Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulation of Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase (iNOS) and its Potential Role in Insulin Resistance, Diabetes and Heart Failure

Nitric oxide synthases (NOS) are the enzymes responsible for nitric oxide (NO) generation. NO is a reactive oxygen species as well as a reactive nitrogen species. It is a free radical which mediates several biological effects. It is clear that the generation and actions of NO under physiological and pathophysiological conditions are regulated and extend to almost every cell type and function within the circulation. In mammals 3 distinct isoforms of NOS have been identified: neuronal NOS (nNOS), inducible NOS (iNOS) and endothelial NOS (eNOS). The important isoform in the regulation of insulin resistance (IR) is iNOS. Understanding the molecular mechanisms regulating the iNOS pathway in normal and hyperglycemic conditions would help to explain some of vascular abnormalities observed in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Previous studies have reported increased myocardial iNOS activity and expression in heart failure (HF). This review considers the recent animal studies which focus on the understanding of regulation of iNOS activity/expression and the role of iNOS agonists as potential therapeutic agents in treatment of IR, T2DM and HF.
How Large and Long-lasting Are the Persuasive Effects of Televised Campaign Ads? Results from a Randomized Field Experiment

We report the results of the first large-scale experiment involving paid political advertising. During the opening months of a 2006 gubernatorial campaign, approximately $2 million of television and radio advertising on behalf of the incumbent candidate was deployed experimentally. In each experimental media market, the launch date and volume of television advertising were randomly assigned. In order to gauge movement in public opinion, a tracking poll conducted brief telephone interviews with approximately 1,000 registered voters each day and a brief follow-up one month after the conclusion of the television campaign. Results indicate that televised ads have strong but short-lived effects on voting preferences. The ephemeral nature of these effects is more consistent with psychological models of priming than with models of on-line processing.
Relationship between head circumference and brain volume in healthy normal toddlers, children, and adults.

OBJECTIVE To quantify the relationship between brain volume and head circumference from early childhood to adulthood, and quantify how this relationship changes with age. METHODS Whole-brain volume and head circumference measures were obtained from MR images of 76 healthy normal males aged 1.7 to 42 years. RESULTS Across early childhood, brain volume and head circumference both increase, but from adolescence onward brain volume decreases while head circumference does not. Because of such changing relationships between brain volume and head circumference with age, a given head circumference was associated with a wide range of brain volumes. However, when grouped appropriately by age, head circumference was shown to accurately predict brain volume. Head circumference was an excellent prediction of brain volume in 1.7 to 6 years old children (r = 0.93), but only an adequate predictor in 7 to 42 year olds. CONCLUSIONS To use head circumference as an accurate indication of abnormal brain volume in the clinic or research setting, the patient's age must be taken into account. With knowledge of age-dependent head circumference-to-brain volume relationship, head circumference (particularly in young children) can be an accurate, rapid, and inexpensive indication of normalcy of brain size and growth in a clinical setting.
Research challenges and potential green technological applications in cloud computing

Cloud computing has generated a lot of interest and competition in the IT industry. It has become a scalable services delivery platform in the field of services computing. The technical foundations of it include service-oriented architecture and virtualisations of hardware and software. The goal is to share resources among the cloud service consumers, cloud partners, and cloud vendors in the cloud value chain. The technology faces several significant challenges and the current research focuses on the technical issues that arise when building and providing clouds and the implications on enterprises and users. Structured along the technical aspects on the cloud programmes, we discuss associated technologies; advances in the introduction of protocols, interfaces, and standards; techniques for modelling and building clouds; and feasibility, testing and the future arising through cloud computing. Cloud computing is a huge leap orienting towards green computing, an environmentally sustainable forever computing with an enormous bright future.
Faculty Development to Address the Achievement Gap

Change • November/December 2015 D isparities in academic achievement between students who are under-represented minorities, the fi rst in their families to go to college, and/or low income (whom we will refer to collectively as disadvantaged students) and their more privileged peers affects students from kindergarten through college. Inequities throughout their education, as well as other causes discussed below, affect the ability of high school graduates to matriculate at the college or university of their choice; later, talented and bright undergraduates may underperform, especially in the large-enrollment courses that serve as gateways to many majors. Unable to pursue the majors of their choice, many disadvantaged students change paths. This failure to retain them in some majors detracts from the rich variety of ideas and experiences in the classroom, decreases the diversity of graduates in some disciplines, and ultimately reduces workforce diversity. The single largest factor that affects student learning that is under control of an institution is instructor quality (Yeh, 2009; Bensimon, 2007). So an essential component of any institution’s strategy for improving the success rates of minority students is to prepare faculty to teach more inclusively to a diverse student population. This article focuses on a program piloted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that engages both current and future faculty in an evidence-based, practiceoriented discourse about the academic-achievement gap
Improving OMR for Digital Music Libraries with Multiple Recognisers and Multiple Sources

