Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Progesterone Is Essential for Protecting against LPS-Induced Pregnancy Loss. LIF as a Potential Mediator of the Anti-inflammatory Effect of Progesterone

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) administration to mice on day 7 of gestation led to 100% embryonic resorption after 24 h. In this model, nitric oxide is fundamental for the resorption process. Progesterone may be responsible, at least in part, for a Th2 switch in the feto-maternal interface, inducing active immune tolerance against fetal antigens. Th2 cells promote the development of T cells, producing leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF), which seems to be important due to its immunomodulatory action during early pregnancy. Our aim was to evaluate the involvement of progesterone in the mechanism of LPS-induced embryonic resorption, and whether LIF can mediate hormonal action. Using in vivo and in vitro models, we provide evidence that circulating progesterone is an important component of the process by which infection causes embryonic resorption in mice. Also, LIF seems to be a mediator of the progesterone effect under inflammatory conditions. We found that serum progesterone fell to very low levels after 24 h of LPS exposure. Moreover, progesterone supplementation prevented embryonic resorption and LPS-induced increase of uterine nitric oxide levels in vivo. Results show that LPS diminished the expression of the nuclear progesterone receptor in the uterus after 6 and 12 h of treatment. We investigated the expression of LIF in uterine tissue from pregnant mice and found that progesterone up-regulates LIF mRNA expression in vitro. We observed that LIF was able to modulate the levels of nitric oxide induced by LPS in vitro, suggesting that it could be a potential mediator of the inflammatory action of progesterone. Our observations support the view that progesterone plays a critical role in a successful pregnancy as an anti-inflammatory agent, and that it could have possible therapeutic applications in the prevention of early reproductive failure associated with inflammatory disorders.
A case study examining the impact of adventure based counseling on high school adolescent self- esteem, empathy, and racism

This study investigated the effectiveness of Adventure Based Counseling upon high school adolescents. The goals of this study were to (a) explore the effectiveness of ABC Counseling in increasing levels of self-esteem and empathy among adolescents; (b) study the efficacy of ABC counseling in reducing perceived racial discrimination, racist attitudes, or both; and (c) investigate the correlation between self-esteem, empathy, perceived racial discrimination, and racist attitudes as related to the effects of ABC counseling. In addition, the effects of ABC counseling on the school-related variables such as discipline, attendance, and academics, as well as possible outcome differences caused by demographic variables like gender and ethnicity were measured in relation to the effects of the ABC counseling treatment. Finally, this study also gathered descriptive data from participants through survey questionnaires regarding their prior knowledge and sensitivity to other races, their perception of racism occurring at the study site, and their experience in ABC counseling. Research indicates that adolescents struggle with and are confronted by many developmental, psychological, and social phenomena while in high school. Salient
Measuring Students’ Writing Ability on a Computer-Analytic Developmental Scale: An Exploratory Validity Study

The purpose of the study was to explore the validity of a novel computer-analytic developmental scale, the Writing Ability Developmental Scale. On the whole, collective results supported the validity of the scale. It was sensitive to writing ability differences across grades and sensitive to within-grade variability as compared to human-rated sensitivity. It predicted scores on the human-rated continuous scale very well. As compared to the human-rated continuous scale, it demonstrated similarly constant mean differences across ethnicity and socioeconomic status—although not for all rising grade differences or for gender. There was no genre differential across the two scales, and measurement precision was highly similar for the two scales.
Improvement of an EVT-Based HEV Using Dynamic Programming

Automotive engineers and researchers have proposed different topologies for series-parallel hybrid electric vehicles (SP-HEVs). The Toyota Hybrid System (THS) is the best known SP-HEV-based vehicle, but alternative solutions, such as electric variable transmission (EVT), have been also proposed. An efficient comparison between these different solutions is a key point to estimate the added value of each topology. This paper presents the application of optimal control to two series-parallel hybrid architectures for efficiency assessment purposes. The dynamic programming method is applied to the THS and to a virtual hybrid vehicle with an EVT. The way to take into account the supplementary degree of freedom provided by the decoupling of the wheels and the engine in both topologies is presented. The optimal fuel consumption is then compared on different driving cycles and brings out an overconsumption of the EVT topology. Then, a parametric study shows that inserting an appropriate gear ratio on the internal-combustion-engine (ICE) shaft can improve the EVT efficiency that becomes close to the THS efficiency.
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by" Me")" offers a fascinating explanation of self-deceptionhow it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it. "
Tim‐3 regulates pro‐ and anti‐inflammatory cytokine expression in human CD14+ monocytes

