Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Peroxisome Proliferator–Activated Receptor-γ Coactivator-1α Overexpression Increases Lipid Oxidation in Myocytes From Extremely Obese Individuals

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the obesity-related decrement in fatty acid oxidation (FAO) in primary human skeletal muscle cells (HSkMC) is linked with lower mitochondrial content and whether this deficit could be corrected via overexpression of peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor-γ coactivator-1α (PGC-1α). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS FAO was studied in HSkMC from lean (BMI 22.4 ± 0.9 kg/m2; N = 12) and extremely obese (45.3 ± 1.4 kg/m2; N = 9) subjects. Recombinant adenovirus was used to increase HSkMC PGC-1α expression (3.5- and 8.0-fold), followed by assessment of mitochondrial content (mtDNA and cytochrome C oxidase IV [COXIV]), complete (14CO2 production from labeled oleate), and incomplete (acid soluble metabolites [ASM]) FAO, and glycerolipid synthesis. RESULTS Obesity was associated with a 30% decrease (P < 0.05) in complete FAO, which was accompanied by higher relative rates of incomplete FAO ([14C]ASM production/14CO2), increased partitioning of fatty acid toward storage, and lower (P < 0.05) mtDNA (−27%), COXIV (−35%), and mitochondrial transcription factor (mtTFA) (−43%) protein levels. PGC-1α overexpression increased (P < 0.05) FAO, mtDNA, COXIV, mtTFA, and fatty acid incorporation into triacylglycerol in both lean and obese groups. Perturbations in FAO, triacylglycerol synthesis, mtDNA, COXIV, and mtTFA in obese compared with lean HSkMC persisted despite PGC-1α overexpression. When adjusted for mtDNA and COXIV content, FAO was equivalent between lean and obese groups. CONCLUSION Reduced mitochondrial content is related to impaired FAO in HSkMC derived from obese individuals. Increasing PGC-1α protein levels did not correct the obesity-related absolute reduction in FAO or mtDNA content, implicating mechanisms other than PGC-1α abundance.
Some Effects of Severe Hypothermia on Learning and Retention

Two experiments have been conducted to assess the effects of extreme hypothermia on learning and retention. In the first experiment two groups of rats were subjected to identical treatments except that the deep body temperature of one group was lowered to between + I° and o° C. before both groups began learning a serial problem solving task. The second experiment included three groups of animals: a control and two experimental groups, the deep body temperature of animals in one of the latter being reduced to between + 13–4° and + 18–5° C. and that of the other to between + I° and o° C. Except for the “hypothermia” phase of the design all groups in the second experiment received identical treatments in the following order: Training on a maze, hypothermia, tests for retention of the maze habit, training on the serial-problem-solving task, tests for speed of locomotion. Animals whose body temperature had been lowered to between + I° and O°C. showed a significant impairment in learning performance when compared with control animals. On the other hand, no significant differences were found between the performances of control animals and those cooled to between + 13.4° and + 18.5°C. The results also suggest that the effects of severe hypothermia may be temporary, since the percentage of impairment decreased as the interval between body cooling and learning increased. The differences in retention of the maze habit among experimental and control groups were very small and in no instance were they statistically significant, although there was a consistent trend towards poorer retention following hypothermia. These small differences may be functions of the technique used to reduce deep body temperature rather than of the effects of hypothermia per se. These results are based upon observations of the behaviour of non-hibernating, homoiothermic animals. With such animals, extreme hypothermia, such as that employed in the present study, results in complete arrest of heart beat, circulation, and respiration. It also suppresses electrical activity in the brain and in our animals cerebral activity may have been arrested for as long as 13 to z hours. Within the limits of our experimental procedure we have failed to find evidence that arrest of these vital metabolic processes as a result of hypothermia produces any very serious, permanent effects on the animal's behaviour once it has been successfully reanimated. If, as previous writers have suggested, severe hypothermia can be used to “… stop all nerve impulses in the brain momentarily …” (Gerard, 1953), our results are difficult to explain if long-term memory is dependent upon the continuous activity of the brain.
Polynomial time approximation scheme for t-latency bounded information propagation problem in heterogeneous wireless networks

