Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are we aware of the external factors that influence our food intake?

OBJECTIVES This research examines the extent to which people accurately report some of the external influences on their food intake. DESIGN In two studies, specific factors (the presence and behavior of others) were manipulated in order to influence the amount of food that individuals consumed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The main outcomes of interest were participants' spontaneously generated explanations for their food intake (Study 1; n = 122), and their ratings of the importance of several potential determinants of food intake (Study 2; n = 75). RESULTS In Study 1, there was high concordance between the amounts eaten by members of a dyad, but very few participants indicated that they were influenced by their partner's behavior; they instead identified hunger and taste as the primary determinants of intake. Study 2 showed that participants' intake was strongly influenced by the behavior of others, but people rated taste and hunger as much more important influences on their intake. CONCLUSIONS If external environmental factors influence people's food intake without their awareness or acknowledgment, then maintaining a healthy diet can be a challenge, with long-term consequences for health and well-being.
Coming to grips with complex disorders: Genetic risk prediction in bipolar disorder using panels of genes identified through convergent functional genomics

We previously proposed and provided proof of principle for the use of a complementary approach, convergent functional genomics (CFG), combining gene expression and genetic data, from human and animal model studies, as a way of mining the existing GWAS datasets for signals that are there already, but did not reach significance using a genetics‐only approach [Le‐Niculescu et al., 2009b ]. CFG provides a fit‐to‐disease prioritization of genes that leads to generalizability in independent cohorts, and counterbalances the fit‐to‐cohort prioritization inherent in classic genetic‐only approaches, which have been plagued by poor reproducibility across cohorts. We have now extended our previous work to include more datasets of GWAS, and more recent evidence from other lines of work. In essence our analysis is the most comprehensive integration of genetics and functional genomics to date in the field of bipolar disorder. Biological pathway analyses identified top canonical pathways, and epistatic interaction testing inside these pathways has identified genes that merit future follow‐up as direct interactors (intra‐pathway epistasis, INPEP). Moreover, we have put together a panel of best P‐value single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), based on the top candidate genes we identified. We have developed a genetic risk prediction score (GRPS) based on our panel, and demonstrate how in two independent test cohorts the GRPS differentiates between subjects with bipolar disorder and normal controls, in both European‐American and African‐American populations. Lastly, we describe a prototype of how such testing could be used to categorize disease risk in individuals and aid personalized medicine approaches, in psychiatry and beyond. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
[Comparision between proximal gastrectomy and total gastrectomy in early gastric cancer].

BACKGROUND/AIMS The purpose of this study was to evaluate clinical outcome of proximal and total gastrectomy regarding reflux esophagitis, nutritional state, and anemia in early gastric cancer. METHODS 94 patients with early gastric cancer were included from January 2001 to January 2007 at Chungnam National University Hospital. Of whom 40 patients (31 men and 9 woman) had proximal gastrectomy (PG) and 54 patients (44 men and 10 woman) had total gastrectomy (TG). We reviewed all their medical and surgical record with surveying for gastrointestinal symptoms and reflux symptoms over the phone. RESULTS There were no significant differences between basic, surgical, and histopathologic characteristics. Bile reflux symptoms and heart burn symptoms were more common and severe in the TG group. The incidences of endoscopically detected reflux esophagitis were about 60% in the TG group and about 30% in the PG group. The hemoglobin levels were significantly higher in the PG group after the operation and were gradually decreased in the TG as the time went. The levels of laboratory variables such as total protein, albumin, and total cholesterol were lower in the TG group than in the PG group after the operation. However, stoma stricture after operation developed in the PG group more often than in the TG group, and esophageal balloon dilatations were performed more frequently in the PG group. CONCLUSIONS PG is favorable for proximal early gastric cancer in terms of reduced reflux esophagitis, anemia, and malnutrition except the stricture at esophagogastrostomy site.
NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF GROUND COOLING POTENTIAL FOR MALAYSIAN CLIMATE

In equatorial countries like Malaysia, the cooling of buildings is almost entirely dependent on air-conditioning, with electricity as the main source of the energy required. As the country develops, with more buildings being built, and as the population grows, with more people demanding thermal comfort in the buildings they work and live in, the rate of electricity consumption for cooling purposes will continue to increase dramatically from year to year. This phenomenon requires the application of alternative energy options and thermal storage. Ground thermal storage is an example of thermal storage which can supply cooling and heating effects resulting in a significant reduction of electricity consumption. This paper discusses the potential of the implementation of ground thermal storage by using a ground heat exchanger (GHE) to supply passive cooling for any application. An analysis has been conducted based on an empirical equation from conduction heat transfer for depths of up to 30 m and thermal diffusivities from 0.04 to 0.1 m 2 /day. The main input parameters were obtained from a local weather station for three consecutive years. The result showed that a significant reduction occurs at a depth of 2.0 m and below, meaning that cooling can be supplied constantly throughout the year. The temperature amplitude is also attenuated relatively with depth, whereby amplitudes of less than 1 °C occur at a depth of more than 4 m with a thermal diffusivity of 0.04 m 2 /day. In addition, thermal diffusivity gives a significant increment in temperature amplitude and it is suggested to be maintained at a value of less than 0.06 m 2 /day. This result provides useful information to researchers and engineers in the field of underground installation of materials or systems such as gas pipelines, water supply and for underground cable transmittance.
Role of lipoproteins and de-novo cholesterol synthesis in progesterone production by cultured bovine luteal cells

