Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How the python heart separates pulmonary and systemic blood pressures and blood flows

Summary The multiple convergent evolution of high systemic blood pressure among terrestrial vertebrates has always been accompanied by lowered pulmonary pressure. In mammals, birds and crocodilians, this cardiac separation of pressures relies on the complete division of the right and left ventricles by a complete ventricular septum. However, the anatomy of the ventricle of most reptiles does not allow for complete anatomical division, but the hearts of pythons and varanid lizards can produce high systemic blood pressure while keeping the pulmonary blood pressure low. It is also known that these two groups of reptiles are characterised by low magnitudes of cardiac shunts. Little, however, is known about the mechanisms that allow for this pressure separation. Here we provide a description of cardiac structures and intracardiac events that have been revealed by ultrasonic measurements and angioscopy. Echocardiography revealed that the atrioventricular valves descend deep into the ventricle during ventricular filling and thereby greatly reduce the communication between the systemic (cavum arteriosum) and pulmonary (cavum pulmonale) ventricular chambers during diastole. Angioscopy and echocardiography showed how the two incomplete septa, the muscular ridge and the bulbuslamelle – ventricular structures common to all squamates – contract against each other in systole and provide functional division of the anatomically subdivided ventricle. Washout shunts are inevitable in the subdivided snake ventricle, but we show that the site of shunting, the cavum venosum, is very small throughout the cardiac cycle. It is concluded that the python ventricle is incapable of the pronounced and variable shunts of other snakes, because of its architecture and valvular mechanics.
Diurnal and Circadian Rhythms in the Tomato Transcriptome and Their Modulation by Cryptochrome Photoreceptors

Background Circadian clocks are internal molecular time-keeping mechanisms that provide living organisms with the ability to adjust their growth and physiology and to anticipate diurnal environmental changes. Circadian clocks, without exception, respond to light and, in plants, light is the most potent and best characterized entraining stimulus. The capacity of plants to respond to light is achieved through a number of photo-perceptive proteins including cryptochromes and phytochromes. There is considerable experimental evidence demonstrating the roles of photoreceptors in providing light input to the clock. Methodology In order to identify genes regulated by diurnal and circadian rhythms, and to establish possible functional relations between photoreceptors and the circadian clock in tomato, we monitored the temporal transcription pattern in plants entrained to long-day conditions, either by large scale comparative profiling, or using a focused approach over a number of photosensory and clock-related genes by QRT-PCR. In parallel, focused transcription analyses were performed in cry1a- and in CRY2-OX tomato genotypes. Conclusions We report a large series of transcript oscillations that shed light on the complex network of interactions among tomato photoreceptors and clock-related genes. Alteration of cryptochrome gene expression induced major changes in the rhythmic oscillations of several other gene transcripts. In particular, over-expression of CRY2 had an impact not only on day/night fluctuations but also on rhythmicity under constant light conditions. Evidence was found for widespread diurnal oscillations of transcripts encoding specific enzyme classes (e.g. carotenoid biosynthesis enzymes) as well as for post-transcriptional diurnal and circadian regulation of the CRY2 transcript.
Upper-Division Transfer Students: Designing a Supplemental Instruction Program for Nursing Students Within a Science Based Curriculum

The transition to upper-level course work of transferring students, predominantly students from 2-year/community colleges, has been explored in recent education research literature. Yet, it has not been sufficiently explored whether and what academic support programs could be successful in supporting transfer students with the transfer process. This article demonstrates the success of an academic support program for a discipline-specific cohort of transfer students entering their junior year in a nursing program at a public university within the University System of Maryland. The study explored prior academic preparation, results of Nursing Entrance Test scores, and interventions provided by an academic support initiative. For a course in pathopharmacology, this collaborative environment—facilitated by successful peers based on Supplemental Instruction, workshops on accelerated learning techniques, and individual tutoring—indicates that participation in such a comprehensive program resulted in an overall higher grade point average at the end of the first semester. There was also a reduced rate of failure or drop out from 15% to 7% in subsequent semesters. Overall, such an initiative could serve as a model for other institutions.
An Arc of Unpaired “Hinge Bases” Facilitates Information Exchange among Functional Centers of the Ribosome

ABSTRACT Information must be shared and functions coordinated among the spatially distinct functional centers of the ribosome. To address these issues, a yeast-based genetic system enabling generation of stable strains expressing only mutant forms of rRNA was devised. The B1a bridge (helix 38) has been implicated in the subtle modulation of numerous ribosomal functions. Base-specific mutations were introduced into helix 38 at sites affecting the B1a bridge and where it contacts the aminoacyl-tRNA (aa-tRNA) D-loop. Both sets of mutants promoted increased affinities for aa-tRNA but had different effects in their responses to two A-site-specific drugs and on suppression nonsense codons. Structural analyses revealed an arc of nucleotides in 25S rRNA that link the B1a bridge, the peptidyltransferase center, the GTPase-associated center, and the sarcin/ricin loop. We propose that a series of regularly spaced “hinge bases” provide fulcrums around which rigid helices can reorient themselves depending on the occupancy status of the A-site.
Evaluation and development of integrated teams: The use of Significant Event Analysis

