Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quetiapine Attenuates Glial Activation and Proinflammatory Cytokines in APP/PS1 Transgenic Mice via Inhibition of Nuclear Factor-κB Pathway

Background: In Alzheimer’s disease, growing evidence has shown that uncontrolled glial activation and neuroinflammation may contribute independently to neurodegeneration. Antiinflammatory strategies might provide benefits for this devastating disease. The aims of the present study are to address the issue of whether glial activation and proinflammatory cytokine increases could be modulated by quetiapine in vivo and in vitro and to explore the underlying mechanism. Methods: Four-month–old amyloid precursor protein (APP) and presenilin 1 (PS1) transgenic and nontransgenic mice were treated with quetiapine (5mg/kg/d) in drinking water for 8 months. Animal behaviors, total Aβ levels, and glial activation were evaluated by behavioral tests, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, immunohistochemistry, and Western blot accordingly. Inflammatory cytokines and the nuclear factor kappa B pathway were analyzed in vivo and in vitro. Results: Quetiapine improves behavioral performance, marginally affects total Aβ40 and Aβ42 levels, attenuates glial activation, and reduces proinflammatory cytokines in APP/PS1 mice. Quetiapine suppresses Aβ1-42-induced activation of primary microglia by decresing proinflammatory cytokines. Quetiapine inhibits the activation of nuclear factor kappa B p65 pathway in both transgenic mice and primary microglia stimulated by Aβ1–42. Conclusions: The antiinflammatory effects of quetiapine in Alzheimer’s disease may be involved in the nuclear factor kappa B pathway. Quetiapine may be an efficacious and promising treatment for Alzheimer’s disease targeting on neuroinflammation.
FRAMEWORK OF VOCATIONAL SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES TEACHER ACTIVITIES: MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS, PROFESSIONAL ROLES AND APPLICATION OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES IN CORRELATION WITH PERSONALITY TRAITS

The relevance of this research is based on the standpoint of the epistemological methodology focusing on the quality of the profession cognition. Therefore, it is presumed that the quality of vocational education is determined by the variable personality traits of teachers (extraversion, openness towards experience and innovation, consciousness, agreeableness, neuroticism). The research object of the current study is the correlation between the personality traits of university of applied sciences teachers and vocational teachers and the curriculum components. The research a ims at identifying the correlation between the motives of vocational school and university of applied sciences teacher activities, educational technologies they use, professional roles and their personality traits, as well as identifying the essential differences of the mentioned variables. The quantitative and qualitative research strategies were employed allowing the researchers to perceive and assess the parameters of the correlation between the professional identity of teachers, meaningfulness in pedagogical work, motivation and educational content. The research results revealed that the social, extrinsic, introjected and identified regulation motivation in vocational schools and universities of applied sciences vary considerably; in universities of applied sciences social and identified regulation motivations manifest themselves, whereas in vocational schools a lot of demotivating factors related to the problems of vocational student identity, career prestige of a vocational teacher and external motivation, are observed. The role of vocational school and university of applied sciences teachers in the didactic process also varies: university of applied sciences lecturers identify themselves in the position of the teacher-andragogue, whereas vocational school teachers see their role as a professional (expert). Moreover, the principles of social constructivism in pedagogy and andragogy are more effective among university of applied sciences lecturers, while vocational school teachers often have to rely on the behaviouristic principles of pedagogy for educational assessment and the enhancement of student motivation. Keywords: Vocational Schools, University of Applied Sciences , Teacher Activities, Motivational Factors, Professional Roles, Educational Technologies, Personality Traits Article DOI: http://doi.org/10.15544/RD.2017. 238
Demographic responses to short-term stress in a 19th century Tuscan population: The case of household out-migration

This paper deals with the relationship between household emigration and short-term crisis in a rural community of mid-19th century Tuscany. Based on a detailed reconstruction of individual and household life-histories, the paper shows the close relationship between household emigration and different kinds of short-term stresses, either economic, epidemiologic or within the household. Despite the different response by SES - with the poorest strata of the population much exposed to price changes and mortality crisis - the death of the household head appears as one of the most powerful factor of household emigration.
EXTENSION OF THE FUZZY C MEANS CLUSTERING ALGORITHM TO FIT WITH THE COMPOSITE GRAPH MODEL FOR WEB DOCUMENT REPRESENTATION

