Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of PMA-induced, LFA-1-dependent lymphocyte aggregation by ADP ribosylation of the small molecular weight GTP binding protein, rho

Botulinum C3 exoenzyme specifically ADP-ribosylates a group of ras- related small molecular weight GTP-binding proteins, rho, and inhibits their biological activity. Using this enzyme, we examined the function of rho in PMA-induced activation of lymphocyte function-associated antigen-1 (LFA-1) in a B lymphoblastoid cell line, JY. Northern blot analysis revealed that among the three rho genes, rhoA mRNA was predominantly expressed in JY cells. Consistently, only one [32P]ADP- ribosylated band was found when the lysate of the cells was subjected to ADP ribosylation by C3 exoenzyme. When the cells were cultured with C3 exoenzyme, this substrate was ADP-ribosylated in situ in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. Concomitant with this ADP ribosylation, PMA-induced LFA-1/intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1-dependent aggregation of JY cells was inhibited. This inhibition was blocked by prior treatment of the enzyme with an anti-C3 monoclonal antibody, and overcome by stimulation with higher concentrations of PMA. The C3 exoenzyme-induced inhibition was not affected by shaking of the cell suspension, while inhibition of aggregation by cytochalasin B was abolished by this procedure, suggesting that the inhibitory effect of the C3 exoenzyme treatment was not due to decrease in cell motility. The C3 exoenzyme treatment affected neither protein phosphorylation in JY cells before and after PMA stimulation, nor affected surface expression of LFA-1 and ICAM-1. These results suggest that rhoA protein works downstream of protein kinase C activation linking PMA stimulation to LFA-1 activation and aggregation in JY cells.
The Challenge of Capturing Daily Processes at the Interface of Social and Clinical Psychology

Abstract Gunthert, Cohen, and Armeli's (this issue) study of anhedonic depression, anxious arousal, and their relation to daily stress and coping demonstrates the promise of daily process methods. Yet, their study also highlights the challenges of researching within-person processes as they unfold day to day. In this commentary we review the scope and potential of daily process research. We then raise issues related to the measurement of daily mood, the appropriate characterization of coping effectiveness, the importance of verifying the timing of daily reports, complexities in the conceptualization and measurement of coping, unsolved problems in the measurement of daily stress, and the dynamic nature of affective experience and its implications for daily process research.
LeChatelier-Samuelson Principle in Games and Pass-Through of Shocks

We show that the LeChatelier-Samuelson principle holds in many strategic environments: the adjustment to changes in parameters (shocks) in the short run (only by one player) is smaller in magnitude than the adjustment in the long run (allowing other players to adjust as well). We show that the principle holds for supermodular games (strategic complements) regardless of whether the shock directly affects only one player's action ("idiosyncratic" shock). The principle holds for submodular games (strategic substitutes) if the shock is idiosyncratic and there are only two players. We provide a simple sufficient condition for the principle to hold in submodular games with more than two players. The principle might fail to hold in submodular games if the shock is not idiosyncratic. We show that our findings explain the breakdown of the principle in non-strategic environments as well, apply our results to multiproduct monopoly and oligopoly cost pass-through, and argue that the principle might explain the empirical findings of overshifting of cost and tax changes.
On category O for the rational Cherednik algebra of G(m,1,n): the almost semisimple case

We determine the structure of category $\cO$ for the rational Cherednik algebra of $G(m,1,n)$ in the case where the $\KZ$ functor satisfies a condition called \emph{separating simples}. As a consequence, we show that the property of having exactly $N-1$ simple modules, where $N$ is the number of simple modules of $G(m,1,n)$, determines the Ariki-Koike algebra up to isomorphism.
Extending Harmonic-Percussive Separation of Audio Signals

