Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecotoxicological quality in sediments of Reloncaví and Corcovado gulfs, Chile

A study of the ecotoxicological quality of surface sediment was carried out on samples collected in the main fjords and interior channels between Reloncavi and Corcovado gulfs. The surface sediment samples were taken with a box corer and analyzed for organic matter content and grain size. Dissolved oxygen was measured in water samples taken 10 m off the bottom. The ecotoxicological evaluation of the sediments was performed using fertilization assays with gametes of Arbacia spatuligera (EPA/600/4-91/003). A fertilization rate of 95%, similar to that of the controls, was achieved. Therefore, the sediments at the sampled stations located in the middle of the channels were classified as non- toxic. Only the sediment at Station 26 (i.e., sector Dalcahue) was classified as "slightly toxic" (90 ± 4.1%). The samples were taken from the central zones of the studied channels and fjords. Since toxicologically these central areas are not polluted, any possible effects of aquaculture activities are expected to be more local in scope.
Active learning enhanced semi-automatic annotation tool for aspect-based sentiment analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis has become popular research field which allows the quantification of textual evaluations of different aspects of products and services. Methods of aspect-based sentiment analysis built on machine learning usually depend on manually annotated training corpora. In order to facilitate the processes of their creation, annotation tools dedicated to this purpose are needed. In this work we proposed a semi-automatic annotation tool which uses active learning to increase the effectiveness of the documents annotation. The use of active learning adapted to the needs of aspect-based sentiment analysis is the main difference between the proposed solution and existing annotation tools. We applied it in the domain of hotels evaluations. The results of realized experiments confirmed the faster increase of the annotation suggestions quality in terms of F1-measure in comparison to the scenario without active learning.
Activation of Group I and Group II Metabotropic Glutamate Receptors Causes LTD and LTP of Electrical Synapses in the Rat Thalamic Reticular Nucleus

Compared with the extensive characterization of chemical synaptic plasticity, electrical synaptic plasticity remains poorly understood. Electrical synapses are strong and prevalent among the GABAergic neurons of the rodent thalamic reticular nucleus. Using paired whole-cell recordings, we show that activation of Group I metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) induces long-term depression of electrical synapses. Conversely, activation of the Group II mGluR, mGluR3, induces long-term potentiation of electrical synapses. By testing downstream targets, we show that modifications induced by both mGluR groups converge on the same signaling cascade—adenylyl cyclase to cAMP to protein kinase A—but with opposing effects. Furthermore, the magnitude of modification is inversely correlated to baseline coupling strength. Thus, electrical synapses, like their chemical counterparts, undergo both strengthening and weakening forms of plasticity, which should play a significant role in thalamocortical function.
Kognitive Ansätze zur Vorhersage der Gruppenleistung

Zusammenfassung: Anhand einer interdependenten Aufgabe wurden verschiedene Vorhersagen der Problemloseleistung in interagierenden Gruppen im Vergleich zu einer Einzelbedingung getestet: Die Distraktorhypothese nimmt an, das bei der Losung kognitiv belastender Aufgaben Prozesverluste entstehen, da sich die Gruppenmitglieder gegenseitig von der zu losenden Aufgabe ablenken. Dem Kompensationsansatz zufolge sind dagegen Leistungsvorteile der Gruppen zu erwarten, die prinzipiell uber bessere Kompensationsmoglichkeiten als Einzelpersonen verfugen. Der Akzentuierungsansatz sagt einen Gruppenvorteil voraus, wenn die einzelnen Gruppenmitglieder uber angemessene Problemlosestrategien verfugen; neigen die Problemloser dagegen dazu, fehlerhafte Losungsprozeduren anzuwenden, so sind dagegen Prozesverluste zu erwarten. Den Probanden wurde die Aufgabe gestellt, mehrere Turm von Hanoi-Probleme entweder einzeln oder in einer Paarbedingung zu losen, nachdem ihnen eine zielfuhrende (Goal-Recursion-Prozedur) oder eine ausers.
[CD23: structures, functions and practical perspectives in allergy reactions].

