bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Effect of dispersion and selective localization of carbon nanotubes on rheology and electrical conductivity of polyamide 6 (PA6), Polypropylene (PP), and PA6/PP nanocomposites
Authors: Abbasi Moud Aref , Javadi Azizeh , Nazockdast Hossein , Fathi Amir , Altstaedt Volker 
Published: November 2014

ABSTRACTNanocomposites were prepared by adding 1–3 vol % multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) to polyamide 6 (PA6), polypropylene (PP), and their co‐continuous blends of 60/40 and 50/50 volume compositions. Because of the good interaction and interfacial adhesion to the PA6, nanotubes were disentangled and distributed evenly through nanocomposites containing PA6. In contrast, lack of active interactions between the matrix and the CNTs resulted in poor tube dispersion in PP. These observations were then verified by studying the rheology and electrical conductivity of their respective nanocomposites. Absence of percolated CNT clusters and possible wrapping of the tubes by PA6 resulted in low electrical conductivity of PA6/CNT nanocomposites. On the other hand, despite the weak dispersion of the tubes, electrical conductivities of PP/CNT nanocomposites were much higher than all other counterparts. This could be the result of good three‐dimensional distribution of the agglomerated bundles and secondary aggregation of tubes in PP. Adding CNTs to blends of PA6/PP (60/40 and 50/50) resulted in almost full localization of carbon nanotubes in PA6, leading to their higher effective concentration. At the same CNT loadings, the blend nanocomposites had three to seven orders of magnitude higher electrical conductivity than pure PA6. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2015, 53, 368–378
Rapid search for tertiary fragments reveals protein sequence–structure relationships
Authors: Zhou Jianfu , Grigoryan Gevorg 
Published: November 2014

AbstractFinding backbone substructures from the Protein Data Bank that match an arbitrary query structural motif, composed of multiple disjoint segments, is a problem of growing relevance in structure prediction and protein design. Although numerous protein structure search approaches have been proposed, methods that address this specific task without additional restrictions and on practical time scales are generally lacking. Here, we propose a solution, dubbed MASTER, that is both rapid, enabling searches over the Protein Data Bank in a matter of seconds, and provably correct, finding all matches below a user‐specified root‐mean‐square deviation cutoff. We show that despite the potentially exponential time complexity of the problem, running times in practice are modest even for queries with many segments. The ability to explore naturally plausible structural and sequence variations around a given motif has the potential to synthesize its design principles in an automated manner; so we go on to illustrate the utility of MASTER to protein structural biology. We demonstrate its capacity to rapidly establish structure–sequence relationships, uncover the native designability landscapes of tertiary structural motifs, identify structural signatures of binding, and automatically rewire protein topologies. Given the broad utility of protein tertiary fragment searches, we hope that providing MASTER in an open‐source format will enable novel advances in understanding, predicting, and designing protein structure.
Determinants of Health-Related Quality of Life in Taiwanese Middle-Aged Women Stroke Survivors
Authors: Pai Hsiang-Chu , Wu Ming-Hsiu , Chang Mei-Yueh 
Published: November 2014

Abstract

Purpose:
Female stroke victims have a higher survival rate and experience a greater loss of quality of life than do male stroke victims. The aim of this study was to evaluate the determinants of health-related quality of life in middle-aged women stroke survivors.

Design:
This study is a cross-sectional design.

Methods:
This cross-sectional research uses a descriptive, prospective, and correlational study design to investigate the associations between latent variables. Participants included women stroke survivors, aged 45–65 years, who were patients at a medical center in Taiwan. Participants completed an interview and a six-part questionnaire comprising the Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36), National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale, Modified Rankin Scale, Burden Scale, Chinese Health Questionnaire, and five items that pertain to the survivor’s cognitive appraisal of coping. Structural equation modeling (SEM), with the use of the partial least squares (PLS) method, was used to examine the proposed conceptual model.

Findings:
A total of 48 dyad samples (48 female stroke survivors, mean age = 55.29; 48 caregivers, mean age = 42.71) participated in the study. Overall, women’s physical functioning (PF; stroke severity), cognitive appraisal of coping, and caregiver’s psychosocial functioning were the predictors, explaining 43.3% of the variance in women’s health-related quality of life.

