Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Urinary Leukotriene E4 Level in Non-Allergic Thai Young Children.

BACKGROUND Urinary leukotriene E4 (uLTE4) concentration represents body leukotriene synthesis. The level increases especially in respiratory allergic diseases. Researches of leukotriene production role in children with respiratory allergic diseases required the normal levels in non-allergic children as references. OBJECTIVE The study was to assess the reference values of uLTE4 in non-allergic Thai children measured by competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) technique. MATERIAL AND METHOD Children who were admitted for elective surgery, aged 6 months to 5 years, were included in the study. Subjects who had acute illness, respiratory allergy (allergic rhinitis and asthma), and chronic diseases were excluded. Morning urine (5 ml) was collectedfor uLTE4 analysis by competitive ELISA technique. RESULTS There were 36 urinary samples from 36 subjects aged 6-60 months with 26 boys and 10 girls. The mean of uLTE4 concentration was 619.73 ± 701.32 pg/ml and the mean of uLTE4 concentration adjustedfor urinary creatinine concentrations was 1,328 ± 788.54 pg/mg creatinine. The mean of uLTE4 concentration in boys and girls were 1,349 ± 817.10 pg/mg creatinine and 1,275 ± 747.79 pg/mg creatinine respectively. The mean of uLTE4 concentration adjusted for urinary creatinine concentrations were 1,363 ± 886.65, 1,384 ± 771.81 and 1,223 ± 773.16 pg/mg creatinine for children with the age of 6-18, 19-36 and 37-60 months respectively. CONCLUSION The concentrations of uLTE4 and uLTE4 per creatinine were presented by age group in Thai very young children with non-respiratory disease. The concentrations were elevated in younger age group.
Computer aided mass detection in mammography with temporal change analysis

This paper presents a method to extract change information from temporal mammogram pairs and to incorporate the temporal change information in the malignant mass classification. In this method, a temporal mammogram registration framework which is based on spatial relations between regions of interest and graph matching was used to create correspondences between regions of current mammogram and regions of previous mammogram. 18 image features were then used to capture the differences (temporal changes) between the matched regions. To assess the contribution of temporal change information to the mass detection, 5 methods were designed to combine mass classification on image features measured on single regions and mass classification on temporal features to improve overall mass classification. The method was tested on 95 pairs of temporal mammograms using k-fold cross validation procedure. The experimental results showed that, when combining two classification results using linear combination or by taking minimum value, the Az score of overall classification performance increased from 0.8843 to 0.8989 and 0.8863 respectively. The results demonstrated that registering temporal mammograms, measuring temporal changes from matched regions and incorporating the change information in the mass classification improves the overall mass detection.
HSpam14: A Collection of 14 Million Tweets for Hashtag-Oriented Spam Research

Hashtag facilitates information diffusion in Twitter by creating dynamic and virtual communities for information aggregation from all Twitter users. Because hashtags serve as additional channels for one's tweets to be potentially accessed by other users than her own followers, hashtags are targeted for spamming purposes (e.g., hashtag hijacking), particularly the popular and trending hashtags. Although much effort has been devoted to fighting against email/web spam, limited studies are on hashtag-oriented spam in tweets. In this paper, we collected 14 million tweets that matched some trending hashtags in two months' time and then conducted systematic annotation of the tweets being spam and ham (i.e., non-spam). We name the annotated dataset HSpam14. Our annotation process includes four major steps: (i) heuristic-based selection to search for tweets that are more likely to be spam, (ii) near-duplicate cluster based annotation to firstly group similar tweets into clusters and then label the clusters, (iii) reliable ham tweets detection to label tweets that are non-spam, and (iv) Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based label prediction to predict the labels of remaining unlabeled tweets. One major contribution of this work is the creation of HSpam14 dataset, which can be used for hashtag-oriented spam research in tweets. Another contribution is the observations made from the preliminary analysis of the HSpam14 dataset.
Using Worker Self-Assessments for Competence-Based Pre-Selection in Crowdsourcing Microtasks

