LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Disruption of latent inhibition induced by ovariectomy can be reversed by estradiol and clozapine as well as by co-administration of haloperidol with estradiol but not by haloperidol alone

Epidemiological and clinical life cycle studies have indicated that the more favorable illness course and the better response to antipsychotic drugs (APDs) in women with schizophrenia correlate with high levels of estrogen, whereas increased vulnerability to exacerbation and relapse and reduced sensitivity to treatment are associated with low estrogen levels. Accordingly, the estrogen hypothesis of schizophrenia proposes that estrogen has a neuroprotective effect in women vulnerable to schizophrenia. Latent inhibition (LI), the capacity to ignore stimuli that received nonreinforced preexposure prior to conditioning, is disrupted in acute schizophrenia patients and in rats and humans treated with the psychosis inducing drug amphetamine. Disruption of LI is reversible by typical and atypical APDs. The present study tested whether low levels of estrogen induced by ovariectomy (OVX) would lead to disruption of LI in female rats and whether such disruption would be normalized by estrogen replacement treatment and/or APDs. Results showed that OVX led to LI disruption, which was reversed by 17β-estradiol (150 μg/kg) and the atypical APD clozapine (5 mg/kg), but not by the typical APD haloperidol (0.1, 0.2, 0.3 mg/kg). Haloperidol regained efficacy when administered with 17β-estradiol (50 μg/kg). These results provide the first demonstration in rats that low levels of hormones can induce a pro-psychotic state that is resistant to at least typical antipsychotic treatment. This constellation may mimic states seen in schizophrenic women during periods associated with low levels of hormones such as the menopause.
What is in that picture ? Visual Question Answering System

Visual Question Answering is a complex task which aims at answering a question about an image. This task requires multimodal representation learning for both images and text. To solve this problem, an image and text representation is required and high level interactions between the two must be carefully encoded into the model in order to provide the correct answer. The answers can be a word, a phrase, a yes/no answer, selection from multiple choice or fill in the blank [6]. For this project, I decided to focus on building a model to answer open-ended questions. Answers to openended questions are specially challenging because it requires vast set of AI capabilities to answer. Some examples of the capabilities needed are object detection, activity recognition, knowledge base reasoning, and commonsense reasoning[2].
Beyond the feminisation of poverty: gender-aware poverty reduction.


 There must be an awareness of gender issues in poverty reduction programs. For example, program efforts that direct aid to the promotion of labor intensive employment options disregard women's already overburdened work regime. Public expenditures to benefit the poor, such as primary education or reformed agricultural extension, may be based on the assumption that men and women will benefit equally, yet there is often gender bias in the delivery of services. One recommendation is to target female headed households in budget-constrained anti-poverty programs. One of the few examples of such programs provides urban female household heads in Chile with employment training, housing, health care, child care, and legal aid services. Causes of female headship vary, and a simple correlation with poverty is not always the case. Well-intentioned women-in-development credit programs in Ghana and Bangladesh have been "hijacked" by men. Programs to address gender discrimination only among the poor may overlook other oppressed women. In India gender discrimination is often greatest among women in wealthy households. Programs must offer more than economic resources, they must help women stretch traditional gender boundaries and obtain skills such as literacy or financial management. They must help women organize collectively to protest injustices and achieve institutional reforms.
A Provenance-based Adaptive Scheduling Heuristic for Parallel Scientific Workflows in Clouds

In the last years, scientific workflows have emerged as a fundamental abstraction for structuring and executing scientific experiments in computational environments. Scientific workflows are becoming increasingly complex and more demanding in terms of computational resources, thus requiring the usage of parallel techniques and high performance computing (HPC) environments. Meanwhile, clouds have emerged as a new paradigm where resources are virtualized and provided on demand. By using clouds, scientists have expanded beyond single parallel computers to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines. Although the initial focus of clouds was to provide high throughput computing, clouds are already being used to provide an HPC environment where elastic resources can be instantiated on demand during the course of a scientific workflow. However, this model also raises many open, yet important, challenges such as scheduling workflow activities. Scheduling parallel scientific workflows in the cloud is a very complex task since we have to take into account many different criteria and to explore the elasticity characteristic for optimizing workflow execution. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive scheduling heuristic for parallel execution of scientific workflows in the cloud that is based on three criteria: total execution time (makespan), reliability and financial cost. Besides scheduling workflow activities based on a 3-objective cost model, this approach also scales resources up and down according to the restrictions imposed by scientists before workflow execution. This tuning is based on provenance data captured and queried at runtime. We conducted a thorough validation of our approach using a real bioinformatics workflow. The experiments were performed in SciCumulus, a cloud workflow engine for managing scientific workflow execution.
Anxiety symptoms and perceived performance in medical students.

