Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dichloroacetate and metformin synergistically suppress the growth of ovarian cancer cells

Both dichloroacetate (DCA) and metformin (Met) have shown promising antitumor efficacy by regulating cancer cell metabolism. However, the DCA-mediated protective autophagy and Met-induced lactate accumulation limit their tumor-killing potential respectively. So overcoming the corresponding shortages will improve their therapeutic effects. In the present study, we found that DCA and Met synergistically inhibited the growth and enhanced the apoptosis of ovarian cancer cells. Interestingly, we for the first time revealed that Met sensitized DCA via dramatically attenuating DCA-induced Mcl-1 protein and protective autophagy, while DCA sensitized Met through markedly alleviating Met-induced excessive lactate accumulation and glucose consumption. The in vivo experiments in nude mice also showed that DCA and Met synergistically suppressed the growth of xenograft ovarian tumors. These results may pave a way for developing novel strategies for the treatment of ovarian cancer based on the combined use of DCA and Met.
Experiential Groups in Counselor Education: Student Attitudes and Instructor Participation

Students in master's-level courses in group work were surveyed regarding their attitudes toward the use of an experiential group activity as a component of their training, as well as the level of instructor involvement in these experiential groups. Students agreed that the experiential group was an effective and necessary teaching tool; however, a substantial minority indicated discomfort with the activity. Also, although the majority of instructors did not directly lead the experiential group, most either observed or received feedback on participation.
Spanish and English Early Literacy Profiles of Preschool Latino English Language Learner Children

ABSTRACT Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine within-group individual differences in the code-related and oral language abilities of an economically stressed Spanish-speaking English language learner (ELL) preschool sample and to evaluate the predictive relationship of these differences to later listening comprehension. Latent class analysis was used to identify similarities in both the latent and outcome variables to form classes of students with similar profiles on the measured variables. Our 1st finding confirmed the existence of 4 distinct psychometrically validated profiles: (a) Low English Language, Average Spanish Language, Mixed Spanish Code-Related (prevalence 19.4%); (b) Average English Language, Strengths in Spanish Language and Spanish Code-Related (24.2%); (c) Mixed English and Spanish Language, Low Spanish Code-Related (prevalence 34%); and (d) High English Language, Average Spanish Language, Mixed Spanish Code-Related (prevalence 22%). The resulting profiles demonstrated that English and Spanish code- and language-related domains of emergent literacy developed unevenly across the Spanish-speaking ELL preschoolers. Relative strengths and weaknesses in code- and language-related skills were also found to be meaningfully related to end-of-year listening comprehension—a precursor to reading comprehension. Finally, profiles yielded meaningful variability along sociodemographic variables. Practice or Policy: Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.
Revictimization of Violence Suffered by Those Diagnosed with Alcohol Dependence in the General Population

Objective. To verify the association between violence and alcohol dependence syndrome in sample populations. Method. Population-wide survey with multistage probabilistic sample. 3,744 individuals of both genders, aged from 15 to 75 years, were interviewed from the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro using the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI 2.1). Results. In both cities, alcohol dependence was associated with the male gender, having suffered violence related to criminality, and having suffered familial violence. In both cities, urban violence, in more than 50% of cases, and familial violence, in more than 90% of cases, preceded alcohol dependence. The reoccurrence of traumatic events occurred in more than half of individuals dependent on alcohol. In São Paulo, having been diagnosed with PTSD is associated with violence revictimization (P = 0.014; Odds = 3.33). Conclusion. Alcohol dependence syndrome is complexly related to urban and familial violence in the general population. Violence frequently precedes alcoholism, but this relationship is dependent on residence and traumatic events. This vicious cycle contributes to perpetuating the high rates of alcoholism and violence in the cities. Politicians ordering the reduction of violence in the large metropolises can, potentially, reduce alcoholism and contribute to the break of this cycle.
Enhancing Commitment or Tightening Control: The Function of Teacher Professional Development in an Era of Accountability

During the past decade or so, popular rhetoric has shifted away from site-based management and participatory governance as the centerpiece of school reform strategies as accountability and standards-based reform have become the reform mantra of policy makers at all levels of government. Critics of accountability-based reforms have suggested that teacher commitment is likely to be the main casualty of these control-based reform strategies. Annual polls of teachers, however, tend to show they generally support key aspects of standards-based reform. Thus, the impact of the apparent shift away from a commitment strategy of school organization toward a control strategy on teachers’ commitment to the profession remains unclear. Our analysis using the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey suggests that schools organized with a stronger commitment strategy may have better success in achieving their reform goals because of increased teacher participation in content-related professional development and greater stability in its teaching staff.
Coping While Connected

