Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stochastic tools hidden behind the empirical dielectric relaxation laws

The paper is devoted to recent advances in stochastic modeling of anomalous kinetic processes observed in dielectric materials which are prominent examples of disordered (complex) systems. Theoretical studies of dynamical properties of ‘structures with variations’ (Goldenfield and Kadanoff 1999 Science 284 87–9) require application of such mathematical tools—by means of which their random nature can be analyzed and, independently of the details distinguishing various systems (dipolar materials, glasses, semiconductors, liquid crystals, polymers, etc), the empirical universal kinetic patterns can be derived. We begin with a brief survey of the historical background of the dielectric relaxation study. After a short outline of the theoretical ideas providing the random tools applicable to modeling of relaxation phenomena, we present probabilistic implications for the study of the relaxation-rate distribution models. In the framework of the probability distribution of relaxation rates we consider description of complex systems, in which relaxing entities form random clusters interacting with each other and single entities. Then we focus on stochastic mechanisms of the relaxation phenomenon. We discuss the diffusion approach and its usefulness for understanding of anomalous dynamics of relaxing systems. We also discuss extensions of the diffusive approach to systems under tempered random processes. Useful relationships among different stochastic approaches to the anomalous dynamics of complex systems allow us to get a fresh look at this subject. The paper closes with a final discussion on achievements of stochastic tools describing the anomalous time evolution of complex systems.
NMR Analysis of a Novel Enzymatically Active Unlinked Dengue NS2B-NS3 Protease Complex*

Background: Dengue protease is a two-component protease that is important for viral replication. Results: An unlinked protease complex containing the NS2B regulatory region and the NS3 protease domain was obtained. Conclusion: The unlinked protease complex produces dispersed cross-peaks in NMR spectra and exists predominantly in a closed conformation in solution. Significance: This new construct will be a useful tool for drug discovery against the dengue virus. The dengue virus (DENV) is a mosquito-borne pathogen responsible for an estimated 100 million human infections annually. The viral genome encodes a two-component trypsin-like protease that contains the cofactor region from the nonstructural protein NS2B and the protease domain from NS3 (NS3pro). The NS2B-NS3pro complex plays a crucial role in viral maturation and has been identified as a potential drug target. Using a DENV protease construct containing NS2B covalently linked to NS3pro via a Gly4-Ser-Gly4 linker (“linked protease”), previous x-ray crystal structures show that the C-terminal fragment of NS2B is remote from NS3pro and exists in an open state in the absence of an inhibitor; however, in the presence of an inhibitor, NS2B complexes with NS3pro to form a closed state. This linked enzyme produced NMR spectra with severe signal overlap and line broadening. To obtain a protease construct with a resolved NMR spectrum, we expressed and purified an unlinked protease complex containing a 50-residue segment of the NS2B cofactor region and NS3pro without the glycine linker using a coexpression system. This unlinked protease complex was catalytically active at neutral pH in the absence of glycerol and produced dispersed cross-peaks in a 1H-15N heteronuclear single quantum correlation spectrum that enabled us to conduct backbone assignments using conventional techniques. In addition, titration with an active-site peptide aldehyde inhibitor and paramagnetic relaxation enhancement studies demonstrated that the unlinked DENV protease exists predominantly in a closed conformation in solution. This protease complex can serve as a useful tool for drug discovery against DENV.
Use of Weighted Vests in Pediatric Occupational Therapy Practice

The aim of this study was to investigate pediatric occupational therapists' general experience and practice with weighted vests and their impressions about whether weighted vests are effective in changing specific behaviors of children with whom they have used weighted vests. A survey was mailed to a random sample of 514 pediatric occupational therapists who belonged to the School-Based Systems Special Interest Section or the Sensory Integration Special Interest Section of the American Occupational Therapy Association. The response rate was 68%. The survey included 43 items which covered therapist opinions, procedures, behavioral observations and knowledge about weighted vests, in addition to demographic information. Respondents who use weighted vests were more likely to have advanced degrees or certifications and more years of experience as pediatric therapists. They reported using weighted vests with preschool and young elementary school-aged children with the diagnoses of autism or attention deficit disorder. Staying on task, staying in seat and attention span were the most common behaviors that therapists reported improving when weighted vests were used.
Examining Competing Models of Transformational Leadership, Leadership Trust, Change Commitment, and Job Satisfaction

This study discusses the influence of transformational leadership on job satisfaction through assessing six alternative models related to the mediators of leadership trust and change commitment utilizing a data sample (N = 341; M age = 32.5 year, SD = 5.2) for service promotion personnel in Taiwan. The bootstrap sampling technique was used to select the better fitting model. The tool of hierarchical nested model analysis was applied, along with the approaches of bootstrapping mediation, PRODCLIN2, and structural equation modeling comparison. The results overall demonstrate that leadership is important and that leadership role identification (trust) and workgroup cohesiveness (commitment) form an ordered serial relationship.
A 98.8% efficient bidirectional full-bridge isolated dc-dc GaN converter

