Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced ethanol inhibition of recombinant N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors by magnesium: role of NR3A subunits.

BACKGROUND The effects of ethanol on brain function are thought to be partly because of altered activity of ion channels that regulate synaptic activity. Results from previous studies from this lab and others have shown that ethanol inhibits the function of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, a calcium-permeable ion channel activated by the neurotransmitter glutamate. Factors that influence the acute sensitivity of NMDA receptors to ethanol may be critical in determining how neurons and neuronal networks respond to the presence of ethanol. In this study, we have examined the effect of physiologically relevant concentrations of magnesium on the ethanol sensitivity of recombinant NMDA receptors and how ethanol inhibition under these conditions is influenced by the NR3A subunit. METHODS Recombinant cDNAs encoding NMDA receptor subunits were expressed in human embryonic kidney 293 cells. Whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology was used to measure currents induced by rapid application of glutamate in the absence and presence of ethanol. RESULTS In magnesium-free recording solution, ethanol inhibited glutamate-mediated currents in cells transfected with NMDA receptor subunits. The magnitude of ethanol inhibition was significantly enhanced when recordings were carried out in media containing 1 mM magnesium. This effect was reversible and required magnesium-sensitive receptors. Magnesium did not enhance ethanol inhibition of glycine-activated NR1/NR3A/NR3B receptors. However, NR3A co-expression prevented the enhancement of ethanol's inhibitory effect on receptors composed of NR2A but not NR2B subunits. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that under physiological conditions, NR3A may be an important regulator of the acute ethanol sensitivity of brain NMDA receptors.
Origins of the glycinergic inputs to the rat locus coeruleus and dorsal raphe nuclei: a study combining retrograde tracing with glycine immunohistochemistry

The amino acid glycine is a major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brainstem and is likely involved in the tonic inhibition of the monoaminergic neurons during all sleep‐waking stages. In order to determine the neurons at the origin of the glycinergic innervation of the two principal monoaminergic nuclei, the locus coeruleus and the dorsal raphe of the rat, we applied a double‐labelling technique, combining retrograde transport of cholera‐toxin B subunit with glycine immunohistochemistry. Using this technique, we found that the locus coeruleus and dorsal raphe nuclei receive a common glycinergic innervation from the ventral and ventrolateral periaqueductal grey, including the adjacent deep mesencephalic reticular nucleus. Small additional glycinergic inputs to these nuclei originated from the lateral paragigantocellular nucleus and the rostral ventromedial medullary reticular formation. The potential role of these glycinergic inputs in the control of the excitability of the monoaminergic neurons of the locus coeruleus and dorsal raphe nuclei is discussed.
The Mind's Eye—Precuneus Activation in Memory-Related Imagery

We examined brain activity associated with visual imagery at episodic memory retrieval using positron emission tomography (PET). Twelve measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were taken in six right-handed, healthy, male volunteers. During six measurements, they were engaged in the cued recall of imageable verbal paired associates. During the other six measurements, they recalled nonimageable paired associates. Memory performance was equalized across all word lists. The subjects' use of an increased degree of visual imagery during the recall of imageable paired associates was confirmed using subjective rating scales after each scan. Memory-related imagery was associated with significant activation of a medial parietal area, the precuneus. This finding confirms a previously stated hypothesis about the precuneus and provides strong evidence that it is a key part of the neural substate of visual imagery occurring in conscious memory recall.
CSR in publicly owned enterprises: opportunities and barriers

Purpose - CSR in water utilities in Denmark faces various challenges in getting to the same level as in private organisations. The water utilities are newly privatised, hybrid organisations that are both professionally and politically driven. The purpose of this paper is an examination of the opportunities and barriers in CSR in these publicly owned enterprises (POEs). The research question is: why do the opportunities of CSR in POEs seem more beneficial than for normal private businesses, while the barriers seem to slow the progression? The opportunities lie in the closeness to and willingness of the political decision-makers of the city. The barriers to CSR in POEs stem from the legal regulatory framework, which dictates efficiencies, price and cost reductions and limits the ethical investments of the POEs. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology of the paper is a comparative study and analysis of the current legislative and organisational framework for the POEs compared to the contemporary CSR approaches of Matten and Moon, Wartick and Wood, and Mitchell Findings - The findings show that a schism seems to exist in CSR of hybrid organisations, which is hard to overcome. Originality/value - The originality of the paper and its contribution to the CSR literature lies in its pointing out the issues in opportunities and barriers in CSR in public, hybrid organisations that need to be solved before CSR can be fully implemented in public service companies at the same level as in private businesses.
Analysis and design of LLC resonant converter considering rectifier voltage oscillation

