Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two-Week Web-Based Mindfulness Training Reduces Stress, Anxiety, and Depressive Symptoms in Individuals with Self-reported Stress: A Randomized Control Trial

The study examined the effects of a short-term web-based mindfulness program. Participants describing themselves as stressed were recruited and a total of 70 participants were randomly assigned to a treatment group (n=35) and a control group (n=35). The mindfulness program included two, 10-minute exercises per day, six days a week, for two weeks. Twenty participants in the treatment group and 34 participants in the control group completed the training. The mean pretest scores indicated that the group was above the cutoff for severe stress on a wellestablished measure (the Perceived Stress Questionnaire). Measures of stress, anxiety and depression symptoms, and a mindfulness questionnaire were administered before, during (after 1 week), and at the end of the treatment (after 2 weeks). The results showed that mindfulness training increased mindfulness skills and reduced levels of perceived stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms (Cohen’s ds>1). No significant changes from pre- to posttest were observed in the wait-list control group. Additionally, increments from pre- to post-test in mindfulness skills were associated with reductions in symptom scores, indicating treatment-specific effects. Together, the results suggest that the brief webbased mindfulness program may serve as an effective means to treat individuals suffering from stress, and motivate further research involving active control groups, alternative forms of web-based treatments as a control, and long-term follow-up of the effects.
Application of enhanced recovery after gastric cancer surgery: An updated meta-analysis

AIM To provide an updated assessment of the safety and efficacy of enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocols in elective gastric cancer (GC) surgery. METHODS PubMed, Medline, EMBASE, World Health Organization International Trial Register, and Cochrane Library were searched up to June 2017 for all available randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing ERAS protocols and standard care (SC) in GC surgery. Thirteen RCTs, with a total of 1092 participants, were analyzed in this study, of whom 545 underwent ERAS protocols and 547 received SC treatment. RESULTS No significant difference was observed between ERAS and control groups regarding total complications (P = 0.88), mortality (P = 0.50) and reoperation (P = 0.49). The incidence of pulmonary infection was significantly reduced (P = 0.03) following gastrectomy. However, the readmission rate after GC surgery nearly tripled under ERAS (P = 0.009). ERAS protocols significantly decreased the length of postoperative hospital stay (P < 0.00001) and medical costs (P < 0.00001), and accelerated bowel function recovery, as measured by earlier time to the first flatus (P = 0.0004) and the first defecation (P < 0.0001). Moreover, ERAS protocols were associated with a lower level of serum inflammatory response, higher serum albumin, and superior short-term quality of life (QOL). CONCLUSION Collectively, ERAS results in accelerated convalescence, reduction of surgical stress and medical costs, improved nutritional status, and better QOL for GC patients. However, high-quality multicenter RCTs with large samples and long-term follow-up are needed to more precisely evaluate ERAS in radical gastrectomy.
Cardiovascular Protection in People With Diabetes Diabetes Canada Clinical Practice Guidelines Expert Committee

• Diabetes significantly accelerates the development and natural history of cardiovascular disease compared to individuals without diabetes. • Healthy behaviour interventions and pharmacological approaches aimed at cardiovascular disease risk reduction can significantly reduce morbidity and mortality, and are an important cornerstone of the management of diabetes. • Although young people with diabetes rarely have a high proximate (<10 year) risk for cardiovascular disease events, they have a relative proximate risk manyfold greater than individuals of similar age without diabetes. • Historically, pharmacological cardiovascular protection approaches have focused on low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and blood pressure reduction, and have demonstrated significant and clinically meaningful cardiovascular risk reduction. Recent data have indicated that certain antihyperglycemic agents are also cardioprotective. • The requirement for pharmacological cardiovascular protection therapies (statins, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors or aldosterone receptor blockers, and anti-platelets) should consider both an individual’s proximate and lifetime cardiovascular disease event risk. • There is emerging recognition that nonatherothrombotic cardiovascular disease complications, such as heart failure, are an important cause of morbidity and mortality in diabetes.
The effect of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on flower constancy in stingless bees

