Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protective Effect of Melatonin on Acute Pancreatitis

Melatonin, a product of the pineal gland, is released from the gut mucosa in response to food ingestion. Specific receptors for melatonin have been detected in many gastrointestinal tissues including the pancreas. Melatonin as well as its precursor, L-tryptophan, attenuates the severity of acute pancreatitis and protects the pancreatic tissue from the damage caused by acute inflammation. The beneficial effect of melatonin on acute pancreatitis, which has been reported in many experimental studies and supported by clinical observations, is related to: (1) enhancement of antioxidant defense of the pancreatic tissue, through direct scavenging of toxic radical oxygen (ROS) and nitrogen (RNS) species, (2) preservation of the activity of antioxidant enzymes; such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), or glutathione peroxidase (GPx), (3) the decline of pro-inflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis α (TNFα) production, accompanied by stimulation of an anti-inflammatory IL-10, (4) improvement of pancreatic blood flow and decrease of neutrophil infiltration, (5) reduction of apoptosis and necrosis in the inflamed pancreatic tissue, (6) increased production of chaperon protein (HSP60), and (7) promotion of regenerative process in the pancreas. Conclusion. Endogenous melatonin produced from L-tryptophan could be one of the native mechanisms protecting the pancreas from acute damage and accelerating regeneration of this gland. The beneficial effects of melatonin shown in experimental studies suggest that melatonin ought to be employed in the clinical trials as a supportive therapy in acute pancreatitis and could be used in people at high risk for acute pancreatitis to prevent the development of pancreatic inflammation.
Wide tuning range millimeter-wave VCOs based on switchable inductive tuning methodology in 90nm CMOS technology

This paper presents the application of switchable inductive tuning technique to the frequency tuning range (FTR) enhancement for millimeter-wave oscillators. By rearranging the induced-current path in the guard ring of a planar inductor, the inductance value can be changed and therefore the resulted total tuning range of the oscillator can be extended. Two VCOs are fabricated for demonstrating the effectiveness of this tuning technique. By using 90nm CMOS technology, a V-band 55 GHz direct VCO with an FTR of 9.95 GHz and a W-band push-push 109 GHz VCO with an FTR of 17.8 GHz are achieved. For the V-band VCO, the measured phase noise ranges from -110 to -120 dBc/Hz over the whole tuning range, no matter the switches are either turned on or off. The power consumption is 11.3 mW with a 0.9 V supply. The evaluated FOM is -184.2 dBc/Hz and FOMT is -189.3 dBc/Hz. For the W-band VCO, the measured phase noise is -108.9 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset from the carrier frequency of 100.6 GHz, while it consumes 22.8 mW from a 1.2 V supply. The evaluated FOM is -175.4 dBc/Hz and the FOMT is -179.5 dBc/Hz.
Who is Marching for Pachamama? : An Intersectional Analysis of Environmental Struggles in Bolivia under the Government of Evo Morales

Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) took office in Bolivia in 2006, riding on the wave of fierce popular protests against previous, neoliberal regimes. Morales was depicted as the country’s first indigenous president. His government promised a radical transformation of national politics and rebranded Bolivia as a “plurinational state”. Under MAS, indigenous subjectivity has moved from a marginalized position to center stage, and become a key condition for political legitimacy. This development is reflected in environmental politics. In international forums, the Bolivian government has claimed to represent a green indigenous alternative, a “culture of life”, as opposed to a Western, capitalist “culture of death”. However, on home ground, critics have accused MAS of coopting aspects of indigenous identity for its own interests and not applying its green agenda within the national borders. The national economy is dependent on intense extraction and export of natural resources, a trend which has not diminished under Morales. Thus, the first Bolivian government to frame itself as indigenous now stands behind initiatives for resource extraction and infrastructural expansion. This raises questions about whose rights are privileged when different actors express conflicting claims based on indigeneity. In this thesis, two salient themes are explored: MAS’ positioning in international climate change negotiations, and the conflict around the plans to construct a highway across the TIPNIS national park and indigenous territory. Drawing on poststructural and postcolonial feminist theory, I analyze intersecting processes of power in Bolivian environmental struggles by unwrapping two figurations: the endangered glacier and the ecological indigenous. These have become emblematic, and are mobilized by various actors for different purposes. Situating these figurations in national and international discourses, I show how they may shift in meaning and both reinforce and challenge relations of power. The research material was generated through ethnographic fieldwork and collection of written texts. Through this study of contemporary Bolivia, I shed light on how power dynamics play out in the framing of environmental problems and their solutions; questions which should be central to research on environmental issues in all contexts.
Using Randomized Caches in Probabilistic Real-Time Systems