In recent years, methods to decompose an audio signal into a harmonic and a percussive component have received a lot of interest and are frequently applied as a processing step in a variety of scenarios. One problem is that the computed components are often not of purely harmonic or percussive nature but also contain noise-like sounds that are neither clearly harmonic nor percussive. Furthermore, depending on the parameter settings, one often can observe a leakage of harmonic sounds into the percussive component and vice versa. In this paper we present two extensions to a state-of-the-art harmonic-percussive separation procedure to target these problems. First, we introduce a separation factor parameter into the decomposition process that allows for tightening separation results and for enforcing the components to be clearly harmonic or percussive. As second contribution, inspired by the classical sines+transients+noise (STN) audio model, this novel concept is exploited to add a third residual component to the decomposition which captures the sounds that lie in between the clearly harmonic and percussive sounds of the audio signal.
Work Force Size and Multifaceted Job Satisfaction: A Cross-National Study

Abstract The relationships between work force size and multiple facets of job satisfaction were examined, using data from 2 national surveys in the United States and Canada. The number of benefits offered by an organization was tested as a possible mediator of these relationships. As predicted, work force size was positively and significantly related to satisfaction with job security, pay, and promotion opportunities in the U.S. sample. When the effect of benefits was controlled for, however, these relationships were no longer statistically significant, suggesting that benefits had a mediating effect. Work force size was negatively and directly related to satisfaction with supervisor competence and having the opportunity to do one's best. These results were replicated in a representative Canadian sample. Thus, benefits had a mediating effect on the relationship between work force size and those facets of job satisfaction over which the organization had the most control (e.g., promotion, pay). Work force s.
Fragments of the other: a psychoanalytic approach to the ego in schizophrenia

Abstract This article describes psychoanalytic research carried out with schizophrenic patients. The aspects of the clinical case are paradigmatic for understanding the splitting of ego in schizophrenia and the triggering of psychosis. There will be a brief historical discussion of the concept of schizophrenia, and of the differences between the ideas developed by Eugen Bleuler and Emil Krapaelin. We compare the diverse authors’ ideas to illuminate today's discussion on clinical methodology and the relationship between psychiatric and psychoanalysis. We link up Bleuler's proposition concerning the splitting of the ego in schizophrenia and his broader conception of psychopathology with more recent psychoanalytic explanation of the disintegration, in psychosis, of all imaginary organization of the ego, as proposed in Jacques Lacan's theory. Clinical vignettes are also discussed in the light of Lacan's psychoanalytical lecture on a Marguerite Duras novel, in order to elucidate the phenomenon of transitivism, a key concept in this case. The article suggests a direction for the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia based on the analyst's position, compared with Duras's character Jacques Hold, who, as a narrator of part of Duras's plot, allows the book's subject to articulate her desire.
Magnitude and Role of Wall Shear Stress on Cerebral Aneurysm: Computational Fluid Dynamic Study of 20 Middle Cerebral Artery Aneurysms

Background and Purpose— Wall shear stress (WSS) is one of the main pathogenic factors in the development of saccular cerebral aneurysms. The magnitude and distribution of the WSS in and around human middle cerebral artery (MCA) aneurysms were analyzed using the method of computed fluid dynamics (CFD). Methods— Twenty mathematical models of MCA vessels with aneurysms were created by 3-dimensional computed tomographic angiography. CFD calculations were performed by using our original finite-element solver with the assumption of Newtonian fluid property for blood and the rigid wall property for the vessel and the aneurysm. Results— The maximum WSS in the calculated region tended to occur near the neck of the aneurysm, not in its tip or bleb. The magnitude of the maximum WSS was 14.39±6.21 N/m2, which was 4-times higher than the average WSS in the vessel region (3.64±1.25 N/m2). The average WSS of the aneurysm region (1.64±1.16 N/m2) was significantly lower than that of the vessel region (P<0.05). The WSSs at the tip of ruptured aneurysms were markedly low. Conclusions— These results suggest that in contrast to the pathogenic effect of a high WSS in the initiating phase, a low WSS may facilitate the growing phase and may trigger the rupture of a cerebral aneurysm by causing degenerative changes in the aneurysm wall. The WSS of the aneurysm region may be of some help for the prediction of rupture.
Building Integrated E-Learning Environment Using Cloud Services and Social Networking Sites

