Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Volume I: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493-1648

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire offers a striking new interpretation of a crucial era in German and European history, from the great reforms of 1495-1500 to the dissolution of the Reich in 1806. Over two volumes, Joachim Whaley rejects the notion that this was a long period of decline, and shows instead how imperial institutions developed in response to the crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably the Reformation and Thirty Years War. The impact of international developments on the Reich is also examined. The first volume begins with an account of the reforms of the reign of Maximilian I and concludes with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. It offers a new interpretation of the Reformation, the Peasants' War, the Schmalkaldic War and the Peace of Augsburg, and of the post-Reformation development of Protestantism and Catholicism. The German policy successfully resisted the ambitions of Charles V and the repeated onslaughtsof both the Ottomans and the French, and it remained stable in the face of the French religious wars and the Dutch Revolt. The volume concludes with an analysis of the Thirty Years War as an essentially German constitutional conflict, triggered by the problems of the Habsburg dynasty and prolonged by the interventions of foreign powers. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the conflict, both reflected the development of the German polity since the late fifteenth century and created teh framework for its development over the next hundred and fifty years.
Long-term Endoscopic Remission of Crohn Disease after Autologous Stem Cell Transplantation for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia

A favourable course of Crohn disease has been observed after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, and there is now mounting evidence that autologous stem cell may be an effective treatment for severe autoimmune diseases. Here, we present the first long-term endoscopic follow-up of a patient with Crohn disease undergoing autologous stem cell transplantation for haematological disease. A 54-year-old woman developed Crohn disease and was submitted to ileocaecal resection. Four months after surgery, the patient contracted acute myeloid leukaemia. She was initially treated with chemotherapy, and subsequently underwent autologous stem cell transplantation. Following transplantation, the patient has remained in clinical remission regarding both diseases, without anti-inflammatory medication. She has undergone ileo-colonoscopy with normal findings at 1, 2, 3 and 5 years after transplantation. This case suggests that autologous stem cell transplantation can change not only the clinical course, but also the natural history of intestinal inflammation in Crohn disease. This has pathophysiological as well as therapeutic implications.
A new dual threshold time-over-threshold circuit for fast timing in PET

Time-over-threshold (ToT) is attractive as a method of combined timing and energy encoding in positron emission tomography (PET) due to its simplicity in implementation and readout. However, conventional single threshold ToT has a nonlinear response and generally suffers from a tradeoff between timing and energy resolution. The resulting poor performance is not fit for applications requiring fast timing, such as time-of-flight (ToF) PET. In this work it is shown experimentally that by replacing single threshold ToT with a dual threshold method in a new compact circuit, excellent time resolution can be achieved (154 ps FWHM for 3 × 3 × 5 mm3 LYSO crystals), suitable for ToF. Dual threshold ToT timing results have been compared to a similar single threshold design, demonstrating that dual threshold ToT performance is far superior to that of single threshold ToT (154 ps versus 418 ps coincidence time resolution for the dual and single threshold cases, respectively). A method of correcting for nonlinearity in dual threshold ToT energy spectra is also demonstrated.
ASRA Practice Advisory on Local Anesthetic Systemic Toxicity

The American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine Practice Advisory on Local Anesthetic Systemic Toxicity assimilates and summarizes current knowledge regarding the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of this potentially fatal complication. It offers evidence-based and/or expert opinion-based recommendations for all physicians and advanced practitioners who routinely administer local anesthetics in potentially toxic doses. The advisory does not address issues related to local anesthetic-related neurotoxicity, allergy, or methemoglobinemia. Recommendations are based primarily on animal and human experimental trials, case series, and case reports. When objective evidence is lacking or incomplete, recommendations are supplemented by expert opinion from the Practice Advisory Panel plus input from other experts, medical specialty groups, and open forum. Specific recommendations are offered for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of local anesthetic systemic toxicity.
NADPH-oxidase-dependent superoxide production by myocyte-derived H9c2 cells: influence of ischemia, heat shock, cycloheximide and cytochalasin D.

