Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of Microglial Activation Attenuates the Development but Not Existing Hypersensitivity in a Rat Model of Neuropathy

Microglia, the intrinsic macrophages of the central nervous system, have previously been shown to be activated in the spinal cord in several rat mononeuropathy models. Activation of microglia and subsequent release of proinflammatory cytokines are known to play a role in inducing a behavioral hypersensitive state (hyperalgesia and allodynia) in these animals. The present study was undertaken to determine whether minocycline, an inhibitor of microglial activation, could attenuate both the development and existing mechanical allodynia and hyperalgesia in an L5 spinal nerve transection model of neuropathic pain. In a preventive paradigm (to study the effect on the development of hypersensitive behaviors), minocycline (10, 20, or 40 mg/kg intraperitoneally) was administered daily, beginning 1 h before nerve transection. This regimen produced a decrease in mechanical hyperalgesia and allodynia, with a maximum inhibitory effect observed at the dose of 20 and 40 mg/kg. The attenuation of the development of hyperalgesia and allodynia by minocycline was associated with an inhibitory action on microglial activation and suppression of proinflammatory cytokines at the L5 lumbar spinal cord of the nerveinjured animals. The effect of minocycline on existing allodynia was examined after its intraperitoneal administration initiated on day 5 post-L5 nerve transection. Although the postinjury administration of minocycline significantly inhibited microglial activation in neuropathic rats, it failed to attenuate existing hyperalgesia and allodynia. These data demonstrate that inhibition of microglial activation attenuated the development of behavioral hypersensitivity in a rat model of neuropathic pain but had no effect on the treatment of existing mechanical allodynia and hyperalgesia.
Network Coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

Topic Recently the “green communications” paradigm has raised in reference to sustainable development for the information and communication technologies (ICT). The wireless world research forum (WWRF) has fixed a 50% decrease of CO2 related to ICT as an objective up to 2020. In order to reach this purpose, the wireless network design criteria need to be reconsidered while keeping an important quality of service (QoS) which is only increasing with time.
Generalized circular colouring of graphs

Let P be a graph property and r, s ∈ N, r ≥ s. A strong circular (P , r, s)-colouring of a graph G is an assignment f : V (G) → {0, 1, . , r − 1}, such that the edges uv ∈ E(G) satisfying |f(u) − f(v)| < s or |f(u) − f(v)| > r − s, induce a subgraph of G with the propery P . In this paper we present some basic results on strong circular (P , r, s)-colourings. We introduce the strong circular P-chromatic number of a graph and we determine the strong circular P-chromatic number of complete graphs for additive and hereditary graph properties. 346 P. Mihók, J. Oravcová and R. Soták
Assessing the Quality of Automatic Summarization for Peer Review in Education

Technology supported peer review has drawn many interests from educators and researchers. It encourages active learning, provides timely feedback to students and multiple perspectives on their work. Currently, online peer review systems allow a student’s work to be reviewed by a handful of their peers. While this is quite a good way to obtain a high degree of confidence, reading a large amount of feedback could be overwhelming. Our observation shows that the students even ignore some feedback when it gets too large. In this work, we try to automatically summarize the feedback by extracting the similar content that is mentioned by the reviewers, which would capture the strength and weaknesses of the work. We evaluate different auto summarization algorithms and length of the summary with educational peer review dataset, which was rated by a human. In general, the students found that medium-size generated summaries (5-10 sentences) encapsulate the context of the reviews, are able to convey the intent of the reviews, and help them to judge the quality of the work.
Inside psychology : a science over 50 years

Introduction 1. The ups and downs of cognitive psychology: attention and other 'executive functions' 2. Psychology in the 1950s: a personal view 3. Learning theory and the cognitive revolution 1961-1971 4. Face recognition in our time 5. Cognitive science now and then 6. Aging memory - aging memories 7. Psycholinguistics in our time 8. Two brains my life in science 9. A perception of perception 10. Social psychology in our time: from 'fun and games' to grown-up science 11. Thirty years of object recognition 12. Reasoning 13. Weber's Law 14. Fifty years of memory neuropsychology research: methods 5, theory 2 15. Mental chronometry: long past, bright future 16. A life in grey areas: cognitive gerontology from 1950 to 2007 17. From little slips to big disasters: an error quest 18. Visual perception 1950 - 2000 19. Human performance from then to now 20. The perception of time 21. From effects to systems in neuropsychology 22. Experimental psychopathology and psychological treatment
Costs to farmers of a tuberculosis breakdown