The LLC resonant converter employing the center-tap rectifier can suffer from high voltage oscillation across the secondary diodes owing to the transformer secondary leakage inductance. The amplitude of the voltage oscillation is varied according to the operation region, i.e., below resonant region and above resonant region. To reduce the diode voltage stress without snubbers, this paper analyzes the voltage oscillation mechanism and presents the design guideline for small voltage oscillation.
Institutions, Latent Entrepreneurship, and Self–Employment: An International Comparison

This paper examines how the institutional environment in 18 countries affects the self–employment decision, as well as the preferences of latent entrepreneurs—individuals who prefer to be self–employed. Latent entrepreneurs fall into two groups, those who are currently self–employed and those who are not—the “truly latent entrepreneurs. ” These two groups differ in their responses to changes in the institutional environment. An occupational choice model where institutions affect switching costs informs the empirical model. As institutions such as economic freedom improve, preferences for self–employment increase for both groups, but the effect is greater for those who are currently self–employed.
AN EXAMINATION OF SELECTED PRESERVICE AGRICULTURAL TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES

The researchers surveyed department heads of purposefully selected agricultural teacher education programs to determine the curricular structure of agricultural teacher education in the United States. Nominations ofprograms to examine were sought from members of the profession. Graduation checklists and course syllabi for all professional agricultural education courses were analyzed. The authors concluded that programs vary greatly across the country. Courses on teaching methods and program and curriculum planning are generally available. Separate courses on serving as FFA advisors or in managing Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) programs are offered in only a few of the selected institutions. FFA was listed as a topic in 9 of the 10 institutions. SAE, or an equivalent topic was listed in all of the institutions studied. The authors offer a potential composite structure based on the programs studied.
PRIVATELY FINANCED CAPITAL IN PUBLIC SERVICES

Recent changes in UK policy, notably the retirement of the 1981 Ryrie rules, presage a substantial increase in the use of private finance for public sector projects. The most important features of the relaxations of 1989 and 1992 relate to: successive modifications of the value-for money tests, notably, in connection with removing the requirement for a systematic comparison with a hypothetical publicly financed project (e.g., when the private sector can be directly remunerated by user tolls); less stringent rules on leasing; and allowing private borrowing on the security of Exchequer-funded assets. The crucial issues are identified to be: the extent of private finance and the implications for macroeconomic indicators; whether the hypothesized operational efficiency gains are sufficient to offset higher financing costs; whether risk is genuinely transferred to the private sector; and whether risk ought to be transferred to the private sector. Copyright 1997 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester
Innovation in Preferred Stock: Current Developments and Implications for Financial Reporting

In this paper we investigate a significant innovation in preferred stock securities issued over the 1993–1996 period. We document trends in preferred stock use which indicate that the introduction of a preferred stock variant, trust preferred securities (TPS), is changing the landscape of corporate balance sheets with an increasing number of companies reporting securities in the “mezzanine” section of the balance sheet (between equity and debt). Referred to by many as the “Holy Grail” of financial instruments, TPS are treated as debt for tax purposes, but not for financial reporting or debt‐rating purposes. Since their introduction in late 1993, they have quickly become the primary variant of new preferred stock issues, representing the majority of all new issues of preferred stock. We (1) document this trend in preferred stock issues, (2) discuss the resulting financial reporting effects of this new security, (3) identify the motivations for this trend and (4) evaluate a new FASB proposal that addresses .
Protean Careers of the 21st Century

"The career is dead—long live the career! " Such is the mixed message regarding careers that we are carrying into the next millennium. The business environment is highly turbulent and complex, resulting in terribly ambiguous and contradictory career signals. Individuals, perhaps in self-defense, are becoming correspondingly ambivalent about their desires and plans for career development. The traditional psychological contract in which an employee entered a firm, worked hard, performed well, was loyal and committed, and thus received ever-greater rewards and job security, has been replaced by a new contract based on continuous learning and identity change, guided by the search for what Herb Shepard called "the path with a heart. " In short, the organizational career is dead, while the protean career is alive and flourishing. In this special issue of The Executive we will examine the ways the career environment and the executive of the 21st century will shape the direction of careers in the years to come. In .
An Analysis of Continuity Intentions of eGovernment Portal Users

