Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of delayed gastric emptying in diabetes.

OBJECTIVE To define the predictors of the rate of gastric emptying in patients with diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 101 outpatients with diabetes (79 type 1 and 22 type 2) underwent measurements of gastric emptying of a solid/liquid meal (scintigraphy), upper gastrointestinal symptoms (questionnaire), glycemic control (blood glucose concentrations during gastric emptying measurement), and autonomic nerve function (cardiovascular reflexes). RESULTS The gastric emptying of solid and/or liquid was delayed in 66 (65%) patients. Solid (retention at 100 min 64 +/- 3.2 vs. 50.2 +/- 3.6%, P < 0.005) and liquid (retention at 100 min 22.7 +/- 1.7 vs. 16.0 +/- 1.8%, P < 0.001) gastric emptying was slower in women than in men. Of all upper gastrointestinal symptoms (including nausea and vomiting), only abdominal bloating/fullness was associated with slower gastric emptying (P < 0.005). A multiple regression analysis demonstrated that both abdominal bloating/fullness and female sex were predictors of slower gastric emptying of both solids and liquids. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that the presence of abdominal bloating/fullness but not any other upper gastrointestinal symptom is associated with diabetic gastroparesis and that gastric emptying is slower in diabetic women than in diabetic men.
Immune checkpoint-targeted therapy: cancer and autoimmune diseases represent two sides of the same coin

The immune system plays a critical role in tumor surveillance and cancer prevention. However, some cancer cells can evade immune destruction by acquiring the ability to inhibit immune checkpoint regulatory pathways and suppress anti-cancer immune responses. In recent years, the immune checkpoints took center stage in cancer immunotherapy and several promising strategies, based on the intervention in immune checkpoint-regulated pathways, have been designed in order to overcome mechanisms of immunosuppression. Clinical studies, using anti-inhibitory immune checkpoint-receptor antibodies, demonstrated durable clinical responses even in patients with advanced cancer. However, the clinical benefit was limited to a subset of cancer patients. Furthermore, the immune checkpoint therapy, which unleashes the immune system in order to augment the anti-cancer immune response, also increases the incidence of autoimmune diseases and induces an array of immune-related adverse effects. Here we briefly discuss some of the pros and cons of immune checkpoint-directed immunotherapy.
Mammographic screening: case-control studies.

BACKGROUND The case-control design can be used to evaluate the benefit of cancer screening programmes. MATERIALS AND METHODS This paper outlines the main methodological features of the case-control design in this context, and indicates some potential biases. It also reviews the existing case-control literature on mammographic screening. RESULTS Case-control studies consistently indicate a reduction of approximately 50% in breast cancer mortality associated with mammography. This result indicates greater benefit than shown in randomised trials; however, one should recognise that trials indicate effectiveness whereas case-control studies indicate efficacy. The two types of evidence are broadly compatible when one allows for screening non-compliance and contamination in the randomised trials. CONCLUSIONS The case-control evidence supports and is consistent with the findings of randomised trials of mammography. Effectiveness estimates from trials indicate the benefit of screening to the population as a whole, and are pertinent to the public policy debate as to the value of offering screening. In contrast, case-control studies indicate benefit to actual screening participants. As such, case-control estimates of efficacy are appropriate for individual decision-making by women about their use of mammography when it is potentially available to them.
Preventing mental disorders in children: a public health priority.

BACKGROUND Mental disorders affect 14% of children, cause significant long-term disability and are arguably the leading health problems that Canadian children face after infancy. Treatment services alone cannot meet children's mental health needs. In addition to treatment, prevention programs hold potential to reduce the number of children with disorders in the population. Effective programs exist for preventing conduct, anxiety and depressive disorders, three of the most prevalent disorders in children. Therefore, we investigated the state of Canadian programs in comparison with prevention programs described in the literature for these three disorders. METHODS We identified children's mental health and early child development (ECD) programs across Canada with national or provincial/territorial scope and significance and with potential relevance to mental health. We then interviewed policy-makers to determine which programs included goals related to mental health, and incorporated key features from programs known to be effective for preventing the three disorders of interest. RESULTS No prevention programs specific to children's mental health were identified. However, 17 ECD programs incorporated generic goals related to mental health and incorporated key features seen in effective prevention programs. Only Ontario's Better Beginnings, Better Futures (BBBF) explicitly included mental health within its major program goals, incorporated multiple features seen in effective (conduct disorder) prevention programs and demonstrated positive child mental health outcomes. DISCUSSION The lack of Canadian prevention programs specific to children's mental health is concerning. ECD programs have the potential to improve child mental health outcomes within their wider mandates. BBBF is an exemplar for such programs. However, new investments in implementing (and evaluating) programs that specifically aim to prevent mental disorders are required to improve the mental health of children in the population. Preventing children's mental disorders must be a Canadian public health priority.
Mobile Device Usage Characteristics: The Effect of Context and Form Factor on Locked and Unlocked Usage