Extracellular oxygen radicals produced by H9c2 rat heart cells in monolayer cultures during ischemia and subsequent reoxygenation were monitored using the luminol-horseradish peroxidase-enhanced chemiluminescence technique. As expected, the photon count diminishes during ischemia but again rapidly attains normal values following reoxygenation. In the presence of superoxide dismutase, this photon emission is repressed, as is also the case in the presence of diphenylene iodonium, a specific inhibitor of NADPH-oxidase activity. Thus, the conclusion seems justified that H9c2 rat heart cells in monolayer cultures produce superoxide radicals extracellularly due to an NADPH oxidase-like action. In order to characterize this extracellular superoxide-generating system, we determined its sensitivity to increased temperatures, inhibition of protein synthesis and perturbations of cytoskeletal structures. Heat shocks result in a delayed inactivation of the NADPH oxidase activity followed by recovery, the kinetics of which depend on the imposed heat shock temperature. This inactivation is independent of protein synthesis and actin cytoskeletal structures, but the recovery of the enzyme's activity is dependent on these entities.
Bethe Projections for Non-Local Inference

Many inference problems in structured prediction are naturally solved by augmenting a tractable dependency structure with complex, non-local auxiliary objectives. This includes the mean field family of variational inference algorithms, soft- or hard-constrained inference using Lagrangian relaxation or linear programming, collective graphical models, and forms of semi-supervised learning such as posterior regularization. We present a method to discriminatively learn broad families of inference objectives, capturing powerful non-local statistics of the latent variables, while maintaining tractable and provably fast inference using non-Euclidean projected gradient descent with a distance-generating function given by the Bethe entropy. We demonstrate the performance and flexibility of our method by (1) extracting structured citations from research papers by learning soft global constraints, (2) achieving state-of-the-art results on a widely-used handwriting recognition task using a novel learned non-convex inference procedure, and (3) providing a fast and highly scalable algorithm for the challenging problem of inference in a collective graphical model applied to bird migration.
Type I, II, and III inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptors are unequally susceptible to down-regulation and are expressed in markedly different proportions in different cell types

The type I inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (InsP3) receptor can be rapidly depleted from cells during stimulation of phosphoinositide hydrolysis because its degradation is accelerated (Wojcikiewicz, R. J. H., Furuichi, T., Nakade, S., Mikoshiba, K., and Nahorski, S. R. (1994) J. Biol. Chem. 269, 7963-7969). The present study examines the regulatory properties of type II and III InsP3 receptors. Initially, the relative abundance of InsP3 receptors was defined in a range of cell types by quantitative immunoblotting. These studies showed that the proportions in which type I, II, and III InsP3 receptors are expressed differs greatly and that some cells (for example, AR4-2J rat pancreatoma cells) express all three receptors. Analysis of the effects of cholecystokinin and bombesin on AR4-2J cells showed that each of the InsP3 receptors could be down-regulated during activation of phosphoinositide hydrolysis, but that depletion of the type II receptor was limited. Such a discrepancy was also seen in rat cerebellar granule cells and was found to result from the type II receptor being relatively resistant to degradation. In conclusion, type I, II, and III receptors can all be down-regulated, but with different characteristics. As the relative abundance of InsP3 receptors is extremely variable, the extent to which activation of the down-regulatory process alters intracellular signaling will vary depending on which InsP3 receptors are expressed.
Strategie de positionnement efficient dans les pays en developpement: Le cas des alliances strategiques nord-sud