Abstract This study provides an integrative coherent model of continuity intentions in the context of electronic public service provision drawing from multiple theoretical research streams. Especially the role of citizens’ expectations and their determinants for electronic public service delivery is discussed. The research model was empirically examined using a sample from four major German cities and structural equation modelling. The data show that the concepts of this multitheoretical approach are compatible and altogether provide a better understanding of citizens’ cognitive processes leading to continued usage behaviour. Both theoretical and practical implications for public administration in general are derived.
A 0.17-mm2 3.19-nJ/transform 256-point fast fourier transform core based on spatiotemporally fine-grained active leakage suppression

This paper presents an ultra-low energy and compact Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor suitable for pervasive sensing systems. To achieve high energy efficiency and small area, we design area-efficient memory-based architecture and equip it with two proposed techniques: (i) spatiotemporally finegrained active leakage suppression for sub-threshold voltage (sub-VTH) combinational logic and (ii) spatiotemporally finegrained performance boosting for ultra-low leakage sub-VTH memory. The prototyped chip, implemented in a 65-nm General-Purpose CMOS, consumes 3.19 nJ per FFT transform and requires 0.17 mm2 area while achieving 1.2 MS/s.
Reproducibility and variability of default-mode networks from functional MRI: Comparison between random- and mixed-effect group statistics

Default-mode networks (DMNs) is a part of so-called resting-state networks associated with intrinsic neuronal activations of the human brain. DMNs represent distinct spatial patterns of neuronal activations within anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial superior, and middle frontal gyri (i.e., anterior DMN, or aDMN) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) along with precuneus (i.e., posterior DMN, or pDMN). In this study, reproducibility and potential variability of the aDMN and pDMN depending on the second-level analysis employing either a random-effect (RFX) that is solely based on inter-subject variability or mixed-effect (MFX) statistic that is based on both the inter- and intra-subject variability. Publicly available group fMRI data were analyzed using temporally-concatenated group independent component analysis (TC-GICA) and DMN-related independent components (ICs) in group-level were automatically selected. Dual-regression approach was adopted to calculate ICs in individual-level via least-square estimation from each subject's fMRI data using estimated group-level ICs as initial parameters. The characteristic traits of the DMNs depending on the adopted second group-level statistics were evaluated based on three performance measures including (1) percentage of overlap, (2) distance of center-of-masses, and (3) Pearson's cross correlation coefficient. The results indicated that the group-level spatial maps from the MFX statistic showed significantly greater level of reproducibility across the subgroups consisted of a part of all the subjects for all three performance measures than these from the RFX statistic (p&#60;10−10 from one-way ANOVA). This may possibly be due to inclusion of the intra-subject variability as a penalty term of neuronal activation. Moreover, for each of the two group statistics, a variability of the DMNs was region-specific, in which the pDMN was consistently showed lower level of variability than the aDMN across all the three performance measures (p&#60;10−10).
Do Government Expenditures Crowd Out Corporate Contributions?

The question of whether corporate charitable contributions are crowded out by government expenditures has been virtually neglected in the literature. While governments are engaged in fiscal realignments, it seems timely to ascertain whether the corporate sector will fund any shortfall in services brought about by government spending adjustments. The authors address this issue using a unique microdata set containing 641 observations on corporate giving over the three-year period from 1990 through 1992. Rather than filling the gap left by government spending reductions, their results suggest that corporate contributions could, in fact, contract—that is, government spending and corporate contributions may be complements rather than substitutes.
A detector head design for small-animal PET with silicon photomultipliers (SiPM)

Small-animal PET systems are now striving for sub-millimetre resolution. Current systems based upon PSPMTs and finely pixellated scintillators can be pushed to higher resolution, but at the expense of other performance parameters and a rapidly escalating cost. Moreover, depth of interaction (DOI) information is usually difficult to assess in such systems, even though this information is highly desirable to reduce the parallax error, which is often the dominant error for such high-resolution systems. In this study we propose a high-resolution detector head for a small-animal PET imaging system with intrinsic DOI information. Instead of a pixellated scintillator, our design is based upon the classic Anger camera principle, i.e. the head is constructed of modular layers each consisting of a continuous slab of scintillator, viewed by a new type of compact silicon photodetector. The photodetector is the recently developed silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) that as well as being very compact has many other attractive properties: high gain at low bias voltage, excellent single-photoelectron resolution and fast timing. A detector head of about 4 × 4 cm2 in area is proposed, constructed from three modular layers of the type described above. We perform a simulation study, using the Monte Carlo simulation package Geant4. The simulation results are used to optimize the geometry of the detector head and characterize its performance. Additionally, hit estimation algorithms are studied to determine the interaction position of annihilation photons correctly over the whole detector surface. The resulting detector has a nearly uniform efficiency for 511 keV photons of ∼70% and an intrinsic spatial resolution of less than ∼0.4 mm full width at half maximum (fwhm).
The Internationalisation of Services

