Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Almanac 2011: Cardiomyopathies. the National Society Journals Present Selected Research That Has Driven Recent Advances in Clinical Cardiology

As we approach the end of 2011 it is clear that the next few years are going to be dominated by the application of new high throughput genetic screening techniques, capable of screening the entire exome or indeed genome. Understanding the data generated by these techniques will require new and equally sophisticated analysis of large and complex datasets, using a systems biology approach with deeper phenotyping and advanced modelling techniques that have the flexibility for continuous update, refinement with discovery of new knowledge. Exciting new developments that may also transform cardiomyopathy research include those of infrastructure and organisation (multi-centre collaborations) and spin-offs from the field of regenerative medicine research. For clinical researchers that translate this information to the clinic the focus will however remain the same; namely improvement of quality and quantity of life.
Cigarette smoking: Attentional mediation of anxiety as a predictor of nicotine withdrawal severity

Although a majority of cigarette smokers report that they smoke to relieve anxiety, studies examining the anxiolytic properties of smoking have yielded equivocal results. Kassel and colleagues proposed that the anxiolytic effects of nicotine might be mediated by the presence or absence of distracting stimuli. More specifically, Kassel and Shiffman postulated that smoking “constrains smokers’ attention to the most immediate and salient stimuli in their environment— when such stimuli are available. ” As a result, smokers are more likely to focus on immediate and distracting stimuli than more distal anxiogenic stimuli, thus reducing anxious mood. Further, smokers who rely more heavily on attentional mediation to relieve anxiety may experience more severe nicotine withdrawal, which may ultimately make it more difficult for them to quit smoking. The current study was designed to assess the degree to which attentional mediation influences the experience of self-reported nicotine withdrawal severity in a sample of 21 adult heavy smokers. Participants completed the attentional mediation paradigm, as developed by Kassel and Shiffman, and then abstained from smoking for 24 hours. As expected, results indicated that anxiety and withdrawal symptoms increased during abstinence from smoking. However, the primary hypothesis was not supported: smokers who displayed greater reductions in anxiety in the presence of a distracting stimulus did not experience more severe nicotine withdrawal. These findings leave the relationship between anxiety and nicotine withdrawal open to speculation. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopy of the Supersoft X-Ray Binary RX J0513.9−6951

We have obtained spectroscopy with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer of the supersoft X-ray binary RX J0513.9-6951 over a complete binary orbital cycle. The spectra show a hot continuum with extremely broad O VI emission and weak Lyman absorptions. He II emission is weak and narrow, while N III and C III emissions are undetected, although lines from these ions are prominent at optical wavelengths. The broad O VI emission and Lyman absorption show radial velocity curves that are approximately antiphased and have semiamplitudes of ∼117 ± 40 and 54 ± 10 km s-1, respectively. Narrow emissions from He II and O VI show small velocity variations with phasing different from the broad O VI but consistent with the optical line peaks. We also measure considerable changes in the far-ultraviolet continuum and O VI emission-line flux. We discuss the possible causes of the measured variations and a tentative binary interpretation.
Does school prepare men for prison?

The potential link between educational ‘failure’ and offending is perennially debated. Research and popular discourses tend to focus on the ‘disadvantaged’ family backgrounds from which the children who fail come. This paper summarises a piece of research that takes a different view. It is grounded in the critical sociology of education that exposes the inherently unequal nature of education systems, the role of education in maintaining and legitimising persistent social inequalities, and the exercise of disciplinary power through the linked institutions of school and prison. It aims to utilise these theoretical frameworks to reignite an interest in the fundamental problems of schooling. It achieves this through the specific focus on the marginalised ‘naughty kids' who often become the prison population of the future. The researcher worked as a teacher in adult male prisons in the UK, and data collected during 200+ brief induction interviews suggested that the experience of schooling was more significant to prisoners than the educational outcomes, or lack thereof. Observations of the apparent ease with which the majority of men coped with their lives in prison led to questions about the possibility of a direct correspondence between prisoners' schooling and their later lives in prison. This was investigated in more detail by conducting in-depth life history interviews with 11 former inmates for a Doctoral thesis. The findings of the research show that school, by its very nature, is not always a benevolent place. Those excluded from or marginalised in education (and later in society) can become the collateral damage of a system that is not merely concerned with the benign transfer of knowledge and social skills; what is often seen as educational failure is conceivably successful social control.
Transcription-dependent colocalization of the U1, U2, U4/U6, and U5 snRNPs in coiled bodies

