Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender-specific effects of a phytogenic feed additive on performance, intestinal physiology and morphology in broiler chickens.

To date, most studies published were carried out on broilers of the same sex, and possible gender-specific effects of phytogenic substances have not been investigated so far. A 3 × 2 factorial study was performed to examine gender-specific effects of a PFA at two dietary levels (150, 1500 ppm) on growth performance, carcass traits and gastrointestinal attributes in broiler chickens versus an untreated control group. The addition of 150 ppm of the PFA led to a downregulation of trypsinogen mRNA in pancreas compared with the control group (p < 0.05). The number of goblet cells decreased in jejunum compared with the unsupplemented group, whereby this effect was more pronounced in male birds (p < 0.05). Furthermore, higher methylamine contents compared with the control group were measured (p < 0.01). In proximal ileum, female birds, supplemented with 150 ppm PFA, had lower crypt depths than their litters in the 1500 ppm treatment (p < 0.05). In distal ileum, villus height:crypt depth ratio was higher in birds fed the PFA at 150 ppm than in the control group (p < 0.05). The 1500 ppm dosage of the PFA increased jejunal histamine concentration compared with the negative control group (p < 0.05). Jejunal histamine concentration was also affected by the interaction PFA × sex (p < 0.05). Regardless of inclusion level, total amount of biogenic amines and other microbial metabolites in digesta samples was not affected by the PFA. These results demonstrate variable, partially gender-specific effects of the tested PFA. Although the supplementation of 150 ppm showed little effect on mRNA expression level of selected marker genes for nutrient digestion, beneficial effects on gut morphology were observed. The 10-fold higher dosage of the PFA did not adversely affect growth performance as well as most investigated parameters compared with the control group.
Evaluation as an Organisational Development Tool

What do you do with a failed evaluation? That is, can positive outcomes come out of a situation where a return on investment cannot be demonstrated? This study highlights the value of the ROI method in providing direction at the macro-level even when level 4 and 5 evaluations are unable to be ascertained. By taking a macro-level view, the researcher was able to provide positive feedback and recommendations for further organisational development.
Detecting and Explaining the Sleeper Effect

The sleeper effect occurs when the persuasiveness of a message increases with the passage of time. Although the existence of the sleeper effect has been demonstrated in several recent investigations, the conditions necessary for its observation have not been specified. In the present research, a current view of memory operation is offered to predict the occurrence of the sleeper effect. This view is examined in two experiments. The findings are interpreted as being congenial with the memory explanation. The status of sleeper effect research is assessed in light of these findings.
Glutamatergic Transmission in Opiate and Alcohol Dependence

Abstract: Both the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and central amygdala (CeA) are thought to play roles in tolerance to, and dependence on, abused drugs. Although our past studies in rat brain slices suggested a role for NMDA receptors (NMDARs) in NAcc neurons in the effects of acute and chronic opiate treatment, the cellular and molecular mechanisms remained unclear. Therefore, we examined the effects of morphine dependence on electrophysiological properties of NMDARs in freshly isolated NAcc neurons and on expression of mRNA coding for NR2A‐C subunits using single‐cell RT‐PCR. Chronic morphine did not alter the affinity for NMDAR agonists glutamate, homoquinolinate, or NMDA, but decreased the affinity of the coagonist glycine. Chronic morphine altered the NMDAR inhibition by two NMDAR antagonists, 7‐Cl‐kynurenate and ifenprodil, but not that by d‐APV or Mg2+. Chronic morphine accelerated the NMDA current desensitization rate in NAcc neurons. In single‐cell RT‐PCR, chronic morphine predominantly reduced the number of neurons expressing multiple NR2 subunits. Ethanol also alters NMDARs. We found that low ethanol concentrations (IC50= 13 mM) inhibited NMDA currents and NMDA‐EPSPs in most NAcc neurons in a slice preparation. NAcc neurons from ethanol‐dependent rats showed enhanced NMDA sensitivity. In CeA neurons, acute ethanol decreased (by 10–25%) non‐NMDA‐ and NMDA‐EPSPs in most neurons. In CeA neurons from ethanol‐dependent rats, acute ethanol decreased the non‐NMDA‐EPSPs to the same extent as in naïve rats, but inhibited (by 30–40%) NMDA‐EPSPs significantly more than in controls, suggesting sensitization to ethanol. Preliminary studies with microdialysis and real‐time PCR analysis support this idea: local ethanol administration in vivo had no effect on glutamate release, but chronic ethanol nearly tripled the expression of NR2B subunits (the most ethanol sensitive) in CeA. These combined findings suggest that changes in glutamatergic transmission in NAcc and CeA may underlie the neuroadaptions that lead to opiate and ethanol dependence.
Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital

