Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synaptic control of excitability in isolated dendrites of hippocampal neurons

The apical dendrites of CA1 pyramidal cells were isolated from their cell bodies by making cuts through proximal stratum radiatum of transverse hippocampal slices from the guinea pig. This lesion separated the distal apical dendritic elements from the somata, basal dendrites, and 50 to 100 microns of the proximal apical dendritic tree. Orthodromic stimuli in stratum radiatum evoked excitatory synaptic responses in isolated dendrites, but no phasic inhibitory components could be detected. In spite of this surgically produced disinhibition, orthodromic stimuli did not elicit burst activity at the resting membrane potential. However, isolated dendrites and intact dendrites could generate multiple slow spike activity when directly stimulated with depolarizing current pulses. When isolated dendrites were depolarized by DC current, excitatory postsynaptic potentials could evoke subthreshold intrinsic slow depolarizations, or repetitive slow spikes, similar to responses elicited by depolarizing current pulses alone. After exposure to bicuculline (5 microns), both intact and isolated dendrites generated bursts of activity following synaptic activation. A possible mechanism for this action of bicuculline is blockade of a residual GABA-mediated inhibition which was not expressed as a postsynaptic hyperpolarization in isolated dendrites. This bicuculline-sensitive event was capable of depressing dendritic excitability in the absence of the recurrent inhibitory synaptic input and was very effective in controlling burst activity. Our results indicate that the dendritic electrical behavior is dependent on a complex interaction between synaptic and voltage-sensitive events.
An aging society: opportunity or challenge?

"This paper steps back from the current political debate [in the United States] over the social security trust fund and examines the more general question of how serious a macroeconomic problem aging is and how policy should respond to it. We focus primarily on issues relating to saving and capital accumulation. We do not consider the broader question of whether the current U.S. national saving rate is too high or too low, but focus on the effect of demographic changes on the optimal level of national saving. In addition, we consider the effects of demographic change on productivity growth and the optimal timing of tax collections. Our general conclusion is that demographic changes will improve American standards of living in the near future, but lower them slightly over the very long term. Other things being equal, the optimal policy response to recent and anticipated demographic changes is almost certainly a reduction rather than an increase in the national saving rate. "
Output invisible control allocation with steady-state input optimization for weakly redundant plants

In this paper, the problem of control allocation is revisited focusing on weakly redundant plants, that is plants having more inputs than outputs but such that no input can be equivalently substituted by a combination of the others. Considering the case of asymptotically constant references, it is shown that input allocation can be used to optimize the steady state input, without altering (even during transients) the output response induced by any a priori given controller. Moreover, a general structure for the allocator is proposed, consisting of a series connection of a steady-state optimizer and an annihilator.
Correction Procedures in Three-Alternative Verbal-Discrimination Lists with Intertriad Associations

Intertriad associative relationships were varied in three-alternative verbal-discrimination lists, using either specific correction (the word itself) or outcome correction ('right,' 'wrong'). All of the associative lists were learned faster with outcome-correction feedback than was the control list, in which there were no interpair associates (NA list); but with specificcorrection feedback, only the list in which both associates were right (AR list) was learned faster. The facilitation with outcome correction is attributed to a change in the chance level of guessing for the lists in which both associates were wrong (AW list) or in which the associates were both right and wrong in different pairs (AB list), and to a summation of rehearsal and implicit response in the AR list. The failure to find interference with specific correction for the AW and AB lists seemed to be a result of the ceiling effect that occurred because of the slow presentation rates. Verbal-discrimination learning has recently been explained in term of the subject's ability to distinguish between the past frequency of experience of the right (R) and wrong (W) members of each pair.1 It was assumed that these differences in experience were acquired through four types of events which contributed one 'frequency unit' each time they occurred during the course of learning. These events were the act of perceiving an item, or the representational response; the choice or pronunciation response during anticipation; the rehearsal of the correct response during the feedback interval; and the implicit associative response. The rehearsal response was seen as the event initially shifting the frequency of experience in favor of the R term, because the representational and Received for publication May 18, 1970. The investigation was supported by Biomedical Sciences Support Grant Fr-07053 from the General Research Support Branch, Division of Research Resources, Bureau of Health Professions Education and Manpower Training, National Institutes of Health. 1 B. R. Ekstrand, W. P. Wallace, and B. J. Underwood, A frequency theory of verbal-discrimination learning, Psychol. Rev., 73, 1966, 566-578.
Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure: Development of Framework and Intervention

OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this work was to describe a novel process and present results of formative research to develop a pediatric office intervention that uses available systems of care for addressing parental smoking. METHODS. The scientific development of the intervention occurred in 3 stages. In stage 1, we designed an office system for parental tobacco control in the pediatric outpatient setting on the basis of complementary conceptual frameworks of preventive services delivery, conceptualized for the child health care setting through a process of key interviews with leaders in the field of implementing practice change; existing Public Health Service guidelines that had been shown effective in adult practices; and adaptation of an evidence-based adult office system for tobacco control. This was an iterative process that yielded a theoretically framed intervention prototype. In stage 2, we performed focus-group testing in pediatric practices with pediatricians, nurses, clinical assistants, and key office staff. Using qualitative methods, we adapted the intervention prototype on the basis of this feedback to include 5 key implementation steps for the child health care setting. In stage 3, we presented the intervention to breakout groups at 2 national meetings of pediatric practitioners for additional refinements. RESULTS. The main result was a theoretically grounded intervention that was responsive to the barriers and suggestions raised in the focus groups and at the national meetings. The Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure intervention was designed to be flexible and adaptable to the particular practices' staffing, resources, and physical configuration. Practice staff can choose materials relevant to their own particular systems of care (www.ceasetobacco.org). CONCLUSIONS. Conceptually grounded and focus-group–tested strategies for parental tobacco control are now available for implementation in the pediatric outpatient setting. The tobacco-control intervention-development process might have particular relevance for other chronic pediatric conditions that have a strong evidence base and have available treatments or resources that are underused.
Characterization of plasmids encoding the phytotoxin coronatine in Pseudomonas syringae.

Coronatine (COR) is a nonhost-specific phytotoxin that substantially contributes to the virulence of several pathovars (pvs.) of Pseudomonas syringae. The COR gene cluster in P. syringae is generally plasmid-encoded in pvs. atropurpurea, glycinea, morsprunorum, and tomato but chromosomally encoded in pv. maculicola. In the present study, we investigated whether the COR plasmids in four pathovars shared other traits including self-transmissibility, conserved oriV/par loci, and insertion sequences (ISs) known to reside on other plasmids in P. syringae. Three COR plasmids were shown to be self-transmissible, and all COR plasmids shared a related oriV/par region. Two COR plasmids hybridized to IS801, an IS element widely distributed in P. syringae. Further analysis of p4180A, a 90-kb COR plasmid in P. syringae pv. glycinea, indicated that multiple copies of IS801 were present on this plasmid, and all copies mapped outside the COR gene cluster. Sequence analysis of the region adjacent to the COR gene cluster in p4180A indicated the presence of additional IS elements including IS870, IS51, and IS1240. The IS elements borne on p4180A may have contributed to horizontal transfer of the COR gene cluster and the evolution of the COR biosynthetic pathway.
Towards Increased Utility of and Satisfaction with Group Recommender Systems

Research on group recommender systems (GRS) has yielded innovative concepts for suggesting services or products to groups of users as well as for bringing users with similar tastes together. We have developed such concepts for group recommender systems and a platform in the domain of movie recommendations for groups. In this workshop we argue that putting a stronger focus on the evolution of the group negotiation process as well as social psychological concepts in the respective decision phase can increase the usability of GRS.
Eventually Returning to Strong Consistency

