Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of potassium on vasodilation to acetylcholine in essential hypertension.

Patients with essential hypertension show impaired endothelium-dependent vasodilation induced by acetylcholine. Because dietary potassium supplementation increases endothelium-dependent relaxations to acetylcholine in hypertensive rats, we designed the present study to investigate whether potassium increases endothelium-dependent vasodilation in essential hypertensive patients. Therefore, in patients with essential hypertension (n = 13) and in normotensive control subjects (n = 13) we evaluated the effect of intrabrachial potassium chloride (0.2 mmol/min) on forearm blood flow (strain-gauge plethysmography) modifications induced by intrabrachial acetylcholine (0.15, 0.45, 1.5, 4.5, and 15 micrograms/100 mL forearm tissue per minute). In both groups of patients, potassium chloride infusion augmented local plasma potassium concentrations. Furthermore, in essential hypertensive patients but not in normotensive subjects it increased the vasodilating effect of the first three infusion rates of acetylcholine. In contrast, in seven adjunctive essential hypertensive patients, potassium chloride did not alter intrabrachial sodium nitroprusside-induced forearm vasodilation (1, 2, and 4 micrograms/100 mL forearm tissue per minute). Finally, to evaluate the role of nitric oxide on potassium-dependent facilitation of acetylcholine-induced vasodilation in essential hypertension, we studied the effect of intrabrachial NG-monomethyl L-arginine (100 micrograms/100 mL per minute) in another group of seven hypertensive patients. Vasodilation to acetylcholine was again increased by potassium chloride; NG-monomethyl L-arginine slightly blunted the vasorelaxing effect of acetylcholine but abolished the potentiating effect of potassium. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Childhood Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the Schools

There has been a growing research and clinical interest in children who meet the criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). An increase in family violence, violence in schools, and a variety of other stressors is suspected of leading to the characteristic PTSD symptoms of reexperiencing the trauma, psychological numbing, and increased states of arousal. School psychologists and other school personnel can be of benefit to children and parents by being made aware of the nature of this disorder and by actively coordinating assessments and interventions. Research on childhood PTSD is presented along with methods of assessment and a review of individual and group interventions. Suggestions are made regarding the school psychologist's role in actively coordinating services through outside agencies, in the school, and at home.
A Study of Object Relations Among Self-Injuring and Non-Injuring College Students

The purpose of this study is to investigate object relational and interpersonal functioning among self-injuring and non-injuring college students. It was hypothesized that self-injury would be associated with more pathological object relational functioning as measured by the Mutuality of Autonomy (MOA) and Social Cognition and Object Relation Scale (SCORS). Additionally, it was hypothesized that self-injurers would evidence significantly more global interpersonal distress on the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems-32 (IIP-32), as well as show elevations in four of the subscales of the IIP-32; self-sacrifice, non-assertiveness, over-accommodation, and interpersonal neediness. Lastly, a number of publications suggest that childhood abuse is a significant risk factor for later developing self-injurious behaviors. This study hypothesized that object relational functioning as measured by the SCORS and MOA would account for additional variance in self-injury even after abuse is taken into account. A survey of 413 college undergraduates indicated that approximately 18.6% of the sample had self-injured at least once, and rates of self-injury were not significantly different across gender. All 77 of the individuals with a history of self-injury and 77 randomly selected individuals with no history of self-injury were re-contacted and invited to participate in further research. In total, 44 self-injuring and 34 non-injuring individuals took part in the second phase of research. Each of the 78 participants completed the IIP-32, SCORS and the MOA. Findings indicate that individuals with a history of self-injury evidenced significantly more pathological scores on the MOA than individuals with no such history. Results only partially supported the hypothesis that self-injury would be related to significantly more iv pathological scores on the SCORS, with only one subscale of the SCORS being significantly related to self-injury. Participants with a history of self-injury also endorsed more interpersonal distress on the IIP-32 than did non-injuring participants. In addition, self-injurers were more likely to endorse a pattern of interpersonal functioning characterized by self-sacrifice, interpersonal neediness, non-assertiveness and overaccommodation than were individuals with no history of self-injury. Results of a hierarchical regression did not support the final hypothesis.
On the complexity of switch programming in fault-tolerant configurable chips

