Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fasting reduces the kiss 1 mRNA levels in the caudal hypothalamus of gonadally intact adult female rats

Kisspeptin, which is the product of the kiss1 gene and its receptor kiss1r, have emerged as the essential gatekeepers of reproduction. The present study used gonadally intact female rats to evaluate fasting-induced suppression of the KiSS-1 system of anteroventral periventricular nucleus (AVPV) and arcuate nucleus (ARC) under normal physiological conditions. Starting on the day of estrous, one group of rats was subjected to 72 h of food deprivation, while the other group of rats was able to continue feeding ad libitum. The length of the estrous cycle was significantly longer in the food-deprived rats as compared to the feeding rats. At the end of the 72-h food deprivation period, all of the fooddeprived rats were at the diestrous phase, with their serum concentrations of LH and leptin significantly lower than that observed in the feeding rats. In addition, as compared to the feeding rats, the expression levels of kiss1 mRNA were significantly lower in the food-deprived rats in the posterior hypothalamic block, which contained the ARC, but not in the anterior hypothalamic block, which contain the AVPV. However, both the kiss1r mRNA expression levels in the anterior and posterior hypothalamic blocks and the neurokinin B and neurokinin 3 receptor mRNA expression levels in the posterior hypothalamic block were not significantly different between the feeding and food-deprived rats. Thus, lower kiss1 mRNA levels in the ARC appear to be responsible for the fasting-induced inhibition of gonadotrophin secretion and subsequent prolongation of the estrous cycle.
AGAinst PolitiCAl rAPe : ArAB woMen ’ s sUBAlternitY DUrinG PolitiCAl strUGGles

Arab Spring movements in many Arab countries revealed a gap at the heart of Arab society and politics: the large-scale subalternity of Arab women in such movements. In this essay, I hypothesise that, with few exceptions, Arab women have always avoided participation in social and political activism because of their fear of political rape – raping women as punishment during political turmoil. The essay traces the history of political rape through different stages of Arab history. The examples are taken from history, literature and international reports and they mainly cover three countries: Syria, Egypt and Libya. These examples prove that vulnerable women’s horror at any possibility of their being sexually abused and then rejected by their families and society has always haunted them, preventing them from struggling or protesting. The essay concludes that subalternity is the only stance from which Arab women can encounter political rape. Then, the essay discusses the subalternity of Arab women in the light of the thought of the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak. This argument leads to the contention that the silence of Arab women vulnerable to political rape should not be considered passive and that feminist theories and actions cannot be successful in supporting subaltern Arab women without the ethical responsibility theorised by Spivak as the most appropriate approach to the subaltern female. This approach entails respecting subaltern Arab women’s culture and fears and avoiding any attempt to make them copies of the European feminist self. Subaltern Arab women who are afraid of being sexually abused have the right to protect their bodies and stick to their culture while still participating in public life. olA ABdAlkAFor DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE, FILM, AND THEATRE STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX silenCe AGAinst PolitiCAl rAPe: ArAB woMen’s sUBAlternitY DUrinG PolitiCAl strUGGles Corresponding author: Ola Abdalkafor, Email: oabdal@essex.ac. uk keywords rape, Arab feminism, Arab Spring, subalternity, Gayatri Spivak
Developing Position Structure-Based Framework for Chinese Entity Relation Extraction

Relation extraction is the task of finding semantic relations between two entities in text, and is often cast as a classification problem. In contrast to the significant achievements on English language, research progress in Chinese relation extraction is relatively limited. In this article, we present a novel Chinese relation extraction framework, which is mainly based on a 9-position structure. The design of this proposed structure is motivated by the fact that there are some obvious connections between relation types/subtypes and position structures of two entities. The 9-position structure can be captured with less effort than applying deep natural language processing, and is effective to relieve the class imbalance problem which often hurts the classification performance. In our framework, all involved features do not require Chinese word segmentation, which has long been limiting the performance of Chinese language processing. We also utilize some correction and inference mechanisms to further improve the classified results. Experiments on the ACE 2005 Chinese data set show that the 9-position structure feature can provide strong support for Chinese relation extraction. As well as this, other strategies are also effective to further improve the performance.
London, Paris, Istanbul, and Cairo: Fashion And International Trade in the Nineteenth Century

This paper is an examination of the relationship between the Anglo-Turkish Convention of 1838 and the transformation in Ottoman women's dress which took place during the nineteenth century. Until now, there has been a tendency to assume a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the Anglo-Turkish Convention and other economic treaties of the period, and fashion. The argument has been that the substantial increase in the volume of imported textiles and other goods led to a change in clothing styles, and indeed to changes in Ottoman taste generally, but my study of Ottoman women's dress indicates that the situation was much more complex. It is clear that the transformation in dress was well under way by the time of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, proceeding at its own rate, tied to events other than the treaty. In this context, fashion represents one of a whole complex of components of culture which, although affected by economic developments, are primarily social phenomena. Examining an area such as fashion (or painting or theater, for instance) will lead to a richer understanding of the period of the Anglo-Turkish Convention.
DENOMINATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN CONGREGATION YOUTH MINISTRY PROGRAMS AND EVIDENCE OF SYSTEMATIC NON-RESPONSE BIASES