Clustering techniques are mostly unsupervised methods that can be used to organize data into groups based on similarities among the in- dividual data items. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is one of well known unsupervised clustering tech- niques, which can also be used for unsupervised web document clustering. In this chapter we will intro- duce a modified method of clustering where the data to be clustered will be represented by graphs instead of vectors or other models. Specifically, we will ex- tend the classical FCM clustering algorithm to work with graphs that represent web documents (Phukon, K. K. (2012), Zadeh, L. A. (1965). Dunn, J. C. (1974)). We wish to use graphs because they can allow us to retain information which is often discard- ed in simpler models.
Maternal Diet Supplementation with n-6/n-3 Essential Fatty Acids in a 1.2 : 1.0 Ratio Attenuates Metabolic Dysfunction in MSG-Induced Obese Mice

Essential polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) prevent cardiometabolic diseases. We aimed to study whether a diet supplemented with a mixture of n-6/n-3 PUFAs, during perinatal life, attenuates outcomes of long-term metabolic dysfunction in prediabetic and obese mice. Seventy-day-old virgin female mice were mated. From the conception day, dams were fed a diet supplemented with sunflower oil and flaxseed powder (containing an n-6/n-3 PUFAs ratio of 1.2 : 1.0) throughout pregnancy and lactation, while control dams received a commercial diet. Newborn mice were treated with monosodium L-glutamate (MSG, 4 mg g−1 body weight per day) for the first 5 days of age. A batch of weaned pups was sacrificed to quantify the brain and pancreas total lipids; another batch were fed a commercial diet until 90 days of age, where glucose homeostasis and glucose-induced insulin secretion (GIIS) as well as retroperitoneal fat and Lee index were assessed. MSG-treated mice developed obesity, glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, pancreatic islet dysfunction, and higher fat stores. Maternal flaxseed diet-supplementation decreased n-6/n-3 PUFAs ratio in the brain and pancreas and blocked glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, GIIS impairment, and obesity development. The n-6/n-3 essential PUFAs in a ratio of 1.2 : 1.0 supplemented in maternal diet during pregnancy and lactation prevent metabolic dysfunction in MSG-obesity model.
Vulnerability assessment of Central-East Sardinia (Italy) to extreme rainfall events

Abstract. In Sardinia (Italy), the highest frequency of extreme events is recorded in the Central-East area (3–4 events per year). The presence of high and steep mountains near the sea on the central and south-eastern coast, causes an East-West precipitation gradient in autumn especially, due to hot and moist currents coming from Africa. Soil structure and utilization make this area highly vulnerable to flash flooding and landslides. The specific purpose of this work is to provide a description of the heavy rainfall phenomenon on a statistical basis. The analysis mainly focuses on i) the existence of trends in heavy rainfall and ii) the characterization of the distribution of extreme events. First, to study possible trends in extreme events a few indices have been analyzed by the linear regression test. The analysis has been carried out at annual and seasonal scales. Then, extreme values analysis has been carried out by fitting a Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) to the data. As far as trends are concerned, different results are obtained at the two temporal scales: significant trends are obtained at the seasonal scale which are masked at the annual scale. By combining trend analysis and GPD analysis, the vulnerability of the study area to the occurrence of heavy rainfall has been characterized. Therefore, this work might support the improvement of land use planning and the application of suitable prevention systems. Future work will consider the extension of the analysis to all Sardinia and the application of statistical methods taking into account the spatial correlation of extreme events.
The Early Optical Afterglow of GRB 030418 and Progenitor Mass Loss

The ROTSE-IIIa telescope and the SSO 40 inch (1.0 m) telescope, both located at Siding Spring Observatory, imaged the early-time afterglow of GRB 030418. In this report, we present observations of the early afterglow, first detected by the ROTSE-IIIa telescope 211 s after the start of the burst and only 76 s after the end of the gamma-ray activity. We detect optical emission that rises for ~600 s, slowly varies around R = 17.3 mag for ~1400 s , and then fades as a power law of index α = -1.36. Additionally, the ROTSE-IIIb telescope, located at McDonald Observatory, imaged the early-time afterglow of GRB 030723. The behavior of this light curve was qualitatively similar to that of GRB 030418, but 2 mag dimmer. These two afterglows are dissimilar to other afterglows such as GRB 990123 and GRB 021211. We investigate whether or not the early afterglow can be attributed to a synchrotron break in a cooling synchrotron spectrum as it passes through the optical band, but we find that this model is unable to accurately describe the early light curve. We present a simple model for gamma-ray burst emission emerging from a wind medium surrounding a massive progenitor star. This model provides an effective description of the data and suggests that the rise of the afterglow can be ascribed to extinction in the local circumburst environment. In this interpretation, these events provide further evidence of the connection between gamma-ray bursts and the collapse of massive stars.
A Linguistically Grounded Graph Model for Bilingual Lexicon Extraction

