Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Locking it down

Objective: To explore the privacy and security of free medication applications (apps) available to Canadian consumers. Methods: The authors searched the Canadian iTunes store for iOS apps and the Canadian Google Play store for Android apps related to medication use and management. Using an Apple iPad Air 2 and a Google Nexus 7 tablet, 2 reviewers generated a list of apps that met the following inclusion criteria: free, available in English, intended for consumer use and related to medication management. Using a standard data collection form, 2 reviewers independently coded each app for the presence/absence of passwords, the storage of personal health information, a privacy statement, encryption, remote wipe and third-party sharing. A Cohen’s Kappa statistic was used to measure interrater agreement. Results: Of the 184 apps evaluated, 70.1% had no password protection or sign-in system. Personal information, including name, date of birth and gender, was requested by 41.8% (77/184) of apps. Contact information, such as address, phone number and email, was requested by 25% (46/184) of apps. Finally, personal health information, other than medication name, was requested by 89.1% (164/184) of apps. Only 34.2% (63/184) of apps had a privacy policy in place. Conclusion: Most free medication apps offer very limited authentication and privacy protocols. As a result, the onus currently falls on patients to input information in these apps selectively and to be aware of the potential privacy issues. Until more secure systems are built, health care practitioners cannot fully support patients wanting to use such apps.
Antistress activity of Argyreia speciosa roots in experimental animals

The antistress effect of a seven-day treatment (100 and 200 mg / kg, p.o.) of the hydroalcoholic extract of Argyreia speciosa root (ASE) was evaluated by using the swimming endurance test, acetic acid–induced writhing test, pentylenetetrazole-induced convulsion test, anoxic tolerance test, cold-restraint, stress-induced gastric ulcers, aspirin-induced ulcers, and biochemical, and histopathological changes in the cold-restraint stress test. The immunomodulatory activity was also evaluated for the same doses, and treatment of ASE was done using the hemagglutination test. Both the doses of ASE showed antistress activity in all the tested models. The ASE-treated animals showed a decrease in immobility time and an increase in anoxic tolerance time in swimming endurance and the anoxic tolerance tests, respectively. The effect of glacial acetic acid and pentylenetetrazole were also reduced by decreasing the number of writhing responses and increasing the onset of convulsions, respectively. In the cold restrained stress and aspirin-induced gastric ulcer models, ASE showed a significant reduction in the ulcer index. Pretreatment with ASE significantly ameliorated the cold stress-induced variations in biochemical levels such as increased plasma cholesterol, triglyceride, glucose, total protein, and cortisol. ASE was also effective in preventing the pathological changes in the adrenal gland, due to cold restrained stress, in rats. In mice immunized with sheep red blood cells, the treatment groups subjected to restraint stress prevented the humoral immune response to the antigen. The immunostimulating activity of the ASE was indicated by an increase in the antibody titer in mice pre-immunized with sheep red blood cells and subjected to restraint stress. The findings of the present investigations indicate that the ASE has significant antistress activity, which may be due to the immunostimulating property and increased resistance, nonspecifically, against all experimental stress conditions.
Skin sympathetic nerve activity in Guillain-Barré syndrome: a microneurographic study

To assess autonomic dysfunction, skin sympathetic nerve activity (SSNA) of four patients with Guillain-Barré syndrome was microneurographically studied in the acute and remission phase. Autonomic symptoms such as sinus tachycardia, palmar hyperhidrosis, hypertension, and orthostatic hypotension were present in the acute phase, but all subsided during remission. Basal resting SSNA and the responses to various physical and mental stimuli were all increased in the acute phase and returned almost to normal during remission. Rate of response in sweat rate and blood flow against SSNA were kept proportionally constant during both the acute and remission phases. These findings suggest that some autonomic nerve symptoms of Guillain-Barré syndrome, particularly during the acute phase, are due to increased SSNA.
Self-Regulation and Inhibition in Comorbid ADHD Children: An Evaluation of Executive Functions

The relationship between executive function and comorbid diagnoses in ADHD children is examined. One hundred six children between 7 and 15 years of age are assessed using the Tower of London (TOL), a test of executive function, and the Kiddie Schedule of Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, Present and Lifetime Version, a diagnostic interview. All children met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. A majority of the children had comorbid anxiety disorders, mood disorders, or oppositional defiant disorder. Measures on the TOL are total move score, total initiation time, and total rule violations. Age is predictive in all three measures of executive function as assessed by the TOL. Gender is predictive of total initiation time and total rule violations. Comorbid disorders are found to not have significance on executive function as measured by the TOL. This study concludes that comorbid disorders may not affect executive function
The Conserved Carboxy Terminus of the Capsid Domain of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Gag Protein Is Important for Virion Assembly and Release

