Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bottlebrush dendritic endings and large dendritic fields: Motion‐detecting neurons in the tectofugal pathway

In avian and mammalian brains, visual information from the retina is conveyed to the telencephalon via two separate pathways: the thalamofugal and the tectofugal pathways. Recently, Karten et al. ([1997] J. Comp. Neurol. 387:449–465) examined a portion of the tectofugal pathway, the projection from the optic tectum to the nucleus rotundus thalami, in pigeons. They defined two distinct subpopulations of tectal neurons projecting from the stratum griseum centrale (SGC; tectal layer 13) to specific divisions of the rotundus. The goal of this study in chick was to verify the existence of the type I and type II SGC neurons, as defined by Karten et al., and then examine in greater detail the connectivity and morphology of these SGC neurons. Furthermore, our results suggest how the unique morphological characteristics of SGC neurons contribute to the large receptive fields (20–50°) found in physiological recordings and the SGC neuronal response to extremely small (ca. 0.05°), fast‐moving (100°/second) stimuli.
Which vehicle for citizenship transmission: Social Studies or Technology Education?

Citizenship education is generally present in educational programmes. When Social Studies was introduced into the New Zealand curriculum in the 1940s, its purpose was to prepare children for living in a democracy. Social Studies became the vehicle through which values of citizenship were transmitted to children. Recently, Technology Education has become a core curriculum area. One of the justifications for its inclusion is as a vehicle to enable students to become responsible citizens in a democracy. This paper contemplates the histories of the development of Social Studies and Technology Education, and considers the place of citizenship education within each discipline.
Electric field analysis of 132kv EPDM insulator and correlation with ageing features

A COMSOL multiphysics electric field analysis of an ethylene-propylene rubber (EPDM) insulator is presented. The 132kV insulator is an inverted post insulator that is taken from a jumper loop. It has been in service in a severely polluted environment for eight years. The insulator's surfaces are asymmetrically aged with organic dark deposits covering the insulator's surface, and with additional surface markings. The insulator has a manufacturing artifact, known as the mold line, which forms an elongated protrusion along the length of the insulator. This artifact is introduced into the COMSOL model to investigate its effect on the local electrical field. The reason for this study is that the area surrounding the mold line is lighter in color, with markings that suggest discharge activity. The regions of the localized field enhancements are identified and correlated with the ageing features, such as hydrophobicity loss, surface roughness and discoloration observed after eight years in service. A discussion whether the environment or the electric field are dominating the ageing process of the insulator is included.
LIVER FAILURE AND LIVER DISEASE

The pathogenic mechanism of hepatorenal syndrome is not well established. We investigated the circulatory function in cirrhosis before and after the development of hepatorenal syndrome. Systemic and hepatic hemodynamics and the activity of endogenous vasoactive systems were measured in 66 patients who had cirrhosis with tense ascites and normal serum creatinine levels; measurements were repeated at follow-up in 27 cases in whom hepatorenal syndrome had developed. At baseline, mean arterial pressure and cardiac output were significantly higher, and hepatic venous pressure gradient, plasma renin activity, and norepinephrine concentration were significantly lower in patients who did not develop hepatorenal syndrome compared with those presenting with this complication. Peripheral vascular resistance was decreased to the same extent in the two groups. Plasma renin activity and cardiac output were the only independent predictors of hepatorenal syndrome. Hepatorenal syndrome occurred in the setting of a significant reduction in mean arterial pressure (83 9 to 75 7 mmHg; P < .001), cardiac output (6.0 1.2 to 5.4 1.5 L/min; P < .01), and wegded pulmonary pressure (9.2 2.6 to 7.5 2.6 mmHg; P < .001) and an increase in plasma renin activity (9.9 5.2 to 17.5 11.4 ng/mL hr; P < .001), norepinephrine concentration (571 241 to 965 502 pg/mL; P < .001), and hepatic venous pressure gradient. No changes were observed in peripheral vascular resistance. In conclusion, these data indicate that hepatorenal syndrome is the result of a decrease in cardiac output in the setting of a severe arterial vasodilation. (HEPATOLOGY 2005;42:439-447.)
Risk and Risk Management for Australian Sex Workers

In this article, we address the experiences of female sex workers in urban Australia through analysis of interviews using a feminist approach. Although many previous studies have been conducted, our focus was on the voices of sex workers in an area that was rapidly gentrifying, leading to local community tensions. Intensive analysis of interview transcripts was employed to derive thematic codes for understanding how the women viewed and managed everyday risk in sex work. They were well aware of the health risks associated with sex work. For women working on premises, domain separation between sex work and other life domains was an important management strategy for maintaining self-esteem. For women working on the street, instincts honed by years of dangerous work provided a measure of safety. Our findings have implications for health and other agencies dealing with sex workers in situations in which community pressure is exerted to move sex workers away from the area.
Outpatient Medication Use in Chinese Geriatric Patients Admitted for Falls: A Case–Control Study at an Acute Hospital in Hong Kong

