Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Calibration Capacity of the Conductance-to-Volume Conversion Equations for the Mouse Conductance Catheter Measurement System

The conductance catheter system is used to measure instantaneous ventricular conductance, and real-time ventricular volume is then determined by converting the measured conductance to volume. Two conductance-to-volume conversion equations for the conductance catheter system have been proposed: Baan's linear equation and Wei's nonlinear equation. In fact, the accuracy of this volume estimation method is limited by several factors, such as the catheter position deviation. The effects of the mouse catheter position deviations on the volume-conductance relationships are investigated with cylindrical finite-element models and mouse left ventricular models. The accuracy and calibration capacity of the two conversion equations for estimating volume are evaluated and compared. According to the comparison results, the performance of the nonlinear conversion equation is better.
Understanding the Human Genome Project: a biographical approach

This article analyzes a number of recently published autobiographies by leading participants in the Human Genome Project (HGP), in order to determine to what extent they may further our understanding of the history, scientific significance and societal impact of this major research endeavor. Notably, I will focus on three publications that fall under this heading, namely The common thread by John Sulston (2002/2003), The language of God (2006) by Francis Collins and A life decoded by Craig Venter (2007). 1 What may we learn from these autobiographical sources about the dynamics of scientific change? What is their added value in understanding science in general and the HGP in particular? These questions will be elaborated in three directions: on the level of knowledge (epistemology), power (politics) and the Self (ethics). On the epistemological level, genomics is often presented as a paradigm shift in the life sciences, a tremendous up-scaling of research, an “informatization” of life. Autobiographies may reveal how this shift – usually discussed in more general terms from a philosophy of science or science studies perspective – manifests itself on an individual scale, on a micro-epistemological level. On the political level, autobiographies may inform us about the micro-politics of scientific change. Finally, on the level of Self, autobiographies may allow us to analyze how researchers, through practices of Self, are actively engaged in constituting themselves as responsible subjects in the face of unpredictable dynamics and unforeseen dilemmas.
Treatment Expectations and Preferences as Predictors of Outcome of Acupuncture for Chronic Back Pain

Study Design. Preplanned secondary analysis of data from participants receiving acupuncture in a randomized clinical trial. Objective. To determine whether patients' expectations of and preferences for acupuncture predict short and long-term treatment outcomes for persons with chronic back pain. Summary of Background Data. Although accumulating evidence suggests that patient expectations and treatment preferences may predict treatment outcomes, few studies have examined this relationship for acupuncture. Methods. Four hundred seventy-seven acupuncture-naïve participants with chronic low back pain who were randomized to 1 of 3 acupuncture or simulated acupuncture treatments were the focus of this analysis. Ten treatments were provided during a 7-week period, and participants were masked to treatment assignment. Before randomization, participants provided expectations regarding treatment success, impressions, and knowledge about acupuncture and treatment preferences. Outcomes of interest were functional status (Roland score) and symptom bothersomeness at 8 and 52 weeks postrandomization, obtained by telephone interviewers masked to treatment assignment. Results. Persons with high pretreatment expectations for the success of acupuncture were more likely to report greater general expectations for improvement, a preference for acupuncture, having heard acupuncture was a very effective treatment and having a very or moderately positive impression of acupuncture. However, none of these variables was a significant predictor of improvement in back-related symptoms or function at 8 or 52 weeks. After 1 treatment, participants' revised expectations of treatment success were only associated with back-symptoms at the end of treatment. After 5 treatments, revised expectation of success was predictive of both symptoms and function at 8 and 52 weeks. Conclusion. Pretreatment expectations and preferences for acupuncture were not found predictive of treatment outcomes for patients with chronic back pain. These results differ from previous studies evaluating acupuncture for chronic back pain. These inconsistent results suggest that the relationship between expectations and outcomes may be more complex than previously believed.
Generative Adversarial Structured Networks

We propose a technique that combines generative adversarial networks with probabilistic graphical models to explicitly model dependencies in structured distributions. Generative adversarial structured networks (GASNs) produce samples by passing random inputs through a neural network to construct the potentials of a graphical model; maximum a-posteriori inference in this graphical model then yields a sample. To train a GASN, one must differentiate a bi-level optimization, which is non-trivial. We present a solution based on “smoothing” the generator, and propose two methods for obtaining the smoothed gradient. We show preliminary experimental results, demonstrating that training GASNs is feasible.
Experimental pneumococcal meningitis causes central nervous system pathology without inducing the 72-kd heat shock protein.

