Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Immigration Dilemma: The Role of Perceived Group Competition, Ethnic Prejudice, and National Identity

In this article, we discuss the role of perceived competition for resources in determining negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration in North America. We first provide background information on immigration policies and levels of immigration to Canada and the United States. Following an overview of our theoretical perspective, we then describe the research we have conducted in Canada and the United States indicating that perceived zero-sum competition between groups, whether situationally induced or a function of chronic belief in zero-sum relations among groups, is strongly implicated in negative immigration attitudes. In addition, we describe our recent attempts to improve attitudes toward immigrants and immigration through the targeting of zero-sum beliefs and through manipulations of the inclusiveness of national identity.
Galaxy Clustering in the Herschel Deep Field

ABSTRA C T We present a study of the angular correlation function as measured in the William Herschel Deep Field, a high galactic latitude field which has been the subject of an extensive observing campaign from optical to infrared wavelengths. It covers 50 arcmin 2 and with it we are able to investigate the scaling of the angular correlation function to B , 28; R; I , 26, K , 20 and H , 22:5: We compare our measurements to results obtained from the smaller Hubble Deep Field. To interpret our results, we use a model which correctly predicts colours, number counts and redshift distributions for the faint galaxy population. We find that at fixed separation the amplitude of v (u ) measured in BRI bandpasses is lower than the predictions of a model containing no luminosity evolution and stable clustering growth in proper coordinates. However, in the near-infrared bandpasses, our measurements are consistent with the predictions of an essentially non-evolving K-selected galaxy redshift distribution. In the range B , 27‐28 we find that our correlation amplitudes are independent of magnitude, which is consistent with the observed flattening of the number count slope and correspondingly slower increase of the cosmological volume element expected at these magnitudes. If our luminosity evolution models provide a correct description of the underlying redshift distributions (and comparisons to available observations at brighter magnitudes suggest they do), then our measurements in all bandpasses are consistent with a rapid growth of galaxy clustering O0 , e , 2 in the normal parametrization) on the sub-Mpc scales which our survey probes. We demonstrate that this rapid growth of clustering is consistent with the predictions of biased models of galaxy formation, which indicate that a rapid rate of clustering growth is expected for the intrinsically faint galaxies which dominate our survey.
Abdominal obesity has the highest impact on metabolic profile in an overweight African population

Aim: The aim of this study was to determine the association between different anthropometric parameters and metabolic profile in an overweight, adult, black Kenyan population. Methods: An opportunity sample of 245 overweight adult Kenyans (body mass index (BMI) ≥ 25 kg/m2) was analysed. A score of metabolic profile (metabolic Z-score) was constructed on the basis of levels of plasma lipids, blood pressure, blood glucose and serum insulin. Linear regressions using metabolic Z-score as outcome and six anthropometric variables (waist circumference (WC), hip circumference, visceral adipose tissue (VAT), abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue, arm fat area and arm muscle area) separately as independent variables were carried out. Results: Mean age of study participants was 42.1 years (SD = 9.6) and 26.5% of the participants were men. The median BMI was 28.6 kg/m2 (Q1 = 26.3; Q3 = 31.3). Of the six anthropometric variables tested, WC and VAT thickness had the strongest negative association with the metabolic profile (β = 0.17 (0.09; 0.24) and 0.15 (0.08; 0.23), respectively). Conclusions: WC and VAT thickness were the strongest anthropometric predictors for the metabolic profile in overweight adult Kenyans. WC is useful in clinical practice for the diagnosis of metabolically unhealthy fat accumulation in an African setting.
Role of PriA in Replication Fork Reactivation inEscherichia coli

As a result of the work of many laboratories, a new paradigm describing the manner by which bacteria respond to repair DNA damage has emerged. This paradigm holds that under any growth condition, essentially all replication forks formed at oriC encounter DNA damage and either stall or collapse before they can complete synthesis of the genome. Maintenance of cell viability therefore requires both correction of the DNA lesion via the action of the DNA repair enzymes and replication fork restart via the combined action of the DNA recombination and replication enzymes. A proposal has been advanced to distinguish this pathway, which operates as a housekeeping function in the absence of exogenous insult to the cell and is likely to be inherently nonmutagenic, from the SOS response, which is induced by exogenous DNA damage and includes error-prone repair, that it be named CPR for coordinated processing of damaged replication forks (M. M. Cox, M. F. Goodman, K. N. Kreuzer, D. J. Sherratt, S. J. Sandler, and K. J. Marians, submitted for publication). In this minireview, we will describe the central role of PriA in the replication fork restart step of CPR.
Web Spam Detection Using Multiple Kernels in Twin Support Vector Machine