Resume Dans cet article, nous abordons une double problematique en postulant qu’une connaissance des determinants du succes des alliances strategiques impliquant des Etats et des firmes pourrait servir aux partenaires pour atteindre respectivement leurs objectifs de developpement et de performance . Ainsi, nos hypotheses de recherche stipulent que dans les pays en developpement, les alliances strategiques sont plus performantes que les autres formes d’organisations. Leur succes repose sur une utilisation efficace du savoir technologique et de la capacite d’emprunt bancaire . Ces hypotheses ont ete verifiees a l’aide d’une analyse en regression lineaire multiple pratiquee sur des donnees issues du Programme Regional du Developpement des Entreprises (PRDE). Les resultats confirment que les alliances strategiques sont performantes dans le contexte des pays en developpement. Ils montrent egalement que les entreprises impliquees dans des alliances strategiques profitent mieux que les autres types d’entreprises du savoir-faire technologique et de la capacite a realiser des montages financiers.
What is applied learning? : exploring understandings of applied learning amongst beginning teachers

Deakin University, Geelong initiated a Graduate Diploma of Applied Learning in 2005. At the end of this year we interviewed selected students in order to gather data on their experience of the new course. The concept of Applied Learning is often not well theorised and one result of this is that gaining consensus about what this might mean is often difficult. The students we interviewed came from quite diverse backgrounds and workplace experiences but nevertheless had similar views about what this concept means in practice and were able to clearly articulate examples of Applied Learning in a range of settings. This paper examines their insights in the light of some theoretical perspectives on Applied Learning and also discusses some of the difficulties experienced by these students when they try to apply new ways of teaching and learning in school settings.
How Do Investments in Enterprise Application Integration Drive Stock Prices?

Enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies are critical to making diverse corporate computer systems work together properly, and as such should be expected to have a positive effect on business value. The event study presented and discussed in this paper seeks to ascertain the relevance of EAI to achieving tangible benefits from the investors' perspective by examining 81 corporate announcements of EAI implementations. The analysis of our data however suggests that EAI investments are not always greeted as good news by investors and do not generally result in positive stock price reactions. Furthermore, the data suggests negative market reaction to financially distressed companies investing in EAI. Particularly in a bear market, investors seem to view an investment in EAI more as a burden than as an asset
Cyberspace Game Show Hosts : Agents for Socialization, Not Just Entertainment

As the Internet has grown in size and popularity, the Internet medium has changed from an educational and technical content to a social and entertainment content. The Lycos search service estimates that the number of WWW pages has grown from 5 million to 6.89 million pages during the months of April to June of 1995, and will reach 10 million pages by 1996. A large number of these pages are devoted to personal pages, whereas only a few years ago personal pages were nonexistent. Similarly, the EFnet Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers have grown from supporting several hundred concurrent users in 1991 to over 20,000 concurrent users in 1996. Both the WWW and IRC are becoming active vehicles of socialization and entertainment. This paper focuses on the technical and social aspects of a set of games designed by the authors that run on IRC, and how AI techniques can augment these games. In particular, we examine the game Risky Business, an online trivia game hosted by a computer program or "bot," short for robot. In addition to providing entertainment, the computer game show host also supports a unique setting that real-life game show hosts never encounter: the opportunity to interact in real-time with thousands of players, 24 hours a day, and become a cornerstone of their social interaction in cyberspace.
Clonal Complexity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Can Hamper Diagnostic Procedures

ABSTRACT Clonal complexity is increasingly accepted in Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, including mixed infections by ≥2 strains, which usually occur in settings with a high burden of tuberculosis and/or a high risk of overexposure to infected patients. Mixed infections can hamper diagnostic procedures; obtaining an accurate antibiogram is difficult when the susceptibility patterns of the strains differ. Here, we show how mixed infections can also prove challenging for other diagnostic procedures, even outside settings where mixed infections are traditionally expected. We show how an unnoticed mixed infection in an HIV-positive patient diagnosed in Madrid, Spain, with differences in the representativeness of the coinfecting strains in different sputum samples, markedly complicated the resolution of a laboratory cross-contamination false positivity alert.
Spore heat resistance plays an important role in disturbance‐mediated assemblage shift of ectomycorrhizal fungi colonizing Pinus muricata seedlings

