Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential activation of renal sympathetic burst amplitude and frequency during hypoxia, stress and baroreflexes with chronic angiotensin treatment

What is the central question of this study? Is the elevated tonic renal nerve activity induced by chronic angiotensin administration mediated by recruitment or increased firing frequency and does this occur via stress, chemoreflex or baroreflex pathways? What is the main finding and its importance? Long‐term angiotensin treatment in rabbits elevates renal sympathetic nerve activity by recruitment of previously silent fibres. This was similar to the effect of chemoreflex stimulation, but not to stress or baroreceptor activation, suggesting that presympathetic pathways activated by angiotensin may be common to those activated by chemoreceptors.
The Spread of the Community Music Idea

The National Conference of Community Centers and Related Problems held in New York City in April, 1916, prefaced its call to the workers in the various parts of the United States by the following quotation from John Dewey, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, which may well serve as the motto or underlying idea of the movement for community music in this country: "The furtherance of the depth and width of human intercourse is the measure of civilization. Freedom and fullness of human companionship is the aim, and intelligent co6perative experimentation, the method. "
Least squares algorithms for time-of-arrival-based mobile location

Localization of mobile phones is of considerable interest in wireless communications. In this correspondence, two algorithms are developed for accurate mobile location using the time-of-arrival measurements of the signal from the mobile station received at three or more base stations. The first algorithm is an unconstrained least squares (LS) estimator that has implementation simplicity. The second algorithm solves a nonconvex constrained weighted least squares (CWLS) problem for improving estimation accuracy. It is shown that the CWLS estimator yields better performance than the LS method and achieves both the Crame/spl acute/r-Rao lower bound and the optimal circular error probability at sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio conditions.
Optimizing B+-Tree for PCM-Based Hybrid Memory

change memory (PCM) as a newly developed storage medium has many attractive properties such as non-volatility, byte addressability, high density and low energy consumption. Thus, PCM can be used to build non-volatile main memory databases. However, PCM's long write latency and high write energy bring challenges to PCM-based memory systems. In this paper, we propose an improvement over the B+-tree for PCM. Particularly, we consider the read/write tendency of leaf nodes. For write-intensive leaf nodes, we use an overflow-node technique to reduce PCM writes, while for read-intensive ones, we adjust the tree structure to remove overflow nodes to improve read performance. Our experimental results suggest that our proposal outperforms the traditional B+-tree and the overflow B+-tree.
The Quasar Project

Conventional mathematics instruction has failed to help many students in urban schools to develop desirable forms of mathematical proficiency. A promising alternative is offered by instruction that is oriented toward helping students develop a meaningful understanding of mathematical ideas through engagement with challenging mathematical tasks. For 5 years, teachers involved in the QUASAR project have engaged in developing and implementing this alternative style of mathematics instruction in urban middle schools. In this article, some critical features of QUASAR instruction are described and exemplified, and some findings regarding the positive impact of this instruction on students are discussed. Finally, some of the challenges and obstacles encountered in attempting to build the capacity of teachers and schools to offer meaning-oriented mathematics instruction are identified.
Moderate Hypermutability of a Transgenic lacZ Reporter Gene in Myc-Dependent Inflammation-Induced Plasma Cell Tumors in Mice

Mutator phenotypes, a common and largely unexplained attribute of human cancer, might be better understood in mouse tumors containing reporter genes for accurate mutation enumeration and analysis. Previous work on peritoneal plasmacytomas (PCTs) in mice suggested that PCTs have a mutator phenotype caused by Myc-deregulating chromosomal translocations and/or phagocyte-induced mutagenesis due to chronic inflammation. To investigate this hypothesis, we generated PCTs that harbored the transgenic shuttle vector, pUR288, with a lacZ reporter gene for the assessment of mutations in vivo. PCTs exhibited a 5.5 times higher mutant frequency in lacZ (40.3 ± 5.1 × 10−5) than in normal B cells (7.36 ± 0.77 × 10−5), demonstrating that the tumors exhibit the phenotype of increased mutability. Studies on lacZ mutant frequency in serially transplanted PCTs and phagocyte-induced lacZ mutations in B cells in vitro indicated that mutant levels in tumors are not determined by exogenous damage inflicted by inflammatory cells. In vitro studies with a newly developed transgenic model of inducible Myc expression (Tet-off/MYC) showed that deregulated Myc sensitizes B cells to chemically induced mutations, but does not cause, on its own, mutations in lacZ. These findings suggested that the hypermutability of PCT is governed mainly by intrinsic features of tumor cells, not by deregulated Myc or chronic inflammation.
READING EXCEPTION WORDS AND PSEUDOWORDS - ARE 2 ROUTES REALLY NECESSARY