To enhance our understanding of the variability of flower constancy, we studied the influence of foraging conditions on the level of individual constancy in two species of stingless bees, Trigona dorsalis and Oxytrigona mellicolor, using a dimorphic artificial flower patch with equal reward in both flower types. Flower constancy increased greatly when the flower types were more dissimilar, and then approached constancy levels found for European honey bees. Sugar concentration had little effect on flower constancy. The presence of nestmates enhanced flower constancy somewhat in O. mellicolor but not in T. dorsalis, probably because of species-specific differences in local enhancement. The individual variability within treatments could be explained partly by individual variation in foraging tempo, with faster foraging leading to higher flower constancy. flower constancy / foraging conditions / stingless bee
Deep Triplet Ranking Networks for One-Shot Recognition

Despite the breakthroughs achieved by deep learning models in conventional supervised learning scenarios, their dependence on sufficient labeled training data in each class prevents effective applications of these deep models in situations where labeled training instances for a subset of novel classes are very sparse -- in the extreme case only one instance is available for each class. To tackle this natural and important challenge, one-shot learning, which aims to exploit a set of well labeled base classes to build classifiers for the new target classes that have only one observed instance per class, has recently received increasing attention from the research community. In this paper we propose a novel end-to-end deep triplet ranking network to perform one-shot learning. The proposed approach learns class universal image embeddings on the well labeled base classes under a triplet ranking loss, such that the instances from new classes can be categorized based on their similarity with the one-shot instances in the learned embedding space. Moreover, our approach can naturally incorporate the available one-shot instances from the new classes into the embedding learning process to improve the triplet ranking model. We conduct experiments on two popular datasets for one-shot learning. The results show the proposed approach achieves better performance than the state-of-the- art comparison methods.
Helminthic Parasites of Domestic Fowls in Ikwuano, Abia State Nigeria

A survey of intestinal parasites of domestic fowl was carried out in Ikwuano, Abia state, Nigeria during 2009. One hundred and eighty (180) gastrointestinal samples were examined microscopically using the direct smear and floatation technique. The result showed a high prevalence of intestinal parasitic infection. Nematodes especially Ascaridia galli 47 (41.6%). and Capillaria caudinflata were most prevalent in the birds. Raillietina tetragona 11 (6.1%) was found to be the highest in occurrence among the cestodes encountered. No trematode was encountered among the birds, while Eimeria tenella 7 (3.9%) was the most prevalent protozoa. The average parasite burden per fowl was found to be 9.8 and majority of the species were restricted to small intestine. Twenty three (12.7%) cases of mixed infections were encountered. The study reveals that there was a high prevalence of intestinal parasites of domestic fowl in the study area. This calls for improved management and disease control to enhance their potential. Keywords: Intestinal parasites, domestic fowl, parasite burden, predilection, mixed infection
Preserving FFD for Programmable Graphics Hardware

Free Form Deformation (FFD) is a well established technique for deforming arbitrary object shapes in space. Although more recent deformation techniques have been introduced, amongst them skeleton-based deformation and cage based deformation, the simple and versatile nature of FFD is a strong advantage, and justifies its presence in nowadays leading commercial geometric modeling and animation software systems. Since its introduction in the late 80’s, many improvements have been proposed to the FFD paradigm, including control lattices of arbitrary topology, direct shape manipulation and GPU implementation. Several authors have addressed the problem of volume preserving FFD. These previous approaches either make use of expensive non-linear optimization techniques, or resort to first order approximation suitable only for small-scale deformations. In this paper we take advantage from the multi-linear nature of the volume constraint in order to derive a simple, exact and explicit solution to the problem of volume preserving FFD. Two variants of the algorithm are given, without and with direct shape manipulation. Moreover, the linearity of our solution enables to implement it efficiently on GPU.
Clinical and Demographic Evaluation of a Holoprosencephaly Cohort From the Kyoto Collection of Human Embryos

