LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Long-term treadmill exercise improves spatial memory of male APPswe/PS1dE9 mice by regulation of BDNF expression and microglia activation.

Increasing evidence suggests that physical activity could delay or attenuate the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD). But the underlying mechanisms are still not fully understood. To investigate the effect of long-term treadmill exercise on the spatial memory of AD mice and the possible role of β-amyloid, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and microglia in the effect, male APPswe/PS1dE9 AD mice aged 4 months were subjected to treadmill exercise for 5 months with 6 sessions per week and gradually increased load. A Morris water maze was used to evaluate the spatial memory. Expression levels of β-amyloid, BDNF and Iba-1 (a microglia marker) in brain tissue were detected by immunohistochemistry. Sedentary AD mice and wildtype C57BL/6J mice served as controls. The results showed that 5-month treadmill exercise significantly decreased the escape latencies (P < 0.01 on the 4th day) and improved the spatial memory of the AD mice in the water maze test. Meanwhile, treadmill exercise significantly increased the number of BDNF-positive cells and decreased the ratios of activated microglia in both the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. However, treadmill exercise did not significantly alleviate the accumulation of β-amyloid in either the cerebral cortex or the hippocampus of the AD mice (P > 0.05). The study suggested that long-term treadmill exercise could improve the spatial memory of the male APPswe/PS1dE9 AD mice. The increase in BDNF-positive cells and decrease in activated microglia might underpin the beneficial effect.
Improving Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction using Word and Entity Based Attention

Classifying the semantic relationship between two entities in a sentence is termed as Relation Extraction (RE). RE from entity mentions is an important step in various Natural Language Processing tasks, such as, knowledge base construction, question-answering etc. Supervised methods have been successful on the relation extraction task [2, 18]. However, the extensive training data necessary for supervised learning is expensive to obtain and therefore restrictive in a Web-scale relation extraction task. To overcome this challenge, [6] proposed a Distant Supervision (DS) method for relation extraction to help automatically generate new training data by taking an intersection between a text corpora and knowledge base. However, the DS assumption is too strong, and may introduce noise such as false negative samples due to missing facts in knowledge base. In order to address this challenge, DS has been modeled as Multi-Instance Multi-Label (MIML) problem [14]. More recently, neural models for DS have been proposed [17, 12]. In this paper, we define ‘instance’ as a sentence containing an entity-pair, and ‘instance set’ as a set of sentences containing the same entity-pair.
Room temperature ionic liquid as a novel medium for liquid/liquid extraction of metal ions

Room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) have been used as novel solvents to replace traditional volatile organic solvents in organic synthesis, solvent extraction, and electrochemistry. The hydrophobic character and water immiscibility of certain ionic liquids allow their use in solvent extraction of hydrophobic compounds. In this work, a typical room temperature ionic liquid, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate [C 4mim][PF6], was used as an alternative solvent to study liquid/liquid extraction of heavy metal ions. Dithizone was employed as a metal chelator to form neutral metal–dithizone complexes with heavy metal ions to extract metal ions from aqueous solution into [C 4mim][PF6]. This extraction is possible due to the high distribution ratios of the metal complexes between [C 4mim][PF6] and aqueous phase. Since the distribution ratios of metal dithiozonates between [C 4mim][PF6] and aqueous phase are strongly pH dependent, the extraction efficiencies of metal complexes can be manipulated by tailoring the pH value of the extraction system. Hence, the extraction, separation, and preconcentraction of heavy metal ions with the biphasic system of [C 4mim][PF6] and aqueous phase can be achieved by controlling the pH value of the extraction system. Preliminary results indicate that the use of [C 4mim][PF6] as an alternate solvent to replace traditional organic solvents in liquid/liquid extraction of heavy metal ions is very promising. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Linguistic analysis of differences in portrayal of movie characters