Conclusions and Clinical Relevance:
We found that female stroke survivors’ level of stroke severity and negative appraisal-impact of stroke are significant predictors of the stroke survivor’s quality of life. In addition to assisting women in their PF rehabilitation, rehabilitation nurses also should help to develop survivors’ self-care confidence as a means to avoid the recurrence of stroke.
Detection of seam carving‐based video retargeting using forensics hash
Authors: Fei Wei , Gaobo Yang , Leida Li , Ming Xia , Dengyong Zhang 
Published: November 2014

AbstractSeam carving is a content‐aware multimedia retargeting technique to adaptively resize multimedia data for different display sizes. However, it can also be used to remove objects from digital object or video for malicious purposes. In this paper, a forensics hash‐based tampering detection and localization approach is proposed for seam carving‐based video retargeting. It extracts the invariant Speeded‐up Robust Feature points from every spatiotemporal image to represent the matching surface, and the relative position change of the neighboring matching surface is used to build the forensic hash in a compact and scalable way. Experimental results show that the proposed forensics approach can effectively estimate the exact amount and rough locations of deleted seam carving surfaces. It achieves desirable detection performance even when there are frames deleted. If the hash length is reasonably increased, it can estimate the rough location and exact amount of deleted frames. Moreover, the built forensics hash is of good robustness, scalability, and compactness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Synthesis of Some Novel Phthalocyanines with Methyl 2‐(oxy)‐2, 2‐diphenylacetate Substituents, Evaluation of Their Antioxidant‐ Antibacterial Activities and Electronic Properties
Authors: Ağırtaş M. Salih , Karataş Ceyhun , Gümüş Selçuk , Okumuş Veysi 
Published: November 2014

AbstractThe synthesis, characterization, spectral, antioxidant, and antibacterial properties of methyl 2‐(oxy)‐2, 2‐diphenylacetate substituted metallophthalocyanines (4–7) are reported. A novel phthalonitrile, methyl 2‐(2, 3‐dicyanophenoxy)‐2, 2‐diphenylacetate (3) was prepared and characterized. The new compounds were characterized by using electronic absorption spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, and elemental analysis. All compounds were tested for their antioxidant activity by using 2, 2‐diphenyl‐1‐picrylhydrazyl radical scavenging ability, metal chelating, and reducing power. Furthermore, these compounds were screened for their in vitro growth inhibiting activity by disc diffusion method against four gram positive and two gram negative bacteria. The electronic data of the new compounds were obtained by computational calculations at B3LYP/6‐31G(d, p) level of theory.
Languages adapt to their contextual niche
Authors: WINTERS JAMES , KIRBY SIMON , SMITH KENNY 
Published: November 2014

abstractIt is well established that context plays a fundamental role in how we learn and use language. Here we explore how context links short-term language use with the long-term emergence of different types of language system. Using an iterated learning model of cultural transmission, the current study experimentally investigates the role of the communicative situation in which an utterance is produced (situational context) and how it influences the emergence of three types of linguistic systems:underspecifiedlanguages (where only some dimensions of meaning are encoded linguistically),holisticsystems (lacking systematic structure), andsystematiclanguages (consisting of compound signals encoding both category-level and individuating dimensions of meaning). To do this, we set up a discrimination task in a communication game and manipulated whether the feature dimension shape was relevant or not in discriminating between two referents. The experimental languages gradually evolved to encode information relevant to the task of achieving communicative success, given the situational context in which they are learned and used, resulting in the emergence of different linguistic systems. These results suggest language systems adapt to their contextual niche over iterated learning.
In Memoriam
Authors: Keating Patricia A. 
Published: November 2014

Regent Exeter (9 October 1959 – 26 March 2014), Shropshire, UK (Life member).Prof. D. Dudley Knight (1 July 1939 – 25 June 2013), Professor Emeritus of Drama at the University of California, Irvine; actor and voice/dialect coach who taught the IPA to actors.Prof. Dr. Horst Weinstock (25 June 1931 – 8 May 2013), Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Romanistik, Aachen University (Life member).
Surveying Hong Kong in the 1950s: Western humanitarians and the ‘problem’ of Chinese refugees
Authors: MADOKORO LAURA 
Published: November 2014

AbstractAt the end of the Second World War, there were over a million displaced persons and refugees in Europe alone. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted with the expansion of the Japanese empire across the Pacific Theater, and many others were similarly displaced when Japan was defeated. Others later fled civil conflicts, in South Asia, for instance, and in China, where thousands left the mainland during the final days of the Chinese Civil War. Among this massive displacement in Asia, unlike in Europe, only a few groups were identified as refugees. One such group consisted of the migrants in Hong Kong who, after 1949, were understood to be refugees fleeing communist oppression in the People's Republic of China. This article examines the critical role that surveys (population studies designed to account for, and define, refugee groups) played in shaping particular, Westernized Cold War understandings of the refugee experience in Hong Kong. These surveys were organized by non-state interests and undertaken with financial support from major American philanthropies. In examining the objectives and methodologies of the refugee surveys conducted in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, in contrast with studies undertaken contemporaneously in Europe, this article observes that, although at the time the flaws in the surveys were recognized and regularly disregarded in the pursuit of broad political objectives, scholars have failed to adequately recognize the subjective nature of the surveys' supposedly empirical evidence. As a result, the dominant European-based narrative about modern refugees has obfuscated the distinctive aspects of the refugee experience in Hong Kong.
The safety dance: biophysics of membrane protein folding and misfolding in a cellular context
Authors: Schlebach Jonathan P. , Sanders Charles R. 
Published: November 2014