In a network sometimes we need to propagate information within a given time period t, which is called t-latency. Any node that accepts information from the other nodes will start transmitting that information if it satisfies the required conditions of the protocol that is in use. In a t-latency bounded information propagation problem, we need to find a minimal set of nodes that will start to transmit information initially so that the whole set of nodes can start transmitting within the given time period, t. In this paper we provide an approximation scheme for a t-latency bounded information propagation problem in heterogeneous wireless networks and we are the first to propose such scheme. We also derive the approximation ratio of our scheme and show that the ratio is bounded by a factor ε which is constant for a particular network.
Art as an Autopoietic Sub-System of Modern Society

This article is concerned with Niklas Luhmann's theory of art which he formulated in the 1990s, based on his general theory of autopoietic systems. This theory regards modern society as a functionally differentiated formation whose sub-systems operate according to their inner principles of communication. According to this, the domain of art can also be seen as an operationally closed and self-referential communicative system. The basic problem in these notions lies in the way in which their description of the relationships existing between different systems is only in very narrow terms. Consequently they partially ignore the present process of de-differentiation which has noticeably changed the status of art in society. Instead, Luhmann's ideas expressly emphasize that functional differentiation is an ongoing process. In order to describe the process of de-differentiation, social theory does not need to abandon the concept of autopoiesis, but it does need to understand social systems as interlaced formations which, to an increasing extent, contain common normative and organizational constituents. Because social systems are not altogether self-referential formations, the concept of autopoiesis can describe them only in part. This particular concept of system has been developed in particular by Richard Münch, and as such it forms a productive alternative to the theory of autopoietic social systems.
Effects of a Transitional Bilingual Education Program: Findings, Issues, and Next Steps

Abstract This study examined the effectiveness of a transitional Spanish–English bilingual program, Academic Language Acquisition (ALA), in enhancing K–5 students' English-language proficiency, as well as their English performance in academic subject areas, in comparison with the Structured English Immersion (SEI) process.1 An existing reading program, Success for All (SFA), served as a confounding influence because it had similar goals for reading development and included English-and Spanish-language curricula. Given 4 years of enrollment in their respective programs, ALA and SEI students, regardless of participation in SFA, were scoring on par with one another as a group. This phenomenon occurred with content-based tests (reading, mathematics, and language arts) and in the reading and listening and speaking portions of the California English Language Development Test, an English-language proficiency measure. The only statistically significant difference among student groups was that students in both ALA and SFA appeared to be scoring at a lower level on the California English Language Development Test writing portion than matched peers in the other three groups of interest (participants in ALA but not SFA, participants in both SEI and SFA, and participants in SEI but not SFA). Additional findings, theoretical and methodological issues, and implications for future research are featured.
Reviews: Youth and the Politics of Representation: Response to Thomas Hatch’s “If the ‘Kids’ Are Not ‘Alright,’ I’m ‘Clueless’”

I n his article "If the 'Kids' are not 'Alright/ I'm 'Clueless,'" Thomas Hatch (1996) raised some provocative questions about the quasi-documentary film Kids and its relevance for addressing questions of representation in the media. Hatch's criticisms are important not because they are particularly insightful but because they are commonplace and as such reveal both the theoretical limitations as well as some related misunderstandings or willful misreadings of the representational politics of youth at work in some popular forms of cultural criticism. Hatch's article also provides the opportunity to further elaborate on the pedagogical importance of critically understanding how film and other media articulate with those ideological assumptions and political practices that animate broader public discourses about young people. While not providing a consistent theory of representational politics, Hatch does raise a number of disparate questions that reveal the shortcomings of particular assumptions about the media as a site of cultural politics and the relevance of analyzing how youth are constructed within Hollywood films. Hatch begins with the ironic disclaimer that he does not know what is going on with kids today and is "clueless" as to whether the kids are "alright," then questions whether Larry Clark's film Kids reflects something unique about today's youth or about the current historical era. Hatch answers his question with a resounding no, asserting that Clark's film reveals nothing about the marginalization of youth that is "unique about this era. " Rather, alienation and marginalization appear as timeless, existential categories that simply register some of the defining experiences through which youth are constructed and narrate themselves. Hence, celluloid representations of marginalized youth in the media and the authority they legitimate and enact in everyday life should be read as essentially unchanging and eternal categories that mark the sites and experiences unique to young people. For Hatch, a politics of representation should focus on mainstream Hollywood films such as Clueless because they betray a "more subtle" form of manipulation and control in depicting youth. With a facile gesture, Hatch concludes that "what is at issue here is not how films are made, but what we make of them" (p. 42). Before I address the question of how we can think politics in the face of pedagogy of representation, I want to comment on the specifics of Hatch's main arguments.
Children's Human Figure Drawings as Measures of Intelligence: The Comparative Validity of Three Scoring Systems

