Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

For four hundred years-from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the US Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s-the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched-and in places continue to wage-against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.
Clinician‐administered PTSD scale: A review of the first ten years of research

The Clinician‐Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) is a structured interview for assessing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnostic status and symptom severity. In the 10 years since it was developed, the CAPS has become a standard criterion measure in the field of traumatic stress and has now been used in more than 200 studies. In this paper, we first trace the history of the CAPS and provide an update on recent developments. Then we review the empirical literature, summarizing and evaluating the findings regarding the psychometric properties of the CAPS. The research evidence indicates that the CAPS has excellent reliability, yielding consistent scores across items, raters, and testing occasions. There is also strong evidence of validity: The CAPS has excellent convergent and discriminant validity, diagnostic utility, and sensitivity to clinical change. Finally, we address several concerns about the CAPS and offer recommendations for optimizing the CAPS for various clinical research applications. Depression and Anxiety 13:132–156, 2001 © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Linear-Logarithmic CMOS Image Sensor With Adjustable Dynamic Range

A new pixel structure is proposed for wide dynamic range CMOS image sensors. A pixel based on a three-transistor active pixel sensor has two linear responses and a logarithmic response using additional circuits. The photogate surrounding the n+/p-sub photodiode exists for the second linear response. The logarithmic response is due to the biased MOS cascode. The proposed pixel was designed and fabricated using a 0.35-μm 2-poly 4-metal standard CMOS process. The dynamic range of the pixel is higher than 106 dB. A test chip with a pixel pitch of 10 × 10 μm2 and a 160 × 120 pixel array is evaluated.
DNA Strongly Impairs the Inhibition of Cathepsin G by α1-Antichymotrypsin and α1-Proteinase Inhibitor*

This paper explores the possibility that neutrophil-derived DNA interferes with the inhibition of neutrophil cathepsin G (cat G) and proteinase 3 by the lung antiproteinases α1-proteinase inhibitor (α1PI), α1-antichymotrypsin (ACT), and mucus proteinase inhibitor (MPI). A 30-base pair DNA fragment (30bpDNA), used as a model of DNA, tightly binds cat G (K d , 8.5 nm) but does not react with proteinase 3, α1PI, ACT, and MPI at physiological ionic strength. The polynucleotide is a partial noncompetitive inhibitor of cat G whoseK i is close to K d . ACT and α1PI are slow binding inhibitors of the cat G-30bpDNA complex whose second-order rate constants of inhibition are 2300 m −1 s−1 and 21 m −1 s−1, respectively, which represents a 195-fold and a 3190-fold rate deceleration. DNA thus renders cat G virtually resistant to inhibition by these irreversible serpins. On the other hand, 30bpDNA has little or no effect on the reversible inhibition of cat G by MPI or chymostatin or on the irreversible inhibition of cat G by carbobenzoxy-Gly-Leu-Phe-chloromethylketone. The polynucleotide neither inhibits proteinase 3 nor affects its rate of inhibition by α1PI. These findings suggest that cat G may cause lung tissue destruction despite the presence of antiproteinases.
A Geographic-Based Approach to Relay Selection for Wireless Ad Hoc Relay Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel relay selection scheme based on geographical information, aiming to minimize the symbol error probability (SEP) for wireless ad hoc relay networks. The proposed scheme utilizes only the source-relay and relay-destination distances as selection criteria to choose the best relay. In particular, such geographical information is often available during network initialization. Thus, the proposed scheme does not need extra procedures to examine which relay has the best channel quality and, hence, reduces significantly the computational complexity. By contrast, most existing relay selection schemes rely on strict channel state information (CSI) and coherent time intervals, drastically increasing the difficulty in practical realizations, especially for large relay networks in which the fading channels are sufficiently fast-varying. In our scheme, the accuracy of the distance information is the main factor resulting in non-best relay selection. An ideal scheme (in which the distances between nodes are exact) and a practical scheme (in which there exists distance estimation errors) will be discussed respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed relay selection method can efficiently improve the SEP performance and outperform the random relay selection scheme.
High dietary folate in pregnant mice leads to pseudo-MTHFR deficiency and altered methyl metabolism, with embryonic growth delay and short-term memory impairment in offspring