Given a programmable chip (such as a WSI systolic array, or a field programmable gate array (FPGA)) made of equally-like configurable logic blocks (cells), the problem of programming the interconnect resources (consisting of switches) has been well studied in the literature. This process can be used for fault tolerance by logically reconfiguring the fault free cells of the array into a new array as well as to customize the FPGA by configuring it to perform the desired functions. Once the desired logical configuration has been achieved (as an the presence of faulty cells), the (programmable) switches in the interconnect resources of the array must be programmed to implement the target topology on the physical array. In this paper, we study the problem of minimizing the programming time (or cost) required for implementing this step. We show that current techniques are not likely to lead to cost optimal polynomial time algorithms, because the underlying covering problems are NPC-complete in the strong sense. The NPC-completeness is also extended to grid arrays.
Father and Daughter Motives and Satisfaction

There are few studies in the communication discipline dealing with father–daughter relationships and methods for increasing satisfaction within these relationships. This study investigates the motives fathers and daughters have when communicating with each other and how these motives affect relationship satisfaction. Results indicated that daughters communicated mainly with their fathers for the following motives: affection, relaxation, pleasure, and inclusion. Fathers reported communicating with their daughters for pleasure, affection, and relaxation. Findings indicate a means of increasing satisfaction among father–daughter relationships by encouraging communication that incorporates statements of affection and pleasure.
Understanding Online and offline Sex Seeking Behavior Among Young Men Who Have Sex With Men: Implications For HIV/AIDS Interventions

vi LIST OF TABLES xii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE 8 HIV/AIDS in the United States 8 HIV/AIDS in the Southern United States 11 HIV/AIDS in South Carolina 13 Current Efforts to address HIV/AIDS among MSM 14 MSM, the Internet and Sex Seeking Behavior 15 Risky Sexual Behavior and the Internet 16 Internalized Homonegativity 19 Health Protective Sexual Communication 27 Perception of Partners‘ Sexual Risk 30 Access to STI Testing and Condoms 32 Contribution to the Literature 33 Chapter Summary 34 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS 36 Conceptual Model 36
Developing and Using Learning Progressions as a Schema for Measuring Progress

Do all students have access to instruction of grade-level content? What does a measure of academic progress within and across grade levels actually look like? Do state content standards provide enough of a map to plan meaningful instruction within each school year? What guides instructional decisions when students fall behind, or when instruction focuses on skills and concepts considered to be “below” current grade level content? To answer these complex and multi-layered questions, we must examine several important dimensions of standards-based curriculum, instruction, and assessment as we consider applying a learning continuum schema to measure progress for all students.
DESA: Distributed Elastic Switch Architecture for efficient networks-on-FPGAS

Networks-on-FPGA consist of a network of switches connected with point-to-point links and can cover sufficiently the communication needs of complex systems implemented on FPGA platforms. The efficient implementation of such networks requires the appropriate tuning of their components to the characteristics of the FPGA's logic and memory resources. In this paper, we present a distributed switch architecture that exploits in the best way the structure of the FPGA and achieves significant area/delay savings when compared to baseline switch architectures; more than 50% increase in operating frequency is achieved for similar area. The proposed switch operates as an elastic pipeline and can be spread throughout the FPGA chip irrespective the topology of the network and without limiting the placement options of the corresponding EDA tools.
Identifying factors affecting public service productivity

