Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bifunctional Roles for Two Topological Isoforms of the Cellular Prion Protein

The physiological function of the cellular prion protein (PrPC) and its contribution to prion diseases remains enigmatic as evidence suggests both pro- and anti-apoptotic functions. The data presented here suggest PrPC is expressed in two topological isoforms with unique functional manifestations and with the participation of both in the pathogenesis of prion disease. Expression of two topological isoforms were identified in wild type mice, a fully secreted isoform, designated SecPrP and a small fraction as a single spanning transmembrane isoform designated CtmPrP. By introducing mutations that favor expression in either SecPrP or CtmPrP the functional role of each form was dissected. Transgenic mice that favor CtmPrP expression develop spontaneous neurodegeneration with evidence of apoptotic cell death. Further investigation in cultured mammalian cells identified a Bax and caspase-3 dependant pathway by which CtmPrP triggers apoptosis in a dose dependant manner. In contrast, SecPrP reveals a protective role against apoptosis as seen in the hippocampus of transgenic mice challenged with kainic acid which otherwise leads to dramatic cell death by increased oxidative stress. The observation was made that CtmPrP favoring mice are most vulnerable to kainic acid mediated neurodegeneration where as SecPrP favoring mice are the least vulnerable to the same treatment. The protective role of SecPrP against oxidative stress was confirmed in cultured mammalian cells and primary cultured neurons. Finally, the contribution of each isoform was assessed in mice inoculated with prions (PrPSc). Mice favoring expression in the CtmPrP form developed symptoms at ~50 days and showed focal accumulation of PrPSc and neurodegeneration proximal to the inoculation site with indications of both apoptotic and oxidative stress related degeneration. Mice favoring expression in the SecPrP form develop symptoms at ~320 days with accumulation of PrPSc throughout the brain yet only show signs of oxidative stress related damage. In conclusion, evidence is provided that wild type PrPC has the intrinsic capacity to be expressed as either SecPrP or CtmPrP and that each isoform can partake in independent pathways. SecPrP participates in a neuroprotective pathway against oxidative stress whereas CtmPrP activates a caspase-3 dependant apoptotic pathway. Further evidence suggests that both isoforms participate in the etiology of infectious prion disease: upregulation of CtmPrP which leads to apoptosis and conversion of SecPrP to PrPSc and its down regulation lead to a higher susceptibility to oxidative stress, thus being able to reconcile how both gain and loss of PrPC functions may occur.
Knowledge of the situation, social network and knowledge sharing in Peshawar University: an empirical study

Abstract Disseminating and sharing of knowledge is the corner stone of knowledge economy. It is, therefore, imperative to know the factors which could be instrumental in this distribution. The purpose of this research is to understand the relative importance of knowledge-sharing factors such as knowledge of the situation and social network (SN) on knowledge sharing in University of Peshawar. Data from 244 randomly selected respondents from the target population has been collected through a questionnaire. The questionnaire was tested for its validity and reliability. Multiple regression analysis has been employed to test hypotheses of the study. Findings indicate that knowledge of the situation and SN both are positive and significant predictors of knowledge sharing. However, among the two, SN happens to be a stronger influential factor within the overall model. This research addresses the gap on knowledge sharing in general and in Universities in particular which appears sparse. As a social research, the study has its limitations. This article contributes to the theoretical integration of Attitude-to-Behaviour process model and social capital and put to empirical testing on regional data. Organisations working on knowledge transfer programs may get benefit from the findings of this research. Recommendations for further research have also been provided.
Genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease potentiates delayed doxorubicin cardiotoxicity during pregnancy

Doxorubicin (DOX) is an important antineoplastic agent with cardiotoxic effects that may manifest as heart failure years after therapy. Because of increased circulatory demands during gestation, pregnant women previously treated with DOX may be at increased risk for heart failure. Individuals with a genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease may be particularly vulnerable. To test this hypothesis, peripubertal female rats predisposed to cardiovascular disease (Spontaneously Hypertensive [SHR] and Spontaneously Hypertensive Heart Failure [SHHF]), and control rats (Wistar Kyoto [WKY]) received 6 weekly injections of DOX (2 mg/kg subcutaneously) or an equal volume of saline (SAL). Four weeks later, the rats were bred with same strain males, and followed through lactation. DOX had no detectable effect on clinical health or fertility. Systolic function assessed echocardiographically as left ventricular fractional shortening (FS) did not change with either DOX or time, but WKY had higher FS (41%) than SHR/SHHF (32%). At the end of the DOX administration protocol, serum cardiac troponin‐T concentration (cTnT), a biomarker of myocardial damage, was not different in SAL or DOX WKY or SHR/SHHF. However, at mid‐gestation, cTnT was increased 4‐fold in DOX SHR/SHHF, whereas it was unchanged in SAL and DOX WKY and SAL SHR/SHHF. These data suggest that genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease potentiates DOX cardiotoxicity during pregnancy and may predict post‐gestational DOX‐induced heart failure.
Bycatch in a Commercial Lobster Fishery: Effects on Two Benthic Predators, Sea Raven and Longhorn Sculpin