serum and, while dibutyryl cyclic AMP (dbcAMP) caused a marked stimulation of progesterone production in complete serum, it had only a small effect in LPDS. Lowdensity lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) increased basal and dbcAMP-stimulated progesterone production. Cells were 7 times more sensitive to LDL than HDL although the maximum response to both lipoproteins did not differ significantly. Inhibition of de-novo cholesterol synthesis by compactin had no effect on dbcAMP-stimulated progesterone production by cells cultured with complete serum or LPDS plus lipoproteins. Basal progesterone production in complete serum was increased by compactin and this was associated with a marked inhibition of cell proliferation, both effects being reversed by mevalonic acid. Compactin caused a 50% reduction in dbcAMP-stimulated progesterone secretion by cells cultured in LPDS. These data show that bovine luteal cells are dependent upon lipoproteins to provide substrate for progesterone synthesis and that, while LDL is the preferred lipoprotein, both LDL and HDL may be of importance in vivo.
Blurred persistence in transactional persistent memory

Persistent memory provides data persistence at main memory level and enables memory-level storage systems. To ensure consistency of the storage systems, memory writes need to be transactional and are carefully moved across the boundary between the volatile CPU cache and the persistent memory. Unfortunately, the CPU cache is hardware-controlled, and it incurs high overhead for programs to track and move data blocks from being volatile to persistent. In this paper, we propose a software-based mechanism, Blurred Persistence, to blur the volatility-persistence boundary, so as to reduce the overhead in transaction support. Blurred Persistence consists of two techniques. First, Execution in Log executes a transaction in the log to eliminate duplicated data copies for execution. It allows the persistence of volatile uncommitted data, which can be detected by reorganizing the log structure. Second, Volatile Checkpoint with Bulk Persistence allows the committed data to aggressively stay volatile by leveraging the data durability in the log, as long as the commit order across threads is kept. By doing so, it reduces the frequency of forced persistence and improves cache efficiency. Evaluations show that our mechanism improves system performance by 56.3% to 143.7% for a variety of workloads.
Pulpal Thermal Changes following Er-YAG Laser Debonding of Ceramic Brackets

Lasers are effective in debonding ceramic brackets. Unfortunately, while reducing the adhesive bond strength, lasers are also reported to increase pulpal temperature. The aim of this study was to evaluate the shear bond strengths and temperature increase levels after debonding ceramic brackets using an Er-YAG laser with or without water-cooling. Sixty polycrystalline upper premolar ceramic brackets were placed on the labial surface of sixty human premolar teeth which were randomly divided into three groups of twenty. A laser pulse at 5 W for 9 seconds was delivered to each bracket in both study groups either with water-cooling (water group) or without water-cooling (waterless group) using an Er-YAG laser. Debonding was performed 45 seconds after laser exposure and shear bond strengths were measured. Data comparison revealed a statistically significant difference between the groups. Mean temperature increases of 2.41°C and 4.59°C were recorded for the water and waterless laser groups, respectively. The shear bond strength value for the control group was 22.76 MPa and 10.46 and 6.36 MPa for the water and waterless laser groups, respectively. The application of Er-YAG laser with water-cooling was an efficient and safe method of debonding ceramic brackets.
Performance of transmit diversity scheme with quantized phase-only feedback

Closed-loop (feedback) rate-one channel orthogonalized space-time block codes (CO-STBCs) for 3 and 4 transmit antennas using a single (real) phase feedback are proposed. These codes with ideal feedback achieve full diversity and result in maximum likelihood (ML) decoding with only linear processing at the receiver. In this paper, we study the impact on the error-rate performance when the feedback phase information is quantized. Simulation results suggest that there is a significant SNR advantage even when only one bit is used to represent the phase feedback term. Also, it is found that three bits are sufficient to obtain nearly the ideal feedback performance.
Lineage pathway of human brain progenitor cells identified by JC virus susceptability

