Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Somatostatin Analogs on Catecholamine Biosynthesis Regulated by Corticosteroids and Bone Morphogenetic Proteins in Rat Pheochromocytoma Cells

Regulatory roles of SSAs in catecholamine synthesis have not been elucidated. To clarify the actions of SSAs on catecholamine biosynthesis, we investigated the mutual interactions among SSAs including octreotide and pasireotide, steroids and BMPs using rat pheochromocytoma PC12 cells. Treatment with octreotide and pasireotide (10 nM to 10 μM) had no significant effect on mRNA levels of Th, DOPA decarboxylase and dopamine-β-hydroxylase in PC12 cells. Regarding the interaction with steroids, treatments with SSAs also had no effect on dexamethasone- or aldosterone-induced Th mRNA expression, while pasireotide reduced mRNA expression of the GR. As for the interaction with BMP-4, which can suppress Th mRNA expression by PC12 cells, SSAs did not affect Th expression reduced by BMP-4 and Id1 or Smad1/5/9 activation induced by BMP-4. However, BMP-4 treatment up-regulated MR expression, while treatment with noggin, which neutralizes endogenous BMPs, downregulated MR expression, and the presence of noggin also attenuated aldosterone-induced Th expression, suggesting that endogenous BMPs act to enhance MR activity. Moreover, BMP-4 treatment suppressed the expression of somatostatin receptors including Sstr2 and Sstr5 in PC12 cells, while treatment with noggin up-regulated the expression of Sstr2 and Sstr5, suggesting that BMPs play a desensitizing role in SSA actions. Collectively, the results revealed that SSAs have no direct effect on catecholamine synthesis; however, adrenomedullar BMPs could be modulators for the responsiveness to MR and SSTRs.
Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control Allocation Schemes for Overactuated Systems with Actuator and Bias Faults

: Fault-Tolerant control is of paramount importance in marine technology, especially for autonomously guided vehicles. It can be achieved by exploiting actuators redundancy, which adds ﬂexibility to the system by guaranteeing maneuverability, even in the presence of actuator faults. The main idea in the control allocation scheme here proposed is at distributing the control effort among the remaining healthy actuators without changing the nominal control law. In this paper, we propose an enhanced adaptive control allocation algorithm for over actuated systems. The proposed algorithm works under actuators loss of effectiveness with possible thruster stuck situations under both input saturation and rate of change constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is shown by simulating a marine surface vehicle model on a path-following problem.
Optical Frequency-Response Analysis for Power Transformer

An optical frequency-response analysis (OFRA) method is proposed to detect the winding deformation in a power transformer. Compared to existing frequency-response analysis (FRA) systems, the proposed system has several unique merits, such as high immunity to electromagnetic interference, direct display of winding deformation, no influence of connected power equipment, and long reliability in harsh environments. First, the principle of optical frequency-response detection and noise elimination is introduced. Then, the algorithm used to acquire the winding deformation matrix is discussed in detail. Next, winding deformation experiments are carried out to investigate the diagnostic ability of the proposed OFRA method. The experimental results indicate that the OFRA can locate the deformation disc and determine the deformation level correctly.
The Moderating Role of Corruption in the Inverted U-Shaped Relationship Between Red Tape and Private Investment in PPP Projects: Evidence From Developing Countries

Government environment is the main determinant in attracting private investment into public–private partnership (PPP) projects, especially in developing countries. Red tape, an indicator of a government's efficiency, plays a critical role in private investment in PPP projects. Reasonable levels of red tape can enhance government transparency and promote private investment, while excessive red tape usually represents low governance efficiency and imposes further risk on private investors. This article explores how developing countries’ red tape affects private investment in PPP projects by examining the moderating effect of corruption. Analyzing a database of 308 PPP projects in 111 developing countries, the study reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between red tape and private investment. Corruption weakens the positive relationship between red tape and private investment at low levels of red tape and mitigates their negative relationship at high levels. The study integrates the inconsistent results of previous research that postulated either a positive or negative relationship between red tape and private investment by proposing a nonlinear model. It also theorizes the moderating effect of corruption based on real management practice and illustrates its mechanism in absorbing private investment in PPP projects.
Analysis of the Ethical Leadership Behaviors’ Effect on Life Satisfaction and Mediation Effect of Organizational Commitment

