Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrastructure of Dimorphic Transformation in Paracoccidioides brasiliensis

The fine structure of Paracoccidioides brasiliensis undergoing temperature-dependent transformation from mycelium to yeast and vice versa (M ⇌ Y) was studied. The transitional form to mycelium from the yeast appears as an elongated bud that extends from the yeast and which has a mixture of characteristics from both the yeast and the mycelium. The transitional form to yeast from the mycelium starts with enlargement of the interseptal spaces and cracking of the outer electron-dense layer of the cell wall of the hypha. Later the interseptal spaces tend to become round and separate. In M → Y only few interseptal spaces seem to transform. The yeast is produced by self-transformation of the hypha. In Y → M a new structure is formed and the yeast dies. Intrahyphal hyphae are observed during the transformation from M → Y, and intrayeast hyphae during the Y → M. Due to the high mortality and breakage observed in both types of transformations, we believe that wound of the yeast or the mycelium could elicit this phenomenon.
Self-rated health as a moderator of the relation between functional impairment and depressive symptoms in older adults

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between functional impairment, self-rated health, and depressive symptoms. Independently, self-rated health and functional impairment each contribute to depressive symptoms; however, it remains unknown how these variables are related to depression in combination. It was hypothesized that self-rated health would moderate the relation between functional impairment and depressive symptoms in a sample of older adults. Method: A community sample of adults aged 60 and above was recruited from primary care clinics (n = 106); 98 of these participants had usable data. Participants completed self-report questionnaires that assessed depressive symptoms, functional impairment, and self-rated physical health. Results: Self-rated health moderated the relation between functional impairment and depressive symptoms. For participants with poor self-rated health, greater functional impairment was associated with greater depressive symptoms. Conclusion: It appears that patient perceptions of health may be protective against depressive symptoms for those with functional impairment.
Disrupting global disability frameworks: settler-colonialism and the geopolitics of disability in Palestine/Israel

Abstract In recent years, Israel has seen an increase in disability studies scholarship and disability rights activism. At the same time, critical disability studies scholars have begun calling attention to the role of colonization and neocolonial powers, too often obscured in disability studies work, in disabling oppressed nations. This article brings these critiques in conversation with disability studies scholarship regarding Occupied Palestine to argue that disability is inextricably intertwined with the settler-colonial project of the Israeli state. By highlighting the geopolitical production of disablement, this work suggests that social approaches to disability have largely effaced disability injustice rooted in geopolitical power imbalances.
Learning on the move.

Learning is a critical element in an organization's ability to carry out its strategy and keep up with the changing demands of its customers. But employee expectations about how information and learning are delivered can change as fast as the marketplace. Consumer-driven products like mobile phones and tablets have changed how we ask questions of experts, where we go for help, and how we consume information. Internal knowledge sharing must keep up. Using data gathered between October and December 2011, this Insight will look at how organizations rely on learning to run their businesses more effectively, and how the ways they deliver that learning can keep pace with employee demand. It will also look specifically at mobile learning, and explore how top-performing companies are unleashing learning and learners.
Genetic Variation of the MHC DQB Locus in the Finless Porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides)

Abstract The Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) is a large multigene coding for glycoproteins that play a key role in the initiation of immune responses in vertebrates. The exon 2 region of the MHC DQB locus was analyzed using 160 finless porpoises from 5 populations in Japanese waters. The 5 populations were based on a previous mitochondrial DNA control region analysis, which showed distinct geographical separation. Eight DQB alleles were detected, and the geographical distribution of the alleles indicated that most of them are shared among the populations. Heterozygosity of the DQB alleles in each population ranged from 0.55 to 0.78, and for all 5 populations was 0.78. Low MHC variability is not a common feature in marine mammals, but the finless porpoise populations inhabiting coastal waters had a relatively high MHC heterozygosity. Balancing selection in the MHC DQB alleles of the finless porpoise was indicated by the higher rate of nonsynonymous than synonymous substitutions for PBR; however, an excess of hetrozygotes compared to expectation was not observed. This suggests that the MHC DQB locus in the finless porpoise may have been under balancing selection for a long evolutionary time period, and is influenced by genetic drift beyond the effect of balancing selection for short time periods in small local populations.
Ongoing education in type 2 diabetes: the attitudes of hard-to-reach participants

