Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protective Effect of Grape Seed and Skin Extract on Cerebral Ischemia in Rat: Implication of Transition Metals

Ischemic stroke is a leading cause of long lasting disability in humans and oxidative stress an important underlying cause. The present study aims to determine the effect of short term (seven-days) administration of high dosage grape seed and skin extract (GSSE 2·5 g/kg) on ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury in a rat model of global ischemia. Ischemia was induced by occlusion of the common carotid arteries for 30 min followed by one-hour reperfusion on control or GSSE treated animals. I/R induced a drastic oxidative stress characterized by high lipid and protein oxidation, a drop in antioxidant enzyme defenses, disturbed transition metals as free iron overload and depletion of copper, zinc and manganese as well as of associated brain enzyme activities as glutamine synthetase and lactate dehydrogenase. I/R also induced NO and calcium disruption and an increase in calpain activity, a calcium-sensitive cysteine protease. Interestingly, almost all I/R-induced disturbances were prevented by GSSE pretreatment as oxidative stress, transition metals associated enzyme activities, brain damage size and histology. Owing to its antioxidant potential, high dosage GSSE protected efficiently the brain against ischemic stroke and should be translated to humans.
Sunday Friends

This research presents results from the 2009 and 2011 evaluations of a biweekly program offered by Sunday Friends, a nonsectarian, nonprofit organization in Santa Clara County, California. The central focus of Sunday Friends is to empower families to “break the cycle of poverty” by providing programming that strengthens families and promotes healthy development of children and youth. Targeting financially needy families, the program uses a unique token economy to reward participation in educational and prosocial activities. Participants earn tickets that may be used to purchase a variety of goods and supplies. Most of the participating families are immigrant, Latino, and bilingual. The primary goal of the evaluations was to determine whether Sunday Friends fosters developmental assets for children and youth. Data were gathered from family members (i.e., adults and minors) and volunteers in 2009 and 2011. Questionnaires were administered to families face-to-face in English or Spanish during program hours, while volunteers were surveyed via an Internet questionnaire in English. We conclude that the token economy at Sunday Friends encourages a positive work ethic and motivates participation in transformative activities. Within an atmosphere of respect, helpfulness, and friendliness, the program fosters healthy family relationships, positive attitudes and behaviors, educational engagement, social capital, and healthy eating. Program volunteers are liked, respected, and viewed as role models. Data from volunteers confirm the reports by family members that the program has positive influences on participants’ lives.
On the MSE robustness of batching estimators

Variance is a classical measure of a point estimator's sampling error. In steady-state simulation experiments, many estimators of this variance-or its square root, the standard error-depend upon batching the output data. In practice, the optimal batch size is unknown because it depends upon unknown statistical properties of the simulation output data. When optimal batch size is estimated, the batch size used is random. Therefore, robustness to estimated batch size is a desirable property for a standard-error estimation method. We consider only point estimators that are a sample mean of steady-state data and consider only mean squared error (MSE) as the criterion for comparing standard-error estimation methods. Like previous authors, we measure robustness as a second derivative. We argue that a previous measure the second derivative of MSE with respect to estimated batch size-is conceptually flawed. We propose a new measure, the second derivative of the MSE with respect to the estimated center of gravity of the non-negative autocorrelations of the output process. With the previous robustness measure, optimal MSE and robustness yielded different rankings of estimation methods. A property of the new robustness measure is that both criteria yield identical rankings.
In Situ Monitoring of Intracellular Glucose and Glutamine in CHO Cell Culture

The development of processes to produce biopharmaceuticals industrially is still largely empirical and relies on optimizing both medium formulation and cell line in a product-specific manner. Current small-scale (well plate-based) process development methods cannot provide sufficient sample volume for analysis, to obtain information on nutrient utilization which can be problematic when processes are scaled to industrial fermenters. We envision a platform where essential metabolites can be monitored non-invasively and in real time in an ultra-low volume assay in order to provide additional information on cellular metabolism in high throughput screens. Towards this end, we have developed a model system of Chinese Hamster Ovary cells stably expressing protein-based biosensors for glucose and glutamine. Herein, we demonstrate that these can accurately reflect changing intracellular metabolite concentrations in vivo during batch and fed-batch culture of CHO cells. The ability to monitor intracellular depletion of essential nutrients in high throughput will allow rapid development of improved bioprocesses.
Apoptosis Signal-regulating Kinase (ASK) 2 Functions as a Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Kinase Kinase in a Heteromeric Complex with ASK1*

