Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender Differences in Clinicoepidemiological Features of Vitiligo: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

Background. Vitiligo has important clinical and social consequences particularly in the pigmented skin. The present study was conducted to assess the differences in clinicoepidemiological presentation of vitiligo in males and females and to understand the factors associated with spread of vitiligo in them. Methods. This is a cross-sectional analysis of secondary clinical data of 168 vitiligo patients at a tertiary medical centre at Navi Mumbai. We used logistic regression models to estimate the association between gender and clinical characteristics of vitiligo and to evaluate the factors associated with spread of vitiligo. Results. There were no significant differences between the mean ages of males and females; however, males reported a longer duration of disease (6.9 (10.4) years) compared with females (4.9 (7.4) years). Males were significantly more likely to report a family history of vitiligo compared with females (adjusted OR (aOR): 16.87, 95% CI: 2.16 to 131.69). Even though females were more likely to report spread of lesions, the association was not statistically significant (OR: 1.21, 95% CI: 0.62 to 2.36). Discussion. The differences in the clinical presentations between genders highlight the need to understand the different factors (possibly genetic) that may play a part in the pathogenesis of this multifactorial disease in males and females.
Optimal Co2 Abatement in the Presence of Induced Technological Change

This paper explores the significance of policy-induced technological change for the design of carbon-abatement policies. We derive analytical expressions characterizing optimal CO2 abatement and carbon tax profiles under different specifications for the channels through which technological progress occurs. We consider both R&D-based and learning-by-doing-based knowledge accumulation, and examine each specification under both a cost-effectiveness and a benefit-cost policy criterion. We show analytically that the presence of induced technological change (ITC) implies a lower time profile of optimal carbon taxes. The impact of ITC on the optimal abatement path varies. When knowledge is gained through R&D investments, the presence of ITC justifies shifting some abatement from the present to the future. However, when knowledge is generated through learning-by-doing, the impact on the timing of abatement is analytically ambiguous. Illustrative numerical simulations indicate that the impact of ITC upon overall costs and optimal carbon taxes can be quite large in a cost-effectiveness setting but typically is much smaller under a benefit-cost policy criterion. The impact of ITC on the timing of abatement is very weak, and the effect (applicable in the benefit-cost case) on total abatement over time is generally small as well, especially when knowledge is accumulated via R&D.
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Behavioral Models of Smoking Addiction

While few studies have applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to smoking addiction, existing work suggests that the intervention holds promise for altering the complex system by which environmental cues interact with cravings to drive behavior. Imaging and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation studies suggest that increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activation and integrity may be associated with increased resistance to smoking cues. Anodal tDCS of the DLPFC, believed to boost activation, reduces cravings in response to these cues. The finding that noninvasive stimulation modifies cue induced cravings has profound implications for understanding the processes underlying addiction and relapse. tDCS can also be applied to probe mechanisms underlying and supporting nicotine addiction, as was done in a pharmacologic study that applied nicotine, tDCS, and TMS paired associative stimulation to find that stopping nicotine after chronic use induces a reduction in plasticity, causing difficulty in breaking free from association between cues and cravings. This mini-review will place studies that apply tDCS to smokers in the context of research involving the neural substrates of nicotine addiction.
Periodic Event-Triggered Distributed Receding Horizon Control of Dynamically Decoupled Linear Systems

Abstract This paper is concerned with the distributed receding horizon control (DRHC) problem for large-scale linear systems with disturbances. A periodic event-triggered DRHC scheme is proposed to reduce communication and computation load. A detailed dual-mode periodic event-triggered DHRC algorithm is designed, and sufficient conditions for ensuring feasibility and stability are established, respectively. We show that the feasibility depends on the testing period, and that the stability is related with the testing period, and the cooperation matrices. The overall system is stable and the system state converges to a set under the designed algorithm.
Planar direct method: a new framework for stereo vision based guidance and obstacle detection

In the context of real-time collision/obstacle avoidance this paper investigates an improvement of a direct method of estimating dense scene structure and image motion. Our proposed method combines stereo-vision (involving geometric constraints), optical flow (involving photometric constraints) and additional model constraints. Modifications to the direct method are introduced through a planarity constraint, an illumination model and a new computational framework in order to deal with significant illumination drifts and obstacle detection on static objects or moving vehicle. Experimental results on real image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.
Tumorigenesis in mice with a fusion of the leukaemia oncogene Mll and the bacterial lacZ gene

