Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Legal Issues Pertaining To The Postsecondary Student With ADD

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has received considerable attention in the media. Is it real- Is it a disability under federal laws- What are the obligations of postsecondary institutions to students with ADD- ADD is real, and, like other impairments, it is a disability when it substantially limits a major life activity. Qualified postsecondary students with this disability are entitled to appropriate accommodations to make the courses, examinations and activities accessible to them. Legally required services must be provided at no additional charge. Services that are not legally required may be offered on a fee for service basis. Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a neurological disorder that impacts upon learning and behavior. ADD is a disability when it substantially limits a major life activity, such as learning. This article explores the nature of ADD and the legal rights of the postsecondary student with ADD. (Please see Introduction in this issue for a discussion of terminology.) Attention Deficit Disorder The Disorder
Direct Angiotensin AT2 Receptor Stimulation Using a Novel AT2 Receptor Agonist, Compound 21, Evokes Neuroprotection in Conscious Hypertensive Rats

Background In this study, the neuroprotective effect of a novel nonpeptide AT2R agonist, C21, was examined in a conscious model of stroke to verify a class effect of AT2R agonists as neuroprotective agents. Methods and Results Spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) were pre-treated for 5 days prior to stroke with C21 alone or in combination with the AT2R antagonist PD123319. In a separate series of experiments C21 was administered in a series of 4 doses commencing 6 hours after stroke. A focal reperfusion model of ischemia was induced in conscious SHR by administering endothelin-1 to the middle cerebral artery (MCA). Motor coordination was assessed at 1 and 3 days after stroke and post mortem analyses of infarct volumes, microglia activation and neuronal survival were performed at 72 hours post MCA occlusion. When given prior to stroke, C21 dose dependently decreased infarct volume, which is consistent with the behavioural findings illustrating an improvement in motor deficit. During the pre-treatment protocol C21 was shown to enhance microglia activation, which are likely to be evoking protection by releasing brain derived neurotrophic factor. When drug administration was delayed until 6 hours after stroke, C21 still reduced brain injury. Conclusion These results indicate that centrally administered C21 confers neuroprotection against stroke damage. This benefit is likely to involve various mechanisms, including microglial activation of endogenous repair and enhanced cerebroperfusion. Thus, we have confirmed the neuroprotective effect of AT2R stimulation using a nonpeptide compound which highlights the clinical potential of the AT2R agonists for future development.
Why Do Some Firms Outsource IT More Aggressively Than Others? The Effects of Organizational Characteristics on IT Outsourcing Decisions

The conventional benefits (i.e., cost reduction, the ability to focus on core competence, technological leadership, etc) and risks (i.e., vendor opportunism, lock-ins, contractual difficulties, etc) of IT outsourcing are extensively documented in the literature. Nevertheless, as IT outsourcing has become a pervasive organizational phenomenon, the greater part of its driving and constraining forces should be understood in a larger organizational context. This study provides new insight into the broader organizational factors, namely firm uncertainty, agency risk, firm innovativeness and IT intensity, that may influence a firm's propensity to outsource IT. The results suggest that firm uncertainty and agency risks negatively affect a firm's outsourcing decisions, while a positive association is observed between a firm's innovativeness (measured by R&D intensity) and IT outsourcing propensity. Our study serves as a fresh vantage point from which to explore new opportunities and challenges of IT outsourcing, going beyond the traditional studies that use financial characteristics as its primary determinants.
The Requirement for Molecular Chaperones during Endoplasmic Reticulum-associated Protein Degradation Demonstrates That Protein Export and Import Are Mechanistically Distinct*

Polypeptide import into the yeast endoplasmic reticulum (ER) requires two hsp70s, Ssa1p in the cytosol and BiP (Kar2p) in the ER lumen. After import, aberrant polypeptides may be exported to the cytoplasm for degradation by the proteasome, and defects in the ER chaperone calnexin (Cne1p) compromise their degradation. Both import and export require BiP and the Sec61p translocation complex, suggesting that import and export may be mechanistically related. We now show that the cne1Δ and two kar2 mutant alleles exhibit a synthetic interaction and that the export and degradation of pro-α factor is defective inkar2 mutant microsomes. Pulse-chase analysis indicates that A1PiZ, another substrate for degradation, is stabilized in thekar2 strains at the restrictive temperature. Because two of the kar2 mutants examined are proficient for polypeptide import, the roles of BiP during ER protein export and import differ, indicating that these processes must be mechanistically distinct. To examine whether Ssa1p drives polypeptides from the ER and is also required for degradation, we assembled reactions using strains either containing a mutation in SSA1 or in which the level of Ssa1p could be regulated. We found that pro-α factor and A1PiZ were degraded normally, indicating further that import and export are distinct and that other cytosolic factors may pull polypeptides from the ER.
The Protein-Protein Interaction extraction based on full texts

Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) extraction from literatures is becoming a more and more significant task in the biomedical information extraction. Though many methods for PPI extraction have achieved promising results, they all concentrated on the abstracts of literatures rather than full texts. In this paper, we append full-text features, namely Location and Co-occurrence to extract PPIs from full texts. Location describes where the protein pair appears in the article. Co-occurrence is the frequency of each protein pair occurring in the article. In addition, syntactic patterns are extracted as features, and then feature selection is applied to improve the performance and reduce the dimension of feature vectors in SVM. Finally, the selected features are combined with two-level DET tree kernel. Experimental results show that the presented approach can achieve an F-score of 74.46% and an AUC of 78.50%.
Genome-Wide Survey of Flavonoid Biosynthesis Genes and Gene Expression Analysis between Black- and Yellow-Seeded Brassica napus

Flavonoids, the compounds that impart color to fruits, flowers, and seeds, are the most widespread secondary metabolites in plants. However, a systematic analysis of these loci has not been performed in Brassicaceae. In this study, we isolated 649 nucleotide sequences related to flavonoid biosynthesis, i.e., the Transparent Testa (TT) genes, and their associated amino acid sequences in 17 Brassicaceae species, grouped into Arabidopsis or Brassicaceae subgroups. Moreover, 36 copies of 21 genes of the flavonoid biosynthesis pathway were identified in Arabidopsis thaliana, 53 were identified in Brassica rapa, 50 in Brassica oleracea, and 95 in B. napus, followed the genomic distribution, collinearity analysis and genes triplication of them among Brassicaceae species. The results showed that the extensive gene loss, whole genome triplication, and diploidization that occurred after divergence from the common ancestor. Using qRT-PCR methods, we analyzed the expression of 18 flavonoid biosynthesis genes in 6 yellow- and black-seeded B. napus inbred lines with different genetic background, found that 12 of which were preferentially expressed during seed development, whereas the remaining genes were expressed in all B. napus tissues examined. Moreover, 14 of these genes showed significant differences in expression level during seed development, and all but four of these (i.e., BnTT5, BnTT7, BnTT10, and BnTTG1) had similar expression patterns among the yellow- and black-seeded B. napus. Results showed that the structural genes (BnTT3, BnTT18, and BnBAN), regulatory genes (BnTTG2 and BnTT16) and three encoding transfer proteins (BnTT12, BnTT19, and BnAHA10) might play an crucial roles in the formation of different seed coat colors in B. napus. These data will be helpful for illustrating the molecular mechanisms of flavonoid biosynthesis in Brassicaceae species.
NeuroRhetoric(s) and NeuroComposition: Foundational Questions for Future Research

This thesis aspires to give voice to Jordynn Jack and L. Greggory Appelbaum’s call for more research in Neurorhetorics. The first chapter reviews the pertinent literature encompassing what is titled, “The Rhetoric of Science,” noting appropriate concepts, arguments, and theories. The second chapter provides an introduction to fundamental ideas in Neuroscience and connects them to possible concepts and concerns within Rhetoric and Composition, raising questions for future consideration. INDEX WORDS: Neurorhetorics, Neurocomposition, Neuroscience, Rhetoric, Composition NEURORHETORIC(S) AND NEUROCOMPOSITION: FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Costs of clinical mastitis and mastitis prevention in dairy herds.

A stratified random sample of 50 Ohio dairy herds, monitored for 1 year between March 1988 and May 1989, was used to estimate the component costs of clinical mastitis per cow-year overall and by organism, the component costs of an episode of clinical mastitis overall and by organism, and the incidence of clinical mastitis by organism. Each herd was visited monthly by a veterinarian who conducted on-farm interviews and completed standardized data-collection forms designed to elicit economic information about the on-farm costs of clinical mastitis and mastitis prevention. Producers collected milk samples prior to treatment of clinical mastitis cases. Culturing methods allowed identification of 18 specific mastitis pathogen classifications. Annual costs estimated were on a per cow-year and clinical episode basis. The monthly mean population of cows monitored was 4,068. Mastitis prevention cost $14.50/cow-year, whereas the cost incurred by producers because of clinical cases of mastitis was $37.91. Organisms prevalent in the cows' environment caused the most costly types of mastitis. Disregarding contaminated samples and episodes for which no milk samples were taken, mastitis for which 2 organisms were isolated accounted for 35.5% of costs of clinical mastitis, followed by cases for which Escherichia coli (21.3%) was isolated, cases for which culturing yielded no growth (8.6%), and cases for which esculin-positive Streptococcus spp (6.4%), Klebsiella spp (5.7%), esculin-negative CAMP-negative Streptococcus spp (5.1%), Enterobacter spp (4.8%), coagulase-negative Staphylococcus spp (4.1%), coagulase-positive Staphylococcus spp (3.0%), S agalactiae (2.5%), and Bacillus spp (1.2%) were isolated. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Do Antisocial preferences exist