Service internationalisation will undoubtedly be an important managerial focus in the future. This article proposes a classification system which illustrates modes and strategies of service internationalisation as a guide for managers taking their services into world markets. These modes are influenced by a combination of the nature of the service (the degree of interaction between service provider and consumer) and the way it is delivered (the degree to which services are embodied in or delivered through goods).
Diffusion basis spectrum imaging detects and distinguishes coexisting subclinical inflammation, demyelination and axonal injury in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis mice

Clinicopathological paradox has hampered significantly the effective assessment of the efficacy of therapeutic intervention for multiple sclerosis. Neuroimaging biomarkers of tissue injury could guide more effective treatment by accurately reflecting the underlying subclinical pathologies. Diffusion tensor imaging‐derived directional diffusivity and anisotropy indices have been applied to characterize white matter disorders. However, these biomarkers are sometimes confounded by the complex pathologies seen in multiple sclerosis and its animal models. Recently, a novel technique of diffusion basis spectrum imaging has been developed to quantitatively assess axonal injury, demyelination and inflammation in a mouse model of inflammatory demyelination. Lenaldekar, which inhibits T‐cell expansion in a non‐cytolytic manner, has been shown to suppress relapses and preserve white matter integrity in mice with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. In this study, relapsing–remitting experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis was induced through active immunization of SJL/J mice with a myelin proteolipid protein peptide. The therapeutic efficacy of Lenaldekar treatment was evaluated via daily clinical score, cross‐sectional ex vivo diffusion basis spectrum imaging examination and histological analysis. Lenaldekar greatly reduced relapse severity and protected white matter integrity in these experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis mice. Diffusion basis spectrum imaging‐derived axial diffusivity, radial diffusivity and restricted diffusion tensor fraction accurately reflected axonal injury, myelin integrity and inflammation‐associated cellularity change, respectively. These results support the potential use of diffusion basis spectrum imaging as an effective outcome measure for preclinical drug evaluation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Analysis of Circulating DNA Serial Assessment of Human Tumor Burdens in Mice by the

Internal human xenografts provide valuable animal models to study the microenvironments and metastatic processes occurring in human cancers. However, the use of such models is hampered by the logistical difficulties of reproducibly and simply assessing tumor burden. We developed a highsensitivity assay for quantifying human DNA in small volumes of mouse plasma, enabling in-life monitoring of systemic tumor burden. Growth kinetics analyses of various xenograft models showed the utility of circulating human DNA as a biomarker. We found that human DNA concentration reproducibly increased with disease progression and decreased after successful therapeutic intervention. A marked, transient spike in circulating human tumor DNA occurred immediately after cytotoxic therapy or surgery. This simple assay may find broad utility in target validation studies and preclinical drug development programs. [Cancer Res 2007;67(19):9364–70]
The end of majority home-ownership: the logic of continuing decline in a post-crash economy

Prior to the Credit Crunch some economists denied the existence of a housing market bubble because the fundamentals supporting inflation were right. Their analysis relied upon assumptions about households as purchasers as the main drivers of the market (transaction volumes and value). The financial crisis and its fallout have shown us that the beliefs and behaviours of other tightly knit groups such as lenders and developers, or more loosely affiliated groups such as landlords, are also crucial to the operation of markets. Weber would have referred to these as “social carriers” in his multi-causal explanations of society. This paper argues that household driven models of “fundamentals” no longer explain the housing market, if they ever did. The current rise of the private landlord and the decade long decline of home-ownership is the beginning of the return of minority ownership of the UK housing stock, a long term change resulting from changed interests and perceptions among the “social carriers” affecting UK housing markets. This has huge implications for almost all aspects of social, welfare and (probably) economic policy.
Asset Prices and Monetary Policy: Some Notes

Three issues regarding asset prices and monetary policy are clarified. First, increases in asset prices due to monetary expansion, despite their “paper” wealth nature, tend to make current consumers as a whole wealthier. Second, the weaker (stronger) effect of monetary policy on investment through the Tobin’s q effect is, the stronger (weaker) monetary effect on consumption through the wealth effect. Third, from the perspective of macroeconomic stability, the soundness of asset market performances does not depend on whether they are fundamental or not, but on their compatibility with the AD-AS balance in the long run.