Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coherent discourse solves the pronoun interpretation problem*

ABSTRACT Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a ‘Pronoun Interpretation Problem’. In contrast, two experiments addressing English children's pronoun production (Bloom, Barss, Nicol & Conway, 1994; de Villiers, Cahillane & Altreuter, 2006) show almost perfect usage. The aim of this study is to verify this asymmetry between pronoun production and pronoun comprehension for Dutch, and to investigate the effects of coherent discourse and topicality on pronoun production and comprehension. Employing a truth-value judgment task and an elicited production task, this study indeed finds such an asymmetry in 83 Dutch children (age range 4 ; 5–6 ; 6). When object pronouns were clearly established as the topic of the target sentence, the Pronoun Interpretation Problem dissolved entirely. These results are compatible with the asymmetrical grammar hypothesis of Hendriks & Spenader (2005/2006) and suggest, contrary to many previous claims, that children are highly proficient at using pragmatic clues in interpretation.
Fuzzy Control Design in Consideration of Input Constraint and Reducing LMIs Conservatism

This paper deals with stability analysis and control design for a class of nonlinear systems with input constraint when using T-S fuzzy model. After leading the control design to LMIs approach, the attention is paid to 1) how to easy the LMIs conditions so that the system is asymptotically stable in a so-called ellipsoid to be made as large as possible; 2) how to relax the LMIs conditions so that the LMIs problem is more feasible. Also a few examples are given to illustrate the theoretical analysis.
The Use of Convalescent Sera in Immune-Electron Microscopy to Detect Non-Suspected/New Viral Agents

Negative staining electron microscopy methods can be employed for the diagnosis of viral particles in animal samples. In fact, negative staining electron microscopy methods are used to identify viruses, especially in minor species and wild animals, when no other methods are available and in cases of rare, emerging or re-emerging infections. In particular, immune-electron-microscopy with convalescent sera is employed to detect etiological agents when there are undiagnosed clinical outbreaks, when alternative diagnostic methods fail due to the lack of immunological reagents and primers, and when there is no indicative clinical suspect. An overview of immune-electron-microscopy with convalescent sera’s use in the diagnosis of new and unsuspected viruses in animals of domestic and wild species is provided through the descriptions of the following four diagnostic veterinary cases: (I) enteric viruses of pigs: Porcine Rotavirus, Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus, Porcine Circovirus and Porcine Torovirus; (II) Rotavirus and astrovirus in young turkeys with enteritis; (III) Parvovirus-like particles in pheasants; and (IV) Lagoviruses: Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus and European Brown Hare Syndrome Virus.
Levetiracetam has an activity‐dependent effect on inhibitory transmission

Purpose: Previous work has shown that levetiracetam (LEV) binds the vesicular protein SV2A and reduces excitatory neurotransmitter release during trains of high‐frequency activity, most likely by accessing its binding site through vesicular endocytosis into excitatory synaptic terminals. Because there are differences in excitatory and inhibitory transmitter release mechanisms, and there are suggestions that neurons differ in their SV2A expression, we were curious whether LEV also reduces inhibitory transmission.
RAPS: A Recommender Algorithm Based on Pattern Structures

We propose a new algorithm for recommender systems with numeric ratings which is based on Pattern Structures (RAPS). As the input the algorithm takes rating matrix, e.g., such that it contains movies rated by users. For a target user, the algorithm returns a rated list of items (movies) based on its previous ratings and ratings of other users. We compare the results of the proposed algorithm in terms of precision and recall measures with Slope One, one of the state-of-the-art item-based algorithms, on Movie Lens dataset and RAPS demonstrates the best or comparable quality.
Imaging mass spectrometry of intraspecies metabolic exchange revealed the cannibalistic factors of Bacillus subtilis

During bacterial cannibalism, a differentiated subpopulation harvests nutrients from their genetically identical siblings to allow continued growth in nutrient-limited conditions. Hypothesis-driven imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) was used to identify metabolites active in a Bacillus subtilis cannibalism system in which sporulating cells lyse nonsporulating siblings. Two candidate molecules with sequences matching the products of skfA and sdpC, genes for the proposed cannibalistic factors sporulation killing factor (SKF) and sporulation delaying protein (SDP), respectively, were identified and the structures of the final products elucidated. SKF is a cyclic 26-amino acid (aa) peptide that is posttranslationally modified with one disulfide and one cysteine thioether bridged to the α-position of a methionine, a posttranslational modification not previously described in biology. SDP is a 42-residue peptide with one disulfide bridge. In spot test assays on solid medium, overproduced SKF and SDP enact a cannibalistic killing effect with SDP having higher potency. However, only purified SDP affected B. subtilis cells in liquid media in fluorescence microscopy and growth assays. Specifically, SDP treatment delayed growth in a concentration-dependent manner, caused increases in cell permeability, and ultimately caused cell lysis accompanied by the production of membrane tubules and spheres. Similarly, SDP but not SKF was able to inhibit the growth of the pathogens Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus epidermidis with comparable IC50 to vancomycin. This investigation, with the identification of SKF and SDP structures, highlights the strength of IMS in investigations of metabolic exchange of microbial colonies and also demonstrates IMS as a promising approach to discover novel biologically active molecules.
The Movement for Responsible County Government