Paid crowdsourcing platforms have evolved into remarkable marketplaces where requesters can tap into human intelligence to serve a multitude of purposes, and the workforce can benefit through monetary returns for investing their efforts. In this work, we focus on individual crowd worker competencies. By drawing from self-assessment theories in psychology, we show that crowd workers often lack awareness about their true level of competence. Due to this, although workers intend to maintain a high reputation, they tend to participate in tasks that are beyond their competence. We reveal the diversity of individual worker competencies, and make a case for competence-based pre-selection in crowdsourcing marketplaces. We show the implications of flawed self-assessments on real-world microtasks, and propose a novel worker pre-selection method that considers accuracy of worker self-assessments. We evaluated our method in a sentiment analysis task and observed an improvement in the accuracy by over 15%, when compared to traditional performance-based worker pre-selection. Similarly, our proposed method resulted in an improvement in accuracy of nearly 6% in an image validation task. Our results show that requesters in crowdsourcing platforms can benefit by considering worker self-assessments in addition to their performance for pre-selection.
MIMO channel capacity and modeling issues on a measured indoor radio channel at 5.8 GHz

Multiple transmitters and receivers can be used to provide high link capacity in future wireless systems. Herein, an analysis of indoor environment multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) measurements in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band at 5.8 GHz is performed and the possible increase in capacity, utilizing multiple transmitters and receivers is examined. The investigation shows that in the measured indoor environment, the scattering is sufficiently rich to provide substantial link capacity increases. Furthermore, the effect of intra-element spacing on the channel capacity is studied. Our investigation also shows that the envelope of the channel coefficients for this obstructed-line-of-sight (OLOS) indoor scenario is approximately Rayleigh distributed and the MIMO channel covariance matrix can be well approximated by a Kronecker product of the covariance matrices describing the correlation at the transmitter side and the receiver side, respectively. A statistical narrowband model for the OLOS indoor MIMO channel based on this covariance structure is presented.
Evaluation of Continuous VNIR-SWIR Spectra versus Narrowband Hyperspectral Indices to Discriminate the Invasive Acacia longifolia within a Mediterranean Dune Ecosystem

Hyperspectral remote sensing is an effective tool to discriminate plant species, providing vast potential to trace plant invasions for ecological assessments. However, necessary baseline information for the use of remote sensing data is missing for many high-impact invaders. Furthermore, the identification of the suitable classification algorithms and spectral regions for successfully classifying species remains an open field of research. Here, we tested the separability of the invasive tree Acacia longifolia from adjacent exotic and native vegetation in a Natura 2000 protected Mediterranean dune ecosystem. We used continuous visible, near-infrared and short wave infrared (VNIR-SWIR) data as well as vegetation indices at the leaf and canopy level for classification, comparing five different classification algorithms. We were able to successfully distinguish A. longifolia from surrounding vegetation based on vegetation indices. At the leaf level, radial-basis function kernel Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) achieved both a high Sensitivity (SVM: 0.83, RF: 0.78) and a high Positive Predicted Value (PPV) (0.86, 0.83). At the canopy level, RF was the classifier with an optimal balance of Sensitivity (0.75) and PPV (0.75). The most relevant vegetation indices were linked to the biochemical parameters chlorophyll, water, nitrogen, and cellulose as well as vegetation cover, which is in line with biochemical and ecophysiological properties reported for A. longifolia. Our results highlight the potential to use remote sensing as a tool for an early detection of A. longifolia in Mediterranean coastal ecosystems.
Learning Spatio-Temporal Features with 3D Residual Networks for Action Recognition