Cloud computing technologies, although in their early stages, have managed to change the way applications are going to be developed and accessed. These technologies are aimed at running applications as services over the internet on a flexible infrastructure. Microsoft Office applications, such as Word processing, Excel spreadsheet, Access database and many more can be accessed through the Internet, even though the files and applications are housed in the cloud. Cloud computing provides a low cost solution to academic institutions for their researchers, faculty, and students. This setup provides an additional benefit because all these browser-based applications can also be accessed through mobile devices in addition to being available to a variety of laptop and desktop computers, provided Internet access is available. At the same time, the massive growth of social networking sites (SNS) among today’s college students is increasing the number of higher education instructors that are combining distance education delivery with SNS. To take advantage of cloud computing and social networking sites, this chapter presents an integrated solution that provides learners with a comprehensive and feature rich environment for building and utilizing applications and can be used for building a virtual environment both for teaching and learning. The authors present an interactive tool that can be used for science education; they combined various technologies to achieve this goal. The environment and the design proposed can also be used as a platform for exploring and sharing new ideas as well as for designing, modifying, and monitoring educational or course contents. In this design under the same environment the authors also allow integration of different pedagogical approaches to both learning and teaching. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-483-3.ch013
Speech as a high level control for teleoperated manipulator arm

In this work a tele-operated system for a robot arm is designed and controlled by the operator, in witch voice control mode occur to carry out remote tasks. A voice command system for the manipulator arm is implemented as a high level control design and compared to a low level control design based on joystick. The high level control paradigm adopted is based on a spotted words recognition system using stochastic model, robust HMM (Hidden Markov Model) with Cepstral coefficients as parameters witch is used in automatic speech recognition system. To implement the approach on a real-time application, a Personal Computer USB interface was designed to transmit commands via Bluetooth components to control the movement of a Robot Arm (the TR-45). The user can control the movements of four degree of freedom (DOF) for TR-45 using a vocal phrase containing spotted words or using a joystick.
Linkages between Number Concepts, Spatial Thinking, and Directionality of Writing: The SNARC Effect and the REVERSE SNARC Effect in English and Arabic Monoliterates, Biliterates, and Illiterate Arabic Speakers

The current investigations coordinate math cognition and cultural approaches to numeric thinking to examine the linkages between numeric and spatial processes, and how these linkages are modified by the cultural artifact of writing. Previous research in the adult numeric cognition literature has shown that English monoliterates have a spatialised mental number line which is oriented from left-to-right with smaller magnitudes associated with the left side of space and larger magnitudes are associated with the right side of space. These associations between number and space have been termed the Spatial Numeric Association Response Code Effect (SNARC effect, Dehaene, 1992). The current study investigates the spatial orientation of the mental number line in the following groups: English monoliterates, Arabic monoliterates who use only the right-left writing system, Arabic-English biliterates, and illiterate Arabic speakers who only read numerals. Current results indicate, for the first time, a Reverse SNARC effect for Arabic monoliterates, such that the mental number line had a right-to-left directionality. Furthermore, a weakened Reverse SNARC was observed for Arabic-English biliterates, and no effect was observed among Illiterate Arabic speakers. These findings are especially notable since left-right biases are neurologically supported and are observed in pre-literate children regardless of which writing system is used by adults. The broader implications of how cultural artifacts affect basic numeric cognition will be discussed.
Quantization of LPC Parameters

