Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perpendicular Patterned Media in an (Al0.9Ga0.1)2O3/GaAs Substrate for Magnetic Storage

By using electron beam lithography, chemically assisted ion beam etching, and electroplating, we have fabricated high aspect ratio magnetic columns, 60–170 nm in diameter, embedded in an aluminum–gallium–oxide/gallium–arsenide [(Al0.9Ga0.1)2O3/GaAs] substrate. In our previous work, we demonstrated storage of data in individual columns spaced 2 µm apart. Here the electroplated Ni columns are in the form of tracks (0.5 and 0.25 µm in the down-track direction, and 1 µm in the cross-track direction), corresponding to areal densities of 1.3 and 2.6 Gbits/in.2, respectively. In this report we describe in more detail the issues in the fabrication of patterned media samples, such as dry etching and oxidation of AlGaAs, and electrodeposition of Ni into GaAs substrate. Initial characterization of the resulting magnets using magnetic force microscopy are also presented.
Inhibition of hyperglycemia‐induced angiogenesis and breast cancer tumor growth by systemic injection of microRNA‐467 antagonist

Abnormal angiogenesis in multiple tissues is a key characteristic of the vascular complications of diabetes. However, angiogenesis may be increased in one tissue but decreased in another in the same patient at the same time point in the disease. The mechanisms of aberrant angiogenesis in diabetes are not understood. There are no selective therapeutic approaches to target increased neovascularization without affecting physiologic angiogenesis and angiogenesis in ischemic tissues. We recently reported a novel miRNA‐dependent pathway that up‐regulates angiogenesis in response to hyperglycemia in a cell‐ and tissue‐specific manner. The goal of the work described herein was to test whether systemic administration of an antagonist of miR‐467 would prevent hyperglycemia‐induced local angiogenesis in a tissue‐specific manner. We examined the effect of the antagonist on hyperglycemia‐induced tumor growth and angiogenesis and on skin wound healing in mouse models of diabetes. Our data demonstrated that the systemic injection of the antagonist prevented hyperglycemia‐induced angiogenesis and growth of mouse and human breast cancer tumors, where the miR‐467 pathway was active in hyperglycemia. In tissues where the miR‐467‐dependent mechanism was not activated by hyperglycemia, there was no effect of the antagonist: the systemic injection did not affect skin wound healing or the growth of prostate tumors. The data show that systemic administration of the miR‐467 antagonist could be a breakthrough approach in the treatment and prevention of diabetes‐associated breast cancer in a tissue‐specific manner without affecting physiologic angiogenesis and angiogenesis in ischemic tissues. —Krukovets, I. , Legerski, M. , Sul, P., Stenina‐Adognravi, O. Inhibition of hyperglycemia‐induced angiogenesis and breast cancer tumor growth by systemic injection of microRNA‐467 antagonist. FASEB J. 29, 3726‐3736 (2015). www.fasebj. org
A simple and sensitive HPLC-UV method for the determination of ponicidin in rat plasma and its application in a pharmacokinetic study.

A simple, rapid, selective and sensitive HPLC-UV method has been developed and validated for the determination of ponicidin in rat plasma. The analyte was extracted from rat plasma by liquid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate as the extraction solvent. The LC separation was performed on a Zorbax Eclipse XDB C(18) analytical column (150 × 4.6 mm i.d., 5 µm) with an isocratic mobile phase consisting of methanol-water-phosphoric acid (45:55:0.01, v/v/v) at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. There was a good linearity over the range of 0.1-25 µg/mL (r = 0.9995) with a weighted (1/C(2) ) least square method. The lower limit of quantification was proved to be 0.1 µg/mL. The accuracy was within ±10.0% in terms of relative error and the intra- and inter-day precisions were less than 9.1% in terms of relative standard deviation. After validation, the method was successfully applied to characterize the pharmacokinetics of ponicidin in rats.
Modality and Negation: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Traditionally, most research in NLP has focused on propositional aspects of meaning. To truly understand language, however, extra-propositional aspects are equally important. Modality and negation typically contribute significantly to these extra-propositional meaning aspects. Although modality and negation have often been neglected by mainstream computational linguistics, interest has grown in recent years, as evidenced by several annotation projects dedicated to these phenomena. Researchers have started to work on modeling factuality, belief and certainty, detecting speculative sentences and hedging, identifying contradictions, and determining the scope of expressions of modality and negation. In this article, we will provide an overview of how modality and negation have been modeled in computational linguistics.
Child Malnutrition , Agricultural Diversification and Commercialization among Smallholders in Eastern Zambia