Medical students represent a highly educated population under significant pressures. During the transition to clinical settings in the third year, they may experience a loss of external control and may counter this with an increase in obsessionality and/or other anxiety symptoms. Our study examines the phenomenology of obsessive-compulsive and other anxiety symptoms in medical students at two U.S. medical schools and relates these symptoms to self-perception of performance. Subjects anonymously completed a battery of questionnaires regarding obsessive-compulsive symptoms, attentional problems, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and perceived performance in medical school. A factor analysis of obsessional symptoms showed four primary factors: checking/doubts, contamination, long time/detail, and unpleasant thoughts/worries. These four factors were similar to those found among college students and other nonclinical populations. Anxiety, attentional, and depressive symptoms were highest in the third-year medical students. In contrast, obsessional symptoms were highest in the first-year students and lower for subsequent years. Perceived performance was not significantly correlated with obsessionality, although lower perceived performance was associated with higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. Students with lower perceived performance in medical school were significantly more likely to be female, depressed, or older. The progressive decrease in number of obsessional symptoms across years and the lack of correlation with perceived performance suggest that these symptoms may be developmentally appropriate, and perhaps adaptive. In contrast, other anxiety symptoms appear to be maladaptive responses to external stressors.
Synthesis and transport properties of AgBi3S5 ternary sulfide compound

Abstract Ternary sulfide AgBi 3 S 5 compound is expected to be a promising thermoelectric material because of its merits such as low electrical resistivity and environmentally compatible composition. In this study, a combined process of mechanical alloying and spark plasma sintering was applied to the fabrication of AgBi 3 S 5 bulk materials, and nearly single phase was obtained by optimizing the sintering conditions, although the mill-derived powders consisted of AgBiS 2 and Bi 2 S 3 phases. The electrical conductivity of the AgBi 3 S 5 bulk material decreases from 178 to 79 Scm −1 with raising temperature from 323 to 573 K, while the Seebeck coefficient ranges from −83 to −167 μV K −1 , thereby a maximum power factor 221 μW m −1  K −2 achieved at 573 K. It is notable that AgBi 3 S 5 has a low thermal conductivity, ranging from 0.70 to 0.64 W m −1  K −1 from room temperature to 573 K, which is the lowest value reported so far for this material. A peak thermoelectric figure of merit value of 0.20 was obtained at 573 K in the present pristine AgBi 3 S 5 sample.
The Brown Assessment of Beliefs Scale: reliability and validity.

OBJECTIVE
The authors developed and evaluated the reliability and validity of the Brown Assessment of Beliefs Scale, a clinician-administered seven-item scale designed to assess delusions across a wide range of psychiatric disorders.


METHOD
The authors developed the scale after reviewing the literature on the assessment of delusions. Four raters administered the scale to 20 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 20 patients with body dysmorphic disorder, and 10 patients with mood disorder with psychotic features. Audiotaped interviews of scale administration conducted by one rater were independently scored by the other raters to evaluate interrater reliability. The scale was administered to 27 patients twice to determine test-retest reliability. Other insight instruments as well as scales that assess symptom severity were administered to assess convergent and discriminant validity. Sensitivity to change was assessed in a multicenter treatment study of sertraline for OCD.


RESULTS
Interrater and test-retest reliability for the total score and individual item scores was excellent, with a high degree of internal consistency. One factor was obtained that accounted for 56% of the variance. Scores on the Brown Assessment of Beliefs Scale were not correlated with symptom severity but were correlated with other measures of insight. The scale was sensitive to change in insight in OCD but was not identical to improvement in severity.


CONCLUSIONS
The Brown Assessment of Beliefs Scale is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing delusionality in a number of psychiatric disorders. This scale may help clarify whether delusional and nondelusional variants of disorders constitute the same disorder as well as whether delusionality affects treatment outcome and prognosis.
Silicon photonic crystal cavity enhanced second-harmonic generation from monolayer WSe2

We demonstrate a silicon photonic crystal cavity enhanced second-harmonic generation (SHG) in tungsten diselenide. The observed SHG is enhanced by a factor of ∼200 compared to a bare monolayer on silicon.
Harmonic tunnelling: tracking non-stationary noises during speech