We examined whether experimental pneumococcal meningitis induced the 72-kd heat shock protein (HSP72), a sensitive marker of neuronal stress in other models of central nervous system (CNS) injury. Brain injury was characterized by vasculitis, cerebritis, and abscess formation in the cortex of infected animals. The extent of these changes correlated with the size of the inoculum (P less than 0.003) and with pathophysiologic parameters of disease severity, i.e., cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lactate (r = 0.61, P less than 0.0001) and CSF glucose concentrations (r = -0.55, P less than 0.0001). Despite the presence of numerous cortical regions having morphologic evidence of injury, HSP72 was not detected in most animals. When present, only rare neurons were HSP72 positive. Western blot analysis of brain samples confirmed the paucity of HSP72 induction. The lack of neuronal HSP72 expression in this model suggests that at least some of the events leading to neuronal injury in meningitis are unique, when compared with CNS diseases associated with HSP72 induction.
Lipin Is a Central Regulator of Adipose Tissue Development and Function in Drosophila melanogaster

ABSTRACT Lipins are evolutionarily conserved proteins found from yeasts to humans. Mammalian and yeast lipin proteins have been shown to control gene expression and to enzymatically convert phosphatidate to diacylglycerol, an essential precursor in triacylglcerol (TAG) and phospholipid synthesis. Loss of lipin 1 in the mouse, but not in humans, leads to lipodystrophy and fatty liver disease. Here we show that the single lipin orthologue of Drosophila melanogaster (dLipin) is essential for normal adipose tissue (fat body) development and TAG storage. dLipin mutants are characterized by reductions in larval fat body mass, whole-animal TAG content, and lipid droplet size. Individual cells of the underdeveloped fat body are characterized by increased size and ultrastructural defects affecting cell nuclei, mitochondria, and autophagosomes. Under starvation conditions, dLipin is transcriptionally upregulated and functions to promote survival. Together, these data show that dLipin is a central player in lipid and energy metabolism, and they establish Drosophila as a genetic model for further studies of conserved functions of the lipin family of metabolic regulators.
Amyloid β, Glutamate, Excitotoxicity in Alzheimer's Disease: Are We on the Right Track?

Alzheimer's disease (AD) has a devastating impact on aged people worldwide. Although sophisticated and advanced molecular methods have been developed for its diagnosis since early phases, pharmacological treatment still represents an unresolved topic. The more the disease progresses, the more the uneffectiveness of antidementia drugs emerges. New and encouraging results from experimental works indicate that glutamate pathway may play a substantial role in the pathogenesis since early stages of the disease. Several experimental data together with the clinical use of the uncompetitive N‐methyl‐d‐aspartate (NMDA) antagonist memantine strengthen this idea. Unfortunately, definitive data on the glutamatergic transmission involvement in AD are still incomplete. Moreover, clinical results indicate only temporarily limited effects of memantine. Currently, memantine is indicated for moderate‐to‐severe cases of AD, an indication that may limit its efficacy and impact on Alzheimer's dementia. The association of memantine with the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor drugs used to treat dementia symptoms appears to be beneficial, in both experimental and clinical studies. Because cholinergic and glutamatergic dysfunction occurs early in AD, the coadministration of appropriate treatment in early stages of the disease might represent a valid option from the beginning of cognitive decline. Moreover, to better evaluate drug efficacy, the association of the recently introduced biomarkers with a clinical AD profile should be considered an aim to pursue.
MIDDLE-R: Consistent database replication at the middleware level

The widespread use of clusters and Web farms has increased the importance of data replication. In this article, we show how to implement consistent and scalable data replication at the middleware level. We do this by combining transactional concurrency control with group communication primitives. The article presents different replication protocols, argues their correctness, describes their implementation as part of a generic middleware, Middle-R, and proves their feasibility with an extensive performance evaluation. The solution proposed is well suited for a variety of applications including Web farms and distributed object platforms.
Process Mining : A Two-Step Approach using Transition Systems and Regions

More and more information about processes is recorded by information systems in the form of so-called “event logs”. Despite the omnipresence and richness of these event logs, most software vendors have been focusing on relatively simple questions under the assumption that the process is fixed and known, e.g., the calculation of simple performance metrics like utilization and flow time. However, in many domains processes are evolving and people, typically, have an oversimplified and incorrect view on the actual business processes. Therefore, process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial and useful information from event logs. One element of process mining is control-flow discovery, i.e., automatically constructing a process model (e.g., a Petri net) describing the causal dependencies between activities. Many control-flow discovery techniques have been proposed in literature. Unfortunately, these techniques have problems when discovering processes with complicated dependencies. This paper proposes a new two-step approach. First, a transition system is constructed which can be modified to avoid over-fitting. Then, using the “theory of regions”, the model is synthesized. The approach has been implemented in the context of ProM and uses Petrify for synthesis. This paper demonstrates that this two-step approach overcomes many of the limitations of traditional approaches.
Detecting novel attacks by identifying anomalous network packet headers

