Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leflunomide for cytomegalovirus: bench to bedside

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality among transplant recipients, frequently engaging the clinician in a struggle to balance graft preservation with control of CMV disease. Leflunomide has been shown to have immunosuppressive activity in experimental allograft models together with antiviral activity inhibiting CMV both in vitro and in vivo. Data are emerging about its potential role in ganciclovir‐sensitive and ‐resistant CMV, primarily by virtue of a unique mechanism inhibiting virion assembly, as opposed to inhibition of viral DNA synthesis by current agents. This review aims to put in perspective, the knowledge acquired in the last decade or so on leflunomide for CMV. Evidence suggests that it might have activity against human CMV with good oral bioavailability and, more importantly in the resource‐poor setting, is economical. Although the data presented here are not from randomized trials, several relevant observations have been made that could influence future, more structured assessments of the drug. An immune suppressive compound with antiviral features and experimental activity in chronic rejection is an attractive combination for organ transplantation, and it appears that leflunomide may just fit that niche.
Functional and Structural Changes of Agricultural Landscapes: How Changes are Conceived by Local Farmers in Two Danish Rural Communities

Abstract The subject of this paper is the views of farmers concerning their local landscape. In two contrasting Danish case study areas previously analysed in the 1990s, a small number of farmers have been interviewed regarding their views of the landscape and recent changes in their respective area including landscape changes. One of the areas (Hvorslev) is characterized by good conditions for agriculture, intensive husbandry production and a relatively stable landscape history. The other (Nees) has more marginal conditions and major changes in land use characterize the recent landscape history. We analyze the way in which the landscape is perceived by farmers and compare their views of the changing landscapes with the actual recorded changes on the one hand, and with other significant changes on the other. Farmers in both areas emphasized the same type of structural changes in agriculture and in the villages as significant, whereas only farmers in Nees indicated that the landscape had changed. When asked to characterize the landscape, farmers in Nees replied with a greater degree of detail and were more locally focused compared to farmers in Hvorslev who mainly referred to (well known) sites located a few kilometres outside the area in question. Long-term experiences with landscape changes and collective actions concerning landscape issues are suggested as the main reasons that farmers in Nees share a well developed awareness of their local landscape. We conclude by discussing some implications of this study for landscape research and policy.
'You have one identity': performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn

Social media are popular stages for self-expression, communication and self-promotion. Rather than facilitating online identity formation, they are sites of struggle between users, employers and platform owners to control online identities – a struggle played out at the level of the interface. This article offers a comparative interface analysis between Facebook and LinkedIn. While Facebook is particularly focused on facilitating personal self-presentation, LinkedIn’s interface caters towards the need for professional self-promotion. And yet, both platforms deploy similar principles of connectivity and narrative – strategies that can be succinctly revealed in recent interface changes. These changing digital architectures form the necessary backdrop for asking critical questions about online self-presentation: How are public identities shaped through platform interfaces? How do these features enable and constrain the sculpting of personal and professional persona? And what are the consequences of imposed c.
Limits to new public participation practices in local land use planning

A key objective of new participatory practices in local affairs is to increase public trust in civic institutions. Debate surrounds the extent to which collaborative approaches to planning and decision making are capable of giving precedence to the concerns of the public or of promoting trust in local institutions. The paper draws on public experience of new participation practices associated with the development control process to determine whether new participation practices moderate or reinforce public distrust of local institutions. It finds that the political realities of the planning system serve to reproduce existing structures of power that do little to overcome public distrust either among groups who have traditionally taken an active role in local affairs, or new participants recruited into the process.
On the asynchronously continuous control of mobile robot movement by motor cortical spiking activity

This paper presents an asynchronously intracortical brain-computer interface (BCI) which allows the subject to continuously drive a mobile robot. This system has a great implication for disabled patients to move around. By carefully designing a multiclass support vector machine (SVM), the subject's self-paced instantaneous movement intents are continuously decoded to control the mobile robot. In particular, we studied the stability of the neural representation of the movement directions. Experimental results on the nonhuman primate showed that the overt movement directions were stably represented in ensemble of recorded units, and our SVM classifier could successfully decode such movements continuously along the desired movement path. However, the neural representation of the stop state for the self-paced control was not stably represented and could drift.
Visualisation Tools for Supporting Self-Regulated Learning through Exploiting Competence Structures