ABSTRACT The retroviral Gag precursor plays an important role in the assembly of virion particles. The capsid (CA) protein of the Gag molecule makes a major contribution to this process. In the crystal structure of the free CA protein of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), 11 residues of the C terminus were found to be unstructured, and to date no information exists on the structure of these residues in the context of the Gag precursor molecule. We performed phylogenetic analysis and demonstrated a high degree of conservation of these 11 amino acids. Deletion of this cluster or introduction of various point mutations into these residues resulted in significant impairment of particle infectivity. In this cluster, two putative structural regions were identified, residues that form a hinge region (353-VGGP-356) and those that contribute to an α-helix (357-GHKARVL-363). Overall, mutations in these regions resulted in inhibition of virion production, but mutations in the hinge region demonstrated the most significant reduction. Although all the Gag mutants appeared to have normal Gag-Gag and Gag-RNA interactions, the hinge mutants were characterized by abnormal formation of cytoplasmic Gag complexes. Gag proteins with mutations in the hinge region demonstrated normal membrane association but aberrant rod-like membrane structures. More detailed analysis of these structures in one of the mutants demonstrated abnormal trapped Gag assemblies. These data suggest that the conserved CA C terminus is important for HIV-1 virion assembly and release and define a putative target for drug design geared to inhibit the HIV-1 assembly process.
Persuasion and culture: Advertising appeals in individualistic and collectivistic societies.

Abstract Two studies examined the extent to which a core dimension of cultural variability, individualism-collectivism (Hofstede, 1980, 1983; Triandis, 1990), is reflected in the types of persuasive appeals that tend to be used and that tend to be effective in different countries. Study 1 demonstrated that magazine advertisements in the United States, an individualistic culture, employed appeals to individual benefits and preferences, personal success, and independence to a greater extent than did advertisements in Korea, a collectivistic culture. Korean advertisements employed appeals emphasizing ingroup benefits, harmony, and family integrity to a greater extent than did U.S. ads. Study 2, a controlled experiment conducted in the two countries, demonstrated that in the U.S. advertisements emphasizing individualistic benefits were more persuasive, and ads emphasizing family or ingroup benefits were less persuasive than they were in Korea. In both studies, however, product characteristics played a role in moderating these overall differences: Cultural differences emerged strongly in Studies 1 and 2 for advertised products that tend to be purchased and used with others, but were much less evident for products that are typically purchased and used individually.
Collective and Relational Identities: The Moderating Effects of Number of Coworkers and Power Distance

Relational identity (viewing the self in terms of relationships) has become increasingly important in organizations today as a result of business demands that involve relationship building and maintenance. At the same time, collective identity (thinking of the self based on group memberships) continues to be influential in many organizations and cultures due to leadership or historical influences. This study examines the relationship between relational and collective identity in two Taiwanese financial services firms and tests the number of coworkers and individual-level power distance as moderators of this relationship. Results show that relational identity is positively related to collective identity and high collective individuals with a large or small number of coworkers (or with low power distance) have strong relational identities. Implications for selection and job design are discussed.
Geographic Variation of Chronic Kidney Disease Prevalence: Correlation with the Incidence of Renal Cell Carcinoma or Urothelial Carcinoma?

Background. The aim of this study is to evaluate whether geographic variations in the prevalence of late-stage chronic kidney disease (CKD) exist and are associated with incidence rates of renal cell carcinoma (RCC), upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC), or lower tract urothelial carcinoma (LTUC). Methods. Prevalence rates of late-stage CKD for 366 townships (n > 30) in Taiwan were calculated for 1,518,241 and 1,645,151 subjects aged 40 years or older in years 2010 and 2009, respectively. Late-stage CKD prevalence in year 2010 was used as a training set and its age-adjusted standardized morbidity rates (ASMR) were divided into three groups as defined <1.76%, 1.76% ≤ ASMR < 2.64%, and ≥2.64%, respectively. Year 2009, defined as the validation set, was used to validate the results. Results. The ASMR of late-stage CKD in years 2010 and 2009 were 1.76%, and 2.09%, respectively. Geographic variations were observed, with notably higher rates of disease in areas of the central, southwestern mountainside, and southeastern seaboard. There were no significant differences among different combined risk groups of RCC, UTUC, and LTUC incidence. Conclusion. The substantial geographic variations in the prevalence of late-stage CKD exist, but are not correlated with RCC, UTUC, or LTUC incidence.
Self-monitoring of expressive behavior.