We describe a simple and efficient network intrusion detection algorithm that detects novel attacks by flagging anomalous field values in packet headers at the data link, network, and transport layers. In the 1999 DARPA off-line intrusion detection evaluation test set (Lippmann et al. 2000), we detect 76% of probes and 48% of denial of service attacks (at 10 false alarms per day). When this system is merged with the 18 systems in the original evaluation, the average detection rate for attacks of all types increases from 61% to 65%. We investigate the effect on performance when attack free training data is not available.
A Meta-Model of the Effects of Goal Characteristics, Feedback, and Role Characteristics in Human Organizations

Recent literature reviews have attempted to link goal-setting processes with other traditional human relations topics, possibly in a search for explanations of the inconsistent results among some empirical studies. The present reformulation builds upon the models developed in these literature reviews by offering more specific propositions regarding the variables in these models and by integrating these variables with three other organizational themes: participative management, job design and role theory. The model offered here is a meta-model because it is an integration of variables and concepts from several other models. Eleven propositions regarding the direct effects of goal characteristics, feedback, and role characteristics and eleven corollaries regarding the moderating effects of personal and job characteristics are presented.
Progress in HIV Reduction and Prevention Among Injection and Noninjection Drug Users

Substantial progress has been made in reducing HIV among injection drug users (IDUs) in the United States, despite political and social resistance that reduced resources and restricted access to services. The record for HIV prevention among noninjecting drug users is less developed, although they are more numerous than IDUs. Newer treatments for opiate and alcohol abuse can now be integrated into primary HIV care; treatment for stimulant abuse is less developed. All drug users present challenges for newer HIV prevention strategies (eg, “test and treat,” nonoccupational postexposure prophylaxis and preexposure prophylaxis, contingency management, and conditional cash transfer). A comprehensive HIV prevention program that includes multicomponent multilevel approaches (ie, individual, network, structural) has been effective in HIV prevention among IDUs. Expanding these approaches to noninjecting drug users, especially those at highest risk (eg, minority men who have sex with men) and incorporating these newer approaches is a public health priority.
The socio-symbolic function of language

Abstract The article starts from the premise known since antiquity that speech indicates something of the speaker. Language as action is regarded not only as a medium to convey lexical or semantic information but also of social meaning. This raises the question: How can we get access to the social meaning of linguistic structures? This is the main question dealt with throughout the paper, which sets out with carefully defining the notion of symbolic meaning on the grounds of social semiotics. It then develops the sociological concept of group (or community) as a cultural sub-system of society, in order to understand better the relationship between language variation as options of linguistic choice and ‘sociolect’ as a group specific linguistic variety. Within this conceptual framework, the contours of a socio-grammar are outlined, which describes the socio-symbolic functions of phonetic, prosodic, morphological, lexical, syntactical, textual, and pragmatic elements of linguistic structure. The perspective then broadens to the level of discourse on which the relationship of language and prestige or language and power is dealt with, notabene with a side view on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the symbolic order of significant difference (in his opus magnum La distinction).
Traditional Interpretation and Treatment of Mental Illness in an Arab Psychiatric Clinic

Traditional interpretations of beliefs commonly entertained and rituals commonly practiced among a sample of 153 Arab psychiatric patients were studied. Ritual practice associated significantly with illiteracy and with the presence of observable disorders of behaviour. The interpretations-ritual relationship is not, however, of a one-to-one nature. The belief that general physical weakness is the cause of psychogenic symptoms is exposed and its implications for therapy are discussed from the traditional and medicopsychological angles.
An Integrity Check for the Conflict Origin AS Prefixes in the Inter-domain Routing

In the Internet, the routing system consists of the Interior-domain and the Inter-domain. Within the Interdomain routing, Autonomous System (AS) represents the administrative network domain, which is managed by a single institution with its operational policy. ASs exchange the ASs’ reachability information to each other. Without the Inter-domain routing scheme, the nodes in the Internet can’t communicate across the multiple ASs. The Inter-domain routing is an essential functional element in the global Internet operation. However, due to several reasons such as miss-configuration at the routers, the Interdomain routing becomes unstable. This occurs that one AS (say AS1) propagates the prefix that has been already assigned to another AS (say AS2) and other peers receive its routing update and inject the misconfigured AS information to their peering routers. Since the routing information associated with AS1 is over written by AS2, AS1 loses the network connectivity. This problem is known as the Conflict Origin AS prefix or the Multiple Origin AS. We recognize that this is a serious problem which degrades the quality of Internet backbone infrastructure. We focus on this problem and propose the mechanism that can detect the Conflict Origin AS prefix automatically using the policy database. Based on the evaluation using the prototype system, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can work well with the existing Internet’s Inter-domain routing system. key words: BGP, prefix, Autonomous System (AS), IRR
Being Transgender