Smartphones and tablets are an indispensable part of modern communication and people spend considerable time interacting with their devices every day. While substantial research has been conducted concerning smartphone usage, little is known about how tablets are used. This paper studies mobile device usage characteristics like session length, interaction frequency, and daily usage in locked and unlocked state with respect to location context. Based on logs from 1,585 Android devices (470 years of total usage time), we derive and analyze 23 million usage sessions. We found that devices remain locked for 60% of the interactions and usage at home occurs twice as frequent as at work. With an average of 58 interactions per day, smartphones are used twice as often as tablets, while tablet sessions are 2.5 times longer, resulting in almost equal aggregated daily usage. We conclude that usage session characteristics differ considerably between tablets and smartphones.
A cock and bull story : Nage sex terms and their implications for ethnozoological classification

Exemplified by English bull and cow, special terms distinguishing members of animal categories by sex are a common feature of languages the world over. The application of such terms in Nage, a language of eastern Indonesia, reveals a system of classification consistent both with the general ethnozoological taxonomy and with culturally important symbolic and utilitarian contrasts. Applied to all creatures classified as "animals" (ana wa), Nage sex differentiable terms are predicated on differences in genital form and features of copulation and reproduction. Partly in this regard, the terms provide support for an unnamed category "mammal" and thus point to a hitherto unremarked criterion for identifying covert taxa-a topic of perennial interest in the general study of folk taxonomies.
Scaling prediction errors to reward variability benefits error-driven learning in humans

Effective error-driven learning requires individuals to adapt learning to environmental reward variability. The adaptive mechanism may involve decays in learning rate across subsequent trials, as shown previously, and rescaling of reward prediction errors. The present study investigated the influence of prediction error scaling and, in particular, the consequences for learning performance. Participants explicitly predicted reward magnitudes that were drawn from different probability distributions with specific standard deviations. By fitting the data with reinforcement learning models, we found scaling of prediction errors, in addition to the learning rate decay shown previously. Importantly, the prediction error scaling was closely related to learning performance, defined as accuracy in predicting the mean of reward distributions, across individual participants. In addition, participants who scaled prediction errors relative to standard deviation also presented with more similar performance for different standard deviations, indicating that increases in standard deviation did not substantially decrease “adapters'” accuracy in predicting the means of reward distributions. However, exaggerated scaling beyond the standard deviation resulted in impaired performance. Thus efficient adaptation makes learning more robust to changing variability.
Examining the interactions among family dynamics, acculturation, spiritual well-being and Asian American culture

This paper evaluates the interactions among family dynamics, acculturation, and spiritual well-being and Asian American culture. Articles included examine the shift of psychology towards an inclusion of religiosity and spirituality, and multicultural perspectives, especially regarding Asian American culture and acculturation. The importance of family of origin influence is also examined. Author believed healthier family dynamics and higher acculturation towards western culture would be significantly related to healthier spiritual, existential, and religious well-being. The author combined the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales – Fourth Edition (FACES-IV), Suinn-Lew Asian Self-Identity Acculturation scale (SLASIA), Spiritual Well-being (SWB) scale, and demographic questions into an electronic survey, which was disseminated among Asian Americans. Univariate and multivariate analyses of variance were conducted for various factors. Results indicated a significantly negative relationship between Family Disengagement and Spiritual Well-Being, and a positive significant relationship between Family Enmeshment and Existential Well-Being. Family Chaos was Examining the Interactions Among Family Dynamics iv significantly and negatively related to Spiritual, Religious, and Existential Well-Being. No significant relationship was found between SL-ASIA acculturation scores and any of the four family health scales. A cluster analysis was also used to explore whether homogeneous subgroups of respondents could be identified. Four meaningful groups were found. Explanations of results are explored. Limitations and future areas of research are examined as well. Examining the Interactions Among Family Dynamics v Table of
Evolution of central pattern generators for bipedal walking in a real-time physics environment

