA23b, an alternative splice variant of OsGATA23 did not respond to above-mentioned stresses. Developmental regulation of the OsGATA genes based on a publicly available microarray database showed distinct expression patterns for most of the GATA members throughout different stages of rice development. Altogether, our results suggest inherent roles of diverse OsGATA factors in abiotic stress signaling and also throw some light on the tight regulation of the spliced variants of OsGATA genes in response to different environmental conditions.
Symptoms and psychosocial situation in schizophrenia: A prospective follow-up study

A representative sample of 156 new schizophrenia patients (DSM III) were examined at their first contact for psychosis and re-examined 2 and 5 years thereafter. The five clinical symptom dimensions (negative, delusional, hallucinatory, disorganization, depressive) described in an earlier study were correlated with the patients' psychosocial situation at each point of examination. The negative dimension was closely and comprehensively associated with the patients' actual psychosocial situation at all phases of the illness, and other dimensions (disorganization, delusions, hallucinations, and depression) at the 2nd and 5th follow-up year. Heterosexual and work development were the major predictors of clinical dimensions. On the other hand, the negative dimension and auditory hallucinations predicted a poor psychosocial outcome, and depressive and manic grandiose dimension a good one. The negative syndrome found in chronically hospitalized patients may be caused or modulated by both environmental and biologi.
ILK is required for the assembly of matrix-forming adhesions and capillary morphogenesis in endothelial cells

Integrins play a key role in regulating endothelial cell survival, migration and differentiated function during angiogenic blood-vessel remodeling. Integrin-linked kinase (ILK) is a multidomain protein that interacts with the cytoplasmic tail of integrin β subunits and is thought to participate in integrin-mediated signal transduction. We report here that attenuation of ILK expression in cultured bovine aortic endothelial cells by RNA interference had marked effects on surface distribution of α5β1 integrin and the organization of cell-matrix adhesions characterized by the disappearance of fibrillar (3D-like) adhesions that are rich in α5β1 and paxillin, and associated fibrillar fibronectin matrix. This defect was not caused by a decrease in fibronectin mRNA levels or by intracellular retention of the protein. Adhesion to surface-adsorbed matrix proteins based on β1 and β3 integrin was enhanced following ILK depletion, whereas cell spreading, migration and multilayer alignment into capillary-like structures on Matrigel were impaired. We conclude that ILK is an important regulator of the endothelial phenotype and vascular network formation by directing the assembly and/or maturation of α5β1-competent matrix-forming adhesions.
Predicting Teacher Performance With Test Scores and Grade Point Average: A Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the degree to which teachers’ test scores and their performance in preparation programs as measured by their collegiate grade point average (GPA) predicted their teaching competence. Results from 123 studies that yielded 715 effect sizes were analyzed, and the mediating effects of test and GPA type, criterion type, teaching level, service level, and decade of data collection were considered. It was found that test scores were at best modestly related to teaching competence and that performance in preparation programs was a significantly better predictor of teaching skill. Results revealed that test scores likely do not provide additional information beyond preservice performance to safeguard the public from incompetent teaching.
An in vitro and in vivo Comparison of the Effect of Stevia rebaudiana Extracts on Different Caries-Related Variables: A Randomized Controlled Trial Pilot Study

The effect of Stevia extracts on in vitro Streptococcus mutans biofilm formation and in vivo plaque pH was evaluated in this paper. Three 10% solutions containing stevioside, rebaudioside A or sucrose were prepared. MTT assay was used to evaluate microbiological counts in vitro. Twenty volunteers rinsed for 1 min with each solutions, and plaque pH was measured at 7 time points after each rinse. Higher in vitro S. mutans biofilm formation was observed in sucrose solution (p < 0.01). After 5, 10, 15 and 30 min, the sucrose in vivo rinse produced a statistically significantly lower pH value compared to the Stevia extracts (F = 99.45, p < 0.01). Stevia extracts can be considered nonacidogenic.
Innovations in Practice: DISCOVER CBT workshops for 16-18-year-olds: development of an open-access intervention for anxiety and depression in inner-city youth.

