Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Involvement of endogenous Orphanin FQ in electroacupuncture‐induced analgesia

RECENT studies suggest that the novel opioid peptide orphanin FQ (OFQ) is involved in pain modulation. We found that intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of OFQ in the rat produced a dose-dependent antagonism of the analgesia induced by 100 Hz electroacupuncture (EA) stimulation as measured in the radiant heat tail-flick assay. Antisense oligonucleotides injected i.c. v. potentiated EA analgesia, presumably by interfering with the expression of the OFQ receptor in brain. These results suggest that endogenous OFQ exerts a tonic antagonistic effect on EA-induced analgesia. No such antagonism was observed when OFQ was injected intrathecally (i.t.). Rather, it appears that spinal OFQ produced a marked analgesic effect and enhanced EA-induced analgesia. These findings are consistent with the experimental results obtained in rats where morphine-induced analgesia is antagonized by i.c. v. OFQ and potentiated by i.t. OFQ.
Exploring Research Data Management

Research Data Management (RDM) has become a professional topic of great importance internationally following changes in scholarship and government policies about the sharing of research data. Exploring Research Data Management provides an accessible introduction and guide to RDM with engaging tasks for the reader to follow and develop their knowledge. Starting by exploring the world of research and the importance and complexity of data in the research process, the book considers how a multi-professional support service can be created then examines the decisions that need to be made in designing different types of research data service from local policy creation, training, through to creating a data repository. Coverage includes: A discussion of the drivers and barriers to RDM Institutional policy and making the case for Research Data Services Practical data management Data literacy and training researchers Ethics and research data services Case studies and practical advice from working in a Research Data Service. Readership: This book will be useful reading for librarians and other support professionals who are interested in learning more about RDM and developing Research Data Services in their own institution. It will also be of value to students on librarianship, archives, and information management courses studying topics such as RDM, digital curation, data literacies and open science.
Impact of ribavirin priming on viral kinetics and treatment response in chronic hepatitis C genotype 1 infection

Ribavirin amplifies the interferon‐alpha (IFN) signalling cascade. As ribavirin needs 4 weeks to reach steady state, ribavirin priming may optimize hepatic IFN sensitivity before starting a pegylated (PEG)‐IFN/ribavirin combination therapy. This study investigated potential benefits of ribavirin priming prior to PEG‐IFN2a/ribavirin combination therapy on viral kinetics, on‐treatment and sustained virological response (SVR) in chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1 infection. Sixty‐eight treatment naive patients were randomized 2:2:1 to ribavirin (ribavirin arm) or placebo (placebo arm) or PEG‐IFN2a (PEG‐IFN2a arm) for 6 weeks prior to 12 weeks of PEG‐IFN2a/ribavirin combination therapy within a double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial. Then, standard PEG‐IFN2a/ribavirin combination therapy according to the German guidelines was continued under the responsibility of the investigators. Ribavirin was given according to body weight and PEG‐IFN2a at a dose of 180 μg subcutaneously once/week. During ribavirin priming, HCV RNA showed a decline of −0.58 log10 IU/mL (P < 0.001) that was unrelated to the IL28B rs12979860 genotype (CC vs CT/TT, P = 0.244). Ribavirin priming did neither increase the PEG‐IFN2a‐induced first‐ or second‐phase viral decline (P values >0.100) nor on‐treatment response or SVR (HCV RNA undetectable at week 12 of combination therapy: ribavirin arm 56%, placebo arm 38%, PEG‐IFN2a arm 50%; SVR: ribavirin arm 41%, placebo arm 54%, PEG‐IFN2a arm 50%; P values >0.300). In conclusion, ribavirin monotherapy showed a significant antiviral activity that was not influenced by the IL28B genotype. Ribavirin priming prior to PEG‐IFN2a/ribavirin combination therapy did neither increase the first‐ or second‐phase viral decline nor on‐treatment response or SVR.
Tris(1H-benzimidazol-3-ium-2-ylmethyl)amine tris(2,4,6-trinitrophenolate) acetonitrile disolvate

