Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of behavioral chaos with a focus on transitions in depression.

This article is the second of three in a special section on chaos theory and psychological assessment. The purpose of this article is to address implications for the measurement of some unstable, transitional human behaviors. One early hallmark of behavioral assessment is the idiographic measurement of temporal, causal, and target factors (e.g., M. R. Goldfried & R. N. Kent, 1972). This is the same basic measurement approach used in chaos theory testing. In addition, behavioral theories have posited nonlinear relations among variables (e.g., J. D. Cone, 1981). However, theory testing often involves investigation of linear relations among episodic and averaged indexes of the variables (e.g., M. J. Marr, 1989). The study of unstable behaviors and chaotic transitions could revive the use of unaveraged single-subject, time series measurement approaches. A rationale for a subtype of chaotic depression (e.g., L. Glass & M. C. Mackey, 1988) and its measurement is offered
The Corriveau-Kelly Death Anxiety Scale

The purpose of this study was to develop a more reliable and sensitive death anxiety scale. In the first study, Templer's Death Anxiety Scale and a newly-developed scale, the Corriveau-Kelly Death Anxiety Scale, were administered to 108 psychology students at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Test-retest reliability coefficients for Templer's scale and the new instrument were . 85 and . 95 respectively while internal consistency coefficients for Templer's scale and the new scale were . 73 and . 95 respectively. In the second study, both death anxiety scales were administered to twenty-six hospice volunteers before and after training. Whereas Templer's scale was not able to detect a statistically significant change (t = 1.9, p > .05), the new instrument showed a significant decrease in death anxiety after training (t = 2.6, p = .01). The results of both studies suggest that the new scale appears to be more reliable and more sensitive to experimental outcomes than Templer's scale.
The role of ethnic identity in school engagement: perceptions of immigrant Tibetan adolescents in select US public schools

This purpose of the study was to ascertain the level of ethnic identity formation and its perceived role on school engagement for Tibetan adolescents enrolled in public schools in two Midwestern states in the USA. The journey of these students from culturally encapsulated schools from Nepal, Bhutan, and India to multiculturally diverse settings was one of the most fascinating facets of the Tibetan Diaspora. Subjects included 16 girls, 25 boys, and 2 who did not identify their gender. The multigroup ethnic identity measure was used to determine the level of ethnic identity formation of Tibetan students while a questionnaire gathered information on school engagement. The overall ethnic identity measure for this sample was high with a mean of 3.58, while the cognitive and affective aspect of the measure was also high with a mean of 3.56 and 3.74, respectively. The girls showed more emotional commitment to ethnic identity, as their mean score was 3.92, while boys scored 3.62. The results clearly corroborated findings and conclusions drawn by other scholars. School and community partnership contributed to the healthy ethnic identity development of adolescents who were thus encouraged to be more engaged in meaningful school activities.
Subtotal obliteration of cerebral arteriovenous malformations after gamma knife surgery.