1 Abiotic disturbance plays an important role in determining assemblage structure and maintaining species richness in many ecosystems. Disturbances events are complex, often affecting multiple environmental parameters simultaneously and causing selective removal of biomass. For this reason, observational studies often fail to elucidate the primary mechanism by which disturbance modifies assembly structure. This is particularly true of microbial systems where reduction in biomass or removal of competitive dominants is not visually obvious. 2 Fire is a major disturbance in pinaceous forests, which are characterized by ectomycorrhizal fungal root associations. To determine the specific mechanisms through which this disturbance affects ectomycorrhizal communities, we experimentally simulated the effects of fire by growing seedlings in field soil exposed to factorial combinations of soil heating and ash addition. Ectomycorrhizal colonists in each of the treatments were then identified from seedling roots using DNA sequences. 3 Both soil heating and ash addition caused changes to the soil chemical environment and altered the fungal assemblages found on seedling roots. The effect on the ectomycorrhizal assembly was most pronounced from soil heating, which caused an overall simplification and increasing dominance by a few taxa with ruderal life‐history strategies. 4 We also conducted a follow‐up experiment to see whether selective mortality of ectomycorrhizal spores might contribute to these patterns. Heat exposure had strong negative effects on all species tested. However, spore heat tolerance was highest for the species that showed the greatest increase in abundance on seedlings grown in heated soils. 5 Synthesis. Fire alters below‐ground communities through changes in soil chemistry and mortality of resident organisms. Our results show that soil heating and selective mortality are key mechanisms determining post‐fire assemblage structure of ectomycorrhizal fungi. These disturbances favour competitively inferior species and may help maintain diversity of ectomycorrhizal assemblages at the landscape scale.
Exactly solvable Ising-Heisenberg chain with triangular XXZ -Heisenberg plaquettes

A mixed Ising-Heisenberg spin system consisting of triangular XXZ-Heisenberg spin clusters assembled into a chain by alternating with Ising spins interacting to all three spins in the triangle is considered. The exact solution of the model is given in terms of the generalized decoration--iteration map and within the transfer-matrix technique. Exact expressions for thermodynamic functions are derived. Ground state phase diagrams, thermodynamic and magnetic properties of the system are examined.
Populations of wide‐field amacrine cells in the mouse retina

We surveyed wide‐field amacrine cells in the mouse, using a large series of retinas from a transgenic strain that expresses the green fluorescent protein (GFP) in isolated retinal cells. Wide‐field cells were present in surprising diversity and number. They formed groups that could be defined by arbor depth, arbor size, and soma size. By conventional criteria, these populations of cells make up 11 amacrine cell “types. ” Five additional types have been reported by others in the mouse. Roughly two‐thirds of the wide‐field amacrine cells are axon‐bearing cells, which have separate dendritic and axonal arbors. The axonal arbor of a single cell sometimes covers the majority of the retinal surface. The axon‐bearing cells appear to be centrifugally conducting neurons similar to those studied electrophysiologically in some other species. Although they are classified as independent morphological types, it seems likely that their physiological functions represent variations on a single organizational plan. These cells are present at every level of the inner plexiform layer, which suggests that they affect most of the mouse retina's final outputs to the brain and, by implication, almost all visual function. J. Comp. Neurol. 499:797–809, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Periodontal Disease and Pregnancy Outcomes

An increasing number of studies are confirming an association between periodontal disease (PD) and adverse outcomes in pregnancy. PD places pregnant women at greater risk for preterm birth than alcohol consumption or smoking. This underscores the importance of offering dental screening to women who are pregnant or contemplating pregnancy and the need for physicians who provide obstetric care to be aware of the possible connection between poor dental health and poor pregnancy outcomes.
au Identification of a Deubiquitinating Enzyme as a Novel AGS 3-Interacting Protein