We have recently shown that discrete foci are present in the nuclei of mammalian cells in which each of the U1, U2, U4/U6, and U5 snRNPs involved in pre-mRNA splicing, and the non-snRNP-splicing factor U2AF, are concentrated (Carmo-Fonseca, M., D. Tollervey, R. Pepperkok, S. Barabino, A. Merdes, C. Brunner, P. D. Zamore, M. R. Green, E. Hurt, and A. I. Lamond. 1991. EMBO (Eur. Mol. Biol. Organ.) J. 10:195-206; Carmo-Fonseca, M. , R. Pepperkok, B. S. Sproat, W. Ansorge, M. S. Swanson, and A. I. Lamond. 1991 EMBO (Eur. Mol. Biol. Organ.) J. 10:1863-1873). Here, we identify these snRNP-rich organelles as coiled bodies. snRNPs no longer concentrate in coiled bodies after cells are treated with the transcription inhibitors alpha-amanitin or actinomycin D. snRNP association with coiled bodies is also disrupted by heat shock. This indicates that the association of snRNPs with coiled bodies may be connected with the metabolism of nascent transcripts. A novel labeling method is described which shows both the RNA and protein components of individual snRNPs colocalizing in situ. Using this procedure all spliceosomal snRNPs are seen distributed in a nonhomogeneous pattern throughout the nucleoplasm, excluding nucleoli. They are most concentrated in coiled bodies, but in addition are present in "speckled" structures which are distinct from coiled bodies and which contain the non-snRNP splicing factor SC-35. U1 snRNP shows a more widespread nucleoplasmic staining, outside of coiled bodies and "speckled" structures, relative to the other snRNPs. The association of snRNPs with "speckles" is disrupted by heat shock but enhanced when cells are treated with alpha-amanitin.
Psychometric Properties of Farsi Version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (FTAS-20)

This study investigated the psychometric properties of Farsi version of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 for 709 undergr aduate students (416 females and 293 males) at the University of Te hran. All participants were asked to complete the Farsi versi on of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (FTAS-20), the Emotional Intel ligence Scale, and the Mental Health Inventory. Findings supported he internal consistency, test-retest reliability, concurrent va lidity, and three-factor structure of the Farsi version of the TAS-20. The f actors found in the Farsi version of the TAS-20 are similar to the thre e factors found by Bagby, Parker and Taylor (1994) and were accordingl y labeled as “Difficulty Identifying Feelings” (DIF), “Difficulty Describing Feelings” (DDF) and “Externally-Oriented Thinking” (EOT). Results of this study provide evidence supporting the cross -cultural validity of the TAS-20 and its applicability in Iran.
Optimal Parameter Selection for the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM): Quadratic Problems

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has emerged as a powerful technique for large-scale structured optimization. Despite many recent results on the convergence properties of ADMM, a quantitative characterization of the impact of the algorithm parameters on the convergence times of the method is still lacking. In this paper we find the optimal algorithm parameters that minimize the convergence factor of the ADMM iterates in the context of ℓ2-regularized minimization and constrained quadratic programming. Numerical examples show that our parameter selection rules significantly outperform existing alternatives in the literature.
Investigating low carbon development of high-density building clusters located around railway passenger transport hubs in China