Accurate reconstruction of the envelope of the short-time power spectrum is very important for both the quality and intelligibility of coded speech. For low-bit-rate speech coding, the linear predictive coding (LPC) parameters are widely used to encode the spectral envelope. The LPC parameters form a perceptually attractive description of the spectral envelope since they describe the perceptually important spectral peaks more accurately than the spectral valleys [1]. As a result, the LPC parameters are used to describe the power spectrum envelope not only in LPC-based coders (e.g. [2, 3]), but also in some coders which are based on entirely different principles (e.g. [4, 5]). In speech coding applications, the LPC parameters are extracted frame-wise from the speech signal, typically at the rate of 50 frames/sec. For telephone speech sampled at 8 kHz, typically a 10’th order LPC analysis is performed. The LPC parameters are quantized prior to their transmission. Most commonly, memoryless quantizers using 20 to 40 bits are employed to encode the LPC parameters at each frame update. Thus, the transmission of the (short-term) power-spectrum envelope requires between 1 and 2 kb/s, which is a major contribution to the overall bit rate for low-rate speech coders. It is, therefore, important to quantize these parameters using as few bits as possible. Considerable work has been done to develop both scalar and vector quantization procedures for the LPC parameters. Scalar quantizers quantize each LPC parameter independently. Vector quantizers consider the entire set of LPC parameters as an entity and allow for direct minimization of quantization distortion. Because of this, the vector quantizers result in smaller quantization distortion than the scalar quantizers at any given bit rate [6, 7]. Our aim in this chapter is to provide an overview of scalar and vector quantization techniques proposed in the literature for quantizing LPC parameters [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24]. Since results for these LPC quantization techniques have been reported in the literature on different data bases, it is not possible to make meaningful comparisons about these techniques. Because of this, we provide in this chapter results for these quantization techniques on a common data base. These results are reported here in terms of a spectral distortion measure (which is used here as the criterion for evaluating the quantization performance).
The Formal Model of DBMS Enforcing Multiple Security Polices

The formal security policy model and security analysis is necessary to help Database Management System (DBMS) to attain a higher assurance level. In this paper we develop a formal security model for a DBMS enforcing multiple security policies including mandatory multilevel security policy, discretionary access control policy and role based access control policy. A novel composition scheme of policies is introduced. And the security properties are comprehensively and accurately specified in terms of about 17 state invariants and state transition constraints. Furthermore, the security of the model is proved with the Z/EVES theorem prover.
Involvement of FrzA/sFRP-1 and the Wnt/Frizzled Pathway in Ischemic Preconditioning

Phosphorylation and subsequent inactivation of glycogen synthase kinase (GSK)-3&bgr; via the Akt/PI3-Kinase pathway during ischemic preconditioning (PC) has been shown to be cardioprotective. As FrzA/sFRP-1, a secreted antagonist of the Wnt/Frizzled pathway, is expressed in the heart and is able to decrease the phosphorylation of GSK-3&bgr; in vitro on vascular cells, we examined its effect during PC using transgenic mouse overexpressing FrzA in cardiomyocytes (&agr;-MHC promoter) under a conditional transgene expression approach (tet-off system). Overexpression of FrzA inhibited the increase in GSK-3&bgr; phosphorylation as well as protein kinase C (PKC) epsilon activation in transgenic mice after PC as compared with littermates. Phospho-Akt (P-Akt), phospho-JNK, or the cytoplasmic &bgr;-catenin levels were not modified, phospho-p38 (P-p38) was slightly increased in transgenic mice after PC as compared with littermates. FrzA transgenic mice displayed a larger infarct size and a greater worsening of cardiac function compared with littermates. All these differences were reversed by the addition of doxycycline. This study demonstrates for the first time that disruption of a &bgr;-catenin independent Wnt/Frizzled pathway induces the activation of GSK-3&bgr; and reverses the benefit of preconditioning.
Genetic compatibility, mate choice and patterns of parentage: Invited Review