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of congregationally-based youth programs in one geographically specified area in northern Indiana. A response rate of 98.9 per- cent (N=269) from congregations to a survey and 42 additional in-person interviews with youth ministers were conducted to compile data on the characteristics of congregations, youth attendance, youth groups, and youth ministers across denominational categories. Results of the study support the hypothesis that youth programming differs across denominations. Findings also highlight the need for high response rates and representative sampling methodologies to provide a valid view of congregationally-based youth programming.
Chromatin differentiation of white blood cells decreases DSB damage induction, prevents functional assembly of repair foci, but has no influence on protrusion of heterochromatic DSBs into the low-dense chromatin

Purpose: Higher order chromatin structure progressively changes with cell differentiation and seems to play an important role in DNA double-strand break (DSB) induction and repair (reviewed in [1]). We compared DNA damage in heterochromatin (Hc) upon the action of qualitatively different radiations. We also studied, how is the sensitivity to DSB induction, assembly of repair foci and processing of DSBs influenced by the differentiation-induced changes in chromatin structure and composition. Materials and methods: Formation, localization (relative to higher-order chromatin domains) and mutual colocalization of γH2AX and p53BP1 repair foci have been studied together with DSB repair kinetics in spatially fixed human skin fibroblast and differently differentiated white blood cells (WBC) irradiated with gamma rays, protons of different energies [2, 3], and 20Ne ions (submitted). Immunostaining and ImmunoFISH were used in combination with high-resolution confocal microscopy [2, 3] and living cell imaging [4]. Results: We found that less DSBs appear in Hc after irradiating cells with gamma rays and protons but not 20Ne ions (preliminary results). In addition, contrary to γ-irradiated human skin fibroblasts and lymphocytes, mature granulocytes neither express DSB repair proteins nor form functional repair foci [5]. At least some DSB repair proteins (e.g. 53BP1) are expressed and γH2AX foci still occur in immature granulocytes and monocytes [2, 5]; however, the colocalization of γH2AX with 53BP1 is low and the majority of DSBs are not repaired. Despite this fact, γH2AX foci protrude from Hc into nuclear subcompartments with low chromatin density. Our living cell observations suggest that 53BP1 can penetrate into the interior of dense Hc domains only after their decondensation [2]. Conclusions: We show that Hc is less sensitive to DSB induction by gamma rays but not heavy ions; lower Hc hydratation and higher protein density (when compared with euchromatin) probably reduce formation of free radicals and increase their sequestration, respectively. This mechanism can protect cells against the indirect effect of ionizing radiation (marked for gamma rays and protons but not heavy ions). Hc features, however, preclude DSB repair, which is best illustrated by its absence in differentiated WBC but not their immature precursors. The protrusion of Hc-DSBs into low-density chromatin nuclear subdomains, however, appears also in differentiated WBC, so the process might simply follow physical forces (e.g. as suggested by M Durante's group). There is no Clinical Trial Registration number.
A New Low-Power CMOS Quadrature VCO with Current Reused Structure

A new quadrature voltage controlled oscillator (QVCO) circuit topology is proposed for low-voltage and low-power applications. In the proposed circuit, two oscillators with current-reused structure are coupled to each other by two P&N-MOS pairs. In this way, low phase noise quadrature signals are generated with low-voltage and low-power. The simulation is made by Cadence in chartered 0.18 μm CMOS process. The simulation result shows that the QVCO phase noise is approximately 117.1 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from 1.8 GHz operation frequency. The QVCO dissipates 1.92 mW with a 1.1 V supply voltage.
Wall-bounded turbulent flows at high Reynolds numbers: Recent advances and key issues

Wall-bounded turbulent flows at high Reynolds numbers have become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Many challenges remain in theory, scaling, physical understanding, experimental techniques, and numerical simulations. In this paper we distill the salient advances of recent origin, particularly those that challenge textbook orthodoxy. Some of the outstanding questions, such as the extent of the logarithmic overlap layer, the universality or otherwise of the principal model parameters such as the von Karman “constant,” the parametrization of roughness effects, and the scaling of mean flow and Reynolds stresses, are highlighted. Research avenues that may provide answers to these questions, notably the improvement of measuring techniques and the construction of new facilities, are identified. We also highlight aspects where differences of opinion persist, with the expectation that this discussion might mark the beginning of their resolution.
Alternative membrane forms of Fc gamma RIII(CD16) on human natural killer cells and neutrophils. Cell type-specific expression of two genes that differ in single nucleotide substitutions

