Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wilson and Patterson's Conservatism Scale: A shortened alternative form

The present study shows the continued usefulness of the C scale, using two independent samples (n = 286, n = 276). Following item analysis a shortened 30-item scale is proposed as an alternative to Wilson's own (1975) revision. Evidence is given that this shortened alternative has high internal reliability, improved relationships with other relevant tests, strong underlying unidimensionality, elegant factorial structure and value in the interpretation of other concepts.
Pregnancy Outcome and Placenta Pathology in Plasmodium berghei ANKA Infected Mice Reproduce the Pathogenesis of Severe Malaria in Pregnant Women

Pregnancy-associated malaria (PAM) is expressed in a range of clinical complications that include increased disease severity in pregnant women, decreased fetal viability, intra-uterine growth retardation, low birth weight and infant mortality. The physiopathology of malaria in pregnancy is difficult to scrutinize and attempts were made in the past to use animal models for pregnancy malaria studies. Here, we describe a comprehensive mouse experimental model that recapitulates many of the pathological and clinical features typical of human severe malaria in pregnancy. We used P. berghei ANKA-GFP infection during pregnancy to evoke a prominent inflammatory response in the placenta that entails CD11b mononuclear infiltration, up-regulation of MIP-1 alpha chemokine and is associated with marked reduction of placental vascular spaces. Placenta pathology was associated with decreased fetal viability, intra-uterine growth retardation, gross post-natal growth impairment and increased disease severity in pregnant females. Moreover, we provide evidence that CSA and HA, known to mediate P. falciparum adhesion to human placenta, are also involved in mouse placental malaria infection. We propose that reduction of maternal blood flow in the placenta is a key pathogenic factor in murine pregnancy malaria and we hypothesize that exacerbated innate inflammatory responses to Plasmodium infected red blood cells trigger severe placenta pathology. This experimental model provides an opportunity to identify cell and molecular components of severe PAM pathogenesis and to investigate the inflammatory response that leads to the observed fetal and placental blood circulation abnormalities.
Rapid changes in the expression of inhibin alpha-, beta A-, and beta B-subunits in ovarian cell types during the rat estrous cycle.

Distributions of inhibin alpha-, beta A-, and beta B-subunits in different ovarian compartments were studied in cycling female rats by in situ hybridization with complementary RNA probes and using immunohistochemical localization with antibodies selective for each inhibin subunit. Consistent with earlier studies showing inhibin production by granulosa cells of maturing follicles, we also detected mRNAs for inhibin alpha-, beta A-, and beta B-subunits in granulosa cells of these follicles. However, based on immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization, we found that inhibin alpha- is not only expressed in granulosa cells of mature follicles but in follicles at all stages of maturation, including primary to tertiary follicles. A number of primordial follicles also contained alpha mRNA and immunodetectable alpha-subunit. Interestingly, theca interna and interstitial gland cells contained inhibin alpha mRNA and alpha-subunit. Low levels of inhibin alpha immunoreactivity as well as specific hybridization to the complementary inhibin alpha mRNA probe were observed in newly formed luteal tissue. beta-Subunits, on the other hand, were detected exclusively in granulosa cells of healthy tertiary follicles. The changes in expression of inhibin alpha-, beta A-, and beta B-subunits were more pronounced during the follicular phase of the cycle: inhibin alpha reached its highest level in granulosa cells, theca interna, and interstitial gland cells a few hours after the LH/FSH surge, while at the same time the beta-subunits decreased dramatically in granulosa cells of mature follicles. Immediately before ovulation (estrus 0200 h), the alpha-subunit sharply declined in preovulatory follicles and was present mainly in granulosa cells from nonovulatory follicles at various stages of maturation. At that time, the beta A- and beta B-subunits could not be detected in preovulatory follicles but were localized mainly in small tertiary follicles (less than 300 microns). Unlike for the alpha- and beta B-subunits, beta A mRNA and immunoreactivity was present in large tertiary follicles (approximately 600 microns) immediately before ovulation. The present findings support the hypothesis that a decrease in inhibin production could be responsible for the secondary FSH surge observed early on estrus. This could be initiated by a change in the ratios of activin-inhibin production by decreasing first, the levels of beta-subunits, second, the levels of alpha-subunit, and third, by a resurgence of activin A produced mainly by granulosa cells from large tertiary follicles. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology Modulation of Human Uterine Smooth Muscle Cell Collagen Contractility by Thrombin, Y-27632, Tnf Alpha and Indomethacin

