Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuromedin U and Its Receptors: Structure, Function, and Physiological Roles

Neuromedin U (NmU) is a structurally highly conserved neuropeptide. It is ubiquitously distributed, with highest levels found in the gastrointestinal tract and pituitary. Originally isolated from porcine spinal cord, it has since been isolated and sequenced from several species. Amino acid alignment of NmU from different species reveals a high level of conservation, and particular features within its structure are important for bioactivity. Specifically, the C terminus, including a terminal asparagine-linked amidation, is essential for activity. The conservation of NmU across a wide range of species indicates a strong evolutionary pressure to conserve this peptide and points to its physiological significance. Despite this, the precise physiological and indeed pathophysiological roles of NmU have remained elusive. NmU was first isolated based on its ability to contract rat uterine smooth-muscle (hence the suffix “U”) and has since been implicated inthe regulation of smooth-muscle contraction, blood pressure and local blood flow, ion transport in the gut, stress responses, cancer, gastric acid secretion, pronociception, and feeding behavior. Two G-protein-coupled receptors for NmU have recently been cloned. These receptors are widespread throughout the body but have differential distributions suggesting diverse but specific roles for the receptor subtypes. Here we detail the isolation and characterization of NmU, describe the discovery, cloning, distribution, and structure of its two receptors, and outline its possible roles in both physiology and pathophysiology. Ultimately the development of receptor-specific ligands and the generation of animals in which the receptors have been selectively knocked out will hopefully reveal the true extent of the biological roles of NmU and suggest novel therapeutic indications for selective activation or blockade of either of its receptors.
Multi-Document Summarization of Evaluative Text

We present and compare two approaches to the task of summarizing evaluative arguments. The ﬁrst is a sentence extraction-based approach while the second is a language generation-based approach. We evaluate these approaches in a user study and ﬁnd that they quantitatively perform equally well. Qualitatively, however, we ﬁnd that they perform well for different but complementary reasons. We conclude that an effective method for summarizing evaluative arguments must effectively synthe-size the two approaches.
[Epidemiological and obstetrics aspects in women with recurrent pregnancy losses at a public maternity in the Brazilian Northeast.]

PURPOSE To describe the epidemiologic and obstetric characteristics of women with recurrent miscarriages. METHODS A descriptive and analytical study whose inclusion criterion was every woman that was attended at the clinic for recurrent miscarriage (loss group), between January 2006 and December 2010. Patients that did not live in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, and those who were not reached by telephone or whose number was not included in the medical record were not included. The Control Group consisted of 204 pregnant women seen at the low-risk prenatal care unit between May 2007 and April 2008. Women who did not accept to be interviewed and those with obstetric risk were excluded from the Control Group. The analyzed variables were: age, education, occupation, marital status, alcohol consumption, body mass index, obstetric history and the gestational age when the losses occurred. The SPSS 18.0 program was used for statistical analysis. Means and standard deviations of continuous variables were compared using the Student's t-test and the frequencies of the nominal variables were compared by the χ2 test. RESULTS The mean age of women in the loss group was higher than in the Control Group (32.3±6.3 versus 26.5±6.4 years old, p<0.01). Consumption of alcoholic beverages predominated in the loss group (36.9 versus 22.1%, p=0.01), as well as marital status (93.2 versus 66.7% were married or living in a stable union, p<0.01). The pre-pregnancy body mass index was higher in the loss group (26.9 versus 23.5%, p<0.01). Regarding obstetric history, 103 women with recurrent miscarriage reported 334 pregnancies. Fifty-six of them had 2 or more miscarriages in the first quarter and in 31 of them, 2 or more pregnancies progressed to late abortions/extremely preterm infants. CONCLUSIONS Some risk factors were identified in women with recurrent losses, such as more advanced age and higher body mass index. These observations agree with more recent proposals regarding recurrent losses that consider the inclusion of losses in various gestational ages.
Phytochemical analysis of Pinus eldarica bark

