Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Link between lipid metabolism and voluntary food intake in rainbow trout fed coconut oil rich in medium-chain TAG

We examined the long-term effect of feeding coconut oil (CO; rich in lauric acid, C12) on voluntary food intake and nutrient utilisation in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), with particular attention to the metabolic use (storage or oxidation) of ingested medium-chain TAG. Trout were fed for 15 weeks one of the four isoproteic diets containing fish oil (FO) or CO as fat source (FS), incorporated at 5 % (low fat, LF) or 15 % (high fat, HF). Fat level or FS did not modify food intake (g/kg0·8 per d), despite higher intestinal cholecystokinin-T mRNA in trout fed the HF-FO diet. The HF diets relative to the LF ones induced higher growth and adiposity, whereas the replacements of FO by CO resulted in similar growth and adiposity. This, together with the substantial retention of C12 (57 % of intake), suggests the relatively low oxidation of ingested C12. The down-regulation of carnitine palmitoyl-transferase-1 (CPT-1) confirms the minor dependency of medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA) on CPT-1 to enter the mitochondria. However, MCFA did not up-regulate mitochondrial oxidation evaluated using hepatic hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase as a marker, in line with their high retention in body lipids. At a low lipid level, MCFA increased mRNA levels of fatty acid synthase, elongase and stearoyl-CoA desaturase in liver, showing the hepatic activation of fatty acid synthesis pathways by MCFA, reflected by increased 16 : 0, 18 : 0, 16 : 1, 18 : 1 body levels. The high capacity of trout to incorporate and transform C12, rather than to readily oxidise C12, contrasts with data in mammals and may explain the absence of a satiating effect of CO in rainbow trout.
Fault diagnosis in a small constant number of parallel testing rounds

Consider a set of processors, V, that can communicate with each other. Assume that each processor can be either “good” or “faulty”. Also assume that the processors can be used to test each other. We provide a parallel algorithm that determines which processors are good and which are faulty in 32 rounds of testing, pre Tided that a strict majority of the processors are good.
Institute for Mathematical Physics Sharp Rate of Average Decay of the Fourier Transform of a Bounded Set Sharp Rate of Average Decay of the Fourier Transform of a Bounded Set Introduction

Estimates for the decay of Fourier transforms of measures have extensive applications in numerous problems in harmonic analysis and convexity including the distribution of lattice points in convex domains, irregularities of distribution, generalized Radon transforms and others. Here we prove that the spherical L 2-average decay rate of the Fourier transform of the Lebesgue measure on an arbitrary bounded convex set in R d is (*) S d−1 | χ B (Rω)| 2 dω 1 2 R − d+1 2. This estimate is optimal for any convex body and in particular it agrees with the familiar estimate for the ball. The above estimate was proved in two dimensions by Podkorytov, and in all dimensions by Varchenko under additional smoothness assumptions. The main result of this paper proves (*) in all dimensions under the convexity hypothesis alone. We also prove that the same result holds if the boundary of ∂Ω is C 3 2 .
Clinical Monograph: Hormone Replacement Therapy

BACKGROUND: For decades, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which includes both estrogen and progestin, has been administered to postmenopausal women to mainly treat the symptoms of menopause and help prevent osteoporosis, with the added benefit of preventing coronary heart disease (CHD). Recently released study results have left clinicians wondering if HRT should be used at all, and, if so, with whom and under what circumstances. OBJECTIVES: To provide readers with an example of the real-world operation of a pharmacy and therapeutics (PandT) committee in its use of a concise clinical monograph to guide its formulary decisions. METHODS: The most relevant information for this committee, interested in evidence, was an analysis of the most current pivotal trials and observational studies that help define the place in therapy of HRT and provide information on product efficacy and safety. These included the Heart and Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study (HERS) and its extension trial, HERS II, in postmenopausal women with CHD and an average age of 67 years. The Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, where the mean age of postmenopausal women was 63 years was also reviewed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) statements through January 8, 2003, on the appropriate use of these agents were also included in this clinical monograph for PandT committee review. RESULTS: HERS and HERS II provided evidence that HRT does not provide secondary prevention in women with CHD. Data from the WHI study concluded that HRT promotes CHD and breast cancer in this age group. The Women's Health, Osteoporosis, Progestin, Estrogen study concluded that lower doses of conjugated estrogens (0.3 mg) are just as effective in treating postmenopausal symptoms as higher doses (0.625 mg) and result in fewer side effects. CONCLUSIONS: The risk of breast cancer outweighs the benefits of osteoporosis prevention from HRT. According to labeling changes recommended by the FDA, HRT (or estrogen replacement therapy) should be limited to the shortest possible duration. Alternatives to HRT should be considered for the prevention of postmenopausal osteoporosis.
Enhancement of the Replication of Hepatitis C Virus Replicons of Genotypes 1 to 4 by Manipulation of CpG and UpA Dinucleotide Frequencies and Use of Cell Lines Expressing SECL14L2 for Antiviral Resistance Testing

