Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Running Head: Affect, Culture and Self-Construals Feeling Badly Makes Us More Who We Are: Negative Affect Strengthens Culturally Consistent Self-Construals

Research suggests that negative affect triggers a variety of cognitive and behavioral responses designed to re-affirm and strengthen one's sense of self. In the current research, four studies explored the hypothesis that negative affect would also intensify the expression of culture consistent self-construals. Using an implicit measure of self-construal (proximity seeking), Study 1 revealed that Western participants sat farther from a stranger when in a negative than a positive affective state. Study 2 found that the self-reported self-construals of Western participants became more independent when experiencing negative affect. Study 3 induced affect implicitly and demonstrated that participants' cultural background moderated the effect of affect of self-construals: The self-construals of Western participants became significantly more independent, but the self-construals of East Asian participants became significantly more interdependent when experiencing negative affect. Finally, Study 4 replicated this cultural difference using an implicit measure of self-construal. Implications for the interplay between affect, self-construal, and culture are discussed.
Organizational Performance as a Dependent Variable

Most studies of organizational performance define performance as a dependent variable and seek to identify variables that produce variations in performance. Researchers who study organizational performance in this way typically devote little attention to the complications of using such a formulation to characterize the causal structure of performance phenomena. These complications include the ways in which performance advantage is competitively unstable, the causal complexity surrounding performance, and the limitations of using data based on retrospective recall of informants. Since these complications are well-known and routinely taught, a pattern of acknowledging the difficulties but continuing the practice cannot be attributed exclusively to poor training, lack of intelligence, or low standards. Most researchers understand the difficulties of inferring causal order from the correlations generated by organizational histories, particularly when those correlations may be implicit in the measurement procedures used. We suggest that the persistence of this pattern is due, in part, to the context of organizational research. Organizational researchers live in two worlds. The first demands and rewards speculations about how to improve performance. The second demands and rewards adherence to rigorous standards of scholarship. In its efforts to satisfy these often conflicting demands, the organizational research community sometimes responds by saying that inferences about the causes of performance cannot be made from the data available, and simultaneously goes ahead to make such inferences. We conclude by considering a few virtues and hazards of such a solution to dilemmas involving compelling contradictory imperatives and the generality of the issues involved.
Thesaurus and Domain Ontology of Geoinformatics

Geoinformatics is a comparatively new interdisciplinary science and as a part of space informatics uses methods and terminology of informatics and many natural sciences. An ontology of geoinformatics is discussed in the paper, especially concerning its structure, relationships with other ontologies, resources for development and utilization. The ontology of geoinformatics is a kind of domain ontology and has a layered structure consisting of syntactic and semantic layers. The corpus of this ontology is an existing multilingual dictionary of geographical information systems (GIS) enriched with terminology from other external sources. The building of the ontology is preceded by the development of a taxonomy and thesaurus of geoinformatics. The thesaurus database is converted into an OWL ontology by a Visual Basic application. The reusing of the ontology is proposed by its transformation in application ontologies for geoinformatics education.
Glycosylated and Nonglycosylated Complement Control Protein of the Lister Strain of Vaccinia Virus

ABSTRACT The vaccinia virus complement control protein (VCP) is a secreted viral protein that binds the C3b and C4b complement components and inhibits the classic and alternative complement pathways. Previously, we reported that an attenuated smallpox vaccine, LC16m8, which was derived from the Lister strain of vaccinia virus (VV-Lister), expressed a glycosylated form of VCP, whereas published sequence data at that time indicated that the VV-Lister VCP has no motif for N-linked glycosylation. We were interested in determining whether the glycosylation of VCP impairs its biological activity, possibly contributing to the attenuation of LC16m8, and the likely origin of the glycosylated VCP. Expression analysis indicated that VV-Lister contains substrains expressing glycosylated VCP and substrains expressing nonglycosylated VCP. Other strains of smallpox vaccine, as well as laboratory strains of vaccinia virus, all expressed nonglycosylated VCP. Individual Lister virus clones expressing either the glycosylated VCP or the nonglycosylated species were isolated, and partially purified VCP from the isolates were found to be functional equivalents in binding human C3b and C4b complement proteins and inhibiting hemolysis and in immunogenicity. Recombinant vaccinia viruses expressing FLAG-tagged glycosylated VCP (FLAG-VCPg) and nonglycosylated VCP (FLAG-VCP) were constructed based on the Western Reserve strain. Purified FLAG-VCP and FLAG-VCPg bind human C3b and C4b and blocked complement-mediated hemolysis. Our data suggest that glycosylation did not affect the biological activity of VCP and thus may not have contributed to the attenuation of LC16m8. In addition, the LC16m8 virus likely originated from a substrain of VV-Lister that expresses glycosylated VCP.
Tenacity ( resistance ) of noroviruses in strawberry compote