Studying the species-specific responses to fishing capture is critical for effective management and conservation of bycatch species given that acute stress incurred from capture and handling may ultimately lead to mortality. While species of low commercial value are often overlooked, having accurate information on the effects of capture on all species is necessary for ecosystem-based management. Sea Raven (SR) Hemitripterus americanus and Longhorn Sculpin (LHS) Myoxocephalus octodecemspinosus are routinely captured in the commercial American lobster Homarus americanus fishery in the Gulf of Maine, and they are discarded due to low commercial value. Despite a lack of economic value, these predatory species play important roles in shaping the benthic communities that they inhabit, highlighting the need to study their stress and mortality due to capture and handling. To help understand the effects of the lobster fishery on these species, the current study evaluated the physical, behavioral, and physiological stress responses of SR and LHS to capture in the state of Maine Zone G commercial lobster fishery. Collectively, our results suggest that although these species appeared to be resilient to capture based on an overt injury assessment, stress responses occurred based on reflex impairment and physiological perturbations, and these responses were species-specific. Given the prevalence of behavioral and physiological stress in this study, further research into the survival outcomes of SR and LHS following release in the commercial lobster fishery is warranted. Commercial fisheries of the United States discarded an average of approximately 11.4% (296 million kg) of total catch as fish bycatch annually from 2010 to 2013 (NMFS 2013, 2016). Among other issues, discards of this magnitude may be considered a significant waste of natural resources, particularly when the mortality of such bycatch Subject editor: Isaac Wirgin, New York University School of Medicine, Tuxedo *Corresponding author: bnanderso@gmail.com Received September 5, 2019; accepted January 30, 2020 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science 12:113–123, 2020 © 2020 The Authors. Marine and Coastal Fisheries published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Fisheries Society. ISSN: 1942-5120 online DOI: 10.1002/mcf2.10114
New Product Announcements, Innovation Disclosure, and Future Firm Performance

This study examines the properties of innovation disclosures contained in new product announcements, a form of voluntary, nonfinancial disclosure. We analyze these properties using a novel, text-based measure of the extent of product innovation disclosed in new product announcements. We find that stock prices react more positively to announcements with more extensive innovation disclosure. In our main analyses, we first find that a higher level of innovation disclosure predicts a greater increase in future sales. We further find that this predictive ability falls when managers have stronger incentives to maximize their wealth and when the corporate governance structure and customers’ bargaining power weaken. Our research enhances the understanding of the properties of managerial voluntary, nonfinancial disclosures and contributes a text-based measure of innovation that captures managerial assessment of the extent of product innovation. This new measure is more generalizable and incrementally informative for firm value and future performance than conventional innovation measures that depend on the existence of patents or research and development expenses.
MIHNet: Combining N-gram, Sequential and Global Information for Text Classification

Pre-training language model has achieved amazing results in many NLP tasks. In Particular, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) create a new era in NLP tasks. Despite the success, these model perform well at Global Information but weak on n-gram and Sequential information. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments of classical text classification models upon BERT in text classification task and provide a general guide for BERT+ models. Finally, we propose a new text classification model called MIHNet (Multi-dimension Information Integration using Highway network), which integrates Global, n-gram and Sequential information together and get a better performance. Notably, our model obtains new state-of-the-art results on eight widely-studied text classification datasets.
Nurses' Perceptions of Caring: A Directed Content Analysis Based on the CARE Model

The purpose of this study was to examine nurses' perceptions of caring based on the four dimensions of a CARE model—competence, altruism, responsibility, and empathy and provide practical strategies to improve nursing caring behaviors. The CARE model was developed based on parents' perceptions of healthcare providers' caring when their children were hospitalized due to critical medical conditions. In this study, a directed content analysis approach was used to analyze nurses' perceptions of caring using CARE as a guide. This study shows the consistency between nurses' and parents' perceptions of caring. Caring nurses are competent, altruistic, responsible, and empathetic.
The Impact of Risk and the Potential for Loss on Managers’ Demand for Audit Quality

