Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinguishing Untreated Osteoblastic Metastases From Enostoses Using CT Attenuation Measurements.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine whether CT attenuation thresholds can be used to distinguish untreated osteoblastic metastases from enostoses. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study group comprised 62 patients with 279 sclerotic bone lesions found at CT (126 enostoses in 37 patients and 153 metastases in 25 patients). The cause of sclerotic lesions was assessed histologically or by clinical and imaging follow-up. None of the patients had undergone prior treatment for the metastases. The mean and maximum attenuation were measured in Hounsfield units. ROC analysis was performed to determine sensitivity, specificity, AUC, 95% CIs, and cutoff values of CT attenuation to differentiate metastases from enostoses. Interreader reproducibility was assessed using an intraclass correlation coefficient with 95% CI. RESULTS The mean and maximum CT attenuation values of enostoses were 1190 ± 239 HU and 1323 ± 234 HU, respectively, and those of osteoblastic metastases were 654 ± 176 HU and 787 ± 194 HU, respectively. Using a cutoff of 885 HU for mean attenuation, the AUC was 0.982, sensitivity was 95%, and specificity was 96%. Using a cutoff of 1060 HU for maximum CT attenuation, the AUC was 0.976, sensitivity was 95%, and specificity was 96%. The mean attenuation intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.987 for enostoses and 0.81 for metastases. The maximum attenuation intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.814 for enostoses and 0.980 for metastases. CONCLUSION CT attenuation measurements can be used to distinguish untreated osteoblastic metastases from enostoses. A mean attenuation of 885 HU and a maximum attenuation of 1060 HU provide reliable thresholds below which a metastatic lesion is the favored diagnosis.
Conﬁdence and Communication Preferences on Weather Forecasts among University Students in Spain

: Weather forecasts affect many persons ’ lives and are used by the general public on a daily basis. However, they are not perfect, and there is an uncertainty associated with the current weather forecasts; users should be aware of this uncertainty. Previous research analyzes the perceptions, uses, and interpretations of uncertainty of Spanish undergraduate students. This study continues with this research line, but we investigate the degree of con ﬁ dence and communication preferences of students enrolled in three meteorology-related subjects taught at two universities in Spain. We evaluated to what extent students trust in the current weather forecasts and analyzed how students are aware of the uncertainty associated with the forecasts considering different lead times. In addition, we assessed how students value the forecast of several weather elements as well as the students ’ preferences for deterministic versus nondeterministic forecasts under two weather situations, with different degree of complexity in the forecast communication. A Google Form questionnaire was developed to address these issues. The survey was conducted in 2018/19, and 101 participants anonymously ﬁ lled out the survey. Participants were enrolled in three different subjects taught in the degree in marine sciences at the University of Alicante and the degrees in environmental sciences and physics at the University of Valencia. Results show that students have a well-formed opinion of weather forecasts, both for con ﬁ dence and in relation to the trend found in the current weather forecasts toward less accurate forecasts for larger lead times. For students ’ preferences for deterministic versus nondeterministic forecasts, a signi ﬁ cant majority of participants prefer weather forecasts that incorporate some uncertainty; a minority prefer single-valued (deterministic) forecasts. In comparing our results with those found in previous studies in different countries and contexts, similar outcomes are observed in general, but some differences are highlighted as well.
Reproductive Behavior in the

Squids use a diverse range of body patterns for communication. Each pattern consists of a series of chromatic, postural, and locomotor components that are under neural control and can change within tractions of a second. Here we describe an ethogram of 48 body pattern components from in xitu observations of reproductively active Sepioteuthis australis. In addition, we identify the total time and average duration that each component is shown, to a resolution of 1 s. Our results suggest that only a few components (e.g., "Golden epaulettes," "Stitchwork fins," and "Rigid arms") are temporally common, that is, shown for more than 80% of the time. In contrast to the component classification reported for other species of squid, for this species we suggest a classification system consisting of "short acute" (lasting for < 10 s); some of these same components were also classified as "medium acute" ( 1 1-60 s) or "chronic" (> 60 s). Several body patterning components were previously unreported, as were some of the combinations observed. The significance of these patterning components is discussed within the context of the associated behaviors of the squid on the spawning grounds.
The Burden and Determinants of Neck Pain in the General Population: Results of the Bone and Joint Decade 2000–2010 Task Force on Neck Pain and Its Associated Disorders