A social psychological construct of self-monitoring (self-observation and self-control guided by situational cues to social appropriateness) of expressive behavior and self-presentation was proposed. An internally consistent, temporally stable self-report measure of individual differences in self-monitoring was constructed. Four converging laboratory and field studies of peer perception ratings, criterion group membership, self-control of facial and vocal emotional expressive behavior, and attention to normative social comparison information were conducted to demonstrate the convergent and discriminant validity of the Self-Monitoring Scale (SM). The use of SM to investigate hypotheses concerning consistency in expression across situations and between channels of expressive behavior was discussed.
Cholinesterase Reactivation in Vivo with a Novel Bis-Oxime Optimized by Computer-Aided Design

Recently, several bis-pyridiniumaldoximes linked by a variable-length alkylene chain were rationally designed in our laboratories as cholinesterase reactivators. Extensive in vitro tests of these oximes with acetylcholinesterase inhibited by two different organophosphate agents, echothiophate and diisopropylfluorophosphate, revealed one compound with particularly good reactivation kinetics and affinity for phosphorylated acetylcholinesterase (AChE). This compound, designated “ortho-7”, with a heptylene chain bridging two aldoximes ortho to a pyridinium ring nitrogen, was chosen for detailed comparison with the classic reactivator pyridine-2-aldoxime methochloride (2-PAM). In vitro, ortho-7 reactivated AChE selectively, without restoring activity of the related enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE). For in vivo studies, rats were injected with ortho-7 or 2-PAM before or after organophosphate exposure, and the activities of AChE and BChE were determined at multiple intervals in blood and solid tissues. Ortho-7 behaved nearly as well in the animal as in vitro, reactivating AChE to the same extent as 2-PAM in all peripheral tissues studied (serum, red blood cell, and diaphragm), but at doses up to 100-fold smaller. Like other oxime reactivators, ortho-7 did not reactivate brain AChE after systemic administration. Nonetheless, this agent could be useful in combination therapy for organophosphate exposure, and it may provide a platform for development of additional, even more effective reactivators.
Why Do They Come? Listening to Visitors at a Decorative Arts Museum

This article presents the background, methodology, and results of a yearlong study of visitor motivation conducted by the Visitor Research Team (VRT) of Winterthur, a Delaware decorative arts museum. The article details the VRT's use of focus groups to determine what really motivates visitors to attend museums. Study results are consistent with recent work in the field showing that learning and recreation are the primary motivations behind museum visitation. Visitors valued museums as places for active, personal learning through the observation of objects and as outlets for physical and mental relaxation and escapism. Results also show that Winterthur visitors ascribe meanings to the words learning and recreation that are different from education and entertainment. The author calls on museums to discover the needs of their audiences and to design marketing and programming using visitors' vocabularies to promote and provide meaningful museum experiences.
Plasma Metabonomic Profiling of Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common microvascular complication of diabetes and the leading cause of visual impairment in working-age adults. Patients with diabetes often develop DR despite appropriate control of systemic risk factors, suggesting the involvement of other pathogenic factors. We hypothesize that the plasma metabolic signature of DR is distinct and resolvable from that of diabetes alone. A nested population-based case-control metabonomic study was first performed on 40 DR cases and 40 control subjects with diabetes using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Eleven metabolites were found to be correlated with DR, and the majority were robust when adjusted for metabolic risk factors and confounding kidney disease. The metabolite markers 2-deoxyribonic acid; 3,4-dihydroxybutyric acid; erythritol; gluconic acid; and ribose were validated in an independent sample set with 40 DR cases, 40 control subjects with diabetes, and 40 individuals without diabetes. DR cases and control subjects with diabetes were matched by HbA1c in the validation set. Activation of the pentose phosphate pathway was identified from the list of DR metabolite markers. The identification of novel metabolite markers for DR provides insights into potential new pathogenic pathways for this microvascular complication and holds translational value in DR risk stratification and the development of new therapeutic measures.
Fast Almost-Gaussian Filtering

Image averaging can be performed very efficiently using either separable moving average filters or by using summed area tables, also known as integral images. Both these methods allow averaging to be performed at a small fixed cost per pixel, independent of the averaging filter size. Repeated filtering with averaging filters can be used to approximate Gaussian filtering. Thus a good approximation to Gaussian filtering can be achieved at a fixed cost per pixel independent of filter size. This paper describes how to determine the averaging filters that one needs to approximate a Gaussian with a specified standard deviation. The design of bandpass filters from the difference of Gaussians is also analysed. It is shown that difference of Gaussian bandpass filters share some of the attributes of log-Gabor filters in that they have a relatively symmetric transfer function when viewed on a logarithmic frequency scale and can be constructed with large bandwidths.
Scale and rotation invariant OCR for Pashto cursive script using MDLSTM network