This paper describes simulation experiments demonstrating that a unitary processing system in the form of a connectionist network is capable of learning to read exception words and pronounceable nonwords aloud. We trained such a network on the 3000 word corpus used by Seidenberg and McClelland (1989). After training, the network was able to read over 99% of the training corpus correctly. When tested on the lists of pronounceable nonwords used in several experiments, its accuracy was closely comparable to that displayed by human subjects. The work addresses the ongoing debate about the nature of the mechanisms that are used in reading words aloud. One view, defended most recently by Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, and Haller (1993), states that adequate performance on both pronounceable nonwords and exception words depends on the use of two separate mechanisms, one that applies rules of grapheme phoneme correspondence and another that retrieves pronunciations specific to particular familiar words. An alternative view, expressed by Seidenberg and McClelland, is that a single system may be capable of learning to read both kinds of letter strings. The work relates more generally to the ongoing debate about the nature of the processing systems underlying human language use. The question is, should these systems be viewed as systems that learn and apply an explicit system of rules, augmented where necessary with an explicit enumeration of exceptions; or should these systems be viewed instead as connectionist systems that gradually develop sensitivity to the structure inherent in the mapping they are asked to learn, through a gradual learning procedure. The connectionist approach has considerable appeal, because it accounts for the fact that regularity is a graded phenomenon and for the fact that human language users are sensitive to these gradations. In the domain of spelling-to-sound translation, Glushko (1979) was the first to emphasize that in fact the crucial variable for word pronunciation tasks is not regularity, but degree of consistency of the spelling-to-sound correspondences exhibited by one word to the correspondences exhibited by its neighbors. Since Glushko’s work it has been clearly established that the more consistent a word’s spelling to sound correspondences are
Overweight in Childhood, Adolescence and Adulthood and Cardiovascular Risk in Later Life: Pooled Analysis of Three British Birth Cohorts

Background Overweight and obesity in adulthood are established risk factors for adverse cardiovascular outcomes, but the contribution of overweight in childhood to later cardiovascular risk is less clear. Evidence for a direct effect of childhood overweight would highlight early life as an important target for cardiovascular disease prevention. The aim of this study was to assess whether overweight and obesity in childhood and adolescence contribute to excess cardiovascular risk in adults. Methods and findings Data from three British birth cohorts, born in 1946, 1958 and 1970, were pooled for analysis (n = 11,447). Individuals were categorised, based on body mass index (BMI), as being of normal weight or overweight/obese in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Eight patterns of overweight were defined according to weight status at these three stages. Logistic regression models were fitted to assess the associations of patterns of overweight with self-reported type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease (CHD) in adulthood (34–53 years). Compared to cohort members who were never overweight, those who were obese in adulthood had increased risk of all outcomes. For type 2 diabetes, the odds ratio was higher for obese adults who were also overweight or obese in childhood and adolescence (OR 12.6; 95% CI 6.6 to 24.0) than for those who were obese in adulthood only (OR 5.5; 95% CI 3.4 to 8.8). There was no such effect of child or adolescent overweight on hypertension. For CHD, there was weak evidence of increased risk among those with overweight in childhood. The main limitations of this study concern the use of self-reported outcomes and the generalisability of findings to contemporary child populations. Conclusions Type 2 diabetes and to a lesser extent CHD risk may be affected by overweight at all stages of life, while hypertension risk is associated more strongly with weight status in adulthood.
Scaling Archived Social Media Data Analysis Using a Hadoop Cloud

Over recent years, there has been an emerging interest in supporting social media analysis for marketing, opinion analysis and understanding community cohesion. Social media data conforms to many of the categorisations attributed to "big-data" -- i.e. volume, velocity and variety. Generally analysis needs to be undertaken over large volumes of data in an efficient and timely manner. A variety of computational infrastructures have been reported to achieve this. We present the COSMOS platform supporting sentiment and tension analysis on Twitter data, and demonstrate how this platform can be scaled using the OpenNebula Cloud environment with Map/Reduce-based analysis using Hadoop. In particular, we describe the types of system configurations that would be most useful from a performance perspective -- i.e. how virtual machines in the infrastructure should be distributed to reduce variability in the analysis performance. We demonstrate the approach using a data set consisting of several million Twitter messages, analysed over two types of Cloud infrastructure.
A broadcast control MAC strategy for wireless LAN

In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol, namely broadcast control (BC) protocol, to enhance the standard IEEE 802.11. In our BC protocol, the access point (AP) collects the contention information of the mobile stations and sends back the optimized control information to guarantee that the communication overhead of the whole wireless local area network (WLAN) maintains in low level. The BC protocol can be implemented by making some negligible modification of standard 802.11 protocols. The performance of BC strategy is compared with the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols via extensive simulations, which show that BC strategy can significantly elevate the efficiency regardless the number of active mobile stations in the WLAN
An Economic Analysis of Health Plan Conversions: Are They in the Public Interest?