While hardware caches are generally effective at improving application performance, they greatly complicate performance prediction. Slight changes in memory layout or data access patterns can lead to large and systematic increases in cache misses, degrading performance. In the worst case, these misses can effectively render the cache useless. These pathological cases, or ``cache risk patterns'', are difficult to predict, test or debug, and their presence limits the usefulness of caches in safety critical real-time systems, especially in hard real-time environments.In this paper, we explore the effect of randomized cache replacement policies in real-time systems with stringent timing constrains. We present simulation-based results on representative examples that illustrate the problem of performance anomalies with standard cache replacement policies. We show that, by eliminating dependencies on access history, randomized replacement greatly reduces the risk of these cache-based performance anomalies, enabling probabilistic worst-case execution time analysis.
Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Stress-Related Inhibitory Gating Impairment

Howard Cromwell, Advisor This project examined how the human brain responds to stress and how mindfulness meditation can reduce stress-related sensory processing deficits. An early brain function called inhibitory gating is impaired in various mental illnesses. Inhibitory gating promotes healthy cognitive function, as gating is theorized to play an important role in the pre-attentional stages of information filtering in the brain. Inhibitory gating is evaluated with electroencephalography (EEG), in which the electrical activity of neural networks is non-invasively assessed via electrodes placed on the scalp. Gating deficits can be induced in healthy people for a brief time with exposure to physical or mental stress, which allows for the gating impairments seen in mental illnesses to be modeled in healthy people. Mindfulness meditation training has been a benefit to patients in various therapeutic settings, but treatments for gating impairment remain unknown. It is essential to target this pervasive deficit for treatment. In the current study, mindfulness meditation was tested as a technique to reduce stress-induced gating impairment. Participants attended four meditation training sessions and underwent a cold-pressor stress task twice; once at the beginning and once at the end of the four appointment experiment. EEG recordings were taken before and after the stress task. The results of this experiment show that mindfulness meditation training can reduce stress-induced inhibitory gating impairment. Two control groups completed personality surveys or progressive muscle relaxation exercises and did not exhibit reduced impairment after four sessions. These findings are promising in that they contribute to the wider understanding of gating impairment and its relationship to stress, and expand on potential treatment options by introducing a safe, low-cost technique with potential to reduce inhibitory gating impairment.
Single-microphone speech enhancement using MVDR filtering and Wiener post-filtering

For single-microphone noise reduction, a minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) filter has been proposed recently. This filter takes the speech correlations of consecutive time frames into account and achieves impressive results in terms of speech distortions even in a blind implementation where we only have access to the noisy speech signal. However, compared to conventional approaches less noise reduction is achieved. Therefore, we propose to combine the single-microphone MVDR with a Wiener post-filter as the minimum-mean-square error optimal solution when multiple time frames are considered. We propose to pre-train the required interframe coherence matrices of the interferences for a large database, while speech correlations and interference power spectral densities are estimated online. In an experimental study based on instrumental measures, the proposed approach achieves a good trade-off between a single-channel Wiener filter and a multi-frame MVDR.
knoWitiary: A Machine Readable Incarnation of Wiktionary

knoWitiary is a resource that presents a reorganized version of Wiktionary’s information in machine readable format. Wiktionary contains a plethora of information about words, including sense definitions, etymology, translations, derived terms and anagrams. Similar work to the one reported here goes one step further than extracting information from Wiktionary: mapping it onto WordNet – NLP community’s de facto gold standard. Lexical and relation overlap shows that Wiktionary provides different types of information compared to WordNet, which implies that much is discarded when doing a mapping. We make a case here for making space for “pure” resources alongside mapped ones, to preserve the unique information that idiosyncratic resources such as Wiktionary provide, which may open up new avenues to explore for tasks that require varied and “unorthodox” information about words.
Factors Relating to Staff Attributions of Control Over Challenging Behaviour

Background Previous research has suggested that severity of intellectual disability (ID) and topography of behaviour may influence staff causal attributions regarding challenging behaviour. Subsequently, these causal attributions may influence helping behaviours. This study investigated the relationship between attributions of control over challenging behaviour and individual and organizational factors. Methods A cross-sectional survey using a between-subjects natural groups design was employed. Care staff and managers completed measures to examine the relationship between staff attributions of control over challenging behaviour and client-related variables, staff-related variables and functioning of the organization. Results Staff attributed challenging behaviour as being less under personal control if the organization was of better quality. Staff attributions of control over challenging behaviours were lower if staff displayed positive attitudes towards the client, the physical and social environment was appropriate and the overall approach to delivering care seemed well-structured. There was no relationship between staff attributions of control and ability of the individual or the overall level of challenging behaviour. However, with respect to specific topographies (i.e. physically aggressive and self-injurious behaviour) there were different profiles of causal attributions made. Discussion Organizational factors, staff behaviour and the topography of challenging behaviour can each influence the attributions of control that staff make. Any interventions that seek to increase the helping behaviour of staff through manipulation of the attributions that they make need to consider both individual factors (topography of behaviour) and environmental factors (staff behaviour and the quality of the service and organization).
Random interlacements and the Gaussian free field

