Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
OBLIGACIONES HACIA GENERACIONES FUTURAS: EL CASO CONTRACTUAL

The article examines models of the diachronic extension of the moral community according to contractarian frameworks. It argues against the critics of the logical possibility of this kind of obligations and examines different contractarian theories based on self-interest and on impartiality. According to this examination the last kind of contractarianism provides the best arguments for these obligations. KEYWORDS - Moral community. Contractarianism. Obligations towards future generations. Self-interest. Non-identity-problem. Impartiality. RESUMO - Neste texto, investiga-se a extensao diacronica da comuni- dade moral no âmbito de teorias contratualistas. Para isso, examinam-se criticas a possibilidade logica de sustentar obrigacoes em relacao a geracoes futuras e se abordam modelos argumentativos contratualistas de justificacao dessas obrigacoes que se baseiam no interesse proprio e na imparcialidade. De acordo com essa pesquisa, a melhor defesa dessas obrigacoes se pode articular recorrendo a esse ultimo tipo de contratualismo. PALAVRAS-CHAVE - Comunidade moral. Contratualismo, Obrigacoes em relacao a geracoes futuras. Interesse proprio. Problema da nao-identidade. Imparcialidade.
A Quenched Central Limit Theorem for Reversible Random Walks in a Random Environment on Z

The main aim of this paper is to prove the quenched central limit theorem for reversible random walks in a stationary random environment on Z without having the integrability condition on the conductance and without using any martingale. The method shown here is particularly simple and was introduced by Depauw and Derrien [3]. More precisely, for a given realization ω of the environment, we consider the Poisson equation (P ω - I)g = f, and then use the pointwise ergodic theorem in [8] to treat the limit of solutions and then the central limit theorem will be established by the convergence of moments. In particular, there is an analogue to a Markov process with discrete space and the diffusion in a stationary random environment.
Adhesion of the Entomopathogenic Fungus Beauveria (Cordyceps) bassiana to Substrata

ABSTRACT The entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana produces at least three distinct single-cell propagules, aerial conidia, vegetative cells termed blastospores, and submerged conidia, which can be isolated from agar plates, from rich broth liquid cultures, and under nutrient limitation conditions in submerged cultures, respectively. Fluorescently labeled fungal cells were used to quantify the kinetics of adhesion of these cell types to surfaces having various hydrophobic or hydrophilic properties. Aerial conidia adhered poorly to weakly polar surfaces and rapidly to both hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces but could be readily washed off the latter surfaces. In contrast, blastospores bound poorly to hydrophobic surfaces, forming small aggregates, bound rapidly to hydrophilic surfaces, and required a longer incubation time to bind to weakly polar surfaces than to hydrophilic surfaces. Submerged conidia displayed the broadest binding specificity, adhering to hydrophobic, weakly polar, and hydrophilic surfaces. The adhesion of the B. bassiana cell types also differed in sensitivity to glycosidase and protease treatments, pH, and addition of various carbohydrate competitors and detergents. The outer cell wall layer of aerial conidia contained sodium dodecyl sulfate-insoluble, trifluoroacetic acid-soluble proteins (presumably hydrophobins) that were not present on either blastospores or submerged conidia. The variations in the cell surface properties leading to the different adhesion qualities of B. bassiana aerial conidia, blastospores, and submerged conidia could lead to rational design decisions for improving the efficacy and possibly the specificity of entomopathogenic fungi for host targets.
Novel Expression Patterns of Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 6 in the Zebrafish Nervous System