Improving productivity requires an understanding of what key factors affect it. This paper aims to define and identify factors affecting the productivity of public service organisations. The objective of the paper is tackled with a qualitative research approach which is explorative in nature. The paper extends the present limited knowledge on the issue by examining, analysing and combining literature from different research fields and by analysing empirical data obtained from the interviews carried out in various departments of the City of Helsinki, Finland. As a result a new public service productivity model is presented.
Experimental pain in hypnosis research: Ischemic vs transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS)

by Seth A. Green, Ph.D. Washington State University December 2009 Chair: Arreed F. Barabasz The purpose of this study was to compare two types of experimental pain typically used in hypnosis research: transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and ischemia on the basis of how closely each approximates clinical pain. Approximation reports were obtained using a semantic differential measure (Osgood, Suci, & Taunenbaum, 1950) in both awake and hypnosis conditions. This study also tested whether high hypnotizables differ in their ability to manage pain induced by TENS as compared to ischemic pain. The final sample was comprised of 50 participants in both pain conditions. Hypnotizability was assessed by the Stanford Hypnotic Clinical Scale (Morgan & Hilgard, 1975). Analyses showed that in the awake state TENS pain failed to closely approximate clinical pain versus ischemic pain. However, in the hypnotic state TENS pain was shown to more closely approximate clinical pain in contrast to ischemic pain. Analyses also revealed that high hypnotizables differ significantly in their ability to manage pain induced by TENS in contrast to ischemic pain. However, consistent with the literature, hypnosis was shown to significantly reduce pain perception versus the same level of painful stimulation in awake conditions.
Management of Collaborative BIM Data by Federating Distributed BIM Models

The architecture engineering and construction sector is currently undergoing a significant period of change and modernization. In the United Kingdom in particular this is driven by the government’s objective of reducing the cost of construction projects. This is to be achieved by requiring all publicly funded projects to utilize fully collaborative building information modeling by 2016. A common goal in increasing building information model (BIM) adoption by the industry is the movement toward the realization of a BIM as either a single data model or a series of tightly coupled federated models. However, there are key obstacles to be overcome, including uncertainty over data ownership, concerns relating to the security/privacy of data, and reluctance to “outsource” data storage. This paper proposes a framework that is able to provide a solution for managing collaboration in the architecture engineering and construction (AEC) sector. The solution presented in this paper provides an overlay that automatically federates and governs distributed BIM data. The use of this overlay provides an integrated BIM model that is physically distributed across the stakeholders in a construction project. The key research question addressed by this paper is whether such an overlay can, by providing dynamic federation and governance of BIM data, overcome some key obstacles to BIM adoption, including questions over data ownership, the security/privacy of data, and reluctance to share data. More specifically, this paper provides the following contributions: (1) presentation of a vision for the implementation and governance of a federated distributed BIM data model; (2) description of the BIM process and governance model that underpins the approach; (3) provision of a validation case study using real construction data from a U.K. highways project, demonstrating that both the federated BIM overlay and the process and governance model are fit for purpose. - See more at: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.1061/%28ASCE%29CP.1943-5487.0000657#sthash.jIj574Lh. dpuf
Regulation of Postnatal Dentate Gyrus Neurogenesis and its Alteration in Experimental Epilepsy.

vii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Neurogenesis in the Adult Mammalian Brain 1 The Role of Adult Neurogenesis 3 Epilepsy and Neurogenesis 4 Morphological Abnormalities in mTLE 7 Mossy Fiber Sprouting 8 Hilar Ectopic Granule Cells 9 Hilar Basal Dendrites 10 Functional Implications of Seizure Induced Dentate Gyrus Plasticity . 11 Mossy Fiber Sprouting 11 Hilar Basal Dendrites 12 Hilar Ectopic Granule Cells 13 Co-morbidities Associated with Epilepsy 14 Overview of the Reelin Signaling Pathway 16 The Reelin Pathway 16 The Reelin Pathway in Epilepsy 21 Questions Addressed in this Dissertation 22 Figures 23 References 26 Chapter 2: The Developmental Stage of Dentate Granule Cells Dictates Their Contribution to Seizure-Induced Plasticity Abstract 38 Introduction 39 Materials and Methods 41 Results 46 Discussion 55 Notes to Chapter 2 61 Figures 64 References 72
Combining cross-stream and time dimensions in phonetic speaker recognition