Multipotential human central nervous system progenitor cells, isolated from human fetal brain tissue by selective growth conditions, were cultured as undifferentiated, attached cell layers. Selective differentiation yielded highly purified populations of neurons or astrocytes. This report describes the novel use of this cell culture model to study cell type–specific recognition of a human neurotropic virus, JC virus. Infection by either JC virions or a plasmid encoding the JC genome demonstrated susceptibility in astrocytes and, to a lesser degree, progenitor cells, whereas neurons remained nonpermissive. JC virus susceptibility correlated with significantly higher expression of the NFI‐X transcription factor in astrocytes than in neurons. Furthermore, transfection of an NFI‐X expression vector into progenitor‐derived neuronal cells before infection resulted in viral protein production. These results indicate that susceptibility to JC virus infection occurs at the molecular level and also suggest that differential recognition of the viral promoter sequences can predict lineage pathways of multipotential progenitor cells in the human central nervous system. Ann Neurol 2003
PIN Auxin Efflux Carrier Polarity Is Regulated by PINOID Kinase-Mediated Recruitment into GNOM-Independent Trafficking in Arabidopsis[C][W]

The phytohormone auxin plays a major role in embryonic and postembryonic plant development. The temporal and spatial distribution of auxin largely depends on the subcellular polar localization of members of the PIN-FORMED (PIN) auxin efflux carrier family. The Ser/Thr protein kinase PINOID (PID) catalyzes PIN phosphorylation and crucially contributes to the regulation of apical-basal PIN polarity. The GTP exchange factor on ADP-ribosylation factors (ARF-GEF), GNOM preferentially mediates PIN recycling at the basal side of the cell. Interference with GNOM activity leads to dynamic PIN transcytosis between different sides of the cell. Our genetic, pharmacological, and cell biological approaches illustrate that PID and GNOM influence PIN polarity and plant development in an antagonistic manner and that the PID-dependent PIN phosphorylation results in GNOM-independent polar PIN targeting. The data suggest that PID and the protein phosphatase 2A not only regulate the static PIN polarity, but also act antagonistically on the rate of GNOM-dependent polar PIN transcytosis. We propose a model that includes PID-dependent PIN phosphorylation at the plasma membrane and the subsequent sorting of PIN proteins to a GNOM-independent pathway for polarity alterations during developmental processes, such as lateral root formation and leaf vasculature development.
Ameloblastin in Hertwig’s Epithelial Root Sheath Regulates Tooth Root Formation and Development

Tooth root formation begins after the completion of crown morphogenesis. At the end edge of the tooth crown, inner and outer enamel epithelia form Hertwig’s epithelial root sheath (HERS). HERS extends along with dental follicular tissue for root formation. Ameloblastin (AMBN) is an enamel matrix protein secreted by ameloblasts and HERS derived cells. A number of enamel proteins are eliminated in root formation, except for AMBN. AMBN may be related to tooth root formation; however, its role in this process remains unclear. In this study, we found AMBN in the basal portion of HERS of lower first molar in mice, but not at the tip. We designed and synthesized small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeting AMBN based on the mouse sequence. When AMBN siRNA was injected into a prospective mandibular first molar of postnatal day 10 mice, the root became shorter 10 days later. Furthermore, HERS in these mice revealed a multilayered appearance and 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine (BrdU) positive cells increased in the outer layers. In vitro experiments, when cells were compared with and without transiently expressing AMBN mRNA, expression of growth suppressor genes such as p21Cip1 and p27Kip1 was enhanced without AMBN and BrdU incorporation increased. Thus, AMBN may regulate differentiation state of HERS derived cells. Moreover, our results suggest that the expression of AMBN in HERS functions as a trigger for normal root formation.
Deep neural ensemble for retinal vessel segmentation in fundus images towards achieving label-free angiography

Automated segmentation of retinal blood vessels in label-free fundus images entails a pivotal role in computed aided diagnosis of ophthalmic pathologies, viz., diabetic retinopathy, hypertensive disorders and cardiovascular diseases. The challenge remains active in medical image analysis research due to varied distribution of blood vessels, which manifest variations in their dimensions of physical appearance against a noisy background. In this paper we formulate the segmentation challenge as a classification task. Specifically, we employ unsupervised hierarchical feature learning using ensemble of two level of sparsely trained denoised stacked autoencoder. First level training with bootstrap samples ensures decoupling and second level ensemble formed by different network architectures ensures architectural revision. We show that ensemble training of auto-encoders fosters diversity in learning dictionary of visual kernels for vessel segmentation. SoftMax classifier is used for fine tuning each member autoencoder and multiple strategies are explored for 2-level fusion of ensemble members. On DRIVE dataset, we achieve maximum average accuracy of 95.33% with an impressively low standard deviation of 0.003 and Kappa agreement coefficient of 0.708. Comparison with other major algorithms substantiates the high efficacy of our model.
The Maximal Causes of Natural Scenes are Edge Filters