Background and aim Ongoing structured patient education, for those with type 2 diabetes, is a core requirement within diabetes health policy. Although type 2 education programmes are becoming established in the UK, a recent review reveals mixed results with little evidence to suggest whether or how such programmes might be directed, to achieve maximal benefit. Black and ethnic minority peoples, and poor and socially disadvantaged groups are especially vulnerable to the effects of the disease. What are the attitudes of these hard-to-reach groups towards diabetes learning? Methods Eight semi-structured interviews were carried out on participants from different cultural backgrounds. All were from the same primary-care setting, who had type 2 diabetes for more than 12 months. Potential participants were asked to opt in to the research process by invitation letter and in-house poster advertisement. Purposive sampling was undertaken on those who opted in. When recruitment proved difficult, targeted personal approaches were undertaken opportunistically, to increase the opt-in rate, and allow further purposive sampling. During analysis, themes and categories emerged inductively from participants’ dialogue, with no ‘a priori’ categories or themes. The themes were then linked into a map, which ultimately described the whole. The sample size was too small to be representative of the practice population and as such findings were not generalisable to a wider setting. Findings Diabetes education was highly valued, it was needed so that people felt well and alive; it had to be a respectful experience involving listening and being listened to. It was necessary for the learning to be personal, the desire coming from within. Previous learning related to employment had involved being shown the ropes and was viewed positively. Past diabetes learning had taken place in family settings, in informal meetings and within consultations with health professionals. These were generally preferred to formal classes. The quality of the learning experience was very important to participants. Stress and depression were barriers to learning and diminished capacity to change. The hard to reach are aptly named when trying to recruit for interview studies.
More than meets the eye : A multi-year expressivity analysis of tomato sterility in ps and ps2 lines

Functional male sterility in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) positional sterile ps and ps-2 lines provides a good facultative sterility system for F1 hybrid seed production. In order to elucidate the observed variability in the trait stability, expressivity was observed in a comparative multi-year study (2008 – 2012) across seven ps and two ps-2 tomato lines. Tomato lines undergoing the study were cultivated from seeds obtained in the preceding year and grown in spring-summer season in greenhouse with constant temperature monitoring. Flowers (normally-shaped or ps-shaped), fruit number, and seed number per fruit were counted for the lowest first six branches of each plant, every year of the study. Lapses in sterility (expressed as percentage of seedless fruits or as number of seeds per seeded fruit produced) were attributed to dramatic greenhouse temperature fluctuations during the flowering period. Analyses of independent descendant F2 hybrid populations of ps × fertile crosses indicated a repeated presence of hitherto unreported phenotypic classes, ps-flowered plants with low or normal seed counts, strongly suggesting the gene responsible for the ps phenotype is distinct from tomato sterility gene. Segregation analyses of all independent crosses showed that either of these traits (ps flower phenotype or fruit sterility) was conferred by a single recessive gene. The calculated genetic distance between these two genes was 13.4 cM, based on the calculation of occurrence of the segregants across the investigated independent F2 populations. All F2 segregants classes produced viable pollen, pointing that the occurrence of novel segregants classes was not due to changed pollen viability. The distinction of ps from tomato sterility gene was further confirmed with molecular analyses of F2 sub-populations using a recently developed ps-linked DNA marker, resulting in a calculated genetic distance of 12 cM between it and the sterility gene.
Reading Semantic Cognition as a theory of concepts

