Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Biology of Morality: Human Development and Moral Neuroscience

Morality has been defined as prescriptive norms regarding how individuals ought to treat one another [Kant, 1785/1959]. The formulation of the categorical imperative – act in such a way that you would will your act to be universal – has led developmental psychologists to study the emergence, origins, structure, and sequence of children’s understanding of norms regarding justice, fairness, and equality [Piaget, 1932], and how children reason when making moral decisions [Colby & Kohlberg, 1987]. Research over the past 30 years from what has come to be known as the Social Domain Model has focused on rigorously defining morality. Psychological criteria, drawn from moral philosophy and refined and validated through empirical research, have been used to determine whether individuals view events, acts, or decisions involving morality as distinct from other types of social considerations, including conventional, prudential, or pragmatic concerns [Killen & Smetana, 2006; Nucci, 2001; Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1998]. Recently, the field of neuroscience has expanded beyond psychological phenomena – such as memory, perception, and information processing – to take on the challenge of studying morality. Neuroscientists seek to determine the parts of the brain that are activated when individuals solve moral dilemmas. Whether a ‘moral organ’ exists in the brain is hotly debated [Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Hauser, 2006]; either way, our understanding of the biological basis of morality has changed dramatically in the past 7–8 years with the use of fMRI techniques along with other psychophysiological measurements. We view this attention to morality as exciting, intriguing, and full of possibilities, but also somewhat perplexing.
Initiation and use of public mental health services by persons with severe mental illness and limited english proficiency.

OBJECTIVE Few studies have examined the effect of limited English proficiency on use of mental health services by persons with mental illness from ethnic minority groups who are uninsured or publicly insured. This study examined how indigent or publicly insured Latino and Asian adults with limited English proficiency initially accessed the public mental health system and how their use of services changed over time compared with English-proficient peers. METHODS Data from San Diego County for fiscal years 2000-2005 were used to examine point of first contact and use of inpatient, emergency, and outpatient services in the 18 subsequent months among 9,243 clients with a psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression. Multivariate regression models were used to compute standardized estimates of utilization. RESULTS Latino and Asian clients with limited English proficiency were significantly less likely to first access the system through emergency services and more likely to access the system through outpatient services (p<.001 for each comparison). In two outpatient programs that were focused on delivering services to clients with limited English proficiency, clients had a higher intensity of outpatient service use than clients in clinics that did not have such a focus (p<.05 for each). CONCLUSIONS The initial pattern of service use was favorable for both groups. However, over time this pattern persisted for Asian clients with limited English proficiency but not for Latino clients with limited English proficiency. Findings suggest that ethnically focused programs may be an effective approach to engaging populations that are underrepresented in the mental health system.
Fluorescent Colored Highway Signs Don't 'Grab' Attention; They 'Guide' It

A novel inattention search paradigm (Mack & Rock, 1998) was used to assess the visual efficiency of fluorescent colored relative to nonfluorescent colored highway signs. Unexpected presentation of a fluorescent colored search target was not accompanied by an improvement in visual search time. However, visual search times improved dramatically once the participants developed the expectancy that the target feature would be presented on a fluorescent colored singleton. This pattern of results suggests that many of the visibility advantages attributed to the use of fluorescent colors in safety applications may be mediated by top-down attentional mechanisms rather than bottom-up (preattentive) mechanisms as previously assumed.
Botulinum as a Toxin for Treating Post-herpetic Neuralgia