Holoprosencephaly (HPE) is a genetically and phenotypically heterogeneous disorder involving developmental defects. HPE is a rare condition (1/10,000–20,000 newborns) but can be found as frequently as 1/250 among conceptions, suggesting that most HPE embryos are incompatible with postnatal life and result in spontaneous abortions during the first trimester of gestation. Beginning in 1961, the Kyoto University in Japan collected over 44,000 human conceptuses in collaboration with several hundred domestic obstetricians. Over 200 cases of HPE have been identified in the Kyoto collection, which represents the largest single cohort of HPE early stage embryo specimens. In this study, we present a comprehensive clinical and demographic evaluation of this HPE cohort prior to genomic analysis. The total percentage of the threatened abortion among HPE embryos in the Kyoto collection was 67%. Almost 20% of the women with embryos affected by HPE had experienced spontaneous miscarriage. In addition, there was a significant tendency that the mothers with HPE cases had fewer live births than the control. Moreover, in 70% of cases, the mother reported bleeding during pregnancy, a higher percentage than expected, indicating that most of the conceptions with HPE embryos tend to be terminated spontaneously. There were no differences in smoking between mothers with HPE affected and unaffected pregnancies; however, alcohol use was higher in women with pregnancies affected by HPE. In this study, we precisely characterize the phenotype and environmental influences of embryos affected by HPE allowing the future leveraging of genomic technologies to further understand the genetics of forebrain development. Anat Rec, 301:973–986, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Stress-strain curve of concretes with recycled concrete aggregates: analysis of the NBR 8522 methodology

Resumo This work analyses the methodology "A" (item A.4) employed by the Brazilian Standard ABNT 8522 (ABNT, 2008) for determining the stress-strain behavior of cylindrical specimens of concrete, presenting considerations about possible enhancements aiming it use for concretes with recycled aggregates with automatic test equipment. The methodology specified by the Brazilian Standard presents methodological issues that brings distortions in obtaining the stress-strain curve, as the use of a very limited number of sampling points and by inducing micro cracks and fluency in the elastic behavior of the material due to the use of steady stress levels in the test. The use of a base stress of 0.5 MPa is too low for modern high load test machines designed do high strength concrete test. The work presents a discussion over these subjects, and a proposal of a modified test procedure to avoid such situations.
Enhancing Nontraditional Student Learning Outcomes in Higher Education

This study contributes to the limited literature on learning outcomes assessment for nontraditional students. There were no substantial differences in the effects of the university experience on enhancing learning outcomes for nontraditional and traditional students across 24 specific areas; there were also minimal differences in satisfaction and academic success (as measured by grade point average). Nontraditional students were defined as minimally to highly-constrained by three life constraints (age, children, and full-time work). Moderately to highly-constrained nontraditional students were less involved with faculty members outside of class and less engaged in a variety of extracurricular activities that have been shown to enhance student learning.
Heat Stress Reduces Intestinal Barrier Integrity and Favors Intestinal Glucose Transport in Growing Pigs

Excessive heat exposure reduces intestinal integrity and post-absorptive energetics that can inhibit wellbeing and be fatal. Therefore, our objectives were to examine how acute heat stress (HS) alters intestinal integrity and metabolism in growing pigs. Animals were exposed to either thermal neutral (TN, 21°C; 35–50% humidity; n = 8) or HS conditions (35°C; 24–43% humidity; n = 8) for 24 h. Compared to TN, rectal temperatures in HS pigs increased by 1.6°C and respiration rates by 2-fold (P<0.05). As expected, HS decreased feed intake by 53% (P<0.05) and body weight (P<0.05) compared to TN pigs. Ileum heat shock protein 70 expression increased (P<0.05), while intestinal integrity was compromised in the HS pigs (ileum and colon TER decreased; P<0.05). Furthermore, HS increased serum endotoxin concentrations (P = 0.05). Intestinal permeability was accompanied by an increase in protein expression of myosin light chain kinase (P<0.05) and casein kinase II-α (P = 0.06). Protein expression of tight junction (TJ) proteins in the ileum revealed claudin 3 and occludin expression to be increased overall due to HS (P<0.05), while there were no differences in claudin 1 expression. Intestinal glucose transport and blood glucose were elevated due to HS (P<0.05). This was supported by increased ileum Na+/K+ ATPase activity in HS pigs. SGLT-1 protein expression was unaltered; however, HS increased ileal GLUT-2 protein expression (P = 0.06). Altogether, these data indicate that HS reduce intestinal integrity and increase intestinal stress and glucose transport.
Automated unsupervised respiratory event analysis

