Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genioglossus premotoneurons and the negative pressure reflex in rats

Reflex increases in genioglossus (GG) muscle activity in response to negative pharyngeal pressure are important for maintenance of upper airway patency in humans. However, little is known of the central circuitry that mediates this negative pressure reflex (NPR). We used two approaches to determine which GG premotoneurons relay negative pressure‐related information to the hypoglossal motor nucleus. First, to identify GG premotoneurons, we injected pseudorabies virus (PRV152) into the GG muscle. We found that medullary GG premotoneurons were concentrated mainly in the reticular formation adjacent to the hypoglossal motor nucleus. Second, in order to determine whether these perihypoglossal neurons were involved in the NPR, we quantified GG EMG responses to negative pressure applied to the isolated upper airway in anaesthetized rats before and after microinjection of muscimol (9 nl; 0.25 mm), a GABA‐A receptor agonist, into the perihypoglossal premotor field. Pressures as low as −4 cmH2O increased inspiratory phase‐related GG activity. The NPR was abolished following bilateral injections of muscimol into the perihypoglossal premotor field at and up to 500 μm rostral to the obex. Muscimol in this location also increased the amplitude of basal, unstimulated phasic GG activity. By contrast, inhibition of neurons caudal to the obex decreased phasic GG activity but had no impact on the NPR. These results suggest that perihypoglossal GG premotoneurons near the obex mediate the NPR and those caudal to the obex are important mediators of respiratory‐related GG activity but are not involved in the NPR.
A Chinese learner and her self-regulated learning: An autoethnography

In this paper, I use an autoethnographical approach, coupled with existing research literature on Chinese learners and learning, to reflect upon my own experiences as a junior high school student in order to explore how Chinese students perceive their learning, and how they establish and justify their own sense of self-regulation in learning. It is found there is a hybrid of nuanced cultural meanings underneath the self-regulated learning experiences in the Chinese context.
Risk perception and cancer worries in families at increased risk of familial breast/ovarian cancer

While families at increased risk for familial breast/ovarian cancer continue to overestimate their cancer risk with increased cancer worries about the future, few studies have examined factors that affect inherited cancer risk perception and cancer worries in both survivors and unaffected female relatives. The purpose of this study was to examine variables that may affect cancer worries and risk perceptions from a family‐based perspective in a racially diverse, community‐based, random sample of 146 dyads consisting of adult female breast and/or ovarian cancer survivors and their unaffected female relatives (N=292). Results indicated that coping style, self‐efficacy, partner's income, family role relationship, and cancer risk perception were significant contributors to the survivors' and their unaffected relatives' cancer worries. Significant variables for perception of cancer risk for both survivors and relatives included income, race, family history of cancer, and cancer worries. Relatives had a higher perception of cancer risk, whereas survivors had more cancer worries. Additionally, the level of cancer worries reported by one member of the dyad was related to the amount of worries reported by the other. The results from this study underscore the importance of clinicians addressing concerns of both affected and unaffected members of families at increased risk of cancer to assist them in managing cancer worries and having realistic risk appraisals to make informed decisions about their own and their family's health surveillance options. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Women in German Politics: Still Jobs for the Boys?

Today the proportion of German politicians who are female is at an all time high. This has largely been achieved via quotas and most of the main parties now operate some kind of quota system. But have quantitative improvements in female representation in been matched by qualitative improvements? This article seeks to answer this question by looking not only at the number of women in parliaments and other collective bodies, but also in the highest echelons of power. It outlines each party's policies regarding the promotion of women and the factors which enhance or hamper their impact. A brief comparison of female political representation in eastern and western Germany is also provided. The author argues that measures such as quotas have increased the number of female German politicians but still do not guarantee them equal access to positions of real power. Furthermore, the incorporation of pro-equality principles into party statutes has not automatically led to their assimilation into party cultures, especially in the case of well-established parties which only recently addressed the gender imbalance in their ranks.
A Novel Early Diagnosis System for Mild Cognitive Impairment Based on Local Region Analysis: A Pilot Study

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder that accounts for 60–70% of cases of dementia in the elderly. An early diagnosis of AD is usually hampered for many reasons including the variable clinical and pathological features exhibited among affected individuals. This paper presents a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system with the primary goal of improving the accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity of diagnosis. In this system, PiB-PET scans, which were obtained from the ADNI database, underwent five essential stages. First, the scans were standardized and de-noised. Second, an Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) atlas was utilized to partition the brain into 116 regions or labels that served for local (region-based) diagnosis. Third, scale-invariant Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) was used, per brain label, to detect the discriminant features. Fourth, the regions' features were analyzed using a general linear model in the form of a two-sample t-test. Fifth, the support vector machines (SVM) and their probabilistic variant (pSVM) were constructed to provide local, followed by global diagnosis. The system was evaluated on scans of normal control (NC) vs. mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (19 NC and 65 MCI scans). The proposed system showed superior accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity as compared to other related work.
Bilateral Foot Center of Pressure during Trunk Forward Bending and Reaching