On 19 September 2012, what has so far been the largest known foodborne outbreak of gastroenteritis in Germany broke out in various schools and childcare establishments in the federal states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. A total of more than 11,000 children and youths suffered from diarrhoea and vomiting. Epidemiological studies conducted by the Robert Koch Institute and the task force set up at the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety suggest that the pathogen and / or the pathogenic substance were transmitted through a batch of raw deep-frozen strawberries. Results from stool tests show that norovirus may have been the cause of the illness. The Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has evaluated the tenacity, i.e. the resistance of noroviruses in strawberry compote which was produced in various ways in the kitchens implicated in the outbreak. Little is generally known about the tenacity of the human norovirus, because the infectiousness of these viruses cannot be measured due to a lack of cell culture systems. Nevertheless, according to the current state of knowledge, it is to be assumed that a high risk of infection is posed not only by raw but also by briefly heated dishes made from strawberries, if they are contaminated with noroviruses.
Coordination under the Shadow of Career Concerns

A firm's innovation process requires employees to develop novel ideas and to coordinate with each other to turn the tacit knowledge embodying these ideas into better products and services. Such work outcomes provide signals about employees' abilities to the labor market, and therefore career concerns arise. The effects of career concerns can both be good' (enhancing incentives for effort in developing ideas) and bad' (preventing voluntary coordination). Our model shows how a firm can take these conflicting forces into account through the design of its explicit incentive system and the way it organizes work processes.
Blind Separation of Image Sources via Adaptive Dictionary Learning

Sparsity has been shown to be very useful in source separation of multichannel observations. However, in most cases, the sources of interest are not sparse in their current domain and one needs to sparsify them using a known transform or dictionary. If such a priori about the underlying sparse domain of the sources is not available, then the current algorithms will fail to successfully recover the sources. In this paper, we address this problem and attempt to give a solution via fusing the dictionary learning into the source separation. We first define a cost function based on this idea and propose an extension of the denoising method in the work of Elad and Aharon to minimize it. Due to impracticality of such direct extension, we then propose a feasible approach. In the proposed hierarchical method, a local dictionary is adaptively learned for each source along with separation. This process improves the quality of source separation even in noisy situations. In another part of this paper, we explore the possibility of adding global priors to the proposed method. The results of our experiments are promising and confirm the strength of the proposed approach.
Adaptive fuzzy control of pure-feedback stochastic nonlinear systems with hysteresis

This paper studies fuzzy adaptive control of pure-feedback stochastic nonlinear systems with Prandtl-Ishlinskii hysteresis. The mean-value theorem is applied to deal with the difficulty from non-affine structure in generalized Prandtl-Ishlinskii hysteresis and original control systems. An adaptive fuzzy control scheme with minimum learning parameter is developed via backstepping. The proposed controller ensures all closed-loop system signals are semi-global bounded(SGB) in fourth-moment and the system output converges to a given trajectories. Simulation is presented to demonstrate effectiveness of the scheme.
Property Rights, Labour Markets, and Efficiency in a Transition Economy: The Case of Rural China

We investigate the consequences of imperfect factor market development for farm efficiency in North China. We estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (as opposed to market) allocation of land, combined with unevenly developed off-farm opportunities. Using a new household survey, we find considerable inefficiency in the use of labour. This inefficiency is alleviated by external labour markets and, to a limited degree, by administrative reallocations. The reallocations do not go far enough, however, which raises important questions about constraints on rental activity and property rights formation more generally.
Skew‐normal/independent linear mixed models for censored responses with applications to HIV viral loads

Often in biomedical studies, the routine use of linear mixed‐effects models (based on Gaussian assumptions) can be questionable when the longitudinal responses are skewed in nature. Skew‐normal/elliptical models are widely used in those situations. Often, those skewed responses might also be subjected to some upper and lower quantification limits (QLs; viz., longitudinal viral‐load measures in HIV studies), beyond which they are not measurable. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian analysis of censored linear mixed models replacing the Gaussian assumptions with skew‐normal/independent (SNI) distributions. The SNI is an attractive class of asymmetric heavy‐tailed distributions that includes the skew‐normal, skew‐t, skew‐slash, and skew‐contaminated normal distributions as special cases. The proposed model provides flexibility in capturing the effects of skewness and heavy tail for responses that are either left‐ or right‐censored. For our analysis, we adopt a Bayesian framework and develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to carry out the posterior analyses. The marginal likelihood is tractable, and utilized to compute not only some Bayesian model selection measures but also case‐deletion influence diagnostics based on the Kullback–Leibler divergence. The newly developed procedures are illustrated with a simulation study as well as an HIV case study involving analysis of longitudinal viral loads.
Information Overload and Children: A Survey of Texas Elementary School Students.