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute is a non-profit company limited by guarantee and collaboratively works with public and private stakeholders. IAPRI exists to carry out agricultural policy research and outreach, serving the agricultural sector in Zambia so as to contribute to sustainable pro-poor agricultural development. The authors acknowledges the generous financial support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Food Security for funding two surveys which provided the data used for the study. We particularly thank USAID mission in Zambia for facilitating the anthropometric data collection and our access to the data. We also wish to thank our fellow researchers at IAPRI and at Thünen Institute for the comments and insights provided during the development of this work and Patricia Johannes for her editing and formatting assistance. The views expressed or remaining errors and omissions are solely the responsibility of the authors. With only a few months remaining, Zambia still has a long way to achieving the millennium development goal of halving the number of stunted children by the end of 2015. Almost half of the children in Zambia remain undernourished and 40% of them have stunted growth, a long term malnutrition effect. This makes Zambia one of the countries with the highest levels of malnutrition in the world. The most vulnerable are the children from rural households which depend entirely on rainfed seasonal agricultural production and income, and survive on diets that are deficient in proteins and other important nutrients. Applying the Generalized Propensity Score (GPS), which analyzes impact of particular interventions on a specific outcome and using Eastern province as a case study, this paper evaluates the impact of agricultural diversification (in terms of calorie and protein production) and commercialization on reducing malnutrition. The study uses two uniquely rich datasets which comprise social-economic, agriculture and anthropometric data observing 1,120 children from different farm households. We measured household agricultural diversification using the Simpson Index over production of major food groups including starchy foods, legumes-nuts-seeds, starchy vegetables, non-starchy vegetables, starchy fruits, non-starchy fruits, dairy, and eggs. Production is measured in two ways, firstly in terms of calorie production and secondly in terms of protein production. While commercialization is measured as an index derived from the share of agricultural sales in household's total value of agricultural production. The following are the key findings from the study: i. With all factors remaining constant, increases in …
Evaluating Organizational Performance

As the definition of organization has evolved, so have the approaches used to evaluate organizational performance. During the past 60 years, organizational theorists and management scholars have developed a comprehensive line of thinking with respect to organizational assessment that serves to inform and be informed by the evaluation discipline. This article examines five extant models to assess organizational performance developed by researchers in the fields of organizational theory and management including the goal model, systems model, process model, strategic constituencies model, and competing values framework. Each model is based on a specific organizational paradigm, yet no model has displaced another in terms of its applicability or superiority for assessing performance. Instead, an accretive effect can be found as each subsequent model expanded upon select attributes of previous models as conceptualizations of organization were refined. Following the examination of the extant models, a checklist approach to evaluate organizational performance is proposed that specifically incorporates evaluation logic into its framework; building on the strengths of the extant models while mitigating the more prominent limitations.
Police Discretion and Encounters With People Experiencing Mental Illness

Police discretion as it applies to encounters with people experiencing mental illness has far-reaching implications. In this study, some of the factors that are related to police officers’ decisions following encounters with people experiencing mental illness were explored. Officers in Australia were presented with one of three videos depicting a police encounter with an individual who was either mentally ill, not mentally ill, or with an ambiguous mental state. Participants were asked how they would “likely” and “ideally” resolve the encounter. Discriminant function analysis revealed that officers’ responses were related to (a) the severity of symptoms presented and (b) the officers’ attitudes toward people experiencing mental illness, as measured by an attitudes questionnaire. There was a discrepancy between participants’ likely and ideal outcomes to the scenarios, which supported the well-known fact that police officers face considerable obstacles when attempting to resolve encounters with people experiencing mental illness.
On optimal routing with multiple traffic matrices

Routing optimization is used to find a set of routes that minimizes cost (delay, utilization). Previous work has addressed this problem for the case of a known, static end-to-end traffic matrix. In the Internet, it is difficult to accurately estimate a traffic matrix, and the constantly changing nature of Internet traffic makes it costly to maintain optimal routing by responding to traffic changes. Thus, it is of interest to maintain a set of routes that are "good" for a number of different possible traffic scenarios. In this paper, we explore ways to find an optimal set of routes with multiple traffic matrices to minimize expected cost. We focus on two general approaches, source-destination routing and destination routing. In the case of source-destination routing, we extend existing methods with a single traffic matrix to solve the optimization problem with multiple traffic matrices: we extend the convex optimization solution methods for a single traffic matrix to the multiple traffic matrix case; we also extend the gradient-based solution methods for a single traffic matrix to the multiple traffic matrix case. However, the multiple traffic matrix case requires many more control variables. In the case of destination routing, we encounter many more differences from the single traffic matrix case. The loop-free property, which is valid for the single traffic matrix case, is no longer valid for the multiple traffic matrix case, and it is difficult to extend existing methods for a single traffic matrix to solve the optimization problem with multiple traffic matrices. We show that it is NP-complete even to determine the feasibility of multiple traffic matrices. We thus propose and evaluate a heuristic algorithm for this case.
Statins and dietary and serum cholesterol are associated with increased lean mass following resistance training.