Convolutional neural networks with spatio-temporal 3D kernels (3D CNNs) have an ability to directly extract spatiotemporal features from videos for action recognition. Although the 3D kernels tend to overfit because of a large number of their parameters, the 3D CNNs are greatly improved by using recent huge video databases. However, the architecture of3D CNNs is relatively shallow against to the success of very deep neural networks in 2D-based CNNs, such as residual networks (ResNets). In this paper, we propose a 3D CNNs based on ResNets toward a better action representation. We describe the training procedure of our 3D ResNets in details. We experimentally evaluate the 3D ResNets on the ActivityNet and Kinetics datasets. The 3D ResNets trained on the Kinetics did not suffer from overfitting despite the large number of parameters of the model, and achieved better performance than relatively shallow networks, such as C3D. Our code and pretrained models (e.g. Kinetics and ActivityNet) are publicly available at https://github.com/kenshohara/3D-ResNets.
Distinct anti-oncogenic effect of various microRNAs in different mouse models of liver cancer

Deregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) is a typical feature of human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, the in vivo relevance of miRNAs along hepatocarcinogenesis remains largely unknown. Here, we show that liver tumors induced in mice by c-Myc overexpression or AKT/Ras co-expression exhibit distinct miRNA expression profiles. Among the downregulated miRNAs, eight (miR-101, miR-107, miR-122, miR-29, miR-365, miR-375, miR-378, and miR-802) were selected and their tumor suppressor activity was determined by overexpressing each of them together with c-Myc or AKT/Ras oncogenes in mouse livers via hydrodynamic transfection. The tumor suppressor activity of these microRNAs was extremely heterogeneous in c-Myc and AKT/Ras mice: while miR-378 had no tumor suppressor activity, miR-107, mir-122, miR-29, miR-365 and miR-802 exhibited weak to moderate tumor suppressor potential. Noticeably, miR-375 showed limited antineoplastic activity against c-Myc driven tumorigenesis, whereas it strongly inhibited AKT/Ras induced hepatocarcinogenesis. Furthermore, miR-101 significantly suppressed both c-Myc and AKT/Ras liver tumor development. Altogether, the present data demonstrate that different oncogenes induce distinct miRNA patterns, whose modulation differently affects hepatocarcinogenesis depending on the driving oncogenes. Finally, our findings support a strong tumor suppressor activity of miR-101 in liver cancer models regardless of the driver oncogenes involved, thus representing a promising therapeutic target in human HCC.
Leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans

This paper reviews the literature on leadership in vertebrate groups, including recent work on human groups, before presenting the results of three new experiments looking at leadership and decision making in small and large human groups. In experiment 1, we find that both group size and the presence of uninformed individuals can affect the speed with which small human groups (eight people) decide between two opposing directional preferences and the likelihood of the group splitting. In experiment 2, we show that the spatial positioning of informed individuals within small human groups (10 people) can affect the speed and accuracy of group motion. We find that having a mixture of leaders positioned in the centre and on the edge of a group increases the speed and accuracy with which the group reaches their target. In experiment 3, we use large human crowds (100 and 200 people) to demonstrate that the trends observed from earlier work using small human groups can be applied to larger crowds. We find that only a small minority of informed individuals is needed to guide a large uninformed group. These studies build upon important theoretical and empirical work on leadership and decision making in animal groups.
Further biochemical characterization, including the detection of surface glycoproteins, of human, calf, and simian rotaviruses

Polyacrylamide gel electrophoretic analysis of purified preparation of the simian rotavirus SA-11 indicated eight polypeptide components that migrated in a manner remarkably similar to those of the previously characterized human and calf rotaviruses. Analyses of preparations of single-shelled and double-shelled particles of human, calf, and simian an rotaviruses have also permitted assignment of the polypeptides to the inner or outer shells. The major components of the outer shells of each virus have been identified as glycoproteins, and the importance of this in terms of host cell specificity is discussed. Sensitivities of the various rotaviruses to acid, proteases, and glycosidases were also investigated.
Physiological impact of the N95 filtering facepiece respirator on healthcare workers.