Apoptosis signal-regulating kinase (ASK) 1 is a mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase kinase (MAP3K) in the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways that play multiple important roles in cytokine and stress responses. Here we show that ASK2, a highly related serine/threonine kinase to ASK1, also functions as a MAP3K only in a heteromeric complex with ASK1. We found that endogenous ASK2 was constitutively degraded in ASK1-deficient cells, suggesting that ASK1 is required for the stability of ASK2. ASK2 in a heteromeric complex with a kinase-negative mutant of ASK1 (ASK1-KN) effectively activated MAP2K and was more competent to respond to oxidative stress than ASK2 alone. Knockdown of ASK2 revealed that ASK2 was required for oxidative stress-induced JNK activation. These results suggest that ASK2 forms a functional MAP3K complex with ASK1, in which ASK1 supports the stability and the active configuration of ASK2. Moreover, ASK2 was found to activate ASK1 by direct phosphorylation, suggesting that ASK1 and ASK2 in a heteromeric complex facilitate their activities to each other by distinct mechanisms. Such a formation of functional heteromeric complex between different MAP3Ks may be advantageous for cells to cope with a wide variety of stimuli by fine regulation of cellular responses.
Exercise and cognitive function in people living with HIV: a scoping review

Abstract Background: Since the advent of antiretrovirals, people with HIV are living longer and have improved quality of life. However, 30–60% of these individuals experience cognitive impairment. Fortunately, physical activity has emerged as a management strategy for cognitive impairment. Purpose: To map the evidence on physical activity and cognition in HIV. Methods: We searched five databases using terms related to physical activity and HIV. Two authors independently reviewed titles and abstracts for studies that addressed physical activity/exercise and cognition in people with HIV. Authors reviewed full texts to identify articles that met our inclusion criteria. One author extracted the data, then we collated the results and summarized the characteristics of included studies. Results: Sixteen studies from high-income countries were included; eight were interventional (five randomized controlled trials and three pre-post single group observational studies) and eight were non-interventional studies. The interventional studies included aerobic, resistive, and Tai Chi exercise for 8 weeks to 12 months in duration. Two of eight interventional studies found exercise to benefit self-reported cognition. All eight non-interventional studies showed a positive relationship between physical activity and cognitive function. Conclusions: Results of this study suggest that physical activity may preserve or improve cognition in people living with HIV. Implications for Rehabilitation Physical activity may play a role in preserving or improving cognition in the human immunodeficiency virus population. Exercise should be prescribed for people with human immunodeficiency virus based on the stage of infection. Rehabilitation professionals should follow current exercise guidelines when prescribing exercise for people living with human immunodeficiency virus.
Achievement of African American and Caucasian Students Referred and Placed or Not Placed in Gifted Programs

The identification of students who are gifted traditionally has been grounded in criteria with an emphasis on unitary measures of intellectual ability. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the performance of elementary school children in a Southeastern state identified as gifted using an assessment process based on MI theory, the Problem Solving Assessment, with a comparable group of students referred for assessment but not identified as gifted. We compared scores on statewide end-of-grade reading and math tests to evaluate the performance of African American and Caucasian students. Although scores for African American students were below those for the Caucasian peers in both groups, the difference between the groups was smaller in reading and mathematics for students identified and placed in gifted programs. We discuss the implications of our findings as they related to identification and program development.
Open Domain Speech Translation: From Seminars and Speeches to Lectures

This paper describes our ongoing work in domain unlimited speech translation. We describe how we developed a lecture translation system by moving from speech translation of European Parliament Plenary Sessions and seminar talks to the open domain of lectures. We started with our speech recognition (ASR) and statistical machine translation (SMT) 2006 evaluation systems developed within the framework of TC-Star (Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation) and CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). The paper presents the speech translation performance of these systems on lectures and gives an overview of our final real-time lecture translation system.
Credit based system for fair data sharing in smart Grid

In smart grid, the smart meter provides fine granular information about consumer power consumption. Consumer power consumption records are stored in big data with the help of data communication center (DCC). For many industries, these data are very much beneficial either for research, social status or economical marketing purpose. But the industry cannot access of power consumption data directly because user privacy is attached with it. Hence, in our proposed system we introduced incentive credit based system, which motivates the consumer to share his data. Further, we also categorize consumer power consumption data, according to the type of user and area of the user, for the proper reward to the consumer. Our result shows many users give preference to the sharing of data for credits due to benefactor rewards associated with privacy level.
Effects of amount of evidence and range of rule on the use of hypothesis and target tests by groups in rule-discovery tasks