Study Design. Best evidence synthesis. Objective. To undertake a best evidence synthesis of the published evidence on the burden and determinants of neck pain and its associated disorders in the general population. Summary of Background Data. The evidence on burden and determinants of neck has not previously been summarized. Methods. The Bone and Joint Decade 2000–2010 Task Force on Neck Pain and Its Associated Disorders performed a systematic search and critical review of literature published between 1980 and 2006 to assemble the best evidence on neck pain. Studies meeting criteria for scientific validity were included in a best evidence synthesis. Results. We identified 469 studies on burden and determinants of neck pain, and judged 249 to be scientifically admissible; 101 articles related to the burden and determinants of neck pain in the general population. Incidence ranged from 0.055 per 1000 person years (disc herniation with radiculopathy) to 213 per 1000 persons (self-reported neck pain). Incidence of neck injuries during competitive sports ranged from 0.02 to 21 per 1000 exposures. The 12-month prevalence of pain typically ranged between 30% and 50%; the 12-month prevalence of activity-limiting pain was 1.7% to 11.5%. Neck pain was more prevalent among women and prevalence peaked in middle age. Risk factors for neck pain included genetics, poor psychological health, and exposure to tobacco. Disc degeneration was not identified as a risk factor. The use of sporting gear (helmets, face shields) to prevent other types of injury was not associated with increased neck injuries in bicycling, hockey, or skiing. Conclusion. Neck pain is common. Nonmodifiable risk factors for neck pain included age, gender, and genetics. Modifiable factors included smoking, exposure to tobacco, and psychological health. Disc degeneration was not identified as a risk factor. Future research should concentrate on longitudinal designs exploring preventive strategies and modifiable risk factors for neck pain.
A Signaling Mechanism Coupling Netrin-1/Deleted in Colorectal Cancer Chemoattraction to SNARE-Mediated Exocytosis in Axonal Growth Cones

Directed cell migration and axonal guidance are essential steps in neural development. Both processes are controlled by specific guidance cues that activate the signaling cascades that ultimately control cytoskeletal dynamics. Another essential step in migration and axonal guidance is the regulation of plasmalemma turnover and exocytosis in leading edges and growth cones. However, the cross talk mechanisms linking guidance receptors and membrane exocytosis are not understood. Netrin-1 is a chemoattractive cue required for the formation of commissural pathways. Here, we show that the Netrin-1 receptor deleted in colorectal cancer (DCC) forms a protein complex with the t-SNARE (target SNARE) protein Syntaxin-1 (Sytx1). This interaction is Netrin-1 dependent both in vitro and in vivo, and requires specific Sytx1 and DCC domains. Blockade of Sytx1 function by using botulinum toxins abolished Netrin-1-dependent chemoattraction of axons in mouse neuronal cultures. Similar loss-of-function experiments in the chicken spinal cord in vivo using dominant-negative Sytx1 constructs or RNAi led to defects in commissural axon pathfinding reminiscent to those described in Netrin-1 and DCC loss-of-function models. We also show that Netrin-1 elicits exocytosis at growth cones in a Sytx1-dependent manner. Moreover, we demonstrate that the Sytx1/DCC complex associates with the v-SNARE (vesicle SNARE) tetanus neurotoxin-insensitive vesicle-associated membrane protein (TI-VAMP) and that knockdown of TI-VAMP in the commissural pathway in the spinal cord results in aberrant axonal guidance phenotypes. Our data provide evidence of a new signaling mechanism that couples chemotropic Netrin-1/DCC axonal guidance and Sytx1/TI-VAMP SNARE proteins regulating membrane turnover and exocytosis.
Additional Observation in Three Cases Patients with Björk-Shiley Heart Valves: Black Holes on MR Images of the Brain of