We describe an evolutionary approach to the control problem of bipedal walking. Using a full rigid-body simulation of a biped, it was possible to evolve recurrent neural networks that controlled stable straight-line walking on a planar surface. No proprioceptive information was necessary in order to achieve this task. Furthermore, simple sensory input to locate a sound source was integrated to achieve directional walking. To our knowledge, this is the first work that demonstrates the application of evolutionary optimization to 3D physically simulated biped locomotion.
Modality-specific auditory and visual temporal processing deficits

We studied the attentional blink (AB) and the repetition blindness (RB) effects using an audio-visual presentation procedure designed to overcome several potential methodological confounds in previous cross-modal research. In Experiment 1, two target digits were embedded amongst letter distractors in two concurrent streams (one visual and the other auditory) presented from the same spatial location. Targets appeared in either modality unpredictably at different temporal lags, and the participants’ task was to recall the digits at the end of the trial. We evaluated both AB and RB for pairs of targets presented in either the same or different modalities. Under these conditions both AB and RB were observed in vision, AB but not RB was observed in audition, and there was no evidence of AB or RB cross-modally from audition to vision or vice versa. In Experiment 2, we further investigated the AB by including Lag 1 items and observed Lag 1 sparing, thus ruling out the possibility that the observed effects were due to perceptual and/or conceptual masking. Our results support a distinction between a modality-specific interference at the attentional selection stage and a modality-independent interference at later processing stages. They also provide a new dissociation between the AB and RB.
Tracing the molecular basis of transcriptional dynamics in noisy data by using an experiment-based mathematical model

Changes in transcription factor levels, epigenetic status, splicing kinetics and mRNA degradation can each contribute to changes in the mRNA dynamics of a gene. We present a novel method to identify which of these processes is changed in cells in response to external signals or as a result of a diseased state. The method employs a mathematical model, for which the kinetics of gene regulation, splicing, elongation and mRNA degradation were estimated from experimental data of transcriptional dynamics. The time-dependent dynamics of several species of adipose differentiation-related protein (ADRP) mRNA were measured in response to ligand activation of the transcription factor peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor δ (PPARδ). We validated the method by monitoring the mRNA dynamics upon gene activation in the presence of a splicing inhibitor. Our mathematical model correctly identifies splicing as the inhibitor target, despite the noise in the data.
Understanding Fourth Graders' Decline in Reading Motivation from Students' and Teachers' Perspectives

UNDERSTANDING FOURTH GRADERS' DECLINE IN READING MOTIVATION FROM STUDENTS' AND TEACHERS' PERSPECTIVES Christine Hebert Old Dominion University Dissertation Chair: Charlene Fleener Previous research by Chall and Jacobs (2003) documented the phenomena of the fourth grade slump, a period in which students switch from learning to read to reading to learn and the subsequent loss of motivation to read. The purpose of this research is to present a phenomenological qualitative study of whether a sample of fourth grade students, low-achieving readers and average achieving readers, exhibited a loss in their motivation to read. Students' responses to a standardized conversational survey and questionnaire, the Motivation to Read Profile (Gambrell, Palmer, Codling & Mazzoni, 2007) and teachers' responses to a researcher-developed questionnaire were examined and coded by themes. Results indicated that there was no difference in motivation to read between low-achieving and average-achieving readers. Students' responses showed positive motivation to read, while teachers' response indicated a negative attitude towards students' motivation to read. Research results were inconclusive concerning students' readiness to switch from learning to read to reading to learn. Implications for future research are discussed. A review of pertinent literature is presented. Dissertation Committee Members: Dr. Linda Bol
Emotional reactions to music: psychophysiological correlates and applications to affective disorders

Music has been used to evoke emotions for centuries. The mechanisms underlying this effect have remained largely unclear. This thesis contributes to research on how music evokes emotions by investigating two mechanisms from the model of Juslin and Vastfjall (2008) - musical expectancy and emotional contagion. In the perception studies the focus is on how musical expectancy violations are detected by either musically trained or untrained individuals. In the music-making studies, we concentrate on mood change brought about by cheerful music in healthy and depressed individuals and factors which could modulate this change like personality, musical preference and general emotional state. The results indicate that the subtlest scale violations are detected at the level of brain electrical potential while the task remains behaviourally difficult. This suggests that scale information is processed using music-syntactic analysis and in memory existing representations of tonal hierarchies, instead of auditory sensory memory as previously believed. Music-making decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue in both depressed and healthy participants whereas arousal and positive mood increased. This suggests that musicmaking could be beneficial for depressed individuals in terms of improving their mood on a short-term basis, even though a reliable music-related decrease of depression symptoms was not found. Among healthy participants, intraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, musical training and liking of the music predicted positive changes in mood following a music-making session. Taken together, these studies indicate that subtle musical scale violations are detected even if they are not consciously perceived as deviants and could therefore be used to evoke emotions, and music-making improves the mood in both healthy and depressed individuals and could serve as a temporary relief in case of depression.
Performance analysis of the Alpha 21264-based Compaq ES40 system