We present a new method, based on graph theory, for bilingual lexicon extraction without relying on resources with limited availability like parallel corpora. The graphs we use represent linguistic relations between words such as adjectival modification. We experiment with a number of ways of combining different linguistic relations and present a novel method, multi-edge extraction (MEE), that is both modular and scalable. We evaluate MEE on adjectives, verbs and nouns and show that it is superior to cooccurrence-based extraction (which does not use linguistic analysis). Finally, we publish a reproducible baseline to establish an evaluation benchmark for bilingual lexicon extraction.
The Effect of Economic Consequences on Social Judgment and Choice: Reward Interdependence and the Preference for Sociability Versus Competence

Competence and sociability (warmth) are fundamental dimensions of social judgment in organizations. However, these qualities are frequently seen as negatively related, with mixed evidence on which is more important. In three studies (N = 993) we investigated the effects of reward interdependence on the preference for sociability versus competence. We predicted that reward interdependence would elicit a more instrumental, calculative mindset, which in turn, would lead individuals to value competence more. Study 1 surveyed working adults who were in actual work groups and found that those who worked in more (vs. less) reward interdependent environments were more likely to think instrumentally and calculatively when considering potential colleagues. This mindset, in turn, was associated with a greater tendency to value competence over sociability. Studies 2 and 3 used an experimental design and found that when people imagined or anticipated working in a situation in which their economic outcomes depended in part on others, they were more likely to adopt an instrumental focus and choose a “competent jerk” over a “lovable fool”. These results call into question a vast social judgment literature that has made claims about the importance of sociability and related constructs without considering the context, and particularly the reward interdependence, often inherent in organizational contexts.
Coping with infertility: a body-mind group intervention programme for infertile couples.

BACKGROUND The recognition of the distressing character of infertility diagnosis and treatment has led to the development of several psychosocial interventions for infertile couples. At the Leuven University Fertility Centre, a body-mind marital group intervention was developed to help infertile couples cope with the distress related to infertility. METHODS AND RESULTS This treatment programme was originally adapted from a mind-body approach, but integrated concepts and techniques from body-oriented therapy, art therapy and multi-family group therapy. In this paper, the therapeutic foundations, treatment goals and practical implications of the mind-body marital group intervention are outlined. Further, the treatment procedure is explained in detail and illustrated by clinical vignettes. CONCLUSIONS Although the first clinical impressions about the usefulness of the body-mind group programme in fertility clinics seem promising, further research is needed to assess its effectiveness.
Risk-O-Meter: an intelligent clinical risk calculator

We present a system called Risk-O-Meter to predict and an- alyze clinical risk via data imputation, visualization, predic- tive modeling, and association rule exploration. Clinical risk calculators provide information about a person's chance of having a disease or encountering a clinical event. Such tools could be highly useful to educate patients to understand and monitor their health conditions. Unlike existing risk calcu- lators that are primarily designed for domain experts, Risk- O-Meter is useful to patients who are unfamiliar with medi- cal terminologies, or providers who have limited information about a patient. Risk-O-Meter is designed in a way such that it is flexible enough to accept limited or incomplete data in- puts, and still manages to predict the clinical risk efficiently and effectively. Current version of Risk-O-Meter evaluates 30-day risk of hospital readmission. However, the proposed system framework is applicable to general clinical risk pre- dictions. In this demonstration paper, we describe different components of Risk-O-Meter and the intelligent algorithms associated with each of these components to evaluate risk of readmission using incomplete patient data inputs.
Phase field crystals as a coarse-graining in time of molecular dynamics

Phase field crystals (PFC) are a tool for simulating materials at the atomic level. They combine the small length scale resolution of molecular dynamics (MD) with the ability to simulate dynamics on mesoscopic time scales. We show how PFC can be interpreted as the result of applying coarse-graining in time to the microscopic density field of molecular-dynamics simulations. We take the form of the free energy for the phase field from the classical density functional theory of inhomogeneous liquids and then choose coefficients to match the structure factor of the time coarse-grained microscopic density field. As an example, we show how to construct a PFC free energy for Weber and Stillinger's two-dimensional square crystal potential which models a system of proteins suspended in a membrane.
Survey of Object Classification in 3 D Range Scans

Modern 3D cameras allow for the acquisition of large 3D scenes containing objects of interest that can be detected and classified for scene understanding. This survey focuses on the task of object classification in urban range scans and indoor RGB-D images. Each approach will be compared based on several factors including classification accuracy, utilization of the 3D data, and performance on key object categories as well as the techniques used for segmentation, feature generation, and classification. Major trends that appear in the literature include the incorporation of contextual cues in classification and the challenge of generating sophisticated 3D feature representations. We conclude that modeling contextual relations for structured prediction provides significant practical benefits and 3D shape-based descriptions can yield an improvement over only using 2D texture based features.
MicroRNA in United Airway Diseases