The paper presents the design and development of an ultra-high efficiency bidirectional isolated full bridge dc-dc converter using Gallium Nitride (GaN) devices. To achieve ultrahigh efficiency, GaN devices, synchronous rectification and high efficiency magnetics are used. The proposed bidirectional converter allows a power flow in both directions using the same power components; this increases power density and reduce the cost. The performance of a 1.7 kW bidirectional converter is experimentally validated in both forward direction (buck mode) and backward direction (boost mode). The converter operates at a switching frequency of 50 kHz with a voltage of 130V at one side and 52V at the other side of the converter. The fast switching speed of the GaN devices are utilized to achieve extremely high conversion efficiency thus reducing the total volume of the converter. The high power GaN converter has attained an extremely high efficiency of 98.8% in both the directions. This paper demonstrates the highest achievable conversion efficiency with the present technology.
Pediatric Peri-Insular Hemispherotomy

A number of surgical procedures are available for patients with epilepsy associated with diffuse hemispheric disorders. In this report, 16 pediatric patients had hemispherectomy: 5 underwent hemidecortication and 11 had peri-insular hemispherotomy. The clinical records were retrospectively reviewed, and the results and complications of the procedures were documented. The procedure was feasible in very young children and in the absence of ventriculomegaly.
Regular Exercise, Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) Activity and the 4G/5G Promoter Polymorphism in the PAI-1 Gene

Summary The aim of this controlled randomised clinical trial was to investigate the effects of regular low to moderate intensity physical activity on plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) activity during three years while taking into account the 4G/5G polymorphism in the promoter of the PAI-1 gene. Male subjects (age 52-62 years, n = 132) were randomised into an exercise or a (non-intervention) reference group. Aerobic threshold increased by 8.8% (p = 0.025) in the exercise group, and decreased by 1.1% in the non-intervention group, while PAI-1 activity did not change significantly in either study group. However, homozygotes for the 4G allele in the exercise group showed a 36% reduction in PAI-1 (p = 0.025). In conclusion, although regular moderate physical activity did not decrease PAI-1 activity in the whole group, regular exercise may be effective for controlling elevated PAI-1 level in subjects homozygous for the 4G allele.
Transfusion medicine service policies for recombinant factor VIIa administration

Recombinant FVIIa (rFVIIa) has been approved for treatment of bleeding in hemophilia patients with inhibitors. It has also been successfully used in nonhemophilia patients with acquired antibodies against FVIII (acquired hemophilia). Pharmacological doses of rFVIIa have been found to enhance the thrombin generation on already activated platelets and, therefore, may also likely be of benefit in providing hemostasis in other situations characterized by profuse bleeding and impaired thrombin generation, 1 such as patients with thrombocytopenia and in those with functional platelet defects. 2,3 Additionally, it has been used successfully in a variety of less well‐characterized bleeding situations, 4–7 as well as in patients with impaired liver function. 8,9
Desktop Shielding System

A new active shielding system, which can be operated on a desktop, is developed with two identical separate magnetic shells: cap shell and cup shell. Shells are axis-symmetric and made of fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP) layers and 20 layers of magnetic sheets sandwiched with the FRP layers. A ring coil for the active compensation is attached to both of the shells so that the axial component of the magnetic field can be shielded at the center space between two shells. This shielding system may be useful in such a case where a single component of the magnetic field from samples needs to be measured for detecting important information. Furthermore, due to the opening at all along the shell edge, samples can be continuously conveyed to the measurement point in the shield. The shielding performance has been investigated numerically for various design parameters and confirmed experimentally. The shielding factor (SF) achieved at low frequency is very high as it reaches 3162 at 1 Hz and it is as high as 100 at 100 Hz.
Nitric oxide: a regulator of mast cell activation and mast cell‐mediated inflammation

Nitric oxide (NO) plays diverse roles in physiological and pathological processes. During immune and inflammatory responses, for example in asthma, NO is generated at relatively high and sustained levels by the inducible form of nitric oxide synthase (NOS‐2). NOS‐2 derived NO regulates the function, growth, death and survival of many immune and inflammatory cell types. In the case of mast cells, NO suppresses antigen‐induced degranulation, mediator release, and cytokine expression. The action of NO on mast cells is time dependent, requiring several hours, and noncGMP mediated, most probably involving chemical modification of proteins. NO inhibits a number of mast cell‐dependent inflammatory processes in vivo, including histamine mediated vasodilatation, vasopermeation and leucocyte‐endothelial cell attachment. In human asthma and animal models of lung inflammation the role of NO is harder to define. However, although there are conflicting data, the balance of evidence favours a predominantly protective role for NO. Mimicking or targeting NO dependent pathways may prove to be a valuable therapeutic approach to mast cell mediated diseases.
Redesign and analysis of globally asymptotically stable bearing only SLAM

The Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) estimation problem is a nonlinear problem, due to the nature of the range and bearing measurements. In latter years it has been demonstrated that if the nonlinearities from the attitude are handled by a separate nonlinear observer, the SLAM dynamics can be represented as a linear time varying (LTV) system, by introducing these nonlinearities and nonlinear measurements as time varying vectors and matrices. This makes the SLAM estimation problem globally solvable with a Kalman filter, however, the noise structure is no longer trivial. In this paper, a new bearings only SLAM estimation algorithm is presented, including a novel design of the noise covariance matrices. Simulations of the SLAM estimator are presented, and show the performance of the state and uncertainty estimates, as well as the stability of the proposed estimator.
Calcitonin gene-related peptide receptor antagonist BIBN 4096 BS for the acute treatment of migraine.

BACKGROUND Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) may have a causative role in migraine. We therefore hypothesized that a CGRP-receptor antagonist might be effective in the treatment of migraine attacks. METHODS In an international, multicenter, double-blind, randomized clinical trial of BIBN 4096 BS, a highly specific and potent nonpeptide CGRP-receptor antagonist, 126 patients with migraine received one of the following: placebo or 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2.5, 5, or 10 mg of BIBN 4096 BS intravenously over a period of 10 minutes. A group-sequential adaptive treatment-assignment design was used to minimize the number of patients exposed. RESULTS The 2.5-mg dose was selected, with a response rate of 66 percent, as compared with 27 percent for placebo (P=0.001). The BIBN 4096 BS group as a whole had a response rate of 60 percent. Significant superiority over placebo was also observed with respect to most secondary end points: the pain-free rate at 2 hours; the rate of sustained response over a period of 24 hours; the rate of recurrence of headache; improvement in nausea, photophobia, phonophobia, and functional capacity; and the time to meaningful relief. An effect was apparent after 30 minutes and increased over the next few hours. The overall rate of adverse events was 25 percent after the 2.5-mg dose of the drug and 20 percent for the BIBN 4096 BS group as a whole, as compared with 12 percent for placebo. The most frequent side effect was paresthesia. There were no serious adverse events. CONCLUSIONS The CGRP antagonist BIBN 4096 BS was effective in treating acute attacks of migraine.
Recognition of own-race and other-race faces by three-month-old infants.

BACKGROUND People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. METHOD In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested face recognition in 3-month-old Caucasian infants by conducting two experiments using Caucasian and Asiatic faces and a visual pair-comparison task. We hypothesized that if the other race effect develops together with face processing skills during the first months of life, the ability to recognize own-race faces will be greater than the ability to recognize other-race faces: 3-month-old Caucasian infants should be better at recognizing Caucasian faces than Asiatic faces. If, on the contrary, the other-race effect is the long-term result of acquired expertise, no difference between recognizing own- and other-race faces will be observed at that age. RESULTS In Experiment 1, Caucasian infants were habituated to a single face. Recognition was assessed by a novelty preference paradigm. The infants' recognition performance was better for Caucasian than for Asiatic faces. In Experiment 2, Caucasian infants were familiarized with three individual faces. Recognition was demonstrated with both Caucasian and Asiatic faces. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that (i) the representation of face information by 3-month-olds may be race-experience-dependent (Experiment 1), and (ii) short-term familiarization with exemplars of another race group is sufficient to reduce the other-race effect and to extend the power of face processing (Experiment 2).
Recombinant IκBα-loaded curcumin nanoparticles for improved cancer therapeutics

The field of recombinant protein therapeutics has been evolving rapidly, making significant impact on clinical applications for several diseases, including cancer. However, the functional aspects of proteins rely exclusively on their structural integrity, in which nanoparticle mediated delivery offers unique advantages over free proteins. In the present work, a novel strategy has been developed where the nanoparticles (NPs) used for the delivery of the recombinant protein could contribute to enhancing the therapeutic efficacy of the recombinant protein. The transcription factor, NFκB, involved in cell growth and its inhibitor, IκBα, regulates its proliferation. Another similar naturally available molecule, which inhibits the function of NFκB, is curcumin. Hence, we have developed a ‘green synthesis’ method for preparing water-soluble curcumin nanoparticles to stabilize recombinant IκBα protein. The NPs were characterized by UV–vis and fluorescence spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and dynamic light scattering before administration into human cervical carcinoma (HeLa) and glioblastoma (U87MG) cells. Experimental results demonstrated that this combined module had enhanced therapeutic efficacy, causing apoptotic cell death, which was confirmed by cytotoxicity assay and flowcytometry analyses. The expression of apoptotic genes studied by semi-quantitative reverse transcription PCR delineated the molecular pathways involved in cell death. Thus, our study revealed that the functional delivery of recombinant IκBα-loaded curcumin NPs has promise as a natural-product-based protein therapeutics against cancer cells.
International practices to promote budget literacy : key findings and lessons learned