This experiment investigated the use of positive and negative hypothesis and target tests by groups in an adaptation of the 2-4-6 Wason task. The experimental variables were range of rule (small vs large), amount of evidence (low vs high), and trial block (1 vs 2). The results were in accordance with Klayman and Ha's (1987) analysis of base rate probabilities of falsification and with additional theoretical considerations. Base rate probabilities were more descriptive of participants' behaviour in target than in hypothesis tests, under low than under high amount of evidence, and at the beginning of the process than at its end. The percentage of positive tests was higher under small than large range of rule. More falsifications than verifications resulted from hypothesis tests than would be expected by a random process. When evidence is richly available, the relative importance of falsification seems to decrease. An analysis of the group compositions before and after group discussion by the PCD model (Crott, Werner, & Hoffmann, 1996) revealed that the normative weight was approximately twice as large as the informational. Groups produced fewer false answers than their members individually.
Cauchy Problem of the non-self-adjoint Gauss-Laguerre semigroups and uniform bounds of generalized Laguerre polynomials

We propose a new approach to construct the eigenvalue expansion in a weighted Hilbert space of the solution to the Cauchy problem associated to Gauss-Laguerre invariant Markov semigroups that we introduce. Their generators turn out to be natural non-self-adjoint and non-local generalizations of the Laguerre differential operator. Our methods rely on intertwining relations that we establish between these semigroups and the classical Laguerre semigroup and combine with techniques based on non-harmonic analysis. As a by-product we also provide regularity properties for the semigroups as well as for their heat kernels. The biorthogonal sequences that appear in their eigenvalue expansion can be expressed in terms of sequences of polynomials, and they generalize the Laguerre polynomials. By means of a delicate saddle point method, we derive uniform asymptotic bounds that allow us to get an upper bound for their norms in weighted Hilbert spaces. We believe that this work opens a way to construct spectral expansions for more general non-self-adjoint Markov semigroups.
Dual Motor-Cognitive Virtual Reality Training Impacts Dual-Task Performance in Freezing of Gait

Freezing of gait (FOG), an episodic gait disturbance characterized by the inability to generate effective stepping, occurs in more than half of Parkinson's disease patients. It is associated with both executive dysfunction and attention and becomes most evident during dual tasking (performing two tasks simultaneously). This study examined the effect of dual motor-cognitive virtual reality training on dual-task performance in FOG. Twenty community dwelling participants with Parkinson's disease (13 with FOG, 7 without FOG) participated in a pre-assessment, eight 20-minute intervention sessions, and a post-assessment. The intervention consisted of a virtual reality maze (DFKI, Germany) through which participants navigated by stepping-in-place on a balance board (Nintendo, Japan) under time pressure. This was combined with a cognitive task (Stroop test), which repeatedly divided participants' attention. The primary outcome measures were pre- and post-intervention differences in motor (stepping time, symmetry, rhythmicity) and cognitive (accuracy, reaction time) performance during single- and dual-tasks. Both assessments consisted of 1) a single cognitive task 2) a single motor task, and 3) a dual motor-cognitive task. Following the intervention, there was significant improvement in dual-task cognitive and motor parameters (stepping time and rhythmicity), dual-task effect for those with FOG and a noteworthy improvement in FOG episodes. These improvements were less significant for those without FOG. This is the first study to show benefit of a dual motor-cognitive approach on dual-task performance in FOG. Advances in such virtual reality interventions for home use could substantially improve the quality of life for patients who experience FOG.
Finding Critical Cells in Web Tables with SRL: Trying to Uncover the Devil's Tease

Tables are extremely important components of documents, because they bear very informative content in a compact and structured way. Being able to understand a table's internal organization would allow to extract and reuse the data they contain. This can be reduced to recognizing critical cells only. Since purely algorithmic approaches are unable to deal with the many different table layouts designed to represent particular kinds of information and/or particular perspectives on them, Machine Learning may represent an effective solution. On one hand, the spatial organization of tables puts a strong emphasis on the relationships among cells, on the other, the extreme variability in style, size, and aims of tables requires flexible approaches. This paper proposes the exploitation of a Statistical Relational Learning approach, that is able to model the complex spatial relationships involved in a table structure, by mixing the power of a relational representation formalism with the flexibility of a statistical learning tool. Experiments on a real-world dataset are reported both for single cell classification and for overall table structure recognition, whose results prove the validity of the proposed approach.
Plasma carbonyls do not correlate with lung function or computed tomography measures of lung density in older smokers