CD23, the low-affinity receptor for IgE, is a surface cell marker and surface CD23 is cleaved into soluble fragments by an autocatalytic mechanism. cDNA clone encoding for CD23 has been isolated and structural studies realized. CD23 is expressed by B and T lymphocytes and by other cells including tumor cells. IL4 and IgE are the most potent inducer of CD23 expression. CD23 has multiple functions: B cell growth and differentiation, capacity to present antigen, cellular mobility, inflammation. The serum sCD23 level is often increased in allergic patients.
Multiple Impedance Control of Redundant Manipulators

The multiple impedance control (MIC) enforces a designated impedance on all cooperating manipulators, and the manipulated object itself. A redundant manipulator exploits more degrees of freedom than those required to achieve the desired position and orientation of the end-effector. In this paper, the MIC law is extended to control cooperative redundant manipulators in the presence of impacts due to contact with the environment. Due to redundancy, the Jacobian velocity matrix is non-squared. However, in the proposed method the adjustment of robot behavior is done without calculation of inverse of this Jacobian matrix. The extended formulation of the MIC algorithm is presented, and a system of two cooperating redundant planar manipulators carrying a common object is studied. The obtained results show good tracking performance even in the presence of impacts due to contact with an obstacle, and also system flexibility. These results reveal the merits of MIC algorithm for object manipulation tasks with redundant arms, though it can be also implemented with obstacle avoidance strategies
Representativeness of the Low-Income Population in the Health and Retirement Study

We study to what extent the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is representative of all income groups, but with a particular emphasis on low-income groups. To focus on the HRS sample composition and abstract from potential measurement issues associated with measures of income, we exploit the SSA administrative data matched to the HRS sample and compare the distribution of the matched SSA variables against the distribution of the same variables for the same population in the SSA databases. Overall, the HRS is representative for the population it covers. However, for some subgroups in the low-income population, there are some differences.
Expression of ptsG Encoding the Major Glucose Transporter Is Regulated by ArcA in Escherichia coli*

Because the phosphoenolpyruvate:sugar phosphotransferase system plays multiple regulatory roles in addition to the phosphorylation-coupled transport of many sugars in bacteria, synthesis of its protein components is regulated in a highly sophisticated way. Thus far, the cAMP receptor protein (CRP) complex and Mlc are known to be the major regulators of ptsHIcrr and ptsG expression in response to the availability of carbon sources. In this report, we performed ligand fishing experiments by using the promoters of ptsHIcrr and ptsG as bait to find out new factors involved in the transcriptional regulation of the phosphoenolpyruvate:sugar phosphotransferase system in Escherichia coli, and we found that the anaerobic regulator ArcA specifically binds to the promoters. Deletion of the arcA gene caused about a 2-fold increase in the ptsG expression, and overexpression of ArcA significantly decreased glucose consumption. In vitro transcription assays showed that phospho-ArcA (ArcA-P) represses ptsG P1 transcription. DNase I footprinting experiments revealed that ArcA-P binds to three sites upstream of the ptsG P1 promoter, two of which overlap the CRP-binding sites, and the ArcA-P binding decreases the CRP binding that is essential for the ptsG P1 transcription. These results suggest that the response regulator ArcA regulates expression of enzyme IICBGlc mediating the first step of glucose metabolism in response to the redox conditions of growth in E. coli.
Survival and apoptosis: a dysregulated balance in liver cancer

Background/Aims: Dysregulation of the balance between proliferation and cell death represents a protumorigenic principle in human hepatocarcinogenesis. This article aims to provide a review of the current findings about how physiological hepatocyte apoptosis is regulated and whether or not its dysregulation might contribute to the progression towards a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) process.
Object-based checkpoints in distributed systems