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of ethical leadership behaviours of school administrators on life satisfaction of physical education and sports teachers and the mediating effect of organizational commitment on this effect. For this purpose, in 2015-2016 academic year, the physical education and sport teachers working at a formal schools in different provinces of Turkey were determined as a research sample by preferring an easy sampling method, the data was obtained from a total of 436 physical education and sport teachers, (176 female and 259 male). In order to obtain data, online surveys (147) and face to face interviews (289) were used. The data obtained from the survey was analyzed by structural equation modeling method. As a result, it was determined that there was a positive relationship among ethical leadership, organizational commitment and life satisfaction. Also a partial mediating effect of organizational commitment in the relationship between ethical leadership and life satisfaction was determined.
The more you know: Investigating why adults get a bigger memory boost from semantic congruency than children

Humans possess the capacity to employ prior knowledge in the service of our ability to remember; thus, memory is oftentimes superior for information that is semantically congruent with our prior knowledge. This congruency benefit grows during development, but little is understood about neurodevelopmental differences that underlie this growth. Here, we sought to explore the brain mechanisms underlying these phenomena. To this end, we examined the neural substrates of semantically congruent vs. incongruent item-context associations in 116 children and 25 young adults who performed encoding and retrieval tasks during functional MRI data collection. Participants encoded item-context pairs by judging whether an item belonged in a scene. Episodic memory was then tested with a source memory task. Consistent with prior work, source memory accuracy improved with age, and was greater for congruent than incongruent pairs; further, this congruency benefit was greater in adults than children. Age-related differences were observed across univariate, functional connectivity, and multivariate analyses, particularly in lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). In sum, our results revealed two general age differences. First, left ventrolateral/rostrolateral PFC exhibited age-related increases in univariate activity, as well as greater functional connectivity with temporal regions during the processing of congruency. Second, right rostrolateral PFC activation was associated with successfully encoded congruent associations in adults, but not children. Finally, multivariate analyses provided evidence for stronger veridical memory in adults than children in right ventrolateral PFC. These effects in right lateral PFC were significantly correlated with memory performance, implicating them in the process of remembering congruent associations. These results connect brain regions associated with top-down control in the congruency benefit and age-related improvements therein.
Total Phenolic Content, Total Flavonoid Content and Radical Scavenging Activity from Zingiber zerumbet Rhizome using Subcritical Water Extraction

Subcritical water extraction (SWE) is an alternative technique that implement water as a solvent. The objective of this work was to compare the efficiency of SWE in temperature range from 100oC to 180oC at extraction times ranging from 5 to 25 minutes with an ethanolic soxhlet extraction in terms of total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC) and radical scavenging activity (RSA) from Zingiber zerumbet. Results showed the highest TPC were obtained at 180oC and 25 min (19.88 mg GAE/g dry sample). The TFC is observed to be slightly fluctuated with time at the respective temperature. The RSA reached the maximum of 83.9 % inhibition at 180oC and 10 minutes of SWE. A direct linear correlation shows the strong correlation were observed between TPC and RSA(R2=0.910) compared to moderate correlation (R2=0.785) perceived in TFC. It shows that using SWE, phenolic content in Zingiber zerumbet more contributed to its radical scavenging activity compared to its flavonoid content. In comparison to soxhlet extraction, SWE process for Zingiber zerumbet extract is favorable for TPC and antioxidant properties. However the values for TFC in general is lower compared to soxhlet extraction. SWE is a potential alternative extraction process that should be further explored.
Racecar Longitudinal Control in Unknown and Highly-Varying Driving Conditions

This paper focuses on racecar longitudinal control with highly-varying driving conditions. The main factors affecting the dynamic behavior of a vehicle, including aerodynamic forces, wheel rolling resistance, traction force resulting from changing tire-road interaction as well as the occurrence of sudden wind gusts or the presence of persistent winds, are considered and assumed to have unknown models. By exploiting the theory on delayed input-state observers and using measurement data about the vehicle and wheel speeds, a dynamic filter that allows the online reconstruction of the above-mentioned unknown time-varying quantities is derived. Moreover, by exploiting the notion of effective tire radius, a reduced-degree-of-freedom model for the longitudinal vehicle dynamics is obtained, which is independent of the traction force and that enables, when used with the observer filter described above, an accurate speed control compensating for the resistance forces. One appealing feature of the proposed estimation and control method is that it requires no model information about such forces, for which, at the state-of-the-art, only heuristic approximations to be a-priori identified are available. Its effectiveness is shown via the simulation of scenarios where the car is required to execute aggressive maneuvers and the asphalt road surface abruptly changes from dry to wet, snowy, and icy. The evaluation also reveals that the proposed estimation technique outperforms standard solutions even in the presence of measurement noise.
Exploring The Use of Role-playing Games In Education