Abstract Any theory of semantic cognition is also a theory of concepts. There are two ways to construe the models presented by Rogers & McClelland (R&M) in Semantic Cognition. If we construe the input and output representations as concepts, then the models capture knowledge acquisition within a stable set of concepts. If we construe the hidden-layer representations as concepts, the models provide a simulation of conceptual change.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and neurocysticercosis

R E S U M E N La asociacion entre la Esclerosis Lateral Amiotrofica (ELA) y la Neurocisticercosis (NCC) rara vez se ha descrito en la literatura. Presentamos un paciente con ambos trastornos. Se diagnostico NCC en un paciente de 55 anos de edad, masculino con tomografia axial y pruebas de inmunoensayo en l iquido cefalorraquideo (LCR). Despues del tratamiento con Praziquantel, desarrollo bradilalia, disartria llegando a lenguaje incomprensible. Tambien mostro sintomatologia bulbar y de neurona motora superior e inferior. La electromiografia apoyo el diagnostico ELA definida, la resonancia magnetica de cerebro confirA B S T R A C T The assoc iat ion between Amyot roph ic Late ra l Sclerosis (ALS) and Neurocyst icercosis (NCC) has rarely been described in literature. We describe a patient with both disorders. NCC was diagnosed in a 55 year-old male patient with posit ive CT scan and cerebrospinal f luid (CSF) immunoassay tests. After Praziquantel treatment, he developed slurred speech, bradylal ia and periods of speech arrest. He also demonst rated bulbar , upper and lower motor neuron symptomatology. Electromyography supported def in ite ALS diagnosis , and brain MRI confirmed the presence of NCC in motor cortices. Although the association between NCC and ALS may have occurred by chance, we hypothesize that auto immune, apoptot ic and c i rcu lato ry CASO CLINICO
Exact Algorithms and APX-Hardness Results for Geometric Set Cover

We study several geometric set cover problems in which the goal is to compute a minimum cover of a given set of points in Euclidean space by a family of geometric objects. We give a short proof that this problem is APX-hard when the objects are axis-aligned fat rectangles, even when each rectangle is an ǫ-perturbed copy of a single unit square. We extend this result to several other classes of objects including almost-circular ellipses, axis-aligned slabs, downward shadows of line segments, downward shadows of graphs of cubic functions, 3-dimensional unit balls, and axis-aligned cubes, as well as some related hitting set problems. Our hardness results are all proven by encoding a highly structured minimum vertex cover problem which we believe may be of independent interest. In contrast, we give a polynomial-time dynamic programming algorithm for 2-dimensional set cover where the objects are pseudodisks containing the origin or are downward shadows of pairwise 2-intersecting x-monotone curves. Our algorithm extends to the weighted case where a minimum-cost cover is required.
Penalty-Regulated Dynamics and Robust Learning Procedures in Games

Starting from a heuristic learning scheme for strategic N -person games, we derive a new class of continuous-time learning dynamics consisting of a replicator-like drift adjusted by a penalty term that renders the boundary of the game’s strategy space repelling. These penalty-regulated dynamics are equivalent to players keeping an exponentially discounted aggregate of their ongoing payoffs and then using a smooth best response to pick an action based on these performance scores. Owing to this inherent duality, the proposed dynamics satisfy a variant of the folk theorem of evolutionary game theory and they converge to (arbitrarily precise) approximations of Nash equilibria in potential games. Motivated by applications to traffic engineering, we exploit this duality further to design a discrete-time, payoff-based learning algorithm that retains these convergence properties and only requires players to observe their in-game payoffs. Moreover, the algorithm remains robust in the presence of stochastic perturbations and observation errors, and it does not require any synchronization between players.
KOMUNITAS IKAN SUKU CYPRINIDAE DI PERAIRAN SEKITAR BUKIT BATIKAP KAWASAN PEGUNUNGAN MULLER KALIMANTAN TENGAH [The Fish Community of Cyprinids from Bukit Batikap Waters in Muller Mountain Areas Central Kalimantan]

