Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
HEAT SHOCK PROTEIN72 PROTECTS HIPPOCAMPAL NEURONS FROM APOPTOSIS INDUCED BY CHRONIC PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS

When exposed to nonlethal heat stress (i.e., heat shock preconditioning), HSP72 expression increased in the mammalian brain. HSP72 enhance the viability of neurons and decrease TUNEL-positive neurons under several kinds of stress (e.g., ischemic). Chronic psychological stress is a kind of stress that could cause hippocampal neuron apoptosis. But whether overexpression of HSP72 can decrease TUNEL-positive hippocampal neurons caused by chronic psychological stress is unclear. To investigate the possible protective role of HSP72 in decreasing chronic psychological stress–induced hippocampal neuron apoptosis, this study analyzed HSP72 expression, apoptotic neurons in the hippocampus of mice. Adult mice were divided into four groups unstressed group; chronic psychological stress group; heat shock stress group; heat shock preconditioning plus psychological stress group; receiving no experimental stress, chronic psychological stress, heat shock stress, heat shock preconditioning plus psychological stress separately. Mice were killed after one month, two months, or three months of stress. A three-way ANOVA (psychological stress × heat shock stress × time) revealed a significant effect of heat shock stress in increasing HSP72 expression, decreasing neuronal apoptosis in hippocampus CA3 region caused by chronic psychological stress, and showed that HSP72 protected hippocampus CA3 neurons from chronic psychological stress.
Oil Company Annual Report Disclosure Responses to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

This paper analyses the annual report disclosures of the other six largest oil companies in reaction to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It focusses on changes in disclosures that can be ascribed to the oil spill. The companies all increased their environmental disclosures, with positive disclosures increasing most. It shows the use of an image enhancement disclosure strategy and a (partial) disclaiming of responsibility disclosure strategy, but do not find evidence consistent with a deflection of attention disclosure strategy, probably due to the high profile of the incident. It is found that BP’s strategy of repeating disclosures about remedial activities several times in different parts of the annual report ensures: an emphasis on the positive, that all stakeholders regardless of their area of focus are likely to notice this disclosure, an increase in the volume of environmental disclosure, and that less detail can be disclosed, reducing litigation-related risks.
Predicting the Cost Per Flying Hour for the F-16 Using Programmatic and Operational Data

Abstract We analyzed economic, operational, and programmatic data from Air National Guard and active duty F-16C/D fighter wings in search of explanatory variables that influence a wing's cost per flying hour (CPFH). Using data from the Air Force Total Ownership Cost database and from the Air Force Knowledge Systems database, we evaluated the predictive ability of various operational and programmatic variables, such as aircraft age, average sortie duration, base location, utilization rate, percent engine type, percent block, and previous year's CPFH. Although separate models were required for active duty and Air National Guard units, both regression models incorporated utilization rate, base location, percent block, and percent engine type and appeared to accurately predict an F-16 C/D fighter wing's CPFH.
Rhythmic profiles of cell cycle and circadian clock gene transcripts in mice: a possible association between two periodic systems

SUMMARY The circadian system shapes the rhythms of most biological functions. The regulation of the cell cycle by a circadian clock was suggested to operate via stages S, G2 and G2/M. This study investigated a possible time link at stages G1 and G1/S as well. The daily expression profiles of cell cycle markers (Ccnd1, Ccne1 and Pcna) and circadian clock genes (Per2 and Clock) were monitored in liver and esophagus (low and high proliferation index, respectively) of BALB/c mice. Locomotor activity displayed a 24 h rhythm, establishing the circadian organization of the suprachiasmatic nucleus. In the liver, the mRNA level of Per2 and Clock fitted the circadian rhythm with a 7.5 h shift. This temporal pattern suggests that the liver harbors a functional circadian clock. The rhythm of the analyzed cell cycle genes, however, was of low significance fitness and showed an opposite peak time between Pcna and Clock. These results indicate a weak regulatory role of the circadian clock. In the esophagus, the rhythms of Clock and Per2 mRNA had a similar peak time and non-circadian periods. These results suggest either that the esophagus does not harbor a functional circadian apparatus or that the phenotypes stem from differences in phase and amplitude of the rhythms of its various cell types. The similarity in the rhythm parameters of Clock, Ccne1 and Pcna transcripts questions the control of the circadian clock on the cell cycle along the G1 and G1/S stages. Yet the G1/S transition may play a role in modulating the local clock of proliferating tissues.
NOS1AP Regulates Dendrite Patterning of Hippocampal Neurons through a Carboxypeptidase E-Mediated Pathway