•Movies alter societal thinking patterns in previously unexplored social phenomena, by exposing the individual to what is shown on screen as the “norm” •Typical studies focus on audio/video modalities to estimate differences along factors such as gender •Linguistic analysis provides complementary information to the audio/video based analytics •We examine differences across gender, race and age
Empaglif lozin as Add-On to Metformin in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes : A 24-Week , Randomized , Double-Blind , Placebo-Controlled Trial

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Patients with HbA1c levels of‡7% to£ 10% (‡53 to£86mmol/mol) while receiving metformin (‡1,500 mg/day) were randomized and treated with once-daily treatment with empagliflozin 10mg (n = 217), empagliflozin 25 mg (n = 213), or placebo (n = 207) for 24 weeks. The primary end point was the change in HbA1c level from baseline at week 24. Key secondary end points were changes from baseline in weight and mean daily glucose (MDG) at week 24.
Comparison of vaginal mesh repair with sacrospinous vaginal colpopexy in the management of vaginal vault prolapse after hysterectomy in patients with levator ani avulsion: a randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE
To compare the efficacy of two standard surgical procedures for post-hysterectomy vaginal vault prolapse in patients with levator ani avulsion.


METHODS
This was a single-center, randomized interventional trial, of two standard surgical procedures for post-hysterectomy vaginal vault prolapse: Prolift Total vs unilateral vaginal sacrospinous colpopexy with native tissue vaginal repair (sacrospinous fixation, SSF), during the period from 2008 to 2011. Entry criteria included at least two-compartment prolapse, as well as complete unilateral or bilateral levator ani avulsion injury. The primary outcome was anatomical failure based on clinical and ultrasound assessment. Failure was defined clinically, according to the Pelvic Organ Prolapse Quantification system, as Ba, C or Bp at the hymen or below, and on translabial ultrasound as bladder descent to 10 mm or more below the lower margin of the symphysis pubis on maximum Valsalva maneuver. Secondary outcomes were evaluation of continence, sexual function and prolapse symptoms based on validated questionnaires.


RESULTS
During the study period, 142 patients who were post-hysterectomy underwent surgery for prolapse in our unit; 72 of these were diagnosed with an avulsion injury and were offered participation in the study. Seventy patients were randomized into two groups: 36 in the Prolift group and 34 in the SSF group. On clinical examination at 1-year follow-up, we observed one (3%) case of anatomical failure in the Prolift group and 22 (65%) in the SSF group (P < 0.001). Using ultrasound criteria, there was one (2.8%) failure in the Prolift group compared with 21 (61.8%) in the SSF group (P < 0.001). The postoperative POPDI (Pelvic Organ Prolapse Distress Inventory) score for subjective outcome was 15.3 in the Prolift group vs 21.7 in the SSF group (P = 0.16).


CONCLUSION
In patients with prolapse after hysterectomy and levator ani avulsion injury, SSF has a higher anatomical failure rate than does the Prolift Total procedure at 1-year follow-up.
Modes of theorizing in strategic human resource management: tests of universalistic, contingency,

The field of strategic human resource management (SHRM) has been criticized for lacking a solid theoretical foundation. This article documents that, contrary to this criticism, the SHRM literature ...
Association of Rare Loss-Of-Function Alleles in HAL, Serum Histidine: Levels and Incident Coronary Heart Disease.

BACKGROUND
Histidine is a semiessential amino acid with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Few data are available on the associations between genetic variants, histidine levels, and incident coronary heart disease (CHD) in a population-based sample.


METHODS AND RESULTS
By conducting whole exome sequencing on 1152 African Americans in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study and focusing on loss-of-function (LoF) variants, we identified 3 novel rare LoF variants in HAL, a gene that encodes histidine ammonia-lyase in the first step of histidine catabolism. These LoF variants had large effects on blood histidine levels (β=0.26; P=1.2×10(-13)). The positive association with histidine levels was replicated by genotyping an independent sample of 718 ARIC African Americans (minor allele frequency=1%; P=1.2×10(-4)). In addition, high blood histidine levels were associated with reduced risk of developing incident CHD with an average of 21.5 years of follow-up among African Americans (hazard ratio=0.18; P=1.9×10(-4)). This finding was validated in an independent sample of European Americans from the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) Offspring Cohort. However, LoF variants in HAL were not directly significantly associated with incident CHD after meta-analyzing results from the CHARGE Consortium.