Background: We aimed to study the curative effects of botulinum A toxin (BTX-A) on the treatment of post-herpetic neuralgia (PNH). Methods: We enrolled 58 PNH patients and treated them with hypodermic injection of BTX-A in Xiangyang No.1 People’s Hospital, Hubei University of Medicine, Hubei, China. We measured and compared the Visual Analog Score (VAS), Neuropathy Pain Scale (NPS), Quality of Life Scale (SF-36) score, PNH seizure severity degree, seizure duration, frequency of attack and the use of painkillers before and after treatment. We used SPSS13 software package for statistical analysis. Values were expressed by mean± standard deviation. P<0.05 indicated a significant difference and P<0.01 indicated an obvious significant difference. Results: Attack frequency, attack duration and attack severity were all significantly lower after treatment (P<0.01). The use of painkillers reduced after treatment (P<0.01) and we observed very few adverse reactions associated with BTX-A injection. Conclusion: The use of BTX-A for treating post-herpetic neuralgia produced very promising results with very few adverse reactions. BTX-A can be considered as a valid approach in the treatment of PNH, especially in patients that do not respond well to painkillers.
Improvement of Visual Search After Audiovisual Exploration Training in Hemianopic Patients

Objective. A variety of rehabilitation strategies have been tried in patients with chronic hemianopia and quadrantanopia. The authors compared 2 approaches of blind field exploration in those with recent onset of disease. Methods. A total of 20 patients with visual field defects were studied between 3 and 24 weeks primarily after stroke. Patients were randomly assigned to separate groups performing either audiovisual stimulation training or a visual stimulation training (20 sessions, each lasting 30 minutes). Patients were evaluated before and after the training with visual exploration tests for reading and object search; eye movements were analyzed with electro-oculography, and a questionnaire was completed by an occupational therapist about impairment in daily life activities. Results. Both groups improved their performance after compensatory eye movement training. Comparisons between the 2 forms of training revealed a significantly greater improvement for all outcome variables for the audiovisual group. In particular audiovisual stimulation significantly increased the number and amplitude of saccades. Conclusions. Multimodal audiovisual exploration training appears to be more effective than exploration training alone and may improve function beyond spontaneous recovery soon after ischemia of the occipital lobe.
The lonS gene regulates swarmer cell differentiation of Vibrio parahaemolyticus

Vibrio parahaemolyticus differentiates from a polarly flagellated, short, rod-shaped cell known as the swimmer to the elongated, hyperflagellated, and multinucleated swarmer cell type when it is grown on a surface. The swarmer is adapted to movement over and colonization of surfaces. To understand the signal transduction mechanism by which the bacterium recognizes surfaces and reprograms gene expression, we isolated a new class of mutants defective in surface sensing. These mutants were constitutive for swarmer cell gene expression, inappropriately expressing high levels of a swarmer cell gene fusion product when grown in liquid. They showed no defect in the swimming motility system, unlike all previously isolated constitutive mutants which have defects in the alternate, polar motility system. The lesions in the majority of the newly isolated mutants were found to be in a gene, lonS, which encodes a polypeptide exhibiting 81% sequence identity to the Escherichia coli Lon protein, an ATP-dependent protease. Upstream sequences preceding the lonS coding region resemble a heat shock promoter, and the homology extends to sequences flanking lonS. The gene order appears to be clpX lonS hupB, like the organization of the E. coli locus. V. parahaemolyticus lonS complemented E. coli lon mutants to restore UV resistance and capsular polysaccharide regulation to that of the wild type. Vibrio lonS mutants were UV sensitive. In addition, when grown in liquid and examined in a light microscope, lonS mutant cells were extremely long and thus resembled swarmer cells harvested from a surface.
Love and intimacy in relationship risk management: HIV positive people and their sexual partners

This paper is about intimacy and its role in relationship risk management. Drawing on qualitative interviews with HIV positive people and their primary sexual partners it becomes apparent that a key tension in relationship risk management is the balance struck between ‘relationship safety’ and ‘viral danger’. We find ‘love’ and ‘intimacy’ to be key features of relationship survival, with relationship intimacy and security signalled or strengthened by unprotected sex. Focusing on ‘discordant’ partnerships in particular, we note that relationship risk management is a fragile process characterised by contradiction and anxiety, at once involving risk reduction and risk opportunity. We conclude that the intimate relationship is a prime source of everyday risk management which may be defended, even at potentially high cost, in the time of sexual epidemic. We also note that previous research has painted an overly calculative picture of risk decision-making in which the lived experiences of intimacy and emotions are largely missing.
Effects of Test Anxiety and Evaluative Threat on Students' Achievement and Motivation

