Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measurements and Modeling of Transient Blood Flow Perturbations Induced by Brief Somatosensory Stimulation

Proper interpretation of BOLD fMRI and other common functional imaging methods requires an understanding of neurovascular coupling. We used laser speckle-contrast optical imaging to measure blood-flow responses in rat somatosensory cortex elicited by brief (2 s) forepaw stimulation. Results show a large increase in local blood flow speed followed by an undershoot and possible late-time oscillations. The blood flow measurements were modeled using the impulse response of a simple linear network, a four-element windkessel. This model yielded excellent fits to the detailed time courses of activated regions. The four-element windkessel model thus provides a simple explanation and interpretation of the transient blood-flow response, both its initial peak and its late-time behavior.
Infectious complications associated with alemtuzumab use for lymphoproliferative disorders.

BACKGROUND Alemtuzumab is an emerging therapy for refractory lymphoproliferative disorders. The associated long-term risks of infection remain poorly defined. METHODS From July 2001 through December 2003, all patients who received alemtuzumab for the treatment of lymphoproliferative disorders at 1 institution underwent a retrospective evaluation to document infectious complications until death or end of follow-up in October 2004. Alemtuzumab recipients who underwent allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation were compared with a concurrent cohort who also underwent allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation but did not receive alemtuzumab. RESULTS Twenty-seven patients were identified (21 with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and 6 with plasma cell disorders). The overall mortality was 37%, with 7 of 10 deaths being related to infection. Significant opportunistic infections occurred in 9 patients (43%) with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, including cytomegalovirus, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, adenovirus, toxoplasmosis, and acanthamaebiasis. Thirty nonopportunistic infections in 22 patients (82%) were also identified. The 3 deaths related to nonopportunistic infections all involved Enterococcus species bacteremia. When compared with a concurrent chronic lymphocytic leukemia cohort that underwent allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, alemtuzumab recipients had an incidence of cytomegalovirus reactivation of 66.7% (6 of 9 patients), compared with 37% in the non-alemtuzumab group (10 of 27 patients; P = .15), and an incidence of post-transplant opportunistic infections (excluding herpesviruses) of 44.4% (compared with 29.6% in the non-alemtuzumab group; P = .41). CONCLUSIONS Despite the use of herpesvirus and Pneumocystis pneumonia prophylaxis, serious infectious complications occur in patients receiving alemtuzumab for lymphoproliferative disorders. Infectious complications are more varied and diverse in patients receiving alemtuzumab than has been reported in trials to date.
Complex I Function Is Defective in Complex IV-deficient Caenorhabditis elegans*

Cytochrome c oxidase (COX) is hypothesized to be an important regulator of oxidative phosphorylation. However, no animal phenotypes have been described due to genetic defects in nuclear-encoded subunits of COX. We knocked down predicted homologues of COX IV and COX Va in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Animals treated with W09C5.8 (COX IV) or Y37D8A.14 (COX Va) RNA interference had shortened lifespans and severe defects in mitochondrial respiratory chain function. Amount and activity of complex IV, as well as supercomplexes that included complex IV, were decreased in COX-deficient worms. The formation of supercomplex I:III was not dependent on COX. We found that COX deficiencies decreased intrinsic complex I enzymatic activity, as well as complex I-III enzymatic activity. However, overall amounts of complex I were not decreased in these animals. Surprisingly, intrinsic complex I enzymatic activity is dependent on the presence of complex IV, despite no overall decrease in the amount of complex I. Presumably the association of complex I with complex IV within the supercomplex I:III:IV enhances electron flow through complex I. Our results indicate that reduction of a single subunit within the electron transport chain can affect multiple enzymatic steps of electron transfer, including movement within a different protein complex. Patients presenting with multiple defects of electron transport may, in fact, harbor a single genetic defect.
Changes in Protein Tyrosine Phosphorylation in the Rat Brain after Cerebral Ischemia in a Model of Ischemic Tolerance

A brief period of sublethal cerebral ischemia, followed by several days of recovery, renders the brain resistant to a subsequent lethal ischemic insult, a phenomenon termed ischemic preconditioning or tolerance. Ischemic tolerance was established in the rat two-vessel occlusion model of ischemia, induced by occlusion of both carotid arteries in combination with hypotension. Ischemic preconditioning (3 minutes) provided maximal neuroprotection when induced 2 days prior to a lethal ischemic insult of 9-minute duration. Neuroprotection persisted for at least 8 weeks. Since neurotransmission has been implicated in ischemic cell death, the effect of ischemic preconditioning on tyrosine phosphorylation of proteins and on the levels of glutamate receptor subunits in hippocampus and neocortex was studied. Regional levels of tyrosine phosphorylation of proteins in general and the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor subunit NR2 in particular are markedly enhanced after ischemia in nonconditioned brains, in both the synaptosomal fraction and the whole-tissue homogenate of rat neocortex and hippocampus, but recover to control levels only in the preconditioned brain. Ischemic preconditioning selectively induces a decrease in the levels of the NR2A and NR2B subunits and a modest decrease in the levels of NR1 subunit proteins in the synaptosomal fraction of the neocortex but not hippocampus after the second lethal ischemia. It was concluded that ischemic preconditioning prevents a persistent change in cell signaling as evidenced by the tyrosine phosphorylation of proteins after the second lethal ischemic insult, which may abrogate the activation of detrimental cellular processes leading to cell death.
The social reproduction of institutionalracism: internationally recruited nursesâexperiences of the British health services