ABSTRACT Treatment for hepatitis C virus (HCV) has improved greatly through the use of direct-acting antivirals (DAAs). However, their effectiveness and potential for drug resistance development in non-genotype 1 variants of HCV remain relatively unexplored, as in vitro assays to assess drug susceptibility are poorly developed and unsuited for a transient-transfection format. In the current study, we have evaluated the effects of dinucleotide frequency changes in the replicon and the use of a SEC14L2-expressing cell line on the replication of HCVs of different genotypes and evaluated the resulting assay formats for measurements of susceptibility to the DAA sofosbuvir. Removal of CpG and UpA dinucleotides from the luciferase gene used in HCV replicons of genotype 1b (Con1) and genotype 2a (JFH-1) achieved between 10- and 100-fold enhancement of replication over that of the wild type posttransfection. Removal of CpG and UpA dinucleotides in the neomycin gene or deletion of the whole gene in replicons of genotype 3a (S52) and genotype 4a (ED43) enhanced replication, but phenotypic effects on altering luciferase gene composition were minimal. A further 10-fold replication enhancement of replicons from all four genotypes was achieved by using a transgenic Huh7.5 cell line expressing SECL14L2, whose expression showed a dose-dependent effect on HCV replication that was reversible by small interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown of gene expression. By combining these strategies, the 100- to 1,000-fold enhancement of replication allowed the susceptibility of all four genotypes to the RNA polymerase inhibitor sofosbuvir to be robustly determined in a transient-transfection assay format. These methods of replication enhancement provide new tools for monitoring the susceptibility and resistance of a wide range of HCV genotypes to DAAs.
Time and Knowability in Evolutionary Processes

Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry whereas neutral and deleterious similarities do better. We also describe how the branching in phylogenetic trees affects the information that the present supplies about the past.
Estimating fetal gestational age using cardiac valve intervals

A new automated method for estimation of the gestational age is presented in this paper based on the intervals between fetal cardiac valve timings and the Q-wave of fetal electrocardiogram (fECG). The intervals were estimated automatically from one-dimensional Doppler Ultrasound and noninvasive fECG. Among the intervals, Isovolumic Contraction Time, Electromechanical Delay Time, Ventricular Filling Time and their interactions were selected in a stepwise regression process. Compared with Crown-Rump Length as gold standard, a mean absolute error of 3.8 weeks was obtained using leave-one-out cross validation. This method also outperformed a fetal heart rate based approach. Since valve intervals reflect the autonomic function, this method provides a novel measure ofthe development of fetal autonomic nervous system that may be growth curve independent.
Sparse Nonparametric Density Estimation in High Dimensions Using the Rodeo

We consider the problem of estimating the joint density of a d-dimensional random vector X = (X1,X2, .,Xd) when d is large. We assume that the density is a product of a parametric component and a nonparametric component which depends on an unknown subset of the variables. Using a modification of a recently developed nonparametric regression framework called rodeo (regularization of derivative expectation operator), we propose a method to greedily select bandwidths in a kernel density estimate. It is shown empirically that the density rodeo works well even for very high dimensional problems. When the unknown density function satisfies a suitably defined sparsity condition, and the parametric baseline density is smooth, the approach is shown to achieve near optimal minimax rates of convergence, and thus avoids the curse of dimensionality.
Analysing Historical Enquiry in School History Textbooks.

According to the South African curriculum, two of the aims of learning history are to learn the process of historical enquiry and to understand historical concepts such as the use of historical sources and examining evidence. This paper explores how a sample of seven social science South African textbooks uses historical sources to enable learners to learn the process of historical enquiry. The findings show that there were no primary sources presented in the Grade 3 – 6 textbooks, although there were many generic pictures and texts. There is an increase in the number and use of sources in the Grade 7 to Grade 9 textbooks, but issues of contextualisation and lack of provenance remain a challenge to the process of developing historical thinking. ‘Pseudo sources’ (a picture or text recreated to look like a primary source) and generic sources of information do not support historical thinking. The multi-perspective approach, which means understanding the diverse ways of interpreting the same event, is poorly developed in the lower grade textbooks but became more evident in the Grade 9 books. Thus, specialised procedural knowledge is only introduced to learners in Grade 9, suggesting that the primary school textbooks analysed in this study are not fully supporting the aims of the official history curriculum.
A R T I C L E S the Incidence of Menstrual Regulation Procedures and Abortion in Bangladesh, 2010