A budget is a vital document that lays out a government’s economic priorities in terms of policies and programs. The World Bank team’s preliminary scrutiny of practices aimed at promoting budget literacy revealed that, unlike financial literacy and citizenship education, concerted approaches to mainstream budget-literacy education at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of schooling are limited. Despite the dearth of literature on this topic, there has been no systematic attempt to compile standalone practices for advancing budget literacy that have been adopted by countries. This review seeks to fill this gap by taking stock of illustrative initiatives promoting budget literacy in selected countries. The presented findings and lessons seek to inform the efforts of practitioners, including policy makers, educational specialists, curriculum experts, fiscal transparency advocates, and civil society organizations interested in improving education or civic engagement and accountability in budget processes. This book presents 35 case studies from 34 countries on the basis of a stock-taking exercise of practices promoting budget literacy. A broad range of curricular content, pedagogical approaches, and learning outcomes for budget literacy are documented. Twenty-seven of the case studies focus on school-based initiatives, and eight on beyond school initiatives.
Low-Oxygen-Recovery Assay for High-Throughput Screening of Compounds against Nonreplicating Mycobacterium tuberculosis

ABSTRACT Screening for new antimicrobial agents is routinely conducted only against actively replicating bacteria. However, it is now widely accepted that a physiological state of nonreplicating persistence (NRP) is responsible for antimicrobial tolerance in many bacterial infections. In tuberculosis, the key to shortening the 6-month regimen lies in targeting this NRP subpopulation. Therefore, a high-throughput, luminescence-based low-oxygen-recovery assay (LORA) was developed to screen antimicrobial agents against NRP Mycobacterium tuberculosis. M. tuberculosis H37Rv containing a plasmid with an acetamidase promoter driving a bacterial luciferase gene was adapted to low oxygen conditions by extended culture in a fermentor with a 0.5 headspace ratio. The MICs of 31 established antimicrobial agents were determined in microplate cultures maintained under anaerobic conditions for 10 days and, for comparative purposes, under aerobic conditions for 7 days. Cultures exposed to drugs under anaerobic conditions followed by 28 h of “recovery” under ambient oxygen produced a luminescent signal that was, for most compounds, proportional to the number of CFU determined prior to the recovery phase. No agents targeting the cell wall were active against NRP M. tuberculosis, whereas drugs hitting other cellular targets had a range of activities. The calculated Z′ factor was in the range of 0.58 to 0.84, indicating the suitability of the use of LORA for high-throughput assays. This LORA is sufficiently robust for use for primary high-throughput screening of compounds against NRP M. tuberculosis.
Coordinated tracking control of multi-agent system with time-delay and partly intermittent information transmission

Coordinated tracking control problem is investigated for nonlinear multi-agent systems with time-delay and partly intermittent information transmission in this paper. When the directed communication topology has a spanning tree, the coordinated tracking control problem can be solved. The proposed delayed and partly intermittent coordinated tracking protocol can guarantee that each follower can track the leader and keep a desired formation. Then, by means of the graph theory and Lyapunov control approach, it is proved that under time-delay and partly intermittent information transmission, the coordinated tracking control system can achieve the exponential stability. Finally, simulation examples are given to verify the validity of the coordinated control algorithm.
Interindividual variability in hepatic drug glucuronidation: studies into the role of age, sex, enzyme inducers, and genetic polymorphism using the human liver bank as a model system

The human liver bank has provided an invaluable model system for the study of interindividual variability in expression and activity of the major hepatic UGTs, including UGT1A1, 1A4, 1A6, 1A9, 2B7, and 2B15. Based on studies using UGT-isoform–selective probes, the rank order of activity variability is UGT 1A1>1A6>2B15>1A4 = 1A9>2B7, with coefficient of variation values ranging from 92 to 45%. Liver donor age, sex, enzyme inducers, and genetic polymorphism are factors that have been implicated as sources of this variability in UGT activity. The expression of UGTs prior to, and immediately following, birth is quite limited, explaining the susceptibility of neonates to certain drug toxicities. Old age appears to have minimal effect on UGT function. Sex differences in UGT activity are relatively small and are confined to several UGTs, including UGT2B15, which shows higher activity in males, compared with females. Enzyme inducers, including coadministered drugs, smoking, and alcohol, may increase hepatic UGT levels. Human liver bank phenotype-genotype studies, using UGT-isoform–selective probes have identified common genetic polymorphisms that are predictive of glucuronidation activity in vitro and that were subsequently verified as predictors of probe-drug clearance by glucuronidation in vivo.