OBJECT Subtotal obliteration of cerebral arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) after Gamma Knife surgery (GKS) implies a complete angiographic disappearance of the AVM nidus but persistence of an early filling draining vein, indicating that residual shunting is still present; hence, per definition there is still a patent AVM and the risk of bleeding is not eliminated. The aim of this study was to determine the risk of hemorrhage for patients with subtotal obliteration of AVMs. METHODS After GKS for cerebral AVMs, follow-up angiography demonstrated a subtotally obliterated lesion in 159 patients. Of these, in 16 patients a subtotally obliterated AVM developed after a second GKS was performed for the partially obliterated lesion. The mean age of these patients was 35.2 years at the time of the diagnosis of subtotally obliterated AVMs. The lesion volumes at the time of initial GKS treatment ranged from 0.1 to 11.5 cm3 (mean 2.5 cm3). The mean peripheral dose used in the 175 GKS treatments was 22.5 Gy (median 23 Gy, range 15-31 Gy). To achieve total obliteration of the AVM, 23 patients underwent a new GKS targeting the proximal end of the early filling vein. The mean peripheral dose given in these cases was 23 Gy (median 24, range 18-25 Gy). The incidence of subtotally obliterated AVMs was 7.6% from a total of 2093 AVMs treated and in which follow-up imaging was available. The diagnosis of subtotally obliterated AVMs was made a mean of 29.4 months (range 4-178 months) after GKS. The number of patient-years at risk (from the time of the diagnosis of subtotally obliterated AVMs until either the confirmation of a total obliteration of the lesion on angiography or the time of the latest follow-up angiographic study that still visualized the early filling vein) was a mean of 3.9 years, ranging from 0.5 to 13.5 years, and a total of 601 patient-years. There was no case of bleeding after the diagnosis of subtotally obliterated AVMs. Of 90 patients who did not undergo further treatment and in whom follow-up angiography studies were available, the same early filling veins still filled in 24 (26.7%), and the subtotally obliterated AVMs were subsequently obliterated in 66 patients (73.3%). In 19 patients who underwent repeated GKS for subtotally obliterated AVMs and in whom follow-up angiography studies were available, the AVMs were obliterated in 15 (78.9%) and remained patent in four (21.1%). CONCLUSIONS The fact that none of the patients with subtotally obliterated AVMs suffered a rupture is not compatible with the assumption of an unchanged risk of hemorrhage for these lesions, and implies that the protection from rebleeding in patients with subtotal obliteration is significant. Subtotal obliteration does not necessarily seem to be a stage of an ongoing obliteration. At least in some cases it represents an end point of this process, with no subsequent obliteration occurring. This observation requires further confirmation by open-ended follow-up imaging.
From Thing to Sign and “Natural Object”: Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Graph Interpretation

This study was designed to find out what scientists and science students actually do when they are reading familiar and unfamiliar graphs. This study provides rich details of the subtle changes in the ontologies (ensemble of elements perceptually available) of scientists and science students as they engage in the reading tasks assigned to them. In the course of the readers’ interpretation work, initially unspecified marks on paper (“ its ”) are turned into objects with particular topologies that are said to correspond to specific features in the world. We theorize this interpretive work as a transition of graphs from things to signs that come to stand for natural objects. Especially among physicists and theoretical ecologists, graphs enter new relations and become natural objects in their own right.
Snoop-Forge-Replay Attacks on Continuous Verification With Keystrokes

We present a new attack called the snoop-forge-replay attack on keystroke-based continuous verification systems. The snoop-forge-replay is a sample-level forgery attack and is not specific to any particular keystroke-based continuous verification method or system. It can be launched with easily available keyloggers and APIs for keystroke synthesis. Our results from 2640 experiments show that: 1) the snoop-forge-replay attacks achieve alarmingly high error rates compared to zero-effort impostor attacks, which have been the de facto standard for evaluating keystroke-based continuous verification systems; 2) four state-of-the-art verification methods, three types of keystroke latencies, and 11 matching-pair settings (-a key parameter in continuous verification with keystrokes) that we examined in this paper were susceptible to the attack; 3) the attack is effective even when as low as 20 to 100 keystrokes were snooped to create forgeries. In light of our results, we question the security offered by current keystroke-based continuous verification systems. Additionally, in our experiments, we harnessed virtualization technology to generate thousands of keystroke forgeries within a short time span. We point out that virtualization setup such as the one used in our experiments can also be exploited by an attacker to scale and speedup the attack.
Between Challenge and Defeat: Repeated Player-Death and Game Enjoyment