Abstract Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) generates methyltetrahydrofolate for methylation reactions. Severe MTHFR deficiency results in homocystinuria and neurologic impairment. Mild MTHFR deficiency (677C > T polymorphism) increases risk for complex traits, including neuropsychiatric disorders. Although low dietary folate impacts brain development, recent concerns have focused on high folate intake following food fortification and increased vitamin use. Our goal was to determine whether high dietary folate during pregnancy affects brain development in murine offspring. Female mice were placed on control diet (CD) or folic acid‐supplemented diet (FASD) throughout mating, pregnancy and lactation. Three‐week‐old male pups were evaluated for motor and cognitive function. Tissues from E17.5 embryos, pups and dams were collected for choline/methyl metabolite measurements, immunoblotting or gene expression of relevant enzymes. Brains were examined for morphology of hippocampus and cortex. Pups of FASD mothers displayed short‐term memory impairment, decreased hippocampal size and decreased thickness of the dentate gyrus. MTHFR protein levels were reduced in FASD pup livers, with lower concentrations of phosphocholine and glycerophosphocholine in liver and hippocampus, respectively. FASD pup brains showed evidence of altered acetylcholine availability and Dnmt3a mRNA was reduced in cortex and hippocampus. E17.5 embryos and placentas from FASD dams were smaller. MTHFR protein and mRNA were reduced in embryonic liver, with lower concentrations of choline, betaine and phosphocholine. Embryonic brain displayed altered development of cortical layers. In summary, high folate intake during pregnancy leads to pseudo‐MTHFR deficiency, disturbed choline/methyl metabolism, embryonic growth delay and memory impairment in offspring. These findings highlight the unintended negative consequences of supplemental folic acid.
Norm-Preserving Discretization of Integral Equations for Elliptic PDEs with Internal Layers I: The One-Dimensional Case

We investigate the behavior of integral formulations of variable coefficient elliptic partial differential equations in the presence of steep internal layers. In one dimension, the equations that arise can be solved analytically and the condition numbers estimated in various $L^p$ norms. We show that high-order accurate Nystrom discretization leads to well-conditioned finite-dimensional linear systems if and only if the discretization is both norm-preserving in a correctly chosen $L^p$ space and adaptively refined in the internal layer.
Structured learning for spoken language understanding in human-robot interaction

Robots are slowly becoming a part of everyday life, being marketed for commercial applications such as telepresence, cleaning or entertainment. Thus, the ability to interact via natural language with non-expert users is becoming a key requirement. Even if user utterances can be efficiently recognized and transcribed by automatic speech recognition systems, several issues arise in translating them into suitable robotic actions and most of the existing solutions are strictly related to a specific scenario. In this paper, we present an approach to the design of natural language interfaces for human robot interaction, to translate spoken commands into computational structures that enable the robot to execute the intended request. The proposed solution is achieved by combining a general theory of language semantics, i.e. frame semantics, with state-of-the-art methods for robust spoken language understanding, based on structured learning algorithms. The adopted data driven paradigm allows the development of a fully functional natural language processing chain, that can be initialized by re-using available linguistic tools and resources. In addition, it can be also specialized by providing small sets of examples representative of a target newer domain. A systematic benchmarking resource, in terms of a rich and multi-layered spoken corpus has also been created and it has been used to evaluate the natural language processing chain. Our results show that our processing chain, trained with generic resources, provides a solid baseline for command understanding in a service robot domain. Moreover, when domain-dependent resources are provided to the system, the accuracy of the achieved interpretation always improves.
A glycogen phosphorylase inhibitor selectively enhances local rates of glucose utilization in brain during sensory stimulation of conscious rats: implications for glycogen turnover

Glycogen is degraded during brain activation but its role and contribution to functional energetics in normal activated brain have not been established. In the present study, glycogen utilization in brain of normal conscious rats during sensory stimulation was assessed by three approaches, change in concentration, release of 14C from pre‐labeled glycogen and compensatory increase in utilization of blood glucose (CMRglc) evoked by treatment with a glycogen phosphorylase inhibitor. Glycogen level fell in cortex, 14C release increased in three structures and inhibitor treatment caused regionally selective compensatory increases in CMRglc over and above the activation‐induced rise in vehicle‐treated rats. The compensatory rise in CMRglc was highest in sensory‐parietal cortex where it corresponded to about half of the stimulus‐induced rise in CMRglcf in vehicle‐treated rats; this response did not correlate with metabolic rate, stimulus‐induced rise in CMRglc or sequential station in sensory pathway. Thus, glycogen is an active fuel for specific structures in normal activated brain, not simply an emergency fuel depot and flux‐generated pyruvate greatly exceeded net accumulation of lactate or net consumption of glycogen during activation. The metabolic fate of glycogen is unknown, but adding glycogen to the fuel consumed during activation would contribute to a fall in CMRO2/CMRglc ratio.
Automatic structural metadata identification based on multilayer prosodic information