Bark extract of Pinus pinaster contains numerous phenolic compounds such as catechins, taxifolin, and phenolic acids. These compounds have received considerable attentions because of their anti-inflammatory, antimutagenic, anticarcinogenic, antimetastatic and high antioxidant activities. Although P. pinaster bark has been intensely investigated in the past; there is comparably less information available in the literature in regard to P. eldarica bark. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the chemical composition of P. eldarica commonly found in Iran. A reversed-phase high pressure liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) method for the determination of catechin, caffeic acid, ferulic acid, and taxifolin in P. pinaster and P. eldarica was developed. A mixture of 0.1% formic acid in deionized water and 0.1% formic acid in acetonitrile was used as the mobile phase, and chromatographic separation was achieved on a Nova pack C18 at 280 nm. The two studied Pinus species contained high amounts of polyphenolic compounds. Among four marker compounds, the main substances identified in P. pinaster and P. eldarica were taxifolin and catechin, respectively. Furthermore, the composition of the bark oil of P. eldarica obtained by hydrodistillation was analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS). Thirty-three compounds accounting for 95.1 % of the oil were identified. The oils consisted mainly of mono- and sesquiterpenoid fractions, especially α-pinene (24.6%), caryophyllene oxide (14.0%), δ-3-carene (10.7%), (E)-β-caryophyllene (7.9%), and myrtenal (3.1%).
A 0.45-V, 14.6-nW CMOS Subthreshold Voltage Reference With No Resistors and No BJTs

We present a low-voltage low-power CMOS subthreshold voltage reference with no resistors and no bipolar junction transistors in a wide temperature range. The temperature stability is improved by second-order compensation. By employing a bulk-driven technique and the MOS transistors working in the subthreshold region, the supply voltage and the power dissipation are reduced. Moreover, a trimming circuit is adopted to compensate for the process-related reference voltage variation. The proposed voltage reference has been fabricated with the 0.18-μm 1.8-V CMOS process. The measurement results show that the minimum power supply voltage is 0.45 V, the power consumption is 14.6 nW, the average temperature coefficient measured from -40 °C to 125 °C is 63.6 ppm/°C, and the line regulation is 1.2 mV/V in the power supply voltage ranging from 0.45 to 1.8 V. In addition, the chip area is 0.012 mm2.
Pharmaceuticals and personal care products as emerging micropollutants in Brazilian surface waters: a preliminary snapshot on environmental contamination and risks

The present work intended to present a preliminary snapshot on the contamination of Brazilian surface waters by pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Data were collected elsewhere for Measured Environmental Concentrations (MEC) in surface waters and Predicted No-Effect Concentration (PNEC). Prioritization was based on risk assessment, where MEC/PNEC ratios higher than 1.0 indicate a positive risk, values below 0.1 indicate absence of risk and intermediate values, potential risk. Results revealed that hormones, antibiotics drugs and triclosan should be prioritized to subsidize the generation of water quality standards to protect aquatic life.
Putting the pieces together: Connected Poselets for human pose estimation

We propose a novel hybrid approach to static pose estimation called Connected Poselets. This representation combines the best aspects of part-based and example-based estimation. First detecting poselets extracted from the training data; our method then applies a modified Random Decision Forest to identify Poselet activations. By combining keypoint predictions from poselet activitions within a graphical model, we can infer the marginal distribution over each keypoint without any kinematic constraints. Our approach is demonstrated on a new publicly available dataset with promising results.
Unifying Text, Metadata, and User Network Representations with a Neural Network for Geolocation Prediction

We propose a novel geolocation prediction model using a complex neural network. Geolocation prediction in social media has attracted many researchers to use information of various types. Our model unifies text, metadata, and user network representations with an attention mechanism to overcome previous ensemble approaches. In an evaluation using two open datasets, the proposed model exhibited a maximum 3.8% increase in accuracy and a maximum of 6.6% increase in accuracy@161 against previous models. We further analyzed several intermediate layers of our model, which revealed that their states capture some statistical characteristics of the datasets.
Feature Forest Models for Probabilistic HPSG Parsing