This study analyze bilateral foot center of pressure (CoP) and compare the extent of bilateral lower limb involvements during trunk forward bending and reaching in stroke patients. The measures of limb involvements were maximum CoP displacement in anterior-posterior direction and the proximal and distal ends of the CoP trajectory. Side of foot and target location interaction effects were significant for maximal CoP anterior-posterior displacement The target location didn't affect the proximal end of the CoP trajectory neither did it affect the difference between feet. The target location affected the distal end of the CoP trajectory and the CoP maximal anterior-posterior displacement significantly, but only the later parameter showed the difference between feet for specific target locations. The pedeography also show the target effects on CoP and different extent of bilateral limb involvements. The extent of bilateral limb involvement varied with target locations. The relationship between foot CoP and neuromuscular control needs further investigations.
Nucleosome eviction from MHC class II promoters controls positioning of the transcription start site

Nucleosome depletion at transcription start sites (TSS) has been documented genome-wide in multiple eukaryotic organisms. However, the mechanisms that mediate this nucleosome depletion and its functional impact on transcription remain largely unknown. We have studied these issues at human MHC class II (MHCII) genes. Activation-induced nucleosome free regions (NFR) encompassing the TSS were observed at all MHCII genes. Nucleosome depletion was exceptionally strong, attaining over 250-fold, at the promoter of the prototypical HLA-DRA gene. The NFR was induced primarily by the transcription factor complex that assembles on the conserved promoter-proximal enhancer situated upstream of the TSS. Functional analyses performed in the context of native chromatin demonstrated that displacing the NFR without altering the sequence of the core promoter induced a shift in the position of the TSS. The NFR thus appears to play a critical role in transcription initiation because it directs correct TSS positioning in vivo. Our results provide support for a novel mechanism in transcription initiation whereby the position of the TSS is controlled by nucleosome eviction rather than by promoter sequence.
How can we understand intentional movements that make up sport ? Rationality or mind-body connection and intuition ?

How can we understand intentional movements that make up sport? The convenient truths often come from an information-processing theory based on a computer model of the mind. The computer model of the mind has been widely adopted for sport research at conceptual, empirical, and practical levels, and it has led to a reliance on notions as information processing, motor programs, representations, traces, schemas, video analyses, and the like. In this paper I will show that development of elite sports results is more than biomechanics and computer models of the mind – it must also incorporate the athlete’s own mind body connection and intuition. The conclusions of my research challenge existing beliefs, assumptions and approaches to best practice.
An ant colony optimization method to detect communities in social networks

Community detection is an important task in social network analysis. It aims to partition the network into clusters so that interactions among members within a cluster are considerably more frequent than that across clusters. A typical instantiation is to maximize the modularity of clusters which is a NP-hard problem, and thus, heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms are employed as approximation. We present a novel divisive algorithm based on ant colony optimization to detect hierarchical community structure by maximizing the modularity. Our algorithm splits the network into two local communities iteratively and incorporates both heuristic information and pheromone trails. Experimental results on a set of synthetic benchmarks and real-world networks verified that our algorithm is highly effective for hierarchical community structure detection.
A Multi-Dimensional Bayesian Approach to Lexical Style

We adapt the popular LDA topic model (Blei et al., 2003) to the representation of stylistic lexical information, evaluating our model on the basis of human-interpretability at the word and text level. We show, in particular, that this model can be applied to the task of inducing stylistic lexicons, and that a multi-dimensional approach is warranted given the correlations among stylistic dimensions.
Interval type-2 fuzzy logic congestion control of video streaming

Intelligent congestion control is vital in encoded video streaming of a clip or film, as network traffic volatility requires constant adjustment of the bit-rate. Equation-based solutions to congestion control are prone to fluctuations in the delivery rate and may respond only when packet loss has already occurred, while both fluctuations and packet loss affect the end-user's perception of the delivered video. A type-1 fuzzy logic controller can operate at video display rates and can cope with uncertainties in packet delay measurements but this paper proposes an interval type-2 fuzzy logic congestion controller, as this has the ability to anticipate un-modeled network states, besides potentially reducing training time prior to deployment. The paper demonstrates an order of magnitude improvement in delivered video quality using type-2 fuzzy logic in respect to type-1 logic, when the control inputs are subject to noise, and reduced packet loss compared to an equation-based controller.
Adaptive Metric Learning Vector Quantization for Ordinal Classification