The metabotropic glutamate receptor 6 (mGluR6 or GRM6) belongs to the class III of the metabotropic glutamate receptor family. It is the only known mGluR that mediates direct synaptic transmission in the nervous system and is thought to mediate the ON-response in the ON-pathway of the vertebrate retina. Phylogenetic and gene structure analysis indicated that the zebrafish genome harbours two mglur6 paralogs, mglur6a and mglur6b. Besides expression in the inner nuclear layer and distinct regions in the brain, both mglur6 paralogs are expressed in ganglion cells of the retina, an expression pattern which can also be observed in the downstream effector molecules gnaoa and gnaob. This unexpected expression pattern is consistent with immunohistological labeling using a peptide antibody specific for the mGluR6b paralog. These expression patterns contradict the existing view that mGluR6 is solely located on ON-bipolar cells where it functions in signal transmission. Consistent with expression in ON-bipolar cells, we report a decreased b-wave amplitude in the electroretinogram after morpholino-based downregulation of mGluR6b, showing a function in the ON response. Our data suggest more widespread functions of mGluR6 mediated signaling in the central nervous system, possibly including sign reversing synapses in the inner retina.
Directory of Useful Decoys, Enhanced (DUD-E): Better Ligands and Decoys for Better Benchmarking

A key metric to assess molecular docking remains ligand enrichment against challenging decoys. Whereas the directory of useful decoys (DUD) has been widely used, clear areas for optimization have emerged. Here we describe an improved benchmarking set that includes more diverse targets such as GPCRs and ion channels, totaling 102 proteins with 22886 clustered ligands drawn from ChEMBL, each with 50 property-matched decoys drawn from ZINC. To ensure chemotype diversity, we cluster each target’s ligands by their Bemis–Murcko atomic frameworks. We add net charge to the matched physicochemical properties and include only the most dissimilar decoys, by topology, from the ligands. An online automated tool (http://decoys.docking.org) generates these improved matched decoys for user-supplied ligands. We test this data set by docking all 102 targets, using the results to improve the balance between ligand desolvation and electrostatics in DOCK 3.6. The complete DUD-E benchmarking set is freely available at http://dude.docking. org.
Chitosan Microspheres in Novel Drug Delivery Systems

The main aim in the drug therapy of any disease is to attain the desired therapeutic concentration of the drug in plasma or at the site of action and maintain it for the entire duration of treatment. A drug on being used in conventional dosage forms leads to unavoidable fluctuations in the drug concentration leading to under medication or overmedication and increased frequency of dose administration as well as poor patient compliance. To minimize drug degradation and loss, to prevent harmful side effects and to increase drug bioavailability various drug delivery and drug targeting systems are currently under development. Handling the treatment of severe disease conditions has necessitated the development of innovative ideas to modify drug delivery techniques. Drug targeting means delivery of the drug-loaded system to the site of interest. Drug carrier systems include polymers, micelles, microcapsules, liposomes and lipoproteins to name some. Different polymer carriers exert different effects on drug delivery. Synthetic polymers are usually non-biocompatible, non-biodegradable and expensive. Natural polymers such as chitin and chitosan are devoid of such problems. Chitosan comes from the deacetylation of chitin, a natural biopolymer originating from crustacean shells. Chitosan is a biocompatible, biodegradable, and nontoxic natural polymer with excellent film-forming ability. Being of cationic character, chitosan is able to react with polyanions giving rise to polyelectrolyte complexes. Hence chitosan has become a promising natural polymer for the preparation of microspheres/nanospheres and microcapsules. The techniques employed to microencapsulate with chitosan include ionotropic gelation, spray drying, emulsion phase separation, simple and complex coacervation. This review focuses on the preparation, characterization of chitosan microspheres and their role in novel drug delivery systems.
Electronic Bulletin Boards and “Public Goods” Explanations of Collaborative Mass Media

Collaborative mass media are a new type of mass communications medium in which the audience acts both as the source and the receiver of the message. Theories of discretionary data base contributions and critical mass theory offer parallel explanations for the success of collaborative media. The present research integrated the predictions of these two perspectives in the context of a national survey of public electronic bulletin board systems. The study documented the nature and extent of electronic bulletin board use and compared predictions about the success of collaborative media based on the two theoretical perspectives. File contribution levels and system adoption rates were both found to be directly related to a measure of symmetry in user participation. Content diversity was directly related to contribution levels, but not to overall adoption levels. The results provided limited support for discretionary data base theory.
Current tools for the identification of miRNA genes and their targets

The discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs), almost 10 years ago, changed dramatically our perspective on eukaryotic gene expression regulation. However, the broad and important functions of these regulators are only now becoming apparent. The expansion of our catalogue of miRNA genes and the identification of the genes they regulate owe much to the development of sophisticated computational tools that have helped either to focus or interpret experimental assays. In this article, we review the methods for miRNA gene finding and target identification that have been proposed in the last few years. We identify some problems that current approaches have not yet been able to overcome and we offer some perspectives on the next generation of computational methods.
Iambic Lengthening and Final Vowels

En 1995, Hayes a observe que dans les langues presentant un allongement iambique des voyelles dans des syllabes ouvertes en alternance, les voyelles situees a la fin du mot ne parviennent pas a devenir longues. Dans cet article, l'A. suggere que cette defaillance doit etre attribuee non pas a l'allongement iambique en lui-meme, mais a d'autres proprietes presentes dans beaucoup de langues du monde, telles que le manque de voyelles longues en position finale dans le mot et l'extrametricite des syllabes finales. En se basant essentiellement sur une analyse des langues amerindiennes, il montre que le phenomene observe resulte de proprietes entierement independantes
Systemic Cardiac Amyloidoses: Disease Profiles and Clinical Courses of the 3 Main Types

Background— Most studies of amyloidotic cardiomyopathy consider as a single entity the 3 main systemic cardiac amyloidoses: acquired monoclonal immunoglobulin light-chain (AL); hereditary, mutated transthyretin-related (ATTRm); and wild-type transthyretin-related (ATTRwt). In this study, we compared the diagnostic/clinical profiles of these 3 types of systemic cardiac amyloidosis. Methods and Results— We conducted a longitudinal study of 233 patients with clear-cut diagnosis by type of cardiac amyloidosis (AL, n=157; ATTRm, n=61; ATTRwt, n=15) at 2 large Italian centers providing coordinated amyloidosis diagnosis/management facilities since 1990. Average age at diagnosis was higher in AL than in ATTRm patients; all ATTRwt patients except 1 were elderly men. At diagnosis, mean left ventricular wall thickness was higher in ATTRwt than in ATTRm and AL. Left ventricular ejection fraction was moderately depressed in ATTRwt but not in AL or ATTRm. ATTRm patients less often displayed low QRS voltage (25% versus 60% in AL; P<0.0001) or low voltage-to-mass ratio (1.1±0.5 versus 0.9±0.5; P<0.0001). AL patients appeared to have greater hemodynamic impairment. On multivariate analysis, ATTRm was a strongly favorable predictor of survival, and ATTRwt predicted freedom from major cardiac events. Conclusions— AL, ATTRm, and ATTRwt should be considered 3 different cardiac diseases, probably characterized by different pathophysiological substrates and courses. Awareness of the diversity underlying the cardiac amyloidosis label is important on several levels, ranging from disease classification to diagnosis and clinical management.
Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy

Rotterdam organised the festival â€˜La Cityâ€™ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the cityâ€™s class position, using femininity as a tool. â€˜La Cityâ€™ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, â€˜La Cityâ€™ campaign material, texts on the character of the city and interviews in local newspapers with policy-makers are analysed in the context of the urban renewal and gentrification policies of Rotterdam. This research shows how the city uses femininity as a marketing strategy to â€˜cleanseâ€™ Rotterdam of its working-class mythology as well as construing a hegemonic gender identity capable of excluding lower-class groups. Rotterdam, according to its own texts, is after bourgeois, feminine inhabitants that â€˜loungeâ€™ in â€˜cocktail barsâ€™ to replace the â€˜roughâ€™ men who worked in the harbour. â€˜La Cityâ€™ is one of many strategies to establish genderfication: the production of space for not only more affluent users (as gentrification is often defined), but also for specific gender notions. Genderfication is also established by practices of â€˜mixingâ€™ urban neighbourhoods and building homes for middle-class families.
A Novel State Parametrization for Stereo-SLAM