Search engines are the most important tools for web data acquisition. Web pages are crawled and indexed by search Engines. Users typically locate useful web pages by querying a search engine. One of the challenges in search engines administration is spam pages which waste search engine resources. These pages by deception of search engine ranking algorithms try to be showed in the first page of results. There are many approaches to web spam pages detection such as measurement of HTML code style similarity, pages linguistic pattern analysis and machine learning algorithm on page content features. One of the famous algorithms has been used in machine learning approach is Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Recently basic structure of SVM has been changed by new extensions to increase robustness and classification accuracy. In this paper we improved accuracy of web spam detection by using two nonlinear kernels into Twin SVM (TSVM) as an improved extension of SVM. The classifier ability to data separation has been increased by using two separated kernels for each class of data. Effectiveness of new proposed method has been experimented with two publicly used spam datasets called UK-2007 and UK-2006. Results show the effectiveness of proposed kernelized version of TSVM in web spam page detection.
Modulation of the Prospective and Retrospective Components of Memory for Intentions in Younger and Older Adults

We evaluate two hypotheses that have implications for the study of prospective memory. First, we examine whether the effect of age is greater on the prospective component or the retrospective component of memory for intentions; and second, we examine whether data-driven and conceptually driven processes differentially influence these two components. The influence of data-driven processes was varied by maintaining or changing the format of the prospective cue from study to test. The influence of conceptually driven processes was manipulated by varying the degree of semantic relatedness between the prospective cue and intention. The effect of age was greater on the prospective component than on the retrospective component. A change in study-test format had the greatest effect on the prospective component, whereas the degree of semantic relatedness had the greatest effect on the retrospective component. These findings suggest that memory for intentions is influenced by both data-driven and conceptually driven processes.
Reducing mobilization of simian immunodeficiency virus based vectors by primer complementation

Human gene therapy vectors based on primate lentiviruses harbour in contrast to oncoretroviruses the risk of vector mobilization by human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV). Infection of cells transduced with a lentiviral vector by HIV could lead to packaging of the lentiviral vector RNA into HIV particles and transfer of the vector.
The span of creativity among long‐lived historical artists

Abstract Three studies examined the relationship between age and creativity in terms of when the masterpieces of major historical artists were produced and when their total creative efforts declined. In Study 1, the lifelong output of 21 long‐lived painters (age = 79+) was tallied; in Study 2, the productivity of a new set of 24 long‐lived male and female artists was compared; and in Study 3, the ages at which masterpieces were produced by several sets of up to 100 relatively short‐ and long‐lived artists were examined. Masterpieces were done in the artists’ 40s and 50s, which is later than the often‐cited 30s. Productivity did not decline until the 50s or 60s, which is later than the 40s reported for musicians and writers. The results were discussed in terms of gender differences, group and individual analyses, interdisciplinary research relating psychology to the humanities, the importance of including old and very old subjects in studies of creative development, and an optimistic view of aging and cogn.
Protecting Medical Data Stored in Public Clouds

Copyright © 2016 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved. Public Clouds offer a convenient way for storing and sharing large amounts of medical data. Nevertheless, using a shared infrastructure raises significant security and privacy concerns. Even if the data are encrypted, the data owner should share some information with the Cloud provider, in order to enable the latter to perform access control; given the high sensitivity of medical data, even such limited information may jeopardize enduser privacy. In this paper we employ an access control delegation scheme to enable the users themselves to perform access control on their data, which are stored in a public Cloud. To selectively provide access to these data without sacrificing their confidentiality we rely on encryption: our system encrypts data before storing them in the Cloud and applies proxy re-encryption so as to encrypt data separately for each (authorized) user.
Uncovering Initiatives Around the World That Foster Holistic Student Development

Guiding students to become responsible citizens is a world-wide goal in universities. Universities in three parts of the world share commonalities in their programs in which students are given opportunities to use and develop their skills and knowledge in relating to others in different types of communities, one within the university setting and two others into communities external to the university setting. Gaining experiences in being a citizen in a community is a key characteristic of the programs.
L-glutamate-induced responses and cGMP-activated channels in three subtypes of retinal bipolar cells dissociated from the cat