We consider continuous time random interlacements on Zd, d≥3, and characterize the distribution of the corresponding stationary random field of occupation times. When d=3, we relate this random field to the two-dimensional Gaussian free field pinned at the origin by looking at scaled differences of occupation times of long rods by random interlacements at appropriately tuned levels. In the main asymptotic regime, a scaling factor appears in the limit, which is independent of the free field, and distributed as the time-marginal of a zero-dimensional Bessel process. For arbitrary d≥3, we also relate the field of occupation times at a level tending to infinity, to the d-dimensional Gaussian free field.
The role of sex steroid hormones, cytokines and the endocannabinoid system in female fertility.

BACKGROUND Marijuana, the most used recreational drug, has been shown to have adverse effects on human reproduction. Endogenous cannabinoids (also called endocannabinoids) bind to the same receptors as those of Δ(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of Cannabis sativa. The most extensively studied endocannabinoids are anandamide (N-arachidonoylethanolamine, AEA) and 2-arachidonoylglycerol. The endocannabinoids, their congeners and the cannabinoid receptors, together with the metabolic enzymes and putative transporters form the endocannabinoid system (ECS). In this review, we summarize current knowledge about the relationships of ECS, sex steroid hormones and cytokines in female fertility, and underline the importance of this endocannabinoid-hormone-cytokine network. METHODS Pubmed and the Web of Science databases were searched for studies published since 1985, looking into the ECS, sex hormones, type-1/2 T-helper (Th1/Th2) cytokines, leukaemia inhibitory factor, leptin and reproduction. RESULTS The ECS plays a pivotal role in human reproduction. The enzymes involved in the synthesis and degradation of endocannabinoids normalize levels of AEA for successful implantation. The AEA degrading enzyme (fatty acid amide hydrolase) activity as well as AEA content in blood may potentially be used for the monitoring of early pregnancies. Progesterone and oestrogen are involved in the maintenance of endocannabinoid levels. The ECS plays an important role in the immune regulation of human fertility. CONCLUSIONS The available studies suggest that tight control of the endocannabinoid-hormone-cytokine network is required for successful implantation and early pregnancy maintenance. This hormone-cytokine network is a key element at the maternal-foetal interface, and any defect in such a network may result in foetal loss.
The Financial Repercussions of New Work-Limiting Health Conditions for Older Workers

This analysis used propensity score matching to construct a comparison sample that is observationally similar at baseline interview to older workers who later experience the onset of a medical condition that limits their ability to work. Using these matched onset and comparison samples, we studied trajectories in earnings and income around onset of the work limitation. Earnings two years after onset for the work-limitation group were 50% lower and poverty rates were nearly double. Income from unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, and retirement and disability benefits offset only a small amount of the earnings declines, resulting in decreased overall household income after onset of the work-limiting condition.
Voices of Marriage and Family Therapists of Color

Abstract A survey was sent to members of the AALANA (African American, Latino/a, Asian and Native American) group, and other Marriage and Family Therapists (MFTs) of color. The survey contained questions regarding the participant's experiences around multicultural training in their graduate programs, the impact of their own ethnic identity on their work, their experiences within AAMFT (American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy), and areas related to multi-Elizabeth culturalism that they believe need further research. Fifteen participants responded to the survey. The data were analyzed using qualitative methods. Results indicated that the participants rated their multicultural training as being inadequate and expressed the need for a more diverse training environment. All participants felt their own ethnicity had a tremendous impact on who they were and on their clinical work. Experiences within AAMFT were reportedly mixed with some positive and negative responses. The participants identified a variety of important areas for further research. The findings suggested in this study have important implications for training programs, educators, AAMFT, and the field in general.
Shape from Texture: Homogeneity Revisited

The objective of this paper is to estimate the orientation of a scene plane from an uncalibrated perspective image under the assumption that the scene is coated with a homogeneous (but unknown) texture. We make the following novel contributions: first, we show that the problem is equivalent to estimating the vanishing line of the plane; second, we show that estimating the two degrees of freedom of this line can be decomposed into two searches each for one parameter; third, we give an algorithm for this estimation which is applicable to both regular and irregular textures. The algorithms do not require that texels are identified explicitly. But once the plane vanishing line has been obtained, then texels locations can be determined, and the geometry of the scene plane computed up to an affine transformation. We give examples of these computations on real images.
Conciliando agência e contexto na dinâmica da mudança institucional