In the cation of the title salt, C24H24N7 3+·3C6H2N3O7 −·2C2H3N, the three benzimidazolium ring systems are oriented to each other at dihedral angles of 10.42 (7), 23.98 (7) and 22.17 (7)°. In the crystal, the cation links to the adjacent picrate anions via N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds; one of independent acetonitrile solvent molecules is also linked to the cation via an N—H⋯N hydrogen bond.
Tests of non‐null hypothesis on proportions for stratified data

It is more reasonable to interpret the efficacy of therapies under non‐null hypothesis, hence tests of non‐null hypothesis have been carried out. Most clinical trials adopt multi‐center campaign and yield stratified data. However, the existing non‐null hypothesis tests are not suitable for stratified data. This paper proposes the tests of non‐null hypothesis on proportions for stratified data. Averaging the treatment‐control difference in each stratum yields the mean treatment‐control difference. Comparing its expectation with the minimal detectable difference leads to set up a non‐null hypothesis. Its variance is used to construct the equation of the basic relationship for stratified designs under the non‐null hypothesis. Then follow the derivations for the one‐ and two‐sample tests. Their performance is demonstrated by the Monte Carlo method. As far as the two‐sample tests are concerned, they reduce to the Cochran test and the Mantel–Haenszel test, on setting the minimal detectable difference equal to zero, and to the Dunnett–Gent test when there is only one stratum. As for the one‐sample test, it also reduces to its classical counterparts in these situations. The observed power coincides with the prescribed power and the relevant operating characteristic curves. The tests can be applied to the active control clinical trials with multi‐center or stratified designs for establishing the clinical superiority or non‐inferiority of a tested drug versus control. Worked examples illustrate the methodology. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Stationary-phase mutants of Sinorhizobium meliloti are impaired in stationary-phase survival or in recovery to logarithmic growth

A screening method was used to identify Sinorhizobium meliloti mutants which are affected in stationary-phase survival. Of 20,000 individual colonies mutagenized with transposon Tn5-B20, 10 mutant strains which showed poor or no survival in the stationary phase were identified. Analyses of expression patterns of the promoterless lacZ genes in the mutant strains revealed individual induction patterns. Most strains were induced in stationary phase as well as under carbon limitation and in pure H2O, but none of the mutants was induced under heat, alkali stress conditions, or low oxygen tension. Plant inoculation tests revealed that the symbiotic proficiency of the mutants was not affected. Two mutants, however, showed gene induction not only in the stationary phase under free-living conditions but also in the bacteroid state. A long-term starvation test was carried out to examine the ability of the 10 mutants to survive prolonged stationary-phase conditions. All mutants showed a clear decrease in the colony-forming ability under the chosen experimental conditions. Staining with green and red fluorescent nucleic acid stain showed that the mutants fell into two different classes. Seven mutants died during stationary phase; the three other mutants remained viable but did not resume growth after prolonged starvation. Five of the ten Tn5-B20 insertions were cloned from the genomes of the mutant strains. Nucleotide sequence analyses established that the transposon had inserted in five distinctive genes. Database searches revealed that four of the tagged loci corresponded to already characterized genes whose gene products are involved in important cellular processes such as amino acid metabolism or aerobic respiration.
The Compensation Algorithm Based on Bayes Theory of Multi Point Measurement Fusion for Methane Concentration

The accuracy of laser gas detection is influenced by temperature and other environmental factors. A compensation algorithm based on Bayes theory for measuring the concentration of methane sensor (CABTMCMS) is proposed. Based on several implementation tests, the corresponding supplementary theorems are presented and proved. The algorithm considers the methane concentration and the change of ambient temperature, tested for methane gas spectral absorption peak in the vicinity of the data, and the corresponding temperature, respectively, using the a priori probability of multi-point testing methane concentration data and the corresponding environmental temperature data, the dates are completed fusion, then, compensated the methane concentration test minimum error is reduced to 1%.
Vehicle Classification with low computation magnetic sensor

