Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future

"An original and insightful exploration of a major component of contemporary American culture. " -H. Bruce Franklin, author ofWar Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination "Bernardi boldly goes where no scholar has gone before and discovers racial anxiety at the center of the Star Trek story. This careful reading of commercial culture's quintessential mega-text provides invaluable insight into how mass media productions help shape us into the people we are. " -George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages "Bernardi's thoughtful and provocative analysis of race in Star Trek is wholly original; it challenges viewers to see the series in a new light, and challenges its creators to be more mindful of the implicit messages in their work. " -Rene Echevarria, co-supervising producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Daniel Bernardi has dissected the history of a myth. If we are ever to track down and expose our semi-conscious racist evasions and dissemblings, we need more books like this one. " -Mike Budd, Florida Atlantic University "I would have sworn that there was little new any scholar could say about Star Trek. I was wrong. Bernardi opens up a rich new set of issues for scholarly examination, centering around the contradictory expression of race within the series and the fan culture that surrounds us. His analysis is bold, provocative, and challenging, yet consistently fair-minded. He combines a fan's detailed knowledge of the program's universe with the theoretical sophistication necessary to make this book a cutting-edge contribution to the cultural studies of race. " -Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture Star Trek and History examines the representational and narrative functions of race in Star Trek and explores how the meaning of race in the science fiction series has been facilitated and constrained by creative and network decision-making, by genre, by intertextuality, and by the audience. The author interprets how the changing social and political movements of the times have influenced the production and meaning of Trek texts and the ways in which the ongoing series negotiated and reflected these turbulent histories. Most significantly, he tells us why is it important for readers to better understand the articulation of race in this enduring icon of American popular culture. Daniel Leonard Bernardi is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at the University of California-Los Angeles. He is the editor of The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United States Cinema.
Mediating Factors in Dietary Change: Understanding the Impact of a Worksite Nutrition Intervention

This report, based on 1,795 participants in the Next Step Trial, examines how a dietary intervention program affected mediating factors for dietary change. The model tested whether intervention increased predisposing (skills, knowledge, and beliefs) and enabling (social support and norms) factors for change and advanced participants into action and maintenance stages of change. The intervention significantly increased both predisposing factors for dietary change and the likelihood of moving into or remaining in action and maintenance stages of change. Changes in predisposing and enabling factors and stage of change at follow-up (regardless of stage at baseline) were associated with significant dietary change. Changes in mediating variables explained between 34% and 55% of the effects of the dietary intervention. These results support the value of measuring mediating factors as part of dietary intervention evaluations and suggest that interventions that target norms and eating environments in addition to skills and knowledge may further increase intervention effectiveness.
Estimation of latent factors for high-dimensional time series

This paper deals with the dimension reduction of high-dimensional time series based on a lower-dimensional factor process. In particular, we allow the dimension of time series N to be as large as, or even larger than, the length of observed time series T. The estimation of the factor loading matrix and the factor process itself is carried out via an eigenanalysis of a N×N non-negative definite matrix. We show that when all the factors are strong in the sense that the norm of each column in the factor loading matrix is of the order N-super-1/2, the estimator of the factor loading matrix is weakly consistent in L 2 -norm with the convergence rate independent of N. Thus the curse is cancelled out by the blessing of dimensionality. We also establish the asymptotic properties of the estimators when factors are not strong. The proposed method together with the asymptotic properties are illustrated in a simulation study. An application to an implied volatility data set, with a trading strategy derived from the fitted factor model, is also reported. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.
Construction of an Obligate Photoheterotrophic Mutant of the Cyanobacterium Synechocystis 6803 : Inactivation of the psbA Gene Family.

psbA in Synechocystis 6803 was found to belong to a small multigene family with three copies. The psbA gene family was inactivated in vitro by insertation of bacterial drug resistance markers. Inactivation of all three genes resulted in a transformant that is unable to grow photosynthetically but can be cultured photoheterotrophically. This mutant lacks oxygen evolving capacity but retains photosystem I activity. Room temperature measurements of chlorophyll a fluorescence induction demonstrated that the transformant exhibits a high fluorescence yield with little or no variable fluorescence. Immunoblot analyses showed complete loss of the psbA gene product (the DI polypeptide) from thylakoid membranes in the transformant. However, the extrinsic 33 kilodalton polypeptide of the water-splitting complex of photosystem II, is still present. The results indicate that assembly of a partial photosystem II complex may occur even in the absence of the intrinsic D1 polypeptide, a protein implicated as a crucial component of the photosystem II reaction center.
Changement organisationnel vers le développement durable dans les petites et moyennes entreprises : le cas d'un zoo