Recent studies show that phonetic sequences from multiple languages can provide effective features for speaker recognition. So far, only pronunciation dynamics in the time dimension, i.e., n-gram modeling on each of the phone sequences, have been examined. In the JHU 2002 Summer Workshop, we explored modeling the statistical pronunciation dynamics across streams in multiple languages (cross-stream dimension) as an additional component to the time dimension. We found that bigram modeling in the cross-stream dimension achieves improved performance over that in the time dimension on the NIST 2001 Speaker Recognition Evaluation Extended Data Task. Moreover, a linear combination of information from both dimensions at the score level further improves the performance, showing that the two dimensions contain complementary information.
Dynamic sink oriented tree algorithm for efficient target tracking of multiple mobile sink users in wide sensor field

In this paper, we introduce an efficient target tracking scheme through a dynamic sink oriented tree (SOT) algorithm for multiple mobile sinks. The SOT is maintained by the partial link reversal algorithm to adapt to the mobile sink environment. The main objective of our proposed algorithm is to efficiently deliver location information of targets to the multiple mobile sinks. Since our protocol can construct and dynamically maintain the SOTs although the sinks moves continuously, data aggregation from target nodes to sink can be efficiently achieved through the SOT, and also, in-network processing of the aggregation process is naturally achieved. In addition, the tracking coverage of each mobile sink is wider by dynamically merging each sink's SOT. Also, we evaluated our protocol in terms of how robust it is by examining the packet loss rate with respect to the sink speed.
Association of elevated reactive oxygen species and hyperthermia induced radiosensitivity in cancer stem-like cells

Cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) are the principal causes of tumor radio-resistance, dormancy and recurrence after radiotherapy. Clinical trials show hyperthermia (HT) might be a potent radiation sensitizer. In this study, CSCs were found to be more susceptible to radiation when combined with HT treatment. Treated cells showed significantly reduced self-renewal, cell survival and proliferation in vitro, as well as significant reduced tumor formation in vivo. Further study demonstrated that the radiosensitization effect was associated with increased intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) level in CSCs, confirmed by modifying redox status in CSCs bidirectionally. Pharmacologic depletion of glutathione by buthionine sulphoximine mimicked HT induced radiosensitivity in CSCs. Antioxidant N-acetylcysteine could efficiently rescue HT induced radiosensitivity in CSCs. To our knowledge, this may be the first report suggesting the association between elevated intracellular ROS level and HT induced radiosensitization in human breast CSCs and pancreatic CSCs, which might provide new strategy for improving CSCs radiosensitivity.
HR 710 (HD 15144) : an ultra-Sr-rich, magnetic Ap star with a close companion

The magnetic, chemically peculiar A-star HR 710 (HD 15144, ADS 1849A, AB Cet) has a close companion in a nearly circular orbit. Its 3-d period is unusually short for such stars. The system emits moderately hard X-rays, which likely come from a white dwarf secondary (ADS 1849Ab). The Sr II spectrum is very strong, and the resonance lines show similar core-nib structure to the stronger Ca K line. We place only loose constraints on a model. There are indications of a lower electron/gas pressure than expected from the star’s parallax and brightness. Strong-line profiles and anomalous excitation/ionization indicate significant deviations from traditional models, fixed by T eff, log g and abundances. Weak spectral-line profiles and wavelength shifts probably indicate abundance patches rather than the presence of a secondary (ADS 1849Ab) spectrum. Our UV‐Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) spectra are from only one epoch. Additional low-noise, high-resolution spectra are needed. We discuss the spectrum within the context of abundance stratification.
Polypeptide growth factors and phorbol ester induce progressive ankylosis (Ank) gene expression in murine and human fibroblasts *