Social resources like trust and shared identity make it easier for people to work and play together. Such social resources are sometimes referred to as social capital. Thirty years ago, Americans built social capital as a side effect of participation in civic organizations and social activities, including bowling leagues. Today, they do so far less frequently (Putnam 2000). HCI researchers and practitioners need to find new ways for people to interact that will generate even more social capital than bowling together does. A new theoretical construct, SocioTechnical Capital, provides a framework for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations.
Religion's ‘state effects’: Evangelical Christianity, political legitimacy, and state formation

Abstract The author argues in this paper that the ‘state effects’ generated by religious movements – even those operating at the margins of societies – require us to consider anew the impact of religious movements on state formation. In Sri Lanka, for instance, evangelicals are a minority. Yet their practice of proselytizing to new audiences was considered ‘unethical,’ generating opposition that was directed not only at them, but also at ruling elites for failing to stem what was seen as an intrusion of incompatible ‘Western’ ideals. Instead of considering how such Christian movements seek to ‘take over’ the functions of the ‘state’ as has been the experience in the United States and parts of Latin America, the author illustrates in this article why it makes more theoretical sense to ask how their activities impinge upon the conceptual frameworks through which the ‘state’ is imagined.
Image-Space Marker Detection and Recognition Using Projective Invariants

Visual marker systems have become an ubiquitous tool to supply a reference frame onto otherwise general scenes. Throughout the last decades, a wide range of different approaches have emerged, each one endowed with different strengths and limitations. Some techniques adopt tags that are optimized to reach a high accuracy in the recovered camera pose, others are based on designs that aim to maximizing the detection speed or minimizing the effect of occlusion on the detection process. Most of them, however, employ a two step procedure where an initial homography estimation is used to translate the marker from the image plane to an orthonormal world where it is validated and recognized. With this paper, we present a general purpose fiducial marker system that allows to perform both steps directly in image-space. Specifically, by exploiting projective invariants such as collinearity and cross ratios, we introduce a detection and recognition algorithm that is fast, accurate and moderately robust to occlusion. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in an extensive experimental section, where a comparison with a well-known baseline technique is presented.
Real-time Tracking of Player Identities in Team Sports

Sports video analysis is a common tool in team sports. It requires keeping track of player positions with corresponding identities during the game and analyzing the resulting trajectories at an abstract level. This thesis proposes a distributed cognitive system for automating this task. The tracking process includes information fusion and building as well as adapting models of the tracked players online; the system supports automated team behavior summarization and offers further analysis in a conceptualization framework. Our contributions are (1) an innovative, general multi-target tracking approach that outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms, (2) adaptive methods for identifying players based on appearance and/or spatial relations with the help of extended self-organizing neural networks, and (3) the implementation of a concrete real-time tracking system for recorded soccer games. Research results are validated in various challenging domains, including full-length soccer match videos and broadcasted material.
Part Analogies in Sets of Objects

Shape retrieval can benefit from analogies among similar shapes and parts of different objects. By partitioning an object to meaningful parts and finding analogous parts in other objects, sub-parts and partial match queries can be utilized. First by searching for similar parts in the context of their shape, and second by finding similarities even among objects that differ in their general shape and topology. Moreover, analogies can create the basis for semantic text-based searches: for instance, in this paper we demonstrate a simple annotation tool that carries tags of object parts from one model to many others using analogies. We partition 3D objects based on the shape-diameter function (SDF), and use it to find corresponding parts in other objects. We present results on finding analogies among numerous objects from shape repositories, and demonstrate sub-part queries using an implementation of a simple search and retrieval application.
Oxidative stress at low levels can induce clustered DNA lesions leading to NHEJ mediated mutations

DNA damage and mutations induced by oxidative stress are associated with various different human pathologies including cancer. The facts that most human tumors are characterized by large genome rearrangements and glutathione depletion in mice results in deletions in DNA suggest that reactive oxygen species (ROS) may cause gene and chromosome mutations through DNA double strand breaks (DSBs). However, the generation of DSBs at low levels of ROS is still controversial. In the present study, we show that H2O2 at biologically-relevant levels causes a marked increase in oxidative clustered DNA lesions (OCDLs) with a significant elevation of replication-independent DSBs. Although it is frequently reported that OCDLs are fingerprint of high-energy IR, our results indicate for the first time that H2O2, even at low levels, can also cause OCDLs leading to DSBs specifically in G1 cells. Furthermore, a reverse genetic approach revealed a significant contribution of the non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway in H2O2-induced DNA repair & mutagenesis. This genomic instability induced by low levels of ROS may be involved in spontaneous mutagenesis and the etiology of a wide variety of human diseases like chronic inflammation-related disorders, carcinogenesis, neuro-degeneration and aging.
iCar-PseCp: identify carbonylation sites in proteins by Monte Carlo sampling and incorporating sequence coupled effects into general PseAAC