A vehicle classification algorithm is proposed based on signal obtained with low computation magnetic sensor. We focus on an implementation of our algorithm on wireless magnetic sensor node. Since the sensor node has limitations on computing capacity and power source, the algorithm must not be too complex. Features we choose to extract for classification include normalized vehicle magnetic length, averaged energy, and number of peaks in Hill pattern. These features are very simple to obtain. We classify vehicles into 5 types: motorcycles, cars, pickups, vans, and buses. The classification based on these features shows promising results. It can identify motorcycles and buses with very high accuracy. The group of cars, pickups and vans possesses similar distribution of features. The classification therefore must consider the three features in a tree structure form. A much better result obtained if we consider cars and pickups belonging to the same class.
“I'm still here”: Exploring what matters to people with intellectual disability during advance care planning

BACKGROUND This study sought to identify, from the perspective of people with intellectual disabilities and life limiting conditions, the factors that strengthened and inhibited their Advance Care Planning. METHODS This in depth qualitative study explored the experiences of four people with intellectual disability and life limiting conditions, through interviews and documentation reviews. RESULTS There was strong agreement across all participants about what positively influenced Advance Care Planning, namely; going at my pace; supporting me to make my own choices; adapting the process to suit me, and, most importantly; continuing to support and plan the life I'm still living. With the exception of being comfortable/skilled in end-of-life support, the skills required of facilitators were similar to those required for all forms of person-centred planning. CONCLUSION The findings are encouraging and demonstrate that Advance Care Planning is a useful tool in ensuring that people with intellectual disability have control and choice over their lives, right to the end.
Systematic Approaches to Improve Test Case Prioritization Using Requirements and Risks

The use of system requirements and their risks enables software testers to identify more important test cases that can reveal faults associated with risky components. Having identified important test cases, software testers can manage the testing schedule more effectively by running such test cases earlier so that they can detect then fix faults sooner, especially, in regression testing. Some work in this area has been done, but the previous approaches and studies have some limitations, such as an improper use of requirements risks in prioritization and an inadequate evaluation method. To address the limitations, we implemented a new requirements risk-based prioritization technique and evaluated it considering whether the proposed approach detects faults earlier overall and also detects faults associated with risky components earlier. Then, we proposed an enhanced risk-based test case prioritization approach that estimates requirements risks systematically with a fuzzy expert system. Next, we performed an experiment on an enterprise cloud application to measure the fault detection rate of different test suites that are prioritized based on two requirements factors and requirements risks. Finally, we employed a systematic risk estimation mechanism using a fuzzy expert system to make our test prioritization process more efficient and more effective. We also provide guidance and understanding to practitioners and researchers on the use of requirements and risk-based test prioritization on different types of software systems through the family of empirical studies performed in this dissertation. Further, we compared our novel requirements risks-based approaches with other existing industrial approaches. These comparisons will help practitioners and researchers to effectively employ prioritization techniques on their working environments.
Towards the Association of Voluntary Disclosures and Value of Firms: Evidence Revisited in India

The information disclosed by the companies in their annual reports reveals much about company’s performance and prospects. Investors take the information as base for decision for investment. Under such circumstance, companies choose to disclose beyond what is mandatorily required. Theories like agency theory, capital need theory and signaling theory support the need of voluntary disclosure. This study is about the relationship between voluntary disclosure and value of Indian pharmaceutical companies listed on World’s oldest stock exchange, Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Objectives: Twofold : First, to investigate the extent of voluntary disclosure practices prevailing in pharma sector of India, Second, to study the impact of voluntary disclosure on Value of companies (value as measured by Weighted Average Cost of Capital, Stock Volatility and Price to Book Ratio) for the year 2010-2011 to 2017-2018. Research Methodology: To understand the extent of disclosure, a disclosure checklist is constructed and descriptive statistics are carved to reach the results. To understand the impact, Panel data regression (Fixed effect model, Random effect model, Hausman test) are run. Observation: Voluntary disclosure does not affect WACC but are negatively related to stock volatility and Price to Book Ratio in Indian scenario.
Crystal structure of lactose synthase reveals a large conformational change in its catalytic component, the beta1,4-galactosyltransferase-I.

