Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced self-administration of the CB1 receptor agonist WIN55,212-2 in olfactory bulbectomized rats: evaluation of possible serotonergic and dopaminergic underlying mechanisms

Depression has been associated with drug consumption, including heavy or problematic cannabis use. According to an animal model of depression and substance use disorder comorbidity, we combined the olfactory bulbectomy (OBX) model of depression with intravenous drug self-administration procedure to verify whether depressive-like rats displayed altered voluntary intake of the CB1 receptor agonist WIN55,212-2 (WIN, 12.5 μg/kg/infusion). To this aim, olfactory-bulbectomized (OBX) and sham-operated (SHAM) Lister Hooded rats were allowed to self-administer WIN by lever-pressing under a continuous [fixed ratio 1 (FR-1)] schedule of reinforcement in 2 h daily sessions. Data showed that both OBX and SHAM rats developed stable WIN intake; yet, responses in OBX were constantly higher than in SHAM rats soon after the first week of training. In addition, OBX rats took significantly longer to extinguish the drug-seeking behavior after vehicle substitution. Acute pre-treatment with serotonin 5HT1B receptor agonist, CGS-12066B (2.5–10 mg/kg), did not significantly modify WIN intake in OBX and SHAM Lister Hooded rats. Furthermore, acute pre-treatment with CGS-12066B (10 and 15 mg/kg) did not alter responses in parallel groups of OBX and SHAM Sprague Dawley rats self-administering methamphetamine under higher (FR-2) reinforcement schedule with nose-poking as operandum. Finally, dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) of OBX rats did not increase in response to a WIN challenge, as in SHAM rats, indicating a dopaminergic dysfunction in bulbectomized rats. Altogether, our findings suggest that a depressive-like state may alter cannabinoid CB1 receptor agonist-induced brain reward function and that a dopaminergic rather than a 5-HT1B mechanism is likely to underlie enhanced WIN self-administration in OBX rats.
Spherule diagrams with graph for social network visualization

As social network information keeps growing, there is always a need for better information visualization techniques for carrying out multifarious analysis, which is commonly called as social network analysis. Social networks have become a big platform for advertisements, where a company targets highly connected than to more isolated users. To target highly connected users and their activities, visualizations such as Euler diagrams, Treemap diagrams, graphs and their combinations were tested by various researchers. Though Euler diagrams combined with graph and Treemap diagrams with graph have provided some interesting results, the one question yet to be answered is the scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel visual technique, “Spherule diagrams with graph”, which addresses the scalability issue. The novel technique is then compared with the traditional Euler diagrams with graph using a twitter case study in an empirical form. Twenty-eight participants were exposed to eighteen diagrams (nine diagrams of each type of visualization) in a software which recorded accuracy and response time (i.e., performance measure). The results of 504 observations indicate that (a) there is no significant difference between the visualizations in terms of accuracy and (b) there is a significant difference between the visualizations in terms of response time. Also, users were asked to aggrandize between the two visualizations (i.e., preference measure), where 75% preferred Spherule diagrams with graph for its simplicity, comprehensiveness, navigation, alignment (layout), set ordering and data items ordering characteristics. We conclude that, Spherule diagrams with graph will be beneficial for researchers and practitioners in the information visualization community who are exploring social networks for business.
Defining and measuring creativity: Are creativity tests worth using?

Creativity tests measure specific cognitive processes such as thinking divergently, making associations, constructing and combining broad categories, or working on many ideas simultaneously. They also measure noncognitive aspects of creativity such as motivation (e.g., impulse expression, desire for novelty, risk‐taking), and facilitatory personal properties like flexibility, tolerance for independence, or positive attitudes to differentness. Raters can score the various kinds of test with substantial levels of agreement, while scores are internally stable to an acceptable degree. The tests also correlate to a reasonable degree with various criteria of creativity such as teacher ratings, and are useful predictors of adult behavior. Thus, they are useful in both research and education. However, they are best thought of as measures of creative potential because creative achievement depends on additional factors not measured by creativity tests, such as technical skill, knowledge of a field, mental health, or even opportunity. However, the multidimensional creativity concept they define indicates that assessments should be based on several tests, rather than relying on a single score.
Streamlined short alternate path protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

The paper gives an innovative idea to be made in Mobile Adhoc Network which provides an ease towards the packet transferring rate. So far in literature it is given many more ideas regarding the accretion of efficiency in MANET. Here we have revealed an easiest method to be adopted in present Adhoc network. This method is gives as SaP (Short alternate Path) protocol, a simplest method to improve the working of MANET. This protocol helps to catch the packets during the packet drop at link breaks or path failure. This protocol transfers the data from the failed node and delivers it to the node next of the failed node in the route through an alternate node. Thus this protocol doesn't go in search of alternate path or new route flooding the requests. This conserves the energy and makes the shortest path back to life even after the node failure at a point. This proposed idea increases the packet delivery ratio, no extra flooding of request, energy consumption and decreased time delay.
Clostridium Perfringens Toxins Involved in Mammalian Veterinary Diseases