CONCLUSIONS
Three LoF mutations in HAL were associated with increased histidine levels, which in turn were shown to be inversely related to the risk of CHD among both African Americans and European Americans. Future investigations on the association between HAL gene variation and CHD are warranted.
Economic burden of dengue in Indonesia

BACKGROUND
Dengue is associated with significant economic expenditure and it is estimated that the Asia Pacific region accounts for >50% of the global cost. Indonesia has one of the world's highest dengue burdens; Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are the primary and secondary vectors. In the absence of local data on disease cost, this study estimated the annual economic burden during 2015 of both hospitalized and ambulatory dengue cases in Indonesia.


METHODS
Total 2015 dengue costs were calculated using both prospective and retrospective methods using data from public and private hospitals and health centres in three provinces: Yogyakarta, Bali and Jakarta. Direct costs were extracted from billing systems and claims; a patient survey captured indirect and out-of-pocket costs at discharge and 2 weeks later. Adjustments across sites based on similar clinical practices and healthcare landscapes were performed to fill gaps in cost estimates. The national burden of dengue was extrapolated from provincial data using data from the three sites and applying an empirically-derived epidemiological expansion factor.


RESULTS
Total direct and indirect costs per dengue case assessed at Yogyakarta, Bali and Jakarta were US$791, US$1,241 and US$1,250, respectively. Total 2015 economic burden of dengue in Indonesia was estimated at US$381.15 million which comprised US$355.2 million for hospitalized and US$26.2 million for ambulatory care cases.


CONCLUSION
Dengue imposes a substantial economic burden for Indonesian public payers and society. Complemented with an appropriate weighting method and by accounting for local specificities and practices, these data may support national level public health decision making for prevention/control of dengue in public health priority lists.
Resistance and Biosorption of Mercury by Bacteria Isolated from Industrial Effluents

The present study is aimed at assessing the ability of two Hg resistant bacterial strains, Brevibacterium casei and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to uptake metal from the medium. For the bacterial isolates the minimum inhibitory concentration of Hg ranged between 400-500 μg/mL. Pseudomonas aeruginosa could tolerate Pb (600 μg/mL), Cu (200 μg/mL), Cd (50 μg/mL), Zn (50 μg/mL), Ni (550 μg/mL) and Cr (50 μg/mL). Brevibacterium casei, on the other hand, showed resistance against Pb, Cu, Cr, Ni, Zn and Cd at a concentration of 650, 200, 150, 550, 50, and 50 μg/mL, respectively. The isolates showed typical growth curves but lag and log phases extended in the presence of mercury. Both isolates showed optimum growth at 37 oC and pH varying from 7-7.5. Metal processing ability of the isolates was determined in a medium containing 100 μg/mL of Hg. Pseudomonas aeruginosa could reduce 93% of mercury from the medium after 40 hours and was also capable to remove Hg 35%, 55% 70% and 85% from the medium after 8, 16, 24 and 32 hours, respectively. Brevibacterium casei could also efficiently remove 80% mercury from the medium after 40 hours and was also able to remove Hg 20%, 40%, 50%, and 65% from the medium after 8, 16, 24 and 32 hours, respectively. Both bacterial strains have shown remarkable ability to uptake metal ions from the culture medium. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was observed to uptake 80% and Brevibacterium casei 70% of Hg from the medium after 24 hours of incubation at 37C. The metal uptake ability suggests possibility of using these bacterial strains for removal of mercury from Hg contaminated wastewater.
Measuring Coverage in MNCH: A Prospective Validation Study in Pakistan and Bangladesh on Measuring Correct Treatment of Childhood Pneumonia

BACKGROUND
Antibiotic treatment for pneumonia as measured by Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) is a key indicator for tracking progress in achieving Millennium Development Goal 4. Concerns about the validity of this indicator led us to perform an evaluation in urban and rural settings in Pakistan and Bangladesh.