Many different chromosomal translocations occur in man at chromosome 11q23 in acute leukaemias. Molecular analyses revealed that the MLL gene (also called ALL‐1, HRX or HTRX) is broken by the translocations, causing fusion with genes from other chromosomes. The diversity of MLL fusion partners poses a dilemma about the function of the fusion proteins in tumour development. The consequence of MLL truncation and fusion has been analysed by joining exon 8 of Mll with the bacterial lacZ gene using homologous recombination in mouse embryonic stem cells. We show that this fusion is sufficient to cause embryonic stem cell‐derived acute leukaemias in chimeric mice, and these tumours occur with long latency compared with those found in MLL–Af9 chimeric mice. These findings indicate that an MLL fusion protein can contribute to tumorigenesis, even if the fusion partner has no known pathogenic role. Thus, truncation and fusion of MLL can be sufficient for tumorigenesis, regardless of the fusion partner.
Comparative Genomic Analysis of the GRF Genes in Chinese Pear (Pyrus bretschneideri Rehd), Poplar (Populous), Grape (Vitis vinifera), Arabidopsis and Rice (Oryza sativa)

Growth-regulating factors (GRFs) are plant-specific transcription factors that have important functions in regulating plant growth and development. Previous studies on GRF family members focused either on a single or a small set of genes. Here, a comparative genomic analysis of the GRF gene family was performed in poplar (a model tree species), Arabidopsis (a model plant for annual herbaceous dicots), grape (one model plant for perennial dicots), rice (a model plant for monocots) and Chinese pear (one of the economical fruit crops). In total, 58 GRF genes were identified, 12 genes in rice (Oryza sativa), 8 genes in grape (Vitis vinifera), 9 genes in Arabidopsis thaliana, 19 genes in poplar (Populus trichocarpa) and 10 genes in Chinese pear (Pyrus bretschneideri). The GRF genes were divided into five subfamilies based on the phylogenetic analysis, which was supported by their structural analysis. Furthermore, microsynteny analysis indicated that highly conserved regions of microsynteny were identified in all of the five species tested. And Ka/Ks analysis revealed that purifying selection plays an important role in the maintenance of GRF genes. Our results provide basic information on GRF genes in five plant species and lay the foundation for future research on the functions of these genes.
Screening for hepatocellular carcinoma: survival benefit and cost-effectiveness.

BACKGROUND The prognosis for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is poor by the time they present with symptoms. This review examines the usefulness of screening programs from the perspectives of survival benefit and of cost-effectiveness. MATERIALS AND METHODS Articles were searched through Medline for screening, HCC, treatment and cost-effectiveness. RESULTS Both ultrasonography and alpha-fetoprotein testing have a low sensitivity for detecting HCC, although a combination of the two investigations can increase sensitivity. They remain the main screening methods because they are convenient, non-invasive and easily assessable. Though earlier studies fail to show improvement in patient management and survival by screening, more recent studies demonstrate that screening can increase the chance of curative treatment and, more importantly, improve survival even after the adjustment of lead-time bias. This is probably due to the improvement in medical treatment and technology. The cost per tumor detected for a region is inversely proportional to the tumor incidence of that region. CONCLUSIONS In countries with a low prevalence of HCC, screening for HCC is not cost-effective. But in countries with a high prevalence of HCC, especially when screening is directed at older patients with a high risk of HCC, screening programs for HCC become much more cost-effective.
Political Reservations and Women&Apos;S Entrepreneurship in India

We quantify the link between the timing of state-level implementations of political reservations for women in India with the role of women in India's manufacturing sector. While overall employment of women in manufacturing does not increase after the reforms, we find significant evidence that more women-owned establishments were created in the unorganized/informal sector. These new establishments were concentrated in industries where women entrepreneurs have been traditionally active and the entry was mainly found among household-based establishments. We measure and discuss the extent to which this heightened entrepreneurship is due to channels like greater finance access or heightened inspiration for women entrepreneurs.
Expression of Erythropoietin and Its Receptor in the Human Retina

OBJECTIVE—The purpose of this study was to evaluate erythropoietin (Epo) and Epo receptor (EpoR) expression in the retina and in vitreous fluid from diabetic and nondiabetic donors. To gain insight into the mechanisms responsible for the regulation of Epo production in the retina, we also assessed retinal expression of hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF-1α and HIF-2α). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Eighteen postmortem eyes from 9 diabetic patients without clinically detectable retinopathy were compared with 18 eyes from 9 nondiabetic donors. mRNA of Epo, HIF-1α, and HIF-2α (quantitative RT-PCR) were measured separately in neuroretina and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Epo and EpoR were assessed in the retina (immunofluorescence by confocal laser microscopy) and in the vitreous fluid (radioimmunoassay and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, respectively). RESULTS—Epo and EpoR mRNAs were significantly higher in the RPE than in the neuroretina. Higher expression of Epo was detected in the retinas (both in the RPE and in the neuroretina) from diabetic donors. By contrast, EpoR expression was similar in both groups. We did not find any difference in HIF-1α and HIF-2α mRNA expression between diabetic and nondiabetic donors (both in RPE and neuroretina). Intravitreal Epo concentration was higher in diabetic donors than in nondiabetic control subjects. However, EpoR concentrations were similar in both groups. CONCLUSIONS—Epo overexpression is an early event in the retina of diabetic patients, and this is not associated with any change in EpoR. At this early stage, other factors apart from hypoxia seem to be more important in accounting for the Epo upregulation that exists in the diabetic retina.
Search in speech, language identification and speaker recognition in Speech@FIT