Clostridium perfringens is a gram-positive anaerobic rod that is classified into 5 toxinotypes (A, B, C, D, and E) according to the production of 4 major toxins, namely alpha (CPA), beta (CPB), epsilon (ETX) and iota (ITX). However, this microorganism can produce up to 16 toxins in various combinations, including lethal toxins such as perfringolysin O (PFO), enterotoxin (CPE), and beta2 toxin (CPB2). Most diseases caused by this microorganism are mediated by one or more of these toxins. The role of CPA in intestinal disease of mammals is controversial and poorly documented, but there is no doubt that this toxin is essential in the production of gas gangrene of humans and several animal species. CPB produced by C. perfringens types B and C is responsible for necrotizing enteritis and enterotoxemia mainly in neonatal individuals of several animal species. ETX produced by C. perfringens type D is responsible for clinical signs and lesions of enterotoxemia, a predominantly neurological disease of sheep and goats. The role of ITX in disease of animals is poorly understood, although it is usually assumed that the pathogenesis of intestinal diseases produced by C. perfringens type E is mediated by this toxin. CPB2, a necrotizing and lethal toxin that can be produced by all types of C. perfringens, has been blamed for disease in many animal species, but little information is currently available to sustain or rule out this claim. CPE is an important virulence factor for C. perfringens type A gastrointestinal disease in humans and dogs; however, the data implicating CPE in other animal diseases remains ambiguous. PFO does not seem to play a direct role as the main virulence factor for animal diseases, but it may have a synergistic role with CPA-mediated gangrene and ETX-mediated enterotoxemia. The recent improvement of animal models for C. perfringens infection and the use of toxin gene knock-out mutants have demonstrated the specific pathogenic role of several toxins of C. perfringens in animal disease. These research tools are helping us to establish the role of each C. perfringens toxin in animal disease, to investigate the in vivo mechanism of action of these toxins, and to develop more effective vaccines against diseases produced by these microorganisms.
The effects of identification training on the identification and production of American English vowels by native speakers of Japanese

The effectiveness of a high variability identification training procedure to improve native Japanese identification and production of the American English (AE) mid and low vowels /æ/, //, //, //, // was investigated. Vowel identification and production performance for two groups of Japanese participants was measured before and after a 6-week identification training period. Recordings were made of both group's pre-/posttraining vowel productions of the five vowels, which were evaluated by a group of native AE listeners using a five-alternative, forced-choice identification task and by an acoustic analysis of the vowel productions. The overall results confirmed that the identification performance of the experimental (trained) participants improved after identification training with feedback and that the training also had a positive effect on their production of the target AE vowels.
Computer-assisted Structuring of Emergency Management Information: A Project Note

In order to achieve high-level resilience against disasters, effective utilization of previous emergency management information is necessary. The goal of this project is to establish effective utilization of emergency management information and emergency response logs that are accumulated as a fundamental dataset to learn lessons for emergencies in the future. More precisely, we develop a framework that simplifies structuring emergency management information and creating databases through various media or formats by exploiting technologies such as natural language processing to fix the bottlenecks for inputting information in emergency response sites, to share disaster state, and to contribute towards achieving more effective use of human resources. The academic aim of this project is to establish the task of creating a database of emergency management information as a subfield of natural language processing applications.
Blind signal processing by complex domain adaptive spline neural networks

In this paper, neural networks based on an adaptive nonlinear function suitable for both blind complex time domain signal separation and blind frequency domain signal deconvolution, are presented. This activation function, whose shape is modified during learning, is based on a couple of spline functions, one for the real and one for the imaginary part of the input. The shape control points are adaptively changed using gradient-based techniques. B-splines are used, because they allow to impose only simple constraints on the control parameters in order to ensure a monotonously increasing characteristic. This new adaptive function is then applied to the outputs of a one-layer neural network in order to separate complex signals from mixtures by maximizing the entropy of the function outputs. We derive a simple form of the adaptation algorithm and present some experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Angry citizens: civic anger and the politics of curative democracy in India

This article examines the emergence of the angry citizen as a legitimate political actor in post-colonial Indian democracy. Approaching such ‘civic anger’ as a historically constituted and socio-politically embedded formation rather than as a subjectively and individually experienced feeling, I show that the rise of the angry citizen was linked to the consolidation of a distinctive politics of curative democracy in the ‘long 1970s’. The lineages of the civic anger of twenty-first century India may be traced to this older formation of curative democracy. The point here is not to offer a chronological revision of the origins of ‘new India’, but to consider the generalisable political implications of the idea of curative democracy, and to identify the distinctive forms of political agency that are associated with the call to cure, reform or renew democracy.
Communication and Social Identity Theory: Existing and Potential Connections in Organizational Identification Research