Information overload is a frequently mentioned negative consequence of the Information Age. Research on information overload focuses on adults and little exists on even whether children suffer from overload. Two hundred sixty-five Texas fourth and eighth graders responded to a survey asking them whether they had experienced information overload, what strategies did they use to reduce the overload condition, and what words would describe their feelings while overloaded. Suggestions to the school library media specialist include altering bibliographic instruction, identifying library behaviors, and considering information-fatigue-syndrome. Results are analyzed by grade level, gender, and content. This study is limited by the small number of subjects, extensive complexity of issues, and brief self-reports from young people of their perception of their own thoughts and feelings.
Automatically Extracting Sentences from Medline Citations to Support Clinicians' Information Needs

Online health knowledge resources contain answers to most of the information needs raised by clinicians in the course of care. However, significant barriers limit the use of these resources for decision-making, especially clinicians' lack of time. Existing solutions are less optimal when information needs cannot be met without substantial cognitive effort and time. Objectives: In this study, we assessed the feasibility of automatically generating knowledge summaries for a particular clinical topic composed of relevant sentences extracted from Medline citations. Methods: The proposed approach combines information retrieval and semantic information extraction techniques to identify relevant sentences from Medline abstracts. We assessed this approach in two case studies on the treatment alternatives for depression and Alzheimer's disease. Results: A total of 515 out of 564 (91.3%) sentences retrieved in the two case studies were relevant to the topic of interest. About one third of the relevant sentences described factual knowledge or a study conclusion that can be used for supporting information needs at the point of care. Conclusions: Our proposed technical approach to helping clinicians meet their information needs is promising. The approach can be extended for other knowledge resources and information need types.
Protective Effect of Allopurinol in Intestinal Ischemia−Reperfusion Injury in Rats Ochronny wpływ allopurynolu w urazie niedokrwiennym jelita cienkiego u szczurów

Background. Acute intestinal ischemia of various origin may lead to tissue anoxia followed by morphological changes (even necrosis) and disorders of cellular metabolism. These changes may be reversible if duration of ischemia is not too long. Restoration of blood circulation is accompanied by synthesis and release of reactive forms of oxygen in significant amounts. Reaction of xanthine oxidase is one of the main sources of this phenomenon. Allopurinol – a competitive inhibitor of xanthine oxidase may show a protective effect on cellular oxidative stress. Objectives. Evaluation of the influence of intestinal ischemia−reperfusion injury on intensity of histopathological changes and some biochemical parameters in rats on allopurinol therapy vs the control group. Material and Methods. All experiments were performed on inbred male Buffalo rats, 14 individuals in each stud− ied group. Intensity of mucosal ischaemic changes in small intestine was diagnosed by 6−degree point scale accord− ing to Chiu et al. [12]. Activity of the xanthine oxidase, superoxide dismutase, β−glucuronidase and malonyl− dialdehyde concentration were determined in supernatants of small intestine homogenates. Results. Deep mucosal changes were observed in small intestine wall of the rats after 50−minute ischemia. However, reperfusion caused partial withdrawal of the changes. Small intestines of rats treated with allopurinol were damaged to a considerably lesser extent. Xanthine oxidase activity was not influenced by 50−minute ischemia and 60−minute reperfusion, although it was strongly inhibited by allopurinol. Superoxide dismutase activity was increased in ischemia and reperfusion and presence of allopurinol amplified this rise. β−glucuronidase activity and malondialdehyde concentration were unchanged in comparison with the control group (p−value > 0.05). Conclusions. It was found that allopurinol had protective role in intestinal ischemia−reperfusion injury in rats. In response to oxidative stress, caused by temporary ischemia and reperfusion, activity of antioxidative enzyme – superoxide dismutase rose and allopurinol amplified this increase (Adv Clin Exp Med 2006, 15, 2, 233–240).
Does functional recovery in elderly hip fracture patients differ between patients admitted from long-term care and the community?