OBJECTIVE To assess the physiological impact of the N95 filtering facepiece respirator (FFR) on healthcare workers. METHODS Ten healthcare workers each conducted multiple 1-hour treadmill walking sessions, at 1.7 miles/h, and at 2.5 miles/h, while wearing FFR with exhalation valve, FFR without exhalation valve, and without FFR (control session). We monitored heart rate, respiratory rate, tidal volume, minute volume, blood oxygen saturation, and transcutaneously measured P(CO2). We also measured user comfort and exertion, FFR moisture retention, and the carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations in the FFR's dead space. RESULTS There were no significant differences between FFR and control in the physiological variables, exertion scores, or comfort scores. There was no significant difference in moisture retention between FFR with and without exhalation valve. Two subjects had peak P(CO2) > or = 50 mm Hg. The FFR with exhalation valve offered no benefit in physiological burden over the FFR without valve. The FFR dead-space oxygen and carbon dioxide levels did not meet the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's ambient workplace standards. CONCLUSIONS In healthy healthcare workers, FFR did not impose any important physiological burden during 1 hour of use, at realistic clinical work rates, but the FFR dead-space carbon dioxide and oxygen levels were significantly above and below, respectively, the ambient workplace standards, and elevated P(CO2) is a possibility. Exhalation valve did not significantly ameliorate the FFR's P(CO2) impact.
Itraconazole-Induced Cholestasis: Involvement of the Inhibition of Bile Canalicular Phospholipid Translocator MDR3/ABCB4

Biliary secretion of bile acids and phospholipids, both of which are essential components of biliary micelles, are mediated by the bile salt export pump (BSEP/ABCB11) and multidrug resistance 3 P-glycoprotein (MDR3/ABCB4), respectively, and their genetic dysfunction leads to the acquisition of severe cholestatic diseases. In the present study, we found two patients with itraconazole (ITZ)-induced cholestatic liver injury with markedly high serum ITZ concentrations. To characterize the effect of ITZ on bile formation in vivo, biliary bile acids and phospholipids were analyzed in ITZ-treated rats, and it was revealed that biliary phospholipids, rather than bile acids, were drastically reduced in the presence of clinically relevant concentrations of ITZ. Moreover, by using MDR3-expressing LLC-PK1 cells, we found that MDR3-mediated efflux of [14C]phosphatidylcholine was significantly reduced by ITZ. In contrast, BSEP-mediated transport of [3H]taurocholate was not significantly affected by ITZ, which is consistent with our in vivo observations. In conclusion, this study suggests the involvement of the inhibition of MDR3-mediated biliary phospholipids secretion in ITZ-induced cholestasis. Our approach may be useful for analyzing mechanisms of drug-induced cholestasis and evaluating the cholestatic potential of clinically used drugs and drug candidates.
Infiniband scalability in Open MPI

Infiniband is becoming an important interconnect technology in high performance computing. Efforts in large scale Infiniband deployments are raising scalability questions in the HPC community. Open MPI, a new open source implementation of the MPI standard targeted for production computing, provides several mechanisms to enhance Infiniband scalability. Initial comparisons with MVAPICH, the most widely used Infiniband MPI implementation, show similar performance but with much better scalability characteristics. Specifically, small message latency is improved by up to 10% in medium/large jobs and memory usage per host is reduced by as much as 300%. In addition, Open MPI provides predictable latency that is close to optimal without sacrificing bandwidth performance
Male and female mice overexpressing the beta(2)-adrenergic receptor exhibit differences in ischemia/reperfusion injury: role of nitric oxide.