This essay builds on the growing, but underdeveloped, role of communication in work based on Social Identity Theory (SIT) as it relates to identity and identification in the organization. Five existing areas of connection between communication and SIT in organizational identification research are documented and assessed. These include salience of dual/multiple identifications, computer-mediated communication and virtual work related to identification, relationally focused work identities, organizational-level identities, and disidentification and related forms.
Selecting Accurate and Comprehensible Regression Algorithms through Meta Learning

Data mining tools often include a workbench of algorithms to model a given dataset but lack sufficient guidance to select the most accurate algorithm according to the nature of the dataset. The most accurate algorithm is not known in advance and no single model format is superior for all datasets. An a priori comparison experiment to determine which algorithm leads to the most optimal model fit could offer relief but is rather time consuming. A meta model which is able to predict and explain which model would fit best could address this problem. The relevance of such a meta model increases with the number and runtime of algorithms under consideration and the size of the dataset. In this paper a novel meta model is proposed to automatically provide support to the user about whether to use a linear, spline, tree, linear tree or linear spline model, given a particular dataset. This study distinguishes itself from previous meta learning studies by focusing on comprehensible regression models, regression specific dataset characteristics, artificially generated datasets and a score based user recommendation.
Dopamine-dependent inhibition of jejunal Na 1K 1-ATPase during high-salt diet in young but not in adult rats

Vieira-Coelho, M. Augusta, Vera A. Lucas Teixeira, Yigael Finkel, Patricio Soares-da-Silva, and Alejandro M. Bertorello. Dopamine-dependent inhibition of jejunal Na1-K1-ATPase during high-salt diet in young but not in adult rats. Am. J. Physiol. 275 (Gastrointest. Liver Physiol. 38): G1317–G1323, 1998. —During high-salt diet endogenous dopamine (DA) reduces jejunal sodium transport in young but not in adult rats. This study was designed to evaluate whether this effect is mediated, at the cellular level, by inhibition of Na1-K1-ATPase activity. Enzyme activity was determined in isolated jejunal cells by the rate of [g-32P]ATP hydrolysis. Cells were obtained from weanling and adult rats fed either with highor normal-salt diet. In 20-day-old but not in 40-day-old rats Na1-K1-ATPase activity was significantly reduced during high-salt diet. This inhibition was abolished by a blocker of DA synthesis. The decreased activity was associated with a decreased a1-subunit at the plasma membrane. During high-salt diet there was an increase in DA content in jejunal cells from 20-day-old rats, associated with a parallel decrease in 5-hydroxytryptamine, compared with normal-salt diet. In 40-day-old rats, however, the catecholamine level remained unchanged during high-salt diet. Incubation of isolated jejunal cells with DA resulted in a dosedependent inhibition of Na1-K1-ATPase activity in 20but not in 40-day-old rats. We conclude that during high-salt diet, jejunal Na1-K1-ATPase in 20-day-old rats is inhibited, and this effect is likely to be mediated by locally formed DA.
Biterm Pseudo Document Topic Model for Short Text

In the past few years, we have witnessed a rapid development of online social media, from which we can access various short texts. Understanding the topic patterns of these short text is significant. Traditional topic models, like LDA, are not suitable when applied to short text topic analysis due to data sparsity. A lot of efforts have been made to solve this problem. However, there is still significant space to improve the effectiveness of these short text specific methods. In this paper, we proposed a novel word co-occurrence network based method, referred to as biterm pseudo document topic model (BPDTM), which extended the previous biterm topic model(BTM) for short text. We utilized the word co-occurrence network to construct biterm pseudo documents. The proposed model is promising since it represents words with their semantic adjacent biterms and is able to model the corpus-level semantic relation between two words. Besides, BPDTM naturally lengthens the documents, which alleviate the influence for performance exerted by data sparsity. Experiments demonstrated that our model outperformed two baselines, i.e. LDA and BTM, which proved its effectiveness on short text topic modeling task.
Homer's garden

Abstract From the depth of the seas, Thetis hears her son's cries of sorrow for the death of Patroclus. The goddess opens her heart to the Nereids and begins her lament: ‘Achilles, exceptional and perfect hero, will meet with an unhappy end, as he is soon to die under the walls of Troy. As his mother, she has good reasons to vent her helplessness towards her son's fate: he has grown like a sapling, she has nursed him as one tends a plant in a garden bed’. 1 Homer, The Iliad, XVIII, 55-56. Homer uses the same metaphor when, later on, Thetis begs Hephaestus to make new weapons for her son. 2 Ibid. XVIII, 437-438. It is a touching, human and poetic passage: it indicates how much care was lavished on bringing up her son, the same care which makes a plant grow in a garden. The word aloe, in epic language, means a combination of garden-orchard-vineyard: a fertile place, rich in trees and flowers, which has to be cultivated with care and order.
Chemotaxis Is Required for Virulence and Competitive Fitness of the Bacterial Wilt Pathogen Ralstonia solanacearum