An on-farm survey of 151 cattle farmers who had experienced a bovine tuberculosis (Mycobacterium bovis) breakdown on their farms was undertaken in 2003 to assess the costs associated with the breakdown. In 90 per cent of cases the cost was estimated to be less than £18,513 for dairy herds and less than £11,462 for beef herds, but with a range from £229 to £103,817. The main cost was the slaughter of reactor cattle. For the majority of the farmers, the compensation payments seemed to meet most of the costs of their breakdowns, although a majority was still left with net losses.
Current mobile payment procedures on the German market from the view of customer requirements

The key to mobile payment acceptance is in the hands of customers. In this paper we use the results of the mobile payment survey MP1 in order to identify and roughly weigh the most relevant acceptance criteria. The outcome of the paper is an evaluation scheme containing the covered payment scenarios, important main criteria (security, costs and convenience) and additional functionality requirements for each MP procedure. The scheme is based on empirical results and can assess a given MP procedure with regard to customer acceptance as well as to compare different procedures. The operational MP procedures Paybox, I-mode and Vodafone m-pay are examined and compared according to the scheme. Finally, a prospect is given to possible further development of mobile payment procedures in the direction of an integrative universal mobile payment system (UMPS).
A multi-factor scheduling of mixed services for integrated data system

The scheduling in LTE downlink channel is a key problem currently. The goal of many existing LTE scheduler is achieving the system highest performance, but the system fairness and delay of partial real-time service under limited bandwidth resources are not enough to be ensured sometimes. Therefore we design a multi-factor scheduling algorithm for the mixed business scenarios. Different from other scheduling, more related factors, such as the delay of head of packet queue, urgency of business and integrity of packet, are taken into account. The result of comparison with MLWDF shows that, the proposed scheduling reduces the average packet delay and packet loss rate of real-time service such as video and VoIP and improves the system fairness.
Two-stage stopping procedures based on standardized time series

We propose some new two-stage stopping procedures to construct absolute-width and relative-width confidence intervals for a simulation estimator of the steady-state mean of a stochastic process. The procedures are based on the method of standardized time series proposed by Schruben and on Stein's two-stage sampling scheme. We prove that our two-stage procedures give rise to asymptotically valid confidence intervals (as the prescribed length of the confidence interval approaches zero and the size of the first stage grows to infinity). The sole assumption required is that the stochastic process satisfy a functional central limit theorem.
A pilot study of what African American maternal caregivers and their adolescent daughters talk about when asked to discuss tobacco together

ABSTRACT Parents play a critical role in shaping their children’s substance use behaviors, yet few studies have examined the messages that caregivers give their adolescents about tobacco. In this study, we identify tobacco-related messages discussed by African American maternal caregivers and their adolescent daughters. Twenty-five African American maternal caregivers and their adolescent daughters participated in a video-taped discussion about tobacco. Discussions were transcribed and coded thematically. Seven themes emerged, which were grouped into tobacco-messages and communication strategies. Messages included health risks, non-health-related reasons to stop smoking, reasons people smoke, and tobacco products and marijuana. Strategies caregivers used to communicate their tobacco-related messages included sharing personal or their families’ experience with smoking, using humor, and role-playing. Finally, embedded within all of the themes, participants expressed their disapproval of tobacco use, whether it was directed at their own use, their adolescents’ use, a family members’ use, or peers’ use. African American maternal caregivers and their daughters openly talk about a variety of tobacco-related topics, and caregivers are open to sharing their own and their families’ experience with substance use. Findings also suggest that having caregivers and their adolescents participate in discussions tasks could be potentially beneficial in facilitating discussions and could identify areas in which caregivers could use help in discussing sensitive topics.
A Parallel Subspace Iteration Method for Generalized Eigenvalue Problems Based on Multi-core Platform

A parallel subspace iteration method for solving eigenvalue problem of based on multi-core platform is presented, which can solve several extreme eigenpair in parallel. Compared with Jacobi-Davidson method, the dimension number of the subspace in the method keeps unchanged, which makes it easier for the programming implementation. Numerical experiments are performed with a quad-core computer under the joint programming environment of Intel Fortran and OpenMp. The computation of the plane wing frequency and aircraft pylon for a real model airplane is taken as an example. As a result, the first 10 frequencies of a plane wing and an aircraft pylon are provided which shown the efficiency and applicability of our parallel computation algorithm.
Altered mRNA transport, docking, and protein translation in neurons lacking fragile X mental retardation protein