Over the last decade, managed-care companies have been consolidating on both a regional and national scale. More recently, nonprofit health plans have been converting to for-profit status, and this conversion has frequently occurred as a step to facilitate merger or acquisition with a for-profit company. Some industry observers attribute these managed-care marketplace trends to an industry shakeout resulting from increased competition in the sector. At the same time, these perceived competitive pressures have led to questions about the long-run viability of nonprofit health plans. Furthermore, some industry and government leaders believe that some nonprofits are already conducting themselves like for-profit health plans and question the state premium tax exemption ordinarily accorded to such plans. This paper examines related health policy issues through the lens of a case study of the proposed conversion of the CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield company to a for-profit public-stock company and its merger with the Wellpoint Corporation. Company executives and board members argued that CareFirst lacked access to sufficient capital and faced serious threats to its viability as a financially healthy nonprofit health care company. They also argued that CareFirst and its beneficiaries would benefit from merger through enhanced economies of scale and product-line extensions. Critics of the proposed conversion and merger raised concerns about the adverse impacts on access to care, coverage availability, quality of care, safety-net providers, and the cost of health insurance. Analyses demonstrate that CareFirst wields substantial market power in its local market, that it is unlikely to realize cost savings through expanded economies of scale, and that access to capital concerns are largely driven by the perceived need for further expansion through merger and acquisition. Although it is impossible to predict future changes in quality of care for CareFirst, analyses suggest that quality appears to be somewhat lower in for-profit national managed-care companies. Additional research is needed to assess the viability of true nonprofits, the potential effects of nonprofits and for-profit national managed-care plans on the evolution of local insurance andprovider markets, and methods for effective oversight of nonprofit healthplans.
Regularized Weighted Collaborative Representation with Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Facial Expression Recognition

Sparse representation is a new approach that has received significant attention for image classification and recognition. This paper presents a regularized weighted collaborative representation based classification algorithm with maximum likelihood estimation. In this method, we modify the collaborative representation fidelity term by introducing regularization factor. On the other hand, by maximizing the likelihood of collaborative fidelity term, the proposed method minimizes the collaborative residuals and improves the effectiveness of facial expression recognition system effectively. The experimental results on the Cohn-Kanade database demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in classification and can achieve a satisfactory recognition result.
The contours of a semantic annotation scheme for Dutch

The creation of semantically annotated corpora has lagged dramatically behind. As a result, the need for such resources has now become urgent. Several initiatives have been launched at the international level in the last years, however, they have focussed almost entirely on English and not much attention has been dedicated to the creation of semantically annotated Dutch corpora. The Flemish-Dutch STEVIN-programme has identified semantic annotation as one of its priorities.Within the project “Dutch Language Corpus Initiative” (D-Coi) we are developing guidelines for the semantic annotation of Dutch and our focus is on two types: semantic role assignment and temporal and spatial semantics. 67 Proceedings of the Sixteenth Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands. Edited by: Khalil Sima’an, Maarten de Rijke, Remko Scha and Rob van Son. Copyright c © 2007 by the individual authors. 68 / INEKE SCHUURMAN AND PAOLA MONACHESI
Simian virus 40 promoters direct expression of the tetracycline gene in plasmid pACYC184

Insertion of HindIII DNA fragments into the HindIII site of plasmid pACYC184 destroys the promoter of the plasmid tetracycline resistance gene and causes Escherichia coli cells harboring recombinant plasmids to be tetracycline sensitive and chloramphenicol resistant. The HindIII-C DNA fragment of simian virus 40 contains the two virus promoters and the virus origin of replication. We report the isolation of recombinant plasmids that contained the simian virus 40 HindIII-C DNA fragment at the HindIII site but were capable of conferring tetracycline resistance to E. coli cells. The viral promoter sequences contained in the HindIII-C fragment presumably replaced the inactivated tetracycline resistance gene promoter sequences and enabled transcription of the tetracycline resistance gene.
Evaluating the Graduation Gap: Interventions Designed to Enhance Upper-level Student Success and Commitment

