Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selective gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization in rural India: The role of siblings

This article examines the role of the sex composition of surviving older siblings on gender differences in childhood nutrition and immunization, using data from the National Family Health Survey, India (1992–1993). Logit and ordered logit models were used for severe stunting and immunization, respectively. The results show selective neglect of children with certain sex and birth-order combinations that operate differentially for girls and boys. Both girls and boys who were born after multiple same-sex siblings experience poor outcomes, suggesting that parents want some balance in sex composition. However, the preference for sons persists, and boys who were born after multiple daughters have the best possible outcomes.
Sucrose-mediated transcriptional regulation of sucrose symporter activity in the phloem

A proton–sucrose symporter mediates the key step in carbon export from leaves of most plants. Sucrose transport activity and steady-state mRNA levels of BvSUT1, a sugar beet leaf sucrose symporter, are negatively regulated specifically by sucrose. Results reported here show that BvSUT1 mRNA was localized to companion cells of the leaf's vascular system, which supports its role in the systemic distribution of photoassimilate. Immunoblot analysis showed that decreased transport activity was caused by a reduction in the abundance of symporter protein. RNA gel blot analysis of the leaf symporter revealed that message levels also declined, and nuclear run-on experiments demonstrated that this was the result of decreased transcription. Further analysis showed that symporter protein and message are both degraded rapidly. Taken together, these data show that phloem loading is regulated by means of sucrose-mediated changes in transcription of a phloem-specific sucrose symporter gene in a regulatory system that may play a pivotal role in balancing photosynthetic activity with resource utilization.
Analysis of spontaneous bursting activity in random neural networks

Developing networks can generate bursting activity despite the absence of pacemaker cells and inhibitory synapses. Bursts are generated by positive feedback through excitatory connections and terminated by a slow depression of network excitability. Similar activity has been observed in cultures of spinal neurons containing inhibitory synapses. Is burst generation in these cultures operating according to the mechanism proposed for developing networks? To answer this question without perturbing the activity, we analyzed the burst pattern of individual neurons in active cultures. We observed a correlation between burst size and preceding interburst interval and a rapid rise and progressive decrease in firing rate during a burst. These findings are consistent with the mechanism of burst generation proposed for developing networks.
Content and context information fusion for mobile landmark recognition

This paper proposes a new information fusion approach that employs two information components for mobile landmark recognition, which includes: content analysis and context analysis. Existing landmark recognition works are mainly based on PC platform, which uses content analysis alone for recognition, and thus has a large computation cost and cannot satisfy mobile users' fast response time requirements. Therefore in this paper, a mobile platform-based landmark recognition system is developed. The bag-of-words method is employed and further improved as content analysis according to the specific features of landmark images. Context analysis based on location (obtained by global positioning system) and direction (obtained by digital compass) information is then integrated with improved BoW as a new information fusion approach for mobile landmark recognition. Finally, the experiment results conducted on the NTU landmark database show that the proposed approach is effective for mobile landmark recognition.
After Ontotheology: Reciprocal, Caring, Creative, and Right Relationships

After Ontotheology: Reciprocal, Caring, Creative, and Right Relationships With the end of ontotheology we may realize, as Dewey did, that what sustains us is our caring relationships with physical nature, biological life, and other persons. My paper argues that relationships are ontologically basic and caring relations are morally basic. Right relationship binds us to the world and holds us together. We live by the grace of others. I conclude that after ontotheology, we must seek to form reciprocal, caring, and creative relationships.
State and Federal Policies for School Facility Construction

Background: The Ohio School Facilities Commission was set up in response to litigation compelling the state to achieve a more equitable distribution in the quality of school facilities. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was a federal policy to stimulate the United States economy and support school facility construction. These two programs provide an opportunity to compare a state-run program to a federal one. Purpose: This study analyzes the distribution of school and community resources across school districts in Michigan and Ohio, two otherwise similar states with very different policies to support school facilities. Using the year prior to the implementation of the ARRA as a baseline, this study then compares the allocation of Qualified School Construction Bonds (QSCB) provided under the ARRA. Research Design: Using Michigan as a control group because of the weak state support for school construction, the analysis shows the distribution and variation of school building capital, community resources, educational inputs, and student outcomes across districts in both states. Based on these indicators, districts that received QSCBs are compared with districts that did not. Findings: Ohio does appear to have a more equitable distribution of capital facilities but the QSCB allocations in Ohio do not appear to be noticeably more equalizing than those in Michigan. Moreover, the allocations in both states went, on average, to districts above the mean on a number of measures of community resources, educational inputs, and student outcomes.
International Standard Reagents for HPV Detection