BACKGROUND Anxiety and depression are common in adolescence but access to effective intervention is limited. METHOD Open-access CBT workshops were developed in consultation with 16-18-year-olds. Rates of uptake, pre-post outcomes and acceptability of workshops were assessed in an uncontrolled study. RESULTS Participants (N = 31) were predominantly from black and minority ethnic groups and three quarters had not previously sought psychological support. Improvements were observed in self-reported anxiety, depression and self-esteem at 12-week follow-up. High levels of satisfaction were reported along with suggestions for further programme development. CONCLUSIONS Community-based CBT workshops show promise in terms of accessibility and acceptability for older adolescents who may not otherwise engage in mental health services.
Robust point matching method by vector structures

A novel robust point matching method is presented in this paper, which can find corresponding point pairs effectively via 2D or 3D points' relative positions. There the relative positions of point sets which come from the same moving rigid object are invariable. To describe the relative position, a vector structure is constructed by connecting one point to the rest. If two points in different sets is a matching pair, their vector structure should be similar, in which the corresponding vectors will have approximate lengths and mutual angles. Our method is based on this kind of similarity. Firstly we apply an algorithm based on Hausdorff Distance to choose the candidate matching pairs for computation reduction. To compare the two structures' similarity, both lengths and mutual angles of vectors should be considered. By finding a benchmark vector, we acquire mutual angles of vectors in the structure; then a similar coefficient is presented to determine if the two structures is a matching pair. After calculating all the similar coefficients of the candidate pairs, a coefficient matrix is built. We give a search strategy to elect matching pairs from the matrix. Through the experiments, it is proved that this method can keep low mismatching ratio even when there are quite large position errors and lots of disturbing points. The method can be applied well to two or three dimensional situation.
Exposure to inhomogeneous static magnetic field beneficially affects allergic inflammation in a murine model

Previous observations suggest that static magnetic field (SMF)-exposure acts on living organisms partly through reactive oxygen species (ROS) reactions. In this study, we aimed to define the impact of SMF-exposure on ragweed pollen extract (RWPE)-induced allergic inflammation closely associated with oxidative stress. Inhomogeneous SMF was generated with an apparatus validated previously providing a peak-to-peak magnetic induction of the dominant SMF component 389 mT by 39 T m−1 lateral gradient in the in vivo and in vitro experiments, and 192 mT by 19 T m−1 in the human study at the 3 mm target distance. Effects of SMF-exposure were studied in a murine model of allergic inflammation and also in human provoked skin allergy. We found that even a single 30-min exposure of mice to SMF immediately following intranasal RWPE challenge significantly lowered the increase in the total antioxidant capacity of the airways and decreased allergic inflammation. Repeated (on 3 consecutive days) or prolonged (60 min) exposure to SMF after RWPE challenge decreased the severity of allergic responses more efficiently than a single 30-min treatment. SMF-exposure did not alter ROS production by RWPE under cell-free conditions, while diminished RWPE-induced increase in the ROS levels in A549 epithelial cells. Results of the human skin prick tests indicated that SMF-exposure had no significant direct effect on provoked mast cell degranulation. The observed beneficial effects of SMF are likely owing to the mobilization of cellular ROS-eliminating mechanisms rather than direct modulation of ROS production by pollen NAD(P)H oxidases.
Development of a cryopreservation protocol for Leydig cells.

BACKGROUND In the present study, we describe a procedure to cryopreserve the postnatal members of the Leydig cell lineage, including progenitor (PLC), immature (ILC) and adult (ALC) Leydig cells from, respectively 21-, 35- and 90-day-old rats. METHODS The cells were resuspended in a culture medium supplemented with 1% bovine serum albumin (Dulbecco's Modified Eagle's Medium [DMEM]/F12) to a final concentration of 2 x 10(6)cells/ml and the effects of varying concentrations of dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) (5, 10, 15 or 20%) were assessed after freezing at -70 degrees C and then storing in liquid nitrogen. After 12 months of frozen storage, these cells were thawed rapidly at 37 degrees C and Trypan Blue exclusion staining and attachment to culture dishes were assessed as measures of viability. RESULTS The trypan blue exclusion and attachment rates for Leydig cell stages were around 85% in the presence of 15% DMSO. After frozen storage, Leydig cell steroidogenic capacity in response to a range of LH doses, (0.01-100 ng/ml) was unchanged compared with freshly isolated control cells. Furthermore, the steady-state mRNA levels for Leydig cell specific transcripts were maintained. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that purified rat Leydig cells at a range of developmental stages can be frozen and that the cryopreserved cells retain normal function.
Feminist Theory and Educational Policy: How Gender Has Been “Involved” in Family School Choice Debates