In distributed applications, multiple objects are cooperated to achieve some objective. The objects may suffer from certain kinds of faults. If some object o is faulty, it is rolled back to the checkpoint and objects which have received messages from o are also required to be rolled back. In this paper, we define influential messages whose receivers are required to be rolled back if the senders are rolled back in the object-based computation model. By using these influential messages, object-based checkpoints are defined to denote semantically consistent global states of the system which are nevertheless inconsistent with the traditional message-based definition. We show how the number of checkpoints can be reduced by taking only the object-based checkpoints.
Reflection through web discussions: assessing nursing students' work‐based learning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate evidence for the use of web discussion in the assessment of work‐based learning in practical nurse education. The paper seeks to investigate what kind of conclusions can be drawn from the students’ learning and learning processes, especially from their ability to reflect by analysing web discussions.Design/methodology/approach – The data were gathered in an action research project in a vocational secondary level institution. The data consists of 26 web discussions among student groups and their teachers' qualitative, evaluative reports, 26 altogether. The data were coded inductively with the NVivo 1.3 qualitative data analysis software. The analysis followed the principles of hierarchical coding. The purpose was to study how the processes of vocational growth, learning and reflection can be detected in the web discussion.Findings – The paper finds that web discussion provides valuable information about the learning processes of students. It is a valid .
Learning: The pupil's voice

Summaries are given of research on the learner's role in learning and pupils' attitudes to school and it is argued that few studies have collected the views of young children on learning. This provides the rationale for a pilot study which probed the perceptions of a sample of 44 Year 2 and Year 6 children in schools in and around London. The findings indicate that children as young as seven can conceptualise 'learning' and are able to articulate learning strategies and processes they use. It is suggested that the pupil's voice is an increasingly important element in furthering our understanding of teaching and learning more generally.
Ubiquitin conjugation triggers misfolded protein sequestration into quality control foci when Hsp70 chaperone levels are limiting

Ubiquitylation of partially misfolded proteins by the yeast Doa10 E3 ligase requires the Hsp40 cochaperone Sis1, whereas the Hsp70 chaperones Ssa1 and Ssa2 are dispensable. Elimination of the Hsp70 chaperones prevents proteasomal degradation, resulting in ubiquitin-dependent sequestration of the misfolded proteins in Hsp42-positive foci.
Remembering the 2006 Football World Cup in Germany: Epistemic and social consequences of perceived memory sharedness

According to shared-reality theory, the sharing of memories satisfies the need for confident knowledge (an epistemic consequence) and belongingness (a social-affiliative consequence). In two experiments, German participants remembered a public event with collective importance—the 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Germany. We examined whether inducing perceptions of sharedness increases confidence in one’s memory of the event (an epistemic consequence) and social identification with the national group (an affiliative consequence). Because episodic, but not semantic, memories entail the reconstruction of the social context of the original experience, they should elicit feelings of shared relevance to a greater extent than do semantic memories. Consistent with our rationale, memory confidence, perceptions of shared relevance, and identification with Germany were enhanced after participants recalled episodic (vs semantic) memories regarding the World Cup. In Experiment 2, we added a more direct manipulation of perceived sharedness: participants were asked to think about people with similar (vs dissimilar) memories. We found that memory confidence, perceptions of shared relevance, and identification with Germany were greater in the high sharedness conditions. In both experiments, the effects on memory confidence and identification were mediated by perceived shared relevance. Overall, the findings demonstrate important cognitive and social consequences of collective memory.
Associations between White Matter Microstructure and Cognitive Performance in Old and Very Old Age