AbstractMost biological processes require the production and degradation of proteins, a task that weighs heavily on the cell. Mutations that compromise the conformational stability of proteins place both specific and general burdens on cellular protein homeostasis (proteostasis) in ways that contribute to numerous diseases. Efforts to elucidate the chain of molecular events responsible for diseases of protein folding address one of the foremost challenges in biomedical science. However, relatively little is known about the processes by which mutations prompt the misfolding ofα-helical membrane proteins, which rely on an intricate network of cellular machinery to acquire and maintain their functional structures within cellular membranes. In this review, we summarize the current understanding of the physical principles that guide membrane protein biogenesis and folding in the context of mammalian cells. Additionally, we explore how pathogenic mutations that influence biogenesis may differ from those that disrupt folding and assembly, as well as how this may relate to disease mechanisms and therapeutic intervention. These perspectives indicate an imperative for the use of information from structural, cellular, and biochemical studies of membrane proteins in the design of novel therapeutics and in personalized medicine.
Norm diffusion and health system strengthening: The persistent relevance of national leadership in global health governance
Authors: BROWN GARRETT WALLACE 
Published: November 2014

AbstractAcademics and policymakers often argue that global health policy greatly affects and influences national health systems because these policies transfer and implant ‘best practice’ norms and accountability techniques into local health systems. On the whole these arguments about the ‘diffusion of norms’ have merit since there is considerable evidence to suggest the existence of a positive correlation between global norms and national behaviour. Nevertheless, this article argues that traditional analytical frameworks to explain norm diffusion underplay the fact that norms are significantly ‘glocalised’ by national actors and further discount the role that national leadership plays in strengthening health systems. In response, this article presents a ten-year comparative paired study of the participatory governance mechanisms of the South African health system and its health strengthening measures. In doing so, the role of the national government in their relations with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFATM) will be examined and how key ‘partnership’ norms were amalgamated into health governance mechanisms. It will be argued that although global policy plays an important guiding role, health norms are never transcribed straightforwardly and a central element to successful health governance remains vested in the nation and the leadership role it exerts.
The Global Politics of Medicine: Beyond global health, against securitisation theory
Authors: HOWELL ALISON 
Published: November 2014

AbstractThis article makes the case for a new field in International Relations (IR): the Global Politics of Medicine. It argues that significant avenues of research can be opened up by focusing on medicine and the life sciences, in order to both challenge current IR theories, and develop new theoretical and empirical insights in IR. In particular, the article challenges the validity of securitisation theory, and specifically the argument that health has been securitised. Showing instead that medicine and warfare have been imbricated from the nineteenth century as strategies of population, it challenges securitisation theory's ahistoricism and its assumption that social security and international security (and the norm/exception) are analytically divisible. Bringing this into the present through the examples of triage, psychological resilience, and genetic intelligence in counterinsurgency, it traces how warfare and medicine now ambitiously seek to treat populations as sets of individual bodies. Arguing that we cannot retreat to some mythical state of politics ‘prior’ to securitisation, it draws out how the fields of war, health, and medicine are nonetheless highly contested. The article concludes by challenging the fields of Global Health, war, and security studies, but also suggests novel routes for pursuing the study of the Global Politics of Medicine.
Sitka spruce silviculture in Scottish forests
Authors: Low Alan J. 
Published: November 2014

SynopsisSitka spruce is the most important species grown in Scottish forests thanks to its high yield potential, site tolerance and wood properties. It is easily raised from seed or cuttings, and can be readily established and tended under a wide range of site conditions using uncomplicated silvicultural techniques. Spaced furrow ploughing and site drainage are normally required for afforestation; and cultivation may also be desirable prior to restocking. Planting at 2500 trees/ha is done in late winter and spring. Weed control may be necessary, particularly to prevent Calluna-induced growth check. On poor sites, repeated fertiliser application prior to canopy closure can be essential to ensure satisfactory growth, and use of nursing mixtures may be worthwhile. Wherever possible, pole stage crops are thinned regularly to enhance stem quality and diameter growth, but on high windthrow hazard sites the onset of windthrow can be delayed by leaving crops unthinned. After an economic rotation of forty-five to sixty years, crops are clear felled and replanted. During establishment, deer control measures are often required to prevent browsing damage. Damage by insects and fungi is seldom serious, provided that bark-feeding insects are controlled by insecticide at time of replanting, and development of fungal butt rot is minimised by urea treatment of fresh stumps.
Sociolinguistic convergence and social interactions within a group of preschoolers: A longitudinal study
Authors: Nardy Aurélie , Chevrot Jean-Pierre , Barbu Stéphanie 
Published: November 2014