This paper describes "search in speech" techniques developed in the Speech@FIT research group at FIT BUT in the last couple of years. It concentrates on spoken term detection (STD) and presents our system for NIST STD 2006 evaluations in detail. It also briefly mentions our systems for speaker and language recognition.
Joint Incremental Disfluency Detection and Dependency Parsing

We present an incremental dependency parsing model that jointly performs disfluency detection. The model handles speech repairs using a novel non-monotonic transition system, and includes several novel classes of features. For comparison, we evaluated two pipeline systems, using state-of-the-art disfluency detectors. The joint model performed better on both tasks, with a parse accuracy of 90.5% and 84.0% accuracy at disfluency detection. The model runs in expected linear time, and processes over 550 tokens a second.
Olfactory sensitivity to bile fluid and bile salts in the European eel (Anguilla anguilla), goldfish (Carassius auratus) and Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) suggests a `broad range' sensitivity not confined to those produced by conspecifics alone

SUMMARY Teleosts have high olfactory sensitivity to bile salts. To assess whether this phenomenon is involved in intra-specific chemical communication alone, or is part of a more `broad range' sensitivity to bile salts produced by heterospecifics, we investigated possible differences in the odour of bile between the sexes and among different species – the eel (Anguilla anguilla), goldfish (Carassius auratus) and Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) – using the electro-olfactogram (EOG). We also identified the main bile constituents by liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. There were marked differences in olfactory response of the eel to thin-layer chromatography fractions of bile from both sexes, and mature and immature conspecifics. Smaller differences were seen in the potency of fractions of bile from male and female goldfish and tilapia. Eels, goldfish and tilapia demonstrated similar olfactory sensitivity to bile from a range of different species, with no apparent correlation between the olfactory potency of bile and a phylogenetic closeness and/or similarity of diet of the donor to the receiver. The three species were able to detect odorants in thin-layer chromatography fractions of heterospecific bile even in the absence of activity in conspecific bile. Eels, goldfish and tilapia responded to both sulphated C27 bile salts (5β-scymnol-sulphate and 5α-cyprinol sulphate) and to taurine-conjugated C24 bile salts (taurochenodeoxycholic acid, taurolithocholic acid and taurocholic acid), irrespective of whether these bile salts were present in conspecific bile. Together, these results suggest that teleosts have a broad-range olfactory sensitivity to bile salts, with potential roles in both intra-specific chemical communication and in inter-specific interactions.
Bilateral despeckling filter in homogeneity domain for breast ultrasound images

Breast sonograms are more effective towards differentiation of cysts from solid tumours; if they could be post-processed for minimization of speckle content without blurring of edges. The approach presented in this paper consists of a bilateral filtering in homogeneity domain so that the despeckling process do not compromises the texture and features of masses. The proposed despeckled approach decomposes the input image into homogeneous and non-homogeneous regions; which are then selectively processed using the bilateral filter. The domain filtering component is made dominant when applied to homogeneous pixels providing smoothening while the range filter dominates on the non-homogeneous pixels leading to edge preservation. Simulations carried out on breast ultrasound images depict satisfactory speckle filtering supported with improvement in values of performance parameters (PSNR, SSIM & SSI).
Optical Current Source Density Analysis in Hippocampal Organotypic Culture Shows That Spreading Depression Occurs with Uniquely Reversing Currents

Spreading depression (SD) involves current flow through principal neurons, but the pattern of current flow over the expanse of susceptible tissues or individual principal neurons remains undefined. Accordingly, tissue and single cell maps made from digital imaging of voltage-sensitive dye changes in hippocampal organotypic cultures undergoing SD were processed via optical current source density analysis to reveal the currents associated with pyramidal neurons. Two distinctive current flow patterns were seen. The first was a trilaminar pattern (420 μm2) that developed with the onset of SD in CA3 pyramidal neurons, in which SD most often began. This initial pattern comprised a somatic current sink with current sources to either side in the dendrites that lasted for seconds extending into the first aspect of the classical “inverted saddle” interstitial direct current waveform of SD. Next, the somatic sink backpropagated at a speed of millimeters per minute into the proximal dendrites, resulting in a reversal of the initial current flow pattern to its second orientation, namely dendritic sinks associated with a somatic source. The latter persisted for the remainder of SD in CA3 and was the only pattern seen in CA1, in which SD was rarely initiated. This backpropagating SD current flow resembles that of activity-dependent synaptic activation. Retrograde and associative signaling via principal neuron current flow is a key means to affect tissue function, including synaptic activation and, by extension, perhaps SD. Such current-related postsynaptic signaling might not only help explain SD but also neuroprotection and migraine, two phenomena increasingly recognized as being related to SD.
Differential electrophysiological response during rest, self-referential, and non–self-referential tasks in human posteromedial cortex