Increasing age is associated with deficits in a wide range of cognitive domains as well as with structural brain changes. Recent studies using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have shown that microstructural integrity of white matter is associated with cognitive performance in elderly persons, especially on tests that rely on perceptual speed. We used structural equation modeling to investigate associations between white matter microstructure and cognitive functions in a population-based sample of elderly persons (age ≥ 60 years), free of dementia, stroke, and neurological disorders (n = 253). Participants underwent a magnetic resonance imaging scan, from which mean fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) of seven white matter tracts were quantified. Cognitive functioning was analyzed according to performance in five task domains (perceptual speed, episodic memory, semantic memory, letter fluency, and category fluency). After controlling for age, FA and MD were exclusively related to perceptual speed. When further stratifying the sample into two age groups, the associations were reliable in the old-old (≥78 years) only. This relationship between white matter microstructure and perceptual speed remained significant after excluding persons in a preclinical dementia phase. The observed pattern of results suggests that microstructural white matter integrity may be especially important to perceptual speed among very old adults.
Evaluating the Consistency of Differential Expression of MicroRNA Detected in Human Cancers

Differential expression of microRNA (miRNA) is involved in many human diseases and could potentially be used as a biomarker for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. However, inconsistency has often been found among differentially expressed miRNAs identified in various studies when using miRNA arrays for a particular disease such as a cancer. Before broadly applying miRNA arrays in a clinical setting, it is critical to evaluate inconsistent discoveries in a rational way. Thus, using data sets from 2 types of cancers, our study shows that the differentially expressed miRNAs detected from multiple experiments for each cancer exhibit stable regulation direction. This result also indicates that miRNA arrays could be used to reliably capture the signals of the regulation direction of differentially expressed miRNAs in cancer. We then assumed that 2 differentially expressed miRNAs with the same regulation direction in a particular cancer play similar functional roles if they regulate the same set of cancer-associated genes. On the basis of this hypothesis, we proposed a score to assess the functional consistency between differentially expressed miRNAs separately extracted from multiple studies for a particular cancer. We showed although lists of differentially expressed miRNAs identified from different studies for each cancer were highly variable, they were rather consistent at the level of function. Thus, the detection of differentially expressed miRNAs in various experiments for a certain disease tends to be functionally reproducible and capture functionally related differential expression of miRNAs in the disease. Mol Cancer Ther; 10(5); 752–60. ©2011 AACR.
The stability of localized spikes for the 1-D Brusselator reaction–diffusion model

In a one-dimensional domain, the stability of localized spike patterns is analysed for two closely related singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion (RD) systems with Brusselator kinetics. For the first system, where there is no influx of the inhibitor on the domain boundary, asymptotic analysis is used to derive a non-local eigenvalue problem (NLEP), whose spectrum determines the linear stability of a multi-spike steady-state solution. Similar to previous NLEP stability analyses of spike patterns for other RD systems, such as the Gierer–Meinhardt and Gray–Scott models, a multi-spike steady-state solution can become unstable to either a competition or an oscillatory instability depending on the parameter regime. An explicit result for the threshold value for the initiation of a competition instability, which triggers the annihilation of spikes in a multi-spike pattern, is derived. Alternatively, in the parameter regime when a Hopf bifurcation occurs, it is shown from a numerical study of the NLEP that an asynchronous, rather than synchronous, oscillatory instability of the spike amplitudes can be the dominant instability. The existence of robust asynchronous temporal oscillations of the spike amplitudes has not been predicted from NLEP stability studies of other RD systems. For the second system, where there is an influx of inhibitor from the domain boundaries, an NLEP stability analysis of a quasi-steady-state two-spike pattern reveals the possibility of dynamic bifurcations leading to either a competition or an oscillatory instability of the spike amplitudes depending on the parameter regime. It is shown that the novel asynchronous oscillatory instability mode can again be the dominant instability. For both Brusselator systems, the detailed stability results from NLEP theory are confirmed by rather extensive numerical computations of the full partial differential equations system.
Intervertebral Motion during Vibration