China has experienced high rates of urbanisation due to the increasing housing demand in cities, resulting in high energy consumption and high carbon dioxide emissions from buildings. Moreover, transport-related carbon dioxide emissions will also show a dramatic increase because of the growing number of vehicles in the process of the rapid urbanisation. This research aims to investigate building energy consumption and transport-related carbon dioxide emissions due to mobilities of users from buildings and propose strategies to reduce their energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions in cities. The main contributions of this research are two-fold. Firstly, in the theoretical aspect,this research fills the research gap on the combination of the carbon dioxide emissions quantification with buildings and the transport. Secondly, in the practical perspective, this research presents examples study of the carbon dioxide emissions quantification, analyses potential factors affecting energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, and provides strategies for low carbon city development. This study adopts an on-site survey, questionnaires, modelling simulation, and regression analysis to explore the situations of carbon dioxide emissions in three cases, with each representing one typical location type. The study provides an understanding of the low carbon city development, investigates energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions and compares energy demand with the simulation; it examines factors including street orientation, the layout of building clusters, overshadows, and urban heat island effects with carbon dioxide emissions from building sectors. Meanwhile, this study regresses modal splits with three aspects relating to socioeconomic characteristics, travel patterns from respondents, and self-evaluation on travelling. All of these provides implications for both theoretical and practical research on low carbon city development.
Chromatin Dynamics in Interphase Nuclei and Its Implications for Nuclear Structure

Translational dynamics of chromatin in interphase nuclei of living Swiss 3T3 and HeLa cells was studied using fluorescence microscopy and fluorescence recovery after photobleaching. Chromatin was fluorescently labeled using dihydroethidium, a membrane-permeant derivative of ethidium bromide. After labeling, a laser was used to bleach small (∼0.4 μm radius) spots in the heterochromatin and euchromatin of cells of both types. These spots were observed to persist for >1 h, implying that interphase chromatin is immobile over distance scales ⩾0.4 μm. Over very short times (<1 s), a partial fluorescence recovery within the spots was observed. This partial recovery is attributed to independent dye motion, based on comparison with results obtained using ethidium homodimer-1, which binds essentially irreversibly to nucleic acids. The immobility observed here is consistent with chromosome confinement to domains in interphase nuclei. This immobility may reflect motion-impeding steric interactions that arise in the highly concentrated nuclear milieu or outright attachment of the chromatin to underlying nuclear substructures, such as nucleoli, the nuclear lamina, or the nuclear matrix.
An Implementation of Failure Detection for Large-scale Distributed Systems

In this paper we discuss the problems that the failure detecting of the large-scale distributed system faces, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the methods proposed before, and propose a new failure detecting implementation combining hierarchical protocol and gossip-style protocol. This implementation adopts hierarchical design and divides the nodes on the large-scale distributed network into several groups. Push model is adopted for the detecting of the nodes of the same group, while the transmission of heartbeat message between different groups uses a protocol similar to gossip-style protocol. It not only shortens detecting time, but also decreases network load. And the leader node can conveniently realize the participation and withdrawal of nodes of the system, which increases the extensibility greatly. Through the experiment and analysis it shows that our implementation possesses the timeliness, accuracy, adaptability and extensibility.
RAQFM : A Resource Allocation Queueing Fairness Measure

Fairness is an inherent and fundamental factor of queue service disciplines in a large variety of queueing applications, ranging from airport and supermarket waiting lines to computer and communication queueing systems. Recent empirical studies show that fairness is highly important to queueing customers in practical scenarios. Despite this importance, queueing theory has devoted very little effort to this subject and an agreed upon measure for evaluating the fairness of queueing systems does not exist. In this work we propose RAQFM, a Resource Allocation Queueing Fairness Measure. The measure is built under the understanding that a widely accepted measure must adhere to the common sense intuition of researchers as well as practitioners and customers, and must also be based on widely accepted principles of social justice. We present the methodology of RAQFM and the principles on which it is based. We discuss its properties, emphasizing the way they appeal to one’s intuition. We provide a methodology by which a wide variety of queueing systems can be analyzed to derive their fairness value. Subject classifications: Queues: quantification of job fairness in queueing systems Area of review: Stochastic Models
Serum pregnenolone, progesterone, 17-hydroxyprogesterone, testosterone and 5 alpha-dihydrotestosterone during female puberty.