The current study explored online preventive coping (privacy settings) and reactive coping (reporting tools) among youth and how the use of these online safety tools related to the frequency of cybervictimization. Surveys were administered to youth in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary school. Results indicated that the prevalence of cybervictimization decreased with grade and did not vary by gender. Gender differences emerged in the use of coping mechanisms, with females more likely to use privacy settings than males. In addition, older females were more likely to use privacy settings compared with younger females. Compared with older females, younger females were more likely to use informal reporting tools (i.e., contacting the person responsible for posting inappropriate content). Only limiting the visibility of posts and comments was uniquely associated with a lower frequency of cybervictimization. Younger adolescents were less likely to engage in the only behaviour that was associated with less frequent cybervictimization. These findings suggest that younger youth may lack the skills and knowledge necessary to cope effectively with cybervictimization.
Governance, Structure and Existence: Authenticity, Rhetoric, Race and Gender

Analysis of internet governance on the large scale is furthered by the study of the ways governance is already emerging online as this elucidates the dynamics of organisation and events and the ways that effective governance may manifest or be disrupted. This paper argues that there are three main factors influencing such governance: the organisation of communication (whether the forum is a mailing list, MOO, Newsgroup, weblog etc); existential issues of 'being' online (such as suspension of being, flame, and patterns of exchange); and the rhetorical mobilization of offline categories. The paper focuses on the governance of a Mailing list called Cybermind, and gives short case studies of the processes arising in its formation and in two disputes. It shows the ways that issues of organisation, authenticity and categories of gender and race influenced the course of the arguments. In all cases offline issues and categories were fundamental to the disputes, but mediated by the existential factors of online life. A paper prepared for the Australian Electronic Governance Conference. Centre for Public Policy, University of Melbourne, Melbourne Victona, 14 and 15 April, 2004. 1 University of Technology, Sydney. jmarshal@ol.com. au. E-mail: jonathan.marshall@uts.edu. au or
Using Richer Models for Articulated Pose Estimation of Footballers

Many computer vision tasks such as object detection, pose estimation,and alignment are directly related to the estimation of correspondences overinstances of an object class. Other tasks such as image classification andverification if not completely solved can largely benefit from correspondenceestimation. This thesis presents practical approaches for tackling the corre-spondence estimation problem with an emphasis on deformable objects.Different methods presented in this thesis greatly vary in details but theyall use a combination of generative and discriminative modeling to estimatethe correspondences from input images in an efficient manner. While themethods described in this work are generic and can be applied to any object,two classes of objects of high importance namely human body and faces arethe subjects of our experimentations.When dealing with human body, we are mostly interested in estimating asparse set of landmarks – specifically we are interested in locating the bodyjoints. We use pictorial structures to model the articulation of the body partsgeneratively and learn efficient discriminative models to localize the parts inthe image. This is a common approach explored by many previous works. Wefurther extend this hybrid approach by introducing higher order terms to dealwith the double-counting problem and provide an algorithm for solving theresulting non-convex problem efficiently. In another work we explore the areaof multi-view pose estimation where we have multiple calibrated cameras andwe are interested in determining the pose of a person in 3D by aggregating2D information. This is done efficiently by discretizing the 3D search spaceand use the 3D pictorial structures model to perform the inference.In contrast to the human body, faces have a much more rigid structureand it is relatively easy to detect the major parts of the face such as eyes,nose and mouth, but performing dense correspondence estimation on facesunder various poses and lighting conditions is still challenging. In a first workwe deal with this variation by partitioning the face into multiple parts andlearning separate regressors for each part. In another work we take a fullydiscriminative approach and learn a global regressor from image to landmarksbut to deal with insufficiency of training data we augment it by a large numberof synthetic images. While we have shown great performance on the standardface datasets for performing correspondence estimation, in many scenariosthe RGB signal gets distorted as a result of poor lighting conditions andbecomes almost unusable. This problem is addressed in another work wherewe explore use of depth signal for dense correspondence estimation. Hereagain a hybrid generative/discriminative approach is used to perform accuratecorrespondence estimation in real-time.
A simple method to sample exhaled NO not contaminated by ambient NO from children and adults in epidemiological studies.