Significant Event Analysis (SEA) is a practical, problem-solving technique that can help teams learn from their experiences and generate practical solutions to complex issues. It has mainly been conducted in Primary Health Care Teams (PHCTs) with the use of an external facilitator. Although SEA is envisioned to address issues of integration and complement routine audit, there is limited evidence that this has been achieved. This paper reports on a 1 day workshop during which team members were trained to use SEA to address issues of service integration. This paper presents an evaluation of the workshop in order to determine if SEA is a feasible tool to support and encourage team self-evaluation without external facilitation. The main barriers to SEA are discussed as well as the need for longitudinal research to assess the impact of SEA on integration of the team and wider service.
A Performance Evaluation System for Professional Support Personnel

The evaluation of educators has focused historically on classroom teachers, although the last decade brought additional attention to the evaluation of principals and superintendents. This note presents a performance evaluation system designed for evaluating professional support personnel (e.g., counselors, deans, librarians). A conceptual framework for the system is provided, including recommended steps in evaluating support personnel and emphasizing both goal and improvement orientations. Finally, while the evaluation system is designed for professional support personnel, system characteristics that may be generalizable to other education professionals are discussed.
International Achievement Differences: An Assessment of a New Perspective

In recent years, a new perspective has challenged the conventional wisdom that U.S. students do poorly in international assessments. It holds that sampling biases and a different curricular arrangement have made U.S. achievement appear low and that a focus on rankings has masked what are really small achievement differences among countries. To assess this perspective, I review evidence from the major international assessments of the past two decades, including the recent Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). I argue for a middle ground. U.S. performance has not been consistently poor, but varies by subject and grade. Ranks sometimes have exaggerated differences, but even developed countries often differ greatly in achievement. Contrary to a common misconception, the assessments have not unfairly compared the mass of U.S. students to small academic elites in other countries. Our poor math performance is not a simple matter of selection bias or course sequencing, but also reflects real deficiencies in curricular focus and teaching. These have been linked to our assembly-line cultural conception of knowledge and schooling. To ground the international findings, I summarize evidence on domestic indicators. Although trends have been generally stable, U.S. student achievement has been weak for several decades. Fundamental school reform is warranted.
The p55 subunit of Drosophila chromatin assembly factor 1 is homologous to a histone deacetylase-associated protein

To gain a better understanding of DNA replication-coupled chromatin assembly, we have isolated the cDNA encoding the smallest (apparent molecular mass, 55 kDa; termed p55) subunit of Drosophila melanogaster chromatin assembly factor 1 (dCAF-1), a multisubunit protein that is required for the assembly of nucleosomes onto newly replicated DNA in vitro. The p55 polypeptide comprises seven WD repeat motifs and is homologous to the mammalian RbAp48 protein, which is associated with the HD1 histone deacetylase. dCAF-1 was immunopurified by using affinity-purified antibodies against p55; the resulting dCAF-1 preparation possessed the four putative subunits of dCAF-1 (p180, p105, p75, and p55) and was active for DNA replication-coupled chromatin assembly. Moreover, dCAF-1 activity was specifically depleted with antibodies against p55. Thus, p55 is an integral component of dCAF-1. p55 is localized to the nucleus and is present throughout Drosophila development. Consistent with the homology between p55 and the HD1-associated RbAp48 protein, histone deacetylase activity was observed to coimmunoprecipitate specifically with p55 from a Drosophila nuclear extract. Furthermore, a fraction of the p55 protein becomes associated with the newly assembled chromatin following DNA replication. These findings collectively suggest that p55 may function as a link between DNA replication-coupled chromatin assembly and histone modification.
A Critical Framework for Organizational Analysis

Some elements of a critical organization theory are outlined, and some basic features of theory in the Frankfurt tradition, in particular Marcuse's view on technological rationality, are discussed. This concept is central to the effort made in the paper to formulate a framework for critical analysis of industrial and other business organizations in late capitalist society. In this framework, an emancipatory rather than a technical-instrumental interest of knowledge is of fundamental importance. Six basic theses are elaborated concerning the relation between man, work, organization and ideology in advanced industrial society.
A Simple Magnetostatic Sensing Method for Assessing the Local Hysteresis Properties in Ferromagnetic Sheet Materials