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of cursive scripts like Pashto and Urdu is difficult due the presence of complex ligatures and connected writing styles. In this paper, we evaluate and compare different approaches for the recognition of such complex ligatures. The approaches include Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Current state of the art in cursive script assumes constant scale without any rotation, while real world data contain rotation and scale variations. This research aims to evaluate the performance of sequence classifiers like HMM and LSTM and compare their performance with descriptor based classifier like SIFT. In addition, we also assess the performance of these methods against the scale and rotation variations in cursive script ligatures. Moreover, we introduce a database of 480,000 images containing 1000 unique ligatures or sub-words of Pashto. In this database, each ligature has 40 scale and 12 rotation variations. The evaluation results show a significantly improved performance of LSTM over HMM and traditional feature extraction technique such as SIFT.
Sense of community and its relevance to adolescents of all ages

In this study, 234 white female and male 13 to 18 year olds were interviewed in informal social settings. They completed questionnaires regarding their neighborhood and school psychological sense of community (Sense of Community Index), experiences of social support (Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviours) and loneliness (Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale), and rated statements assessing subjective well-being. Multiple regression and correlation analyses indicated that social support and sense of community were distinctive aspects of the adolescent's community context. Neighborhood sense of community, followed by non-directive guidance, support, and age, predicted adolescent loneliness. Sense of community was the primary correlate with subjective evaluations of well-being. Sense of community scores for neighborhood and school settings were significantly lower for older adolescents. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental research implications and the importance of sense community in prevention programs to facilitate adolescent development. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Extended Version of a Paper Accepted for Publication in Ieee Trans. on Cad, Accepted March 2013 1 Efficient Gr¨obner Basis Reductions for Formal Verification of Galois Field Arithmetic Circuits

Galois field arithmetic is a critical component in communication and security-related hardware, requiring dedicated arithmetic circuit architectures for greater perfor mance. In many Galois field applications, such as cryptography, the da t path size in the circuits can be very large. Formal verificati on of such circuits is beyond the capabilities of contemporary verification techniques. This paper addresses formal verifi cation of combinational arithmetic circuits over Galois fields of the type F2k using a computer-algebra/algebraic-geometry based approach. The verification problem is formulated as membership testing of a given specification polynomial in a corresponding ideal generated by the circuit constraints. Ideal membership tes ting requires the computation of a Gröbner basis, which is computationally very expensive. To overcome this limitation, we an alyze the circuit topology and derive a term order to represent the polynomials. Subsequently, using the theory Gr̈ obner bases over F2k , we show that this term order renders the set of polynomials itself a minimal Gr öbner basis of this ideal. Consequently, the verification test reduces to a much simpler case of Gr̈ obner basis reduction via polynomial division, significantly enhancing verification efficiency. To further improve our approach, we exploit the concepts presented in theF4 algorithm for Gr öbner basis, and show that our verification test can be formulated as Gaussian eliminat ion on a matrix representation of the problem. Finally, we demonst rate the ability of our approach to verify the correctness of, anddetect bugs in, up to 163-bit circuits in F2163 — whereas verification utilizing contemporary techniques proves infeasible.
A note on the reliability and validity of a 30‐item version of Entwistle & Tait's Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory

Background. The Approaches to Studying Inventory is a widely used instrument, devised to measure individual differences in learning, and has recently undergone revision. No published work reports the psychometric properties of the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (RASI). Aims. The study aims to determine the reliability and validity of the scores produced by a short-form, 30-item RASI. Sample. The sample consisted of 356 undergraduate students (204 females, 125 males, 27 anonymous responses) enrolled in the Faculty of Business at a medium-sized UK university. A total of 101 were aged 25 years or over, 228 were aged under 25 years. Methods. The internal consistency reliability of the scores produced by the RASI is established by the calculation of alpha coefficients. The construct validity of the scores produced by the instrument is established by oblique factor analysis of the 12 subscales and then the 30 items. Results. Evidence of moderate to high internal consistency reliability and satisfactory construct validity. Conclusions. This short-version of the RASI can be recommended to researchers, staff developers and teachers as a useful instrument to measure approaches to learning.
Researching academic identity: using discursive psychology as an approach

Current thinking on academic identities is heavily influenced by developments in other disciplines, notably sociology. This accords with Haggis’s (2007) challenge for educational researchers to engage with current theory and methods from across the social sciences. However, the traditional sister discipline to education, psychology, seems underrepresented in the academic identities literature. This article demonstrates the use of a form of discourse analysis developed within discursive psychology and argues that this offers a complementary level of analysis to studies inspired by realist social theory. Discourse analysis of this sort provides the basis for identifying the mechanisms through which identities are adopted, negotiated and altered. The demonstration of this method relates to a longitudinal study into teacher development among participants on the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education at the London School of Economics. This study shows how this method might be used to develop pedagogic research into areas such as academic identities, conceptions of teaching and threshold concepts.