Polypeptide growth factors promote cellular proliferation by binding to specific plasma membrane‐anchored receptors. This interaction triggers the phosphorylation of signal transducing molecules and the transcriptional activation of numerous genes. We have used a differential display approach to identify fibroblast growth factor (FGF)‐1‐inducible genes in murine NIH 3T3 fibroblasts. Here we report that one of these genes encodes ank, a type IIIa transmembrane protein reported to function in cells as an inorganic pyrophosphate transporter. FGF‐1 induction of ank mRNA expression is first detectable at 2 h after growth factor addition and is dependent on de novo RNA and protein synthesis. Ank gene expression is also upregulated after treating quiescent fibroblasts with several other mitogenic agents (e.g., calf serum or platelet‐derived growth factor‐BB) or the tumor promoter phorbol 12‐myristate 13‐acetate. Furthermore, in comparison to parental NIH 3T3 cells, oncogene‐transformed NIH 3T3 cells constitutively express elevated levels of ank mRNA. FGF‐1 also increases ank gene expression in non‐immortalized human embryonic lung fibroblasts. Finally, the murine and human ank genes are expressed in vivo in a tissue‐specific manner, with highest levels of mRNA expression found in brain, heart, and skeletal muscle. These results indicate that ank is a growth factor‐regulated delayed‐early response gene in mammalian cells, and we propose that increased ank expression during cell cycle progression may be necessary to maintain proper intracellular pyrophosphate levels during conditions of high cellular metabolic activity. J. Cell. Biochem. 84: 27–38, 2002. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Regulation of Relative Abundance of Arterivirus Subgenomic mRNAs

ABSTRACT The subgenomic (sg) mRNAs of arteriviruses (order Nidovirales) form a 5′- and 3′-coterminal nested set with the viral genome. Their 5′ common leader sequence is derived from the genomic 5′-proximal region. Fusion of sg RNA leader and “body” segments involves a discontinuous transcription step. Presumably during minus-strand synthesis, the nascent RNA strand is transferred from one site in the genomic template to another, a process guided by conserved transcription-regulating sequences (TRSs) at these template sites. Subgenomic RNA species are produced in different but constant molar ratios, with the smallest RNAs usually being most abundant. Factors thought to influence sg RNA synthesis are size differences between sg RNA species, differences in sequence context between body TRSs, and the mutual influence (or competition) between strand transfer reactions occurring at different body TRSs. Using an Equine arteritis virus infectious cDNA clone, we investigated how body TRS activity affected sg RNA synthesis from neighboring body TRSs. Flanking sequences were standardized by head-to-tail insertion of several copies of an RNA7 body TRS cassette. A perfect gradient of sg RNA abundance, progressively favoring smaller RNA species, was observed. Disruption of body TRS function by mutagenesis did not have a significant effect on the activity of other TRSs. However, deletion of body TRS-containing regions enhanced synthesis of sg RNAs from upstream TRSs but not of those produced from downstream TRSs. The results of this study provide considerable support for the proposed discontinuous extension of minus-strand RNA synthesis as a crucial step in sg RNA synthesis.
The 2016 Speakers in the Wild Speaker Recognition Evaluation

The newly collected Speakers in the Wild (SITW) database was central to a text-independent speaker recognition challenge held as part of a special session at Interspeech 2016. The SITW database is composed of audio recordings from 299 speakers collected from open source media, with an average of 8 sessions per speaker. The recordings contain unconstrained or "wild" acoustic conditions, rarely found in large speaker recognition datasets, and multi-speaker recordings for both speaker enrollment and verification. This article provides details of the SITW speaker recognition challenge and analysis of evaluation results. There were 25 international teams involved in the challenge of which 11 teams participated in an evaluation track. Teams were tasked with applying existing and novel speaker recognition algorithms to the challenges associated with the real world conditions of SITW. We provide an analysis of some of the top performing systems submitted during the evaluation and provide future research directions. Copyright ©2016 ISCA.