BACKGROUND It is largely unknown whether functional recovery following hip fracture differs between long-term care (LTC) and community-dwelling residents. Our primary purpose was to compare recovery between these patients 6 months following hip fracture, controlling for known prognostic factors. Secondarily, we examined the contribution of residential status, in addition to patient characteristics, to functional recovery. METHODS We studied a population-based inception cohort of 451 hip fracture patients >/= 65 years old admitted to one Canadian health region hospital between July 1999 and September 2000. Participants completed the Modified Barthel Functional Index (MBI) in hospital and again via telephone interviews 6 months postoperatively. Data were also collected on surgery and rehabilitation timing, length of hospital stay (LOS). and discharge destination. Relative change from prefracture function adjusting for known prognostic factors, and the proportion of participants returning to prefracture function were compared between the LTC and community-dwelling residents. RESULTS LTC residents (n = 115) were older, with lower function prefracture, more comorbidities, and increased dementia than community-dwelling residents (n = 336). Six months postfracture, 17 (22%) LTC and 180 (71%) community-dwelling residents had regained prefracture function (p <.001). LTC residents had 33% lower (-40.6, -27.2) and community-dwelling residents 11.6% lower (-14.8, -8.4) 6-month MBI scores relative to prefracture scores after risk adjustment. Residential status was significantly associated with risk-adjusted functional recovery (p <.001). Median LOS was 4 days less for LTC than for community-dwelling residents (p <.001). Twelve (10%) LTC and 266 (79%) community-dwelling residents were discharged to inpatient rehabilitation (p <.001). CONCLUSION Following hip fracture, most LTC residents do not regain prefracture function irrespective of known prognostic factors. Further investigation is needed as to the extent to which personal and environmental characteristics contribute to outcome after hip fracture.
Genome-wide mapping of DNase I hypersensitive sites and association analysis with gene expression in MSB1 cells

DNase I hypersensitive sites (DHSs) mark diverse classes of cis-regulatory regions, such as promoters and enhancers. MSB-1 derived from chicken Marek's disease (MD) lymphomas is an MDV-transformed CD4+ T-cell line for MD study. Previously, DNase I HS sites were studied mainly in human cell types for mammalian. To capture the regulatory elements specific to MSB1 cells and explore the molecular mechanisms of T-cell transformation caused by MDV in MD, we generated high-quality of DHSs map and gene expression profile for functional analysis in MSB1 cell line. The total of 21,724 significant peaks of DHSs was identified from around 40 million short reads. DHSs distribution varied between chromosomes and they preferred to enrich in the gene-rich chromosomes. More interesting, DHSs enrichments appeared to be scarce on regions abundant in CpG islands. Besides, we integrated DHSs into the gene expression data and found that DHSs tended to enrich on high expressed genes throughout whole gene regions while DHSs did not show significant changes for low and silent expressed genes. Furthermore, the correlation of DHSs with lincRNAs expression was also calculated and it implied that enhancer-associated lincRNAs probably originated from enhancer-like regions of DHSs. Together, our results indicated that DNase I HS sites highly correlate with active genes expression in MSB1 cells, suggesting DHSs can be considered as markers to identify the cis-regulatory elements associated with chicken Marek's disease.
An Alternative Energy Recovery Clamp Circuit for Full-Bridge PWM Converters With Wide Ranges of Input Voltage

A full-bridge DC-DC converter employing a diode rectifier in the output experiences a severe voltage overshoot and oscillation problem across the diode rectifier caused by interaction between junction capacitance of the rectifier diode and leakage inductance of the transformer. The pronounced reverse-recovery current of high-power diodes significantly contributes to these issues by increasing power lossand voltage overshoot. Conventional energy recovery clamping circuits suffer from high voltage overshoot if the converter input voltage is wide. In this paper, a novel energy recovery clamp circuit is proposed to overcome this problem. The proposed circuit requires neither active switches nor lossy components. Therefore, the proposed circuit is very promising in high-voltage and high-power applications. Performance of the proposed circuit is verified both theoretically and experimentally with a 70-kW DC-DC converter.
Activating Transcription Factor 4 Promotes Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma Invasion and Metastasis in Mice and Is Associated with Poor Prognosis in Human Patients

Background Activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4) is a stress response gene that is involved in homeostasis and cellular protection. However, its expression and function in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) remains unknown. In this study, we aimed to determine the clinicopathologic significance of ATF4 in ESCC and its potential role in ESCC invasion and metastasis. Methodology/Principal Findings We demonstrated that ATF4 overexpression is correlated with multiple malignant characteristics and indicates poor prognosis in ESCC patients. ATF4 expression was an independent factor that affected the overall survival of patients with ESCC after surgical resection. ATF4 promoted cell invasion and metastasis by promoting matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2 and MMP-7 expression, while its silencing significantly attenuated these activities both in vitro and in vivo. Conclusions/Significance We report that ATF4 is a potential biomarker for ESCC prognosis and that its dysregulation may play a key role in the regulation of invasion and metastasis in ESCC cells. The targeting of ATF4 may provide a new strategy for blocking ESCC metastasis.