Summary: We report the cases of three patients with Bjo¨rk-Shiley convexo-concave heart valves with unusual black holes shown on cerebral MR images. For two patients, these findings were associated with fracture of the Bjo¨rk-Shiley convexo-concave heart valve, and for the third, with worn surfaces on the heart valve. Susceptibility changes shown by MR imaging suggest the possibility that these black holes may be associated with microscopic metallic particles, although, the exact cause of these black holes remains undetermined.
Evaluation of economic disruptions from the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake using a refined 1 adaptive regional input-output model

8 The Adaptive Regional Input-Output (ARIO) model is popular for quantifying indirect economic losses, 9 which stem from business and supply chain interruption. However, refining this model to study new contexts 10 is challenging in its basic form due to low-resolution modeling of behavioral parameters and temporally 11 static reconstruction rates. This paper presents a refined ARIO, or R-ARIO model that incorporates dynamic 12 reconstruction rates, sector-level modeling of behavioral parameters, and explicit modeling of housing losses 13 separately from productive capital losses. We perform a global variance-based sensitivity analysis to identify 14 the most influential parameters on predicted indirect loss from the R-ARIO model. A case study application 15 to the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake Sequence isolates trends in housing and economic recovery, capturing 16 temporal differences in reconstruction demand and uncertainty across economic indicators.
Websites Need Your Permission Too – User Sentiment and Decision-Making on Web Permission Prompts in Desktop Chrome

The web utilizes permission prompts to moderate access to certain capabilities. We present the first investigation of user behavior and sentiment of this security and privacy measure on the web, using 28 days of telemetry data from more than 100M Chrome instal-lations on desktop platforms and experience sampling responses from 25,706 Chrome users. Based on this data, we find that ignoring and dismissing permission prompts are most common for geolocation and notifications. Permission prompts are perceived as more annoying and interrupting when they are not allowed, and most respondents cite a rational reason for the decision they took. Our data also supports that the perceived availability of contextual information from the requesting website is associated with allowing access to a requested capability. More usable permission controls could facilitate adoption of best practices that address several of the identified challenges; and ultimately could lead to better user experiences and a safer web.
A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning

Sequential prediction problems such as imitation learning, where future observations depend on previous predictions (actions), violate the common i.i. d. assumptions made in statistical learning. This leads to poor performance in theory and often in practice. Some recent approaches provide stronger guarantees in this setting, but remain somewhat unsatisfactory as they train either non-stationary or stochastic policies and require a large number of iterations. In this paper, we propose a new iterative algorithm, which trains a stationary deterministic policy, that can be seen as a no regret algorithm in an online learning setting. We show that any such no regret algorithm, combined with additional reduction assumptions, must find a policy with good performance under the distribution of observations it induces in such sequential settings. We demonstrate that this new approach outperforms previous approaches on two challenging imitation learning problems and a benchmark sequence labeling problem.
Financialisation, financial development, and investment: evidence from European non-financial corporations

This article provides estimations of the effects of different financial channels on physical investment in Europe using the balance sheets of publicly listed non-financial corporations (NFCs) for the period 1995-2015. The evidence suggests that both financial payments and financial income have an adverse effect on investment in fixed assets. The negative impacts of increasing financial income are non-linear with respect to company size: they crowd out investment in large companies, and have a positive effect on the investment of relatively smaller companies. Similar to the recent literature on financegrowth nexus, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial development and companies’ investment. However, in contrast to the existing literature, we also find that a higher degree of financial development in the country is associated with a stronger negative effect of financial income on investment.
Convergence in Probability of Compressed Annealing