Global hysteretic properties of electrical steels can be measured using ring or strip samples, while the assessment of the local hysteretic properties is a much more difficult task since the measurement method needs to be very sensitive. This paper presents a new method wherein the intensity and spatial distribution of the magnetic field, arising from large gradients in the local magnetization, are measured. These large gradients are induced by the passage of a test sample through the steep gradient field of a small, proximate permanent magnet. Magnetic field measurements during both directions of motion provide information indicative of the hysteresis properties. We theoretically analyze these measurements and show experimentally that the measurements correlate well with all the significant aspects of conventional hysteresis loops. The results given in this paper are qualitative, and the method is both by its simplicity and its sensitivity to important hysteresis features a powerful means of magnetic nondestructive evaluation.
A unified approach for domain-specific tweet sentiment analysis

Twitter is an online social networking (OSN) service that enables users to send and read short messages called “tweets”. As of December 2014, Twitter has more than 500 million users, out of which more than 284 million are active users and about 500 million tweets are posted every day. Tweet sentiment analysis (TSA) identifies a valuable platform for the OSN study which provides insights into the opinion of the public about culture, products and political agendas and thereby is able to predict the trends in specific domains. In order to execute efficient TSA on a particular topic or domain, a TSA approach with unified tool, UnB TSA, is proposed consisting of four steps: tweets collection, refinement (excluding noisy tweets), sentiment lexicon creation and sentiment analysis. As a key part, the lexicon is domain-specific that incorporates expressions whose sentiment varies from one domain to another. Four algorithms including expanding limited hashtags into a larger and more complete set to collect tweets have been implemented. Experiments on the `iPhone 6' domain which obtains convincing results in all of the four phases, showing the superiority of the domain-specific TSA approach over a generic one.
Adjuvant hepatic arterial infusion chemotherapy with 5-Fluorouracil and interferon after curative resection of hepatocellular carcinoma: a preliminary report.

BACKGROUND AND AIM Advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with portal vein invasion or intrahepatic metastases has an unfavorable prognosis, even after curative hepatic resection. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of adjuvant hepatic arterial infusion chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and systemic interferon (IFN). PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients who were diagnosed as having HCC with portal vein invasion or intrahepatic metastases were included in the study (n=33). Out of these patients, 16 were treated with adjuvant therapy consisting of continuous arterial infusion of 5-FU and subcutaneous injection of IFN-α. Another 17 patients who underwent hepatic resection without adjuvant chemotherapy served as controls. RESULTS The five-year cumulative survival rate was significantly higher in the adjuvant treatment group (71.1%) than in the control group (44.0%; p=0.023). The rate of patients with multiple (≥4) recurrent intrahepatic nodules was significantly lower in the adjuvant group (44.4%) than in the control group (100%; p=0.040). The development of intrahepatic recurrence within 12 months was significantly lower in the adjuvant group (33.3%) than in the control group (80.0%; p=0.040). CONCLUSION Our data suggest that this adjuvant chemotherapy can improve postoperative prognosis by reducing intrahepatic recurrence.
Music-brand congruency in highand low-cognition radio advertising

Many radio commercials use background music to accompany a message. This research examines how brand-congruent music (i.e. music that ‘fits’ the brand) will affect ‘Attitude towards the Ad’ (AAd) and ‘Attitude towards the Brand’ (ABrand), specifically when used with different types of ad copy that are more or less demanding of cognitive resources (high-cognition vs low-cognition advertising copy). In high-cognition ads, congruent music results in a more positive AAd and ABrand compared to incongruent music or no music. However, this effect is not found with low-cognition ads, where AAd (and ABrand) are similar for all three conditions of congruent music, incongruent music and no music.
Eyes in the Aisles

To what extent do cereal spokes-characters make eye contact with children versus adults, and does their eye contact influence choice? In study 1, the shelf placement and eye positioning of 86 cereal spokes-characters were evaluated in 10 grocery stores in the Eastern United States. We calculated the average height of cereal boxes on the shelf for adult- versus children-oriented cereals (48 in. vs. 23 in.) and the inflection angle of spokes-characters’ gaze (0.4° vs. −9.6°). We found that cereal characters on child- (adult-) oriented cereals make incidental eye contact at children’s (adults’) eye level. In Study 2, we showed that eye contact with cereal spokes-characters increased feelings of trust and connection to the brand, as well as choice of the brand over competitors. Currently, many of the cereals targeted toward children are of the heavily sugared, less healthy variety. One potential application of this finding would be to use eye contact with spokes-characters to promote healthy choices and healthier food consumption.
A Possibilistic Approach for Building Statistical Language Models