The lactose synthase (LS) enzyme is a 1:1 complex of a catalytic component, beta1,4-galactosyltransferse (beta4Gal-T1) and a regulatory component, alpha-lactalbumin (LA), a mammary gland-specific protein. LA promotes the binding of glucose (Glc) to beta4Gal-T1, thereby altering its sugar acceptor specificity from N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) to glucose, which enables LS to synthesize lactose, the major carbohydrate component of milk. The crystal structures of LS bound with various substrates were solved at 2 A resolution. These structures reveal that upon substrate binding to beta4Gal-T1, a large conformational change occurs in the region comprising residues 345 to 365. This repositions His347 in such a way that it can participate in the coordination of a metal ion, and creates a sugar and LA-binding site. At the sugar-acceptor binding site, a hydrophobic N-acetyl group-binding pocket is found, formed by residues Arg359, Phe360 and Ile363. In the Glc-bound structure, this hydrophobic pocket is absent. For the binding of Glc to LS, a reorientation of the Arg359 side-chain occurs, which blocks the hydrophobic pocket and maximizes the interactions with the Glc molecule. Thus, the role of LA is to hold Glc by hydrogen bonding with the O-1 hydroxyl group in the acceptor-binding site on beta4Gal-T1, while the N-acetyl group-binding pocket in beta4Gal-T1 adjusts to maximize the interactions with the Glc molecule. This study provides details of a structural basis for the partially ordered kinetic mechanism proposed for lactose synthase.
The Effect of Grants on University Drop-Out Rates: Evidence on the Italian Case

In this paper we evaluate the impact of need-based grants on university drop-out rates in the first year of enrollment, using student-level administrative data from all Italian universities in the period 2003-2013. We exploit the fact that not all eligible students receive financial aid due to limited resources to generate a treatment and a control group. Using this partition, we estimate the average treatment effect, i.e. the average effect on low income students, controlling for a set of observable characteristics by running regressions on blocks defined on the propensity score. Results point towards a sizeable effect of grants in reducing dropping out from higher education: around one third of these students would have left university in the first year in absence of the grants. This evidence is robust to a variety of specifications and sample selection criteria.
Leadership in Crises: The Ultimate Challenge

The modern companies normally face the issue how they can manage successfully a disaster as a consequence of faulty product, environmental & financial problem or due to personal scandals. It should be noted that the consequences of any disaster afflicting the businesses are significantly expensive and it takes lot of time to re-establish the reputation of the company. It is prime role of the leadership of the organization to judiciously deal with the situation and to act in the positive manner. Leaders' tasks are to take up the stock of the existing situation and to take the necessary steps for the restoration of the position, image and reputation of the company. Moreover, leadership in managing crises in the organizations can reduce the harm caused by the catastrophic event. On the other hand, the lack of successful leadership deteriorates the impact. The Leaders in the companies should have necessary skills and competencies with the aim of successfully managing the crises. This paper deals with the essential leadership skills and competencies during the crises besetting the companies and how a good leader should act and take necessary steps to restore the companies' images and standing.
Crop Selection Method to maximize crop yield rate using machine learning technique

Agriculture planning plays a significant role in economic growth and food security of agro-based country. Se- lection of crop(s) is an important issue for agriculture planning. It depends on various parameters such as production rate, market price and government policies. Many researchers studied prediction of yield rate of crop, prediction of weather, soil classification and crop classification for agriculture planning using statistics methods or machine learning techniques. If there is more than one option to plant a crop at a time using limited land resource, then selection of crop is a puzzle. This paper proposed a method named Crop Selection Method (CSM) to solve crop selection problem, and maximize net yield rate of crop over season and subsequently achieves maximum economic growth of the country. The proposed method may improve net yield rate of crops.
Dilemmatic group memberships of hard-of-hearing employees during the process of acquiring and adapting to the use of hearing aids