This article contributes to research on the complex relation between dying in a digital game and player experience. In this article, we extend recent findings (Ravaja, Turpeinen, Saari, Kelti-kangas-Järvinen, & Puttonen, 2008) indicating that player death may induce positive affect. The study explored whether smiling upon dying in a game should be attributed to transient relief experiences or, instead, related to being challenged to try harder. Facial expressions were recorded while players experienced frequent deaths and occasionally reached safe zones in a shooter game. Players, indeed, smiled after dying, as testified by deactivation of the corrugator supercilii and activation of the zygomaticus major. Although retrospective subjective evaluations showed player-death events were appraised negatively, importantly, zygomaticus major activation decreased with repeated player-deaths. Moreover, safe zones did not result in patterns of facial electromyography activity indicating pleasure, countering a transient relief explanation. We propose that, as part of the ongoing game, player death reinforces the sense of challenge that the game offers. While dying may not be fun in itself, being challenged may initially be experienced as enjoyable and, therefore, evoke a smile. Without clear progress in the game and a lost sense of challenge, however, dying is no longer a laughing matter.
Application of High-Throughput Isothermal Denaturation to Assess Protein Stability and Screen for Ligands

Many diseases in humans are caused by mutations that decrease the stability of specific proteins or increase their susceptibility to aggregation. Consequently, the availability of high-throughput methods for assessing protein stability and aggregation properties under physiological conditions (e.g., 37 °C) is necessary to analyze physicochemical properties under conditions that are closer to in vivo models. Therefore, the authors have explored the use of isothermal denaturation (ITD) in a 384-well format to evaluate the reproducibility of the method in assessing the stability of proteins at temperatures below the melting temperature and detecting the binding of ligands. Under the conditions tested, the authors were able to assess the stability of citrate synthase and malate dehydrogenase at different constant temperatures and detect the binding of oxaloacetate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide to these 2 enzymes, respectively, using the 384-well format. The ITD experiments detected ligand binding to these proteins at about 4 times lower concentration compared with techniques that measure changes in melting temperature. The data show that ITD can be applied to screen libraries of a relatively large number of compounds or detect small stability differences between protein variants. (Journal of Biomolecular Screening 2008:337-342)
Search Retargeting using Directed Query Embeddings

Determining user audience for online ad campaigns is a critical problem to companies competing in online advertising space. One of the most popular strategies is search retargeting, which involves targeting users that issued search queries related to advertiser's core business, commonly specified by advertisers themselves. However, advertisers often fail to include many relevant queries, which results in suboptimal campaigns and negatively impacts revenue for both advertisers and publishers. To address this issue, we use recently proposed neural language models to learn low-dimensional, distributed query embeddings, which can be used to expand query lists with related queries through simple nearest neighbor searches in the embedding space. Experiments on real-world data set strongly suggest benefits of the approach.
Why do teachers refer pupils for special education? An analysis of referral records

Abstract We studied the referral for special education records of children and youth to identify the problems for which referrers said pupils needed help. Coders examined 382 forms used by two school systems and recorded demographic information and referrers' statements describing individual pupils' difficulties. We found that (a) 69% of the referrals were for boys, (b) regular classroom teachers alone initiated 74% of the referrals and contributed to another 5%, and (c) over two‐thirds of students referred were in earlier grade levels, particularly kindergarten (16%), first (26%), second (15%), or third grade (11%). Problems most likely to be described on referral forms were general academic problems (found on 35% of referrals), reading problems (31%), and attention problems (23%) other problems such as fearfulness (2%), visual‐perceptual difficulties (1%), and depression (1%) were rarely included. Factor analysis of the referral reasons revealed five common types of referrals, some of which interacted w.
Bisphenol AF-Induced Endogenous Transcription Is Mediated by ERα and ERK1/2 Activation in Human Breast Cancer Cells