We previously showed that contamination of exhaled air by ambient NO could be avoided by 1 min of breathing and final inhalation of clean air (clean air procedure) prior to exhaled air sampling in balloons. This approach is, however, unsuitable for sampling large groups in epidemiological studies, because it is time consuming and laborious. We therefore discarded the initial part of exhaled air, which may contain ambient NO, in prebags of 250, 540, 775, 1000, and 2000 ml. The subsequent part of exhaled air was sampled in balloons and the NO content was measured. Inflation of a prebag of 500 ml to prevent ambient NO contamination proved to be effective only at low ambient NO levels (<20 ppb). Larger sizes of the prebag (1000 ml for adults and 775 ml for children) are, however, required so that contamination of the air sample at higher levels of ambient NO (up to 115 ppb) is excluded. Using different prebags of gradually increasing size, it was shown that the initial part of exhaled air (<500 ml) contained relatively high amounts of NO that gradually decreased, but attained a constant level in the subsequent air volumes. Using rather large prebags of 2000 and 1000 ml, respectively, in adults and children yielded exhaled NO levels even below those obtained the clean air procedure was applied in combination with a prebag of 540 ml. As this reduction also occurs at ambient NO levels of nearly zero, we suggest that this reduction was due to interference by the water vapor arising from the lowest part of the lungs. In conclusion, the use of a prebag to discard the initial volume of exhaled air ensures accurate measurement of exhaled endogenous NO in large-scale epidemiological studies not biased by ambient NO.
Opus: University of Bath Online Publication Store Systematic Review of Parent and Family Interventions Systematic Review and Meta-analysis: Parent and Family-based Interventions for Children and Adolescents with Chronic Medical Conditions

Systematic review and meta-analysis of parent and family-based interventions for children and adolescents with chronic medical conditions. This version is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Abstract Objective: To quantify the effects of parent-and family-based psychological therapies for youth with common chronic medical conditions on parent and family outcomes (primary aim) and child outcomes (secondary aim). Thirty-seven randomized controlled trials were included. Quality of the evidence was evaluated using GRADE criteria. Data were extracted on parent, family, and child outcomes. Results: Pooled psychological therapies had a positive effect on parent behavior at post-treatment and follow-up; no significant improvement was observed for other outcome domains. Problem solving therapy (PST) improved parent mental health and parent behavior at post-treatment and follow-up. There was insufficient evidence to evaluate cognitive-behavioral and systems therapies for many outcome domains. Conclusions: Parent and family-based psychological therapies can improve parent outcomes, with PST emerging as particularly promising. Future research should incorporate consensus statements for outcomes assessment, multi-site recruitment, and active comparator conditions.
On Detection of Resistive Bridging Defects by Low-Temperature and Low-Voltage Testing

Test application at reduced power supply voltage (low-voltage testing) or reduced temperature (low-temperature testing) can improve the defect coverage of a test set, particularly of resistive short defects. Using a probabilistic model of two-line nonfeedback short defects, we quantify the coverage impact of low-voltage and low-temperature testing for different voltages and temperatures. Effects of statistical process variations are not considered in the model. When quantifying the coverage increase, we differentiate between defects missed by the test set at nominal conditions and undetectable defects (flaws) detected at non nominal conditions. In our analysis, the performance degradation of the device caused by lower power supply voltage is accounted for. Furthermore, we describe a situation in which defects detected by conventional testing are missed by low-voltage testing and quantify the resulting coverage loss. Experimental results suggest that test quality is improved even if no cost increase is allowed. If multiple test applications are acceptable, a combination of low voltage and low temperature turns out to provide the best coverage of both hard defects and flaws.
The Economics of “Crossing Over”: Examining the Link between Correctional Officer Pay and Guard–Inmate Boundary Violations

ABSTRACT This study seeks to ascertain why some correctional officers engage in boundary violations with inmates in spite of the presence of strong organizational cultural norms which discourage familiarity between staff and offenders. Using an alternate version of Blau and Blau’s relative deprivation theory to guide in the interpretation of our analyses, we conclude that poor pay, perceptions of boundary violations by other officers, and lack of family support, the economics, lead some officers to have a lack of pride in their work and profession, thus, triggering their closeness to inmates across the sacrosanct border, resulting in the crossing over.
Caspase-3-dependent organ apoptosis early after burn injury.