In an increasingly competitive global labour market, more countries with nursing shortages are recruiting from abroad. The UK is no exception. However, little research has been conducted into the experiences of racism and discrimination among internationally recruited nurses in the UK. The empirical data in this paper contribute to understanding how immigrant workers from Black and other minority ethnic backgrounds experience working in British health services and provide empirically grounded accounts of individual and institutional racism. A total of 67 internationally recruited nurses (IRNs) participated in 11 focus group interviews which were held at three sites in the UK: Leeds, Cardiff and London. These focus groups were audio-taped and analysed using NVivo, version 1.3. In focus groups, IRNs described discrimination and racism as central to their experiences as IRNs working in the UK. This study demonstrates the ways in which racism and institutional racism work in healthcare practice from the perspective of IRNs and how they cope with these negative experiences. The data suggest that racism and institutional racism are understood in more complex ways than previously reported and that institutional racism may be reproduced through negative stereotypes of foreigners and professional hierarchies which are forms of structured social relations. These structured social relations are reproduced in complex professional relationships and hierarchies, in the meaning of ethnicity and stereotypes for individuals and the relationship between racist attitudes and racist behaviours. Based on these findings, we argue that racism and institutional racism are reproduced through personal and interpersonal as well as structured social relationships, and provide working examples of the concept of institutional racism in practice. We discuss the implications of the findings for equal opportunities policies in the health services.
Highly informative nature of inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) sequences amplified using tri- and tetra-nucleotide primers from DNA of cauliflower (Brassica oleracea var. botrytis L.).

Inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) sequences as molecular markers can lead to the detection of polymorphism and also be a new approach to the study of SSR distribution and frequency. In this study, ISSR amplification with nonanchored primer was performed in closely related cauliflower lines. Fourty-four different amplified fragments were sequenced. Sequences of PCR products are delimited by the expected motifs and number of repeats, which validates the ISSR nonanchored primer amplification technique. DNA and amino acids homology search between internal sequences and databases (i) show that the majority of the internal regions of ISSR had homologies with known sequences, mainly with genes coding for proteins implicated in DNA interaction or gene expression, which reflected the significance of amplified ISSR sequences and (ii) display long and numerous homologies with the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. ISSR amplifications revealed a high conservation of these sequences between Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica oleracea var. botrytis. Thirty-four of the 44 ISSRs had one or several perfect or imperfect internal microsatellites. Such distribution indicates the presence in genomes of highly concentrated regions of SSR, or "SSR hot spots. " Among the four nonanchored primers used in this study, trinucleotide repeats, and especially (CAA)5, were the most powerful primers for ISSR amplifications regarding the number of amplified bands, level of polymorphism, and their nature.
Clinical characteristics of individuals with germline mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2: analysis of 10,000 individuals.

PURPOSE To assess the characteristics that correlate best with the presence of mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 in individuals tested in a clinical setting. PATIENTS AND METHODS The results of 10,000 consecutive gene sequence analyses performed to identify mutations anywhere in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (7,461 analyses) or for three specific Ashkenazi Jewish founder mutations (2,539 analyses) were correlated with personal and family history of cancer, ancestry, invasive versus noninvasive breast neoplasia, and sex. RESULTS Mutations were identified in 1,720 (17.2%) of the 10,000 individuals tested, including 968 (20%) of 4,843 women with breast cancer and 281 (34%) of 824 with ovarian cancer, and the prevalence of mutations was correlated with specific features of the personal and family histories of the individuals tested. Mutations were as prevalent in high-risk women of African (25 [19%] of 133) and other non-Ashkenazi ancestries as those of European ancestry (712 [16%] of 4379) and were significantly less prevalent in women diagnosed before 50 years of age with ductal carcinoma in situ than with invasive breast cancer (13% v 24%, P =.0007). Of the 74 mutations identified in individuals of Ashkenazi ancestry through full sequence analysis of both BRCA1 and BRCA2, 16 (21.6%) were nonfounder mutations, including seven in BRCA1 and nine in BRCA2. Twenty-one (28%) of 76 men with breast cancer carried mutations, of which more than one third occurred in BRCA1. CONCLUSION Specific features of personal and family history can be used to assess the likelihood of identifying a mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2 in individuals tested in a clinical setting.
Expression of horseradish peroxidase in transgenic tobacco.