During neuronal development, neurons form elaborate dendritic arbors that receive signals from axons. Additional studies are needed to elucidate the factors regulating the establishment of dendritic patterns. Our work explored possible roles played by nitric oxide synthase 1 adaptor protein (NOS1AP; also known as C-terminal PDZ ligand of neuronal nitric oxide synthase or CAPON) in dendritic patterning of cultured hippocampal neurons. Here we report that the long isoform of NOS1AP (NOS1AP-L) plays a novel role in regulating dendrite outgrowth and branching. NOS1AP-L decreases dendrite number when overexpressed at any interval between day in vitro (DIV) 0 and DIV 12, and knockdown of NOS1AP-L results in increased dendrite number. In contrast, the short isoform of NOS1AP (NOS1AP-S) decreases dendrite number only when overexpressed during DIV 5–7. Using mutants of NOS1AP-L, we show that neither the PDZ-binding domain nor the PTB domain is necessary for the effects of NOS1AP-L. We have functionally narrowed the region of NOS1AP-L that mediates this effect to the middle amino acids 181–307, a region that is not present in NOS1AP-S. Furthermore, we performed a yeast two-hybrid screen and identified carboxypeptidase E (CPE) as a binding partner for the middle region of NOS1AP-L. Biochemical and cellular studies reveal that CPE mediates the effects of NOS1AP on dendrite morphology. Together, our results suggest that NOS1AP-L plays an important role in the initiation, outgrowth, and maintenance of dendrites during development.
Health Insurance and Health Care Access Before and After SSDI Entry

This report uses National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data linked to data from the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Medicare programs to create profiles of SSDI beneficiaries during the three years before and after SSDI entry to illustrate changes in insurance status, health care access, and utilization. SSDI beneficiaries were less likely to be insured, even three years prior to SSDI entry, and utilization and access problems peaked right before and after entry. At the time their SSDI applications were approved, 11 percent had completed the entire 24-month Medicare waiting period and about one-third had completed 12 months or more. Eliminating the Medicare waiting period could help many beneficiaries who lack health insurance. However, this policy alone would not help those who are uninsured before entry and approved a long time after SSDI entitlement.
Hadoop Workloads Characterization for Performance and Energy Efficiency Optimizations on Microservers

The traditional low-power embedded processors such as Atom and ARM are entering into the high-performance server market. At the same time, big data analytics applications are emerging and dramatically changing the landscape of data center workloads. Emerging big data applications require a significant amount of server computational power. However, the rapid growth in the data yields challenges to process them efficiently using current high-performance server architectures. Furthermore, physical design constraints, such as power and density have become the dominant limiting factor for scaling out servers. Numerous big data applications rely on using Hadoop MapReduce framework to perform their analysis on large-scale datasets. Since Hadoop configuration parameters as well as system parameters directly affect the MapReduce job performance and energy-efficiency, joint application, system, and architecture level parameters tuning is vital to maximize the energy efficiency for Hadoop-based applications. In this work, through methodical investigation of performance and power measurements, we demonstrate how the interplay among various Hadoop configuration parameters, as well as system and architecture level parameters affect not only the performance but also the energy-efficiency across various big data applications. Our results identify trends to guide scheduling decision and key insights to help improving Hadoop MapReduce applications performance, power, and energy-efficiency on microservers.
Discriminative Training of Structured Dictionaries via Block Orthogonal Matching Pursuit

It is well established that high-level representations learned via sparse coding are eﬀective for many machine learning applications such as denoising and classiﬁcation. In addition to being reconstructive, sparse representations that are discriminative and invariant can further help with such applications. In order to achieve these desired properties, this paper proposes a new framework that discriminatively trains structured dictionaries via block orthogonal matching pursuit. Specifically, the dictionary atoms are assumed to be organized into blocks. Distinct classes correspond to distinct blocks of dictionary atoms; however, our algorithm can handle the case where multiple classes share blocks. We provide theoretical justiﬁcation and empirical evaluation of our method.
A Novel Experimental System for Investigation of Cortical Activities Related to Lower Limb Movements

We report the development of a novel experimental system for investigation of potential correlation between cortical neuronal signals and lower limb movement with targeted application towards cortical controlled neuroprosthesis. The system consists of a specially designed chair and a virtual reality based task environment. We designed a training paradigm for non-human primates to perform whole leg full extension and retraction task that simulates standing and sitting. With the special chair, the 'stand up' and 'sit down' can be performed with the head fixed, which is required for steady and especially acute cortical recordings. In this experimental environment we can simultaneously record leg kinematics during simulated stand up and stepping, ground reaction forces, leg muscle activities and neuronal activities in different cortical areas through either microdriveable electrodes or chronically implanted arrays. With this system and other state-of-the-art techniques, and combined with computational tools that we are developing, we aim to identify neural activity patterns that correlate with muscle activity and/or kinematics associated with leg movement during standing and stepping activities under naive and well trained conditions
Molecular analysis of G+C-rich upstream sequences regulating transcription of the human carbonic anhydrase II gene