Tim‐3 and PD‐1 are powerful immunoinhibitory molecules involved in immune tolerance, autoimmune responses, and antitumor or antiviral immune evasion. A current model for Tim‐3 regulation during immune responses suggests a divergent function, such that Tim‐3 acts synergistically with TLR signaling pathways in innate immune cells to promote inflammation, yet the same molecule terminates Th1 immunity in adaptive immune cells. To better understand how Tim‐3 might be functioning in innate immune responses, we examined the kinetics of Tim‐3 expression in human CD14+ M/MФ in relation to expression of IL‐12, a key cytokine in the transition of innate to adaptive immunity. Here, we show that Tim‐3 is constitutively expressed on unstimulated peripheral blood CD14+ monocytes but decreases rapidly upon TLR stimulation. Conversely, IL‐12 expression is low in these cells but increases rapidly in CD14+ M/MФ in correlation with the decrease in Tim‐3. Blocking Tim‐3 signaling or silencing Tim‐3 expression led to a significant increase in TLR‐mediated IL‐12 production, as well as a decrease in activation‐induced up‐regulation of the immunoinhibitor, PD‐1; TNF‐α production was not altered significantly, but IL‐10 production was increased. These results suggest that Tim‐3 has a role as a regulator of pro‐ and anti‐inflammatory innate immune responses.
A novel support vector machine robust model based electrical equaliser for coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

Classifiers, such as artificial neural networks non-linear equaliser (ANN-NLE), Wiener–Hammerstein non-linear equaliser, Volterra non-linear equaliser (Volterra-NLE) and support vector machine non-linear equaliser (SVM-NLE), can play a significant role in compensating non-linear imperfections in the optical communications context. Using classifiers to mitigate the non-linear effects in coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) systems is an interesting idea to be investigated. In this study, a novel support vector machine robust version, specifically adapted to a 100 Gb/s CO-OFDM data structure for long haul distance, is proposed. Firstly, the authors demonstrate that SVM-NLE upgrades the system performance by about 10−1 in terms of bit-error rate compared to Volterra-NLE at optical signal-to-noise ratio equal to 14 dB. Then, they show that it can double the transmission distance up to 1600 km over single mode fibre channel. Furthermore, a performance comparison is performed using 16 quadrature amplitude modulation and 40 Gb/s bit rate for SVM-NLE, ANN-NLE and inverse Volterra series transfer function non-linear equaliser, respectively.
Methods for exploring and mining tables on Wikipedia

Knowledge bases extracted automatically from the Web present new opportunities for data mining and exploration. Given a large, heterogeneous set of extracted relations, new tools are needed for searching the knowledge and uncovering relationships of interest. We present WikiTables, a Web application that enables users to interactively explore tabular knowledge extracted from Wikipedia. In experiments, we show that WikiTables substantially outperforms baselines on the novel task of automatically joining together disparate tables to uncover "interesting" relationships between table columns. We find that a "Semantic Relatedness" measure that leverages the Wikipedia link structure accounts for a majority of this improvement. Further, on the task of keyword search for tables, we show that WikiTables performs comparably to Google Fusion Tables despite using an order of magnitude fewer tables. Our work also includes the release of a number of public resources, including over 15 million tuples of extracted tabular data, manually annotated evaluation sets, and public APIs.
Graduated Assignment Algorithm for Multiple Graph Matching Based on a Common Labeling

In pattern recognition applications, with the aim of increasing efficiency, it is useful to represent the elements by attributed graphs (which consider their structural properties). Under this structural representation of the elements some graph matching problems need a common labeling between the vertices of a set of graphs. Computing this common labeling is a NP-Complete problem. Nevertheless, some methodologies have been presented which obtain a sub-optimal solution in polynomial time. The drawback of these methods is that they rely on pairwise labeling computations, causing the methodologies not to consider the global information during the entire process. To solve this problem, we present a methodology which generates the common labeling by matching all graph nodes to a virtual node set. The method has been tested using three independent datasets, one synthetic and two real. Experimental results show that the presented method obtains better performance than the most popular common labeling algorithm with the same computational cost.
Developing a Sensitive Practitioner Research Methodology for Studying the Impact of Child Sexual Abuse