This paper discriminates different types of structural metadata in transcripts of university lectures: boundary events (comma, full stops and interrogatives), and disfluencies (repair). The disambiguation process is based on predefined multilayered linguistic information and on its hierarchical structure. Since boundary events may share similar linguistic properties, in terms of f0 and energy slopes, presence/absence of silent pauses, and duration of different units of analysis, different classification methods based on a set of automatically derived prosodic features have been applied to differentiate between those events and disfluencies. This paper also performs a detailed analysis on the impact of each individual feature in discriminating each structural event. The results of our data-driven approach allow us to reach a structured set of basic features towards the disambiguation of metadata events. These results are a step forward towards the analysis of speech acts and their disambiguation from disfluencies.
Coupled Ferredoxin and Crotonyl Coenzyme A (CoA) Reduction with NADH Catalyzed by the Butyryl-CoA Dehydrogenase/Etf Complex from Clostridium kluyveri

ABSTRACT Cell extracts of butyrate-forming clostridia have been shown to catalyze acetyl-coenzyme A (acetyl-CoA)- and ferredoxin-dependent formation of H2 from NADH. It has been proposed that these bacteria contain an NADH:ferredoxin oxidoreductase which is allosterically regulated by acetyl-CoA. We report here that ferredoxin reduction with NADH in cell extracts from Clostridium kluyveri is catalyzed by the butyryl-CoA dehydrogenase/Etf complex and that the acetyl-CoA dependence previously observed is due to the fact that the cell extracts catalyze the reduction of acetyl-CoA with NADH via crotonyl-CoA to butyryl-CoA. The cytoplasmic butyryl-CoA dehydrogenase complex was purified and is shown to couple the endergonic reduction of ferredoxin (E0′ = −410 mV) with NADH (E0′ = −320 mV) to the exergonic reduction of crotonyl-CoA to butyryl-CoA (E0′ = −10 mV) with NADH. The stoichiometry of the fully coupled reaction is extrapolated to be as follows: 2 NADH + 1 oxidized ferredoxin + 1 crotonyl-CoA = 2 NAD+ + 1 ferredoxin reduced by two electrons + 1 butyryl-CoA. The implications of this finding for the energy metabolism of butyrate-forming anaerobes are discussed in the accompanying paper.
Smartphone-based indoor pedestrian tracking using geo-magnetic observations

With the widespread use of smartphones, the use of location-based services LBS with smartphones has become an active research issue. The accurate measurement of user location is necessary to provide LBS. While outdoor locations are easily obtained with GPS, indoor location information is difficult to acquire. Previous work on indoor location tracking systems often relied on infrastructures that are influenced by environmental changes and temporal differences. Several studies have proposed infrastructure-less systems that are independent of the surroundings, but these works generally required non-trivial computation time or energy costs. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure-less pedestrian tracking system in indoor environments. The system uses accelerometers and magnetic sensors in smartphones without pre-installed infrastructure. We reduced the cumulative error of location tracking by geo-magnetic observations at corners and spots with magnetic fluctuations. In addition, we developed a robust estimation model that is tolerant to false positives, as well as a mobility model that reflects the characteristics of multiple sensors. Extensive evaluation in a real environment indicates that our system is accurate and cost-effective.
EFD: A hybrid knowledge/statistical‐based system for the detection of fraud

EFD (Electronic Fraud Detection) assists Investigative Consultants in the Managed Care & Employee Benefits Security Unit of the Travelers Insurance Companies in the detection and preinvestigative analysis of healthcare provider fraud. the task EFD performs, scanning a large population of health insurance claims in search of likely fraud, has never been done manually. Furthermore, the available database has few positive examples. Thus, neither existing knowledge engineering techniques nor statistical methods are sufficient for designing the identification process. to overcome these problems, EFD uses knowledge discovery techniques on two levels. First, EFD integrates expert knowledge with statistical information assessment to identify cases of unusual provider behavior. the heart of EFD is 27 behavioral heuristics, knowledge‐based ways of viewing and measuring provider behavior. Rules operate on them to identify providers whose behavior merits a closer look by the Investigative Consultants. Second, machine learning is used to develop new rules and improve the identification process. Pilot operations involved analysis of nearly 22 000 providers in six metropolitan areas. the pilot is implemented in SAS Institute's SAS® System, AICorp's Knowledge Base Management System (KBMS®), and Borland International's Turbo Prolog®. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Measuring physiological responses to stressors using a novel Hmox1 reporter mouse