The electrophysiological basis for higher brain activity during rest and internally directed cognition within the human default mode network (DMN) remains largely unknown. Here we use intracranial recordings in the human posteromedial cortex (PMC), a core node within the DMN, during conditions of cued rest, autobiographical judgments, and arithmetic processing. We found a heterogeneous profile of PMC responses in functional, spatial, and temporal domains. Although the majority of PMC sites showed increased broad gamma band activity (30–180 Hz) during rest, some PMC sites, proximal to the retrosplenial cortex, responded selectively to autobiographical stimuli. However, no site responded to both conditions, even though they were located within the boundaries of the DMN identified with resting-state functional imaging and similarly deactivated during arithmetic processing. These findings, which provide electrophysiological evidence for heterogeneity within the core of the DMN, will have important implications for neuroimaging studies of the DMN.
PROFITABILITY OF CONTRARIAN AND MOMENTUM STRATEGIES AND MARKET STABILITY

This paper proposes a continuous-time heterogeneous agent model of investor behaviour consisting of fundamentalist, contrarian, momentum and market maker strategies to study their impact on market stability and profitability. The underlying stochastic delay integro-differential equation model provides a unified approach to model different time horizons of momentum and contrarian strategies, which play an important role in the profitability of these strategies empirically. By including noise traders and imposing a stochastic fundamental value, we demonstrate that momentum and contrarian strategies can be consistent with market efficiency and the model is able to replicate various market phenomena and stylized facts. Finally, we demonstrate the activities of different traders can affect their profitability dramatically, which sheds new light in understanding the profitability mechanism.
The Exploration and Analysis of Using Multiple Thesaurus Types for Query Expansion in Information Retrieval.

This paper proposes the use of multiple thesaurus types for query expansion in information retrieval. Hand-crafted thesaurus, corpus-based co-occurrence-based thesaurus and syntactic-relation-based thesaurus are combined and used as a tool for query expansion. A simple word sense disambiguation is performed to avoid misleading expansion terms. Experiments using TREC-7 collection proved that this method could improve the information retrieval performance significantly. Failure analysis was done on the cases in which the proposed method fail to improve the retrieval effectiveness. We found that queries containing negative statements and multiple aspects might cause problems in the proposed method.
Perception of Identity Threat as the Main Disturbance of Iranian Divorced Women: A Qualitative Study

ABSRACT Postdivorce identity challenges can be experienced differently in societies that underline the lack of normalcy of divorce. Therefore, this study was conducted to explore Iranian divorced women’s perceptions of their identities. A qualitative content analysis method was applied. Participants included 18 divorced women recruited based on purposive sampling. Data were gathered using unstructured interviews, and analyzed via content analysis method. Three categories—stigmatization, separation shock, and remarriage paradox—were extracted, and the main theme was identity threat. Findings illustrate that Iranian divorced women can be considered at risk, and hence, understanding their views is vital for developing context-specific preventive and intervention programs.
Derivation, propagation and differentiation of human stem and progenitor cells

Neuronal loss is a common feature of many neurological disorders, including stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury. Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and hESC-derived neural progenitors (NPs) may provide a number of new ways for studying and treating diseases and injuries in the brain. Studying the proliferation and differentiation characteristics of hESCs and NPs is important for three main reasons: 1, they represent an almost unlimited source of cells for neuron replacement therapies after neurodegeneration in the brain; 2, they are a good source of normal human cells for studying functional genomics, proteomics or for drug screening; and 3, they allow us to study early human brain development. The general aims of this thesis were four-fold: 1, to develop efficient and simple methods for the large scale propagation of hESCs and hESC-derived NPs; 2, to optimise NP differentiation into mature neurons and glia; 3, to find suitable materials to promote migration and differentiation of stem and progenitor cells, and; 4, to uncover critical differentiation factors expressed in common between neuroblasts in the rostral migratory stream (RMS; the only long distance cell migration system in the human brain) and that of hESC-derived NPs. To address these aims, we used a range of techniques including cell culture, morphometric analysis, immunocytochemistry, immunohistochemistry and RT-PCR. Here we report the development of an improved method for the transfer and culture of undifferentiated hESCs in the absence of a cell feeder-layer, which is more cost effective and reduces the contact with murine feeder cells that render the hESCs