Research suggests that game-based education encourages motivation and drives academic progress. Role-playing games integrate challenge, narrative, and collaboration within the overarching theme of character and player development. The review article delves into literature around the international use of role-playing games in education. The findings from multiple qualitative and quantitative research studies are analysed to identify trends and gaps in the research. The findings support the suggestion that role-playing games are being used to develop collaboration and communication skills, and that their educational potential increases when paired with a formal debrief period. Limitations to the current use of role-playing games are identified as varied levels of student and teacher experience with games and small sample sizes of existing studies.
Performance-Based Aid, Enhanced Advising, and the Income Gap in College Graduation: Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial

Income gaps in college enrollment, persistence, and graduation raise concerns for those interested in equal opportunity in higher education. We present findings from a randomly assigned scholarship for low-income students at a medium-sized public 4-year university. The program focused solely on the first four semesters of enrollment and tied aid disbursements to modest academic benchmarks and enhanced academic advising. Meaningful decreases in time to degree appear to be driven by students with the lowest academic preparation and family income. Treated students took out approximately 20% less in student loans during the duration of the program. Participants also indicated high satisfaction with the program’s model of enhanced academic advising.
A Novel Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Sleep-Wake Detection Using Heart Rate Variability and Acceleration

Sleep-wake detection is of great importance for the measurement of sleep quality. In this article, a novel ensemble deep learning framework is proposed to detect sleep-wake states based on heart rate variability (HRV) and acceleration. We firstly design a local feature based long short-term memory (LF-LSTM) network to encode temporal dependency and learn features from acceleration data with high sampling frequency. In the meantime, some handcrafted features are extracted from HRV which has a special data format. After that, we develop a unified framework to integrate these two types of features, i.e., the features extracted from HRV and the features learned by LF-LSTM from acceleration, to form a complete feature set. Finally, an efficient ensemble learning scheme is proposed to further boost the performance of sleep-wake classification. A real dataset has been collected to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We also compare with some well-known benchmark approaches for sleep-wake detection. The results demonstrate that the proposed ensemble deep learning method outperforms all the benchmark approaches.
Helping Employees Help the Environment: An Intervention to Increase Environmental Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB-E) Via a Subtle Stimulus

HELPING EMPLOYEES HELP THE ENVIRONMENT: AN INTERVENTION TO INCREASE ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIORS (OCB-E) VIA A SUBTLE STIMULUS Rebecca C. Garden Old Dominion University, 2020 Director: Dr. Xiaoxiao Hu Researchers’ understanding of the relationships between environmentally-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (i.e., OCB-Es) and other workplace variables have improved since the turn of the century, but both our comprehension of the behaviors and the effectiveness of interventions targeting them require much more investigation. Further, there is very little research that examines the role of positive affect in promoting these behaviors, even though scholars have suggested that it may be the “silver bullet” (Kals & Müller, 2012) to facilitating employees’ voluntary environmental actions. To that end, the aim of the current research is to take an initial step towards understanding how organizations can use a subtle affective stimulus intervention to increase employees’ OCB-Es, as well as how stable personality traits may moderate this relationship. The current experimental field-study was designed to increase OCBEs via repeated exposure to a positively valenced subtle stimulus (i.e., a picture of a person smiling). In addition to examining positive affect as a mediator of this relationship, I also investigated how certain personality traits (i.e., openness to experience and conscientiousness) may both moderate the relationship between positive affect and OCB-Es and directly affect them. Although neither the proposed relationship between the subtle stimulus and positive affect nor the indirect effect of the stimulus on OCB-Es via positive affect for two of the three performance dimensions were supported, results did demonstrate a mediation effect of the
Glucocorticoids inhibit macrophage differentiation towards a pro-inflammatory phenotype upon wounding without affecting their migration