Class-based n-gram language models are those most frequently-used in continuous speech recognition systems, especially for languages for which no richly annotated corpora are available. Various word clustering algorithms have been proposed to build such class-based models. In this work, we discuss the superiority of soft approaches to class construction, whereby each word can be assigned to more than one class. We also propose a new method for possibilistic word clustering. The possibilistic C-mean algorithm is used as our clustering method. Various parameters of this algorithm are investigated; e.g., centroid initialization, distance measure, and words’ feature vector. In the experiments reported here, this algorithm is applied to the 20,000 most frequent Persian words, and the language model built with the clusters created in this fashion is evaluated based on its perplexity and the accuracy of a continuous speech recognition system. Our results indicate a 10% reduction in perplexity and a 4% reduction in word error rate.
Virioplankton: Viruses in Aquatic Ecosystems

SUMMARY The discovery that viruses may be the most abundant organisms in natural waters, surpassing the number of bacteria by an order of magnitude, has inspired a resurgence of interest in viruses in the aquatic environment. Surprisingly little was known of the interaction of viruses and their hosts in nature. In the decade since the reports of extraordinarily large virus populations were published, enumeration of viruses in aquatic environments has demonstrated that the virioplankton are dynamic components of the plankton, changing dramatically in number with geographical location and season. The evidence to date suggests that virioplankton communities are composed principally of bacteriophages and, to a lesser extent, eukaryotic algal viruses. The influence of viral infection and lysis on bacterial and phytoplankton host communities was measurable after new methods were developed and prior knowledge of bacteriophage biology was incorporated into concepts of parasite and host community interactions. The new methods have yielded data showing that viral infection can have a significant impact on bacteria and unicellular algae populations and supporting the hypothesis that viruses play a significant role in microbial food webs. Besides predation limiting bacteria and phytoplankton populations, the specific nature of virus-host interaction raises the intriguing possibility that viral infection influences the structure and diversity of aquatic microbial communities. Novel applications of molecular genetic techniques have provided good evidence that viral infection can significantly influence the composition and diversity of aquatic microbial communities.
BL-038, a Benzofuran Derivative, Induces Cell Apoptosis in Human Chondrosarcoma Cells through Reactive Oxygen Species/Mitochondrial Dysfunction and the Caspases Dependent Pathway

Chondrosarcoma is a highly malignant cartilage-forming bone tumor that has the capacity to invade locally and cause distant metastasis. Moreover, chondrosarcoma is intrinsically resistant to conventional chemotherapy or radiotherapy. The novel benzofuran derivative, BL-038 (2-amino-3-(2,6-dichlorophenyl)-6-(4-methoxyphenyl)benzofuran-4-yl acetate), has been evaluated for its anticancer effects in human chondrosarcoma cells. BL-038 caused cell apoptosis in two human chondrosarcoma cell lines, JJ012 and SW1353, but not in primary chondrocytes. Treatment of chondrosarcoma with BL-038 also induced reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. Furthermore, BL-038 decreased mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) and changed mitochondrial-related apoptosis, by downregulating the anti-apoptotic activity members (Bcl-2, Bcl-xL) and upregulating pro-apoptotic members (Bax, Bak) of the B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) family of proteins, key regulators of the apoptotic machinery in cells. These results demonstrate that in human chondrosarcoma cells, the apoptotic and cytotoxic effects of BL-038 are mediated by the intrinsic mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathway, which in turn causes the release of cytochrome c, the activation of caspase-9 and caspase-3, and the cleavage of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP), to elicit apoptosis response. Our results show that the benzofuran derivative BL-038 induces apoptosis in chondrosarcoma cells.
Annotating the Contemporary Chinese Corpus

In recent years, great progress has been made in Chinese corpus processing. A fifty-million-word Chinese National Corpus project has been put into effect, and many automatic corpus processing programs have also been developed. In this paper, we will briefly introduce our work on constructing a large scale annotated corpus for Chinese grammatical research and developing a Chinese Corpus Multilevel Processing system—CCMP. First, we present our annotation scheme. Second, we discuss some basic methodologies for Chinese corpus analysis and propose a man-machine mutually dependent corpus processing model. Finally, we introduce the survey of our CCMP. We hope our work will give impetus to further research in Chinese corpus linguistics.
Response: Dialogue with Sociohistorical Vygotskian Academia about a Sociocultural Approach

I argue that all four commentators belong to the cultural-historical paradigm that I described and discussed in my original article, based on their opposition to a sociocultural approach, and their focus on developmentalism, the hierarchy of values, and the value of monism, agreement, and oneness. I provide my replies to their charges against a sociocultural approach especially of relativism. Finally, I discuss new problematics of cultural contact with power asymmetry for the cultural-historical paradigm that I have noticed in the commentaries.