OBJECTIVE To examine the role played by endotoxin, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), and caspase-3 in the increased apoptosis seen in solid organs in the early period after a burn injury. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA Burn injury is often associated with immune suppression. Bacterial translocation and systemic endotoxemia have been reported after a burn injury, and caspase-3 activation due to TNF-alpha and Fas ligand (FasL) are presumed to initiate apoptosis. We hypothesized that endotoxin-induced TNF-alpha expression and caspase-3 activation could be the stimulus for the apoptosis after burn injury. METHODS A 20% full-thickness scald burn was used in C57BL/6 mice. Three hours after burn injury, tissue samples were obtained from the thymus, lung, liver, and spleen. Lipopolysaccharide-nonresponsive (C3H/HeJ) and TNFalpha null B6x129tnf-/- mice were also used. To detect apoptosis, hematoxylin and eosin stain, in situ TUNEL, DNA extraction, and gel electrophoresis were all performed. Caspase-3 activity and TNF-alpha and FasL mRNA were also measured. RESULTS Increased apoptosis and caspase-3 activity were observed in the thymus and spleen 3 hours after burn injury but were not seen in liver or lung. In the thymus and spleen, increased expression of FasL mRNA was also observed, whereas increased TNF-alpha mRNA was not. Increased apoptosis in thymus and spleen were also observed in C3H/HeJ and B6x129tnf-/- mice after burn injury. An inhibitor of the caspase-3 (Z-VAD-fmk) reduced apoptosis in both thymus and spleen. CONCLUSIONS In the early period after a burn injury, increased apoptosis is observed primarily in the lymphoid organs and is independent of endotoxin or TNF-alpha. The increased caspase-3 activity in thymus and spleen contributes to apoptosis in these organs.
Minority College Aspirations, Expectations and Applications under the Texas Top 10% Law

The Texas legislature passed the Top 10% Law in 1996 guaranteeing automatic admission to any Texas public college or university for seniors who graduate in the top decile of their high school class.Using data on a representative sample of seniors (N = 12,029) enrolled in 96 Texas public high schools, we examine whether and how this law affects the educational aspirations and expectations of graduating seniors, as well as whether they apply to college.Hierarchical generalized linear models demonstrate that the knowledge of a percent plan has played an important role in raising the sights of students who might not otherwise consider college. This effect is particularly pronounced for minority students, although peer, family and high school context play pivotal roles.
GLP-1 Agonism Stimulates Brown Adipose Tissue Thermogenesis and Browning Through Hypothalamic AMPK

GLP-1 receptor (GLP-1R) is widely located throughout the brain, but the precise molecular mechanisms mediating the actions of GLP-1 and its long-acting analogs on adipose tissue as well as the brain areas responsible for these interactions remain largely unknown. We found that central injection of a clinically used GLP-1R agonist, liraglutide, in mice stimulates brown adipose tissue (BAT) thermogenesis and adipocyte browning independent of nutrient intake. The mechanism controlling these actions is located in the hypothalamic ventromedial nucleus (VMH), and the activation of AMPK in this area is sufficient to blunt both central liraglutide-induced thermogenesis and adipocyte browning. The decreased body weight caused by the central injection of liraglutide in other hypothalamic sites was sufficiently explained by the suppression of food intake. In a longitudinal study involving obese type 2 diabetic patients treated for 1 year with GLP-1R agonists, both exenatide and liraglutide increased energy expenditure. Although the results do not exclude the possibility that extrahypothalamic areas are also modulating the effects of GLP-1R agonists, the data indicate that long-acting GLP-1R agonists influence body weight by regulating either food intake or energy expenditure through various hypothalamic sites and that these mechanisms might be clinically relevant.
Dynamic-Priority based Event-Driven Communication in Smart Grid

The confluence of power and cyber networks is a key to the evolution of smart grid (SG). The explosive growth of data in SG to support pervasive communication, demands to exchange essential information guided by need based events. The scaling of such asynchronous event-driven communication for practical utility in SG needs to evolve with information prioritization. Owing to the size of the power grid, it is often necessary to aggregate such event-driven data to reduce the multi-tasking overhead of higher-level controllers. As such, prioritization of the processing of these event-driven information is essential. In this paper, using the context of a neighborhood-area network, where communication is enabled between consumer loads and supervisor energy-management system (EMS) controller to achieve balance between demand and supply, a priority-based eventdriven communication mechanism is outlined. For that purpose, load-demands are grouped into different classes based on their priorities. Demand processing policy based on dynamic-priorities is analyzed using delay and fairness performance parameters. An optimization problem is also formulated to achieve performance tradeoff between delays experienced by different classes of load-demands and the EMS processing cost. The performance evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed prioritybased solution.