Background: Preterm labour occurs in approximately 10% of pregnancies and is a major cause of infant morbidity and mortality. However, the pathways involved in regulating contractility in normal and preterm labour are not fully elucidated. Our aim was to utilise a human myometrial contractility model to investigate the effect of a number of uterine specific contractility agents in this system. Therefore, we investigated the contractile response of human primary uterine smooth muscle cells or immortalised myometrial smooth muscle cells cultured within collagen lattices, to known mediators of uterine contractility, which included thrombin, the ROCK-1 inhibitor Y-27632, tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF alpha) and the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory indomethacin.
Strategy and Background in Congressional Campaigns

Common conceptions of the electoral connection often make two assumptions about the behavior of candidates and voters. The first is that candidates focus their campaigns on their records. The second is that voters evaluate candidates on the basis of their campaign messages. This article explores how candidates' backgrounds influence these two components of representation. The main premise is simple: Campaign messages are more effective if they emphasize issues on which candidates have built a record that appears favorable to voters. Consequently, candidates tend to focus on this type of issue when choosing campaign themes. Candidates are less successful in winning favorable evaluations if they stray from their records and make unsubstantiated claims.
APRIX: A Master-Slave Operating System Architecture for Multiprocessor Embedded Systems

The recent emergence of heterogeneous chip multiprocessors requires a different operating system organization from the usual SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) organization. Although the SMP organization has been widely adopted in modern multiprocessor operating systems, it is restricted to homogeneous processors with a global shared memory. On the other hand, the master-slave organization has little dependency upon the underlying hardware architecture, thus having great potential to cope with heterogeneous multiprocessors. This motivated us to reexamine the master-slave approach. In this paper, we attempt to address real-time and performance issues associated with the master-slave approach. Specifically, we first describe our previous design of a master-slave architecture, called APRIX. We then present an improved communication mechanism between the master and slave, which allows the master to provide priority-based system call services to slave kernels and also improves the overall multiprocessing performance.
Language identification of code switching Malay-English words using syllable structure information

This paper introduces a language identification approach using syllable structure information. We also review and compare other approaches. Most of these approaches use linguistic information for language identification. The information used for language identification is Malay affixation information, English vocabulary list, alphabet ngram, grapheme n-gram. The approach using syllable structure information has the highest accuracy at 93.73% compared to other approaches. Based on the accuracy result of comparison, by using syllable structure 1.91% accuracy had increased for language identification compare with the second higher result in this paper. Syllable structure information is able to gain a better result for language identification.
Memory system performance in a NUMA multicore multiprocessor

Modern multicore processors with an on-chip memory controller form the base for NUMA (non-uniform memory architecture) multiprocessors. Each processor accesses part of the physical memory directly and has access to the other parts via the memory controller of other processors. These other processors are reached via the cross-processor interconnect. As a consequence a processor's memory controller must satisfy two kinds of requests: those that are generated by the local cores and those that arrive via the interconnect from other processors. On the other hand, a core (respectively the core's cache) can obtain data from multiple sources: data can be supplied by the local memory controller or by a remote memory controller on another processor. In this paper we experimentally analyze the behavior of the memory controllers of a commercial multicore processor, the Intel Xeon 5520 (Nehalem). We develop a simple model to characterize the sharing of local and remote memory bandwidth. The uneven treatment of local and remote accesses has implications for mapping applications onto such a NUMA multicore multiprocessor. Maximizing data locality does not always minimize execution time; it may be more advantageous to allocate data on a remote processor (and then to fetch these data via the cross-processor interconnect) than to store the data of all processes in local memory (and consequently over-loading the on-chip memory controller).
Determining Sample Size in Validation Research

WITH the exception of research amenable to a sequential analysis approach (Fiske and Jones, 2), the omnipresent decision of what size sample to use in an investigation must be met at the outset. Usually this is a complex problem with several non-statistical facets, mainly involving availability of resources. For the type of investigation considered here-estimating the predictive efficiency of a test in a job context-the difficulty of the decision as to the magnitude of n, the sample size, has been aptly stated by Thorndike and Hagen (3) as follows:
Nasal harmony in Ikwere, a language with no phonemic nasal consonants

Abstract This paper presents a descriptive study of nasals and nasal harmony in Ikwere, an Igboid language of Nigeria. In the variety studied here, nasality is surface-contrastive in vowels but not in consonants. Nasality has the status of a morpheme-level feature which is either present or absent in each morpheme (root or affix). If present, it is predictably distributed across nonobstruent sounds by a system of nasal harmony which operates within the domain of the simple word, spreading nasality bidirectionally until blocked by an obstruent. The class of nasalizing sounds includes the nonexplosive stops ḅ and ’ḅ , confirming results of an earlier study showing these sounds to be nonobstruents (Clements and Osu 2002). The analysis brings to light some of the basic typological parameters that characterize nasal harmony in Ikwere, as well as an idiosyncratic restriction to the “phonological root”, a domain which excludes initial syllables in noun roots that are homophonous with prefixes in other words. The paper concludes with a summary and discussion of implications for the feature analysis and typology of stops.
Preventing Retail-Sector Crimes