County government in every state, except Rhode Island and Connecticut (which have troubles of their own), whether it be under the town system or under the commissioner system, is organized on the plan of making as many officers as possible "directly responsible to the people. " The people elect their board of supervisors or commissioners, as the case may be, and undertake to hold them responsible for the financial affairs of the county. They are to control, if they can, the expenditures, among others, of the sheriff. But always the sheriff is no subordinate of theirs; the people selected him! In the course of his work he collects sundry fees which so far as the supervisors are concerned he may account for or not as he pleases. They may reach him in some slow roundabout way but never by the direct power of summary removal which a private business concern may exercise. The supervisors may set out upon a program of economy and efficiency including, let us say, the standardization of supplies. But the county clerk will not recognize their superior authority; he will run his office to suit his personal convenience; and if the supervisors undertake to check him he may find some way of appealing to the people. The superintendent of the poor, the treasurer and the auditor may likewise go their respective gaits, and the county will be blessed not with one government, but with several. This is the particular form which the ancient and revered theory of the separation of powers has taken in this branch of government. No one officer or board is entrusted with power enough to do serious wrong; let the people be the boss! Noble sentiment. But there is a reverse side to it. Division of power carries with it division of responsibility. It is as though the board of directors were charged with the control of a private enterprise, but were expressly denied the power to select the manager and heads of departments wherewith to execute their trust. So 116
Quality Daily Physical Education for the Primary School Student: A Personal Account of the Trois-Rivières Regional Project

This article offers a brief and personal account of the historical background, implementation and principal findings from the Trois-Rivières regional project, a large-scale quasi-experimental intervention that tested the impact of providing a daily hour of specialist-taught quality physical education upon the physical and mental development of primary school students. The intervention continued in grades one through six, and it enhanced maximal aerobic power, physical working capacity, muscle strength and physical performance in both boys and girls in both an urban and a rural setting. However, the programme had little influence upon the immediate health, growth, maturation or prevalence of obesity in the experimental group. A follow-up study was carried out when the students had become adults; this showed positive effects upon attitudes towards physical activity, but only limited long-term effects upon habitual physical activity and other aspects of health behaviour. Strengths and limitations of the Trois-Rivières regional project are considered, and suggestions are offered for those planning future studies of this type.
Addressing uncertainty in implicit preferences

The increasing amount of content available via digital television has made TV program recommenders valuable tools. In order to provide personalized recommendations, recommender systems need to collect information about user preferences. Since users are reluctant to invest much time in explicitly expressing their interests, preferences often need to be implicitly inferred through data gathered by monitoring user behavior. Which is, alas, less reliable. This article addresses the problem of learning TV preferences based on tracking the programs users have watched, whilst dealing with the varying degrees of reliability in such information. Three approaches to the problem are discussed: use all information equally; weight information by its reliability or simply discard the most unreliable information. Experimental results for these three approaches are presented and compared using a content-based filtering recommender built on a Naïve Bayes classifier.
Invited Commentary Invited Commentary: Maternal Effects in Preterm Birth—Effects of Maternal Genotype, Mitochondrial DNA, Imprinting, or Environment?

Preterm birth is an important public health problem. A wide range of risk factors has been investigated, of which the strongest established is a woman’s previous history of preterm birth. In this issue of the Journal, Boyd et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2009;170(11):1358–1364) and Svensson et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2009;170(11):1365–1372), using data on singleton livebirths from national birth registers linked with multigeneration databases, found evidence that maternal genetic factors impact on the risk for preterm birth, whereas paternal and probably fetal genetic factors do not. Possible caveats include missing information, the range of maternal risk factors included in the analyses, possible misclassification of these risk factors, and possible vertical transmission of microbial flora or behaviors from mother to daughter. Weinberg and Shi (Am J Epidemiol. 2009;170(11):1373–1381) build on the evidence regarding potential mechanisms underlying the heritability of preterm birth from these 2 and other studies, to evaluate the comparative ability of different study designs to distinguish among these potential mechanisms. These studies have different strengths, and a portfolio of studies of different designs and with more detailed phenotyping than previously done will be needed to probe further the etiology of preterm birth and thereby provide tools for its control.
Ecological Moral Realism: An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Studying Moral Psychology