Among the many developing countries where abortion is highly legally restricted, Bangladesh is unique in permitting the provision of menstrual regulation (MR) services as part of the government family planning program. MR procedures are generally performed using manual vacuum aspiration, with a maximum limit of 10 weeks after a wom-an's last menstrual period, and without a test to confirm pregnancy. * The MR program is considered to contribute significantly to protecting women's health; 1 manual vacuum aspiration, which is recommended by the World Health Organization, 2,3 has a very low rate of complications and mortality when performed by trained staff in hygienic conditions. 4–6 However, unsafe induced abortions are still widely performed in Bangladesh. The national rate of MRs and induced abortions combined was 28 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 in 1995 (based on indirect estimation techniques), 7 the same rate as in South-central Asia in that year. †8 According to another study using a model-based approach, the combined MR and abortion rate in Bangladesh was in the range of 26–30 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s. 9 No national study on the incidence of MR and abortion has been conducted since the 1995 analysis. 7 Yet in the past 15 years, notable changes have occurred in Ban-gladesh that may have affected access to MR services and women's and couples' motivation to resort to MR or abortion. Unmet need for contraception remained substantial at 12% in 2011, after declining from 17% in 2007. 10,11 In addition, contraceptive use increased relatively slowly from the mid-1990s until 2011: The percentage of currently married women aged 15–49 using any method increased from 49% to 61%—an average annual increase of 0.8 percentage points. Although a majority of Bangla-deshi couples who use contraceptives relied on modern methods in the past and continued to do so in 2011 (52% of married women), most used the pill, the injectable or condoms (44%), and only a small proportion used methods with very low failure rates, such as sterilization, the IUD and the implant (8%). 11 Clearly, unmet need for contraception , use of traditional methods (9% in 2011), and reliance on short-term, reversible methods with relatively high risks of contraceptive failure and discontinuation are important factors contributing to unintended pregnancy. Bangladesh has made significant progress in reducing maternal mortality over the last two decades: The maternal mortality ratio is estimated to have fallen from 871 CONTEXT: Bangladesh is unique in …
Collective Intelligence and Neutral Point of View: The Case of Wikipedia

We examine whether collective intelligence helps achieve a neutral point of view using data from a decade of Wikipedia's articles on US politics. Our null hypothesis builds on Linus' Law, often expressed as "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. " Our findings are consistent with a narrow interpretation of Linus' Law, namely, a greater number of contributors to an article makes an article more neutral. No evidence supports a broad interpretation of Linus' Law. Moreover, several empirical facts suggest the law does not shape many articles. The majority of articles receive little attention, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant.
Coach and peer normative perceptions in relation to youth athlete effort

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between perceived social norms emanating from two different channels (i.e. coaches and peers) and individual self-reported effort in youth athletes. Female youth athletes (N = 145, Mage = 13.9 years) attending a five-day summer volleyball sport camp self-reported their perceptions of their coach's approval of effort during the camp (coach subjective norm), how many of their peers exerted effort during the camp (peer descriptive norm), and their own effort during the camp. Results from a regression analysis indicated that perceived social norms associated with both channels were positively associated with self-reported effort, accounting for 13% of the variance. These results suggest that both coach and peer normative information may be important external sources of motivation associated with individual effort in youth sport. This highlights the possible importance of including normative information from either source, and suggests that both coaches and peers may be important channels of normative influence. If replicated, the current findings have implications for understanding the social influences associated with athlete effort in youth athletes.
Parallel test generation with low communication overhead

In this paper we present a method of parallelizing test generation for combinational logic using boolean satisfiability. We propose a dynamic search-space allocation strategy to split work between the available processors. This strategy is easy to implement with a greedy heuristic and is economical in its demand for inter-processor communication. We derive an analytical model to predict the performance of the parallel versus sequential implementations. The effectiveness of our method and analysis is demonstrated by an implementation on a Sequent (shared memory) multiprocessor. The experimental data shows significant performance improvement in parallel implementation, validates our analytical model, and allows predictions of performance for a range of time-out limits and degrees of parallelism.
Salient object detection based on boundary contrast with regularized manifold ranking