This essay introduce an analytical structure that seeks reconciling elements of agency and context in the analysis of institutional change dynamics. The framework is based on the interconnection between the institutional work and gradual institutional change approaches. Both were created as alternatives to theoretical perspectives that put too much emphasis on social structure (e.g. path dependence theory) or to human agency (e.g. institutional entrepreneurship). However, despite the analytical gains that both of them have brought to the study of institutional change, they are still strongly tied to the assumptions of the research traditions through which they have emerged. A rapprochement between such theoretical schemes allows greater rigor to investigate processes of institutional change and enables greater awareness of the assumptions inherent to each perspective, as well as it encourages the search for more balanced alternatives for explaining institutional maintenance and change. At the heart of this proposal, there is a search for understanding the dynamics of institutional life. The institutional context exhibits a certain level of institutional plasticity and it can be modified according to the availability of practices, meanings, and resources. Therealization of this potential for change is dependent on institutional actors' reflexivity levels, and their munificence of resources. The practices of institutional creation, maintenance, and disruption in a particular context will, therefore, result from the interaction between the institutional context characteristics (the level of institutional plasticity) and the types of institutional actors (the level of institutional discretion) involved.
Connecting Parliament to the Public via the Internet

A number of scholars have argued that the Internet could strengthen representative democracy. This article presents two case studies of online consultations run on behalf of the UK Parliament and tests a series of hypotheses about online public deliberation. One consultation involved women survivors of domestic violence; the other was linked to the examination by a Parliamentary Committee of the draft Communications Bill. The article concludes by suggesting that the success of online parliamentary consultations is dependent upon two groups of actors, parliamentarians and citizens, each of which must acquire new types of communication skills and develop new practices of operating.
Traffic risk perception, road safety attitudes, and behaviors among road users: a comparison of Turkey and Norway

The present study aims to investigate differences in road safety attitudes, driver behavior, and traffic risk perception between Turkey and Norway. A questionnaire survey was conducted among a sample of Norwegian (n = 247) and Turkish (n = 213) road users. The results show that Turkish respondents perceived traffic risk to be higher than Norwegian respondents. Turkish respondents reported safer attitudes towards drinking and driving than Norwegian respondents, while Norwegians reported safer attitudes towards speeding. Turkish respondents reported a lower frequency of speeding behaviors than Norwegian respondents, whereas Norwegian respondents reported a lower frequency of drinking and driving. Traffic risk perception was related to road safety attitudes and behaviors among Norwegian respondents but not among Turkish respondents. The results were discussed with respect to differences in traffic safety, traffic culture, and the development levels in Turkey and Norway.
Approximation Bounds for Some Sparse Kernel Regression Algorithms

Gaussian processes have been widely applied to regression problems with good performance. However, they can be computationally expensive. In order to reduce the computational cost, there have been recent studies on using sparse approximations in gaussian processes. In this article, we investigate properties of certain sparse regression algorithms that approximately solve a gaussian process. We obtain approximation bounds and compare our results with related methods.
Improving I/O performance of Xen hypervisors for solid state drives

Solid state drives (SSDs) are becoming increasingly popular in computing environment that employ virtualization. The Xen hypervisor is the most popular hypervisor for virtualization. In this paper, we discuss the performance of SSDs on the Xen hypervisor, show that the Xen I/O model causes performance degradation in SSDs, and analyze the reasons for the degradation. We then propose a new I/O processing method, clustering of fragmented I/O requests, which improves the I/O performance of SSDs. The evaluations indicate that our proposed method improves the I/O performance by as much as 7%.
Cooperative, competitive and individual problem‐solving

Purpose of this study was the problem-solving effectiveness and time required for solution under cooperative, competitive, and individual conditions of 108 sixth grade Greek children. Thirty six three-person groups, half all-male and half all-female, were given Mastermind and Questions problems across all three conditions. The sex (2) × conditions (3) A NOVA with repeated measures across conditions resulted in the most effective problem solver working individually was more effective than the cooperative condition or the competitive condition. The least effective problem solver working individually was less effective than the cooperative condition or the competitive condition. The average individual did not differ in problem-solving from the cooperative condition, as would be predicted by Johnson et al. (1981). Cooperative group interaction was more effective than competitive, but only with Mastermind. Individuals were not necessarily faster than groups. No sex differences were found. In comparing problem-solving effectiveness of individuals and groups, qualifications should be made regarding comparisons with the average individual or high individual.