Many pattern analysis problems require classification of examples into naturally ordered classes. In such cases, nominal classification schemes will ignore the class order relationships, which can have a detrimental effect on classification accuracy. This article introduces two novel ordinal learning vector quantization (LVQ) schemes, with metric learning, specifically designed for classifying data items into ordered classes. In ordinal LVQ, unlike in nominal LVQ, the class order information is used during training in selecting the class prototypes to be adapted, as well as in determining the exact manner in which the prototypes get updated. Prototype-based models in general are more amenable to interpretations and can often be constructed at a smaller computational cost than alternative nonlinear classification models. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed ordinal LVQ formulations compare favorably with their nominal counterparts. Moreover, our methods achieve competitive performance against existing benchmark ordinal regression models.
Data-aware design and verification of service compositions with Reo and mCRL2

Service-based systems can be modeled as stand-alone services coordinated by external connectors. Reo is a channel-based coordination language with well-defined semantics that enables a compositional construction of complex connectors from a set of primitive channels. It has been successfully applied in the area of web service composition specification as well as in business process modeling. In this paper, we present a mapping from Reo to mCRL2, a specification language based on the process algebra ACP, extended with data and time. The mapping enables verification of Reo process models and service compositions using the mCRL2 model checking facilities. The supporting Eclipse Coordination Tools suite provides a user-friendly environment for the modeling and verification process.
Adrenocortical Carcinoma: Review and Update

Adrenocortical carcinoma is a rare endocrine tumor with a poor prognosis. These tumors can be diagnostically challenging, and diagnostic algorithms and criteria continue to be suggested. Myxoid and oncocytic variants are important to recognize to not confuse with other tumors. In addition, the diagnostic criteria are different for oncocytic adrenal carcinomas than conventional carcinomas. Adrenocortical carcinomas usually occur in adults, but can also occur in children. In children these tumors are diagnostically challenging as the histologic features of malignancy seen in an adult tumor may not be associated with aggressive disease in a child. Adrenocortical carcinomas occur with increased frequency in Beckwith-Wiedemann and Li-Fraumeni syndromes, but most occur sporadically. Gene expression profiling by transcriptome analysis can discriminate adrenocortical carcinomas from adenomas and divide carcinomas into prognostic groups. The increasing understanding of the pathogenesis of these tumors may provide increasing treatment targets for this aggressive tumor.
Real-time sonar system using acoustic lens and numerical analysis based on 2D/3D parabolic equation method

The autonomous underwater vehicle mounted on the forward obstacle avoidance sonar is developed to investigate ocean environments. In order to obtain real time, high efficiency and clear acoustic images, the real-time sonar system using an acoustic lens has been studied. The propagation of sound through acoustic lenses can be modeled using either the ray-tracing, wave acoustics or a combination of both. In this paper, the sound pressure near the focal area of the acoustic lenses is studied by using the parabolic equation methods. In conclusions, the acoustic lens simulation based on wave acoustics offers a valid means for predictions in the performance of acoustic lenses before fabrication.
An initial model fo complex dynamics in electric power system blackouts

We define a model for the evolution of a long series of electric power transmission system blackouts. The model describes opposing forces, which have been conjectured to cause self-organized criticality in power system blackouts. There is a slow time scale representing the opposing forces of load growth and growth in system capacity and a fast time scale representing cascading line overloads and outages. The time scales are coupled: load growth leads to outages and outages lead to increased system capacity. The opposing forces result in a dynamic equilibrium in which blackouts of all sizes occur. The model is a means to study the complex dynamics of this dynamic equilibrium. The Markov property of the model is briefly discussed. The model dynamic equilibrium is illustrated using initial results from the 73-bus IEEE reliability test system.
Ethics, Choices, and Decisions in Acute Medicine: A National Survey of Norwegian Physicians’ Attitudes