This paper proposes a novel parametrization for probabilistic stereo SLAM algorithms. It is optimized to fulfill the assumption of Gaussian probability distributions for system errors. Moreover it makes full use of the contraints induced by stereo vision and provides a close to linear observation model. Therefore the position and orientation are estimated incremetally. The parametrization of landmarks is chosen as the landmarks projection in the master camera and its disparity to the projection in the slave camera. This way a minimal parametrization is given, that is predestinated for linear probabilistic estimators.
Management of Chronic Hepatitis C in Veterans: The Potential of Integrated Care Models

The prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is higher among veterans than nonveterans, but only about 14% of all identified infected veterans have ever received antiviral therapy. High rates of comorbid psychiatric and substance use disorders are major barriers to receiving antiviral treatment for veterans, and characteristics associated with poor virologic response are more common in this population. However, accumulating evidence indicates that patients with psychiatric and substance use disorders can successfully receive interferon-based antiviral therapies in an integrated or multidisciplinary health-care setting. The broad aims of integrated care models include reducing fragmentation and improving continuity and coordination of care. Although, to date, there are no randomized controlled trials of specific care models for patients with HCV, studies of integrated care for other chronic diseases suggest several strategies for optimizing outcomes for patients with HCV. Components of an HCV clinic incorporating these principles have been tested in a nonrandomized setting and include routine screening of all patients for psychiatric and substance use disorder risk factors, collaboration with mental health providers within the HCV clinic, following a defined integrated medical/psychiatric clinical protocol, provision of ongoing integrated support during antiviral treatment or retreatment, and educating patients on principles of chronic disease self-management.
Development of Chronic Inflammatory Arthropathy Resembling Rheumatoid Arthritis in Interleukin 1 Receptor Antagonist–Deficient Mice

Interleukin (IL)-1 is a proinflammatory cytokine that plays important roles in inflammation, host defense, and the neuro-immuno-endocrine network. IL-1 receptor antagonist (ra) is an endogenous inhibitor of IL-1 and is supposed to regulate IL-1 activity. However, its pathophysiological roles in a body remain largely unknown. To elucidate the roles of IL-1ra, IL-1ra–deficient mice were produced by gene targeting, and pathology was analyzed on different genetic backgrounds. We found that all of the mice on a BALB/cA background, but not those on a C57BL/6J background, spontaneously developed chronic inflammatory polyarthropathy. Histopathology showed marked synovial and periarticular inflammation, with articular erosion caused by invasion of granulation tissues closely resembling that of rheumatoid arthritis in humans. Moreover, elevated levels of antibodies against immunoglobulins, type II collagen, and double-stranded DNA were detected in these mice, suggesting development of autoimmunity. Proinflammatory cytokines such as IL-1β, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor α were overexpressed in the joints, indicating regulatory roles of IL-1ra in the cytokine network. We thus show that IL-1ra gene deficiency causes autoimmunity and joint-specific inflammation and suggest that IL-1ra is important in maintaining homeostasis of the immune system. Possible involvement of IL-1ra gene deficiency in RA will be discussed.
A Comprehensive Symbolic Analysis of TLS 1.3

The TLS protocol is intended to enable secure end-to-end communication over insecure networks, including the Internet. Unfortunately, this goal has been thwarted a number of times throughout the protocol's tumultuous lifetime, resulting in the need for a new version of the protocol, namely TLS 1.3. Over the past three years, in an unprecedented joint design effort with the academic community, the TLS Working Group has been working tirelessly to enhance the security of TLS. We further this effort by constructing the most comprehensive, faithful, and modular symbolic model of the TLS~1.3 draft 21 release candidate, and use the TAMARIN prover to verify the claimed TLS~1.3 security requirements, as laid out in draft 21 of the specification. In particular, our model covers all handshake modes of TLS 1.3. Our analysis reveals an unexpected behaviour, which we expect will inhibit strong authentication guarantees in some implementations of the protocol. In contrast to previous models, we provide a novel way of making the relation between the TLS specification and our model explicit: we provide a fully annotated version of the specification that clarifies what protocol elements we modelled, and precisely how we modelled these elements. We anticipate this model artifact to be of great benefit to the academic community and the TLS Working Group alike.
The salmon, the lungfish (or the coelacanth) and the cow: a revival?