Bisphenol AF (BPAF)-induced transcriptional activity has been evaluated by luciferase reporter assay. However, the molecular mechanism of BPAF-induced endogenous transcription in human breast cancer cells has not been fully elucidated. In the present study, we investigated the effect and mechanism of BPAF-induced endogenous transcription detected by real-time PCR in human breast cancer cells. We found that BPAF stimulated transcription of estrogen responsive genes, such as trefoil factor 1 (TFF1), growth regulation by estrogen in breast cancer 1 (GREB1) and cathepsin D (CTSD), through dose-dependent and time-dependent manners in T47D and MCF7 cells. Gene-silencing of ERα, ERβ and G protein-coupled estrogen receptor 1 (GPER) by small interfering RNA revealed that BPAF-induced endogenous transcription was dependent on ERα and GPER, implying both genomic and nongenomic pathways might be involved in the endogenous transcription induced by BPAF. ERα-mediated gene transcription was further confirmed by inhibition of ER activity using ICI 182780 in ERα-positive T47D and MCF7 cells as well as overexpression of ERα in ERα-negative MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells. Moreover, we utilized Src tyrosine kinase inhibitor PP2 and two MEK inhibitors PD98059 and U0126 to elucidate the rapid nongenomic activation of Src/MEK/ERK1/2 cascade on endogenous transcription. Our data showed that BPAF-induced transcription could be significantly blocked by PP2, PD98059 and U0126, suggesting activation of ERK1/2 was also required to regulate endogenous transcription. Taken together, these results indicate that BPAF-induced endogenous transcription of estrogen responsive genes is mediated through both genomic and nongenomic pathways involving the ERα and ERK1/2 activation in human breast cancer cells.
Reversal of experimentally induced seizure activity in mice by glibenclamide

Background ATP sensitive potassium channels are widely distributed in central nervous system (CNS) and these channels could be the target in CNS disorders by their modulators. Purpose The present study was designed to investigate the anticonvulsant potential of glibenclamide on MES induced seizure and pentylenetetrazole induced seizure in mice. Methods Seizures were induced in 7 months albino mice with a single 12 mA intensity of 50 Hz stimulus for 0.2 s using electroconvulsiometer. Tonic flexion, tonic extension, clonic convulsion and mortality protection were recorded, 60 minutes after the oral administration of the vehicle (3% Tween 80), Standard (diazepam 3 mg/kg i.p.) and glibenclamide (5 mg/kg). In second model, seizures were induced with a single convulsive dose (80 mg/kg i.p) of pentylentetrazole (PTZ). Seizures were assessed in terms of onset of seizure, number of jerks, onset of tonic convulsion and clonic convulsions and mortality protection. The study was performed at antidiabetic dose of glibenclamide 5 mg/kg per oral. Results Glibenclamide (5 mg/kg p.o.) showed significant (p<0.05) protective activity in MES induced seizures and attenuated pentylenetetrazole-induced seizure activity in mice. The anticonvulsant action of glibenclamide was noticeable in this study. However, further studies are required to elucidate its full anticonvulsant potential. Conclusions Glibenclamide is able to exert protective effects in MES induced seizures and attenuates pentylenetetrazole induced seizure activity in mice.
Race and Place: Equity Issues in Urban America. by John W. Frasier, Florence M. Margai, and Eugene Tettey-Fio

County governments have been a key feature of American politics since before the creation of the United States, but they do not get much respect from political scientists. Dismissed as ‘‘the sleeping giant,’’ ‘‘the dark continent of American government,’’ and ‘‘the backward institution,’’ the 3,043 county governments across the nation are often treated as an afterthought even by those scholars who specialize in the study of local government. In Counties as Service Delivery Agents, J. Edwin Benton argues that such attitudes have blinded scholars to the emerging prominence of county governments in the American federal system. Created to serve as administrative arms of states, county governments were the traditional means for providing welfare, health care, transportation, judicial administration, and tax assessment services. In recent decades the service responsibilities of county governments have expanded to such an extent that counties are now seen by many as an acceptable replacement for municipal governments and a primary agent of regional services. Indeed, in 1997, 39% of all local government spending was done through counties. After a solid introduction to county governments, Benton makes an ambitious effort to understand the factors behind the changing obligations of counties. Unfortunately, most of his analysis is descriptive, which frustrates any attempt to sort through the many conflicting variables. Benton begins by tracing the historical development of county governments from their establishment in Virginia in 1634. Regional differences quickly became evident as a system of strong county governments was instituted across the South, a combination of strong municipalities and weak counties developed in New England, and counties with somewhat mixed powers flourished throughout the mid-Atlantic. Although the states experimented with various forms of county government structure and powers in the early years of the nation, by the Civil War it was generally accepted that county governments existed primarily to administer policies established by state governments. This subordination was alleviated somewhat during the Progressive Era as the elected county leadership was professionalized and county home rule became an option in many states. However, the basic form of county governments remained remarkably static well into the twentieth century. After World War II suburbanization transformed local government across the nation, forcing a reconfiguration of service responsibilities among municipalities, counties, townships, and special districts. Initially, county governments were unprepared for the rapid transfer of people from center cities to the unincorporated areas. As a result, many newly suburbanized areas found more immediate relief for their service needs by
Characterization of Transcriptional Changes in ERG Rearrangement-Positive Prostate Cancer Identifies the Regulation of Metabolic Sensors Such as Neuropeptide Y