In this paper an approach is presented how self-regulated learning can be supported and stimulated by visualising knowledge and competence structures in order to provide visual guidance in the learning process. In the field of adaptive systems and related research techniques of intelligent guidance have been developed, which, however, may have the disadvantage of limiting the learner. On the other hand, self-regulated learning gives greater control and responsibility to the learner, however, especially weak learner may have difficulties without provision of guidance. The presented approach combines both offering guidance and granting control over the own learning process. A set of learning tools have been developed which implement and demonstrate the proposed approach. Since knowledge structuring and knowledge visualisation are well established in the field of knowledge management, this approach can be exploited to bridge the research fields of e-learning and knowledge management.
Automatic Reconstruction of Unstructured 3D Data: Combining a Medial Axis and Implicit Surfaces

This paper presents a new method that combines a medial axis and implicit surfaces in order to reconstruct a 3D solid from an unstructured set of points scattered on the object's surface. The representation produced is based on iso‐surfaces generated by skeletons, and is a particularly compact way of defining a smooth free‐form solid. The method is based on the minimisation of an energy representing a “distance” between the set of data points and the iso‐surface, resembling previous reserach19. Initialisation, however, is more robust and efficient since there is computation of the medial axis of the set of points. Instead of subdividing existing skeletons in order to refine the object's surface, a new reconstruction algorithm progressively selects skeleton‐points from the pre‐ computed medial axis using an heuristic principle based on a “local energy” criterion. This drastically speeds up the reconstruction process. Moreover, using the medial axis allows reconstruction of objects with complex topology and geometry, like objects that have holes and branches or that are composed of several connected components. This process is fully automatic. The method has been successfully applied to both synthetic and real data.
L2 Processing of Dutch regular and irregular verbs

Do L1 and (advanced) L2 speakers of Dutch employ distinct processes - rule application for regulars and lexical lookup for irregulars - when producing Dutch past tense forms ? Do L2 speakers of a language that observes the same dual conjugation system as in Dutch (e.g. English, German) produce Dutch past tenses by a different process (i.e. more like that of L1 speakers) than learners of Dutch with a different L1 verb system (e.g. Japanese and Chinese) ? We studied the on-line past tense production performance of L1 speakers and of advanced L2 speakers of Dutch varying relative past tense frequency of regular and irregular Dutch verbs. Performance proved slower and less accurate with both L1 and L2 speakers for irregular verbs with relatively low past tense frequency. No frequency effects were found for regular verbs. The results were qualitatively the same for English/German and for Japanese/Chinese L2 speakers, with striking tendency to overgeneralize the regular past tense formation. We conclude that the mental representation of the Dutch past tense rule is essentially the same for L1 and L2 language users
High functioning autistic spectrum disorders, offending and other law-breaking: findings from a community sample

Abstract The prevalence and pattern of offending and other law-breaking among groups of men and women with High Functioning Autism/Asperger Syndrome (ASDs) living in the community has not, so far, been examined empirically. In this study, the illegal behaviours of a small sample (N = 25) of people with ASDs were investigated. Unexpectedly, both self-report and ‘official’ data indicated that the rate of law-breaking, including offending, was very low. Indeed, it was significantly (p<0.05) lower than that of a stringent non-ASD comparison group (N = 20). Despite similarities, however, there were some striking differences between the patterns of illegal behaviours in the two groups. The participants with a diagnosis of an ASD were significantly (p<0.01) less likely to report that they had engaged in illicit drug-taking; in contrast, they were significantly more likely (p<0.05) to report activities which could be categorised as ‘criminal damage’. Moreover, they tended to have a greater history of violent behaviours. The methodological limitations of this study, particularly the difficulties of recruiting an adequate community sample of people with ASDs, are discussed, together with the implications for the development of services for the small minority of men and women with this diagnosis who are involved in criminal offending and other law-breaking.
The Sacred in Leadership: Separation, Sacrifice and Silence

In attempting to escape from the clutches of heroic leadership we now seem enthralled by its apparent opposite—distributed leadership: in this post-heroic era we will all be leaders so that none are. This essay suggests that we need to reconsider the nature of leadership if we are to assess alternatives and a critical aspect is its relationship to the sacred. I suggest that the sacred nature of leadership is not so much the elephant in the room but the room itself—the space that allows leadership to work. Leadership embodies three elements of the sacred: the separation between leaders and followers, the sacrifice of leaders and followers, and the way leaders silence the anxiety and resistance of followers. The essay concludes that non-sacred governance systems are plausible but that the effort and responsibility required would politicize the private sphere and render radical alternatives—non-sacred leadership—only viable for short-term, small scale organizations. We need therefore to find ways of engaging with, rather than seeking to avoid, the sacred nature of leadership.
The Parochial Dinosaur: Organizational Science in a Global Context