Effects of L-glutamate (Glu), the neurotransmitter released by photoreceptors, on isolated cat bipolar cells were examined. Membrane currents of bipolar cells were recorded by the patch-clamp technique in a conventional whole-cell recording configuration using pipettes containing 1 mM cGMP, which has been known to activate a cationic current sensitive to Glu in ON-type bipolar cells. ON-type bipolar cells (depolarized by light in in situ) and OFF-type bipolar cells (hyperpolarized by light) were identified by their response polarity to Glu. When the whole-cell configuration was established, ON-type bipolar cells showed a steady inward current which was suppressed by Glu, consistent with the response polarity observed in in situ recordings. In contrast, OFF-type cells did not show a steady current during the recordings. However, they responded to Glu with an increase in cationic conductance. Among recorded cells, rod-driven bipolar cells were identified by their immunoreactivity to anti-protein kinase C (PKC-IR) antibody. Examination of PKC-IR revealed that ON-type bipolar cells included both rod- and cone-driven bipolar cells, while OFF-type cells were all cone-driven bipolar cells. The cGMP-activated current observed in ON-type cells was accompanied by a change in the current fluctuation due to the opening and closing of underlying channels. Fluctuation analysis gave a unitary conductance value of 13 pS. In half of the cells examined, maximum open probability reached almost 100%. The cGMP- activated channel in bipolar cells seems novel, fundamentally different from those found in photoreceptor cells or olfactory receptor cells.
Encrypted Domain Processing for Cloud Privacy - Concept and Practical Experience

Cloud security comprises access control and end-to-end security based on flow or message-level privacy. In some applications, in which all processing takes place at the client side and the Cloud simply handles data storage (e.g. Google Docs), on-line data encryption/decryption guarantees privacy. However, when a service requires server processing (e.g. spreadsheets), privacy must necessarily rely on a dependable entity according to local regulations. Summing up, full Cloud privacy has not been achieved so far. In this paper we take a step towards that goal. We propose executing server side operations in the encrypted domain, so that both the operands and the results are opaque to the server, yet clear to the user. We evaluate this concept with a real Google Apps implementation of basic arithmetic operations.
Cell-type specific short-term plasticity at auditory nerve synapses controls feed-forward inhibition in the dorsal cochlear nucleus

Feed-forward inhibition (FFI) represents a powerful mechanism by which control of the timing and fidelity of action potentials in local synaptic circuits of various brain regions is achieved. In the cochlear nucleus, the auditory nerve provides excitation to both principal neurons and inhibitory interneurons. Here, we investigated the synaptic circuit associated with fusiform cells (FCs), principal neurons of the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) that receive excitation from auditory nerve fibers and inhibition from tuberculoventral cells (TVCs) on their basal dendrites in the deep layer of DCN. Despite the importance of these inputs in regulating fusiform cell firing behavior, the mechanisms determining the balance of excitation and FFI in this circuit are not well understood. Therefore, we examined the timing and plasticity of auditory nerve driven FFI onto FCs. We find that in some FCs, excitatory and inhibitory components of FFI had the same stimulation thresholds indicating they could be triggered by activation of the same fibers. In other FCs, excitation and inhibition exhibit different stimulus thresholds, suggesting FCs and TVCs might be activated by different sets of fibers. In addition, we find that during repetitive activation, synapses formed by the auditory nerve onto TVCs and FCs exhibit distinct modes of short-term plasticity. Feed-forward inhibitory post-synaptic currents (IPSCs) in FCs exhibit short-term depression because of prominent synaptic depression at the auditory nerve-TVC synapse. Depression of this feedforward inhibitory input causes a shift in the balance of fusiform cell synaptic input towards greater excitation and suggests that fusiform cell spike output will be enhanced by physiological patterns of auditory nerve activity.
Sensory Ataxic Neuropathy in Golden Retriever Dogs Is Caused by a Deletion in the Mitochondrial tRNATyr Gene

Sensory ataxic neuropathy (SAN) is a recently identified neurological disorder in golden retrievers. Pedigree analysis revealed that all affected dogs belong to one maternal lineage, and a statistical analysis showed that the disorder has a mitochondrial origin. A one base pair deletion in the mitochondrial tRNATyr gene was identified at position 5304 in affected dogs after re-sequencing the complete mitochondrial genome of seven individuals. The deletion was not found among dogs representing 18 different breeds or in six wolves, ruling out this as a common polymorphism. The mutation could be traced back to a common ancestor of all affected dogs that lived in the 1970s. We used a quantitative oligonucleotide ligation assay to establish the degree of heteroplasmy in blood and tissue samples from affected dogs and controls. Affected dogs and their first to fourth degree relatives had 0–11% wild-type (wt) sequence, while more distant relatives ranged between 5% and 60% wt sequence and all unrelated golden retrievers had 100% wt sequence. Northern blot analysis showed that tRNATyr had a 10-fold lower steady-state level in affected dogs compared with controls. Four out of five affected dogs showed decreases in mitochondrial ATP production rates and respiratory chain enzyme activities together with morphological alterations in muscle tissue, resembling the changes reported in human mitochondrial pathology. Altogether, these results provide conclusive evidence that the deletion in the mitochondrial tRNATyr gene is the causative mutation for SAN.
ROC analysis of classifiers in machine learning: A survey