ERG gene rearrangements are found in about one half of all prostate cancers. Functional analyses do not fully explain the selective pressure causing ERG rearrangement during the development of prostate cancer. To identify transcriptional changes in prostate cancer, including tumors with ERG gene rearrangements, we performed a meta-analysis on published gene expression data followed by validations on mRNA and protein levels as well as first functional investigations. Eight expression studies (n = 561) on human prostate tissues were included in the meta-analysis. Transcriptional changes between prostate cancer and non-cancerous prostate, as well as ERG rearrangement-positive (ERG+) and ERG rearrangement-negative (ERG−) prostate cancer, were analyzed. Detailed results can be accessed through an online database. We validated our meta-analysis using data from our own independent microarray study (n = 57). 84% and 49% (fold-change>2 and >1.5, respectively) of all transcriptional changes between ERG+ and ERG− prostate cancer determined by meta-analysis were verified in the validation study. Selected targets were confirmed by immunohistochemistry: NPY and PLA2G7 (up-regulated in ERG+ cancers), and AZGP1 and TFF3 (down-regulated in ERG+ cancers). First functional investigations for one of the most prominent ERG rearrangement-associated genes - neuropeptide Y (NPY) - revealed increased glucose uptake in vitro indicating the potential role of NPY in regulating cellular metabolism. In summary, we found robust population-independent transcriptional changes in prostate cancer and first signs of ERG rearrangements inducing metabolic changes in cancer cells by activating major metabolic signaling molecules like NPY. Our study indicates that metabolic changes possibly contribute to the selective pressure favoring ERG rearrangements in prostate cancer.
Perceived Control Over Illness, Realistic Acceptance, and Psychological Adjustment in People with AIDS

This study investigated perceptions of control over illness and realistic acceptance of illness and their association with psychological adjustment in people with AIDS. Research has suggested that beliefs in personal control over illness are positively associated with psychological adjustment in several chronic illnesses, even at advanced stages of disease. However, stage theories of death and dying maintain that it is psychologically adaptive to realistically accept the possibility of death, especially at advanced stages of progressive disease. This study investigated both sets of these beliefs in a sample of 42 people with late-stage AIDS. Findings indicated that perceptions of control over illness course were associated with less depressive symptoms and less anxiety about death, and that realistic acceptance—while associated with more comprehensive planning for death—was associated with greater hopelessness. These findings are consistent with research showing that people frequently maintain exaggerated.
PromoterPlot: a graphical display of promoter similarities by pattern recognition

PromoterPlot () is a web-based tool for simplifying the display and processing of transcription factor searches using either the commercial or free TransFac distributions. The input sequence is a TransFac search (public version) or FASTA/Affymetrix IDs (local install). It uses an intuitive pattern recognition algorithm for finding similarities between groups of promoters by dividing transcription factor predictions into conserved triplet models. To minimize the number of false-positive models, it can optionally exclude factors that are known to be unexpressed or inactive in the cells being studied based on microarray or proteomic expression data. The program will also estimate the likelihood of finding a pattern by chance based on the frequency observed in a control set of mammalian promoters we obtained from Genomatix. The results are stored as an interactive SVG web page on our server.