The concept of united airway diseases (UAD) has received increasing attention in recent years. Sustained and increased inflammation is a common feature of UAD, which is inevitably accompanied with marked gene modification and tight gene regulation. However, gene regulation in the common inflammatory processes in UAD remains unclear. MicroRNA (miRNA), a novel regulator of gene expression, has been considered to be involved in many inflammatory diseases. Although there are an increasing number of studies of miRNAs in inflammatory upper and lower airway diseases, few miRNAs have been identified that directly link the upper and lower airways. In this article, therefore, we reviewed the relevant studies available in order to improve the understanding of the roles of miRNAs in the interaction and pathogenesis of UAD.
A Market Orientation on the Internet

A market orientation (MO) has long been an essential concept in marketing discipline. Advanced information technologies show a great potential for information acquisition, sharing, and dissemination, all of which are the essential processes of an MO. This paper proposes a framework of an Internet-mediated market orientation (IMO), in which the Internet functions as a transformer of the traditional MO into a more efficient and effective way of information generation, dissemination and responsiveness on line toward sustaining competitive advantage.
MSE based transceiver designs for bi-directional full-duplex MIMO systems

We consider a multiple antenna full-duplex (FD) bi-directional (point-to-point) communication system with a limited analog domain self-interference cancellation capability. The effect of the residual self-interference resulting from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channel estimation errors and limited dynamic ranges of the transmitters and receivers is studied in the digital domain. We design transceiver matrices based on the minimization of sum mean-squared error (MSE) and the maximum per-node MSE optimization problems subject to individual power constraints at each node through an iterative alternating algorithm, which is proven to converge to at least a local optimal solution.
Double Yardstick Regulation for Vertically Integrated Network Firms

Vertically integrated network firms own a natural monopoly infrastructure and compete in downstream markets for products which use the services of this facility as an essential input. Such a firm can shift costs between the network and final product sectors to foreclose efficient entry into the downstream market without triggering the traditional incremental cost test for cross-subsidies. We propose an alternative test for strategic cost shifting which is more sensitive than the incremental cost test. Our procedure is based on econometric exploitation of data drawn from a number of similar firms and uses a simple, though non-standard, hypothesis test. The method is illustrated through a study of the electricity retailing industry in New Zealand. * This paper builds on earlier work with Emma Gilbert. Helpful comments from David Giles, Tim Hazledine, Norman Ireland, and seminar participants at the Universities of Auckland and Canterbury and at the New Zealand Econometrics Study Group are gratefully acknowledged.
Ranking tandem mass spectra: And the impact of database size and scoring function on peptide spectrum matches

Proteomics is currently driven by mass spectrometry. For the analysis of tandem mass spectra many computational algorithms have been proposed. There are two approaches, one which assigns a peptide sequence to a tandem mass spectrum directly and one which employs a sequence database for looking up possible solutions. The former method needs high quality spectra while the latter can tolerate lower quality spectra. Since both methods are computationally expensive, it is sensible to establish spectral quality using an independent fast algorithm. In this study, we first establish proper settings for database search algorithms for the analysis of spectra in our gold benchmark dataset and then analyze the performance of ScanRanker, an algorithm for quality assessment of tandem MS spectra, on this ground truth data. We found that OMSSA and MSGFDB have limitations in their scoring functions but were able to form a proper consensus prediction using majority vote for our benchmark data. Unfortunately, ScanRanker's results do not correlate well with the consensus and ScanRanker is also too slow to be used in the capacity it is supposed to be used.
Imprinting of the Polycomb Group Gene MEDEA Serves as a Ploidy Sensor in Arabidopsis

Balanced maternal and paternal genome contributions are a requirement for successful seed development. Unbalanced contributions often cause seed abortion, a phenomenon that has been termed “triploid block. ” Misregulation of imprinted regulatory genes has been proposed to be the underlying cause for abnormalities in growth and structure of the endosperm in seeds with deviating parental contributions. We identified a mutant forming unreduced pollen that enabled us to investigate direct effects of unbalanced parental genome contributions on seed development and to reveal the underlying molecular mechanism of dosage sensitivity. We provide evidence that parent-of-origin–specific expression of the Polycomb group (PcG) gene MEDEA is causally responsible for seed developmental aberrations in Arabidopsis seeds with increased paternal genome contributions. We propose that imprinted expression of PcG genes is an evolutionary conserved mechanism to balance parental genome contributions in embryo nourishing tissues.