Large quantities of scanned music are now available in public digital music libraries. However, the information in such sources is represented as pixel data in images rather than symbolic information about the notes of a piece of music, and therefore it is opaque to musically meaningful computational processes (e.g., to search for a particular melodic pattern). Optical Music Recognition (Optical Character Recognition for music) holds out the prospect of a solution to this issue and allowing access to very large quantities of musical information in digital libraries. Despite the efforts made by the different commercial OMR developers to improve the accuracy of their systems, mistakes in the output are currently too frequent to make OMR a practical tool for bulk processing. One possibility for improving the accuracy of OMR is to use multiple recognisers and combine the results to achieve an output better than each of them individually. The general process presented here can be divided into three subtasks, S1, S2, and S3. S1 is focused in the correction of rhythmical errors at bar level, counting the errors of the different OMR outputs, establish a ranking of the results, and make a pairwise alignment to select the best measures. S2 is based on the alignment and voting of individual symbols. For this task we have implemented a conversion of the most important symbols to a simple grammar. Finally, S3 improves the output of S2 by comparing and adding symbols from S1 and detecting gaps through the alignment of wrong measures. The process described in this paper is part of our "Big Data Approach" where a large amount of data is available in music score libraries, such as the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), for the purpose of Music Information Retrieval (MIR).
Operant Behavior during Sleep

Operant-conditioning techniques were employed to produce organized behavior during sleep as defined by the electroencephalographic record. Patterned responding was found in so-called "light" and "deeper" electroencephalograph stages as well as in the awake record. Results suggest that the use of the electroencephalographic record as a reliable indicator of the sleep-awakefulness continuum be re-examined.
L2 effects on the perception and production of a native vowel contrast in early bilinguals

This study investigates the effect of L2 (Spanish) use on Catalan–Spanish bilinguals’ ability to accurately perceive and produce two contrastive native Catalan vowel categories, /e/ and /ε/. Participants were L1 Catalan highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals differing in amount of daily exposure/use of Catalan (low: 40%–70% vs. high: 80%–100%). Perceptual accuracy was assessed through speeded categorization and AXB discrimination tasks based on a 10-step vowel continuum (/e/–/ε/). Production accuracy was assessed by eliciting /ε/ tokens in Catalan cognate and noncognate words. The results indicated that participants using Spanish more frequently discriminated Catalan vowels /e/ and /ε/ less accurately and significantly more slowly and had a more Spanish-like acoustic target in the production of Catalan /ε/, particularly in cognate words. These results are consistent with the view that, in a language contact context, extensive L2 experience affects L1 sound categories.
INVENTÁRIO DE ESTILOS PARENTAIS (IEP) – Gomide (2006) PERCURSO DE PADRONIZAÇÃO E NORMATIZAÇÃO

Apos oito anos de estudos acerca do tema, o Inventario de Estilos Parentais (IEP - Gomide, 2006) foi validado e encontra-se disponivel para utilizacao. Esse instrumento avalia o estilo parental, ou seja, as estrategias e tecnicas utilizadas pelos pais para educar os filhos, por meio de sete praticas educativas, sendo cinco vinculadas ao desenvolvimento do comportamento anti-social: negligencia, punicao inconsistente, disciplina relaxada, monitoria negativa e abuso fisico; e duas relacionadas ao desenvolvimento de comportamentos prosociais: comportamento moral e monitoria positiva. Este artigo contempla os estudos-piloto, estudos sobre fidedignidade, validade interna, externa, perfil das maes de adolescentes infratores, estudos sobre comportamento moral, relacao entre praticas educativas e abuso de drogas e a normatizacao dos dados obtidos. Da aplicacao do IEP obtem-se escores de cada uma das praticas e tambem o indice de estilo parental geral (IEP). O escore permite que o aplicador apreenda informacoes sobre as praticas educativas familiares utilizadas, facilitando a escolha dos procedimentos de intervencao (orientacao, treinamento ou terapia) a serem utilizados com a familia. O IEP e o primeiro instrumento psicologico brasileiro capaz de avaliar as praticas educativas parentais de criancas e adolescentes que apresentam risco.
On the capacity of the blockwise incoherent MPSK channel

The capacity of M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with carrier phase unknown but constant over L symbols is investigated. It is shown that capacity-achieving channel inputs are uniformly distributed and independent MPSK symbols. Capacity over a range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and L is presented for binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and quaternary phase-shift keying (QPSK). Upper and lower easy-to-compute bounds on capacity are derived. It is proven that for large L the coherent capacity is approached. An analytic asymptotic expression for low L/spl middot/SNR is derived exhibiting the expected quadratic dependence on the SNR.
Proposal : Using Resource Requirements in Multiprogrammed Multiprocessor Scheduling