Activator of G protein Signaling 3 (AGS3) is a receptor-independent G protein activator that has been implicated in multiple biological events such as brain development, neuroplasticity and addiction, cardiac function, Golgi structure/function, macroautophagy and metabolism. However, how AGS3 is regulated is little known. We demonstrate here that AGS3 interacts with a ubiquitin specific protease USP9x, and this interaction is at least partially mediated through the C-terminal G protein regulatory domain of AGS3. Knockdown of USP9x causes a moderate reduction in the level of AGS3. In contrast, overexpression of either USP9x or its deubiquitinating domain UCH increases the amount of AGS3, whereas expression of the mutant UCH domain that lacks deubiquitinating activity does not have the same effect. As previously observed in AGS3 knockdown cells, the localization of several marker proteins of the late Golgi compartments is disturbed in cells depleted of USP9x. Taken together, our study suggests that USP9x can modulate the level of a subpopulation of AGS3, and this modulation plays a role in regulating the structure of the late Golgi compartments. Finally, we have found that levels of AGS3 and USP9x are co-regulated in the prefrontal cortex of rats withdrawn from repeated cocaine treatment. In conjunction with the above data, this observation indicates a potential role of USP9X in the regulation of the AGS3 level during cocaine-induced neuroplasticity. Citation: Xu Z, Xia B, Gong Q, Bailey J, Groves B, et al. (2010) Identification of a Deubiquitinating Enzyme as a Novel AGS3-Interacting Protein. PLoS ONE 5(3): e9725. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0009725 Editor: Karl-Wilhelm Koch, University of Oldenburg, Germany Received January 7, 2010; Accepted February 22, 2010; Published March 17, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Xu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported in part by the American Heart Association (AHA) award (#07651554) and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) 2008 Young Investigator Award. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: ma@lifesci.ucsb. edu
A generalization of Bourgain’s circular maximal theorem

where dσr is the normalized surface measure on r S . It is easy to see that M is not bounded on L (see Example 1.1 below). A well-known result of Bourgain [1] asserts that M is bounded on L for 2 < p ≤ ∞. We will consider the question of boundedness of M and Mδ from L to L. Unless stated to the contrary, we will be dealing only with functions defined on R. Absolute constants will be denoted by C, and the notation ' will mean = up to a constant.
Functional Analysis of Two PLA2G2A Variants Associated with Secretory Phospholipase A2-IIA Levels

Background Secretory phospholipase A2 group IIA (sPLA2-IIA) has been identified as a biomarker of atherosclerosis in observational and animal studies. The protein is encoded by the PLA2G2A gene and the aim of this study was to test the functionality of two PLA2G2A non-coding SNPs, rs11573156 C>G and rs3767221 T>G where the rare alleles have been previously associated with higher and lower sPLA2-IIA levels respectively. Methodology/Principal Findings Luciferase assays, electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA), and RNA expression by RT-PCR were used to examine allelic differences. For rs3767221 the G allele showed ∼55% lower luciferase activity compared to the T allele (T = 62.1 (95% CI 59.1 to 65.1) G = 27.8 (95% CI 25.0 to 30.6), p = 1.22×10−35, and stronger EMSA binding of a nuclear protein compared to the T-allele. For rs11573156 C >G there were no luciferase or EMSA allelic differences seen. In lymphocyte cell RNA, from individuals of known rs11573156 genotype, there was no allelic RNA expression difference for exons 5 and 6, but G allele carriers (n = 7) showed a trend to lower exon 1–2 expression compared to CC individuals. To take this further, in the ASAP study (n = 223), an rs11573156 proxy (r2 = 0.91) showed ∼25% higher liver expression of PLA2G2A (1.67×10−17) associated with the G allele. However, considering exon specific expression, the association was greatly reduced for exon 2 (4.5×10−5) compared to exons 3–6 (10−10 to 10−20), suggesting rs11573156 G allele-specific exon 2 skipping. Conclusion Both SNPs are functional and provide useful tools for Mendelian Randomisation to determine whether the relationship between sPLA2-IIA and coronary heart disease is causal.