For many decades research has been done on social preferences. Only recently researcher started to look for the occurrence of antisocial preferences. They designed new games to test for the ‘dark side’ of human nature. We tried to find out if antisocial preferences really exist or if they are just a side effect of the design of the games. We discussed fairness, inequality and reciprocity. We also checked for the occurrence of experimenter demand effects. In the last part of our research we wanted to see if and how social- and antisocial preferences would fit together. We found the positive burning rates found in the experiments were mainly because of fairness and inequality but there was also evidence for highly antisocial behavior. We found that social- and antisocial preferences would fit together and designed a scale to do this. Antisocial preferences do exist but they only cover a small part of human behavior.
Small object detection algorithm for sonar image based on pixel hierarchy

In view of the unclear outline of the object characteristics and the complexity of the background noise in sonar images, an object detection algorithm is proposed based on pixel hierarchy. According to the characteristics of depth map, "depth information" is inserted into different layers of the sonar image to describe the “depth” of each layer. Due to the higher gray values of the objects, and the lower gray values of the background, the sonar image is layered according to different gray-levels. The high gray values of sonar image are divided into several areas and then the areas are marked. Using the high gray value characteristics of the object pixels in each image layers, a coefficient for characterizing the possibility of containing the object pixels in each image layer is defined so that the final object segmentation is made easier. Experimental results show that the object segmentation algorithm is accurate and fast.
Geographic distance and pH drive bacterial distribution in alkaline lake sediments across Tibetan Plateau

Continent-scale biogeography has been extensively studied in soils and marine systems, but little is known about biogeographical patterns in non-marine sediments. We used barcode pyrosequencing to quantify the effects of local geochemical properties and geographic distance for bacterial community structure and membership, using sediment samples from 15 lakes on the Tibetan Plateau (4–1670 km apart). Bacterial communities were surprisingly diverse, and distinct from soil communities. Four of 26 phyla detected were dominant: Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Actinobacteria, albeit 20.2% of sequences were unclassified at the phylum level. As previously observed in acidic soil, pH was the dominant factor influencing alkaline sediment community structure, phylotype richness and phylogenetic diversity. In contrast, archaeal communities were less affected by pH. More geographically distant sites had more dissimilar communities (r = 0.443, P = 0.030). Variance partitioning analysis showed that geographic distance (historical contingencies) contributed more to bacterial community variation (12.2%) than any other factor, although the environmental factors explained more variance when combined (28.9%). Together, our results show that pH is the best predictor of bacterial community structure in alkaline sediments, and confirm that both geographic distance and chemical factors govern bacterial biogeography in lake sediments.
3D Symmetry Measure Invariant to Subject Pose During Image Acquisition

In this study we evaluate the influence of subject pose during image acquisition on quantitative analysis of breast morphology. Three (3D) and two-dimensional (2D) images of the torso of 12 female subjects in two different poses; (1) hands-on-hip (HH) and (2) hands-down (HD) were obtained. In order to quantify the effect of pose, we introduce a new measure; the 3D pBRA (Percentage Breast Retraction Assessment) index, and validate its use against the 2D pBRA index. Our data suggests that the 3D pBRA index is linearly correlated with the 2D counterpart for both of the poses, and is independent of the localization of fiducial points within a tolerance limit of 7 mm. The quantitative assessment of 3D asymmetry was found to be invariant of subject pose. This study further corroborates the advantages of 3D stereophotogrammetry over 2D photography. Problems with pose that are inherent in 2D photographs are avoided and fiducial point identification is made easier by being able to panoramically rotate the 3D surface enabling views from any desired angle.
SP ] 2 1 Fe b 20 08 An atlas for tridiagonal isospectral manifolds

Let TΛ be the compact manifold of real symmetric tridiagonal matrices conjugate to a given diagonal matrix Λ with simple spectrum. We introduce bidiagonal coordinates, charts defined on open dense domains forming an explicit atlas for TΛ. In contrast to the standard inverse variables, consisting of eigenvalues and norming constants, every matrix in TΛ now lies in the interior of some chart domain. We provide examples of the convenience of these new coordinates for the study of asymptotics of isospectral dynamics, both for continuous and discrete time.
Intelligent agents in virtual worlds