AbstractSociolinguistic studies have shown that linguistic usage is closely related to social relationships and interactions between individuals. This has been established in adults and adolescents but developmental studies involving children are lacking. This paper studies whether and how peers influence the acquisition of social dialects in young children by using direct observations and quantitative analyses of spontaneous peer interactions and relationships at kindergarten. The longitudinal follow-up of one group of French-speaking children 4 to 5 years of age shows that the individual scores of sociolinguistic variables converge after one year of frequent contact. Moreover, we find that children who interact more frequently adopt similar usage of sociolinguistic variables, whereas other factors have no influence (teacher's speech, child's awareness of standard sociolinguistics norms, reported interpersonal attraction). These results provide the first evidence that social interactions within the peer group do have an influence on children's linguistic usage through daily interactions at an early age.
Genetic moderation of child maltreatment effects on depression and internalizing symptoms by serotonin transporter linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), norepinephrine transporter (NET), and corticotropin releasing hormone receptor 1 (CRHR1) genes in African American children
Authors: Cicchetti Dante , Rogosch Fred A. 
Published: November 2014

AbstractGenetic moderation of the effects of child maltreatment on depression and internalizing symptoms was investigated in a sample of low-income maltreated and nonmaltreated African American children (N= 1,096). Lifetime child maltreatment experiences were independently coded from Child Protective Services records and maternal report. Child depression and internalizing problems were assessed in the context of a summer research camp by self-report on the Children's Depression Inventory and adult counselor report on the Teacher Report Form. DNA was obtained from buccal cell or saliva samples and genotyped for polymorphisms of the following genes: serotonin transporter linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), norepinephrine transporter, and corticotropin releasing hormone receptor 1. Analyses of covariance with age and gender as covariates were conducted, with maltreatment status and respective polymorphism as main effects and their Gene × Environment (G × E) interactions. Maltreatment consistently was associated with higher Children's Depression Inventory and Teacher Report Form symptoms. The results for child self-report symptoms indicated a G × E interaction forBDNFand maltreatment. In addition,BDNFand triallelic5-HTTLPRinteracted with child maltreatment in a G × G × E interaction. Analyses for counselor report of child anxiety/depression symptoms on the Teacher Report Form indicated moderation of child maltreatment effects by triallelic5-HTTLPR. These effects were elaborated based on variation in developmental timing of maltreatment experiences. Norepinephrine transporter was found to further moderate the G × E interaction of5-HTTLPRand maltreatment status, revealing a G × G × E interaction. This G × G × E was extended by consideration of variation in maltreatment subtype experiences. Finally, G × G × E effects were observed for the co-action ofBDNFand the corticotropin releasing hormone receptor 1 haplotype. The findings illustrate the variable influence of specific genotypes in G × E interactions based on variation in maltreatment experiences and the importance of a multigenic approach for understanding influences on depression and internalizing symptoms among African American children.
Interpersonal cognitive biases as genetic markers for pediatric depressive symptoms: Twin data from the Emotions, Cognitions, Heredity and Outcome (ECHO) study
Authors: Lau Jennifer Y. F. , Belli Stefano R. , Gregory Alice M. , Eley Thalia C. 
Published: November 2014

AbstractChildhood depressive symptoms may arise from genetic and environmental risks, which act to bias the ways in which children process emotional information. Previous studies show that several “cognitive biases” are heritable and share genetic and environmental risks with depressive symptoms. Past research suggests that many cognitive biases only reflect genetic risks for depressive symptoms from adolescence. The present study sought to identify (a) when interpersonal cognitions mature as risk factors for depressive symptoms by examining whether these factors are stable and predict symptoms across time in childhood, and (b) the extent to which interpersonal cognitions reflect inherited/environmental risks on children's depressive symptoms. Results showed that there was some stability for interpersonal cognitive biases from age 8 to 10 years (rs = .32–.43). Only the absence of positive self/other perceptions, and negative peer and mother expectations at age 8 predicted depressive symptoms at age 10 (after controlling for depressive symptoms at age 8). The absence of positive self/other perceptions shared genetic influences with depressive symptoms within and across time. Across middle to late childhood, interpersonal cognitions begin to operate as vulnerability-trait factors for depressive symptoms, gradually reflecting distal genetic risks on symptoms.