In this interview-based study, we investigated the common social experiences and minority stressors related to being transgender. It is one of two articles that resulted from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 17 participants who claimed a variety of transgender identities (e.g., cross-dresser, transman, transwoman, butch lesbian) and were from different regions in the United States. The interview was centered on how participants’ identities influenced their lives across different interpersonal contexts. Participants described developing a more complex understanding of gender because of the effect of their transgender status on others and the need to modify their gender presentation at times to secure their safety. In the workplace, their gender could overshadow their competence and, in the age of social media, was always at risk of becoming public. Seeking social support could be dangerous, and the process of transitioning was found to make safe spaces especially elusive. Also, open communication about sex and gender was found to be particularly important within successful intimate relationships. Our findings emphasized the tensions between a need to be respected and valued for oneself and one’s abilities with a need to mitigate the very real dangers of being visible or out as transgender in different contexts. Our research can be used to enhance health professionals’ understandings of transgender people’s life experiences, to identify salient minority stressors for further research exploration, and to advance advocacy.
ASSESSING MISSISSIPPI AEST TEACHERS' CAPACITY FOR TEACHING SCIENCE INTEGRATED PROCESS SKILLS

The purpose of this study was to determine AEST teachers’ capacity to teach science integrated process skills. Twenty teachers attending a summer workshop completed three instruments to assess their capacity to teach integrated process skills, determine their preferred learning styles, and determine their confidence (self-efficacy) to teach science. Overall, AEST teachers exhibited a satisfactory level of ability in their capacity to teach integrated process skills. AEST teachers also had a high self-efficacy as far as their capacity to teach science concepts to their students. While AEST teachers preferred to learn through reflection, through the use of visuals, through sequential activities, and by sensing, those teachers that were reflective learners had a higher capacity to teach science integrated process skills than those teachers who were active learners.
The Relationships of Destination Image, Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions: An Integrated Model

ABSTRACT Built upon the tourism and marketing literature, a conceptual model depicting the relationship among tourism destination image components, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions was proposed. A conceptual model consisting of six hypotheses was empirically tested using survey data from 550 Chinese tourists who visited Zhang-Jia-Jie, a major Chinese tourism destination shown on the list of the World Natural Heritage. The empirical findings reveal that: (a) overall tourism destination is reflected by both cognitive image and affective image, and (b) overall tourism destination image has an indirect impact on behavioral intentions through satisfaction. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed before the article concludes with limitations and directions for future research.
Brokering Culture and Labor: An Anthropological Analysis of IT Offshore Labor between Japan and India

Brokering Culture and Labor: An Anthropological Analysis of IT Offshore Labor between Japan and India Akiko Murata The rapid expansion of information and communication technology (ICT) has accelerated the distribution of work across geographically dispersed areas, and this transnational relocation of work is viewed as a seamless transaction by proponents of technological globalization. However, a close examination of the collaboration involved in Indian/Japanese software offshoring illuminates an array of difficulties that problematize the “seamlessness” of this endeavor. This dissertation investigated the complex social world of offshoring by focusing on analyzing India-Japan software offshoring, and the study revealed corporate control as well as workers’ efforts and struggles to make this ICT-supported relocation of work function smoothly. Through the analysis of the interviews with Indian software engineers and liaison officers between companies and within companies, in combination with observations of their workplaces, this dissertation highlights the corporate demands for flexibility in two layers: demands for being flexible in macro-labor circulations, to function as “labor buffers,” and being flexible in terms of micro-communication issues and clients’ demands. At the same time, it also reveals that corporate control is not a monolithic and totalizing force, but a complex and contradictory process generated through the struggles and intense labor of both Indian and Japanese sides that attempt to connect the disjunctions and make the business look “seamless. ” This study illuminates the irony that the relocation of work can intensify labor for both sides because of clients’ micromanagement and communication difficulties. In addition, it also captures workers’ efforts to distance themselves from corporate control, and their attempt to utilize the “onsite opportunity” to pursue their own interest. By highlighting the corporate demands for dual flexibility, as well as layers of communication difficulties and contradictions in Japan-Indian offshoring businesses, this dissertation provides insight into an anthropological and sociological analysis of offshoring as a complex global social phenomenon.