This paper presents a novel noise robust front-end algorithm and evaluates its performance on the Aurora 2 database. Most algorithms aimed at improving the performance of recognisers in background noise make an estimate of the noise spectrum that is then used to obtain an improved estimate of the spectrum of the underlying speech. In the case of stationary noises it is sufficient to take an average noise spectrum from the period before the speech utterance and/or to use a speech/non-speech detector to update this estimate using the noise sampled from any gaps in an utterance. For nonstationary noises where the noise spectrum changes faster than the duration of a typical utterance (e.g. within 0.5s) then there can be substantial differences between the estimated and actual noise spectrum for a particular frame, leading to poor performance. The algorithm presented here provides an improved estimate of the noise that can be tracked throughout the duration of the speech utterance, by making use of the harmonic structure of the voiced speech spectrum. This running estimate of the noise is obtained by sampling the noise spectrum in the gaps (or “tunnels”) between the harmonic spectral peaks. Compared to the ETSI standard MFCC front-end [1], the proposed algorithm delivers an average improvement in performance of 43.93% on the Aurora 2 database [2]. 1. Front-end Algorithm Overview A summary of the algorithm is shown in figure 1 and the details of the processing performed by each block described in the section 2. Figure 1: Block diagram of front-end algorithm The spectrum of the signal is first obtained by taking an FFT. The peaks in this spectrum are then determined from spectral derivatives. Each of these candidate peaks are analysed to categorise them as a peak coming from either a voiced speech harmonic or noise. The noise spectrum at a peak categorised as speech is estimated by interpolation from the adjacent noise spectra in the surrounding “tunnels”. These frame based noise measurements contribute to the running average of the noise spectrum in the Mel domain. Whilst this noise estimate could be used in many alternative algorithms, in this implementation it is used for an SNR dependent spectral subtraction. The remaining processing blocks are spectral normalisation performed in the Mel domain, normalising with the long term average of the spectrum and also by the frame energy. Finally a cube root compression is performed followed by cosine transform to produce 12 cepstral coefficients and a log energy measure. 2. Front-end Algorithm Details
Pulmonary venous isolation by antral ablation with a large cryoballoon for treatment of paroxysmal and persistent atrial fibrillation: medium-term outcomes and non-randomised comparison with pulmonary venous isolation by radiofrequency ablation

BACKGROUND
To prevent atrial fibrillation (AF) recurrence after catheter ablation, pulmonary venous isolation (PVI) at an antral level is more effective than segmental ostial ablation. Cryoablation around the pulmonary venous (PV) ostia for AF therapy is potentially safer compared to radiofrequency ablation (RFA). The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of a strategy using a large cryoablation balloon to perform antral cryoablation with 'touch-up' ostial cryoablation for PVI in patients with paroxysmal and persistent AF.


METHODS
Paroxysmal and persistent AF patients undergoing their first left atrial ablation were recruited. After cryoballoon therapy, each PV was assessed for isolation and if necessary, treated with focal ostial cryoablation until PVI was achieved. Follow-up with Holter monitoring was performed. Clinical outcomes of the cryoablation protocol were compared, with consecutive patients undergoing PVI by RFA.


RESULTS
124 consecutive patients underwent cryoablation. 77% of paroxysmal and 48% of persistent AF subjects were free from AF at 12 months after a single procedure. Over the same time period, 53 consecutive paroxysmal AF subjects underwent PVI with RFA and at 12 months, 72% were free from AF at 12 months (p=NS). There were too few persistent AF subjects (n=8) undergoing solely PVI by RFA as a comparison group. Procedural and fluoroscopic times during cryoablation were significantly shorter than RFA.


CONCLUSIONS
PV isolation can be achieved in less than 2 h by a simple cryoablation protocol with excellent results after a single intervention, particularly for paroxysmal AF.
Description and validation of a noninvasive placebo acupuncture procedure.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate a simulated acupuncture technique for use in randomized controlled trials assessing the efficacy of acupuncture for low-back pain.


SETTING
The clinic of an accredited acupuncture college in Seattle, Washington.


SUBJECTS
Acupuncture-naïve enrollees of Group Health Cooperative who had visited their primary care provider with a complaint of back pain that persisted for at least 3 months.


EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
In the first experiment, subjects received six insertions of real needles and six pokes with a toothpick in a guidetube in a two-period crossover design. In the second experiment, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a complete treatment with real acupuncture needles or a simulated treatment using a toothpick in a guidetube.


OUTCOMES
In the first experiment, we compared subjects' perceptions about which implement was used for each "insertion" while in the second, we compared the perceptions (e.g., acupuncturist's warmth and caring, the reasonableness of acupuncture as a treatment) and pain relief of those who received an acupuncture treatment using needles to those receiving simulated acupuncture.