BACKGROUND Age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) is a prevalent condition associated with disability and mortality. Exercise and optimal nutrition are interventions to prevent and treat sarcopenia, yet little is known, outside of protein, of the effect of common nutrition recommendations and medication use on exercise-related muscle gain. METHODS Forty-nine community-dwelling, 60- to 69-year-old men and women completed 2 weeks of nutrition education (American Dietetic Association recommendations) followed by 12 weeks of high intensity resistance exercise training (RET) with postexercise protein supplementation and 3x/wk dietary logs. RESULTS We observed a dose-response relationship between dietary cholesterol (from food logs) and gains in lean mass that was not affected by variability in protein intake. Serum cholesterol and the serum cholesterol lowering agent statin were also independently associated with greater increases in lean mass. Dietary cholesterol was not associated with serum cholesterol or the significant reduction in blood pressure observed, but trends were observed for altered plasma C-reactive protein. CONCLUSION These data suggest that dietary and serum cholesterol contribute to the skeletal muscles' response to RET in this generally healthy older population and that some statins may improve this response.
The State of Survey Methodology

In this overview, we discuss the current state of survey methodology in a form that is useful and informative to a general social science audience. The article covers existing challenges, dilemmas, and opportunities for survey researchers and social scientists. We draw on the most current research to articulate our points; however, we also speculate on both technological and cultural changes that currently influence or may soon affect the efficacy of different methodological choices.
Optimal Routing for Delay-Sensitive Traffic in Overlay Networks

We design dynamic routing policies for an overlay network which meet delay requirements of real-time traffic being served on top of an underlying legacy network, where the overlay nodes do not know the underlay characteristics. We pose the problem as a constrained MDP, and show that when the underlay implements static policies such as FIFO with randomized routing, then a decentralized policy, that can be computed efficiently in a distributed fashion, is optimal. Our algorithm utilizes multi-timescale stochastic approximation techniques, and its convergence relies on the fact that the recursions asymptotically track a nonlinear differential equation, namely the replicator equation. Extensive simulations show that the proposed policy indeed outperforms the existing policies.
Adaptive algorithms for hypergraph learning

Social media sharing platforms enable image content as well as context information (e.g., user friendships, geo-tags assigned to images) to be jointly analyzed in order to achieve accurate image annotation or successful image recommendation. The context information is expressed frequently in terms of high-order relations, such as the relations among users, tags, and images. Hypergraphs can model the aforementioned high-order relations between their vertices (i.e., users, user social groups, tags, geo-tags, and images) by hyper-edges, whose influence can be assessed by properly estimating their weights. Here, an efficient adaptive hypergraph weight estimation is proposed for image tagging. In particular, both equality and inequality constraints enforced during hypergraph learning are taken into account and an efficient adaptation step selection using the Armijo rule is proposed. Experiments conducted on a dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art.
Maximal Aerobic Power versus Performance in Two Aerobic Endurance Tests among Young and Old Adults

Background: Aerobic fitness is of great value for reducing risk of mortality and cardiovascular diseases. Objective: This study evaluated the performance in and correlations between a new test (five-minute pyramid test, 5MPT), the six-minute walk-test (6MWT) and maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max) among old and young adults. Methods: Forty-four habitually active adults (females and males), 23 old (64–79 years) and 21 young (20–32 years) participated. In the 5MPT, the participants moved back and forth along a short walkway (5.5 m) over boxes (height: ‘old people’ 0.42 m, ‘young people’ 0.62 m) arranged like an elongated step pyramid for 5 min. Power in the pyramid test (5MPTpower) was calculated as the product of numbers of laps, body weight, gravity and highest box level divided by time. A 6MWT and a maximal cycle ergometer test for direct measurements of VO2max were also performed. In all tests heart rate, with on-line electrocardiography, and perceived exertion were recorded. Results: There was a strong correlation between the 5MPTpower and VO2max for the entire group studied (r = 0.98), and each of the four subgroups old and young females and males separately (r = 0.78–0.98). Contrary to several earlier studies, especially involving people with various diseases, the present data showed that 6MWT cannot be used to predict VO2max among old females and young adults. The correlation with VO2max was weaker for the 6MWT than for the 5MPTpower. The relative performance values for the old compared to the young (ratio old/young × 100) were considerably lower in 5MPTpower and VO2max (47–55%) than in distance and ‘work’ in the 6MWT (82–86%). Conclusions: The results, with age and gender variations, can be valuable information in health-fitness contexts, since measuring physical aerobic capacity is very significant in connection with risk evaluations of mortality and various diseases. The 5MPT is a rapid, functional, easy and inexpensive tool for predicting assessed maximal aerobic power.
How Q Methodology Can be Democratized