METHODS AND FINDINGS
Caregivers of 950 children under 5 y with pneumonia and 980 with "no pneumonia" were identified in urban and rural settings and allocated for DHS/MICS questions 2 or 4 wk later. Study physicians assigned a diagnosis of pneumonia as reference standard; the predictive ability of DHS/MICS questions and additional measurement tools to identify pneumonia versus non-pneumonia cases was evaluated. Results at both sites showed suboptimal discriminative power, with no difference between 2- or 4-wk recall. Individual patterns of sensitivity and specificity varied substantially across study sites (sensitivity 66.9% and 45.5%, and specificity 68.8% and 69.5%, for DHS in Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively). Prescribed antibiotics for pneumonia were correctly recalled by about two-thirds of caregivers using DHS questions, increasing to 72% and 82% in Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively, using a drug chart and detailed enquiry.


CONCLUSIONS
Monitoring antibiotic treatment of pneumonia is essential for national and global programs. Current (DHS/MICS questions) and proposed new (video and pneumonia score) methods of identifying pneumonia based on maternal recall discriminate poorly between pneumonia and children with cough. Furthermore, these methods have a low yield to identify children who have true pneumonia. Reported antibiotic treatment rates among these children are therefore not a valid proxy indicator of pneumonia treatment rates. These results have important implications for program monitoring and suggest that data in its current format from DHS/MICS surveys should not be used for the purpose of monitoring antibiotic treatment rates in children with pneumonia at the present time.
The generalized railroad crossing: a case study in formal verification of real-time systems

A new solution to the generalized railroad crossing problem, based on timed automata, invariants and simulation mappings, is presented and evaluated. The solution shows formally the correspondence between four system descriptions: an axiomatic specification, an operational specification, a discrete system implementation, and a system implementation that works with a continuous gate model.<<ETX>>
LL-MAC: A low latency MAC protocol for wireless self-organised networks

This paper proposes LL-MAC, a medium access control (MAC) protocol specifically designed for wireless sensor network applications that require low data latency. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices and their main application is environmental monitoring. In order to achieve such requirements, the whole network must work autonomously and collaborate in periodically sensing the surrounding environment and sending data to the sink. LL-MAC uses novel techniques to offer a low end-toend data transmission latency from the furthest away nodes to the sink in a unique working cycle while offering a low duty cycle operation in a multi-hop fashion. Key features of this protocol include a synchronised sleep schedule to reduce control overhead along with a mechanism to avoid overhearing unnecessary traffic and elude collisions. Finally, control interval adjustment enables power-aware topology management in changing environments. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
DISTRIBUTION EQUILIBRIUM OF LANTHANIDE(III) COMPLEXES WITH N-BENZOYL-N-PHENYLHYDROXYLAMINE IN SEVERAL INERT SOLVENT SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT The distribution equilibrium of lanthanides(III) (Ln) with N-benzoyl-N-phenylhydroxylamine (BPHA, HL) in several inert solvent systems was studied. The representative lanthanides(III) (Yb, Eu and Pr) were all found to extract as self-adduct chelates of the form, LnL3(HL)m, (m = 1–3), containing a different number of neutral adduct molecules in extracted species. The differences in the number of neutral adduct molecules in extracted species with each solvents are attributed to the difference in the solvation trend for BPHA. The extraction constant and separation factor were determined in several inert solvent systems. It was found that the distribution ratio of lanthanide(III) tends to decrease with increases in the distribution constant of BPHA. Relationship between the polarity of the solvent and the extractability are also discussed.
The significance of Streptococcus anginosus group in intracranial complications of pediatric rhinosinusitis.

OBJECTIVE
To assess the significance of the Streptococcus anginosus group in intracranial complications of pediatric patients with rhinosinusitis.