This study was conducted in Joloi river (Barito sub-watershed) in province of Central Kalimantan. The aims of study are to know fish diversity, abundance, local distribution, species status, and its potency. The results were recorded 26 species from 15 genus, the range of abundance between 1-29,83; local distribution between 0,69-9,66%, 5 endemic species, 1 new record, most have potency as fish consume. The tambra fish require to be studied furthermore.
Extracting Topics and Innovators Using Topic Diffusion Process in Weblogs

We propose a ranking technique which extracts topics and innovators by analyzing that process. Our method identifies URLs of topics and the bloggers who trigger topic diffusion. Our assumption is that the strength of propagation of a topic is determined by the influences of topics and bloggers. This decomposition is attained through singular value decomposition (SVD); We construct a diffusion matrix: the first left and right singular vectors are regarded respectively as the influences of the topics and the bloggers. We show that our method can extract propagative topics (which is not bursty because of the media effect) as well as the influential bloggers.
On Compiling System Models for Faster and More Scalable Diagnosis

Knowledge compilation is one of the more traditional approaches to model-based diagnosis, where a compiled system model is obtained in an off-line phase, and then used to efficiently answer diagnostic queries on-line. The choice of a suitable representation for the compiled model is critical to the success of this approach, and two of the main proposals have been Decomposable Negation Normal Form (DNNF) and Ordered Binary Decision Diagram (OBDD). The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we show that in the current state of the art, DNNF dominates OBDD in efficiency and scalability for some typical diagnostic tasks. This result is based on a step-by-step comparison of the complexities of diagnostic algorithms for DNNF and OBDD, together with a known succinctness relation between the two representations. Second, we present a tool for model-based diagnosis, which is based on a state-of-the-art DNNF compiler and our implementations of DNNF diagnostic algorithms. We demonstrate the efficiency of this tool against recent results reported on diagnosis using OBDD.
Functional Identification of Catalytic Metal Ion Binding Sites within RNA

The viability of living systems depends inextricably on enzymes that catalyze phosphoryl transfer reactions. For many enzymes in this class, including several ribozymes, divalent metal ions serve as obligate cofactors. Understanding how metal ions mediate catalysis requires elucidation of metal ion interactions with both the enzyme and the substrate(s). In the Tetrahymena group I intron, previous work using atomic mutagenesis and quantitative analysis of metal ion rescue behavior identified three metal ions (MA, MB, and MC) that make five interactions with the ribozyme substrates in the reaction's transition state. Here, we combine substrate atomic mutagenesis with site-specific phosphorothioate substitutions in the ribozyme backbone to develop a powerful, general strategy for defining the ligands of catalytic metal ions within RNA. In applying this strategy to the Tetrahymena group I intron, we have identified the pro-S P phosphoryl oxygen at nucleotide C262 as a ribozyme ligand for MC. Our findings establish a direct connection between the ribozyme core and the functionally defined model of the chemical transition state, thereby extending the known set of transition-state interactions and providing information critical for the application of the recent group I intron crystallographic structures to the understanding of catalysis.
Differences in antibiotic prescribing in paediatric outpatients

Antibiotics represent the most widely prescribed therapeutic agents. The prevalence of drug prescription differs across age, with preschool children being most exposed to antibiotic drugs, especially in the community setting. A review with the aim to compare the profile of antibiotic drug prescription at the multinational, national and regional levels was performed. This overview of drug-utilisation studies found quantitative and qualitative differences in the antibiotic prescription profile between and within countries. Moreover, differences exist also at the local level and between prescribers. In general, second-choice antibiotic drugs (eg, cephalosporins) were more commonly prescribed in settings characterised by a high prevalence of antibiotic prescription. Geographical differences should be taken into account when monitoring antimicrobial drug resistance and when planning educational interventions for health professionals and parents with the aim to improve the rational use of antibiotic drugs.
Intraoperative Ultrasound Guidance During Intracavitary Brachytherapy Applicator Placement in Cervical Cancer: The University of Alabama at Birmingham Experience