We study the application of a strongly non-linear generative model to image patches. As in standard approaches such as Sparse Coding or Independent Component Analysis, the model assumes a sparse prior with independent hidden variables. However, in the place where standard approaches use the sum to combine basis functions we use the maximum. To derive tractable approximations for parameter estimation we apply a novel approach based on variational Expectation Maximization. The derived learning algorithm can be applied to large-scale problems with hundreds of observed and hidden variables. Furthermore, we can infer all model parameters including observation noise and the degree of sparseness. In applications to image patches we find that Gabor-like basis functions are obtained. Gabor-like functions are thus not a feature exclusive to approaches assuming linear superposition. Quantitatively, the inferred basis functions show a large diversity of shapes with many strongly elongated and many circular symmetric functions. The distribution of basis function shapes reflects properties of simple cell receptive fields that are not reproduced by standard linear approaches. In the study of natural image statistics, the implications of using different superposition assumptions have so far not been investigated systematically because models with strong non-linearities have been found analytically and computationally challenging. The presented algorithm represents the first large-scale application of such an approach.
A Bayesian discovery procedure

Summary. We discuss a Bayesian discovery procedure for multiple‐comparison problems. We show that, under a coherent decision theoretic framework, a loss function combining true positive and false positive counts leads to a decision rule that is based on a threshold of the posterior probability of the alternative. Under a semiparametric model for the data, we show that the Bayes rule can be approximated by the optimal discovery procedure, which was recently introduced by Storey. Improving the approximation leads us to a Bayesian discovery procedure, which exploits the multiple shrinkage in clusters that are implied by the assumed non‐parametric model. We compare the Bayesian discovery procedure and the optimal discovery procedure estimates in a simple simulation study and in an assessment of differential gene expression based on microarray data from tumour samples. We extend the setting of the optimal discovery procedure by discussing modifications of the loss function that lead to different single‐thresholding statistics. Finally, we provide an application of the previous arguments to dependent (spatial) data.
AA‐FVDM: An accident‐avoidance full velocity difference model for animating realistic street‐level traffic in rural scenes

Most of existing traffic simulation efforts focus on urban regions with a coarse two‐dimensional representation; relatively few studies have been conducted to simulate realistic three‐dimensional traffic flows on a large, complex road web in rural scenes. In this paper, we present a novel agent‐based approach called accident‐avoidance full velocity difference model (abbreviated as AA‐FVDM) to simulate realistic street‐level rural traffics, on top of the existing FVDM. The main distinction between FVDM and AA‐FVDM is that FVDM cannot handle a critical real‐world traffic problem while AA‐FVDM settles this problem and retains the essence of FVDM. We also design a novel scheme to animate the lane‐changing maneuvering process (in particular, the execution course). Through numerous simulations, we demonstrate that besides addressing a previously unaddressed real‐world traffic problem, our AA‐FVDM method efficiently (in real time) simulates large‐scale traffic flows (tens of thousands of vehicles) with realistic, smooth effects. Furthermore, we validate our method using real‐world traffic data, and the validation results show that our method measurably outperforms state‐of‐the‐art traffic simulation methods.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The effects of diffuse pollution on the European eel Anguilla anguilla (Linnaeus, 1758)

vi List of figures . viii List of tables . xi List of abbreviations . xiv Acknowledgements . xix Chapter 1. General introduction . 1 Eel biology and life cycle . 1 Population decline . 5 Contaminants in freshwater. 11 1.3. 1. Pesticides . 13 1.3. 1.1. Herbicides . 15 1.3. 1.2. Insecticides . 16 1.3. 1.3. Fungicides . 16 1.3. 1.4. Molluscicides . 17 1.3. 2. Pharmaceuticals . 17 1.3. 3. Industrial products . 19 1.3. 4. Metals. 20 Contaminants and diadromous fish . 21 1.4. 1. What we know from other diadromous species . 21 1.4. 2. Potential problems for the European eel . 22 Thesis aims . 23 Outline of thesis . 23 Chapter 2. General methods . 26
Combinatorial Approaches in Quantum Information Theory

We investigate the exploitation of various combinatorial properties of graphs and set systems to study several issues in quantum information theory. We characterize the combinatorics of distributed EPR pairs for preparing multi-partite entanglement in a real communication network. This combinatorics helps in the study of various problems in multi-party case by just reducing to the two-party case. Particularly, we use this combinatorics to (1) study various possible and impossible transformations of multi-partite states under LOCC, thus presenting an entirely new approach, not based on entropic criterion, to study such state transformations. (2) present a protocol and proof of its unconditional security for quantum key distribution amongst several trusted parties. (3) propose an idea to combine the features of quantum key distribution and quantum secret sharing. We investigate all the above issues in great detail and finally conclude briefly with some open research directions based on our research.