The authors propose that the empirical study of human moral behavior as undertaken by positive psychologists, psychologists interested in the study of values, and experimental ethicists can be normative at its core, yet also remain truly scientific. To do this, those interested in the empirical study of human moral behavior should consider the concept of affordances, which is central to the Gibsonian ecological psychology tradition, as an approach to studying virtues and strengths. From this perspective, virtues can be better defined as part of moral analogues of affordances (MAAs). Just as the affordance “being-climbable” is a relation between climbing ability and height, so one can similarly define a MAA as an opportunity for moral behavior. Virtues, on this account, would be defined as abilities to behave appropriately in morally relevant situations. If one studies virtues as components of MAAs, virtues are only comprehensible in terms of morally relevant situations. Similarly, morally relevant situations are comprehensible only in terms of abilities to behave appropriately in them, that is, in terms of virtues. We believe that such an approach holds many advantages.
First steps in developing the Dutch version of the Bayley III: Is the original Bayley III and its item sequence also adequate for Dutch children?

The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development [Bayley III, Bayley, N. (2006). The Bayley scales of infant and toddler development. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation] is currently developed and exclusively normed for American children. In this study, the appropriateness of the Bayley III item content and item sequence for Dutch children was evaluated. The translated version, the Bayley-III-NL was evaluated in two phases. In phase 1 (N = 100), analyses showed that overall the item content seemed to be appropriate for Dutch children. In addition, the item sequence was found to be suitable for Dutch children. After phase 1, small adaptations were made to the instructions of a few items based on the experiences of the examiners to improve standardization in performance. In phase 2 (N = 400), the findings of phase 1 were confirmed in a larger sample. It is concluded that Dutch norms can be based upon the current version of the Bayley-III-NL.
Chlamydia pneumoniae antibodies are associated with an atherogenic lipid profile

OBJECTIVE To determine, within a representative population group of men and women, whether alteration of the lipid profile might underlie the reported association between Chlamydia pneumoniae and ischaemic heart disease. DESIGN AND SETTING Cross sectional survey in an area with a high incidence of ischaemic heart disease. SUBJECTS 400 randomly selected participants in the World Health Organisation MONICA project’s third population survey in Northern Ireland. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Stored sera were examined by microimmunofluorescence for IgG antibodies toC pneumoniae at a dilution of 1 in 64. Mean total and high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol were compared between seropositive and seronegative individuals with adjustment for age, measures of socioeconomic status, smoking habit, alcohol consumption, body mass index, and the season during which blood had been taken. RESULTS In seropositive men, adjusted mean serum total cholesterol and HDL cholesterol were 0.5 mmol/l (9.2%) higher and 0.11 mmol/l (9.3%) lower, respectively, than in seronegative men. Differences in women did not achieve statistical significance, but both total cholesterol and HDL cholesterol were higher (3.6% and 5.8%, respectively) in seropositive than in seronegative individuals. CONCLUSIONS There is serological evidence thatC pneumoniaeinfection is associated with an atherogenic lipid profile in men. Altered lipid levels may underlie the association betweenC pneumoniae and ischaemic heart disease.
The use of the Children’s Depression Inventory in an Irish context

The present study aimed to provide normative data on the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) for an Irish population. Analyses revealed significant differences between older and younger children and between males and females on CDI total scores. Older children scored higher than younger children and females scored higher than males. Results showed that the overall mean CDI score of Irish schoolchildren is similar to that of the original American normative sample. However, there were differences noted between the two populations when broken down by age and gender. Irish adolescents were found to score significantly higher than their American counterparts. Irish female adolescents were found to score higher than American female adolescents. However, Irish male adolescents scored significantly lower than American boys of the same age. Amongst the younger age group, a significant difference was also found between the American and Irish boys, with Irish boys in this age group scoring lower. There was no sign.
An optimization formulation for footsteps planning

We present a novel method to solve the problem of planning footsteps for a humanoid robot according to an arbitrary set of tasks. In this method, we consider the sequence of footsteps required to solve a task as a virtual kinematic chain that augments the state of the humanoid robot. We introduce this representation to formulate the footsteps planning as an iterative constrainted optimization problem where the footsteps are accounted for as additional degrees of freedom helping the robot in achieving its tasks. We demonstrate the efficiency and the generality of the method through three task scenarios for the humanoid robot HRP-2.
Third-generation parathyroid hormone assays and all-cause mortality in incident dialysis patients: the CHOICE study.