We recently presented a comprehensive automated off-line method for supervised respiratory event classification from uncalibrated respiratory inductive plethysmography signals. This method required training with a sample of clinical measurements classified by an expert. This human intervention is labor intensive and involves subjective judgments that may introduce bias to the automated classification. To address this we developed a novel method for unsupervised respiratory event classification, named AUREA (Automated Unsupervised Respiratory Event Analysis). This paper describes the algorithm underlying AUREA and demonstrates its successful application to respiratory signals acquired from infants in the postoperative recovery room. The advantages of AUREA are: first, it provides real-time classification of respiratory events; second, it requires no human intervention; and lastly, it has substantially better performance than the supervised method.
Incidence, Risk Factors, and Outcomes of Panton-Valentine Leukocidin-Positive Methicillin-Susceptible Staphylococcus aureus Infections in Auckland, New Zealand

ABSTRACT Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) has been linked to invasive community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections. However, the association between disease and PVL-positive methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) has not been widely reported. We aimed to examine the epidemiology of PVL in clinical MSSA isolates from patients presenting to Auckland City Hospital. Four hundred eleven MSSA clinical isolates and 93 nasal carriage isolates were collected and tested for the presence of the lukSF-PV genes using PCR. The results were examined in light of host and disease factors. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) was performed on a random subset of isolates to ensure that there was no single PVL-positive MSSA clone responsible for disease in Auckland. The prevalence of the lukSF-PV genes in MSSA isolates associated with disease (124/335; 37%) was not significantly different from the prevalence of the lukSF-PV genes in MSSA nasal carriage isolates (29/93; 31% [P = 0.33]). PVL-positive MSSA isolates in Auckland are genetically diverse and come from a number of different clonal complexes. PVL-positive infections peaked at between 10 and 20 years of age, with a subsequent decline. Pacific ethnicity, age, diagnosis of skin and soft tissue infection (SSTI), community-onset infection, and the need for surgical intervention were found by multivariate analysis to be independently associated with PVL-positive MSSA infection. More than one-third of MSSA infections in our patient population are caused by PVL-positive strains. Those patients with PVL-positive MSSA infection were more likely to be of Pacific ethnicity, be younger in age, have community-onset infection, have SSTI, and need surgical intervention.
First evidence of dengue virus infection in wild caught mosquitoes during an outbreak in Assam, Northeast India.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Dengue is one of the major public health problems worldwide, transmitted mainly by Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus mosquitoes. Rapid urbanisation and industrialisation have led to an increase in vector population in Northeastern states of India. In 2013, Guwahati, the capital city of Assam, India experienced an outbreak of dengue. This study was undertaken with an objective to determine infection rates of dengue viruses (DENV) in both the established vectors present in this region. METHODS During the outbreak (2013), adults and larvae of both the vector species were collected from different container habitats found in case reporting areas and container index was also recorded. The mosquitoes were first pooled, homogenised and processed for NS1-ELISA. This was followed by RT-PCR of the mosquito pools. RESULTS Both Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus were found breeding in containers with container index in the range of 29.41 to 80%. Six pools of Ae. aegypti were found to be positive for NS1 antigen. RT-PCR assay revealed positivity in only the NS1-ELISA positive pools, exhibiting circulation of serotype DENV-2. Minimum infection rate of female and male Ae. aegypti was recorded as 10.87 and 11.03 respectively. INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSION This is the maiden report of detection of DENV in wild caught Ae. aegypti mosquitoes from Northeastern Region of India. The study also demonstrates the presence of transovarial transmission of dengue virus in this part of country. This information is useful in respect of both entomological as well as epidemiological point of view for taking appropriate vector control measures.
Atomic-resolution STEM imaging and EELS-SI of defects in BiFeO3 ceramics co-doped with Nd and Ti