En tenant compte du fait que le developpement durable ne peut se realiser sans changements dans les organisations et de la necessite de comprendre des mecanismes permettant aux petites et moyennes entreprises (PMEs) d'effectuer cette transition, cette etude cherche a comprendre le changement organisationnel d'une PME ayant deja fait des contributions significatives dans ce domaine. Plus precisement, cette etude de cas ethnographique analyse les dynamiques specifiques de ce changement afin de comprendre les processus ayant contribue au developpement durable, les facteurs ayant influence cette evolution dans le temps et la maniere dont ces changements ont ete implantes. La conservation des animaux, une fonction maintenant directement liee a la raison d'etre de l'organisation, est sans doute la plus grande contribution du zoo pour le developpement durable. L'eco-efficacite, qui pourrait etre consideree comme une extension des objectifs de conservation est le deuxieme levier utilise par le zoo afin de se rapprocher du developpement durable. Ces sous processus du changement ont permis au zoo d'evoluer du musee vivant qu'il etait vers un reel centre de conservation. Durant cette periode, l'organisation est passee par la prise de conscience de la necessite d'un tel changement avant de faconner sa propre vision de ce changement et de la direction a prendre. Il en a decoule une planification des actions a realiser afin de permettre un changement progressif, en concretisant un projet a la fois. Lorsque la conscience et la vision etaient partagees au niveau organisationnel, le changement etait significatif ; lorsque le changement etait seulement partage par des individus moins influents, le changement etait mineur. Cette prise de conscience fut influencee par de nombreux facteurs internes et externes qui ont facilite un tel changement d'une facon croissante avec l'evolution des valeurs dans le temps. Certains employes ont particulierement encourage ce processus, en prenant en charge l'un de quatre roles d'agent de changement: instigateur, constructeur, coordinateur, ou facilitateur. Ces constats ont amene a la formulation de plusieurs hypotheses, modeles et lecons qui pourraient aider aussi bien des agents de changements que des chercheurs, a comprendre et a faciliter un tel processus. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLES DE L’AUTEUR : Developpement durable et soutenable, Changement organisationnel, Gestion de changement, Leader ou agent de changement, PME, Zoos, Valeurs.
Vascular hyper-reactivity with sodium loading and with deoxycorticosterone induced hypertension in the rat.

1. Reactivity to noradrenaline was measured in resistance vessels of isolated perfused rat tails in two experiments. In the first experiment the three treatment groups were ‘desoxycorticosterone (DOCA)/saline/nephrectomy’, ‘saline/nephrectomy’ and ‘intact/water’. In the second experiment an additional‘nephrectomy/water’ group was included and reactivity to vasopressin was also measured. 2. DOCA/saline/nephrectomy animals were hypertensive for at least 4 weeks before they were killed. 3. Vascular reactivity to noradrenaline was increased in preparations from DOCA/saline/nephrectomy and saline/nephrectomy groups compared with the intact/H2O group in both experiments. This increased reactivity was not associated with an elevated baseline vascular resistance. 4. In contrast to noradrenaline, responses to vasopressin did not differ significantly between the groups. 5. These results support the theory that the effects of sodium balance on arterial pressure are mediated at least in part by changes in resistance vessel reactivity to noradrenaline.
In search of database consistency

http://cacm.acm. org/blogs/blog-cacm The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm. org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM Michael Stonebraker discusses the implications of the CAP theorem on database management system applications that span multiple processing sites.
‘I am a mother’: young women’s negotiation of femininity and risk in the transition to adulthood

Abstract In studies of sexual risk behaviour among youth, the role of dominant conceptions of masculinity and femininity has received increasing attention. However, where research has sought to explore femininity, it has predominantly focused on adolescent girls. This paper departs from previous research by offering insights into how young women negotiate their femininity as they transition from adolescence to adulthood and encounter changing social contexts. Drawing on data from ethnographic enquiry, it argues that as young women transition out of school and into emerging adulthood, their options for negotiating different types of femininity become constrained, with consequences for engagement in sexual risk behaviours. This may to some extent explain why in some South African contexts older young women are more vulnerable to HIV infection than adolescent girls. The paper offer insights into future prospects for youth development programming seeking to reduce young women’s vulnerability to risk.
Evaluating hotels rating prediction based on sentiment analysis services