Humam papillomavirus is the commonest genital viral infection in healthy sexually active subjects, and the presence of chronic or persistent HPV types in genital cells may constitute a prognostic marker of underlying, or predict future HPV-associated diseases. A variety of novel tests for detecting the presence of oncogenic HPV types in biological specimens have been reported. These are based on the various stages of infection and viral life cycle. HPV infects squamous epithelium with expression of various gene products intimately linked to epithelial cell differentiation. Hence, there are basically three classes of detectable markers directly derived from HPVs: molecular markers based on detection of nucleic acid sequences, serological markers based on detection of antibodies against viral proteins, and cellular markers based on detection of proteins expressed intracellularly, upon either infection or carcinogenesis. The nature of various assays and the development of international standard reagents for qualitative and quantitative assessment of assay performance are outlined. There is an increasing demand to develop standard tools to assess the quality of HPV detection systems, for regulatory and clinical management purposes. International standard reagents for HPV will help defining the analytical sensitivity and specificity of various detection methods, and will allow assuring that laboratory services used to evaluate disease burden, HPV vaccines, and cancer prevention strategies are accurate and comparable worldwide. The advancement of prophylactic vaccine candidates against HPV infections and related diseases stresses the increasing importance of HPV assays in monitoring the impact of HPV vaccination on disease burden.
Sibling relationships in early childhood.

DUNN, JUDY. Sibling Relationships in Early Childhood. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 787811. This review considers (1) recent evidence on the nature of sibling interaction from observational studies of preschool children and (2) the developmental implications of this evidence. Sibling interaction is discussed in terms of "reciprocal" and "complementary" interaction. Sibling influence is most plausibly associated with the reciprocal features of the relationship and with sociocognitive development. "Sibling status" variables, the focus of previous research, are not consistently related to the reciprocal but to the complementary features, which are probably of less developmental significance. Research into the origins of the marked individual differences between siblings must take account of the mutual influence of parental and sibling relationships, not solely sibling status variables.
Scientific Forest Conservation and the Statistical Picturing of Nature's Limits in the Progressive-Era United States

This paper explores debates over the statistical picturing of the nation's finite forest resources in the Progressive-era United States. This picturing was made possible by a variety of new quantitative and graphical practices that made maps and statistics appear as objective evidence of the natural limits those objects appeared to exhibit. Drawing on the work of Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this appearance was generated through more generalized practices of enframing. Enframing involved the systematic ordering of objects to create the appearance of a world metaphysically divided in two and graspable in terms of the distinction between reality and the objective representations through which reality as such was made to appear. This binary ordering, or enframing, of appearance created the appearance of order itself as an apparently abstract framework within which the objects so enframed could be more closely regulated. Enframing the forest quantitatively transformed heterogeneous forests into an apparently calculable quantity available to new disciplinary forms of state power that Foucault argues are characteristic of modern governmentality. The timber-famine debate also highlights the question of trust and the dependence of expert authority on traditional gender and class differences, which were themselves reworked through the quantifying practices of scientific forest conservation.
Bridging the Rice Yield Gaps under Drought: QTLs, Genes, and their Use in Breeding Programs

Rice is the staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Although rice production has doubled in the last 30 years as a result of the development of high-yield, widely adaptable, resource-responsive, semi-dwarf varieties, the threat of a food crisis remains as severe as it was 60 years ago due to the ever-increasing population, water scarcity, labor scarcity, shifting climatic conditions, pest/diseases, loss of productive land to housing, industries, rising sea levels, increasing incidences of drought, flood, urbanization, soil erosion, reduction in soil nutrient status, and environmental issues associated with high-input agriculture. Among these, drought is predicted to be the most severe stress that reduces rice yield. Systematic research on drought over the last 10 years has been conducted across institutes on physiology, breeding, molecular genetics, biotechnology, and cellular and molecular biology. This has provided a better understanding of plant drought mechanisms and has helped scientists to devise better strategies to reduce rice yield losses under drought stress. These include the identification of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for grain yield under drought as well as many agronomically important traits related to drought tolerance, marker-assisted pyramiding of genetic regions that increase yield under drought, development of efficient techniques for genetic transformation, complete sequencing and annotation of rice genomes, and synteny studies of rice and other cereal genomes. Conventional and marker-assisted breeding rice lines containing useful introgressed genes or loci have been field tested and released as varieties. Still, there is a long way to go towards developing drought-tolerant rice varieties by exploiting existing genetic diversity, identifying superior alleles for drought tolerance, understanding interactions among alleles for drought tolerance and their interaction with genetic backgrounds, and pyramiding the best combination of alleles.
Kentucky's Medicaid Expansion Showing Early Promise On Coverage And Access To Care.