In the late 1970s, intense and sometimes acrimonious discussions between the recently established phylogeneticists/cladists and the proponents of the long-standing ‘gradistic’ school of systematics transcended specialized periodicals to reach a significantly wider audience through the journal Nature (Halstead, 1978, 1981; Gardiner et al. , 1979; Halstead et al. , 1979). As is well known, cladistis ‘won’ the debate by showing convincingly that mere similarity or ‘adaptive levels’ were not decisive measures to establish kinship. The essay ‘The salmon, the lungfish and the cow: a reply’ by Gardiner et al. (1979) epitomized that debate, deliberating to a wider audience the foundations of the cladistic paradigm, advocating that shared derived characters (homologies) support a sister-group relationship between the lungfish and cow exclusive of the salmon (see also Rosen et al. , 1981; Forey et al ., 1991).
Studying Transfer Students. Part II: Dimensions of Transfer Students' Adjustment.

The movement of students from community colleges to 4-year colleges or universities has been an area of inquiry that has received attention from researchers and policy makers. A plethora of research has focused on the academic outcomes of transfer students at senior institutions. Specifically, the concept of transfer shock has been used to explain transfer students' academic adjustment as measured by GPA. The intent of this study was to move beyond the transfer shock concept by building on previous works to establish new methods, concepts, and frameworks to better understand and characterize the complex transfer process of community college students. This cross-sectional study examined a cohort of 717 students at a multicultural university in Southern California who transferred from 64 California community colleges during 1994 and 1995. Utilizing the Laanan-Transfer Students' Questionnaire (L–TSQ),© the study employed the concepts of quality of effort, student involvement, and culture shock as guiding the.
Successful carboplatin desensitization in patients with proven carboplatin allergy

Carboplatin is one of the most useful and well tolerated cytotoxic drugs for gynecologic malignancies. Hypersensitivity to carboplatin is not rare among patients receiving multiple recurrent treatments with this drug. The aim of the current study was to offer a safe and convenient carboplatin desensitization strategy to patients with a proven allergic reaction to this drug.
Image Reconstruction

Throughout the past two decades, digital image processing has made its way into today’s technology and computer driven society. Its applications encompass a wide variety of specialized disciplines including medical imaging, machine vision, remote sensing, and astronomy – even influencing the computer user at home. Personal images obtained with digital cameras can easily be manipulated by a variety of dedicated commercial and public domain image processing software packages. Image reconstruction has to be defined in this context. Whereas image enhancement strives to bring out certain features in an image to simplify the extraction of image information, image reconstruction is the attempt to retrieve information that has been lost or obscured in the imaging process itself. Therefore, image reconstruction requires a systems approach that takes into account the entire process of image formation including the propagation of light through inhomogeneous media, the properties of the optical system, and the characteristics of the detector. Here, solar astronomy will serve as an example of the image formation process. We will discuss various image reconstruction methods and the underlying mathematical models.
Induction and Mentoring: Levels of Student Teacher Understanding

The purpose of this study was to explore perspectives held by student teachers about induction and mentoring programs and how teacher education programs could contribute to a broader continuum of supports that span from preservice to in-service teaching. Using survey research, this mixed-method study sought to understand what student teachers from three state universities (N = 310) knew about induction and mentoring. To answer the four research questions, quantitative data from the surveys were analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi squared, whereas the open-ended items were analyzed using grounded theory methodology. Findings indicated that student teachers have limited comfort with and awareness of induction programming, including new teacher supports. Levels of understanding utilizing a new induction continuum theory are described: limited, basic, emerging, and knowledgeable.