The realistic animation of the behavior of virtual agents emulating human beings and evolving within virtual 3D worlds (a field also known as artificial life) has received great attention during the last few years. The current challenge is to create a behavioral system for the virtual agents so that they behave as realistic as possible. Such a system should provide the agents with the most typical features of human intelligence: perception, recognition, memory, learning, reasoning, etc. Among the large number of different techniques to solve this problem, those based on artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be especially suitable for this purpose. In this paper, we apply several artificial intelligence techniques (such as neural networks, expert systems, fuzzy logic, K-means) to create a sophisticated behavioral system that allows the agents to take intelligent decisions by themselves. The paper describes the behavioral system, its main components and how these AI techniques have been effectively incorporated into the system. In order to show the good performance of our approach, an illustrative example is analyzed.
The Lactococcal Plasmid pNP40 Encodes a Third Bacteriophage Resistance Mechanism, One Which Affects Phage DNA Penetration

The lactococcal plasmid pNP40 mediates insensitivity to (phi)c2 by an early-acting phage resistance mechanism in addition to the previously identified abortive infection system, AbiF, in the Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis MG1614 background. A second abortive infection determinant on pNP40, AbiE, does not confer resistance to (phi)c2. The early-acting mechanism on pNP40 does not prevent phage adsorption nor does it appear to operate by restriction/modification. Phage DNA was not detected in pNP40-containing cells until 30 min following exposure to (phi)c2 compared with 5 min in a sensitive host; however, electroporation of phage DNA into resistant hosts resulted in the release of phage progeny from a dramatically elevated number of cells compared with conventionally infected hosts. It appears therefore that pNP40 encodes a novel phage resistance mechanism which blocks DNA penetration specifically for (phi)c2.
Borderline detection by Bayes vector quantizers

Borderline detection is the problem of finding samples falling near the decision boundary. It has many applications, related to the fact that for these samples small variations of feature values, due for instance to the presence of noise, can completely change their classification. In this paper, we propose an approach to borderline detection based on the geometric characteristics of labeled vector quantizers. The approach is based on the estimation of the true decision boundary by means of the Bayes Vector Quantizer (BVQ) algorithm. BVQ is a stochastic gradient algorithm for the minimization of the misclassification risk, hence it guarantees the accurate approximation of the optimal decision boundary. The features of the approach are discussed in comparison with Support Vector Machines (SVM), that is the best boundary hunting technique known in the literature.
Money's Role in the Monetary Business Cycle

A small, structural model of the monetary business cycle implies that real money balances enter into a correctly-specified, forward-looking IS curve if and only if they enter into a correctly-specified, forward-looking Phillips curve. The model also implies that empirical measures of real balances must be adjusted for shifts in money demand to accurately isolate and quantify the dynamic effects of money on output and inflation. Maximum likelihood estimates of the modelÕs parameters take both these considerations into account, but still suggest that money plays a minimal role in the monetary business cycle.
Discrete-Time Sliding Mode Observer for Sensorless Vector Control of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine

This paper proposes a sensorless vector control that combines two discrete-time observers to estimate the rotor speed and position of permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM). The first one is a sliding mode (DSM) current observer and the second one is an adaptive electromotive force (EMF) observer. Initially, the sliding conditions that assure the sliding motion around the sliding surface are derived and a design procedure to the DSM current observer is developed. Moreover, using discrete-time adaptive Lyapunov based EMF observer the rotor speed and position are obtained. Experimental results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the very good performance of the proposed discrete-time sensorless vector control.
Spectral analysis of heart rate without resampling

Standard methods of estimating the power spectral density (PSD) of irregularly sampled signals such as instantaneous heart rate (HR) require resampling at uniform intervals and replacement of unusable samples. The Lomb periodogram is a means of obtaining PSD estimates directly from irregularly sampled time series, avoiding these requirements. The author compares Fourier, autoregressive, and Lomb PSD estimates from synthetic, real, and noise-corrupted real heart rate time series, and examines systematic differences among these estimates. An algorithm is presented for obtaining a heart rate time series suitable for Lomb PSD estimation from an RR interval time series with included ectopic beats and erroneous measurements. The author concludes with a brief survey of other applications of the technique, such as estimation of respiratory frequency from a time series of beat-by-beat measurements of the mean electrical axis. <<ETX>>
The language of conflict and resolution

Communication and Conflict - William F Eadie and Paul E Nelson A Review and an Agenda for Research The Language of Opposition - Linda L Putnam Challenges in Organizational Dispute Resolution Resolving Relational Paradox - William A Donohue The Language of Conflict in Relationships Conflict in Our Intimate Relationships - Judy C Pearson Conflict Negotiation under Crisis Conditions - Mitchell R Hammer Emotional Communication in Conflict - Tricia S Jones Essence and Impact Language and Civility - Donald G Ellis The Semantics of Anger