Kentucky is one of only two southern states, at the time of this writing, to have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The expansion raised Medicaid eligibility levels as a means to make coverage more accessible and make health care more affordable for a population likely to face financial barriers in using medical care. This article examines the first-year impact of Kentucky's Medicaid expansion on insurance coverage and access to care. Focusing on Kentucky's low-income population, we observed large reductions in the low-income uninsurance rate from 35 percent at the end of 2013 to just below 11 percent by the end of 2014. Other findings revealed declines in unmet medical needs because of cost and declines in the number of people without a readily identifiable source of regular care among low-income groups. While our results are limited to Kentucky's experience with Medicaid expansion, they may hold lessons for other states looking to address health care access issues among their historically vulnerable and low-income populations.
Effects of Spike-Driven Feedback on Neural Gain and Pairwise Correlation

Both single neuron and neural population spiking statistics, such as firing rate or temporal patterning, are critical aspects of manyneural codes. Tremendous experimental and theoretical effort has been devoted to understanding how nonlinear membrane dynamics and ambient synaptic activity determine the gain of single neuron firing rate responses. Furthermore, there is increasing experimental evidence that the same manipulationsthat affect firing rate gain also modulate the pairwise correlationbetween neurons. However, there is little understanding of the mechanistic links between rate and correlation modulation. In this thesis, we explore how spike-driven intrinsicfeedback co-modulates firing rate gain and spike traincorrelation. Throughout our study, we focus on excitable LIF neurons subject to Gaussian white noise fluctuations. We first review prior work which develops linear response theory for studying spectral properties of LIF neurons. This theory is used to capture the influence of weak spike driven feedback in single neuron responses. We introduce a concept of "dynamic spike count gain" and study how this property is affected by intrinsic feedback, comparing theoretical results to simulations of stochastic ODE models. We then expand our scope to a pair of such neurons receiving weakly correlated noisy inputs. Extending previous work, we study the correlation between the spike trains of these neurons, comparing theoretical and simulation results. We observe that firing rate gain modulation from feedback is largely time-scale invariant, while correlation modulation exhibits marked temporal dependence. To discern whether these effects can be solely attributed to firing rate changes, we perform a perturbative analysis to derive conditions for correlation modulation over small time scales beyond that expected from rate modulation. We find that correlation is not purely a function of firing rate change; rather it is also influenced by sufficiently fast feedback inputs. These results offer a glimpse into the connections between gain and correlation, indicating that attempts to manipulate either property via firing rates will affect both, and that achievability of modulation targets is constrained by the time scale of spike feedback.
Classic high lateral tension and triangular resection methods to prevent dog ear and elongation scar in patients undergoing abdominoplasty: A comparative open-label clinical trial

Background: One of the most common operations in the plastic surgery curse is abdominoplasty. Several methods were recommended for achieving better results. In the present study, efficacy of a new method compared with classical high lateral tension on preventing dog ear and elongation scar was evaluated. Materials and Methods: in an open-label, randomized clinical trial, seventy patients who were candidates for abdominoplasty were selected and randomly divided into two groups. The first group was operated by classic high lateral method and the second group was operated by a new method concentrating on changing incision line and angle. Dog ear prevention, length of scar, improvement, and postoperative complications were compared between the two groups. Results: The mean ± standard deviation (SD) length of scar in treated patients with classical and new abdominoplasty surgical methods was 53.68 ± 6.34 and 41.71 ± 1.78 cm, respectively, and the length of scar in the group treated with the new method was significantly shorter (P < 0.001). The mean ± SD distance between two anterior superior iliac spine in group treated by new method was significantly decreased after surgery (31.3 ± 1.3 cm) compared to before intervention (36.7 ± 3.9 cm) (P < 0.01). Conclusion: The new method is more likely to be successful in patients with high lateral tension abdominoplasty. However, according to the lack of similar studies in this regard and the fact that this method was introduced for the first time, it is recommended that further studies in this area are needed and patients in term of complications after surgery need a longer period of follow-up.
Dynamic Ecocentric Assessment Combining Emergy and Data Envelopment Analysis: Application to Wind Farms