F ew educational reform movements have attracted more attention than choice programs in education—programs that, as a result of the reformulation of regulations governing public schools, provide parents with educational options in the forms of school vouchers, charter school programs, homeschooling, interand intradistrict enrollment options, and other alternatives to the traditional public school system. Using school choice as a lens through which to review mothers’ involvement in educational reform, this article examines how gendered assumptions about families and markets pervade discussions about school choice, particularly those about homeschooling. Despite an abundance of research on school choice (e.g., Good and Braden 2000; Yancey 2000; Poetter and KnightAbowitz 2001), few studies have considered the gender politics of parents’ incorporation or the fact that school-choice programs are formulated in ways that often reveal gendered and social-classed assumptions about families, employment, markets, and education. Why? Why, when we have so many excellent accounts of the moral and structural constraints that mothers disproportionately face and of women as mothers and caretakers in the realm of education, have critical realist and feminist perspectives been so lacking in research on educational reform? Why, when some policy researchers are clearly concerned with “welfare mothers” and “deadbeat dads” (e.g., Goodwin 1997; Mensing, French, and Fuller 2000), does gender escape consideration when the subject turns from thinking about schools as mechanisms for securing students’ social welfare to thinking about schools as efficient structures that provide parents with educational options for their children?
Breast Cancer Characterization Based on Image Classification of Tissue Sections Visualized under Low Magnification

Rapid assessment of tissue biopsies is a critical issue in modern histopathology. For breast cancer diagnosis, the shape of the nuclei and the architectural pattern of the tissue are evaluated under high and low magnifications, respectively. In this study, we focus on the development of a pattern classification system for the assessment of breast cancer images captured under low magnification (×10). Sixty-five regions of interest were selected from 60 images of breast cancer tissue sections. Texture analysis provided 30 textural features per image. Three different pattern recognition algorithms were employed (kNN, SVM, and PNN) for classifying the images into three malignancy grades: I–III. The classifiers were validated with leave-one-out (training) and cross-validation (testing) modes. The average discrimination efficiency of the kNN, SVM, and PNN classifiers in the training mode was close to 97%, 95%, and 97%, respectively, whereas in the test mode, the average classification accuracy achieved was 86%, 85%, and 90%, respectively. Assessment of breast cancer tissue sections could be applied in complex large-scale images using textural features and pattern classifiers. The proposed technique provides several benefits, such as speed of analysis and automation, and could potentially replace the laborious task of visual examination.
Association of Quadriceps Muscle Fat With Isometric Strength Measurements in Healthy Males Using Chemical Shift Encoding-Based Water-Fat Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract Magnetic resonance–based assessment of quadriceps muscle fat has been proposed as surrogate marker in sarcopenia, osteoarthritis, and neuromuscular disorders. We presently investigated the association of quadriceps muscle fat with isometric strength measurements in healthy males using chemical shift encoding-based water-fat magnetic resonance imaging. Intermuscular adipose tissue fraction and intramuscular proton density fat fraction correlated significantly (P < 0.05) with isometric strength (up to r = −0.83 and −0.87, respectively). Reproducibility of intermuscular adipose tissue fraction and intramuscular proton density fat fraction was 1.5% and 5.7%, respectively.
Change in Higher Education: Not Enough, or Too Much?

Change is a perennial struggle for campuses. Trustees, presidents, policymakers, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community groups all seek to alter some aspect of colleges and universities. Common wisdom is that higher education faculty, staff, and administrators do not want to change and are slow to innovate. This article examines the challenges of change from a macro perspective, using insights from studies of change and leadership, and the perspective of change agents, to provide a new hypothesis of why change is difficult: the presence of too many simultaneous and competing change initiatives, not the unwillingness of campus constituents to engage in change, prevent progress. Concentrated institutional action is impeded by too many stakeholders interested in different types of change, a lack of synergy among change initiatives, an inability to create priorities, leadership turnover, a pressure for leaders to innovate rather than implement, and the movement away from core institutional purposes in the pursuit of prestige.
A Comparison of American and Chinese Students' Perceived Stress, Coping Styles, and Health Promotion Practices