This article reviews academic management from three global perspectives: contextual, quantitative, and qualitative. Based on multiple methods of assessment, academic management is found to be overly parochial. Cultural values of the United States underlie and have fundamentally framed management research, thus imbuing organizational science with implicit, and yet inappropriate, universalism. Recommendations are made to develop a more globally relevant organizational science in which universal, regiocentric, intercultural, and culture-specific theories and research are clearly demarcated.
In Favor of Tipping the Balance: Animal Rights Activists in Defense of Residential Picketing

This discussion focuses on the rationales employed by animal rights activists to explain their involvement in, and support of, protest tactics that are controversial both inside and outside the animal rights movement. The paper centers on the use of residential picketing (“home demos”) in a campaign against a private, multinational animal testing firm. Using ethnographic data and semistructured interviews with activists, the discussion demonstrates that these activists are aware of the marginality of their tactics. Despite some ambivalence, however, activists accept full responsibility for their actions and justify their behavior by utilizing supportive rationales that stress the perceived efficacy of home demos. Specifically, they appeal to the immediate and long-term psychological and direct and indirect material impacts on protest targets. These narratives are explored as constructions that are shaped and disseminated within the context of the state’s preoccupation with “ecoterrorism” and the movement’s internal debates regarding acceptable protest tactics.
Universal and dialect-specific pathways of acquisition: Caregivers, children, and t/d deletion

Abstract T/d deletion is one of the most widely studied variables in sociolinguistic research, and findings demonstrate universal morphological and phonological constraints across a range of dialects. Research into the acquisition of this variable suggests that articulatory constraints are learned first, followed by grammatical, and finally stylistic and social constraints. Dialect-specific constraints are also found, implicating the caregiver in the process of acquisition. In this article, we contribute to this research on the acquisition of t/d through the examination of the speech of preschool children in interaction with their primary caregivers in a community in Scotland. Our results mirror previous results on how and when particular constraints are acquired, providing further evidence for universal order of acquisition of this form. We also demonstrate dialect-specific constraints on use that can be mapped directly to caregiver speech. This provides additional evidence on how variable forms are transmitted from parent to child in these early stages.
Improving medical segmentation with haptic interaction

We present a new virtual reality-based interaction metaphor for semi-automatic segmentation of medical 3D volume data. The mouse-based, manual initialization of deformable surfaces in 3D represents a major bottleneck in interactive segmentation. In our multi-modal system we enhance this process with additional sensory feedback. A 3D haptic device is used to extract the centerline of a tubular structure. Based on the obtained path a cylinder with varying diameter is generated which in turn is used as the initial guess for a deformable surface.
Regulation of metastasis‐related gene expression by p53: A potential clinical implication

Tumor metastasis is the main cause of mortality and treatment failure in cancer patients. It is a complex biological process regulated by alternations in expression of many genes. The p53 tumor suppressor gene has been shown to regulate expression of some metastasis‐related genes. P53 transcriptionally activates expression of the genes encoding epidermal growth factor receptor, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)‐2, cathepsin D, and thrombospondin‐1 but represses expression of the genes encoding basic fibroblast growth factor and multidrug resistance‐1. Decreased expression of E‐cadherin is associated with p53 alternations. Because these p53‐regulatory genes either promote or inhibit tumor metastasis, the net effect of p53 expression on tumor metastasis depends upon the pattern of expression of these genes in a particular tumor. Because radiotherapy has been shown to increase tumor metastasis in both animal and human studies and because p53 is activated by radiation or DNA‐damaging reagents, here we propose the working hypothesis that p53 may promote tumor metastasis upon induction by local radiotherapy or chemotherapy in some tumor types. For patients whose tumors contain wild‐type p53, MMP inhibitors might be given with or before radiotherapy or chemotherapy to prevent an increase in tumor metastasis. Special caution should be taken with patients with cancers such as nasopharyngeal carcinoma in which p53 mutation is infrequent and radiotherapy is the main choice of treatment. To test our hypothesis, three studies are proposed and could serve as an initial step in understanding the complex biological process following radiation‐induced p53 activation and its roles in regulation of tumor metastasis. Mol. Carcinog. 24:25–28, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
HIGH-ORDER POINT VARIATIONS AND GENERALIZED DIFFERENTIALS

In a series of nonsmooth versions of the Pontryagin Maximum Principle, we used generalized differentials of set-valued maps, flows, and abstract variations. Bianchini and Stefani have introduced a notion of possibly high-order variational vector that has the summability property. We consider a slightly more general class of variational vectors than that defined by Bianchini and Stefani, and prove that the convex combinations of these vectors arise as “differentials” of variations that are differentiable in the sense of one of our generalized differentiation theories, namely, that of “approximate generalized differential quotients” (AGDQs).
3D focal spot manipulation at millimeter waves