Hmox1 protein holds great promise as a biomarker of organismal health as it is highly expressed in stressed or damaged cells. However, documenting Hmox1 expression patterns has thus far only been feasible in simple model organisms with limited relevance to humans. We now report a new Hmox1 reporter line that makes it possible to access this information in mice, the premiere model system for studying human disease and toxicology. Using a state-of-the-art strategy, we express multiple complementary reporter molecules from the murine Hmox1 locus, including firefly luciferase to allow long-term, non-invasive imaging of Hmox1 expression, and β-galactosidase for high-resolution mapping of expression patterns post-mortem. We validate the model by confirming the absence of haplo-insufficiency effects, the fidelity of reporter expression, and its responsiveness to oxidative and inflammatory stimuli. In addition to providing blueprints for Hmox1 expression in mice that provide novel biological insights for follow-up, this work paves the way for the broad application of this model to regulatory toxicology studies and, also, pre-clinical investigations into human degenerative diseases.
Evaluating Translation Quality and CLIR Performance of Query Sessions

This paper presents the evaluation of the translation quality and Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) performance when using session information as the context of queries. The hypothesis is that previous queries provide context that helps to solve ambiguous translations in the current query. We tested several strategies on the TREC 2010 Session track dataset, which includes query reformulations grouped by generalization, specification, and drifting types. We study the Basque to English direction, evaluating both the translation quality and CLIR performance, with positive results in both cases. The results show that the quality of translation improved, reducing error rate by 12% (HTER) when using session information, which improved CLIR results 5% (nDCG). We also provide an analysis of the improvements across the three kinds of sessions: generalization, specification, and drifting. Translation quality improved in all three types (generalization, specification, and drifting), and CLIR improved for generalization and specification sessions, preserving the performance in drifting sessions.
Photocycles of Channelrhodopsin‐2

Recent developments have used light‐activated channels or transporters to modulate neuronal activity. One such genetically‐encoded modulator of activity, channelrhodopsin‐2 (ChR2), depolarizes neurons in response to blue light. In this work, we first conducted electrophysiological studies of the photokinetics of hippocampal cells expressing ChR2, for various light stimulations. These and other experimental results were then used for systematic investigation of the previously proposed three‐state and four‐state models of the ChR2 photocycle. We show the limitations of the previously suggested three‐state models and identify a four‐state model that accurately follows the ChR2 photocurrents. We find that ChR2 currents decay biexponentially, a fact that can be explained by the four‐state model. The model is composed of two closed (C1 and C2) and two open (O1 and O2) states, and our simulation results suggest that they might represent the dark‐adapted (C1‐O1) and light‐adapted (C2‐O2) branches. The crucial insight provided by the analysis of the new model is that it reveals an adaptation mechanism of the ChR2 molecule. Hence very simple organisms expressing ChR2 can use this form of light adaptation.
The cap and the 3' splice site similarly affect polyadenylation efficiency

The 5' cap of a mammalian pre-mRNA has been shown to interact with splicing components at the adjacent 5' splice site for processing of the first exon and the removal of the first intron (E. Izaurralde, J. Lewis, C. McGuigan, M. Jankowska, E. Darzynkiewicz, and I.W. Mattaj, Cell 78:657-668, 1994). Likewise, it has been shown that processing of the last exon and removal of the last intron involve interaction between splicing components at the 3' splice site and the polyadenylation complex at the polyadenylation signal (M. Niwa, S. D. Rose, and S.M. Berget, Genes Dev. 4:1552-1559, 1990; M. Niwa and S. M. Berget, Genes Dev. 5:2086-2095, 1991). These findings suggest that the cap provides a function in first exon processing which is similar to the function of the 3' splice site at last exon processing. To determine whether caps and 3' splice sites function similarly, we compared the effects of the cap and the 3' splice site on the in vitro utilization of the simian virus 40 late polyadenylation signal. We show that the presence of a m7GpppG cap, but not a cap analog, can positively affect the efficiency of polyadenylation of a polyadenylation-only substrate. Cap analogs do not stimulate polyadenylation because they fail to bind titratable cap-binding factors. The failure of cap analogs to stimulate polyadenylation can be overcome if a 3' splice site is present upstream of the polyadenylation signal. These data indicate that factors interacting with the cap or the 3' splice site function similarly to affect polyadenylation signal, along with m7GpppG cap, is inhibitory to polyadenylation. This finding suggests that the interaction between the cap-binding complexes and splicing components at the 5' splice site may form a complex which is inhibitory to further processing if splicing of an adjacent intron is not achieved.