Probabilistic modeling of lexicalized grammars is difficult because these grammars exploit complicated data structures, such as typed feature structures. This prevents us from applying common methods of probabilistic modeling in which a complete structure is divided into sub-structures under the assumption of statistical independence among sub-structures. For example, part-of-speech tagging of a sentence is decomposed into tagging of each word, and CFG parsing is split into applications of CFG rules. These methods have relied on the structure of the target problem, namely lattices or trees, and cannot be applied to graph structures including typed feature structures. This article proposes the feature forest model as a solution to the problem of probabilistic modeling of complex data structures including typed feature structures. The feature forest model provides a method for probabilistic modeling without the independence assumption when probabilistic events are represented with feature forests. Feature forests are generic data structures that represent ambiguous trees in a packed forest structure. Feature forest models are maximum entropy models defined over feature forests. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed for maximum entropy estimation without unpacking feature forests. Thus probabilistic modeling of any data structures is possible when they are represented by feature forests. This article also describes methods for representing HPSG syntactic structures and predicate-argument structures with feature forests. Hence, we describe a complete strategy for developing probabilistic models for HPSG parsing. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is empirically evaluated through parsing experiments on the Penn Treebank, and the promise of applicability to parsing of real-world sentences is discussed.
A trial of making reference gait data for simple gait evaluation system with wireless inertial sensors

Recently, the use of wearable inertial sensors have been widely studied in the field of human movement analysis. Our research group developed a wearable motion measurement system using the wireless inertial sensors for rehabilitation training and daily exercise. However, there are few reference data to evaluate motor function. In this paper, reference data of joint and inclination angles of lower limb and that of gait event timing for gait evaluation were made by measurement with 4 healthy subjects in their twenties. Average values of inclination and joint angles and gait event timings were similar to those seen in literature. These suggest that the averaged data obtained in this paper can be used as reference data. Then, gait data of a healthy subject in his thirties were compared with the reference data. Most of angles and all the gait event timings were considered to be standard of 20's. However, some angles of the healthy subject in his thirties were considered not to be the standard partly. These differences in evaluation were considered to depend on a level of similarity of movement to the reference data. It was expected to evaluate the level of similarity of movement from various parameters.
Malnutrition in hospital outpatients and inpatients: prevalence, concurrent validity and ease of use of the ‘malnutrition universal screening tool’ (‘MUST’) for adults†

The ‘malnutrition universal screening tool’ (‘MUST’) for adults has been developed for all health care settings and patient groups, but ease of use and agreement with other published tools when screening to identify malnutrition requires investigation. The present study assessed the agreement and the prevalence of malnutrition risk between ‘MUST’ and a variety of other tools in the same patients and compared the ease of using these tools. Groups of patients were consecutively screened using ‘MUST’ and: (1) MEREC Bulletin (MEREC) and Hickson and Hill (HH) tools (fifty gastroenterology outpatients); (2) nutrition risk score (NRS) and malnutrition screening tool (MST; seventy-five medical inpatients); (3) short-form mini nutritional assessment (MNA-tool; eighty-six elderly and eighty-five surgical inpatients); (4) subjective global assessment (SGA; fifty medical inpatients); (5) Doyle undernutrition risk score (URS; fifty-two surgical inpatients). Using ‘MUST’, the prevalence of malnutrition risk ranged from 19–60% in inpatients and 30% in outpatients. ‘MUST’ had ‘excellent’ agreement (κ 0.775–0.893) with MEREC, NRS and SGA tools, ‘fair–good’ agreement (κ 0.551–0.711) with HH, MST and MNA-tool tools and ‘poor’ agreement with the URS tool (κ 0.255). When categorisation of malnutrition risk differed between tools, it did not do so systematically, except between ‘MUST’ and MNA-tool (P=0.0005) and URS (P=0.039). ‘MUST’ and MST were the easiest, quickest tools to complete (3–5 min). The present investigation suggested a high prevalence of malnutrition in hospital inpatients and outpatients (19–60% with ‘MUST’) and ‘fair–good’ to ‘excellent’ agreement beyond chance between ‘MUST’ and most other tools studied. ‘MUST’ was quick and easy to use in these patient groups.
HDL, HDL2, and HDL3 Subfractions, and the Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction: A Prospective Population Study in Eastern Finnish Men