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the reliability of numerical ratings of hotels calculated by three sentiment analysis algorithms. Design/methodology/approach – More than one million reviews and numerical ratings of hotels in seven cities in four countries were extracted from TripAdvisor web site. Reviews were classified as positive or negative using three sentiment analysis tools. The percentage of positive reviews was used to predict numerical ratings that were then compared with actual ratings. Findings – All tools classified reviews as positive or negative in a way that correlated positively with numerical ratings. More complex algorithms worked better, yet predicted ratings showed reasonable agreement with actual ratings for most cities. Predictions for hotels were less reliable if based on less than 50-60 percent of available reviews. Practical implications – These results validate that sentiment analysis can be used to transform unstructured qualitative data on user opinion into quantitative ratings. Current tools may be useful for summarizing opinions of user reviews of products and services on web sites that do not require users to post numerical ratings such as traveler forums. This summarizing may be valuable not just to potential users, but also to the service and product providers and offers validation and benchmarking for future improvement of opinion mining and prediction techniques. Originality/value – This work assesses the correlation between sentiment analysis of hotels’ reviews and their actual ratings. The authors also evaluated the reliability of results of sentiment analysis calculated by three different algorithms.
Development and Plasticity of Cognitive Flexibility in Early and Middle Childhood

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to flexibly switch between tasks, is a core dimension of executive functions (EFs) allowing to control actions and to adapt flexibly to changing environments. It supports the management of multiple tasks, the development of novel, adaptive behavior and is associated with various life outcomes. Cognitive flexibility develops rapidly in preschool and continuously increases well into adolescence, mirroring the growth of neural networks involving the prefrontal cortex. Over the past decade, there has been increasing interest in interventions designed to improve cognitive flexibility in children in order to support the many developmental outcomes associated with cognitive flexibility. This article provides a brief review of the development and plasticity of cognitive flexibility across early and middle childhood (i.e., from preschool to elementary school age). Focusing on interventions designed to improve cognitive flexibility in typically developing children, we report evidence for significant training and transfer effects while acknowledging that current findings on transfer are heterogeneous. Finally, we introduce metacognitive training as a promising new approach to promote cognitive flexibility and to support transfer of training.
Extraction of Visual Facial Features for Health Management

In this paper, a visual face feature extraction scheme using image processing techniques for health management systems is proposed. Five visual face features, i.e., face contours, face colors, smile lines, hairlines, and melanocytes, were detected, extracted, stored, and retrieved for healthcare management. These actions were performed using the software services in cloud computing environments. Users can periodically browse the changes of the face shapes and texture features. Chinese medical doctors could also check the extracted visual features and give some suggestions for patients via the Internet.
Scale for the assessment of thought, language, and communication (TLC).

by Nancy C. Andreasen The following set of definitions was developed to improve the reliability of assessments of "formal thought disorder. " In the past such assessments have been unreliable at least in part because clinicians and researchers have not agreed upon the meaning of the terms which they have used. It is hoped that the following definitions will provide a common and reliable stock of terms to describe the language and cognitive behaviors which can be observed in psychiatric patients.
A GPGPU Physarum Cellular Automaton Model

: Scientists have been gaining inspiration from several natural processes and systems to ﬁnd ﬁne solutions in many complex hard to solve engineering problems for many years now. Nevertheless, most of these natural systems suffer from great amount of time to perform; thus, scientists are seeking for computational tools and methods that could encapsulate in a conscious way nature’s genius, dealing at the same moment with time complexity. In this conquest, Cellular Automata (CA) proposed long time ago by John von Neumann, can be considered as a promising candidate. CA have the ability to capture the essential features of systems in which global complicated behavior emerges from the collective effect of simple components, which interact locally. These characteristics are immanent in many natural systems; namely Physarum polycephalum ,an amoeba, is such a system. This simple organism presents the intelligence of ﬁnding effective solutions to demanding engineering problems such as shortest path(s) problems, various graph problems, evaluation of transport networks or even robotic control. In this paper, we move forward by taking advantage of a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and the Compute Uniﬁed Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model, to make use of the CA inherit parallelism when biomimicking the behavior of P. polycephalum in maze, providing the ability to ﬁnd the minimum path between two spots. In this way we are able to produce a virtual easy-to-access lab speeding up signiﬁcantly the biological paradigm when modeled by CA implemented in General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) environment.
Autologous Bone Marrow Cell Transplantation Increases Leg Perfusion and Reduces Amputations in Patients with Advanced Critical Limb Ischemia Due to Peripheral Artery Disease