Serum pregnenolone, progesterone, 17-hydroxyprogesterone, testosterone and 5α-dihydrotestosterone concentrations were measured radio-immunologically from a group of 200 normal girls 7–17 years of age. Samples from postmenarcheal girls were taken on days 6–9 and 20–23 of the menstrual cycle. Steroid concentrations were related to bone age, breast and pubic hair developmental stages, and gynecological age. When the premenarcheal values and the values from postmenarcheal samples taken on days 6–9 were related to bone age, the concentrations of all the five steroids increased with advancing age. The first steroid to exhibit a significant rise was pregnenolone. This rise was first seen between the bone age groups 7.5 and 8.5 years. Testosterone was quite unchanged until 9.5 years of bone age, after which a steep increase took place until 12.5 years, the concentrations reached being 3.5-fold the initial level. Following menarche, which took place at 13.4 years of bone age in this series, a plateau was visible i.
Under Consideration for Publication in J. Functional Programming Macros That Work Together Compile-time Bindings, Partial Expansion, and Definition Contexts

Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) is a large language that is built mostly within itself. Unlike the usual approach taken by non-Lisp languages, the self-hosting of Racket is not a matter of bootstrapping one implementation through a previous implementation, but instead a matter of building a tower of languages and libraries via macros. The upper layers of the tower include a class system, a component system, pedagogic variants of Scheme, a statically typed dialect of Scheme, and more. The demands of this language-construction effort require a macro system that is substantially more expressive than previous macro systems. In particular, while conventional Scheme macro systems handle stand-alone syntactic forms adequately, they provide weak support for macros that share information or macros that use existing syntactic forms in new contexts. This paper describes and models novel features of the Racket macro system, including support for general compile-time bindings, sub-form expansion and analysis, and environment management. The presentation assumes a basic familiarity with Lisp-style macros, and it takes for granted the need for macros that respect lexical scope. The model, however, strips away the pattern and template system that is normally associated with Scheme macros, isolating a core that is simpler, that can support pattern and template forms themselves as macros, and that generalizes naturally to Racket's other extensions. 1 Macros as a Compiler-Extension API The progression from text pre-processors (such as the C pre-processor) to Lisp macros to Scheme macros is an evolution toward a wider compiler API—one that, at the Scheme end, exposes the compiler's management of lexical context. This widening of the API makes certain language extensions possible that were technically impossible before, such as a local transformer that reliably expands to a reference of an enclosing binding. The classic example of a scope-respecting macro is or, which (in simplified form) takes two expressions. It returns the value of the first expression if it is not #f (i.e., false) or the value of the second expression otherwise: (define-syntax-rule (or e1 e2) (let ([tmp e1]) (if tmp tmp e2))) The tmp binding in the expansion of or ensures that the first expression is evaluated only once, and it is also the part that must respect lexical scope. A Scheme macro system ensures that the or macro works correctly in a setting like (let ([tmp 5]) (or #f tmp))
AN INTERIM WORLD LIST OF BATFLIES (DIPTERA: NYCTERIBIIDAE AND STREBLIDAE).