This article reports on one attempt to take up the challenge of democratizing Q. Described as ‘a method for the scientific study of human subjectivity’ (McKeown and Thomas, 1988: 12), Q methodology can be used to explore and identify ‘commonly shared attitudes, perspectives or identities’ (Kitzinger and Stainton Rogers, 1985: 170). Significantly, the British ‘dialect’ of Q methodology has moved away from the so-called ‘scientific’ focus on subjectivity towards a dis cursive and critical approach, with Q being described as ‘a quintessentially alter native methodology for those dealing with discourse and text’ (Stainton Rogers, 1995: 178). Q is a method that is seen to be particularly amenable to the interests and values of social constructionist research (John, 1997; Stainton Rogers, 1991) and ‘research questions which are concerned to hear “many voices”’ (Stainton Rogers, 1995: 183). In this respect, even though many feminists routinely argue ‘an affinity between feminist research and qualitative methods’ (Henwood and Pidgeon, 1995: 7), Q is a quantitative method that some feminist researchers (Kitzinger, 1986; Senn, 1996) have found to be valuable. In a study using Q methodology, participants typically sort a number of propo sitions or statements to reflect their own (subjective) view on a topic of investi gation. Rather than the researcher imposing the structure in advance – as in a survey – or attaching structure afterwards – as in content analysis of interviews – it is the participants’ sorting that provides the structuring of the data (Kitzinger and Stainton Rogers, 1985: 170). Thus, the methodology can be seen as already being quite ‘democratic’ in how it allows subjects to speak for themselves. However, there are aspects of Q methodology, as it is conventionally used, that are not as congruent with a democratic approach. The way in which propositions
PcExl1 a Novel Acid Expansin-Like Protein from the Plant Pathogen Pectobacterium carotovorum, Binds Cell Walls Differently to BsEXLX1

Microbial expansins act on plant cell walls similarly to plant expansins, albeit their loosening activity levels are tenfold lesser compared to plant expansins. We report the characterization of an expansin-like gene from the plant pathogen Pectobacterium carotovorum, named exl1. PcExl1 is an acidic protein that binds cellulose (Avicel), and weakens filter paper. The acidic nature of PcExl1 confers different binding properties when compared to Bacillus subtilis BsEXLX1, which is a basic protein. PcExl1 binding to wheat cell wall increased when acidic components were depleted, reaching a similar level to the binding to Avicel, indicating that cellulose is the target of PcExl1.
Energy-efficient based on cluster selection and trust management in cooperative spectrum sensing

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) has been proposed as a solution for radio spectrum resources scarcity problem. Clustering technique is introduced to increase the performance of CSS and overcome the shadowing and fading effects, also to reduce the control channel overhead for big number of cooperative users. However, Clustering is facing two major issues which are the data falsification caused by the malicious users and the increasing delay and energy consumption especially when the cluster heads is far away from the fusion center. In this paper, we propose a cluster and forward based on the trust CSS. By dividing all the secondary users into clusters and using of the trust threshold for selecting the most trusted CHs that can send their sensing decisions to the fusion center which can save more energy consumption and delay transmission, and improve the spectrum sensing performance.
An approach to reconstituting motility of single myosin molecules

Summary Over the last five years, the value of in vitro motility assays a s probes of the mechanical properties of the actin–myosin interaction has been amply demonstrated. Motility assays in which single fluorescent actin filaments are observed moving over surfaces coated with myosin or its soluble fragments are now used in many laboratories. They have been applied to a wide range of problems including the study of structure–function relationships in the myosin molecule and measurement of fundamental properties of the myosin head. However, one limitation of these assays has been uncertainty over the number of myosin heads interacting with each sliding filament, that frustrates attempts to determine properties of individual heads. In order to address this limitation, we have modified the conditions of the actin sliding filament assay to reduce the number of heads interacting with each filament. Our goal is to establish an assay in which the motor function of a single myosin head can be characterized from the movement of a single actin filament.
State-Trait Anxiety and Motocross Performance

The prediction from state-trait theory that subjects low in anxiety will perform better than highly anxious subjects on a more difficult task was tested on a motocross competition. We analyzed the relationships among the entire rank order of finish and state and trait anxiety measured by State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for 32 motocross riders (males whose age ranged from 16 to 27 yr.) participating in a national competition in Italy. A negative correlation between performance (measured by rank at the finish of the competition) and state anxiety was noted. The r for state and trait anxiety scores was also negative, but that between performance and trait anxiety was nonsignificant. Additional studies of high level sport competition will provide data relevant to planning interventions to control athletes' anxiety.