BackgroundWe investigated the association of cholesterol concentrations in serum high density lipoprotein (HDL) and its subfractions HDL2 and HDL3 with the risk of acute myocardial infarction in 1,799 randomly selected men 42, 48, 54, or 60 years old. Methods and ResultsBaseline examinations in the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study were done during 1984-1987. In Cox multivariate survival models adjusted for age and examination year, serum HDL cholesterol of less than 1.09 mmol/l (42 mg/dl) was associated with a 3.3-fold risk of acute myocardial infarction (95% confidence intervals [CI], 1.7-6.4), serum HDL2, cholesterol of less than 0.65 mmol/1 (25 mg/dl) was associated with a 4.0-fold risk of acute myocardial infarction (95% CI, 1.9-8.3), and serum HDL3 cholesterol of less than 0.40 mmol/l (15 mg/dl) was associated with a 2.0-fold (95% CI, 1.1-4.0) risk of acute myocardial infarction. Adjustments for obesity, ischemic heart disease, other cardiovascular disease, maximal oxygen uptake, systolic blood pressure, antihypertensive medication, serum low density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglyceride concentrations reduced the excess risks associated with serum HDL, IIDL2, and HDL3 cholesterol in the lowest quartiles by 52%, 48%, and 41%, respectively. Additional adjustments for alcohol consumption, cigarettes smoked daily, smoking years, and leisure time energy expenditure reduced these excess risks associated with low HDL, HDL2, and HDL3 cholesterol levels by another 26%, 24% and 21%, respectively. ConclusionsOur data confirm that both total HDL and HDL2 levels have inverse associations with the risk of acute myocardial infarction and may thus be protective factors in ischemic heart disease, whereas the role of HDL3 remains equivocal. (Circulation 1991;84:129–139)
Wild bird‐associated C ampylobacter jejuni isolates are a consistent source of human disease, in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Summary The contribution of wild birds as a source of human campylobacteriosis was investigated in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom (UK) over a 10 year period. The probable origin of human C ampylobacter jejuni genotypes, as described by multilocus sequence typing, was estimated by comparison with reference populations of isolates from farm animals and five wild bird families, using the STRUCTURE algorithm. Wild bird‐attributed isolates accounted for between 476 (2.1%) and 543 (3.5%) cases annually. This proportion did not vary significantly by study year (P = 0.934) but varied seasonally, with wild bird‐attributed genotypes comprising a greater proportion of isolates during warmer compared with cooler months (P = 0.003). The highest proportion of wild bird‐attributed illness occurred in August (P < 0.001), with a significantly lower proportion in November (P = 0.018). Among genotypes attributed to specific groups of wild birds, seasonality was most apparent for T urdidae‐attributed isolates, which were absent during cooler, winter months. This study is consistent with some wild bird species representing a persistent source of campylobacteriosis, and contributing a distinctive seasonal pattern to disease burden. If Oxfordshire is representative of the UK as a whole in this respect, these data suggest that the national burden of wild bird‐attributed isolates could be in the order of 10 000 annually.
ApproximatingL2Invariants of Amenable Covering Spaces: A Combinatorial Approach