Listed are 53 published generic and subgeneric (5 of which published prior to 1946 were not included in Neave's Nomen. Zool.) as well as 432 specific and subspecific names of batflies. Nycteribiidae are here divided into 2 subfamilies (incl. Cyclopodiinae, n. subfam.), 11 genera; and Streblidae, into 4 subfamilies (with Nycteriboscinae renamed Brachytarsininae), 20 genera. Larger genera are again divided into subgenera and/or species-groups. A review of the generic nomenclature results in the following new synonymy: Oxycephalus=Cyclopodia; Penicillidia=StyloPenicillidia; Basilia = Tripselia; Listropoda= Nycteriphila; Brachytarsina= Nycteribosca; Megistopoda= Pterellipsis. Leptocyclopodia is raised to genus-rank; Phthiridium, revived as genus; Listropoda and Pseudelytromyia revived as subgenera. Generic and subgeneric positions (but not synonymy) of the species are worked out, and 85 new combinations are proposed. A revised supraspecific classification is provided for Basilia and Nycteribia . Questions are raised concerning identity of Hippobosca vespertilion is Fabr. and priority of Lipoptena phyllostomatis Perty.
Mechanisms of tannin resistance and detoxification in the rumen

Tannins are naturally occurring protein-binding polyphenols that occur in many forage plants and which reduce nutritive value through inhibitory effects on ruminal and intestinal functions. Some animals have adapted to tannins through the synthesis of tannin-binding salivary proteins, the presence of tannin-resistant or tannin-degrading ruminal/intestinal microorganisms, or other potential adaptations in the lower intestinal tract. Streptococcus caprinus/gallolyticus is found ubiquitously in the rumen of many animals browsing tanninrich forage legumes. Biochemical studies have shown that this bacterium metabolises gallic acid to pyrogallol, although it does not metabolise pyrogallol, and produces extracellular polysaccharide (EPS) in response to tannins in the growth medium. Induction of EPS appears to be a bacterial defence mechanism that permits the bacterium to maintain its population when related species are dying. Selenomonas ruminantium K2 grows in the presence of hydrolysable or condensed tannins as a sole carbon source and secretes a tannin-inducible tannin acylhydrolase (TAH). This enzyme has been isolated and characterised, and the putative gene has been cloned and sequenced. Current studies focus on identifying the tannin-responsive element that control the gene. A number of other tannin-resistant bacterial species have been isolated and identified. In addition to effects of tannins on microbial function, intestinal function studies have revealed that tannins inhibit nutrient metabolism and uptake in the abomasum and small intestine of ruminants. Alkaline phosphatase and aminopeptidase-N activities are inhibited, intestinal microvilli structure is disturbed and signs of tissue fragility are evident. These studies indicate that the proteincomplexing action of tannins may have a more profound effect on intestinal rather than rumen function and that microbial interactions in the rumen may reduce but not eliminate tannin toxicity.
Development of a Recombinant HSP 110-HER-2 / neu Vaccine Using the Chaperoning Properties of HSP 110

Several studies have shown that when purified from a tumor, certain heat shock proteins (HSPs) can function as effective vaccines against the same tumor by virtue of their ability to bind tumor-specific peptides. However, only a small fraction of the associated peptides would be expected to be immunogenic, in addition to which, the clinical application of this vaccine requires the availability of a surgical specimen of sufficient quantity for purification of the HSP. The present study describes a new approach for the development of natural HSP vaccines that do not have these limitations. This approach uses a recombinant HSP that is noncovalently bound to a recombinant tumor protein antigen by heat shock. HSP110 has been selected for this purpose, because it has been shown to be a highly efficient molecular chaperone in binding to large protein substrates. We show that a “natural chaperone complex” between HSP110 and the intracellular domain (ICD) of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein (HER-2)/neu is formed by heat shock. This HSP110ICD vaccine elicited both CD8 and CD4 T-cell responses against ICD as determined by an antigen-specific IFNproduction in an enzymelinked immunospot assay (ELISPOT). In vivo depletion studies revealed that the CD8 T-cell response was independent of CD4 T-cell help. The HSP110-ICD complex also significantly enhanced ICD-specific antibody responses relative to that seen with ICD alone. No CD8 T cell or antibody response was detected against HSP110. The use of recombinant HSP110 to form natural chaperone complexes with large protein antigens represents a new and powerful approach for the design of protein-targeted cancer vaccines.