Abstract Identification of factors that influence post-secondary student achievement and motivation in the classroom continues to be an important educational objective. The author investigated the interactive effects of learner characteristic, test anxiety, and the classroom variable, threat of evaluation, on the achievement and motivation of 61 postsecondary students assigned randomly to high- or low-evaluative threat conditions. Statistically significant interactions revealed that all the students, particularly the test-anxious students, performed poorly and were less motivated when exposed to highly evaluative classrooms. The findings expand previous research and should be considered by professors when they design and implement higher education courses.
Robust location understanding in spoken dialog systems using intersections

The availability of digital maps and mapping software has led to significant growth in location-based software and services. To safely use these applications in mobile and automotive scenarios, users must be able to input precise locations using speech. In this paper, we propose a novel method for location understanding based on spoken intersections. The proposed approach utilizes a rich, automatically-generated grammar for street names that maps all street name variations into a single canonical semantic representation. This representation is then transformed to a sequence of position-dependent subword units. This sequence is used by a classifier based on the vector space model to reliably recognize spoken intersections in the presence of recognition errors and incomplete street names. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated using data collected from users of a deployed spoken dialog system.
Prospective Teachers' Sense of Efficacy and Beliefs about Control.

We examined the structure and meaning of efficacy for a sample of 182 prospective teachers and related efficacy to beliefs about control and motivation. The two independent dimensions of teaching efficacy (TE) and personal efficacy (PE) usually identified in studies of experienced teachers were also found for these prospective teachers. Both TE and PE were significantly correlated with bureaucratic orientation, but in opposite directions. Neither TE nor PE was related to motivational style; only TE was related to pupil control ideology. Canonical correlations, however, revealed more complex relationships. Personal efficacy was positively related to a control orientation that rejects teacher control of students but accepts the schools' control of teachers. The interaction of TE and PE made unique contributions to the prediction of pupil control ideology and bureaucratic orientation.
DOCKGROUND protein-protein docking decoy set

UNLABELLED A protein-protein docking decoy set is built for the Dockground unbound benchmark set. The GRAMM-X docking scan was used to generate 100 non-native and at least one near-native match per complex for 61 complexes. The set is a publicly available resource for the development of scoring functions and knowledge-based potentials for protein docking methodologies. AVAILABILITY The decoys are freely available for download at http://dockground.bioinformatics. ku.edu/UNBOUND/decoy/decoy.php
Two-Channel IIR QMF banks with approximately linear-phase analysis and synthesis filters

A computationally simple method to obtain IIR analysis and synthesis filters that possess negligible phase distortion is presented. It is shown that for a certain class of FIR filter banks, the polyphase components are approximately all-pass. By applying the balanced reduction procedure to the polyphase components of such an FIR prototype filter all-pass IIR polyphase components are obtained. The resulting IIR designs have negligible phase distortion. Design examples indicate that the derived IIR filter banks can be implemented more efficiently than the FIR prototypes. Results show that the IIR filters are better than linear phase perfect reconstruction systems when implemented in a finite wordlength processor. <<ETX>>
Tactylus, a pen-input device exploring audiotactile sensory binding

Recent studies have shown that through a careful combination of multiple sensory channels, so called multisensory binding effects can be achieved that can be beneficial for collision detection and texture recognition feedback. During the design of a new pen-input device called Tactylus, specific focus was put on exploring multisensory effects of audiotactile cues to create a new, but effective way to interact in virtual environments with the purpose to overcome several of the problems noticed in current devices.
Metabolic Engineering of Poly(3-Hydroxyalkanoates): From DNA to Plastic