Abstract In this paper, we prove that the L 2 Betti numbers of an amenable covering space can be approximated by the average Betti numbers of a regular exhaustion, proving a conjecture in [DM]. We also prove that an arbitrary amenable covering space of a finite simplicial complex is of determinant class.
A New Feedback Control Mechanism for Error Correction in Packet-Switched Networks

Error correction mechanisms enable control and other real-time applications to be executed over unreliable packet-switched networks. By adding carefully adjusted redundancy to transmitted data at the sender, it is possible to recover lost data at the receiver and thereby improve effective throughput. We describe simple models for packet loss, which allow us to find the optimal redundancy as a function of packet loss probability. Two feedforward control mechanisms based on the packet loss probability are presented: one that is computed off-line and another one using an on-line algorithm. A drawback with these approaches is their dependency on accurate network state information and precise loss models. To cope with these issues, we propose a new feedback solution that tracks the optimum using gradient estimation. Simulations in ns-2 illustrate the behavior of the error correction schemes, demonstrating that the feedback solution outperforms the feedforward solution in presence of model erros.
Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use at a Single Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center

The aim of this study was to determine the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in an inflammatory bowel disease population at a single pediatric center. The secondary aims were to determine predictors of CAM use and assess parental attitude to CAM use. A survey was developed that was distributed electronically and given out in the clinic. Two hundred thirty-five surveys were analyzed. Thirty-six percent of respondents reported that their children had used CAM, while 19.6% were current users. Sixty-three percent of respondents were “extremely” or “very supportive” of CAM and 57.6% would have been “extremely” or “very supportive” at the time of their children's diagnosis. The most commonly used CAM modalities were fish oil (48.8%), probiotics (22.5%), acupuncture/pressure (17.5%), aloe (16.3%), yoga/meditation (16.3%), chiropractic (12%), and herbal medicine (13.8%). Multivariate analysis revealed 2 independent factors predictive of subjects using CAM: use of biologics (odds ratio of 2.8; p = .008) and subjects' parent using CAM (odds ratio of 10.9; p ⩽ .001). More than one third of children in this study and their parents have used CAM. Families are supportive of CAM both at the time of diagnosis and as an ongoing component of their child's treatment even if they were not past or current users of CAM. Predictors of CAM use were treatment with a biologic and having a parent who used CAM.
Impact of Cognitive Neuroscience on Stroke Rehabilitation

For over 2 decades, cognitive neuroscience has been shaping our understanding of perception, cognition, and consciousness.1 The term has been coined to describe the translation between cognition, the biological processes of the brain, and computational modeling.2,3 From early on, several fields of high clinical relevance were developed under the umbrella of cognitive neuroscience: neuropsychology,4 neuroimaging,5 neural plasticity,6 and neurorehabilitation.7 Stroke rehabilitation should benefit substantially from cognitive neuroscience in the coming years. To illustrate this point, we draw here on a series of well established studies and outline clinical trials which would be useful to perform. The conceptual shift from classical aphasic syndromes to cognitive models of speech and language processing8 opened new vistas for rehabilitation, and the new therapeutic interventions are or will be soon ready for clinical trials. Predicting outcome is, however, still difficult,9 partially because of the poor understanding we have of neural mechanisms supporting recovery of cognitive functions. The investigation of simpler models, such as the dual-stream model for auditory processing, rather than the complex networks involved in speech and language processing, may offer useful insights into postlesional plasticity and reorganization. A intriguing development is the use of brief behavioral interventions, such as prismatic adaptation in neglect, which are believed to enhance plasticity and alter the organization of the contralesional hemisphere.10 There is currently a translational gap between the demonstrated effects of prismatic adaptation in specific tasks and the clinically relevant reduction of neglect-related disability.11 To bridge this gap, we need to understand better the mechanisms that underlie the effect of prismatic adaptation and to define more precisely the indications for this treatment so that more focused randomized controlled trials can be performed. Geschwind’s influential reanalysis of aphasic syndromes emphasized a mechanistic model of language …