Over the past several decades, there has been a wealth of research identifying factors and conditions of persistence toward graduation for first-year students and more recently transfer students. While previous research recognizes these critical periods, some recent literature suggests that students may face a similar transitional period later in their academic careers as they advance into their major areas of study. To date, there has been a dearth of information exploring upper-level students' success and commitment to graduation. Exploring this later transition might provide a critical link to understanding the graduation gap between those students who persist to graduation and those who drop out. The purpose of this research was to review the intervention programs proscribed by the literature, design an intervention program, and examine the impact of the program on criminal justice students during this advanced transitional phase of their college careers. It examined the direct and indirect effects of the intervention program on both retention and the antecedents of successful retention while controlling for other relevant influences identified in the literature. The results indicated that the intervention had small, but significant positive direct and indirect effects on academic integration, commitment to the university, and graduating in a timely fashion. Policy implications are discussed.
Lack of Time as an Obstacle to Women's Education: The Case of Upper Volta

The neglected and disadvantaged position of rural girls and women has frequently been noted by scholars. The situation in Upper Volta is similar to that in the rest of subSaharan Africa. In 1974 only 10 percent of the eligible age group attended school at the primary level, 7.0 percent of the girls and 11.2 percent of the boys. A great disparity existed between rural and urban areas, with 70 percent of the children in urban areas attending school in contrast to 9 percent of those in rural areas.
A Content Analysis of Animation in Television Advertising

Abstract A content analysis of the major networks and three cable networks was conducted to investigate the current status of animation in television advertising. A total of 2,454 advertisements were analyzed over a seven-day period. Findings suggest that advertisers are using animation as a method of execution in their TV advertisements directed at adults as well as children.
Computing camera orientation relative to a world coordinate frame by detecting its projected axes

In this paper a new approach is presented to compute the camera orientation relative to some man-made objects coordinate frame, the world coordinate frame. The approach is based on the observation, that man-made structures expose many lines, which are aligned with three principal orthogonal directions, belonging to a cartesian world coordinate frame. Modeling the camera as an orthographic one, a nonlinear equation system is derived, which solutions yield three angles, that describe the camera orientation relative to the scene. In order to detect the projected principal axes of the world coordinate frame, an analysis of the log-magnitude spectrum of an image is used, followed by an algorithm that uses line information from the input image directly. The algorithm has been tested on a variety of rendered test images and real images of ships.
Sound Source Localization and Speech Understanding in Complex Listening Environments by Single-sided Deaf Listeners After Cochlear Implantation

Objective: To assess improvements in sound source localization and speech understanding in complex listening environments after unilateral cochlear implantation for single-sided deafness (SSD). Study Design: Nonrandomized, open, prospective case series. Setting: Tertiary referral center. Patients: Nine subjects with a unilateral cochlear implant (CI) for SSD (SSD-CI) were tested. Reference groups for the task of sound source localization included young (n = 45) and older (n = 12) normal-hearing (NH) subjects and 27 bilateral CI (BCI) subjects. Intervention: Unilateral cochlear implantation. Main Outcome Measures: Sound source localization was tested with 13 loudspeakers in a 180 arc in front of the subject. Speech understanding was tested with the subject seated in an 8-loudspeaker sound system arrayed in a 360-degree pattern. Directionally appropriate noise, originally recorded in a restaurant, was played from each loudspeaker. Speech understanding in noise was tested using the Azbio sentence test and sound source localization quantified using root mean square error. Results: All CI subjects showed poorer-than-normal sound source localization. SSD-CI subjects showed a bimodal distribution of scores: six subjects had scores near the mean of those obtained by BCI subjects, whereas three had scores just outside the 95th percentile of NH listeners. Speech understanding improved significantly in the restaurant environment when the signal was presented to the side of the CI. Conclusion: Cochlear implantation for SSD can offer improved speech understanding in complex listening environments and improved sound source localization in both children and adults. On tasks of sound source localization, SSD-CI patients typically perform as well as BCI patients and, in some cases, achieve scores at the upper boundary of normal performance.
Intolerance Toward Immigrants in Switzerland: Diminished Threat Through Social Contacts?†

Intolerance toward immigrants has recently reached noticeable highs in Switzerland. Referring to the conflict theory, the perception of a specific group as a threat tends to lead to intolerance toward that group. The expectation of a negative relationship between threat and toler- ance is nevertheless not assumed to be universally valid for all members of society. In particular, the contact theory assumes that intercultural encounters should promote positive attitudes toward culturally different individuals and groups. Using a new and unique data set, our Heckman selec- tion models reveal that Swiss who view rising immigration to mean a loss of economic privileges and an erosion of Swiss cultural values are less tolerant toward immigrants. Moreover, our results indicate that contact with immigrants may moderate this effect. However, not all group settings are able to reduce the perceived threats in a similar way, and not all sorts of social contact are able to foster tolerance toward immigrants.