Eventually and weakly consistent distributed systems have emerged in the past decade as an answer to scalability and availability issues associated with strong consistency semantics, such as linearizability. However, systems o ﬀ ering strong consistency semantics have an advantage over systems based on weaker consistency models, as they are typically much simpler to reason about and are more intuitive to developers, exhibiting more predictable behavior. Therefore, a lot of research and development e ﬀ ort is being invested lately into the re-engineering of strongly consistent distributed systems, as well as into boosting their scalability and performance. This paper overviews and discusses several novel directions in the design and implementation of strongly consistent systems in industries and research domains such as cloud computing, data center networking and blockchain. It also discusses a general trend of returning to strong consistency in distributed systems, when system requirements permit so.
Visibly Pushdown Expression Effects for XML Stream Processing

We define an effect system, based upon visibly pushdown languages (VPLs), for a programming language that processes streams of tokens with parenthesis-like matching, as found in XML documents or s-expressions. The effect analysis ensures that programs read and write words in which tokens match, despite the fact that tokens are read and written individually. In particular, the novel treatment of input provides a compositional description of the behaviour of programs with lookahead. We introduce visibly pushdown expressions (VPEs), corresponding to the class of VPLs, as the effects. VPEs generalize regular expression types by incorporating intersection, unmatched tokens, and overlapped concatenation (used in the analysis of operations with lookahead). Hosoya, Vouillon, and Pierce’s decision procedure for language inclusion between regular expression types, via a translation to non-deterministic tree automata, does not apply to VPEs. Instead we obtain a decision procedure via a translation of VPEs to Alur and Madhusudan’s monadic second order logic with matching relation MSOμ.
Primers for EPIC amplification of intron sequences for fish and other vertebrate population genetic studies.

generally polymorphic and sometimes hypervariable; they are expected to be codominant and selectively neutral; they are easily amplifiable by PCR, and they can be revealed on simple agarose or acrylamide gels; and large numbers can be obtained at low cost (3−8). Using a given pair of primers, several loci can be simultaneously amplified. This phenomenon may reflect former polyploidizations, tandem duplications, and other phenomena occurring during lineage evolution and producing pseudogenes. This intron characteristic is useful for biologists because it potentially provides a number of polymorphisms with only a pair of primers. The universality property of the primers described has a slight surmountable disadvantage: the risk of human DNA contamination. It is not always possible to avoid contamination by respecting usual PCR rules but it is easily detectable because of the highly specific profiles obtained for each species and for each exon-primed
Electroweak bubble nucleation, nonperturbatively

We present a lattice method to compute bubble nucleation rates at radiatively induced first order phase transitions, in high temperature, weakly coupled field theories, nonperturbatively. A generalization of Langer's approach, it makes no recourse to saddle point expansions and includes completely the dynamical prefactor. We test the technique by applying it to the electroweak phase transition in the minimal standard model, at an unphysically small Higgs mass which gives a reasonably strong phase transition (lambda/g^2 =0.036, which corresponds to m(Higgs)/m(W) = 0.54 at tree level but does not correspond to a positive physical Higgs mass when radiative effects of the top quark are included), and compare the results to older perturbative and other estimates. While two loop perturbation theory slightly under-estimates the strength of the transition measured by the latent heat, it over-estimates the amount of supercooling by a factor of 2.
Induction of epithelial-mesenchymal transition in primary airway epithelial cells from patients with asthma by transforming growth factor-beta1.