The study objective was to investigate the association of polypharmacy and medications with patient falls resulting in hip fractures among community-living geriatric patients. A case–control study was conducted at an acute public hospital in Hong Kong. The study population was community-living Chinese patients aged 65 years and above who were admitted for falls resulting in hip fractures during an 18-month study period. Each of these patients was matched to a control patient with the same age and sex, but without falls and fractures. Data were collected from electronic patient record. Data of 170 cases and 170 controls were eventually collected. The following variables associated with increased risk of falls resulting in hip fractures remained statistically significant after multivariate logistic regression, including benign prostatic hyperplasia [odds ratio (OR) = 2.654; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.105–6.378; P = 0.029], first-generation antihistamines (OR = 3.176; 95% CI, 1.044–9.664; P = 0.042), antiparkinson medications (OR = 3.754; 95% CI, 1.158–12.169; P = 0.027), osteoporosis (OR = 3.159; 95% CI, 1.167–8.552; P = 0.024), and use of walking aids (OR = 2.543; 95% CI, 1.544–4.188; P < 0.001). In conclusion, this study identified various medications and comorbidities, rather than polypharmacy based on the number of medications, as predictors associated with increased risk of falls resulting in hip fractures for local geriatric patients. The findings provided insights into the potential medication-related fall prevention strategies, including clinical medication review, adverse drug event monitoring, and drug optimization.
Inequalities in children's household contexts: place, parental presence and migration

PART 2 Children and Inequality: Closing the Gap High rates of poverty and inequality are reproduced over time and across generations. Amongst the many factors that perpetuate inequality – such as unequal education, unequal employment opportunities and earnings, and unequal health risks and health services – we need to consider the role of place and the unequal contexts in which children grow up. Location, or where people live, plays a major role in determining the availability of resources and opportunities that support human development. In the two decades since democracy, there have been improvements in many public goods: road access, the construction of human settlements, service infrastructure, schools and clinics.1 But vast disparities remain, and these will continue to reinforce human inequalities until more even levels of delivery and opportunity have been achieved.
Region based cache coherence for tiled MPSoCs

The need for faster and more energy efficient computing has led us to the multicore era with distributed shared memory hierarchies. The primary goal is to distribute parallel tasks onto multiple processing elements to collectively achieve shorter execution times at lower frequencies and supply voltages when compared to a single-core architecture. Major challenges of this approach are how to achieve local, low latency memory accesses and low overheads for coherence and synchronization management. We believe that enabling global coherence in tiled many-core architectures does not scale in a cost efficient manner and isn't even required for applications with limited degrees of parallelism. In this paper, we propose a novel region based cache coherence scheme, where coherence is provided by hardware directories within a flexibly sized but confined set of compute and memory tiles. We also show that data placement and task mapping have a huge impact on the application performance, and hence should be considered in conjunction with region based coherence. The approach is evaluated by means of a high level simulation model using workloads from PARSEC. Experiments demonstrate that our region based approach with multiple compute tiles increases performance by a factor of up to 2.5 compared to a single tile structure with nominally identical computing and memory resources. Thus the independent local memory accesses, which are effectively increasing the memory bandwidth, usually outweigh the penalties of inter-tile remote memory accesses. Our approach also reduces the directory structures significantly compared to traditional schemes, making it scalable for large MPSoCs (eg. by 41.4% for a 16 tile system with 4 tiles per region). Considering data-to-task-placement, our investigations show that it can lead to performance variations up to a factor of 12.7.
A capacitor-free feed-forward compensated single-stage merged topology fully-differential CMOS folded cascode amplifier

This paper presents a capacitor-free feed-forward compensation technique for single-stage CMOS folded-cascode operational transconductance amplifiers (OTA) using a "merged CMOS cascode transconductors" topology. A phase margin of around 65 degrees can be achieved without the use of any "added" load capacitance for the open-loop amplifier. This ensures optimum step response (fast settling without ringing) for the feedback amplifier in switched-capacitor signal processing applications. An improved "fast sensing" common-mode feedback circuit with high common-mode gain is also used for the single-stage cascode OTA.
alpha(2)-Adrenoceptor agonists inhibit vitreal glutamate and aspartate accumulation and preserve retinal function after transient ischemia.