Most of current life-cycle approaches show an anthropocentric standpoint for the evaluation of human-dominated activities. However, this perspective is insufficient when it comes to assessing the contribution of natural resources to production processes. In this respect, emergy analysis evaluates human-driven systems from a donor-side perspective, accounting for the environmental effort performed to make the resources available. This article presents a novel methodological framework, which combines emergy analysis and dynamic Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for the ecocentric assessment of multiple resembling entities over an extended period of time. The use of this approach is shown through a case study of wind energy farms. Furthermore, the results obtained are compared with those of previous studies from two different angles. On the one hand, a comparison with results from anthropocentric approaches (combined life cycle assessment and DEA) is drawn. On the other hand, results from similar ecocentric approaches, but without a dynamic model, are also subject to comparison. The combined use of emergy analysis and dynamic DEA is found to be a valid methodological framework for the computation of resource efficiency and the valuation of ecosystem services. It complements traditional anthropocentric assessments while appropriately including relevant time effects.
Community responses to a suicidal crisis: implications for suicide prevention.

We conducted a cross-sectional, random-digit-dial survey to evaluate public responses to a hypothetical question: "If someone you knew was suicidal, what would you do first? " Younger people were more likely to call a suicide hotline, and less likely to go to an emergency room (ER) or call 911; immigrants (in the U.S. < 15 years) were more likely to call 911, and less likely to call a suicide hotline; African Americans were more likely to go to the ER and call 911; Hispanics were more likely to call 911 but less likely to call a suicide hotline. These results suggest that public messages about hotlines and emergency options for suicidal patients need to be tailored to relevant population characteristics including age, education, ethnicity, and language preferences.
Segmentation of Continuous Speech Using Phonotactics

Abstract Listeners appear to use phonotactic constraints in the segmentation of continuous speech. Because some strings of phonemes (such as [lv] and [mr] in Dutch) never occur within the same syllable, they cue syllable boundaries, and hence possible word boundaries. Dutch listeners found it easier to detect words at the beginnings of nonsense sequences when the words were aligned with a phonotactic boundary (e.g., pil, pill, in [p i l.vrem]) than when they were misaligned (e.g., pil in [p i lm.rem]). This effect was stronger for words at the ends of nonsense sequences (e.g., rok, skirt, in [fim.rɐk] and [fi.drɐk]). Two control experiments indicated that although part of this effect can be attributed to the role of phonotactics in speech production, there remains a significant perceptual component; the legality of sound sequences appears to be computed on-line during recognition. It is argued that segmentation is achieved via competition between candidate words, that competition is modulated by knowledge about where in the input candidates are unlikely to begin or end, and that phonotactic constraints are one of several information sources used in this segmentation process.
Reproducing movement in the lower extremity using kinesthetic cues of distance and location.

The purpose of this study was to determine if kinesthetic cues of distance or location serve as references in motor memory for reproducing movement in the lower extremity. Thirty normal subjects randomly reproduced criterion movements of 30, 60, and 90 degrees of knee flexion. Starting positions of the criterion and reproduction movements were varied. Reproducing distance required that subjects move the same amplitude as the criterion movement, while reproducing location involved moving to the end position of the criterion movement. Results showed that reproductions based on location were significantly (p less than .05) more accurate than those based on distance cues. Reproductions of 30 and 60 degrees were found to be significantly (p less than .05) less variable than 90-degree reproduction movements. The results were explained according to the theories that have been proposed for retention of kinesthetic distance and location cues in motor memory.
A reduced-dimensionality approach to uncovering dyadic modes of body motion in conversations

Face-to-face conversations are central to human communication and a fascinating example of joint action. Beyond verbal content, one of the primary ways in which information is conveyed in conversations is body language. Body motion in natural conversations has been difficult to study precisely due to the large number of coordinates at play. There is need for fresh approaches to analyze and understand the data, in order to ask whether dyads show basic building blocks of coupled motion. Here we present a method for analyzing body motion during joint action using depth-sensing cameras, and use it to analyze a sample of scientific conversations. Our method consists of three steps: defining modes of body motion of individual participants, defining dyadic modes made of combinations of these individual modes, and lastly defining motion motifs as dyadic modes that occur significantly more often than expected given the single-person motion statistics. As a proof-of-concept, we analyze the motion of 12 dyads of scientists measured using two Microsoft Kinect cameras. In our sample, we find that out of many possible modes, only two were motion motifs: synchronized parallel torso motion in which the participants swayed from side to side in sync, and still segments where neither person moved. We find evidence of dyad individuality in the use of motion modes. For a randomly selected subset of 5 dyads, this individuality was maintained for at least 6 months. The present approach to simplify complex motion data and to define motion motifs may be used to understand other joint tasks and interactions. The analysis tools developed here and the motion dataset are publicly available.