We consider combinatorial optimization problems for which the formation of a neighborhood structure of feasible solutions is impeded by a set of constraints. Neighborhoods are recovered by relaxing the complicating constraints into the objective function within a penalty term. We examine a heuristic called compressed annealing that integrates a variable penalty multiplier approach within the framework of simulated annealing. We refer to the value of the penalty multiplier as "pressure. " We analyze the behavior of compressed annealing by exploring the interaction between temperature (which controls the ability of compressed annealing to climb hills) and pressure (which controls the height of the hills). We develop a necessary and sufficient condition on the joint cooling and compression schedules for compressed annealing to converge in probability to the set of global minima. Our work generalizes the results of Hajek (1988) in the sense that when there are no relaxed constraints, our results reduce to his.
MEN, MASCULINITIES AND GENDER POLITICS IN SOUTH AFRICA: A REPLY TO MACLEOD

Many gender scholars have welcomed the new theoretical and empirical work on men. But there have certainly been voices of caution and dissent, though thus far these have been somewhat muted. In her article Catriona Macleod expresses doubts about my approach to the study of men in South Africa. In this article I respond to her concerns. While my response indicates disagreement, I think Macleod’s critique is important for the study of gender in Southern Africa because it promotes debate, allows the opportunity for the restatement of position and opens up a discussion on the link between academic work and politics.
Membrane Remodeling by the Double-Barrel Scaffolding Protein of Poxvirus

In contrast to most enveloped viruses, poxviruses produce infectious particles that do not acquire their internal lipid membrane by budding through cellular compartments. Instead, poxvirus immature particles are generated from atypical crescent-shaped precursors whose architecture and composition remain contentious. Here we describe the 2.6 Å crystal structure of vaccinia virus D13, a key structural component of the outer scaffold of viral crescents. D13 folds into two jellyrolls decorated by a head domain of novel fold. It assembles into trimers that are homologous to the double-barrel capsid proteins of adenovirus and lipid-containing icosahedral viruses. We show that, when tethered onto artificial membranes, D13 forms a honeycomb lattice and assembly products structurally similar to the viral crescents and immature particles. The architecture of the D13 honeycomb lattice and the lipid-remodeling abilities of D13 support a model of assembly that exhibits similarities with the giant mimivirus. Overall, these findings establish that the first committed step of poxvirus morphogenesis utilizes an ancestral lipid-remodeling strategy common to icosahedral DNA viruses infecting all kingdoms of life. Furthermore, D13 is the target of rifampicin and its structure will aid the development of poxvirus assembly inhibitors.
Single-Dose Safety and Pharmacokinetics of ST-246, a Novel Orthopoxvirus Egress Inhibitor

ABSTRACT ST-246 is a novel, potent orthopoxvirus egress inhibitor that is being developed to treat pathogenic orthopoxvirus infections of humans. This phase I, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled single ascending dose study (first time with humans) was conducted to determine the safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of ST-246 in healthy human volunteers. ST-246 was administered in single oral doses of 500, 1,000, and 2,000 mg to fasting healthy volunteers and 1,000 mg to nonfasting healthy volunteers. ST-246 was generally well tolerated with no serious adverse events, and no subject was withdrawn from the study due to ST-246. The most commonly reported drug-related adverse event was neutropenia, which was found, upon further analysis, not to be treatment related. ST-246 was readily absorbed following oral administration with mean times to maximum concentration from 2 h to 3 h. Absorption was greater in nonfasting volunteers than in fasting volunteers. Administration of ST-246 resulted in exposure levels predicted to be sufficient for inhibiting orthopoxvirus replication compared to exposure levels in nonhuman primates in which ST-246 protected animals from lethal orthopoxvirus infection.
Discriminating Taxonomic Categories and Domains in Mental Simulations of Concepts of Varying Concreteness