SUMMARY Poly(3-hydroxyalkanoates) (PHAs) are a class of microbially produced polyesters that have potential applications as conventional plastics, specifically thermoplastic elastomers. A wealth of biological diversity in PHA formation exists, with at least 100 different PHA constituents and at least five different dedicated PHA biosynthetic pathways. This diversity, in combination with classical microbial physiology and modern molecular biology, has now opened up this area for genetic and metabolic engineering to develop optimal PHA-producing organisms. Commercial processes for PHA production were initially developed by W. R. Grace in the 1960s and later developed by Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the early 1990s, Metabolix Inc. and Monsanto have been the driving forces behind the commercial exploitation of PHA polymers in the United States. The gram-negative bacterium Ralstonia eutropha, formerly known as Alcaligenes eutrophus, has generally been used as the production organism of choice, and intracellular accumulation of PHA of over 90% of the cell dry weight have been reported. The advent of molecular biological techniques and a developing environmental awareness initiated a renewed scientific interest in PHAs, and the biosynthetic machinery for PHA metabolism has been studied in great detail over the last two decades. Because the structure and monomeric composition of PHAs determine the applications for each type of polymer, a variety of polymers have been synthesized by cofeeding of various substrates or by metabolic engineering of the production organism. Classical microbiology and modern molecular bacterial physiology have been brought together to decipher the intricacies of PHA metabolism both for production purposes and for the unraveling of the natural role of PHAs. This review provides an overview of the different PHA biosynthetic systems and their genetic background, followed by a detailed summation of how this natural diversity is being used to develop commercially attractive, recombinant processes for the large-scale production of PHAs.
Dental floss behaviour: A test of the predictive utility of the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the effects of making implementation intentions

A prospective study was conducted in order to investigate the utility of the Theory of Planned Behaviour in predicting dental floss intentions and behaviour. The efficacy of making implementation intentions as an intervention to increase dental floss behaviour was also tested. A sample of 119 participants was recruited from a university population. At Time 1, participants completed measures of the Theory of Planned Behaviour, past behaviour and half of the participants formed implementation intentions specifying where and when they would use dental floss. Behaviour was assessed using a diary card in which participants recorded their dental floss use over a 3-week period. Results showed that the Theory of Planned Behaviour variables predicted 46% of the variance in intention and 29% of the variance in behaviour. Implementation intentions were not found to be an effective intervention in increasing dental floss behaviour. Results suggest that interventions should target an individual's attitude and perceptions of control in order to increase dental floss intentions and behaviour.
The inflammatory cytokine, interleukin‐1 beta, mediates loss of astroglial glutamate transport and drives excitotoxic motor neuron injury in the spinal cord during acute viral encephalomyelitis

Astrocytes remove glutamate from the synaptic cleft via specific transporters, and impaired glutamate reuptake may promote excitotoxic neuronal injury. In a model of viral encephalomyelitis caused by neuroadapted Sindbis virus (NSV), mice develop acute paralysis and spinal motor neuron degeneration inhibited by the AMPA receptor antagonist, NBQX. To investigate disrupted glutamate homeostasis in the spinal cord, expression of the main astroglial glutamate transporter, GLT‐1, was examined. GLT‐1 levels declined in the spinal cord during acute infection while GFAP expression was preserved. There was simultaneous production of inflammatory cytokines at this site, and susceptible animals treated with drugs that blocked IL‐1β release also limited paralysis and prevented the loss of GLT‐1 expression. Conversely, infection of resistant mice that develop mild paralysis following NSV challenge showed higher baseline GLT‐1 levels as well as lower production of IL‐1β and relatively preserved GLT‐1 expression in the spinal cord compared to susceptible hosts. Finally, spinal cord GLT‐1 expression was largely maintained following infection of IL‐1β‐deficient animals. Together, these data show that IL‐1β inhibits astrocyte glutamate transport in the spinal cord during viral encephalomyelitis. They provide one of the strongest in vivo links between innate immune responses and the development of excitotoxicity demonstrated to date.
Short Telomeres Are Associated With Increased Carotid Atherosclerosis in Hypertensive Subjects