This document is intended to be a thesis proposal, the next checkpoint in the author’s PhD program. As such, some portions of the document (namely the introduction) represent actual sections of the thesis while others merely describe the contents of the thesis. This distinction will be made clear when necessary. In broad terms, the research has been focussed on the use of resource requirements of parallel jobs in the scheduling of these jobs in the context of large-scale multiprocessors. The two resource requirements investigated are (1) the service-times, and (2) the memory demands of jobs. In addition, a significant portion of the research has been devoted to the implementation of practical scheduling disciplines in the context of a real parallel system. This document presents the contributions made in these areas. The document is organized as follows. First, a preliminary introduction of the thesis is presented. Section 3 describes the basic structure of the thesis, and provides a detailed section breakdown. Section 4 outlines the research that is currently underway, which will comprise the last major chapter of the thesis. Finally, conclusions are presented. Attached to this document are three papers that the author has published on parallel-job scheduling, the aggregate content of which represents a significant fraction of the thesis. These papers are:
Efficacy of Residual Bifenthrin Applied to Landscape Vegetation Against Aedes albopictus

Abstract The daytime biting mosquito Aedes albopictus is a nuisance pest commonly found in suburban yards. The recommended course of treatment for Ae. albopictus is to keep yards free of water-holding containers; however, infestations may require additional control methods such as residual pesticide applications to vegetation. Five plants commonly found in yards or in uncultivated areas in Gainesville, FL were chosen as substrates for evaluation of the effectiveness of residual bifenthrin against 5–7-day-old female Ae. albopictus. Knockdown of mosquitoes after 1 h of exposure was highest the day of and 7 days after treatment. Plant species clearly impacted the effectiveness of residual bifenthrin. One-hour knockdown 7 days after treatment remained high (>62%) only on azalea and holly bush vegetation. Knockdown counts 24 h after exposure demonstrated that residual efficacy of bifenthrin was highest on azalea, with >77% mortality for up to 35 days. Additional bioassays revealed significant differences in the knockdown rates of male, female, gravid, and blood-fed Ae. albopictus exposed to residual bifenthrin treatments, with the highest knockdown observed on the day of and 7 days after treatment.
Impact of Network Density on Bandwidth Resource Management in WSN

We describe a self-organizing, clustering protocol for band- width resource management in Wireless Sensor Networks. The proposed protocol allows the sensor nodes to communicate by a time-slotted, sched- uled MAC algorithm. When the nodes are densely deployed, i.e., the connectivity is very high, the MAC algorithm may not provide access for all of the nodes due to the limited number of time-slots, consequently the network capacity degrades. To overcome this drawback, we extend the time-slotted MAC algorithm by clustering the nodes into di®erent frequency domains while they can use the same time domain. The idea is basically to multiplex the time domain with the frequency domain. As a result, the number of nodes that are granted access to the wireless medium is increased by the number of frequency channels available. By using simulations, we evaluate the performance of the protocol. The results reveal that frequency multiplexing has the e®ect of increasing the capacity up to 100%.
Psychology Research and Behavior Management Dovepress Health Psychology in Primary Care: Recent Research and Future Directions

Over the last decade, research about health psychology in primary care has reiterated its contributions to mental and physical health promotion, and its role in addressing gaps in mental health service delivery. Recent meta-analyses have generated mixed results about the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of health psychology interventions. There have been few studies of health psychology interventions in real-world treatment settings. Several key challenges exist: determining the degree of penetration of health psychology into primary care settings; clarifying the specific roles of health psychologists in integrated care; resolving reimbursement issues; and adapting to the increased prescription of psychotropic medications. Identifying and exploring these issues can help health psychologists and primary care providers to develop the most effective ways of applying psychological principles in primary care settings. In a changing health care landscape, health psychologists must continue to articulate the theories and techniques of health psychology and integrated care, to put their beliefs into practice, and to measure the outcomes of their work.
Solvent dramatically affects protein structure refinement