Peroxidases are common oxidoreductases present in plants, animals and micro-organisms. Plant peroxidases are classified as basic, neutral or acidic enzymes, depending on their profiles of elution during ion-exchange column chromatography or isoelectric points [ 11. Horseradish (Amtoru~hru sticuna) peroxidases (HRPs; EC 1.1 1.1.7), are probably the best characterized of these enzymes. They are believed to be involved in plant responses to a number of biotic and abiotic stresses, notably in the disruption of free radicals and active derivatives of oxygen. The effects of these molecules have been well described [2], and in general the presence of these compounds are ‘highly destructive’ for cell metabolism. However, these oxygen derivatives are involved in halogenation and hydroxylation reactions in peroxisomes and in the cell wall, suggesting that the plant cell needs a fine regulation between production and destruction of oxygen radicals. A key to the comprehension of the role of peroxidase activity in this and other stress responses could be the study of the effect of modified expression and targeting of peroxidase activity in transgenic plants. The present report describes the production of such tobacco plants using a synthetic HRP gene [ 31, with a range of regulatory and targeting sequences.
The Effects of Teacher’s Employment of Language Learning Software on Iranian Pre-Intermediate EFL Learners’ Autonomy” has

There are arguments by practitioners for and against applying Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) to improve learner autonomy. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of teacher’s employment of language learning software on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners’ autonomy. To carry out the study, 60 participants were selected from among pre-intermediate students studying English at a boarding school in Khooshab, Sabzevar, Iran. After homogenizing the participants, they were randomly assigned to two groups as the experimental and the control groups. Prior to the treatments, an autonomy pre-test was administered to all the participants. Then, the experimental group received instruction using language learning software and the control group received traditional instruction using printed text materials. Each group received 16 sessions of 90 minutes of instruction and the participants took an autonomy post-test at the end of sessions. The data were collected for the research and then subjected to the appropriate statistical procedures. The results showed that teacher’s employment of language learning software had a Received December 22, 2015; Accepted March 5, 2016. © 2016 Khate Sefid Press International Journal of Language and Applied Linguistics 2016; 2(1):83-98 Published online March 15, 2016 (http://www.ijlal.ir) ISSN: 2383-0514 (Online) © 2016 Khate Sefid Press 84 significant impact on improving learners’ autonomy in the experimental group. Also, the participants of the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in autonomy.
Group Formation, Participant Retention, and Group Disbandment in a Men's Mutual Help Organization

Representatives of an international men’s peer-led mutual help organization were surveyed to determine rates of group formation and disbandment, rates of individual participation and retention, and factors associated with long lasting and effective groups. From 1990 to 1998, the organization’s center gained a net of about 3 groups and 22 members per year. Median survival time of groups was estimated to be 41⁄2 years. Over 60% of the groups disbanded within 3 years of formation. Groups perceived to be more effec tive and that were initiated early in the history of the organization were much less likely to disband. Members most commonly dropped out of a group because of time conflicts and difficulty traveling to meetings. Older members were less likely to drop out of a group. Implications of the findings for the survival and development of mutual help groups and organizations
Type-theoretical semantics with coercive subtyping

In the formal semantics based on modern type theories, common nouns are interpreted as types, rather than as functional subsets of entities as in Montague grammar. This brings about important advantages in linguistic interpretations but also leads to a limitation of expressive power because there are fewer operations on types as compared with those on functional subsets. The theory of coercive subtyping adequately extends the modern type theories with a notion of subtyping and, as shown in this paper, plays a very useful role in making type theories more expressive for formal semantics. In particular, it gives a satisfactory treatment of the type-theoretic interpretation of modified common nouns and allows straightforward interpretations of interesting linguistic phenomena such as copredication, whose interpretations have been found difficult in a Montagovian setting. We shall also study some type-theoretic constructs that provide useful representational tools for formal lexical semantics, including how the so-called dot-types for representing logical polysemy may be expressed in a type theory with coercive subtyping.
Organizing New Product Development Projects in Strategic Alliances