Objective: To study the attitudes of Norwegian physicians to resuscitation of hypothetical patients all at risk of neurological sequelae. Design: Mail-based survey. Setting: A cohort of Norwegian physicians who are representative of the national physician corps. Interventions: A total of 1650 Norwegian physicians (7% of practicing physicians in Norway) received a written questionnaire describing six scenarios of patients all in need of emergency life-saving intervention. Respondents were asked whether they would resuscitate; whether such resuscitation was in the patient’s best interest; whether a surrogate’s refusal of intervention would be accepted; and whether they would have wanted resuscitation if the patient were their own child, their spouse, or themselves. Positive or negative responses on a four-point Likert scale were recorded. Measurements and Main Results: A total of 1,069 respondents (response rate, 65%). Physicians responding to these scenarios were a) more inclined to resuscitate an anonymous patient than if the patient were themselves or their kin; b) willing to resuscitate although they do not consider this intervention to be in the patient’s best interest; c) willing to refrain from resuscitation on surrogate request in spite of a reasonably good prognosis; d) willing to accept surrogate’s refusal of resuscitation in spite of a stated opinion that such intervention would be in the patient’s best interest; and e) less willing to resuscitate newborn infants compared with older children and adults (except the aged) with similar prognoses. Conclusion: There appear to be differences in medical thinking about best interest, surrogate decision making, and the relative value of lives as far as these are applied to acute, life-saving treatment.
Algal Lectins as Potential HIV Microbicide Candidates

The development and use of topical microbicides potentially offers an additional strategy to reduce the spread of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Carbohydrate-binding agents (CBAs) that show specificity for high mannose carbohydrates on the surface of the heavily glycosylated envelope of HIV are endowed with potent anti-HIV activity. In fact, a number of algal lectins such as cyanovirin-N, microvirin, microcystis viridis lectin, scytovirin, Oscillatoria agardhii agglutinin and griffithsin are considered as potential microbicide candidates to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV through topical applications. They not only inhibit infection of cells by cell-free virus but they can also efficiently prevent virus transmission from virus-infected cells to uninfected CD4+ target T-lymphocytes and DC-SIGN-directed capture of HIV-1 and transmission to CD4+ T lymphocytes. This review focuses on the structural properties and carbohydrate specificity of these algal lectins, their antiviral activity against HIV and several other enveloped viruses, their safety profile and viral resistance patterns.
Connection between customer emotions and relationship quality in online music services

Previous research focuses primarily on studying the influence of emotions on satisfaction in online music services, whereas few studies analyse their effects on trust and commitment. This study specifically examines the interaction role of emotions in relationship quality (i.e. a higher-order construct composed of commitment, satisfaction and trust). We hypothesise that emotions will exert a direct effect on relationship quality, but will also moderate the relationship between its components. An empirical survey is used to test the hypotheses. Data are collected from a total of 408 users of online music services from the UK, Germany and Denmark. The results provide strong support for the proposals that, on the one hand, satisfaction and trust lead customers towards developing high commitment to online music services; and, on the other hand, emotions are important quasi-moderators to engage in online service relationships. The results of this study could help online music service providers (a) to create a successful business model; and (b) to determine the main drivers of online loyalty.
Results of a SNP genome screen in a large Costa Rican pedigree segregating for severe bipolar disorder

We have ascertained in the Central Valley of Costa Rica a new kindred (CR201) segregating for severe bipolar disorder (BP‐I). The family was identified by tracing genealogical connections among eight persons initially independently ascertained for a genome wide association study of BP‐I. For the genome screen in CR201, we trimmed the family down to 168 persons (82 of whom are genotyped), containing 25 individuals with a best‐estimate diagnosis of BP‐I. A total of 4,690 SNP markers were genotyped. Analysis of the data was hampered by the size and complexity of the pedigree, which prohibited using exact multipoint methods on the entire kindred. Two‐point parametric linkage analysis, using a conservative model of transmission, produced a maximum LOD score of 2.78 on chromosome 6, and a total of 39 loci with LOD scores >1.0. Multipoint parametric and non‐parametric linkage analysis was performed separately on four sections of CR201, and interesting (nominal P‐value from either analysis <0.01), although not statistically significant, regions were highlighted on chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 12, 16, 19, and 22, in at least one section of the pedigree, or when considering all sections together. The difficulties of analyzing genome wide SNP data for complex disorders in large, potentially informative, kindreds are discussed. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Firm as Social Networks: An Organisational Perspective

This paper offers an organizational perspective on the firm in new economic geographies. It starts with the premise of the firm as a production function in neoclassical economics and a cost minimisation device in transaction cost economics. By pointing out the inadequacy in these mainstream economic perspectives on the firm, I draw upon recent behavioral and managerial theories to develop a relational conception of the firm as social networks in which actors are embedded in ongoing power relations and discursive processes. In further elaborating this relational perspective on the firm as an organisational device, I show how the firm is governed through social relations among different actors, how it is a site of contested ideologies and political representations among these actors, and how space and geographical scales matter in shaping its social construction. Taken together, this organisational perspective aims to shift our research agenda in urban and regional development from promoting the growth of the firm per se to understanding how the firm serves as a relational institution that connects spatially differentiated actors in different places and regions. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.