A low affinity receptor for IgG immune complexes, Fc gamma RIII(CD16), is expressed on human NK cells as an integral membrane glycoprotein anchored through a transmembrane peptide; on polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN) the receptor is anchored through a phosphatidylinositol (PI) linkage. The protein on NK cells has a molecular mass 6-10 kD larger than that on PMN, and, unlike the latter, is resistant to PI-specific phospholipase C (PI-PLC). Fc gamma RIII(CD16) transcripts isolated from PMN and NK cells of single donors revealed multiple single nucleotide differences, one of which converts an in frame UGA termination codon to a CGA codon. The resulting open reading frame encodes a longer cytoplasmic domain for Fc gamma RIII(CD16) in NK cells, contributing to its transmembrane anchor. Two nearly identical, linked genes that encode these transcripts have been cloned for Fc gamma RIII(CD16), one of which (III-1) is allelic for NA- 1 and NA-2. The allelic sites have been mapped to two single nucleotides in the extracellular domain. These genes are transcribed in a cell type-specific fashion to generate the alternatively anchored forms of this receptor.
Validation of the Learning Progression-based Assessment of Modern Genetics in a college context

ABSTRACT Building upon a methodologically diverse research foundation, we adapted and validated the Learning Progression-based Assessment of Modern Genetics (LPA-MG) for college students’ knowledge of the domain. Toward collecting valid learning progression-based measures in a college majors context, we redeveloped and content validated a majority of a previous version of the LPA-MG which was developed for high school students. Using a Rasch model calibrated on 316 students from 2 sections of majors introductory biology, we demonstrate the validity of this version and describe how college students’ ideas of modern genetics are likely to change as the students progress from low to high understanding. We then utilize these findings to build theory around the connections college students at different levels of understanding make within and across the many ideas within the domain.
Research and Teaching Statement 1.1.1 Improved Iterative Methods

1.1 Summary of the Previous Accomplishments As the IC technology moves to nanometer device dimensions and gigahertz clock frequencies, interconnects play the dominating role in determining the performance, power, reliability, and cost of the system. Therefore , interconnect-centric paradigm is needed at every level of the design process, from system architecture design to careful process geometry optimization, to eliminate the interconnect performance bottleneck. Due to substantial advances in VLSI process technology, designers are facing rapid increase in system complexity. One natural approach to designing highly complex systems is to to decompose the large system into a set of smaller subsystems recursively and carry out the design hierarchically. Circuit partitioning divides a given circuit into a collection of smaller subcircuits while satisfying the given area and/or pin constraints. The conventional objective of partitioning is to minimize the number of connections among the subcircuits, which has a direct impact on the nal chip area minimization. Under the new interconnect-centric design paradigm, however, partitioning is seen as the crucial step that deenes the local and global interconnects { intra-partition connections become local interconnects, whereas inter-partition connections become global interconnects. To meet the performance requirement of today's complex design, partitioners must consider the amount of interconnect induced by partitioning (measured by its cutsize) as well as its impact on performance (measured by its delay). Many proposed cutsize oriented partitioners do not consider delay, while many proposed delay oriented partitioners do not consider cutsize. As a result, there is a strong need for a performance driven partitioner that considers both cutsize and delay and provides smooth cutsize/delay tradeoo. The main focus of my research at UCLA VLSI CAD Lab during last 5 years has been on the development of novel algorithms for the performance driven circuit partitioning problem under the objective of simultaneous cutsize and delay minimization, which later migrated into the interconnect-driven physical planning. The outcome is the development of 6 algorithms 1 categorized into the following 3 groups. Our goal on this topic is to investigate the limitations of current state-of-the-art in iterative improvement based cutsize driven and delay driven partitioners, and develop eecient and eeective way to overcome the limitations. We proposed LR 2], KPM 3, 15], and FLARE 5] algorithms. LR (Loose net Removal) is a cutsize driven bipartitioning algorithm. LR is a variant of conventional cell move based FM 8] bipartitioning algorithm, where a new modiied gain function is used …
Two-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement simulations of colliding flows

Context. Colliding flows are a commonly used scenario for the formation of molecular clouds in numerical simulations. Turbulence is produced by cooling, because of the thermal instability of the warm neutral medium. Aims. We carried out a two-dimensional numerical study of colliding flows to test whether statistical properties inferred from adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations are robust with respect to the applied refinement criteria. Methods. We compare probability density functions of various quantities, as well as the clump statistics and fractal dimension of the density fields in AMR simulations to a static-grid simulation. The static grid with 2048 2 cells matches the resolution of the most refined subgrids in the AMR simulations. Results. The density statistics are reproduced fairly well by AMR. Refinement criteria based on the cooling time or the turbulence intensity appear to be superior to the standard technique of refinement by overdensity. Nevertheless, substantial differences in the flow structure become apparent. Conclusions. In general, it is difficult to separate numerical effects from genuine physical processes in AMR simulations.
Codeswitching and discourse markers in the narratives of a bilingual speaker with aphasia