Recent studies have suggested that alpha(2)-adrenergic agonists prevent neuronal cell death in a number of animal models, although the mechanism of alpha(2)-neuroprotection remains unclear. In a retinal ischemia model, the alpha(2)-specific agonist brimonidine (1 mg/kg i.p.) preserves approximately 80% of the electroretinogram (ERG) b-wave. The protective effect of brimonidine is completely blocked by coadministration of the alpha(2)- antagonist rauwolscine. Brimonidine treatment preserves the ERG b-wave if animals are treated 1 or 3 h before ischemia, but has no effect if it is injected during ischemia. The 3-h pretreatment effect is blocked by i.v. injection of rauwolscine 2 h later (1 h before ischemia). A comparison of vitreous humor glutamate levels between untreated and brimonidine-treated eyes shows that 1) after ischemia, glutamate levels rise 2- to 3-fold in the untreated animals, and 2) glutamate levels in the brimonidine-treated animals are comparable to the nonischemic controls. Hence, the mechanism for brimonidine-mediated protection in the retinal ischemia model requires activation of the alpha(2)-adrenergic receptors immediately before and during ischemia. These data suggest that activation of the alpha(2)-adrenergic receptor may reduce ischemic retinal injury by preventing the accumulation of extracellular glutamate and aspartate.
Identification of a δ-Endotoxin Gene Product Specifically Active against Spodoptera littoralis Bdv. among Proteolysed Fractions of the Insecticidal Crystals of Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. aizawai 7.29

At least three different insecticidal crystal protein genes were shown to be expressed in Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. aizawai 7.29, a strain that is potentially active against the cotton leafworm Spodoptera littoralis Bdv. Among crude K-60 fractions (60- to 70-kilodalton [kDa] molecules) that were products of proteolysed crystals containing the active domains of the protoxin molecules, we were able to distinguish several distinct components on the basis of their antigenic relationship and their larvicidal properties. A purified fraction designated SF2 was a 61-kDa component specifically active against Pieris brassicae L. and homologous to the B. thuringiensis subsp. berliner 1715 plasmid-encoded crystal protein. A second fraction designated SF1 was composed of 63- and 65-kDa polypeptides and was specifically active against S. littoralis. The SF1 fraction and particularly the 65-kDa component were not antigenically related to the 61-kDa component. The purified fractions were compared with the products of three different crystal protein genes we previously cloned from total DNA of B. thuringiensis subsp. aizawai, among them a new type of crystal protein gene encoding a protein that is specifically active against S. littoralis and other insects of the Noctuidae family. This approach led us to consider the 65-kDa component as a minimum active part of a δ-endotoxin that is encoded by this new gene. Products of the two other cloned genes can be correlated with the 61- and 63-kDa components, respectively. Thus, in B. thuringiensis subsp. aizawai 7.29, multiple δ-endotoxin genes of different structural types direct the synthesis of several δ-endotoxins with different host specificities which were identified as components of the insecticidal crystals.
Vestibulo‐ocular Signal Transformation in Frequency‐Tuned Channels

Self‐generated locomotor activity is accompanied by head movements that cause retinal image displacements with a resultant degradation of visual information processing. To maintain visual acuity, retinal image drift must be counteracted by dynamic compensatory gaze adjustments that derive to a large extent from vestibulo‐ocular reflexes (VOR). During head motion, vestibular signals code a wide frequency range from static head position to high acceleration profiles during rapid head turns. This large dynamic range suggests that the sensory–motor transformation occurs in parallel, yet complementary frequency‐tuned pathways. In fact, the classic “three‐neuronal” VOR pathway is composed of distinct functional subgroups of cells with different intrinsic properties and response dynamics at each synaptic level. This generates sets of neuronal filters that are ideal for particular frequency ranges and signaling patterns, respectively. In second‐order vestibular subgroups, different filter functions, and hence a different synaptic processing is facilitated by a coadaptation of intrinsic membrane and emerging network properties. The consecutive assembly and sequential connectivity of pre‐ and postsynaptic neuronal elements with corresponding physiological properties, generates parallel pathways that allow for separate coding of different dynamic head‐motion components during locomotor activity.
Electric current driven polarity change of nanomgnets