Summary This paper outlines the methodology of a research study which used unstructured life story interviewing to explore the impact of child sexual abuse on the lives of seven young men aged between 15 and 24 (see Durham, 1999). In approaching this research, a theoretical relationship was established between ethnography (particularly a life story approach), feminist praxis, anti-oppressive research and social work practitioner research. Researching experiences of child sexual abuse is stressful for all concerned, and requires a methodology which establishes a safe environment, which facilitates an expression and discussion of painful and fearful feelings and experiences, and provides appropriate on-going support. In setting up this environment and providing support, before, during and after the data collection phase, the value and importance of social work practitioner research was established. The potential influence of this on the nature of data collected was acknowledged, both as a potential cost, in terms of objec tivity, but also as a benefit, in creating a climate for the production of sensitive know ledge. It is concluded that a life-story practitioner research approach, incorporating the principles of anti-oppressive research practice, is an appropriate methodology for the study of the experience and impact of child sexual abuse, producing knowledge of substantial depth.
On the Energy–Delay Tradeoff and Relay Positioning of Wireless Butterfly Networks

This paper considers energy-delay tradeoff (EDT) of data transmission in wireless-network-coded butterfly networks (WNCBNs) where two sources convey their data to two destinations with the assistance of a relay employing either physical-layer network coding (PNC) or analog network coding (ANC). Hybrid automatic repeat request with incremental redundancy (HARQ-IR) is applied for reliable communication. In particular, we first investigate the EDT of both PNC and ANC schemes in WNCBNs to evaluate their energy efficiency. It is found that there is no advantage to using a relay in a high-power regime. However, in a low-power regime, the PNC scheme is shown to be more energy efficient than both the ANC and direct transmission (DT) schemes if the relay is located far from the sources, whereas both the PNC and ANC schemes are less energy efficient than the DT scheme when the relay is located near the sources. Additionally, algorithms that optimize relay positioning (RP) are developed based on two criteria: minimizing total transmission delays and minimizing total energy consumption subject to node location and power allocation constraints. This optimization can be considered a benchmark for RP in either a low-latency or low-energy-consumption WNCBN.
Gender-Dependent HLA-DR-Restricted Epitopes Identified from Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Glycoprotein D

ABSTRACT In recent clinical trials, a herpes simplex virus (HSV) recombinant glycoprotein D (gD) vaccine was more efficacious in woman than in men. Here we report six HLA-DR-restricted T-cell gD epitope peptides that bind to multiple HLA-DR (DR1, DR4, DR7, DR13, DR15, and DRB5) molecules that represent a large proportion of the human population. Four of these peptides recalled naturally primed CD4+ T cells in up to 45% of the 46 HSV-seropositive, asymptomatic individuals studied. For the gD49-82, gD77-104, and gD121-152 peptides, the CD4+ T-cell responses detected in HSV-seropositive, asymptomatic women were higher and more frequent than the responses detected in men. Immunization of susceptible DRB1*0101 transgenic mice with a mixture of three newly identified, gender-dependent, immunodominant epitope peptides (gD49-82, gD77-104, and gD121-152) induced a gender- and CD4+ T-cell-dependent immunity against ocular HSV type 1 challenge. These results revealed a gender-dependent T-cell response to a discrete set of gD epitopes and suggest that while a T-cell epitope-based HSV vaccine that targets a large percentage of the human population may be feasible with a limited number of immunodominant promiscuous HLA-DR-restricted epitopes, gender should be taken into account during evaluations of such vaccines.
A second-order cone programming approach for minimax design of 2-D FIR filters with low group delay

A design algorithm based on second-order cone programming (SOCP) for minimax design of 2-D FIR filters with low group delay is proposed. SOCP is a special class of convex programming problems that can be carried out considerably more efficiently than the popular semidefinite programming. The simulation studies presented in this paper also confirm this in a filter design context. The proposed algorithm is compared favorably with a recently proposed design method based on sequential quadratic programming. The proposed design method is expected to be a useful utility for 2-D digital filter designers whose interest is not limited to linear phase responses and low order filters
Religiosity and the Third-Person Effect

During the past decade, the 3rd-person effect has emerged as an important area of research in the field of mass communication. This study provides one of the first empirical measurements of the influence of religiosity on the 3rd-person effect. This study provides evidence that, on moral issues, religiosity is positively associated with perceived media impact on others. It also provides evidence that, on nonmoral issues, religiosity is not associated with perceived media impact on self or others.
How do groups react to unexpected threats? Crisis management in organizational teams