We describe how hard-of-hearing (HOH) employees renegotiate both their existing and new group memberships when they acquire and begin to use hearing aids (HAs). Our research setting was longitudinal and we carried out a theory-informed qualitative analysis of multiple qualitative data. When an individual discovers that they have a hearing problem and acquire a HA, their group memberships undergo change. First, HOH employees need to start negotiating their relationship with the HOH group. Second, they need to consider whether they see themselves as members of the disabled or the nondisabled employee group. This negotiation tends to be context-bound, situational, and nonlinear as a process, involving a back-and-forth movement in the way in which HOH employees value different group memberships. The dilemmatic negotiation of new group memberships and the other social aspects involved in HA rehabilitation tend to remain invisible to rehabilitation professionals, occupational healthcare, and employers.
An expression vector system for stable expression of oncogenes.

A series of mammalian expression vectors was constructed for the stable integration and high constitutive expression of cellular and viral oncogenes. Based on pUC 19, the vectors contain several elements (Fig. la). These are a SV40 early promoter fragment containing the enhancer core sequences (1), a unique cloning site followed by a retroviral MSV-LTR providing a transcription termination signal and serving as additional enhancer of a hybrid Tn5 KmR/G418R gene under the control of the thymidine kinase (TK)-promoter (derived from pHS272; 3). The vectors can thus be used as bacterial/mammalian shuttle plasmids. The SV40 promoter has a 3 bp deletion at the BglI site within the origin of replication to prevent autonomous replication in the presence of SV40 large T-antigen (2). In addition, the pMSEx vectors contain a synthetic oligonucleotide providing a translation initiation signal (4) followed by a Stul site in three different positions (pMSEx1 -3, see Fig. 2a) and stop signals in all reading frames. The StuI sites may prove useful for cloning blunt end cDNA fragments without addition of linkers. The following oncogenes were inserted into pMSPE: SV40LT,
The Constitutive Tyrosine Phosphorylation of CD3ζ Results from TCR-MHC Interactions That Are Independent of Thymic Selection1

The TCR complex, when isolated from thymocytes and peripheral T cells, contains a constitutively tyrosine-phosphorylated CD3ζ molecule termed p21. Previous investigations have shown that the constitutive phosphorylation of CD3ζ results from TCR interactions with MHC molecules occurring in both the thymus and the periphery. To determine what contribution the selection environment had on this constitutive phosphorylation, we analyzed CD3ζ from several distinct class I- and II-restricted TCR-transgenic mice where thymocyte development occurred in either a selecting or a nonselecting MHC environment. Herein, we report that constitutively phosphorylated CD3ζ (p21) was present in thymocytes that developed under nonselecting peptide-MHC conditions. These findings strongly support the model that the TCR has an inherent avidity for MHC molecules before repertoire selection. Biochemical analyses of the TCR complex before and after TCR stimulation suggested that the constitutively phosphorylated CD3ζ subunit did not contribute to de novo TCR signals. These findings may have important implications for T cell functions during self-MHC recognition under normal and autoimmune circumstances.
Different homogeneity detectors for improving Space-Time Adaptive Radar performance in heterogeneous clutter

Secondary data selection for estimation of the clutter covariance matrix in space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is normally obtained from cells (range rings) in close proximity of the cell under test. The aim of this paper is the analysis of performance improvement of space-time adaptive radars when secondary data selection is obtained by discriminating between quasi-homogeneous areas on the ground which generate clutter with different statistics (i.e. clutter edges including littoral, farmland-wooded hills or rural-urban interfaces). The algorithm presented in this paper, referred to as the different homogeneity detector (DHD), has been tested with simulated data obtained by using a general clutter model and a uniform linear array.