Objective The objective of this study was to evaluate the University of Alabama at Birmingham experience with routine intraoperative ultrasound (IUS)–guided tandem placement for cervical cancer. Methods Between 1999 and 2008, 243 cervical cancer patients underwent IUS-guided tandem placement. One hundred thirty-nine patients received low-dose-rate brachytherapy, and 104 received high-dose-rate brachytherapy. Three hundred fifty-six IUS-guided procedures were performed. Clinical and imaging data were retrospectively analyzed to evaluate complications requiring reinsertion of tandem placement in the context of IUS. Results All 243 cervical cancer patients completed intracavitary brachytherapy. Five (1.4%) of 356 IUS-guided applicator placements resulted in uterine perforation. All of these patients underwent successful tandem insertion on the second attempt, and no significant clinical sequelae occurred. Intraoperative ultrasound enabled direct uterine visualization and facilitated real-time feedback for selection of a suitable tandem length and curvature; no suboptimal placements requiring return to the operating room occurred (excluding perforation). Conclusions In this large series, IUS guidance substantially increased the rate of successful applicator placement and diminished the rate of uterine perforation relative to historical controls. We strongly recommend the use of IUS guidance during operative intrauterine tandem placement for cervical cancer.
p53-Dependent S-Phase Damage Checkpoint and Pronuclear Cross Talk in Mouse Zygotes with X-Irradiated Sperm

ABSTRACT One difficulty in analyzing the damage response is that the effect of damage itself and that of cellular response are hard to distinguish in irradiated cells. In mouse zygotes, damage can be introduced by irradiated sperm, while damage response can be studied in the unirradiated maternal pronucleus. We have analyzed the p53-dependent damage responses in irradiated-sperm mouse zygotes and found that a p53-responsive reporter was efficiently activated in the female pronucleus. [3H]thymidine labeling experiments indicated that irradiated-sperm zygotes were devoid of G1/S arrest, but pronuclear DNA synthesis was suppressed equally in male and female pronuclei. p53−/− zygotes lacked this suppression, which was corrected by microinjection of glutathione S-transferase-p53 fusion protein. In contrast, p21−/− zygotes exhibited the same level of suppression upon fertilization by irradiated sperm. About a half of the 6-Gy-irradiated-sperm zygotes managed to synthesize a full DNA content by prolonging S phase, while the other half failed to do so. Regardless of the DNA content, all the zygotes cleaved to become two-cell-stage embryos. These results revealed the presence of p53-dependent pronuclear cross talk and a novel function of p53 in the S-phase DNA damage checkpoint of mouse zygotes.
The Effects of a 15-Week Exercise Intervention on Fitness and Postural Control in Older Adults

Falls are the leading cause of nonfatal injuries in older adults and often lead to adverse changes in confidence and lifestyle that trigger further declines in postural control. Decreased fitness is associated with poor performance on postural control assessments, especially those that increase task difficulty. The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of a traditional group fitness class and a Wii fitness exercise program on individual's ability to maintain postural control with an environmental distracter. Eighty-seven community-dwelling seniors were randomized into one of three groups (Control, Wii Fitness, Group Fitness). Interventions were delivered three times per week for 15 weeks. A significant improvement in the Sensory Organization Test (SOT) equilibrium score was seen over time. There was a significant training group by time interaction for 6-minute walk (p = 0.14, effect size = .776). There was a significant pretest (7.2 ± 1.4) post-test (6.7 ± 1.4) comparison for 8-foot Timed “Up and Go” (p = 0.017). There was a significant interaction between training groups and time (p = 0.010) for chair stands. Post hoc tests revealed that equilibrium scores during cognitive distraction (38.1 ± 20.9) were significantly less than both the visual distraction (51.9 ± 20.2) and auditory distraction (49.3 ± 21.1). There were no differences during the increased environmental load testing (p = 0.686). Results indicated that both intervention programs were successful at improving postural control and fitness.