BACKGROUND There has been controversy about the utility of new third-generation parathyroid hormone (PTH) assays measuring only 1-84 PTH, with few large studies comparing second- and third-generation PTH measurements in patients with ESRD. METHODS We measured 1-84 PTH ('biointact' or 'whole' PTH) and total PTH ('intact' PTH) in a national cohort of 515 incident dialysis patients from banked frozen EDTA plasma (median follow-up, 35 months) and examined the accuracy of estimating 1-84 PTH from total PTH and the associations of these levels with patient characteristics and mortality. RESULTS The 1-84 PTH and total PTH levels were closely correlated. Higher 1-84 PTH was associated with African-American race and higher serum phosphate and lower calcium levels. The percentage of total PTH represented by 1-84 PTH was, on average, 53%, but with a wide range (25-89%). Calculating 1-84 PTH from total PTH using a proposed standard conversion factor (54%) led to misclassification of 8% of the population compared with measured 1-84 PTH. In a multivariate Cox proportional hazards model for all-cause mortality, a 1-84 PTH value >160 pg/ml was associated with increased risk of mortality (HR = 1.62, 95% CI, 1.03-2.54) compared to a level of 80-160 pg/ml. Elevated total PTH, 7-84 PTH and the 1-84 PTH/7-84 PTH ratio were not significantly associated with mortality. CONCLUSIONS The 1-84 PTH and total PTH are highly correlated. Elevated 1-84 PTH was significantly associated with increased mortality, whereas total PTH did not reach statistical significance. Thus, although in other respect they are similar, there may be utility in measuring 1-84 PTH for its associations with mortality.
Genome-Wide Scan for Linkage to Obesity-Associated Hypertension in French Canadians

Essential hypertension is a heterogeneous disorder that is thought to develop because of several overlapping subsets of underlying mechanisms. One such causal pathway may involve pathophysiological alterations induced by obesity. In the present study, we examined whether investigating clinically defined subtypes of hypertension, such as obesity-associated hypertension, facilitates the search for its genes. Fifty-five extended families were selected on the basis of having ≥2 siblings affected by hypertension from a geographically remote French-Canadian population. Fifteen of these families showed a high prevalence (≥70%) of obesity. Genome-wide scan using qualitative multipoint linkage analysis (GeneHunter 2.1; marker density <10 cM) was performed in the entire set of hypertensive families and the subset with high prevalence of obesity. In the scan involving all 55 families, the most significant loci (logarithm of odds [LOD] score=2.5) were identified on chromosomes 1 (D1S1597) and 11 (D11S1999). In the scan including only the subset of families with obesity-hypertension, the most significant locus (LOD score=3.1) was found on chromosome 1 in the same region as the scan involving all families (D1S1597). Genotyping additional markers increased the significance of this locus (LOD score=3.5) and refined its position (D1S2672). Several candidate genes of obesity-hypertension are located in close proximity; these include the tumor necrosis factor receptor 2 and atrial natriuretic peptide genes. These results suggest that investigating clinically defined subtypes of hypertension, such as obesity-associated hypertension, may facilitate the search for genes of this complex disorder.
[Physiology and pathophysiology of renal circulation].

An estimate of renal blood flow in the human kidney is possible with PAH-clearance, radiologic and radioisotopic techniques. But even animal experiments with clearance- and flow-measurements usually allow only a coarse evaluation of the renal blood flow. In the past, glomerular filtration has been determined by micropuncture methods. From changes in glomerular filtration, intrarenal alterations of flow resistance have been calculated. Using this method, resistance at different vascular levels could not be measured because the vessels of the mammalian kidney, except peritubular capillaries, vasa recta and single capillaries of the glomerulum, are not accessible to micropuncture. The recently developed split hydronephrotic kidney model allows investigation of almost all renal vessels. Thus it could be demonstrated that regulation of the renal blood flow is mediated not only by afferent and efferent arterioles, but also by arcuate and interlobular arteries. In this model, the effects of systemic blood pressure changes and local drug application on the renal vascular resistance were measured. Angiotensin II elicited pre- as well as postglomerular vasoconstriction, of which only a minor part was due to elevation of systemic blood pressure by Angiotensin II. Dopamine at low concentrations dilated especially the larger preglomerular arteries and, at higher concentrations, caused a vasoconstriction of these vessels. The vasodilatory response could be blocked by haloperidol, whereas the vasoconstrictory effect was abolished by phentolamine and propranolol. Calcium-channel-blockade by nitrendipine exerted a dose-dependent preglomerular vasodilation. Atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) also dilated preglomerular vessel segments, but at higher doses it additionally induced a postglomerular vasoconstriction. Thus, increments of glomerular filtration by ANP could be explained by its hemodynamic effects. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)