Despite the increasing dependence on teams, there has been little research on crisis management in organizational teams in the corporate sector. In this study which is based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of 30 crisis cases, the prevalent types of crises were identified and effective strategies used for team crisis coping were explored. The results showed that 90% of team level crises were caused by external or environmental factors rather than internal disturbances. Reflecting the dominant cause of crisis events, the effectiveness of crisis management was strongly affected by teams’ external activities. Suggestions based on the results are made for managing contemporary organizational teams operating in highly competitive, uncertain, and threatening environments.
NIDS based on payload word frequencies and anomaly of transitions

This paper presents a novel payload analysis method. Consecutive bytes are separated by boundary symbols and defined as words. The frequencies of word appearance and word to word transitions are used to build a model of normal behavior. A simple anomaly score calculation is designed for fast attack detection. The method was tested using real traffic and recent attacks to demonstrate that it can be used in IDS. Tolerance to small number of attack in training data is shown.
Crowd Governance: The Monitoring Role of Wikipedia in the Financial Market

In this study, we explore whether Wikipedia plays a governance role in the financial market by reducing the information disadvantage of individual investors. We hypothesize that the aggregation of information on Wikipedia enables individual investors to collectively monitor insiders and institutional investors. Using the creation of a firm Wikipedia page as an information event, our empirical results support our hypothesis and further show that the governance effect is stronger for firms with higher institutional ownership concentration as well as those with more intensive insider trading activity. Taken together, these findings support the view that Wikipedia helps mitigate the information asymmetry among individual investors, institutional investors, and corporate insiders.
Quaternion-Based Sliding Mode Control for Six Degrees of Freedom Flight Control of Quadrotors

Despite extensive research on sliding mode control (SMC) design for quadrotors, the existing approaches suffer from certain limitations. Euler angle-based SMC formulations suffer from poor performance in high-pitch or -roll maneuvers. Quaternion-based SMC approaches have unwinding issues and complex architecture. Coordinate-free methods are slow and only almost globally stable. This paper presents a new six degrees of freedom SMC flight controller to address the above limitations. We use a cascaded architecture with a position controller in the outer loop and a quaternion-based attitude controller in the inner loop. The position controller generates the desired trajectory for the attitude controller using a coordinate-free approach. The quaternion-based attitude controller uses the natural characteristics of the quaternion hypersphere, featuring a simple structure while providing global stability and avoiding unwinding issues. We compare our controller with three other common control methods conducting challenging maneuvers like flip-over and high-speed trajectory tracking in the presence of model uncertainties and disturbances. Our controller consistently outperforms the benchmark approaches with less control effort and actuator saturation, offering highly effective and efficient flight control.
Exploring Inner Experience: The descriptive experience sampling method

Written for the psychologist, philosopher, and layperson interested in consciousness, Exploring Inner Experience provides a comprehensive introduction to the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method for obtaining accurate reports of inner experience. DES uses a beeper to cue participants to pay attention to their experience at precisely defined moments; participants are then interviewed to obtain high-fidelity accounts of their experience at those moments. Exploring Inner Experience shows (a) how DES uncovers previously unknown details of inner experience; (b) how the implications of this method affect our understanding of inner experience and the human condition more generally; (c) how DES avoids the traps that destroyed the introspections of the previous century; (d) why DES reports of inner experience should be considered reliable and valid; and (e) how to use the DES method. This book will be basic reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and students interested in consciousness, as well as anyone who is seriously concerned with understanding the human condition. (Series B)
'Now someone like me finds me': Gift Exchange and Reciprocity in Community Arts at Bankstown Youth Development Service

The relationship between artist and participant is central to community arts. It is the nature of this relationship that defines the art form and distinguishes it from mainstream artistic practice. Participation, access, engagement and collaboration are keys to this successful relationship and are concepts that have been identified as integral to the practice throughout the development of community arts (Hawkins, 1993). Theorising community arts through the lens of gift exchange is one way to examine the uniqueness of the artist and participant relationship and its capacity to build community through artistic and social exchanges. Artistic relationships between participants in community arts may be built over years and decades of practice, and the case study organisation presented in this article, Bankstown Youth Development Service, is one example of how career trajectories are developed through community arts. This case study shows that there is a distinct need for more longitudinal studies and evaluations of community artists and organisations, as they offer an illuminating view of the value and effects of community arts beyond immediate economic, artistic or social outcomes.