The prevalence of crime in the retail sector is higher than for residents, and multiple victimization is common. Shops and stores have major exposure to external crime such as theft, burglary, robbery and threats, and violence to staff. Internal crime, such as fraud and theft by employees, is less of a problem. The location, siting, and design of a store significantly affects its crime risk, as does the type of neighborhood in which it is situated. Expenditure on security measures is high, but evaluated and published accounts of crime-prevention experiments are rare. Nonetheless, there are documented and cost-effective examples of prevention against all the major crime risks; the most useful approach to implementing these will require development and dissemination of crime audit methods and good practice in crime prevention. Cooperative methods of crime prevention in local areas, involving changes in security management within companies, and participation of public agencies, are likely also to be required.
Low Self-Esteem: A Cognitive Perspective

Although low self-esteem is common in clinical populations, a cognitive conceptualization of the problem and an integrated treatment programme deriving from that conceptualization are as yet lacking. The paper proposes a cognitive model for low self-esteem, deriving from Beck's model of emotional disorder. It outlines a treatment programme which integrates ideas and methods from cognitive therapy for depression, anxiety and more recent work on schemas or core beliefs. The model and treatment are illustrated with an extended case example.
String matching with k differences by finite automata

Approximate string matching is a sequential problem and therefore it is possible to solve it using finite automata. A nondeterministic finite automaton is constructed for string matching with k differences. It is shown, how dynamic programming and "shift-and" based algorithms simulate this nondeterministic finite automaton. The corresponding deterministic finite automaton have O((k+2)/sup m-k/*(k+1)! ) states, where m is the length of the pattern and k is the number of differences. The time complexity of algorithms based on such deterministic finite automaton is O(n), where n is the length of text.
Remembering and anticipating stressors: Positive personality mediates the relationship with sense of humor

Abstract Participants' reports of recent stressors and anticipated stressors were predicted using a measure of sense of humor that assessed positive and negative uses of humor and measures of positive personality characteristics: optimism, hope, and happiness. The prediction was the tendency to use positive humor and/or avoid negative humor would be associated with higher levels of positive personality qualities, and that the positive personality qualities would mediate the relationship between sense of humor styles and perceptions of stress. The mediator model was supported for both past and future measures of perceived stress. Sense of humor differences explained variance in perceived stressors, but the inclusion of the positive personality qualities in the model virtually eliminated the contributions of sense of humor. It appears that appropriate uses of humor may support the selected positive personality qualities, which contribute to less extreme construal of stressors.
The role of ARX in cortical development

The ARX protein (encoded by the aristaless‐related homeobox gene) is a member of the paired class of homeoproteins. More precisely, it is a member of the Aristaless subclass of proteins with a glutamine residue (Q) at the critical position 50 of the homeodomain (Q50). Through identification of diverse inherited or de novo mutations, genetic investigations of X‐linked mental retardation conditions have demonstrated the implication of ARXin a wide spectrum of disorders extending from phenotypes with severe neuronal migration defects, such as lissencephaly, to mild forms of X‐linked mental retardation without apparent brain abnormalities. These investigations have recently directed attention to the role of this gene in brain development. Analysis of its spatiotemporal localization profile have revealed expression mainly in telencephalic structures at all stages of development. Interestingly, in adult, ARX expression becomes restricted to a population of GABAergic neurons. Although the identification of the target genes regulated by ARX remains a crucial step to better understanding its role during brain development, studies of the role of ARX orthologs in different models have indicated that it is essential for important developmental processes such as proliferation, cell differentiation and neuronal migration.
Acquisition of High-Level Chromosomal Instability Is Associated with Integration of Human Papillomavirus Type 16 in Cervical Keratinocytes