There is growing interest in the possibility that genetic compatibility may drive mate choice, including gamete choice, particularly from the perspective of understanding why females frequently mate with more than one male. Mate choice for compatibility differs from other forms of choice for genetic benefits (such as ‘good genes’) because individuals are expected to differ in their mate preferences, changing the evolutionary dynamics of sexual selection. Recent experiments designed to investigate genetic benefits of polyandry suggest that mate choice on the basis of genetic compatibility may be widespread. However, in most systems the mechanisms responsible for variation in compatibility are unknown. We review potential sources of variation in genetic compatibility and whether there is any evidence for mate choice driven by these factors. Selfish genetic elements appear to have the potential to drive mate compatibility mate choice, though as yet there is only one convincing example. There is abundant evidence for assortative mating between populations in hybrid zones, but very few examples where this is clearly a result of selection against mating with genetically less compatible individuals. There are also numerous cases of inbreeding avoidance, but little evidence that mate choice or differential fertilization success driven by genetic compatibility occurs between unrelated individuals. The exceptions to this are a handful of situations where both the alleles causing incompatibility and the alleles involved in mate choice are located in a chromosome region where recombination is suppressed. As yet there are only a few potential sources of genetic compatibility which have clearly been shown to drive mate choice. This may reflect limitations in the potential for the evolution of mate choice for genetic compatibility within populations, although the most promising sources of such incompatibilities have received relatively little research.
Using Propensity Score Matching to Test the Community College Penalty Assumption

Research studies have been ambivalent about whether enrolling in community college makes completing a bachelor’s degree less likely than directly enrolling in a four-year institution. This study uses propensity score matching with a posttreatment adjustment to determine the treatment effect associated with taking the community college to four-year college transfer pathway. Each transfer student was matched to a four-year college junior from the same high school who enrolled at an equally selective four-year college. We found no significant difference between transfers and native juniors, demonstrating the viability of the community college to four-year pathway. Policy implications are provided.
Monitoring Sodium Removal and Delivered Dialysis by Conductivity

As cardiovascular stability and the delivery of the prescribed dialysis “dose” seem to be the main factors in determining the morbidity and mortality of hemodialyzer patients today, it is of paramount importance to match hydro-sodium removal with interdialytic load and to verify the delivered dialysis at each session. A specially designed Biofeedback Module (BM - COT Hospal) allows the automatic determination of plasma water conductivity and effective ionic dialysance with no need for blood samples. Using BM, we evaluated the validity of “conductivity kinetic modelling” (CKM) and the possibility that this may substitute “sodium kinetic modelling”. Moreover, we evaluated the “in vivo” relationship between ionic dialysance and effective urea clearance. Our results demonstrate that: 1) CKM makes it possible to obtain programmed end-dialysis plasma water conductivity with an error of less than ± 0.14 mS/cm, roughly equivalent to a sodium concentration of ± 1.4 mEq/L. 2). Ionic dialysance and effective urea clearance are not equivalent but, as the interrelationship between these is known, the BM allows the routine monitoring of delivered dialysis.
“Adolescents Can't Be Gay”: Perceptions on Youth, Sexual Diversity, and the Case of Mexico

Being a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender adult is still a difficult matter. Even if one lives in a “first-world” society or happens to be a citizen whose government has taken steps toward fighting discrimination or advocating for the rights of this long segregated community, the day-to-day life events are almost never part of the “big picture” that describes our societies today. And, if being gay is hard, being queer and young often carries a double stigma; a stigma that is hard to see if one is not paying close attention. For many years, since the concept of adolescence was first developed, this life period was considered an “uncomfortable” transition into adulthood. Adolescence always seemed to be a lesser adulthood. And so, we inherited the depiction of youth who lack knowledge and abilities to make decisions, to have opinions, to contradict, to disagree, to confront, or to understand. It still comes as a surprise to find that many of my colleagues–among them psychologists, physicians, and social workers–are convinced adolescents should not be taken seriously. When it comes to adolescent sexuality, researchers have focused on topics such as sexuality education, contraceptive methods, the use of