Salient object detection via graph-based manifold ranking, which exploits the boundary prior by using image boundaries as labelled background queries, always achieves impressive performance. However, when the salient object broadly touches the image boundary, this method is fragile and may fail. To address this issue, we present a novel approach which bases on boundary contrast with regularized manifold ranking. First, we compute the contrast saliency against the image boundary as ranking queries, instead of directly using the boundaries as background queries. Second, we use an affinity matrix with regularization for manifold ranking to infer saliency value. Third, we integrate saliency inference result with foregroundness based on boundary connectivity to improve the detection accuracy. Last, we adopt multiscale method to mitigate the object scale effect in saliency detection. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves comparable or better performance than stat-of-the-art methods.
Determinants of Entrepreneurial Intentions of Business Students in Pakistan

This research is aimed to study the role of demographic and external factors on the intentions of business students in Pakistan to become future entrepreneurs. Self-developed semi-structured questionnaires were prepared and data was collected from the final year students in two leading business institutes of Pakistan. The primary data collected during interviews and focus group sessions were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings and analysis of this study suggest that we cannot ignore the importance of any of the defined factors as stated in the propositions on the development of entrepreneurial intentions of business students in Pakistan. Neither family business, nor entrepreneurial education alone plays an independent role in building up the intentions to generate a new idea or start one's own business. It is a complete package of individual characteristics, influence of family, friends and the opportunities available in the surroundings that mutually act as motivators to plan and become entrepreneurs. Although much research has been conducted on identifying the personality, demographic and social factors in developed countries, there still exists a need to specify which elements play the most influential role in shaping the decision to start a firm particularly in a developing country like Pakistan. This research was an attempt to fill this gap by providing qualitative analysis and suggestions to the educational institutions, teachers, consultants, advisors and policymakers.
Personal Life Event Detection from Social Media

Creating video clips out of personal content from social media is on the rise. MuseumOfMe, Facebook Lookback, and Google Awesome are some popular examples. One core challenge to the creation of such life summaries is the identification of personal events, and their time frame. Such videos can greatly benefit from automatically distinguishing between social media content that is about someone's own wedding from that week, to an old wedding, or to that of a friend. In this paper, we describe our approach for identifying a number of common personal life events from social media content (in this paper we have used Twitter for our test), using multiple feature-based classifiers. Results show that combination of linguistic and social interaction features increases overall classification accuracy of most of the events while some events are relatively more difficult than others (e.g. new born with mean precision of .6 from all three models).
Introgression of Ivermectin Resistance Genes into a Susceptible Haemonchus contortus Strain by Multiple Backcrossing

Anthelmintic drug resistance in livestock parasites is already widespread and in recent years there has been an increasing level of anthelmintic drug selection pressure applied to parasitic nematode populations in humans leading to concerns regarding the emergence of resistance. However, most parasitic nematodes, particularly those of humans, are difficult experimental subjects making mechanistic studies of drug resistance extremely difficult. The small ruminant parasitic nematode Haemonchus contortus is a more amenable model system to study many aspects of parasite biology and investigate the basic mechanisms and genetics of anthelmintic drug resistance. Here we report the successful introgression of ivermectin resistance genes from two independent ivermectin resistant strains, MHco4(WRS) and MHco10(CAVR), into the susceptible genome reference strain MHco3(ISE) using a backcrossing approach. A panel of microsatellite markers were used to monitor the procedure. We demonstrated that after four rounds of backcrossing, worms that were phenotypically resistant to ivermectin had a similar genetic background to the susceptible reference strain based on the bulk genotyping with 18 microsatellite loci and individual genotyping with a sub-panel of 9 microsatellite loci. In addition, a single marker, Hcms8a20, showed evidence of genetic linkage to an ivermectin resistance-conferring locus providing a starting point for more detailed studies of this genomic region to identify the causal mutation(s). This work presents a novel genetic approach to study anthelmintic resistance and provides a “proof-of-concept” of the use of forward genetics in an important model strongylid parasite of relevance to human hookworms. The resulting strains provide valuable resources for candidate gene studies, whole genome approaches and for further genetic analysis to identify ivermectin resistance loci.
Large Scientific Calculations an Dedicated Clusters of Workstations

The availability of high capacity, low latency interconnec ts enable clusters of workstations to form powerful multicomputers w ith good computing and memory capabilities. To achieve high per formance with modern cache hierarchies, software must be writt en with the architecture in mind, e.g. reducing data movement f or the data intensive application increase performance. Data movement becomes even more important with the high cost of internode communication for clusters of workstations, but overl apping computation and communication may reduce the cost. The pape r presents optimized versions of two large scientific applica tions on one SMP and two dedicated clusters of Sparc based workstatio ns with up to 32 processors. The nodes in the clusters are connec ted using high speed SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) based in t rconnects. Results show that the SCI clusters can be favorabl e in price and competitive in performance to large multi-proces sor servers, in particular when the aggregated memory demand is high. Keyword: Dedicated Clustering, SMP, SCI, MPI, CFD