Abstract—Recent studies have shown that individuals with shorter telomeres present a higher prevalence of arterial lesions and higher risk of cardiovascular disease mortality. As a group, patients with high blood pressure are at an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases. However, some hypertensive patients are more prone than others to atherosclerotic lesions. The main objective of this study was to examine the relationship between telomere length, as expressed in white blood cells, and carotid artery atherosclerotic plaques in hypertensive males. Data from 163 treated hypertensive men who were volunteers for a free medical examination were analyzed. Extracranial carotid plaques were assessed with B-mode ultrasound. Telomere length was measured from DNA samples extracted from white blood cells. The results of this study show that telomere length was shorter in hypertensive men with carotid artery plaques versus hypertensive men without plaques (8.17±0.07 kb versus 8.46±0.07 kb; P <0.01). Multivariate analysis showed that in addition to age, telomere length was a significant predictor of the presence of carotid artery plaques. The findings from this study suggest that in the presence of chronic hypertension, which is a major risk factor for atherosclerotic lesions, shorter telomere length in white blood cells is associated with an increased predilection to carotid artery atherosclerosis.
Is the MWT-A Suitable for the Estimation of Premorbid Intelligence Level?

Vocabulary tests have long been used for estimating premorbid intelligence level in the neuropsychological assessment of dementia. However, doubts exist about the validity of such intelligence tests. The present study examines whether the Multiple-Choice Vocabulary Test – Version A (Mehrfachwahl-Wortschatz-Test – Version A, MWT-A) is valid for assessing premorbid intelligence level. Data from a total of 821 patients in a specialized outpatient clinic for dementia (memory clinic), covering the whole spectrum of cognitive impairment, were evaluated using analysis of variance with the dependent variable premorbid intelligence level (MWT-A) and the independent variable extent of global cognitive impairment (Mini-Mental-State Examination, MMSE: mean = 25.2, SD = 3.9). The latter was divided into six MMSE ranges or groups, respectively (29–30, 28–28, 27–27, 25–26, 22–24, 05–21). In the case of a pathologically relevant global cognitive impairment (24–26 MMSE points), the MWT-A underestimates the premorbid intel.
Chronic Peroxisome Proliferator-activated Receptor γ (PPARγ) Activation of Epididymally Derived White Adipocyte Cultures Reveals a Population of Thermogenically Competent, UCP1-containing Adipocytes Molecularly Distinct from Classic Brown Adipocytes*

The recent insight that brown adipocytes and muscle cells share a common origin and in this respect are distinct from white adipocytes has spurred questions concerning the origin and molecular characteristics of the UCP1-expressing cells observed in classic white adipose tissue depots under certain physiological or pharmacological conditions. Examining precursors from the purest white adipose tissue depot (epididymal), we report here that chronic treatment with the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ agonist rosiglitazone promotes not only the expression of PGC-1α and mitochondriogenesis in these cells but also a norepinephrine-augmentable UCP1 gene expression in a significant subset of the cells, providing these cells with a genuine thermogenic capacity. However, although functional thermogenic genes are expressed, the cells are devoid of transcripts for the novel transcription factors now associated with classic brown adipocytes (Zic1, Lhx8, Meox2, and characteristically PRDM16) or for myocyte-associated genes (myogenin and myomirs (muscle-specific microRNAs)) and retain white fat characteristics such as Hoxc9 expression. Co-culture experiments verify that the UCP1-expressing cells are not proliferating classic brown adipocytes (adipomyocytes), and these cells therefore constitute a subset of adipocytes (“brite” adipocytes) with a developmental origin and molecular characteristics distinguishing them as a separate class of cells.