The upstream promoter sequences of the human carbonic anhydrase II (CA II) gene have been studied by 5' deletion analysis. Promoter activity was assayed by transfection and chloramphenicol acetyltransferase assay in both human HeLa cells and murine L cells. This investigation showed that the CA II promoter is comparable in activity to that of the simian virus 40 early-region promoter and enhancer and that the CA II upstream sequences exert a different pattern of control in the two cell lines.
Rescoring-Aware Beam Search for Reduced Search Errors in Contextual Automatic Speech Recognition

Using context in automatic speech recognition allows the recognition system to dynamically task-adapt and bring gains to a broad variety of use-cases. An important mechanism of contextinclusion is on-the-fly rescoring of hypotheses with contextual language model content available only in real-time. In systems where rescoring occurs on the lattice during its construction as part of beam search decoding, hypotheses eligible for rescoring may be missed due to pruning. This can happen for many reasons: the language model and rescoring model may assign significantly different scores, there may be a lot of noise in the utterance, or word prefixes with a high outdegree may necessitate aggressive pruning to keep the search tractable. This results in misrecognitions when contextuallyrelevant hypotheses are pruned before rescoring, even if a contextual rescoring model favors those hypotheses by a large margin. We present a technique to adapt the beam search algorithm to preserve hypotheses when they may benefit from rescoring. We show that this technique significantly reduces the number of search pruning errors on rescorable hypotheses, without a significant increase in the search space size. This technique makes it feasible to use one base language model, but still achieve high-accuracy speech recognition results in all contexts.
Consumer response to sponsorship leveraged packaging – a fast moving consumer goods context

In the last decade, sponsorship has become a mainstream marketing communications tool with worldwide sponsorship spending approaching US$45 billion. However, the rapid growth of corporate sponsorship has led to the emergence of ‘sponsorship clutter’, a major challenge for companies seeking sponsorship opportunities. As the market for sponsorship becomes intensely competitive, it is essential that sponsorship investments be carefully managed to ensure their effectiveness. One type of sponsorship leveraging that is widely used in the Australian Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry (FMCG) is sponsorship leveraged packaging (SLP). SLP involves depicting the sponsored property’s image and logos on the sponsoring brand’s packaging. Despite its widespread use, little empirical research exists to explain whether sponsorship leveraged packaging (SLP) impacts consumer behaviour in low involvement settings. This research specifically addresses these gaps in the known body of literature relating to sponsorship, packaging and marketing communications by empirically investigating the relationship between SLP and consumer behaviour. Given the current trend of large sponsorship leverage investments, it becomes increasingly important to have a clear understanding of what to expect when SLP is used and how to maximise its impact on consumers and the marketplace. In this research, image transfer theory, together with an attention-trial-response model are presented in order to develop a framework to explain factors impacting consumer response to SLP. Empirical results indicate that consumer response to SLP is impacted by identification with the sponsored property and perceived fit of the property and sponsor. Furthermore, the relationship is moderated by type of sponsored property, awareness of the sponsorship, frequency of purchase of the sponsoring brand and respondent characteristics. Theoretically, this research provides understanding of a little explored context for sponsorship, i.e. FMCG. It also provides strategic relevance for brand managers in guiding sponsorship investment and package design decisions.
Measuring Value -Based Productivity: A Confirmatory Factor Analytic (CFA) Approach