ABSTRACT Background: Codeswitching and discourse markers are proposed as potentially compensatory means to promote fluency in bilingual people diagnosed with nonfluent aphasia. Aim: This paper examined four linguistic markers of aphasia and fluency—grammaticality, complexity, codeswitching, and discourse markers—in the narratives of a bilingual speaker, in order to assess whether and to what extent these phenomena are manifested in the two languages of a person with aphasia. Methods & Procedures: Sixteen narratives per language were collected, using a cue word procedure, from a 59-year-old Yiddish–English bilingual with diagnosed moderate nonfluent aphasia. Analyses of frequency and locus of ungrammaticality, sentence complexity, codeswitching, and discourse markers were conducted as well as motivations for codeswitching. Outcomes & Results: Findings showed more ungrammaticality in English (L2) than Yiddish (L1), relatively similar levels of complexity, and very similar use of discourse markers in both languages. Codeswitching was more prevalent in Yiddish (L1), motivated by lexical access difficulties, whereas in English (L2), codeswitching was motivated both by lexical access and cross-linguistic lexicalization differences. Conclusions: Differential use of codeswitching across the languages of a bilingual person with nonfluent aphasia shows that different strategies are used to enhance fluency and compensate for ungrammaticality in each language. Clinically, the study shows the importance of assessment in both languages, and suggests that intervention in both languages should be considered pending further investigation.
Humanoid robot push recovery through foot placement

This paper presents biped robot push recovery through foot placement. The main challenge in foot placement approach i.e. direction and size of step to be taken is estimated based on inverted pendulum model considering change in kinetic and potential energies in case of external push. The direction and strength of push in our real robot is detected through Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS) and the balance is recovered by foot placement in appropriate direction with calculated step size.
Hopf bifurcation and chaos in a free-running current-controlled Cuk switching regulator

An autonomous free-running Cuk converter is studied in this paper. Analysis of the describing nonlinear state equations shows that the system loses stability via a supercritical Hopf bifurcation. The boundary of stability is derived and local trajectories of motion studied. Cycle-by-cycle simulations of the actual system reveal the typical bifurcation from a stable equilibrium state to chaos, via limit cycles, and quasi-periodic orbits. Experimental measurements confirm the bifurcation scenarios. The occurrence of such kinds of bifurcation in autonomous dc/dc converters has been rarely known in power electronics.
Explosions of O-Ne-Mg cores, the Crab supernova, and subluminous type II-P supernovae

We present results of simulations of stellar collapse and explosions in spherical symmetry for progenitor stars in the 8–$10\,M_\odot$ range with an O-Ne-Mg core. The simulations were continued until nearly one second after core bounce and were performed with the Prometheus/Vertex code with a variable Eddington factor solver for the neutrino transport, including a state-of-the-art treatment of neutrino-matter interactions. Particular effort was made to implement nuclear burning and electron capture rates with sufficient accuracy to ensure a smooth continuation, without transients, from the progenitor evolution to core collapse. Using two different nuclear equations of state (EoSs), a soft version of the Lattimer & Swesty EoS and the significantly stiffer Wolff & Hillebrandt EoS, we found no prompt explosions, but instead delayed explosions, powered by neutrino heating and the neutrino-driven baryonic wind which sets in about 200 ms after bounce. The models eject little nickel (${<} 0.015~M_\odot$), explode with an energy of ${\ga}0.1\times 10^{51}\,$erg, and leave behind neutron stars (NSs) with a baryonic mass near $1.36\,M_\odot$. Different from previous models of such explosions, the ejecta during the first second have a proton-to-baryon ratio of $Y_{\rm{e}} \ga 0.46$, which suggests a chemical composition that is not in conflict with galactic abundances. No low-entropy matter with $Y_{\rm{e}} \ll 0.5$ is ejected. This excludes such explosions as sites of a low-entropy r-process. The low explosion energy and nucleosynthetic implications are compatible with the observed properties of the Crab supernova, and the small nickel mass supports the possibility that our models explain some subluminous type II-P supernovae.
Computer Games and Multichannel Audio Quality Part 2 ' Evaluation of Time-Variant Audio Degradations Under Divided and Undivided Attention

The effect of division of attention between the evaluation of multichannel audio quality degradations and involvement in a visual task (playing a computer game) was investigated. Time-variant impairments (drop-outs) were used to provide degradations in audio quality. It was observed that involvement in a visual task may significantly change the results obtained during the evaluation of audio impairments for some experimental conditions.