Vibration exposure is widely recognized as a risk factor for low back pain. An experimental protocol was designed to quantify the intervertebral motion response in human subjects to sinusoidal vertical vibration at 5 and 8 Hz, and at a variety of acceleration levels. Intervertebral motion in the mid-sagittal plane was measured using a transducer linkage system attached to pins placed directly into the spinous processes of adjacent vertebrae. The postures of the subjects were carefully controlled. The effects of forward flexion, arm support, gravitational load, and sitting on a cushion were evaluated. The rigid body motion of the superior vertebra with respect to the inferior vertebra was expressed in terms of relative sagittal plane rotation, axial translation, and anterior-posterior shear translation. It was found that the lumbar motion segments exhibited coupled periodic behaviour in response to sinusoidal vertical vibration, with up to 1 mm peak-to-peak displacement in the axial direction. The greatest intervertebral motion occurred when the subject was exposed to 5 Hz vibration as compared to 8 Hz. For a constant frequency of 5 Hz excitation, the peak-to-peak amplitudes of the computed motions tended to increase as the acceleration level increased. In the flexed posture, with no arm support, the active trunk musculature helped reduce the intervertebral motion. Additional gravitational load on the shoulders caused increased relative axial displacement. A polyethylene foam cushion placed on the seat reduced vibration transmission at 5 Hz excitation and consequently decreased the intervertebral motion.
New Flexure Parallel-Kinematic Micropositioning System With Large Workspace

Flexure-based micropositioning systems with a large workspace are attractive for a variety of precision engineering applications. In this paper, a new idea of multistage compound parallelogram flexure is proposed for the mechanism design of a novel parallel-kinematic XY micropositioning system, which has a motion range larger than 10 mm along with a compact structure. The established quantitative models and the stage performances are validated by conducting finite-element analysis (FEA) and experimental studies. Moreover, an enhanced model-predictive control (EMPC) is presented for positioning control of the system, which has a nonminimum-phase plant. It is shown that the EMPC is capable of producing a low magnitude of output tracking error by imposing an appropriate suppression on the control effort. Simulation and experimental studies reveal that the EMPC scheme outperforms the conventional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and MPC methods in terms of transient response speed and steady-state accuracy. The idea that is presented in this paper is extendable to design and control of other micro-/nanopositioning systems with either minimum- or nonminimum-phase plants.
How Far Do Low-Income Parents Travel to Shop for Food? Empirical Evidence from Two Urban Neighborhoods

Research on the impact of the built environment on obesity and access to healthful foods often fails to incorporate information about how individuals interact with their environment. A sample of 198 low-income WIC recipients from two urban neighborhoods were interviewed about where they do their food shopping and surveys were conducted of food stores in their neighborhoods to assess the availability of healthful foods. Results indicate that participants rarely shop at the closest supermarket, traveling on average 1.58 miles for non-WIC food shopping and 1.07 miles for WIC shopping. Findings suggest that access to healthful foods is not synonymous with geographic proximity.
HIGH-ENERGY X-RAY DETECTION OF G359.89−0.08 (SGR A−E): MAGNETIC FLUX TUBE EMISSION POWERED BY COSMIC RAYS?

We report the first detection of high-energy X-ray (E > 10 keV) emission from the Galactic center non-thermal filament G359.89−0.08 (Sgr A−E) using data acquired with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). The bright filament was detected up to ∼50 keV during a NuSTAR Galactic center monitoring campaign. The featureless power-law spectrum with a photon index Γ ≈ 2.3 confirms a non-thermal emission mechanism. The observed flux in the 3–79 keV band is FX = (2.0 ± 0.1) × 10−12 erg cm−2 s−1, corresponding to an unabsorbed X-ray luminosity LX = (2.6 ± 0.8) × 1034 erg s−1 assuming a distance of 8.0 kpc. Based on theoretical predictions and observations, we conclude that Sgr A−E is unlikely to be a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) or supernova remnant–molecular cloud (SNR–MC) interaction, as previously hypothesized. Instead, the emission could be due to a magnetic flux tube which traps TeV electrons. We propose two possible TeV electron sources: old PWNe (up to ∼100 kyr) with low surface brightness and radii up to ∼30 pc or MCs illuminated by cosmic rays (CRs) from CR accelerators such as SNRs or Sgr A*.