The use of ROC Receiver Operating Characteristics analysis as a tool for evaluating the performance of classification models in machine learning has been increasing in the last decade. Among the most notable advances in this area are the extension of two-class ROC analysis to the multi-class case as well as the employment of ROC analysis in cost-sensitive learning. Methods now exist which take instance-varying costs into account. The purpose of our paper is to present a survey of this field with the aim of gathering important achievements in one place. In the paper, we present application areas of the ROC analysis in machine learning, describe its problems and challenges and provide a summarized list of alternative approaches to ROC analysis. In addition to presented theory, we also provide a couple of examples intended to illustrate the described approaches.
Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) ; comparison with X-ray analysis

Analytical electron microscopy offers two main techniques of interest to materials science: electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and energy-dispersive x-ray analysis (EDX). The scientist is confronted with the choice of one of the two for the problem under consideration, although it is possible to employ both simultaneously. It is therefore important to know what to expect from each of the two techniques to assess which one is more likely to yield the desired information. Here both are compared to provide help in making that decision. The various aspects are illustrated with recent applications of both techniques in the research on interfaces in ceramics. Emphasis is put on the analysis of additional information contained in EELS, because this contributes to the understanding of bonding and chemistry inside the specimen
A note on internationalisation, internationalism and language teaching and learning

In the editorial of The Language Learning Journal of July 2011, readers’ attention is drawn to the decline in language teaching and learning in British schools and universities, and to the attempt of the British Academy to promote language teaching against this decline. The British Academy paper makes seven recommendations of which the second refers to a ‘broader understanding of internationalisation and language learning’ saying that ‘language learning should be central to the missions and internationalisation agendas of universities’ (British Academy 2011: 6). It may be a good strategy to link language teaching and learning with internationalisation agendas because these are in turn driven by government agendas, not only in Britain but across the Western European and North American world. The consequence could be more government support. There is however a need to examine carefully whether this link is sound, in case the strategy were to be challenged, and because of the potential impact on the teaching of languages per se.
The Impact of Presentation Form, Entrepreneurial Passion, and Perceived Preparedness on Obtaining Grant Funding

This study investigates important questions for any emerging high-technology firm attempting to obtain funding: Does the design of the presentation and the perceived passion and preparedness of the presenter influence expert reviewers’ assessment of the merits of the firm’s proposal? The authors analyzed 22 videotaped presentations to reviewer panels at a U.S. Department of Defense technology transfer consortium and compared the panels’ assessments of the presenting firms’ proposals both before and after the formal presentations. The data showed that, on average, higher levels of perceived entrepreneurial passion and presenter preparedness and presentation designs that effectively captured the audiences’ attention resulted in higher ratings by decision makers on the firm’s technology merit, management ability, and commercial potential.
Hardware Efficient Automatic Thresholding for NEO-Based Neural Spike Detection

The nonlinear energy operator (NEO) algorithm has been commonly implemented in hardware for neural spike detection. However, the traditional method to set the threshold is sensitive to the spike firing rate. In this paper, a new approach is presented to automatically set the threshold, in real time, in a manner that is robust to the spike firing rate and suitable for a neural implant. The presented threshold calculation method statistically analyzes the neural signal standard deviation and root-mean-square frequency and can update the threshold of each channel sequentially every few seconds. Hardware efficient architectures to estimate the threshold calculation statistical parameters are also presented. This automatic thresholding method for NEO spike detection shows robust performance for firing rates from 10 to 100, occupies only 0.021 mm2 in 130 nm CMOS, and consumes only 50 nW in simulations with a 20-kHz clock.
Inhibition of Rho kinase (ROCK) increases neurite outgrowth on chondroitin sulphate proteoglycan in vitro and axonal regeneration in the adult optic nerve in vivo

Inhibitory molecules derived from CNS myelin and glial scar tissue are major causes for insufficient functional regeneration in the mammalian CNS. A multitude of these molecules signal through the Rho/Rho kinase (ROCK) pathway. We evaluated three inhibitors of ROCK, Y‐ 27632, Fasudil (HA‐1077), and Dimethylfasudil (H‐1152), in models of neurite outgrowth in vitro. We show, that all three ROCK inhibitors partially restore neurite outgrowth of Ntera‐2 neurons on the inhibitory chondroitin sulphate proteoglycan substrate. In the rat optic nerve crush model Y‐27632 dose‐dependently increased regeneration of retinal ganglion cell axons in vivo. Application of Dimethylfasudil showed a trend towards increased axonal regeneration in an intermediate concentration. We demonstrate that inhibition of ROCK can be an effective therapeutic approach to increase regeneration of CNS neurons. The selection of a suitable inhibitor with a broad therapeutic window, however, is crucial in order to minimize unwanted side effects and to avoid deleterious effects on nerve fiber growth.