Abstract Oxidative stress and inflammation are hallmarks of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). A critical byproduct of oxidative damage is the introduction of carbonyl groups into amino acid residues. We hypothesize that plasma carbonyl content is inversely correlated with lung function and computed tomography (CT) measures of lung density among smokers and is elevated in COPD. Carbonyl was measured in plasma of participants aged 60 years and older by ELISA. Generalized linear and additive models were used to adjust for potential confounders. Among 541 participants (52% male, mean age 67 years, 41% current smokers), mean plasma carbonyl content was 17.9±2.9 nmol ml−1 and mean forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) was 80.7±20.9% of predicted. Plasma carbonyl content was inversely associated with FEV1, but this relationship was largely explained by age. Multivariate analyses ruled out clinically meaningful associations of plasma carbonyl content with FEV1, FEV1/FVC (forced vital capacity) ratio, severity of airflow obstruction, and CT lung density. Plasma carbonyl content is a poor biomarker of oxidative stress in COPD and emphysema.
Semiautonomy and Leaving Home in Early Adulthood

Studies of leaving home in early adulthood have been inconsistent in whether semiautonomous nonhousehold-based living arrangements such as dormitories barracks and other group quarters are included as "away from home. " This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS72) to trace the living arrangements sequences of young adults to clarify how semiautonomy should best be treated. This study used a 25% random subsample of the entire NLS72 sample of more than 22000. The authors divide living arrangements into 3 categories: 1) residentially dependent 2) semiautonomous and 3) residentially independent. Results show that 1) 21% of males and 18% of females experience residential semiautonomy in their 1st year after high school; 2) in 1973 73% of the young women and 49% of the young men no longer residentially dependent were in semiautonomous living arrangements; 3) in 1973 and 1974 95% or more of those living semiautonomously were either attending school or serving in the military; and 4) by 1979 the few still in semiautonomy were increasingly civilian non-students (35% of males and 85% of females). Treating the semiautonomous as if they had not left home raises the median duration between finishing high school and leaving home by 19 months comapred with treating the semiautonomous as if they had left. Those who were living semiautonomously at the 1st observation were usually more likely to be independent at the later survey than were those who residentially dependent at Time 1 although the effects are often quite small and depend on the type of semiautonomy. 55% of school-leavers and 64% of those ending military service returned home from semiautonomjy between 1973 and 1974. In 1976 52% of former students and 57% of those leaving military service reappeared in the partental home. The authors conclude that studies of leaving home in the US need to consider how semiautonomy is to be treated and such treatment should depend on the type of study being conducted.
Trends in Counseling Psychology Training Programs

All surveys of counseling psychology training programs conducted by the Council of Counseling Psychology Training Programs from 1975 through 1987 were reviewed. Descriptive statistics were calculated and analyzed for trends for the following program characteristics: student applications and admissions, matriculated students, financial aid, internship placements, and initial employment settings. Results indicate (a) distinctly different trends between APA- and non-APA-accredited programs in many program characteristics, (b) increasing female applications, admissions, and enrollments, (c)no improvement in minority student admissions, (d) increasing hospital internships, and (e) increasing initial job placements in hospitals, community mental health centers, and private practice.
The proposed trigger-less TBit/s readout for the Mu3e experiment

The Mu3e experiment searches for charged lepton flavor violation in the rare decay μ→eee with a projected sensitivity of 10−16. A precise measurement of the decay product momenta, decay vertex and time is necessary for background suppression at rates of 109 muons/s. This can be achieved by combining an ultra-lightweight pixel tracker based on HV-MAPS with two timing systems. The trigger-less readout of the detector with three stages of FPGA-boards over multi GBit/s optical links into a GPU filter farm is presented. In this scheme data from all sub-detectors is merged and distributed in time slices to the filter farm.
Probabilistic Neural Network and its Adaptive Version - a Stochastic Approach to PD Pattern Classification Task

The quality of electrical insulation of any power apparatus is an indispensable requirement for its successful and reliable operation. Partial Discharge (PD) phenomenon serves as an effective Non Destructive Testing (NDT) technique and provides an index on the quality of the insulation. The innovative trend of using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) towards the classification of PD patterns is cogent and discernible. In this paper a novel method for the classification of the PD patterns using the original Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) as well as its variation is elucidated. A preprocessing scheme that extracts pertinent features of PD from the raw data towards achieving a compact ANN has been employed. The classification of single-type insulation defects such as voids, surface discharges and corona has been taken up. The first part of the paper gives a brief on PD, various diagnostic techniques and interpretation. The second part deals with the theoretical concepts of PNN and its adaptive version. The .