This study examined the scoring systems of Goodenough and Harris (1963), Naglieri (1988), and Ayres and Reid (I1966) for using human figure drawings to assess the intellectual abilities of children. Drawing scores of 100 children, aged 6 to 15, were compared to their performance on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), while the drawing scores of a separate group of 100 children, aged 6 to 15, were compared to their performance on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III (WISC-I1I). All three drawing systems correlated significantly and at similar levels with the WISC-R as well as the WISC-III, suggesting that the far shorter and more recent Naglieri technique may save clinicians time and effort. None of the drawing systems had a pattern of significantly different validity coefficients for children of varying ages or intelligence scores.
Planning in Action Language BC while Learning Action Costs for Mobile Robots

The action language BC provides an elegant way of formalizing dynamic domains which involve indirect effects of actions and recursively defined fluents. In complex robot task planning domains, it may be necessary for robots to plan with incomplete information, and reason about indirect or recursive action effects. In this paper, we demonstrate how BC can be used for robot task planning to solve these issues. Additionally, action costs are incorporated with planning to produce optimal plans, and we estimate these costs from experience making planning adaptive. This paper presents the first application of BC on a real robot in a realistic domain, which involves human-robot interaction for knowledge acquisition, optimal plan generation to minimize navigation time, and learning for adaptive planning.
Look ahead parallel pursuit

We endeavor to improve compressed sensing reconstruction performance of parallel pursuit algorithms. In an iteration, standard parallel pursuit algorithms use a support-set expansion by a fixed number of coefficients, leading to restricted performance. To achive a better performance, we develop a look ahead strategy that adaptively chooses the best number of coefficients. We develop a new algorithm which we call look ahead parallel pursuit, where a look ahead strategy is invoked on a minimal residual norm criterion. The new algorithm provides a trade-off between performance and complexity.
A multi-strand approach to promoting equalities and human rights in policy making

New European Union policy is to be subject to equality impact assessment for all strands of inequality and multiple discrimination (European Commission, 2006). This article discusses research that tested a gender mainstreaming model for its ability to reveal intersectional inequalities. The resulting collaborative multi-strand model situates intersectional enquiry at a structural level, enables the integration of equalities and human rights approaches and supports prioritisation without reductively homogenising 'strand' specific inequalities. This is a step towards intersectional working. Gaining satisfactory intersectional evidence will require improved quantitative data collection, the revaluing of qualitative data, and collaborative working between 'equality makers and policy makers'.
Religious Institutions, Church–State History and Muslim Mobilisation in Britain, France and Germany

With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church–State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims’ religious needs in each country.
A Study of Energy-Saving Shoes for Robot Considering Lateral Plane Motion

In this paper, we propose a flexible shoe system for biped robots to optimize energy consumption of the lateral plane motion. This shoe system is made to deform decline outside in the lateral plane and it can absorb the kinetic energy of the robot in the lateral plane. Furthermore, this hardware (shoes) and software (controller) can be easily applicable to the ordinary walking robot system. The effectiveness and characteristics of this system are confirmed by computer simulations and experimental results. It is confirmed that the stiffness of the shoe is a very important parameter for energy consumption by using computer simulations and experimental results.
The average availability of parallel checkpointing systems and its importance in selecting runtime parameters

Performance prediction of checkpointing systems in the presence of failures is a well-studied research area. While the literature abounds with performance models of checkpointing systems, none address the issue of selecting runtime parameters other than the optimal checkpointing interval. In particular the issue of processor allocation is typically ignored. In this paper we briefly present it performance model for long-running parallel computations that execute with checkpointing enabled. We then discuss how it is relevant to today's parallel computing environments and software, and present case studies of using the model to select runtime parameters.
Dynamic duty-cycled MAC for wireless sensor networks with energy harvesters

Medium Access Control (MAC) for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is usually implemented by taking battery - operated sensor nodes. MAC for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs) are of great interest to researchers due to its good network lifetime. MAC layer has an important role in the power saving mechanism of EH-WSNs. The paper proposes a MAC energy saving schemes by taking the exponential decision as the principle of operation. This Exponential Decision - MAC (ED-MAC) includes two proposed method by taking residual energy as the primary factor. In the first proposed method, Exponential Decision MAC Based on Dynamic Duty cycle Scheduling of current Residual Energy (ED-DSR) takes into account only the current residual energy and thereby adjusts the duty cycle of each sensor nodes dynamically. In the second method, prospective increase in the residual energy over time by each sensor node is estimated using Exponential Decision-Dynamic Duty cycle Scheduling based on Prospective increase in energy (ED-DSP) so that it can reduce off time more aggressively when possible and thereby achieves more energy savings. The scenario for EH-WSNs was simulated in NS2. Simulation results show that ED-MAC schemes have better performance than dynamic duty cycled Receiver Initiated Linear Decision MAC (RILD-MAC).
Let your body move: a prototyping toolkit for wearable force feedback with electrical muscle stimulation

Electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) is a promising wearable haptic output technology as it can be miniaturized considerably and delivers a wide range of haptic output. However, prototyping EMS applications is challenging. It requires detailed knowledge and skills about hardware, software, and physiological characteristics. To simplify prototyping with EMS in mobile and wearable situations we present the Let Your Body Move toolkit. It consists of (1) a hardware control module with Bluetooth communication that uses off-the-shelf EMS devices as signal generators, (2) a simple communications protocol to connect mobile devices, and (3) a set of control applications as starting points for EMS prototyping. We describe EMS-specific parameters, electrode placements on the skin, and user calibration. The toolkit was evaluated in a workshop with 10 researchers in haptics. The results show that the toolkit allows to quickly generate non-trivial prototypes. The hardware schematics and software components are available as open source software.
Simple hysterectomy in the presence of invasive cervical cancer in Iran

The objective of this study was to determine the reasons leading to an inappropriate simple hysterectomy in the presence of invasive cervical cancer. During 1997–2001, 62 cases of invasive cervical carcinoma that had been treated by simple hysterectomy were referred to the gynecology oncology service in Vali-e-Asr hospital, Tehran, Iran. Five had microinvasive carcinoma. The remaining 57 women had either adenocarcinomas or squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). Medical records were reviewed retrospectively to determine the reasons for inappropriate hysterectomy. Reasons for inappropriate hysterectomy were as follow: lack of preoperative Pap smear (P/S) (29%), deliberate hysterectomy for biopsy-proven cancer (25.8%), negative P/S (6.5%), inadequate evaluation of abnormal P/S (6.5%), failure to perform an indicated conization (3.2%), and emergent operation because of uterine perforation (1.6%). Reasons for inappropriate hysterectomy in the remainder of patients (27.4%) were not found because of lack of sufficient information. Although 45.2% of these patients had complained for vaginal bleeding, only four of them had preoperative endocervical and endometrial sampling. Despite the increasing emphasis on performing cervical cancer screening before hysterectomy, only 18 (29%) referral patients had preoperative P/S. We conclude that by close adherence to the cervical cancer screening guidelines and appropriate evaluation of the presenting symptoms, we may avoid inappropriate management of cervical carcinomas with simple hysterectomy. Many cases of simple hysterectomy in the presence of biopsy-proven squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix necessitates some reconsideration of gynecology oncology postgraduate courses for general gynecologists.
PM Source Apportionment for Short-Term Cardiac Function Changes in ApoE−/− Mice

Daily rates of cardiovascular mortality and morbidity are have been associated with daily variations in fine particulate matter (aerodynamic diameter ≤2.5 μm, PM2.5), but little is known about the influences of the individual source-related PM2.5 categories or the temporal lags for the effects. We investigated heart rate (HR) and HR variability (HRV) data collected during a 5-month study involving 6 hr/day, 5 day/week exposures of normal (C57) mice and a murine model for atherosclerotic disease (ApoE−/−) in Sterling Forest (Tuxedo, New York, USA). The mice were exposed to concentrated ambient particles (PM2.5 concentrated 10-fold, producing an average of 113 μg/m3). Daily 6-hr PM2.5 air samples were analyzed by X-ray fluorescence, permitting attribution to major PM source categories [secondary sulfate (SS), resuspended soil (RS), residual oil (RO) combustion, and other, largely due to motor vehicle traffic]. We examined associations between these PM2.5 components and both HR and HRV for three different daily time periods: during exposure, the afternoon after exposure, and late at night. For HR there were significant transient associations for RS during exposure, and for SS in the afternoon after exposure. For HRV, there were comparable associations with RO in the afternoon after exposure and for both SS and RS late at night. The biologic bases for these associations and their temporal lags are not known but may be related to the differential solubility of the biologically active PM components at the respiratory epithelia and their access to cells that release mediators that reach the cardiovascular system. Clearly, further research to elucidate the underlying processes is needed.