RESULTS
In the first experiment, the toothpick insertions were perceived as slightly more like real needling than the real needling (mean ratings of 2.8 and 2.1, respectively; p = 0.08). In the second experiment, 52% percent of those receiving the simulated needling versus 65% of those receiving real acupuncture believed they were "definitely" or "probably" receiving real acupuncture (p = 0.33). Perceptions of acupuncture, as measured by a credibility questionnaire, were similar in the two groups. Those receiving real acupuncture were more likely to report immediate pain relief, and this was the factor most predictive of the subject's belief about which treatment they had received (p = 0.02).


CONCLUSIONS
The simulated acupuncture procedure evaluated in this study represents a reasonable control treatment for acupuncture-naïve individuals in randomized controlled trials assessing the efficacy of acupuncture for low-back pain.
Learner and instructor identified success factors in distance education

To better understand their perceptions of optimal tools and strategies for success, this research analyzed the experiences of learners and instructors in an online distance education environment. A qualitative constant comparative analysis methodology supported by an appropriate conceptual framework guided the study. Data were collected over multiple years and from multiple stakeholders. The study identified the following significant conclusions: the availability of multiple tools added flexibility to the learning environment; technology tools should appeal to multiple learning styles; collaboration, reflection, and building a learning community were important strategies supported by multiple tools; and participant satisfaction, appropriate prerequisite skills, and faculty and administrative involvement ensured programmatic success. According to this study, optimal distance education environments should address factors identified in the conceptual framework.
Analysis and Optimization of a New 2-D Magnet Array for Planar Motor

This paper presents a new 2-D permanent-magnet array for a planar motor, in which the angle between the magnetization directions of any two adjacent magnets is 45°. The harmonic model for flux density distribution of the array is solved by the scalar magnetic potential equation and validated by the finite-element method. An analytical model for real-time control is derived by taking the first harmonic of the magnetic flux density distribution. The ignored higher harmonics in z-component of the magnetic flux density distribution is minimized by the genetic algorithm such that the analytical model becomes more accurate. Compared with the well-known Halbach magnet array, the proposed magnet array has lower higher harmonic components and higher z -component of the magnetic flux density, which will reduce the force ripples of the planar motor.
A robotic device as a sensitive quantitative tool to assess upper limb impairments in stroke patients: a preliminary prospective cohort study.

OBJECTIVE
To compare kinematic indices in age-matched healthy subjects and stroke patients, by evaluating various tasks performed with a robotic device, and to provide an objective and standardized protocol to assess upper limb impairments in stroke patients.


DESIGN
A prospective cohort study.


SUBJECTS
Age-matched healthy subjects (n = 10) and stroke patients (n = 10).


METHODS
Various kinematic indices were analysed from 3 randomly assigned tasks performed by the affected arm in stroke patients and the dominant arm in healthy subjects. These tasks, composed of large-amplitude, targeted and geometrical movements, were standardized and performed with the ReaPLAN robotic device.


RESULTS
For large-amplitude movements, the stroke patients' path lengths were less constant in amplitude, less rectilinear and less smooth than those for healthy subjects (p < 0.001). For the targeted movements, the stroke patients' path lengths were less rectilinear than those of the healthy subjects (p < 0.001). For the geometrical movements, the stroke patients had greater difficulty making the requested shapes compared with the healthy subjects (p < 0.01).


CONCLUSION
Our study proposes an objective and standardized protocol to assess stroke patients' upper limbs with any robotic device. We suggest that further randomized controlled trials could use this quantitative tool to assess the efficacy of treatments such as robot-assisted therapy.
Life cycle cost modeling for railway vehicle

Life cycle costing is one of the most effective cost- approaches when we choose a solution from series of alternative so the least long-term cost ownership is achieved. Life cycle costing in railway industry has been focused on the prediction of investment of railway vehicles. But in today, the life cycle cost (LCC) prediction on total railway system is highly necessary. In this paper, we presented a life cycle cost model of railway vehicle as a basic study for evaluating the life cycle cost of total railway system; track, signaling, power supply and station et al. The life cycle costing model is mainly consisted of initial investment, annual operation and maintenance, and disposal costs. We basically defined a model for conventional railway vehicle based on the UNIFE LCC model. But some cost categories expanded to make our model represents domestic problems which cannot be covered in the UNIFE LCC model. We also applied our LCC model for the estimation of LCC on the brake disks and pads of commercial operating subway vehicles in Korea for our model verification. We found the usefulness of our model.