We use experimental economic markets to investigate the impact of risk and the potential for loss on managers’ demand for audit quality. We posit that managers’ audit quality preferences are influenced by these two important contextual factors, which are often not considered or are difficult to isolate in prior research. We specifically predict and find evidence that risk significantly reduces managers’ average demanded audit quality level and likelihood of hiring the best available auditor in the market. We also find evidence that the potential for loss, and to a lesser extent its interaction with risk, reduce managers’ likelihood of hiring the best available auditor. Our results, based on manipulating risk and the potential for loss, provide evidence that risk aversion and loss aversion influence managers’ audit quality demand. In supplemental analyses, we show that our results are robust to alternative economic explanations. Our results suggest these two common contextual factors influence the demand for audit quality.
Deep learning approach for cerebellum localization in prenatal ultrasound images

Ultrasound (US) has become one of the most common forms for medical imaging in clinical practice. It is a non-invasive and safe practice that allows obtaining images in real time. It is also a technology with important challenges such as low image quality and high variability (between manufacturers and institutions) [1]. This work aims to apply a fast and accurate deep learning architecture to detect and locate cerebellum in prenatal ultrasound images. Cerebellum biometry is used to estimate fetal age [2] and cerebellum segmentation could be applied to detect malformation [3]. YOLO (You Only Look Once) is a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for detection, classification and location of objects in images [4]. YOLO was innovative because it solved a regression problem to predict the location (coordinates and sizes) of bounding boxes and associated classes. We used 316 ultrasound scans of fetal brains and their respective cerebellar segmentations. From these, 78 images were randomly taken to be treated as test images and the rest were available to feed the trainings. Segmentation masks were converted to numerical descriptions of bounding boxes. To deal with small data set, transfer learning was done by initializing convolutional layers with weights pretrained on Imagenet [5]. We evaluated detection using F1 score and localization using average precision (AP) for 78 test images. Our best AP was 84.8% using 121 divisions or cells per image. Future work will focus on segmentation task assisted by localization.
Geographical variation in morphological leaf traits of Huperzia serrata (lycopodiaceae) from Vietnam

Morphological leaf traits can be used to assess adaptive responses of plants to environmental conditions. To assess how the representation of Huperzia serrata leaf traits, such as leaf length (LL), leaf width (LW) and leaf area (LA) response to changes in mean annual temperature (MAT), sunshine duration (SuH), mean annual precipitation (MAP), air humidity (Hu), intraspecific variation of the morphological leaf traits of the species was analyzed along a geographical gradient of Vietnam. The results showed that among the three populations at the three sites, leaf sizes increased with MAT and MAP. Huperzia serrata, climatic factors, morphological leaf traits, Vietnam.
Critical Success Strategies for Competitive Advantage of Indigenous Construction Firms in Developing Countries: A Ghana Study

Though a plethora of studies have suggested indigenous construction firms in developing countries are competitively disadvantaged and risk being marginalized in the competition posed by their foreign counterparts, there is lack of empirical study that identifies the critical success strategies for competitive advantage of indigenous construction firms in developing countries to adduce empirical findings towards policy direction and formulation. Thus, this study identifies the critical success strategies for competitive advantage of indigenous construction firms in developing countries using Ghana as a case study and suggests strategies for competitive advantage of indigenous construction firms. The use of principal component analysis and varimax rotation in data analysis aided in reducing the large set of success strategies to four principal components. Using a questionnaire survey, 667 respondents were invited to rate 21 success strategies identified from literature based on their knowledge and experience. Correlations between the 21 variables showed that four key components underlay the critical success strategies for competitive advantage of indigenous construction firms in developing countries, namely tendering, contract, client-centred and branding strategies. Findings and recommendations of this study may be useful to construction stakeholders who are seeking innovative ways to enhance indigenous construction firms’ competitive advantage and policy direction.
Identification of rice resistant to rice false smut and the virulence differentiation of Ustilaginoidea virens in Jangsu Province.

The rice resistance to false smut was identified and the virulence differentiation of Ustilaginoidea virens was investigated by artificial injected inoculation in Jangsu Province.The results showed that 44 in 198 varieties were complete immunity(CI),such as Yandao 1201,Nanjing 17113.34 varieties were high resistance(HR),such as Huai 66,Changyou 008,Huai 68.29 varieties were resistance(R),such as Cunsanli,Xiangyou 953.37 varieties were middle resistance(MR),such as A2,Mangxiaobaiwan.31 varieties were middle sensibility(MS),such as Xiangzinuo,Zaochadao.15 varieties were sensibility(S),such as Tianfengyou 559,Yanyou 1120.8 varieties were high sensibility(HS),such as Huangkeyouzhan,Xiaohongjing,CVR4.46 strains with virulence were injected to the three different resistant varieties which had been identified,the result of virulence differentiation of U.virens indicated that there was a discrepancy between different rice varieties in response to one strain,and for one variety,a prominent virulence differentiation was between the strains tested.
Biodiversity loss in grasslands : consequences for ecosystem functioning and interactions with above- and belowground organisms