OBJECTIVE Cardiac overexpression of beta(2)-adrenergic receptors (beta(2)ARs) in male mice (MTG4) results in increased contractility and increased ischemic injury. Considering recent clinical data indicating that premenopausal women are protected from cardiovascular injury, we assessed the consequences of beta(2)AR overexpression in females (FTG4). Since protection in females is mediated via estrogen, which activates endothelial and inducible nitric oxide synthases (eNOS and iNOS) we also examined the role of NOS in ischemia/reperfusion injury in male and female TG4 and wild-type (WT) mice. METHODS Hearts from MTG4, FTG4, MWT and FWT mice were isolated and perfused in the Langendorff mode. Hearts were pretreated with either 1 micromol/l of the nonspecific NOS inhibitor, L-NAME, or 100 nmol/l of the specific iNOS inhibitor, 1400W. Control hearts received no treatment. All hearts were subjected to 20 min ischemia and 40 min reperfusion while 31P-NMR spectra were acquired. RESULTS During ischemia, ATP and pH fell lower in MTG4 hearts than in FTG4 or WT hearts. Hearts from MTG4 mice exhibited increased ischemia/reperfusion injury as indicated by lower recoveries of postischemic contractile function, ATP and PCr than WT. Despite contractility being elevated in FTG4 hearts to the same level as MTG4 hearts, ischemia/reperfusion injury was not increased, as indicated by similar postischemic recoveries of contractile function, ATP and PCr in FTG4 hearts compared to WT. ATP and pH fell lower during ischemia in L-NAME-treated FTG4 hearts than in untreated FTG4 hearts, falling as low as untreated MTG4s. Recoveries of contractile function, ATP and PCr were as low in L-NAME-treated FTG4 hearts as in untreated MTG4 hearts and lower than untreated FTG4 hearts. In contrast, 1400W had no effect on FTG4 hearts. MTG4 hearts were unaffected by L-NAME or 1400W. CONCLUSIONS beta(2)AR overexpression increased ischemia/reperfusion injury in males but not females, thus females were protected from the detrimental effects of beta(2)AR overexpression. Protection was abolished by treatment with L-NAME, but not 1400W, implying that protection was mediated by eNOS not iNOS.
Bone loss from the human distal tibia epiphysis during 24 days of unilateral lower limb suspension

Bone loss during immobilization is well documented. Currently, the only means of studying this in human beings is bed rest, which is resource intensive and inconvenient for the subjects. Unilateral lower limb suspension (ULLS) has been suggested as an alternative, but has not previously been demonstrated to cause bone loss. The main aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that ULLS would cause bone loss determined by peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT). We investigated eight young healthy volunteers (19.1 ± 0.7 years; body mass index, 22.4 ± 2.6 kg m−2), who underwent ULLS for 24 days; their right foot was suspended with a strap attached to the shoulder so the knee angle was 10 deg and they wore a left shoe with a 7.5 cm sole to allow clearance of the right foot and used bilateral crutches to perambulate. Bone scans were obtained by pQCT from the distal epiphyses and from the diaphyses of the tibia in each leg twice before suspension, at days 7, 14 and 21 of the ULLS, and at days 4, 9, 35 and 90 of recovery. After 21 days of ULLS, bone mineral content of the peripheral portion of the epiphysis of the suspended tibia was reduced by 0.89 ± 0.48% (from 280.9 ± 34.5 to 278.4 ± 34.2 mg mm−1, P < 0.001) but no changes were observed in its central portion or in the unsuspended tibia. In the peripheral epiphyseal portion, significant bone loss (by 0.32 ± 0.54%, P= 0.045) occurred as early as day 7 of ULLS. We have demonstrated, for the first time, that in humans bone is lost during ULLS at rates comparable to those seen with bed rest, without alteration in limb fluid volumes thus validating the technique and raising important questions about the mechanisms involved.
Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria

Some natural resources -- oil and minerals in particular -- exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste and corruption from oil rather than Dutch disease has been responsible for its poor long run economic performance. We propose a solution for addressing this resource curse which involves directly distributing the oil revenues to the public. Even with all the difficulties of corruption and inefficiency that will no doubt plague its actual implementation, our proposal will, at the least, be vastly superior to the status quo. At best, however, it could fundamentally improve the quality of public institutions and, as a result, transform economics and politics in Nigeria.
Where and Why Users "Check In"

The emergence of location based social network (LBSN) services makes it possible to study individuals’ mobility patterns at a fine-grained level and to see how they are impacted by social factors. In this study we analyze the check-in patterns in LBSN and observe significant temporal clustering of check-in activities. We explore how self-reinforcing behaviors, social factors, and exogenous effects contribute to this clustering and introduce a framework to distinguish these effects at the level of individual check-ins for both users and venues. Using check-in data from three major cities, we show not only that our model can improve prediction of future check-ins, but also that disentangling of different factors allows us to infer meaningful properties of different venues.