Most studies of conceptual knowledge in the brain focus on a narrow range of concrete conceptual categories, rely on the researchers' intuitions about which object belongs to these categories, and assume a broadly taxonomic organization of knowledge. In this fMRI study, we focus on concepts with a variety of concreteness levels; we use a state of the art lexical resource (WordNet 3.1) as the source for a relatively large number of category distinctions and compare a taxonomic style of organization with a domain-based model (an example domain is Law). Participants mentally simulated situations associated with concepts when cued by text stimuli. Using multivariate pattern analysis, we find evidence that all Taxonomic categories and Domains can be distinguished from fMRI data and also observe a clear concreteness effect: Tools and Locations can be reliably predicted for unseen participants, but less concrete categories (e.g., Attributes, Communications, Events, Social Roles) can only be reliably discriminated within participants. A second concreteness effect relates to the interaction of Domain and Taxonomic category membership: Domain (e.g., relation to Law vs. Music) can be better predicted for less concrete categories. We repeated the analysis within anatomical regions, observing discrimination between all/most categories in the left mid occipital and left mid temporal gyri, and more specialized discrimination for concrete categories Tool and Location in the left precentral and fusiform gyri, respectively. Highly concrete/abstract Taxonomic categories and Domain were segregated in frontal regions. We conclude that both Taxonomic and Domain class distinctions are relevant for interpreting neural structuring of concrete and abstract concepts.
Contribution of integrated teaching in the improvement of an undergraduate ophthalmology curriculum

Purpose Conventional medical curriculum is the rule of medical teaching in Greek Medical Schools. Medical students are often taught irrelevant details with little or no reference to their potential clinical significance. Alternatively, integrated teaching warrants that the complete teaching material is covered by each faculty member not considering areas of personal expertise. The aim of this study was to evaluate the implementation of integrated teaching in ophthalmic training. Methods The main outcome measures of this retrospective study were a) comments and recommendations made anonymously by the fifth-year medical students in the evaluation questionnaires filled in at the end of their training, and b) scores obtained by students in their final examination at the end of their training in the 2nd Department of Ophthalmology as part of the core Curriculum of the Medical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The latter outcome was analyzed with respect to the implementation of integrated teaching. Results The score obtained by students in the final examination, which is an objective outcome measure, increased significantly after the implementation of integrated teaching. The final grade (scores out of 10) of students who were trained with the integrated system (6.17±1.67, mean ± standard deviation) was significantly higher compared to those (5.52±2.20) trained with the conventional system (P<0.001). The positive outcome of this process was evident as there was a significant increase in the number of students satisfied with the teaching process compared to previous academic years. Conclusion Based on the experience of eight academic years and as a result of interactive assessment process our department has modified its medical student teaching process from conventional to integrated; all teaching staff members are involved in the teaching process, while students are divided in small groups. In conclusion, integrated teaching in small student groups appears to be an efficient teaching method (for both theoretical and clinical skills) of ophthalmic training for medical students.
Restricted parameter space models for testing gene‐gene interaction

There is a growing recognition that interactions (gene‐gene and gene‐environment) can play an important role in common disease etiology. The development of cost‐effective genotyping technologies has made genome‐wide association studies the preferred tool for searching for loci affecting disease risk. These studies are characterized by a large number of investigated SNPs, and efficient statistical methods are even more important than in classical association studies that are done with a small number of markers. In this article we propose a novel gene‐gene interaction test that is more powerful than classical methods. The increase in power is due to the fact that the proposed method incorporates reasonable constraints in the parameter space. The test for both association and interaction is based on a likelihood ratio statistic that has a x̄2 distribution asymptotically. We also discuss the definitions used for “no interaction” and argue that tests for pure interaction are useful in genome‐wide studies, especially when using two‐stage strategies where the analyses in the second stage are done on pairs of loci for which at least one is associated with the trait. Genet. Epidemiol. 33:386–393, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.