High resolution scanning transmission electron microscope (HRSTEM) imaging and electron energy loss spectroscopy spectrum imaging (EELS SI) methods have been successfully applied to the analysis of (Bi0.85Nd0.15)(Fe0.9Ti0.1)O3 (BNFT) ceramics. The atomic scale structural and chemistry of defects in these ceramics have been determined, leading to the discovery of a new class of Nd-rich nanoprecipitates in these ceramics.
Optimization of Receptor-G Protein Coupling by Bilayer Lipid Composition II

The visual transduction system was used as a model to investigate the effects of membrane lipid composition on receptor-G protein coupling. Rhodopsin was reconstituted into large, unilamellar phospholipid vesicles with varying acyl chain unsaturation, with and without cholesterol. The association constant (K a ) for metarhodopsin II (MII) and transducin (Gt) binding was determined by monitoring MII-Gt complex formation spectrophotometrically. At 20 °C, in pH 7.5 isotonic buffer, the strongest MII-Gtbinding was observed in 1-stearoyl-2-docosahexaenoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (18:0,22:6PC), whereas the weakest binding was in 1-stearoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (18:0,18:1PC) with 30 mol% cholesterol. Increasing acyl chain unsaturation from 18:0,18:1PC to 18:0,22:6PC resulted in a 3-fold increase in K a . The inclusion of 30 mol% cholesterol in the membrane reduced K a in both 18:0,22:6PC and 18:0,18:1PC. These findings demonstrate that membrane compositions can alter the signaling cascade by changing protein-protein interactions occurring predominantly in the hydrophilic region of the proteins, external to the lipid bilayer. These findings, if extended to other members of the superfamily of G protein-coupled receptors, suggest that a loss in efficiency of receptor-G protein binding is a contributing factor to the loss of cognitive skills, odor and spatial discrimination, and visual function associated with n-3 fatty acid deficiency.
In vivo and phantom measurements versus Eclipse TPS prediction of near surface dose for SBRT treatments

This study reports on Gafchromic EBT2 film skin dose measurements for lung stereotactic body radiotherapy. These measurements were compared to near surface skin doses predicted by Eclipse treatment planning system (TPS) using the Analytical Anisotropic Algorithm (AAA) for a 6 MV photon beam. The accuracy of the predicted near surface dose for 3×3, 5×5 and 10×10 cm2 fields was assessed using an Attix chamber and EBT2 film in a Virtual Water phantom and compared to Monte Carlo calculation. The maximum near surface dose and its location were identified from the patient's treatment plan. For phantom measurements, the TPS dose (nominal 0 mm depth) was higher than the Attix chamber data by up to 24.0 % but in closer agreement with the EBT2 film measurement, which was up to 10.3 % higher than the Attix data. The MC calculated dose values were higher than the Attix data by up to 3.5% for the depths up to 2 mm. The maximum patient skin dose estimated from in vivo EBT2 film measurements was 7.5 – 19.5 Gy per course and depended on the number of overlapping fields, beam weight and/or contact with immobilisation devices. The TPS predicted dose for patient plans was mostly higher than the in vivo dose, by as much as 69.3%, but in two cases was lower, by as much as -23.1%.
Economic Mobility in the United States

The size of available economic rewards and the extent to which those awards are open to all individuals in a society are two critical factors in determining the extent to which a society's economic and social structure is believed to be fair and just by those who participate in it. And over the long term, these fundamental economic elements are likely to have a significant effect on the prevailing public mood within a society. The impact of these factors is even greater in a nation such as the United States, in which the national ideology is deeply rooted in the promise of equal opportunity for all.