We utilize research on alliance governance structures and on new product development to study how partners working under an existing alliance governance structure will organize a new product development project. Initially, we consider a contractual alliance doing multiple projects and argue that the critical organization decisions for any project are whether one or both partners should be involved, whether the partners should work with little or considerable interaction, and whether decision-making authority should reside in a project manager or be consensual. Based on the answers to these questions, we identify at least four viable project organization options. We next examine the option that would be selected under conditions involving the alliance's newness, whether a cooperative history exists, and the distribution of skills for the project. Under each condition, we compare the costs and benefits of the options with respect to the underlying transaction costs, potential for learning, and the ability to contribute to developing a social relations network. By allowing variations in time-to-market pressures, the tacit knowledge that a partner can obtain from the project, and the partners' need to work closely together on future projects, we can determine the points at which costs and benefits indicate a switch from one organization option to another. Finally, we indicate how to adjust the theory for it to apply to a contractual alliance doing only one project and to an institutional alliance such as a joint venture.
Exploiting Different Cognition Levels of Channel Information in Transmission Scheduling of Two Sources Over Time Varying Wireless Channels

In this work, we investigate the methods to optimally exploit different cognition levels of channel information in transmission control for interfering sources. We consider a network that consists of two transmitter-receiver pairs which operate over time varying channels. We obtain the optimal scheduling techniques which maximize the expected weighted sum-rate of the network per time slot. The scheduling decisions depend on the information about the channels between nodes. Due to energy and timing overhead, learning instantaneous channels states may be costly or infeasible. We consider the optimal scheduling policies in the following cases: (1) when all the channels are perfectly measured, (2) when all the channels are measured with some error probability, (3) when delayed information about the channels is known using previous time slots transmissions, (4) when the channels are measured infrequently, (5) when the channels are not measured at all, or (6) when the decisions are taken in a distributed manner. In each of the cases, we exploit the channel characteristics to formulate the scheduling optimization problem. We derive the formulas for the belief about the channels to be in a certain state at a certain time slot. We formulate the problem of finding the optimal policy in the case of availability of delayed information as a partially observable Markovian decision problem (POMDP). In the case of distributed scheduling, we formulate the problem as a quadratic program. We compare the optimal performance levels in all the cases numerically and thus evaluate the effect of channel state information knowledge.
Introduction of statistical information in a syntactic analyzer for document image recognition

This paper presents an improvement to document layout analysis systems, offering a possible solution to Sayre's paradox (which states that an element "must be recognized before it can be segmented; and it must be segmented before it can be recognized"). This improvement, based on stochastic parsing, allows integration of statistical information, obtained from recognizers, during syntactic layout analysis. We present how this fusion of numeric and symbolic information in a feedback loop can be applied to syntactic methods to improve document description expressiveness. To limit combinatorial explosion during exploration of solutions, we devised an operator that allows optional activation of the stochastic parsing mechanism. Our evaluation on 1250 handwritten business letters shows this method allows the improvement of global recognition scores.
A General Purpose Feature Extractor for Light Detection and Ranging Data

Feature extraction is a central step of processing Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data. Existing detectors tend to exploit characteristics of specific environments: corners and lines from indoor (rectilinear) environments, and trees from outdoor environments. While these detectors work well in their intended environments, their performance in different environments can be poor. We describe a general purpose feature detector for both 2D and 3D LIDAR data that is applicable to virtually any environment. Our method adapts classic feature detection methods from the image processing literature, specifically the multi-scale Kanade-Tomasi corner detector. The resulting method is capable of identifying highly stable and repeatable features at a variety of spatial scales without knowledge of environment, and produces principled uncertainty estimates and corner descriptors at same time. We present results on both software simulation and standard datasets, including the 2D Victoria Park and Intel Research Center datasets, and the 3D MIT DARPA Urban Challenge dataset.
Mechanisms of Middle ear aeration: Anatomic and physiologic evidence in primates

Proper aeration is a prerequisite for normal middle ear function in all terrestrial mammals. Our previous studies in primates provided anatomic evidence of neural circuits between the middle ear, brain, and eustachian tube by which central respiratory neurons can control middle ear aeration. Yet mechanisms that regulate middle ear aeration remain poorly understood. This study extends our research by examining maturation of these neural circuits, and investigating their underlying physiology. Ultrastructural examination of tympanic nerves, the afferent limb of the neural circuit, in an age‐graded series of cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) showed substantial differences between newborn, young, and adult animals. These included a twofold increase in average myelin thickness, and greater than threefold increase in the ratio of myelinated to un‐myelinated fibers from newborn to adult animals. These marked developmental changes may translate into functional differences in regulation of middle ear aeration in young animals, and possibly explain the extraordinarily high incidence of middle ear disease in early childhood. In physiologic experiments, bilateral electromyographic responses were recorded from eustachian tube muscles, the efferent limb of the neural circuit, in adult monkeys after ipsilateral stimulation of the tympanic nerve. Response latencies were 9 to 28 msec, similar to those of other multi‐synaptic bilateral brainstem reflexes. These physiologic data strongly suggest a concept of active control of middle ear aeration by respiratory neurons in the brain.