Productivity affects many organisations to survive in the rapidly progressing business environment. In this paper, productivity is viewed from the other side of coin which is through values as intangible enabler in fuelling it. Values play significant role for this reason. Therefore, this paper expounds the value-based productivity that is related to the performance of the organisation based on the literature review and expert’s view. This study aimed at testing the psychometric properties of the questionnaire of value-based productivity items of performance measurement based on the Value-based Total Performance Excellence Model. 600 questionnaires were distributed to the selected Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) i.e the public university of Malaysia. The data collected was analysed using predictive analytics software (PASW) and AMOS, both version 18. Structural Equation Modeling technique i.e. the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) approach was employed to test the 6-factor hypothesized model of the value-vased productivity which consisted values of efficiency, collectiveness, non-exploitative, economy of scale, frugality, timeliness. The result of the CFA suggested that the 6-factor hypothesised model to be revised and yielded a 4-factor measurement model of productivity values. The revised CFA measurement model indicated fit statistics that are adequate with normed chi-square = 2.190, CFI = 0.990, TLI = 0.974. GFI = 0.969 and RMSEA = 0.080. In conclusion, the revised model fitted the data well and there is no proof that the 4-factor measurement model is incorrect. Implications of the study was significant to the university for empowering value-based productivity approach. This is vital in ensuring that university is gearing up for achieving total organisational excellence as emphasized in 1Malaysia concept – ‘performance first’ i.e. to prioritize the organisational achievement.
Exit the Dragon? Collapse of Co-management at Komodo National Park, Indonesia

Abstract A significant current approach to creating compatibility between tourism and biodiversity conservation focuses on managing protected areas under collaborative management arrangements. The collaborating stakeholders are generally government agencies, non-governmental organizations, community groups and occasionally private sector organizations, with the balance determined by local circumstances. The aim is to create resilient governance systems informed by adaptive co-management philosophy. In 2005, a collaborative management initiative was set up at Komodo National Park, in eastern Indonesia, to manage a group of islands inhabited by the iconic Komodo lizard and several human communities. The area is popular with general interest tourists wishing to see the ‘dragons’ and with divers enjoying the rich coral reefs fringing the islands. The reefs are also the spawning grounds for fish-stocks exploited by fishermen based locally and further afield. The collaborative arrangements were designed to regulate both tourism use of the islands and fishing, but despite substantial investment of expertise and resources, it ran for just 5 years before collapsing. The reasons for its failure lie generally in the difficulty of managing complex social-ecological systems, and specifically in the overly narrow design of the initiative and in the political ecology of the Indonesian civil service, which despite anti-corruption efforts retains high levels of venality and weak environmental awareness.
Transfer of humoral immunity against cytomegalovirus proteins following transplantation of T‐cell‐depleted allogeneic bone marrow from seropositive donors

Previous work by Grob et al. [Lancet i:774, 1987] has demonstrated that allogeneic, T‐cell‐depleted bone marrow transplant recipients have a better prognosis for reactivated cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection if their donor is also immune. It was proposed that adoptively transferred humoral immunity was responsible for the protective effect of active infection. Immunoblot analysis using purified virions was used here to examine pre‐ and posttransplant antibody responses of seropositive recipients who had undergone active viral infection after transplantation. Immunoblots were assessed for the numbers of polypetides recognised and reactivity against individual polypeptides. Immunoblots were also scanned by quantitative densitometry, and the intensity of antibody responses against total viral protein and individual polypeptides was determined. Sera from recipients with immune donors exhibited a secondary‐type immune reponse in terms of both intensity and polypeptide specific pattern of antibody reactivity, compared with those recipients with nonimmune donors. In particular, recipients with immune donors appeared to show a greater reactivity against a protein of Mr 55,000; this may represent the envelope glycoprotein gB, which is a major target for neutralising antibodies, and might also be utilised for preparing an effective vaccine for CMV.
MUlti information based Ground Control Points selection method

Ground Control Points (GCPs) are one of the most important data used in many fields of Remote Sensing. The number and distribution of GCPs are always the key factors for the success of some researches. A GCPs selection method by integrating the three dimensional spatial information (i.e. the earth coordinates (X, Y, Z) and the corresponding feature information underlying the data itself was proposed. To testify the performance of this method, a Rational Function Model Resolving experiment is conducted. Experiment results show that the accuracy and time-consuming performance are both improved using GCPs selected by the proposed method.
Compressed Dipoles Resonating at Higher Order Modes With Enhanced Directivity

A compressed dipole operating at higher order modes is proposed and investigated for the enhancement of boresight directivity. Compared with conventional dipoles in free space, the length of the proposed dipole is compressed although the currents on the compressed dipole still sinusoidally distribute. The traces of calculated compressed dipole’s directivity against compressibility show that the directivity of a compressed dipole operating at higher resonant modes is larger than conventional dipoles for the well selected compressibility. This paper shows that printing the dipole onto a piece of dielectric substrate can achieve the desired compressibility. The relationship between the compressibility and relative permittivity of the dielectric slab provides the guidance to realize the selected compressibility. As an example, a thin linear compressed dipole resonating at the third mode is designed, fabricated, and measured to validate the method. The measured broadside gain of the proposed compressed dipole reaches up to 4.6 dBi, 75% or 2.45 dBi higher than a conventional dipole.