This paper investigates the initial steps in setting logical inputs to an edge-driven computational device composed of an array of magnetic nickel dots. An edge driven device computes by setting inputs on one edge of the device, driving the entire system into a global ground state, and reading the results on the far edge. In the proposed architecture, the device is made up of an array of nickel dots and offers low power dissipation, high integration density, room temperature operation and simple fabrication steps. Current traveling down a nearby wire is used to set the magnetic polarity of dots on the input edge. The logical state of a dot is identified with the orientation of the dots magnetic field. The switching of polarity was attempted via a locally induced magnetic field generated by reversing the direction of the current in the nearby wire, a first step in the ultimate construction of an edge-driven device. The aluminum wire had dimensions of 250 nm in thickness, 8 μm in width, and 40 μm in length. The nickel dots, formed by electron beam lithography, had a thickness of 100 nm and diameter ranging from 300 nm to 500 nm. Switching of the magnetic polarity of dots near the wire was observed using magnetic force microscopy (MFM), with MFM cantilever phase images used to identify the reversals. In contrast, dots further away from the wire did not appear to be influenced by the direction of current in the wire, another requirement for edge-driven devices.
The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling for university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time. Based on a difference-in-differences approach and using administrative data on all students in Germany, we find that this reform decreased university enrollment rates. Moreover, students are more likely to delay their enrollment, to drop out of university, and to change their major. We discuss supply-side restrictions, age differences, and increased workload during school as potential mechanisms and present back-of-the-envelope cost–benefit considerations showing that the earnings gain from an extended labor market participation may still offset the adverse effects presented in this study.
Factors associated with strain in co-resident spouses of patients following stroke

Objective: To identify the factors associated with carer strain following stroke. Design: Co-resident spouses of stroke patients were sent questionnaire measures of their perceptions of strain, stress, mood, handicap, adjustment, social support, life satisfaction and personality, and patient's mood and independence in activities of daily living. Setting: Stroke spouses were identified from the stroke register at City Hospital, Nottingham. Results: In a sample of 222 carers, 37% had significant strain. Strain was highly correlated with negative affectivity on the Positive and Negative Affectivity Scale, carer mood on the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) and carer's perceptions of patient's independence in activities of daily living on the Extended Activities of Daily Living Scale (EADL). Logistic regression analysis of 96 of these carers supported the correlations and showed three factors, carer GHQ-12, patient EADL and negative affectivity, were independently associated with carer strain. Conclusion: The relationship between these factors and strain needs to be tested prospectively. Early identification of carers who may be at risk of strain later on will enable services to be targeted at prevention rather than cure.
Sequence‐specific binding by Aspergillus nidulans AflR, a C6 zinc cluster protein regulating mycotoxin biosynthesis

The Aspergillus nidulans aflR gene is found within a 60 kb gene cluster that includes ≈24 other genes that putatively function in the production of the aflatoxin‐related mycotoxin sterigmatocystin. Previous work showed that AflR is a C6 zinc binuclear cluster protein that is conserved across Aspergillus spp. and functions as a pathway‐specific transcription factor in activating expression of other cluster genes. In this report, we demonstrate that A. nidulans AflR (AnAflR) is a 45 kDa protein that binds to the palindromic sequence 5′‐TCG(N5)CGA‐3′ found in the promoter regions of several aflatoxin and sterigmatocystin cluster genes (stc genes). The in vivo relevance of this AnAflR binding site was assessed by examining the contribution of the three TCG(N5)CGA elements in the 1.1 kb promoter region of stcU using gene fusions with the bacterial uidA gene encoding β‐glucuronidase (GUS). By mutating one, two or all three of the AnAflR‐binding elements and examining GUS activity in wild‐type aflR or ΔaflR A. nidulans strains, we found that stc gene activation required both AnAflR and at least one TCG(N5)CGA AflR binding site.
Is it necessary to dissect levels I and IIB in hypopharyngeal cancer?

Conclusion: The low incidence of metastases in levels I and IIB in patients with hypopharyngeal cancer in cases of clinical N0 and N+ neck and the fact that all patients with metastases in levels I and IIB received postoperative radiotherapy justifies the preservation of levels I and IIB in patients with hypopharyngeal cancer to improve functional results and reduce the operating time. Objectives: Neck dissection of levels I and IIB is technically demanding due to the complex local anatomy and can cause several comorbidities. Therefore the aim of the study was to analyze whether levels I and IIB have to be dissected in patients with hypopharyngeal cancer. Methods: This was a retrospective analysis of all patients who underwent primary surgical treatment for hypopharyngeal cancer and neck dissection, with evaluation of the incidence of metastases in levels I and IIB in cases of cN0 and cN+ neck. Results: None of the patients with cN0 neck but 2/33 patients with cN+ neck had metastases in level I. Metastases in level IIB were detected in 1/14 patients with cN0 neck and 2/36 patients with cN+ neck. All patients with metastases in levels I and IIB received postoperative radiotherapy due to the N2b and N2c status.