Carbonylation is a posttranslational modification (PTM or PTLM), where a carbonyl group is added to lysine (K), proline (P), arginine (R), and threonine (T) residue of a protein molecule. Carbonylation plays an important role in orchestrating various biological processes but it is also associated with many diseases such as diabetes, chronic lung disease, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, chronic renal failure, and sepsis. Therefore, from the angles of both basic research and drug development, we are facing a challenging problem: for an uncharacterized protein sequence containing many residues of K, P, R, or T, which ones can be carbonylated, and which ones cannot? To address this problem, we have developed a predictor called iCar-PseCp by incorporating the sequence-coupled information into the general pseudo amino acid composition, and balancing out skewed training dataset by Monte Carlo sampling to expand positive subset. Rigorous target cross-validations on a same set of carbonylation-known proteins indicated that the new predictor remarkably outperformed its existing counterparts. For the convenience of most experimental scientists, a user-friendly web-server for iCar-PseCp has been established at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iCar-PseCp, by which users can easily obtain their desired results without the need to go through the complicated mathematical equations involved. It has not escaped our notice that the formulation and approach presented here can also be used to analyze many other problems in computational proteomics.
Measuring Stellar Velocity Dispersions in Active Galaxies

We present stellar velocity dispersion (σ*) measurements for a significant sample of 40 broad-line (type 1) active galaxies for use in testing the well-known relation black hole mass and stellar velocity dispersion. The objects are selected to contain Ca II triplet, Mg I b triplet, and Ca H+K stellar absorption features in their optical spectra so that we may use them to perform extensive tests of the systematic biases introduced by both template mismatch and contamination from the active galactic nucleus (AGN). We use the Ca II triplet as a benchmark to evaluate the utility of the other spectral regions in the presence of AGN contamination. Broad Fe II emission, extending from ~5050 to 5520 Å, in combination with narrow coronal emission lines, can seriously bias σ* measurements from the Mg I b region, highlighting the need for extreme caution in its use. However, we argue that at luminosities constituting a moderate fraction of the Eddington limit, when the Fe II lines are both weak and smooth relative to the stellar lines, it is possible to derive meaningful measurements with careful selection of the fitting region. In particular, to avoid the contamination of coronal lines, we advocate the use of the region 5250-5820 Å, which is rich in Fe absorption features. At higher AGN contaminations, the Ca H+K region may provide the only recourse for estimating σ*. These features are notoriously unreliable, due to a strong dependence on spectral type, a steep local continuum, and large intrinsic broadening. Indeed, we find a strong systematic trend in comparisons of Ca H+K with other spectral regions. Luckily the offset is well described by a simple linear fit as a function of σ*, which enables us to remove the bias and thus extract unbiased σ* measurements from this region. We lay the groundwork for an extensive comparison between black hole mass and bulge velocity dispersion in active galaxies, as described in a companion paper by Greene & Ho.
Bilingual Phonological Awareness: Reexamining the Evidence for Relations within and across Languages.

There is increasing interest in the role of phonological awareness across languages. Research is uncovering cross-language effects of phonological awareness upon English reading, even from nonalphabetic languages. However, little of this research has focused on examining the extent to which multiple measures of phonological awareness indicate a single construct within or across languages. This article updates 2 recent reviews of the literature by fitting rival a priori models of multiple measures in order to test within-language and across-language structure among multiple phonological awareness tasks. Although the number and types of languages covered were quite limited, the results demonstrate high cross-language correlations, suggesting that measurement error has attenuated prior estimates of the cross-language correlation of phonological tasks. The current results suggest that in alphabetic languages, there is empirical support for phonological awareness as a unitary ability within English and other languages. In Korean and in Spanish, phonological awareness may operate as a language-general construct. In Cantonese and Mandarin, the results were less clear. The results also highlight the limitations of the current research base and important areas for future investigation.
Four Dimensions Of Assertiveness

Two studies were conducted to test for the existence of several postulated kinds of assertiveness and to develop a set of scales capable of measuring these hypothesized constructs reliably. The preliminary form of 80 statements was administered to a sample of 175 subjects. A factor analysis confirmed the presence of four dimensions. The item sets were revised, extended and administered to a sample of 304 subjects consisting of 138 men and 166 women. The item correlations were analyzed by the method of principal components and an oblique rotation revealed four correlated dimensions. Items best representing each factor were summed and correlated with measures of Tolerance vs. Hostility, Level of Self Esteem, and Social Desirability. The results indicate that there are four kinds of assertive behaviors: Directiveness, Social Assertiveness, Defense of One's Interests, and Independence. These are relatively independent of hostility and social desirability but are positively correlated with self esteem.
Confidence-Constrained Maximum Entropy Framework for Learning from Multi-Instance Data