ABSTRACT Glucocorticoid drugs are widely used to treat immune-related diseases, but their use is limited by side effects and by resistance, which especially occurs in macrophage-dominated diseases. In order to improve glucocorticoid therapies, more research is required into the mechanisms of glucocorticoid action. In the present study, we have used a zebrafish model for inflammation to study glucocorticoid effects on the innate immune response. In zebrafish larvae, the migration of neutrophils towards a site of injury is inhibited upon glucocorticoid treatment, whereas migration of macrophages is glucocorticoid resistant. We show that wounding-induced increases in the expression of genes that encode neutrophil-specific chemoattractants (Il8 and Cxcl18b) are attenuated by the synthetic glucocorticoid beclomethasone, but that beclomethasone does not attenuate the induction of the genes encoding Ccl2 and Cxcl11aa, which are required for macrophage recruitment. RNA sequencing on FACS-sorted macrophages shows that the vast majority of the wounding-induced transcriptional changes in these cells are inhibited by beclomethasone, whereas only a small subset is glucocorticoid-insensitive. As a result, beclomethasone decreases the number of macrophages that differentiate towards a pro-inflammatory (M1) phenotype, which we demonstrated using a tnfa:eGFP-F reporter line and analysis of macrophage morphology. We conclude that differentiation and migration of macrophages are regulated independently, and that glucocorticoids leave the chemotactic migration of macrophages unaffected, but exert their anti-inflammatory effect on these cells by inhibiting their differentiation to an M1 phenotype. The resistance of macrophage-dominated diseases to glucocorticoid therapy can therefore not be attributed to an intrinsic insensitivity of macrophages to glucocorticoids. Summary: In a zebrafish model for inflammation, glucocorticoids do not affect the migration of macrophages, but inhibit their differentiation towards an M1 phenotype, by strongly attenuating transcriptional responses in these cells.
English Language Testing for Citizenship: A Thematic Analysis

The proposed changes to citizenship requirements in Australia have an increased focus on English language competency and on ‘Australian’ values. The dominance of the English language on the global stage can reinforce the hegemonic nature of the English language, which is becoming increasingly embedded in the image of an Australian citizen. This raises questions on what is motivating the centrality of English language testing for citizenship, and how these shape conceptions of Australian identity. This research is a thematic content analysis of media releases from newspapers, government statements and other grey materials on the recent changes to Australia’s citizenship requirements, particularly English language testing. The research found that English language testing can be seen as a form of cultural hegemony, which is shaped by a discourse of social integration and border security. Implications for understanding diversity and working with diverse language groups are explored in light of the English language testing and citizenship discourses in Australia.
Genetic Analyses and Mapping of Pink-Root Resistance in Onion

Pink root [PR (caused by Phoma terrestris)] is a major soil-borne disease of onion (Allium cepa) and reduces both yield and quality of bulbs. PR-resistant cultivars offer the best control option for this disease. The objectives of this study were to complete genetic analyses and mapping of PR resistances from independent sources. Segregating families were developed from different sources of PR resistance and evaluated using a seedling screen. PR severity in two segregating families from the same source of resistance mapped to one position on chromosome 4 with logarithm of odds (LOD) scores of 8.0 and 10.3, and explained 28% and 35% of the phenotypic variation, respectively. Estimates of additive and dominance effects revealed this source of PR resistance is codominantly inherited. PR resistance from a second source was assessed by percent survival in the seedling evaluation, showed codominance, and mapped to the same region on chromosome 4 at LOD 12.5 and explained 54% of the phenotypic variation. This research demonstrates that PR resistance from different sources mapped to the same chromosome region and showed similar modes of inheritance.
A Novel Graphics-Based Multi-Epoch Power Adjustment Strategy for WPCNs

In this paper, we focus on a wireless powered communication network where a hybrid access point can wirelessly activate the power of source nodes, and receive their information. Considering the time-switching protocol that implies energy harvesting, and energy usage are separated by time, a novel graphics-based multi-epoch power adjustment (GB-MPA) strategy is proposed to maximize the sum-throughput over a finite time horizon consisting of multiple transmission epochs. The proposed strategy relies on graphical constraint conditions, and allows the elimination of restrictions corresponding to the objective of throughput maximization. Moreover, the proposed GB-MPA strategy can be combined with the time-switching factor optimization by employing an alternating optimization procedure for performance enhancement. Simulation results show the accuracy of the proposed strategy, reduced complexity compared with the conventional convex optimization method, and the existing multi-epoch power adjustment strategy, and the compatibility with the alternating optimization procedure for developing the joint power, and time allocation scheme.