One of the most challenging problems in protein structure prediction is improvement of homology models (structures within 1–3 Å Cα rmsd of the native structure), also known as the protein structure refinement problem. It has been shown that improvement could be achieved using in vacuo energy minimization with molecular mechanics and statistically derived continuously differentiable hybrid knowledge-based (KB) potential functions. Globular proteins, however, fold and function in aqueous solution in vivo and in vitro. In this work, we study the role of solvent in protein structure refinement. Molecular dynamics in explicit solvent and energy minimization in both explicit and implicit solvent were performed on a set of 75 native proteins to test the various energy potentials. A more stringent test for refinement was performed on 729 near-native decoys for each native protein. We use a powerfully convergent energy minimization method to show that implicit solvent (GBSA) provides greater improvement for some proteins than the KB potential: 24 of 75 proteins showing an average improvement of >20% in Cα rmsd from the native structure with GBSA, compared to just 7 proteins with KB. Molecular dynamics in explicit solvent moved the structures further away from their native conformation than the initial, unrefined decoys. Implicit solvent gives rise to a deep, smooth potential energy attractor basin that pulls toward the native structure.
Optimization of polyphenol extraction from red grape pomace using aqueous glycerol/tartaric acid mixtures and response surface methodology

ABSTRACT Grape pomace is a food industry waste containing a high burden of antioxidant polyphenols and several methodologies have been developed for their efficient extraction. However, a sustainable and environmentally friendly process should involve recovery means composed of benign, non-toxic solvents, such as tartaric acid and glycerol, which are natural food constituents. In this line, this study examined the extraction of polyphenols using aqueous tartaric acid/glycerol solutions. The aim was to assess the role of acid and glycerol concentration in the extraction yield, employing a Box-Behnken experimental design and response surface methodology. The results showed that solutions containing only glycerol (20%, w/v) are more suitable for retrieving polyphenols, flavonoids, and pigments from grape pomace, while tartaric acid exerted a negative effect in this regard, when tested at concentrations up to 2% (w/v).
Exponential Local Discriminant Embedding and Its Application to Face Recognition

Local discriminant embedding (LDE) has been recently proposed to overcome some limitations of the global linear discriminant analysis method. In the case of a small training data set, however, LDE cannot directly be applied to high-dimensional data. This case is the so-called small-sample-size (SSS) problem. The classical solution to this problem was applying dimensionality reduction on the raw data (e.g., using principal component analysis). In this paper, we introduce a novel discriminant technique called “exponential LDE” (ELDE). The proposed ELDE can be seen as an extension of LDE framework in two directions. First, the proposed framework overcomes the SSS problem without discarding the discriminant information that was contained in the null space of the locality preserving scatter matrices associated with LDE. Second, the proposed ELDE is equivalent to transforming original data into a new space by distance diffusion mapping (similar to kernel-based nonlinear mapping), and then, LDE is applied in such a new space. As a result of diffusion mapping, the margin between samples belonging to different classes is enlarged, which is helpful in improving classification accuracy. The experiments are conducted on five public face databases: Yale, Extended Yale, PF01, Pose, Illumination, and Expression (PIE), and Facial Recognition Technology (FERET). The results show that the performances of the proposed ELDE are better than those of LDE and many state-of-the-art discriminant analysis techniques.
Academic Procrastination in Two Settings: Motivation Correlates, Behavioral Patterns, and Negative Impact of Procrastination in Canada and Singapore

Two studies are reported examining academic procrastination and motivation in 1,145 university students from Canada and Singapore. In Study 1, relationships between procrastination and motivation variables were found to be similar across contexts, with self-efficacy for self-regulated learning most strongly associated with procrastination in both contexts. In Study 2, patterns of procrastinating behavior and the negative impact of procrastination were examined and compared in Canadian and Singaporean undergraduates. Participants in both contexts reported writing to be the academic task most prone to procrastination. More Singaporeans than Canadians were classified as negative procrastinators (i.e. rated procrastination as a negative influence on academic functioning). In both contexts, negative procrastinators spent more time procrastinating than neutral procrastinators and displayed lower self-efficacy for self-regulated learning. On decrit deux recherches portant sur la motivation et la procrastination universitaire (tendance a remettre au lendemain) de 1145 etudiants du Canada et de Singapour. Dans la premiere etude, les relations entre la motivation et la procrastination sont apparues etre analogues dans les deux pays, la variable la plus fortement associea la procrastination etant l'auto-efficience pour l'apprentissage autoregule. Dans la deuxieme etude, les schemas comportementaux de procrastination et son impact negatif ont ete analyses et compares chez les etudiants de 1° cycle canadiens et singapouriens. Les sujets des deux pays ont mentionne la redaction comme etant la tâche universitaire la plus soumise a la procrastination. Davantage de Singapouriens que de Canadiens ete classes en procrastinateurs negatifs (c'est-a-dire que la procrastination est consideree comme etant un handicap pour les etudes). Dans les deux cas, les procrastinateurs negatifs gaspillaient plus de temps que les procrastinateurs neutres et manifestaient une moindre auto-efficience pour l'apprentissage autoregule.