A cross-sectional survey utilized the Perceived Stress Scale, Brief COPE, and Health Promotion Lifestyle Profile II to ascertain similarities and differences between American (n=319) and Chinese (n=335) college students and between higher and lower stressed students in both samples. The results suggested the existence of a country difference in terms of perceived stress level, stress coping strategies, and health promotion practices. Similar differences were also observed between higher and lower stressed students, regardless of country.
Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century

length, demonstrating the extraordinarily difficult conditions of escape for enslaved men and women as well as the violent tactics used in their pursuit. Finally, a number of moments begin to construct conversations that never reached the courts, clues that approach the social and political understandings of the enslaved themselves. Martı́n Gangá’s conversation about age is one, and the description of oaths on the subsequent page is just as valuable (41–2). Within the evidence of one example, Barcia demonstrates how profoundly authorities misunderstood the content and cosmology of those they kept in slavery, whether in the discussion of suicide or the language of a suggestive song (118). Although Barcia might feel isolated in framing the book within the African diaspora – the book is ‘the first to consider the origins of slaves in Cuba as an integral part of the story of their resistance’, he asserts – a tremendous amount of collaboration awaits. Studies of the Yor ubá diaspora, the Igbo and Cross River Basin, and Central Africa in the Caribbean offer comparative context and specificity that promise to develop discussions of identity construction and politics in transatlantic contexts, with specificity across time and region. Barcia’s tantalizingly brief discussions of gender and dress, language and religious iconography can gain context from and enrich these debates in equal measure. Such work has tremendous social and political import, and the research promises more than discussion of military tactics or religion alone. Collaboration between the fields has been and promises to be fruitful in approaching more meaningful conceptions of all of the Atlantic actors. In the context of the massive demographic transformation of nineteenth-century Cuban slavery, scholars will likely heed Barcia’s call for its overwhelming salience. Throughout the text, Barcia adeptly highlights future directions in Cuban slavery studies. The ‘real magnitude of marronage in Colonial Cuba requires further study’, he observes (70); he calls for more research on coartación prior to 1860 (95); and he hopes for new research that will incorporate women and the elderly (133). Both for its research and insistently diasporic frame, Seeds of Insurrection contributes promisingly to this growing body of work.
Near optimal swarm deployment using Descriptor Functions

The article describes a novel approach for deployment of a swarm of heterogeneous autonomous vehicles. Each vehicle is treated as the agent of a network, which cooperates in order to cover a given area according to its own capabilities. A general framework is introduced, which aims at providing tools for solving a large class of coordination problems. The capabilities of each agent are modeled with Descriptor Functions; the sum of these functions constitutes the swarm's descriptor. The goal of the swarm is to match a desired descriptor, by minimizing an appropriate cost functional. A control law is proposed, which is capable of driving the agents towards the achievement of the goal. The existence of local minima and of a global minimum is discussed. Theoretical results on the existence of the global minimum are given. The Area Coverage problem is selected as a preliminary test for the algorithm. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Recovered Memory and the Daubert Criteria

Research during the past two decades has firmly established the reliability of the phenomenon of recovered memory. This review first highlights the strongest evidence for the phenomenon itself and discusses the survey, experimental, and biological evidence for the varying mechanisms that may underlie the phenomenon. Routes to traumatic amnesia from dissociative detachment (loss of emotional content leading to loss of factual content) and from dissociative compartmentalization (failure in integration) are discussed. Next, an argument is made that false memory is a largely orthogonal concept to recovered memory; the possibility of one phenomena is largely irrelevant to the potential for the other. Furthermore, some aspects of the false memory research offer supportive data for the recovered memory researcher. Finally, the issue of error rates in making the Daubert case is explored. It is concluded that the weight of the evidence should allow the recovered memory victim to come before the court.
Communicating Trust in E-Commerce Interactions

T he process of building a relationship with a consumer involves attracting a consumer to the place of business, engaging the consumer in the purchase decision-making process, transacting the exchange of goods and services for payment, fulfilling any obligations of warranty and follow-up service, and setting the stage for future interactions. That process relies on messages of an economic nature, but which serve a relational function as well. Indeed, virtual economic transactions share many of the characteristics of relationship building and maintenance displayed in interpersonal computer-mediated communication (CMC), including creating trust. Research shows that trust can develop over time (Walther & Burgoon, 1992) or swiftly (Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998). But, key differences exist between e-commerce interactions and noncommercial interactions. Several phenomena are absent from e-commerce interactions compared with face-to-face (FtF) interactions: The presumption of desired relational development is not present, the degree of intimacy possible in an e-commerce relationship is constrained, and the expansion of whatever e-relationship exists into other domains is limited, if even possible. The economic process embedded in commercial transactions is designed first to facilitate the transfer of goods and services for money. The development of a business-consumer relationship through a series of transactions may have positive benefits for both parties, but that relationship is a secondary outcome. The primary outcome is successful economic transactions. Yet, without some