RATIONALE Airway remodeling in asthma is associated with the accumulation of fibroblasts, the primary cell responsible for synthesis and secretion of extracellular matrix proteins. The process by which the number of fibroblasts increases in asthma is poorly understood, but epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) may play a significant role. OBJECTIVES To evaluate whether EMT occurs in primary airway epithelial cells (AECs), the mechanisms involved, and if this process is altered in asthmatic AECs. METHODS AECs were obtained from subjects with asthma (n = 8) and normal subjects without asthma (n = 10). Monolayer and air-liquid interface-AEC (ALI-AEC) cultures were treated with transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta1 (10 ng/ml) for 72 hours and assayed for mesenchymal and epithelial markers using quantitative polymerase chain reaction, confocal microscopy, and immunoblot. The involvement of BMP-7, Smad3, and MAPK-mediated signaling were also evaluated. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS TGF-beta1-induced EMT in AEC monolayers derived from subjects with asthma and normal donors. EMT was characterized by changes in cell morphology, increased expression of mesenchymal markers EDA-fibronectin, vimentin, alpha-smooth muscle actin, and collagen-1, and loss of epithelial markers E-cadherin and zonular occludin-1. Inhibition of TGF-beta1-induced signaling with Smad3-inhibiting siRNA or TGF-beta1-neutralizing antibodies prevented and reversed EMT, respectively, whereas BMP-7 had no effect. In ALI-AEC cultures derived from normal subjects, EMT was confined to basally situated cells, whereas in asthmatic ALI-AEC cultures EMT was widespread throughout the epithelium. CONCLUSIONS TGF-beta1 induces EMT in a Smad3-dependent manner in primary AECs. However, in asthmatic-derived ALI-AEC cultures, the number of cells undergoing EMT is greater. These findings support the hypothesis that epithelial repair in asthmatic airways is dysregulated.
Mycobacterial UvrD1 Is a Ku-dependent DNA Helicase That Plays a Role in Multiple DNA Repair Events, Including Double-strand Break Repair*

Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other bacterial pathogens have a Ku-dependent nonhomologous end joining pathway of DNA double-strand break repair. Here we identify mycobacterial UvrD1 as a novel interaction partner for Ku in a genome-wide yeast two-hybrid screen. UvrD1 per se is a vigorous DNA-dependent ATPase but a feeble DNA helicase. Ku stimulates UvrD1 to catalyze ATP-dependent unwinding of 3′-tailed DNAs. UvrD1, Ku, and DNA form a stable ternary complex in the absence of ATP. The Ku binding determinants are located in the distinctive C-terminal segment of UvrD1. A second mycobacterial paralog, UvrD2, is a vigorous Ku-independent DNA helicase. Ablation of UvrD1 sensitizes Mycobacterium smegmatis to killing by ultraviolet and ionizing radiation and to a single chromosomal break generated by I-SceI endonuclease. The physical and functional interactions of bacterial Ku and UvrD1 highlight the potential for cross-talk between components of nonhomologous end joining and nucleotide excision repair pathways.
Book Review

I single out Mills' contribution because it is the least glib empirically of all the chapters, but even so, it is much too easygoing in its approach to the evidence. Several of the others are simply baffling in their treatment of data. At least none of the chapters resorts to the postmodern defense of relativism. All the same, authors in the critical tradition need to be as demanding of themselves as they are hard on orthodoxy if they are to be fully persuasive. Overall, this is an unusual and stimulating collection. This reader is persuaded that issues of identity, the problematic nature of markets, and the challenge of postmodernism demand further attention. They also deserve more rigorous research.
A combined algorithm both for restraining intensive interferences and for weak signals DOA estimation

Under the circumstance of intensive interferences, the detection probability of weak signals and the precision for their DOA estimation would be decreased seriously. A combined algorithm both for anti-jamming and DOA estimation is achieved based on the least mean-square error criterion in this paper. Finally, the results are analyzed theoretically. Computer simulations show its efficiency.
Mengurangi Bullying melalui Program Pelatihan “Guru Peduli”

This study investigated a strategy of reducing bullying in elementary school through “Guru Peduli” (“Teacher Care”) training. It was a training done for teachers. It aimed to increase teachers’ awareness, knowledge and skills to prevent and reduce bullying. The aim of this quasi-experimental research was to test the effectiveness of “Guru Peduli” training for reducing elementary school bullying. Two elementary schools were involved as the experimental and control groups. There were six classes were for class observation and six locations for playground observation. The observations were done before and after the training. The data were analyzed with Wilcoxon Signed-Rank and Mann-Whitney test. The data showed that there was a significant difference of bullying between the experimental and control schools. There was also a significant reduction of bullying in experimental school after the training. Keywords: bullying, “Guru Peduli” training, teachers’ knowledge
A new duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech

A new duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several major affecting factors, such as multiplicative companding factors (CFs), and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. The three basic Tone 3 patterns (i.e., full tone, half tone and sandhi tone) are also properly considered using three different CFs to separate how they affect syllable duration. Experimental results show that the variance of the syllable duration is greatly reduced from 180.17 to 2.52 frame/sup 2/ (1 frame = 5 ms) by the syllable duration modeling to eliminate effects from those affecting factors. Moreover, the estimated CFs of those affecting factors agree well with our prior linguistic knowledge. Two extensions of the duration modeling method are also performed. One is the use of the same technique to model initial and final durations. The other is to replace the multiplicative model with an additive one. Lastly, a preliminary study of applying the proposed model to predict syllable duration for TTS (text-to-speech) is also performed. Experimental results show that it outperforms the conventional regressive prediction method.
Interval criterion for stability analysis of discrete-time neural networks with partial state saturation nonlinearities

A generalization of sufficient conditions for global asymptotic stability of the equilibrium x/sub e/=0 of discrete-time neural networks, described by systems which have saturation nonlinearities on part of the states in the case of interval uncertainties, is considered. When using quadratic form Lyapunov functions, sufficient conditions, based on the positive definite interval matrices, are presented. In order to check this, a recent proposed method for determining the outer bounds of eigenvalues ranges is used. A numerical example, illustrating the applicability of the method suggested, is solved at the end of the paper.
Optimal tolerability of ultra-low-dose continuous combined 17β-estradiol and norethisterone acetate: laboratory and safety results

Objective To evaluate the influence of two ultra-low doses of oral continuous combined hormone therapy and placebo on metabolic parameters, and to assess safety endpoints and overall tolerability in healthy postmenopausal women. Design In a subpopulation of the Clinical study on Hormone dose Optimisation In Climacteric symptoms Evaluation (CHOICE) trial, lipids and parameters of glucose metabolism and hemostasis were analyzed in Nordic women (n = 158) at baseline and after 12 and 24 weeks of treatment with 0.5 mg 17β-estradiol (E2) + 0.25 mg norethisterone acetate (NETA), 0.5 mg E2 + 0.1 mg NETA or placebo. Adverse events occurring from the first trial-related activity, whether related or not related to the study medication, were recorded for the entire population (n = 575) of the trial. The seriousness, relationship to treatment and the reason for withdrawal were reported. Results Both ultra-low-dose combinations were neutral to changes in lipid and lipoprotein, hemostasis parameters and carbohydrate metabolism during the trial. The incidence of serious adverse events was only 1% in respective treatment groups. Adverse events were the reason for withdrawal in only 2% and 6% of women in the 0.5 mg E2 + 0.25 mg and 0.1 mg NETA groups, and in 8% in the placebo group. No weight gain or change in blood pressure was reported during the trial in any of the study groups. Conclusion The treatments had neutral effects on metabolic parameters in the study population. Excellent tolerability of both ultra-low doses resulted in high completion rates.
Immunological Study of a Chitosan Prosthesis in the Sciatic Nerve Regeneration of the Axotomized Dog

This study demonstrated that when the regeneration of the axotomized sciatic nerve is induced through tubulization with chitosan, this biomaterial does not induce immunostimulation or immunodepression in the dog. Canine females were distributed among three groups: an intact control group which was only isolated, an axotomized control group, and an axotomized group which was tubulized with 3% chitosan prostheses. In vitro culture and phagocytosis tests, as well as IgG and IgM serum concentrations, were determined in peripheral blood on days 0, 15, 30 and 60. The results showed that chitosan implants did not importantly affect the immune response.