This paper evaluates performance characteristics of the Compaq ES40 shared memory multiprocessor. The ES40 system contains up to four Alpha 21264 CPU's together with a high-performance memory system. We qualitatively describe architectural features included in the 21264 microprocessor and the surrounding system chipset. We further quantitatively show the performance effects of these features using benchmark results and profiling data collected from industry-standard commercial and technical workloads. The profile data includes basic performance information-such as instructions per cycle, branch mispredicts, and cache misses-as well as other data that specifically characterizes the 21264. Wherever possible, we compare and contrast the ES40 to the AlphaServer 4100-a previous-generation Alpha system containing four Alpha 21164 microprocessors-to highlight the architectural advances in the ES40. We find that the Compaq ES40 often provides 2 to 3 times the performance of the AlphaServer 4100 at similar clock frequencies. We also find that the ES40 memory system has about five times the memory bandwidth of the 4100. These performance improvements come from numerous microprocessor and platform enhancements, including out-of-order execution, branch prediction, functional units, and the memory system.
An Accurate and Efficient Method to Calculate the Error Statistics of Block-based Approximate Adders

Adders are key building blocks of many error-tolerant applications. Leveraging the application-level error tolerance, a number of approximate adders were proposed recently. Many of them belong to the category of block-based approximate adders. For approximate circuits, besides normal metrics such as area and delay, another important metric is the error measurement. Given the popularity of block-based approximate adders, in this work, we propose an accurate and efficient method to obtain the error statistics of these adders. We first show how to calculate the error rates. Then, we demonstrate an approach to get the exact error distribution, which can be used to calculate other error characteristics, such as mean error distance and mean square error.
Fixity: Identity, Time and Dur on Facebook

The purpose of social network services (SNS) is to enable new ways of making contact and staying in touch. The finessed use of SNS can enable people to manage their social connections with fluidity; enabling change of social grouping and evolving identity. Key to this performance is that it is enacted through time. Certain aspects of SNS may of course create a fixing in identity and its performance, trapping people, for example, in a display of identity in the past that they have come to regret. In this paper, we shall report evidence that suggests that the temporal experiencing of Facebook with regard to this aspect of time and identity needs to be placed alongside another feature of the way the service is used. This feature leads people to feel as if they are always acting in the now and that their history - as well as that of others they connect to seems to disappear from view. We shall suggest that the performance of identity through time is thus constrained. Users seek but cannot find adequate ways of adjusting their identity by crafting past and future performances outside the envelope of identity in the present, in the now, the one facilitated and emphasized by Facebook design and use patterns.
The pattern of the electromagnetic field emitted by mobile phones in motor vehicle driving simulators

IntroductionThe paper reports the results of the determinations of UMTS EMF distributions in the driver’s cab of motor vehicle simulators. The results will serve as the basis for future research on the influence of EMF emitted by mobile phones on driver physiology.Materials and MethodsTwo motor vehicle driving simulators were monitored, while an EMF source was placed at the driver’s head or on the dashboard of the motor vehicle driving simulator. For every applied configuration, the maximal electric field strength was measured, as were the values at 16 points corresponding to chosen locations on a driver’s or passenger’s body.ResultsWhen the power was set for the maximum (49 mW), a value of 27 V/m was measured in the vicinity of the driver’s head when the phone was close to the head. With the same power, when the phone was placed on the dashboard, the measured maximum was 15.2 V/m in the vicinity of the driver’s foot. Similar results were obtained for the passenger. Significant perturbations in EMF distribution and an increase in electric field strength values in the motor vehicle driving simulator were also observed in comparison to free space measurements, and the electric field strength was up to 3 times higher inside the simulator.ConclusionsThis study can act as the basis of future studies concerning the influence of the EMF emitted by mobile phones on the physiology of the driver. Additionally, the authors postulate that it is advisable to keep mobile phones at a distance from the head, i.e. use, whenever possible, hands-free kits to reduce EMF exposure, both for drivers and passengers.