Fragile X syndrome is caused by the absence of functional fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP), an RNA binding protein. The molecular mechanism of aberrant protein synthesis in fmr1 KO mice is closely associated with the role of FMRP in mRNA transport, delivery, and local protein synthesis. We show that GFP-labeled Fmr1 and CaMKIIα mRNAs undergo decelerated motion at 0–40 min after group I mGluR stimulation, and later recover at 40–60 min. Then we investigate targeting of mRNAs associated with FMRP after neuronal stimulation. We find that FMRP is synthesized closely adjacent to stimulated mGluR5 receptors. Moreover, in WT neurons, CaMKIIα mRNA can be delivered and translated in dendritic spines within 10 min in response to group I mGluR stimulation, whereas KO neurons fail to show this response. These data suggest that FMRP can mediate spatial mRNA delivery for local protein synthesis in response to synaptic stimulation.
Privacy and identity management for everyone

The shift from a paper-based to an electronic-based society has dramatically reduced the cost of collecting, storing and processing individuals' personal information. As a result, it is becoming more common for businesses to "profile" individuals in order to present more personalized offers as part of their business strategy. While such profiles can be helpful and improve efficiency, they can also govern opaque decisions about an individual's access to services such as credit or an employment position. In many cases, profiling of personal data is done without the consent of the target individual.In the past decade, the European Union and its member states have implemented a legal framework to provide guidance on processing of personal data with the specific aim to restore the citizens' control over their data. To complement the legal framework, the prime (Privacy and Identity Management for Europe) project [14] has implemented a technical framework for processing personal data. prime's vision is to give individuals sovereignty over their personal data so that:Individuals can limit the information collected about them by using pseudo-identities, certifications and cryptography when performing online transactions,Individuals can negotiate legally-binding "privacy policies" with their service providers that govern how disclosed personal data can be used and which precautions must be taken to safeguard it, andIndividuals and service providers can use automated mechanisms to manage their personal data and their obligations towards data which they have collected from other parties.To accomplish this, the prime project has designed and implemented a practical system-level solution which incorporates novel cryptographic protocols, sophisticated security protocols, and artificial intelligence algorithms. This paper describes the architecture of this system. Most key features of this architecture have been implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype.
Levodopa-carbidopa with occlusion in older children with amblyopia.

PURPOSE To study the role of levodopa-carbidopa in supplementing occlusion therapy in older children with strabismic or anisometropic amblyopia. METHODS A clinical study was performed on 40 amblyopic children (19 strabismic and 21 anisometropic), 6 to 18 years old (mean age, 10.9 years). They received an average dose of 1.86 mg/kg/day (1.33-2.36 mg/kg/day) of levodopa and carbidopa (4:1 ratio) or a placebo in 3 divided doses over a 4-week period, combined with full-time occlusion. The occlusion was continued for the study duration of 3 months. Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study visual acuity charts and Cambridge low-contrast gratings for contrast sensitivity (CS) were used to assess visual functions. Tolerance and compliance with occlusion and capsule consumption were assessed. RESULTS Visual acuity of the nonamblyopic eye did not deteriorate during the study in either group. CS decreased by 22 units in the levodopa group and increased in the placebo group by 53 units at the first month. The CS in the levodopa group recovered later by the third month of follow-up. Both the levodopa and the placebo groups showed significant improvement in visual function in the amblyopic eye (P <.001). Overall changes in logarithm of minimum angle of resolution values and CS in the amblyopic eyes were similar in both groups (P >.05). Strabismic and anisometropic amblyopes did not behave differently. Drug tolerance, occlusion compliance, and capsule ingestion compliance were similar between the groups, with no significant side effects. CONCLUSIONS Clinically, levodopa supplementation does not offer any advantage over occlusion alone. Moreover, the risk of occlusion amblyopia could increase with the use of drugs like levodopa that might affect the plasticity of the visual cortex.
Cytochrome c and dATP-mediated Oligomerization of Apaf-1 Is a Prerequisite for Procaspase-9 Activation*

To elucidate the mechanism of activation of procaspase-9 by Apaf-1, we produced recombinant full-length Apaf-1 and purified it to complete homogeneity. Here we show using gel filtration that full-length Apaf-1 exists as a monomer that can be transformed to an oligomeric complex made of at least eight subunits after binding to cytochrome c and dATP. Apaf-1 binds to cytochromec in the absence of dATP but does not form the oligomeric complex. However, when dATP is added to the cytochromec-bound Apaf-1 complex, complete oligomerization occurs, suggesting that oligomerization is driven by hydrolysis of dATP. This was supported by the observation that ATP, but not the nonhydrolyzable adenosine 5′-O-(thiotriphosphate), can induce oligomerization of the Apaf-1-cytochrome c complex. Like the spontaneously oligomerizing Apaf-530, which lacks its WD-40 domain, the oligomeric full-length Apaf-1-cytochrome c complex can bind and process procaspase-9 in the absence of additional dATP or cytochrome c. However, unlike the truncated Apaf-530 complex, the full-length Apaf-1 complex can release the mature caspase-9 after processing. Once released, mature caspase-9 can process procaspase-3, setting into motion the caspase cascade. These observations indicate that cytochrome c and dATP are required for oligomerization of Apaf-1 and suggest that the WD-40 domain plays an important role in oligomerization of full-length Apaf-1 and the release of mature caspase-9 from the Apaf-1 oligomeric complex.
The Influence of Family and Parent Types on the Child Rearing Practices of Parents : Nigerian Experience