In this work a methodology to shape the near field of radiating apertures is presented. The technique, despite being generic, is applied to the specific scenario of shaping the focal pattern of a 12λ focusing aperture at 30 GHz. The main result comprises the capability to shrink/enlarge the focal depth, without affecting the spot diameter. To verify the concept, the acquired aperture distribution is mapped on a Radial Line Slot Antenna (RLSA), which has been manufactured and measured, showing excellent results.
The Role of Supportive Housing for HIV-Positive Mothers and Their Children

ABSTRACT Homelessness and housing instability continue to be significant social issues facing low-income families, suggesting a need for more comprehensive, family-based approaches to housing services. This study explored the experiences of 10 HIV-positive women and their children in a Midwestern supportive housing program via in-depth interviews and 5 supportive housing staff. This study explored the challenges associated with housing stability, the availability and limitations of available supportive services, and the effect of permanent supportive housing in the lives of families impacted by HIV/AIDS. Narratives of case managers and housing participants provide a unique perspective into the challenges and strengths of supportive housing programs. Findings reveal the complex needs of HIV-positive mothers in supportive housing, including accessing housing in safe and affordable neighborhoods, and highlight the effectiveness of permanent supportive housing and comprehensive case management services in helping HIV-positive women maintain their health. Findings from this study can help improve case management and social services for women and children living in supportive housing and highlight the need for specific child- and family-centered services. Additional longitudinal research is needed to document sustained effects of supportive housing.
Water Quality and Herbivory Interactively Drive Coral-Reef Recovery Patterns in American Samoa

Background Compared with a wealth of information regarding coral-reef recovery patterns following major disturbances, less insight exists to explain the cause(s) of spatial variation in the recovery process. Methodology/Principal Findings This study quantifies the influence of herbivory and water quality upon coral reef assemblages through space and time in Tutuila, American Samoa, a Pacific high island. Widespread declines in dominant corals (Acropora and Montipora) resulted from cyclone Heta at the end of 2003, shortly after the study began. Four sites that initially had similar coral reef assemblages but differential temporal dynamics four years following the disturbance event were classified by standardized measures of ‘recovery status’, defined by rates of change in ecological measures that are known to be sensitive to localized stressors. Status was best predicted, interactively, by water quality and herbivory. Expanding upon temporal trends, this study examined if similar dependencies existed through space; building multiple regression models to identify linkages between similar status measures and local stressors for 17 localities around Tutuila. The results highlighted consistent, interactive interdependencies for coral reef assemblages residing upon two unique geological reef types. Finally, the predictive regression models produced at the island scale were graphically interpreted with respect to hypothesized site-specific recovery thresholds. Conclusions/Significance Cumulatively, our study purports that moving away from describing relatively well-known patterns behind recovery, and focusing upon understanding causes, improves our foundation to predict future ecological dynamics, and thus improves coral reef management.
Collection Development in University Libraries in Ghana: Some Observations

There are now three Universities in Ghana with a total enrollment of about 10,000 students. The oldest and largest is the University of Ghana, Legon, which was established in 1948 as a University College preparing students for the degrees of the University of London. The University of Science and Technology at Kumasi was the second to be established in the country. It started as a College of Technology in 1951 and was raised to University status in 1961. The University of Cape Coast came into being in 1962, mainly to produce graduate teachers for expanding secondary schools and teacher‐training colleges. All the universities have libraries which provide services to faculty members, scholars and students. The number of books allowed to be borrowed, however, depends on the status of the user, with faculty members having more privileges than students at all the universities.
Molecular Mechanisms Regulating the Dendritic Development of Newborn Olfactory Bulb Interneurons in a Sensory Experience-Dependent Manner

Inhibitory interneurons in the olfactory bulb are generated continuously throughout life in the subventricular zone and differentiate into periglomerular and granule cells. Neural circuits that undergo reorganization by newborn olfactory bulb interneurons are necessary for odor detection, odor discrimination, olfactory memory, and innate olfactory responses. Although sensory experience has been shown to regulate development in a variety of species and in various structures, including the retina, cortex, and hippocampus, little is known about how sensory experience regulates the dendritic development of newborn olfactory bulb interneurons. Recent studies revealed that the 5T4 oncofetal trophoblast glycoprotein and the neuronal Per/Arnt/Sim domain protein 4 (Npas4) transcription factor regulate dendritic branching and dendritic spine formation, respectively, in olfactory bulb interneurons. Here, we summarize the molecular mechanisms that underlie the sensory input-dependent development of newborn interneurons and the formation of functional neural circuitry in the olfactory bulb.