DESIGN
Retrospective cohort study.


SETTING
Tertiary pediatric hospital.


PATIENTS
A 20-year review of medical records identified patients with intracranial complications resulting from rhinosinusitis. In the 50 cases identified, S anginosus was the most commonly implicated bacterial pathogen in 14 (28%). Documented data included demographics, cultured bacteria, immune status, sinuses involved, type of intracranial complication, otolaryngologic surgical and neurosurgical intervention, type and duration of antibiotics used, and resulting neurologic deficits. Complications and outcomes of cases of S anginosus group-associated rhinosinusitis were compared with those of other bacteria.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
The severity and outcomes of intracranial complications of pediatric rhinosinusitis due to S anginosus group bacteria compared with other bacteria.


RESULTS
Infection caused by the S anginosus group resulted in more severe intracranial complications (P = .001). In addition, patients with S anginosus group-associated infections were more likely to require neurosurgical intervention (P < .001) and develop long-term neurologic deficits (P = .02). Intravenous antibiotics were administered for a longer duration (P < .001) for S anginosus group-associated infections.


CONCLUSIONS
Rhinosinusitis associated with the S anginosus group should be considered a more serious infection relative to those caused by other pathogens. Streptococcus anginosus group bacteria are significantly more likely than other bacteria to cause more severe intracranial complications and neurologic deficits and to require neurosurgical intervention. A low threshold for intervention should be used for infection caused by this pathogen.
Design versus Assessment of Concrete Structures Using Stress Fields and Strut-and-Tie Models

Stress fields and strut-and-tie models are widely used for design and assessment of structural concrete members. Although they are often used in the same manner for both purposes, developing suitable stress fields and strut-and-tie models for the design of a new structure or for assessment of the strength of an existing one should not necessarily be performed following the same approach. For design, simple load-carrying models in equilibrium with the external actions can be considered. From the various possibilities, those leading to better behavior at serviceability limit state and to simple reinforcement layouts should be selected (or a combination of them). For the assessment of existing structures, however, avoiding unnecessary strengthening (or minimizing it) should be the objective. Thus, simple stress fields or strut-and-tie models are to be iteratively refined whenever the calculated strength of the member is insufficient with respect to the design actions. This can be done by accounting for kinematic considerations to calculate the higher possible strength of the member accounting for its actual geometry and available reinforcement (allowing to calculate the exact solution according to limit analysis). In this paper, the differences between the two approaches for design and assessment are clarified and explained on the basis of some examples. A number of strategies are comprehensibly presented to obtain suitable stress fields and strut-and-tie models in both cases. The results of exact solutions according to limit analysis (developed using elastic-plastic stress fields) are finally compared to 150 tests of the literature showing the consistency and generality of the presented approaches. INTRODUCTION Currently, most codes for structural concrete are oriented to design of new structures. Yet assessing the strength of existing structures (and their retrofitting, if necessary) is becoming more and more a relevant task for structural engineers. This is influencing codes of practice, which start incorporating new concepts related to life cycle design
Learning Salient Features for Speech Emotion Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks

As an essential way of human emotional behavior understanding, speech emotion recognition (SER) has attracted a great deal of attention in human-centered signal processing. Accuracy in SER heavily depends on finding good affect- related , discriminative features. In this paper, we propose to learn affect-salient features for SER using convolutional neural networks (CNN). The training of CNN involves two stages. In the first stage, unlabeled samples are used to learn local invariant features (LIF) using a variant of sparse auto-encoder (SAE) with reconstruction penalization. In the second step, LIF is used as the input to a feature extractor, salient discriminative feature analysis (SDFA), to learn affect-salient, discriminative features using a novel objective function that encourages feature saliency, orthogonality, and discrimination for SER. Our experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our approach leads to stable and robust recognition performance in complex scenes (e.g., with speaker and language variation, and environment distortion) and outperforms several well-established SER features.