Whereas two key steps in cervical carcinogenesis are integration of high-risk human papillomavirus (HR-HPV) and acquisition of an unstable host genome, the temporal association between these events is poorly understood. Chromosomal instability is induced when HR-HPV E7 oncoprotein is overexpressed from heterologous promoters in vitro. However, it is not known whether such events occur at the “physiologically” elevated levels of E7 produced by deregulation of the homologous HR-HPV promoter after integration. Indeed, an alternative possibility is that integration in vivo is favored in an already unstable host genome. We have addressed these issues using the unique human papillomavirus (HPV) 16-containing cervical keratinocyte cell line W12, which was derived from a low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion and thus acquired HPV16 by “natural” infection. Whereas W12 at low passage contains HPV16 episomes only, long-term culture results in the emergence of cells containing integrated HPV16 only. We show that integration of HPV16 in W12 is associated with 3′ deletion of the E2 transcriptional repressor, resulting in deregulation of the homologous promoter of the integrant and an increase in E7 protein levels. We further demonstrate that high-level chromosomal instability develops in W12 only after integration and that the forms of instability observed correlate with the physical state of HPV16 DNA and the level of E7 protein. Whereas intermediate E7 levels are associated with numerical chromosomal abnormalities, maximal levels are associated with both numerical and structural aberrations. HR-HPV integration is likely to be a critical event in cervical carcinogenesis, preceding the development of chromosomal abnormalities that drive malignant progression.
Exact Generation of Minimal Acyclic Deterministic Finite Automata

We give a canonical representation for minimal acyclic deterministic finite automata (MADFA) with n states over an alphabet of k symbols. Using this normal form, we present a method for the exact generation of MADFAs. This method avoids a rejection phase that would be needed if a generation algorithm for a larger class of objects that contains the MADFAs were used. We give upper and lower bounds for MADFAs enumeration and some exact formulas for small values of n.
Championing intellectual pluralism

Purpose - This editorial seeks to argue for intellectual pluralism and adventurous enquiry in an era of status badging of publication venues and institutions and to review Design/methodology/approach - The paper is an editorial review and argument. Findings - The paper acknowledges pressures towards a North American inspired unitary neo-classical economic view of the accounting world and related badging of higher education institutions and research publications globally. It identifies the community of accounting scholars including Research limitations/implications - The paper offers scope and associated recognition for researchers prepared to take up and address a wide array of theoretical perspectives and research issues of global significance. Originality/value - The paper provides important empirical data and research network information to scholars in the interdisciplinary accounting field of research.
Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens Summer Games

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. This article argues that the IOC policy on sex reassignment does not operate to guard against discrimination and harassment against transsexual athletes but that it operates to maintain the popular illusion that there are two, binary gender designations. While both transsexual and Olympic bodies have unique histories and vastly different experiences in the social and political realms, using psychoanalysis we contend that the need to test gendered bodies is incited by an anxiety about bodily deterioration, aging, and, ultimately, mortality.
History as social memory assets: The example of Tim Hortons

Abstract Strategic management research has demonstrated that firm-specific resources can confer a distinct competitive advantage. This research, however, tends to assume that the resources are fixed and immutable and that they operate inside the organization. We offer a competing view in which resources are socially constructed and operate primarily on external stakeholders. Drawing from emerging research in social memory studies, we argue that historical narratives are an emerging means of socially constructing firm-specific social memory assets that can be used to create competitive advantage. We illustrate our argument through an analysis of how Tim Hortons, a now iconic Canadian company, uses historical and tradition-based narratives to construct its brand identity.
Gβγ Binds to the Extreme C Terminus of SNAP25 to Mediate the Action of Gi/o-Coupled G Protein–Coupled Receptors

Gi/o-coupled G protein–coupled receptors can exert an inhibitory effect on vesicle release through several G protein–driven mechanisms, more than one of which may be concurrently present in individual presynaptic terminals. The synaptosomal-associated protein of 25 kDa (SNAP25) is a key downstream effector of Gβγ subunits. It has previously been shown that proteolytic cleavage of SNAP25 by botulinum toxin A reduces the ability of Gβγ to compete with the calcium sensor synaptotagmin 1 (Syt1) for binding to SNAP25 in a calcium-dependent manner. These truncated SNAP25 proteins sustain a low level of exocytosis but are unable to support serotonin-mediated inhibition of exocytosis in lamprey spinal neurons. Here, we generate a SNAP25 extreme C-terminal mutant that is deficient in its ability to bind Gβγ while retaining normal calcium-dependent Syt1 binding to soluble N-ethylmaleimide attachment protein receptor (SNARE) and vesicle release. The SNAP25Δ3 mutant, in which residue G204 is replaced by a stop codon, features a partial reduction in Gβ1γ2 binding in vitro as well as a partial reduction in the ability of the lamprey 5-hydroxytryptamine1b–type serotonin receptor to reduce excitatory postsynaptic current amplitudes, an effect previously shown to be mediated through the interaction of Gβγ with SNAP25. Syt1 calcium-dependent binding to SNAP25Δ3 was reduced by a small extent compared with the wild type. We conclude that the extreme C terminus of SNAP25 is a critical region for the Gβγ-SNARE interaction.