ABSTRACT Ralstonia solanacearum, a soilborne plant pathogen of considerable economic importance, invades host plant roots from the soil. Qualitative and quantitative chemotaxis assays revealed that this bacterium is specifically attracted to diverse amino acids and organic acids, and especially to root exudates from the host plant tomato. Exudates from rice, a nonhost plant, were less attractive. Eight different strains from this heterogeneous species complex varied significantly in their attraction to a panel of carbohydrate stimuli, raising the possibility that chemotactic responses may be differentially selected traits that confer adaptation to various hosts or ecological conditions. Previous studies found that an aflagellate mutant lacking swimming motility is significantly reduced in virulence, but the role of directed motility mediated by the chemotaxis system was not known. Two site-directed R. solanacearum mutants lacking either CheA or CheW, which are core chemotaxis signal transduction proteins, were completely nonchemotactic but retained normal swimming motility. In biologically realistic soil soak virulence assays on tomato plants, both nonchemotactic mutants had significantly reduced virulence indistinguishable from that of a nonmotile mutant, demonstrating that directed motility, not simply random motion, is required for full virulence. In contrast, nontactic strains were as virulent as the wild-type strain was when bacteria were introduced directly into the plant stem through a cut petiole, indicating that taxis makes its contribution to virulence in the early stages of host invasion and colonization. When inoculated individually by soaking the soil, both nontactic mutants reached the same population sizes as the wild type did in the stems of tomato plants just beginning to wilt. However, when tomato plants were coinoculated with a 1:1 mixture of a nontactic mutant and its wild-type parent, the wild-type strain outcompeted both nontactic mutants by 100-fold. Together, these results indicate that chemotaxis is an important trait for virulence and pathogenic fitness in this plant pathogen.
Human resources retention and knowledge transfer in mergers and acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions can be a mechanism used by firms to access innovative knowledge, including intellectual property, and to strengthen and expand their core capabilities. In the mergers and acquisition context, the creation of value depends on the transfer of capabilities and knowledge being carried out successfully during the post-acquisition integration process. The paper adopts this view. It examines the role of the top management and personnel who hold knowledge and skills linked to the capability of the acquired firm considered most valuable by the acquiring firm in the transfer of knowledge from the acquired firm to the acquiring firm. The paper also examines whether the impact of the retention of the acquired firm's high-value human resources (HVHR) on knowledge transfer is moderated by the degree of embeddedness of the knowledge to be transferred. Furthermore, the study identifies the factors that influence the retention of the acquired firm's HVHR. We tested the model using data from a sample of 57 domestic, related, friendly Spanish mergers and acquisitions belonging to a wide variety of industries. The results support the notion that the more embedded the knowledge, the greater the impact of the acquired firm's HVHR retention on the knowledge transfer. They also show that the autonomy granted to the acquired firm, the frequency of use of rich media among the personnel of both firms, and the acquired firm's pre-acquisition profitability are factors encouraging the acquired firm's HVHR to remain. The study contributes to the literature on knowledge transfer in mergers and acquisitions by highlighting the relevance of retention of the acquired firm's HVHR for knowledge transfer, as well as demonstrating the importance of taking into consideration the nature of the knowledge to be transferred. It also contributes to the literature on the implementation process in mergers and acquisitions by identifying factors available to managers to favor HVHR continuity in the acquiring firm or the one resulting from the merger. Copyright © 2013 Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management.
Which Pension?: Women, Risk and Pension Choice

This paper investigates women's perceptions of choice and risk in the field of pensions. It extends on a paper published in a recent edition of this journal in which Alan Aldridge applied Pierre Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital and habitus to the field of personal finance. Since the late 1980s the marketisation of pensions has resulted in an expansion of pension options. According to Anthony Giddens the expansion of choice is one of the positive aspects of living in a ‘risk society'. However, the expansion of pension choice has passed pension risks onto consumers. Using qualitative interviews this paper investigates the perceptions of 45 employed women aged 40–59 of the risks associated with choosing a pension. At the theoretical level the paper seeks to demonstrate the need to qualify notions of reflexive decision-making put forward by Giddens by emphasising the role of habitual action in decision-making, as put forward by Bourdieu. The paper shows that material circumstances, cultural capital, extent and quality of pension information and habitus affect perceptions of pension choice and pension risks. The paper concludes that the expansion of pension choice has been, in many ways, negative rather than positive and thus is likely to lead to increasing poverty among many women in later life.