Multi-instance data, in which each object (bag) contains a collection of instances, are widespread in machine learning, computer vision, bioinformatics, signal processing, and social sciences. We present a maximum entropy (ME) framework for learning from multi-instance data. In this approach each bag is represented as a distribution using the principle of ME. We introduce the concept of confidence-constrained ME (CME) to simultaneously learn the structure of distribution space and infer each distribution. The shared structure underlying each density is used to learn from instances inside each bag. The proposed CME is free of tuning parameters. We devise a fast optimization algorithm capable of handling large scale multi-instance data. In the experimental section, we evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in terms of exact rank recovery in the space of distributions and compare it with the regularized ME approach. Moreover, we compare the performance of CME with Multi-Instance Learning (MIL) state-of-the-art algorithms and show a comparable performance in terms of accuracy with reduced computational complexity.
Teaching as a Function of the Teacher's Personality

One sometimes hears the remark, &dquo;Teachers are born, not nzade. &dquo; A more sophisticated version might be that teachers are &dquo;nzade&dquo; mainly by their parents during childhood and adolescence. The writer of this article has long been interested in dynamic psychology ; that is, a study of the inner forces that make personality what it is. He shows, in the accompanying report, how many of these inner forces, established in early life, reveal themselves in teaching.
Talking about documents: revealing a missing link to multimedia meeting archives

In the context of multimedia meeting recordings and analysis, we introduce a new kind of multimedia alignment, which aims at reunifying documents with all kind of temporal media. The alignment proposed in this article uses the similarities that exist between the documents’ content and the speech transcript’s content in order to provide temporal indexes to printable documents. Several document content alignment strategies are discussed in this article and evaluated at various levels of granularity.
KOI-3278: A Self-Lensing Binary Star System

Starry Brightness The high photometric precision of NASA's Kepler observatory has enabled the detection of many planets because they cause slight dimming of their host stars as they orbit in front of them. From these data, Quintana et al. (p. 277) have spotted a five-planet system around a small star. Here, the outermost planet is only 10% larger than Earth and completes its 130-day orbit entirely within the habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on its surface. Similarly, Kepler can detect faint periodic brightenings, as Kruse and Agol (p. 275) have reported for the binary system KOI-3278. In this system, a white dwarf acts as a gravitational microlens when it passes in front of its Sun-like G-star companion every 88 days. The lensing effect allows the mass of the white dwarf to be estimated, which helps us to understand how similar binary systems may have evolved. A white dwarf that eclipses a Sun-like star enhances, rather than dims, its brightness through relativistic effects. Over 40% of Sun-like stars are bound in binary or multistar systems. Stellar remnants in edge-on binary systems can gravitationally magnify their companions, as predicted 40 years ago. By using data from the Kepler spacecraft, we report the detection of such a “self-lensing” system, in which a 5-hour pulse of 0.1% amplitude occurs every orbital period. The white dwarf stellar remnant and its Sun-like companion orbit one another every 88.18 days, a long period for a white dwarf–eclipsing binary. By modeling the pulse as gravitational magnification (microlensing) along with Kepler’s laws and stellar models, we constrain the mass of the white dwarf to be ~63% of the mass of our Sun. Further study of this system, and any others discovered like it, will help to constrain the physics of white dwarfs and binary star evolution.
Dynamic phasor analysis of a class of PWM systems

The paper makes use of the so-called dynamic phasor model for stability and performance analysis of a class of PWM systems. The dynamic phasor model allows for the state to be represented in the frequency domain where a harmonic Lyapunov function is defined. The analysis covers both periodically switched systems and non-periodic systems where the switching is controlled by feedback.
New lecturers' accounts of reading higher education research

In reviewing what lecturers found valuable for their professional development, it has been argued that ‘professional reading’ of both higher education research and literature in their disciplines is a major theme for individual enhancement. Despite the increased interest in the writing practices of students and staff in higher education, however, the continued ‘invisibility of reading’ leaves an area of significant lecturer development unexplored, given the argument that reading practices provide insight into learning preparedness and critical thinking approaches. This paper reports the outcomes of a small-scale study of academic reading for four new lecturers as they engage with higher education research as part of their professional development within a research-intensive higher education institution. It is argued that the difficulties these new lecturers experience in engaging with higher education research are more complex than the overcoming of linguistic differences in an unfamiliar discipline but relate to lecturers' wider conceptions of their academic identity.