Bone marrow cell transplantation has been shown to induce angiogenesis and thus improve ischemic artery disease. This study evaluates the effects of intramuscular bone marrow cell transplantation in patients with limb-threatening critical limb ischemia with a very high risk for major amputation. After failed or impossible operative and/or interventional revascularization and after unsuccessful maximum conservative therapy, 51 patients with impending major amputation due to severe critical limb ischemia had autologous bone marrow cells (BMC) transplanted into the ischemic leg. Patients 1–12 received Ficoll-isolated bone marrow mononuclear cells (total cell number 1.1 ± 1.1 × 109), patients 13–51 received point of care isolated bone marrow total nucleated cells (3.0 ± 1.7 × 109). Limb salvage was 59% at 6 months and 53% at last follow-up (mean 411 ± 261 days, range 175–1186). Perfusion measured with ankle-brachial index (ABI) and transcutaneous oxygen tension (tcpO2) at baseline and after 6 months increased in patients with consecutive limb salvage (ABI 0.33 ± 0.18 to 0.46 ± 0.15, tcpO2 12 ± 12 to 25 ± 15 mmHg) and did not change in patients eventually undergoing major amputation. No difference in clinical outcome between the isolation methods were seen. Clinically most important, patients with limb salvage improved from a mean Rutherford category of 4.9 at baseline to 3.3 at 6 months (p = 0.0001). Analgesics consumption was reduced by 62%. Total walking distance improved in nonamputees from zero to 40 m. Three severe periprocedural adverse events resolved without sequelae, and no unexpected long-term adverse events occurred. In no-option patients with end-stage critical limb ischemia due to peripheral artery disease, bone marrow cell transplantation is a safe procedure that can improve leg perfusion sufficiently to reduce major amputations and permit durable limb salvage.
Isolation of a Negative Control Mutant of the Nitrogen Assimilation Control Protein, NAC, in Klebsiella aerogenes

ABSTRACT A negative control mutant of the nitrogen assimilation control protein, NAC, has been isolated. Mutants with the leucine at position 111 changed to a nonhydrophobic residue activate transcription from hut and ure promoters, but fail to repress gdhA expression. This failure does not result from failure to bind to either of the two sites required for gdhA repression, but the binding at those sites is altered in the mutant. It appears that the NAC negative control mutants fail to form the complex structures (probably tetramers) formed by wild-type NAC at the gdhA promoter.
Comparison of Ranson, APACHE II and APACHE III Scoring Systems in Acute Pancreatitis

Introduction Acute pancreatitis runs an unpredictable course. The early prediction of the severity of an acute attack has important implications for management and timely intervention. Aim To assess the prognostic accuracy of Ranson and APACHE II and III scoring systems in predicting the severity of acute pancreatitis. Methods One hundred fifty-three patients with acute pancreatitis (67.3% gallstone-related, 9.2% alcoholic, 17% idiopathic, and 6.5% of miscellaneous causes) were studied prospectively. Data conforming to the scoring systems were recorded 24 (the APACHE scores) and 48 hours (the Ranson score) after admission. Analysis was performed by using receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC), area under a curve (AUC), and by comparing likelihood ratios of positive test (LRPT). Results One hundred nineteen cases of pancreatitis were classified as mild, and 34 were classified as severe. The mortality rate was 3.2%. All three scores correlated with length of stay and disease severity. AUC for Ranson was found to be significantly larger than AUC for APACHE II and APACHE III score (0.817, cut-off ≥3; 0.618, cut-off, ≥10; and 0,676, cut-off ≥42 respectively). The Ranson score achieved the highest sensitivity and the lowest false-negative rate, but the positive and negative predictive values and LRPT were of similar extent for all three scores. Conclusion The APACHE III offers little, if any, advantage over the APACHE II score. Ranson criteria proved to be as powerful a prognostic model as the more complicated APACHE II and III scoring systems, but with the disadvantage of a 24-hour delay.
High-throughput fluorescence assay for membrane-protein interaction

Membrane-protein interaction plays key roles in a wide variety of biological processes. Although various methods have been employed to measure membrane binding of soluble proteins, a robust high-throughput assay that is universally applicable to all proteins is lacking at present. Here we report a new fluorescence quenching assay utilizing enhanced green fluorescence protein (EGFP)-fusion proteins and a lipid containing a dark quencher, N-dimethylaminoazobenzenesulfonyl-phosphatidylethanolamine (dabsyl-PE). The EGFP fluorescence emission intensity showed a large decrease (i.e., >50%) when EGFP-fusion proteins bound the vesicles containing 5 mol% dabsyl-PE. This simple assay, which can be performed using either a cuvette-based spectrofluorometer or a fluorescence plate reader, allowed rapid, sensitive, and accurate determination of lipid specificity and affinity for various lipid binding domains, including two pleckstrin homology domains, an epsin N-terminal homology domain, and a phox homology domain. The assay can also be applied to high-throughput screening of small molecules that modulate membrane binding of proteins.