This study investigated the influence of family and parent types on the child rearing practices of parents of children in day care centres in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Two research questions were answered and two hypotheses were tested. The population studied consisted of 12080 parents of children (age from birth to 3 years) in the 604 government approved crèche/nursery schools in the State. A sample of 1200 parents (respondents) was drawn from this population using multistage random sampling technique. The instrument used for data collection was a 51-item Child Rearing Practice Scale (CRPS) with Pearson’s average reliability coefficient of 0.84 adapted to evaluate child rearing practices under the five domains of child rearing related to infancy, namely: feeding, cleaning, protection, stimulation and monitoring of growth and development. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while one-way analysis of variance and independent t-test were used where appropriate to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 significant level. The findings revealed that family-type and parent-type of parents of children in day care centres in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria significantly influence the child rearing practices of such parents. Parents of children from extended family do significantly better in child rearing practices than their nuclear family counterparts, while those of two-parent families do significantly better than their single parent and step-parent counterparts. The findings are of practical essence to day care centres, social welfare centres, government and some non-governmental organizations.
A double-blind, placebo-controlled study of selegiline transdermal system in depressed adolescents.

OBJECTIVE A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled flexible-dose, parallel group trial was conducted at 26 clinical investigational sites in the United States to examine the safety and efficacy of the selegiline transdermal system (STS) (EMSAM®) in adolescents (ages 12-17 years) meeting American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV) criteria for moderate to severe major depressive disorder (MDD) without psychotic features. METHODS Adolescents (n=308) with moderate to severe MDD were randomized to either STS (n=152) or placebo (n=156). Two hundred and fifteen (69.8%) subjects completed the study and 17 (5.5%) reported discontinuation because of adverse events (AEs). The primary efficacy outcome measure was the mean change from baseline to end of study (week 12 last observation carried forward [LOCF]) in the Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised (CDRS-R) total score. Secondary outcome measures included end-point Clinical Global Impressions - Severity (CGI-S) and Clinical Global Impressions - Improvement (CGI-I). RESULTS Patients on STS or placebo had a significant decline from baseline (p<0.001) on their CDRS-R total score with mean reductions±SD as follows: STS 21.4±16.6; placebo 21.5±16.5. Both groups had similar response rates (58.6% vs. 59.3%) defined as CGI-I of 1 or 2 at study end. However, these between-group efficacy findings were without statistical significance. The overall incidence of reported AEs was 62.5% for STS-treated patients and 57.7% for placebo-treated patients. Most commonly reported AEs in STS or placebo groups were application site reactions (STS=24.3%; placebo=21.8%), headache (STS=17.1%; placebo=16.7%), and nausea (STS=7.2%; placebo=7.7%). Treatment groups did not differ on any laboratory parameters, vital signs, or electrocardiogram (ECG) findings. No suspected hypertensive crises were reported in the trial. CONCLUSIONS These data demonstrated that the STS was safe and well tolerated in this adolescent sample. However, both STS-treated and placebo-treated subjects demonstrated a decline from baseline in depressive symptoms (CDRS-R total score) over the length of the study, without statistical superiority by either group.
Towards a Web Accessibility Monitor

As the information society develops, the “digital divide” grows. On the other hand, appropriate uses of new technologies can bridge the divide and enable new user groups to access information and participate in communication. In particular, people with disabilities may benefit from the development. We propose a tool to monitor the accessibility to content on the Internet. Using data warehouse techniques, we can discover how some accessibility properties depend on variables such as publishing tools, operating system, script language, geographical location, etc. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) [1] of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have been adopted by eEurope2002 and are recommended for all public information in all member states. The guidelines, promoting multiple representation of content, are useful in many contexts. For example, a car driver “reading” electronic mail can make use of tools developed for persons who are blind. Benchmarking web pages can also be useful for ranking results from a search engine for a blind person. Several automatic validators, such as the HTML validator from the W3C [1] or A-prompt [2], are already in use. However, the use of data warehouse technology in this context seems to be a new approach. An evaluation and report language (EARL) [1] is being developed by the W3C.