Considering the current rate of extinctions, it is crucial to understand the consequences of these losses of biodiversity for the functioning of ecosystems. Grasslands proved a very suitable ecosystem for biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research. In earlier experiments, nitrogen-fixing legumes dominated the effects of plant diversity, but in our experiment without legumes we also found that diverse plant communities have higher productivity than species-poor ones. These results could not be explained by sampling effects. Instead, complementarity in nutrient uptake and more efficient nutrient use at high diversity are the most important driving forces behind the positive effects of diversity. We also found that the negative effect of plant diversity on the invasibility of the community may be a sampling effect, as the increased presence of two particular plant species were the most important factors affecting invasion success. Plant diversity may also affect many other organisms in grasslands. We found that nematodes responded positively to plant diversity. Specific associations between plants and nematodes resulted in increased nematode diversity at high plant diversity. Of course, higher trophic level organisms do not only respond to plant diversity, they may also regulate plant diversity. We found that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) alter competition between plants and contribute to plant diversity by enhancing the establishment of plants. Earlier studies also reported strong effects of herbivores, pathogens and mutualists on plant communities, but most of these studies investigated a single group of organisms in isolation from other driving forces. We show that the separate effects of these organisms on plant diversity may change dramatically when studied in combination. A neutral effect of an aboveground insect herbivore on plant diversity and a positive effect of a belowground insect herbivore turned strongly negative when both herbivores were present in the plant community. It is argued that a combined approach, using interactions between changes in plant diversity and multiple 'drivers of plant diversity' (both biotic and abiotic) is needed to fully understand plant community dynamics. To be able to predict the consequences of biodiversity loss worldwide it is necessary to integrate the results of this approach over different ecosystems and ecosystem processes across large spatial and temporal scales.
Introductory Chapter: Ramifications of Incomplete Knowledge

Mathematical statistics has long been widely practiced in many fields of science [1]. Nevertheless, statistical methods have remained remarkably intact ever since the pioneering work [2] of R.A. Fisher and his contemporary scientists early in the twentieth century. Recently however, it has been claimed that most scientific results are wrong [3], due to malpractice of statistical methods. Errors of that kind are not caused by imperfect methodology but rather, reflect lack of understanding and proper interpretation. In this introductory chapter, a different cause of errors is addressed—the ubiquitous practice of willful ignorance (WI) [4]. Usually it is applied with intent to remedy lack of knowledge and simplify or merely enable application of established statistical methods. Virtually all statistical approaches require complete statistical knowledge at some stage. In practice though, that can hardly ever be established. For instance, Bayes estimation relies upon prior knowledge. Any equal a priori probability assumption (“uninformed prior”) does hardly disguise some facts are not known, which may be grossly deceiving. Uniform distribution is a specific assumption like any other. Willful ignorance of that kind must not be confused with knowledge to which we associate some degree of confidence. It may be better to explore rather than ignore consequences of what is not known at all. That will require novel perspectives on how mathematical statistics is practiced, which is the scope of this book.
The role of sown wildflower strips for biological control in agroecosystems

As agriculture represents the main land user, agro-ecosystems are major drivers of landscape structure, biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. The extension of monocultures and intensive use of chemicals led to simplified landscapes with often only small and fragmented remnants of refuge habitats and an associated decline of biodiversity. As beneficial insects provide ecosystem functions such as pollination and biological control, agriculture faces an important challenge to protect populations of beneficial insects to restore and maintain essential ecosystem services. This can be achieved by habitat manipulation, e.g. by the implementation of agri-environment schemes. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of local habitat manipulation with sown flower habitats and of varying landscape composition in the surrounding of the study fields on biological control of agricultural pests. With field experiments, different groups of natural enemies of cereal aphids (ground- and vegetation-dwelling predators and parasitoids) and their potential biological control were analyzed in winter wheat fields in the range of flower habitats and in differently structured landscapes. Additionally, the potential of the flower habitats for biological control of the rape pollen beetle by its parasitoids was also analyzed in the context of landscapes with varying complexities to test for local and landscape influences on biological control.
How People Reflect On The Usage Of Cosmetic Virtual Goods: A Structural Topic Modeling Analysis Of R/Dota2 Discussions

With virtual purchases being a leading source of revenue for game developers, it is still unclear how players evaluate non-functional goods and the experiences those goods grant. With the use of structural topic models, this work demonstrates the dimensions of players’ experience extracted from discussions in association with price changes. This work contributes to the field by decomposing virtual goods values into experience dimensions in their relationship between extracted experience dimensions and the item’s price, and by a detailed description of expectation mismatch.