Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inflammation‐induced preterm birth alters neuronal morphology in the mouse fetal brain

Adverse neurological outcome is a major cause of long‐term morbidity in ex‐preterm children. To investigate the effect of parturition and inflammation on the fetal brain, we utilized two in vivo mouse models of preterm birth. To mimic the most common human scenario of preterm birth, we used a mouse model of intrauterine inflammation by intrauterine infusion of lipopolysaccharide (LPS). To investigate the effect of parturition on the immature fetal brain, in the absence of inflammation, we used a non‐infectious model of preterm birth by administering RU486. Pro‐inflammatory cytokines (IL‐10, IL‐1β, IL‐6 and TNF‐α) in amniotic fluid and inflammatory biomarkers in maternal serum and amniotic fluid were compared between the two models using ELISA. Pro‐inflammatory cytokine expression was evaluated in the whole fetal brains from the two models. Primary neuronal cultures from the fetal cortex were established from the different models and controls in order to compare the neuronal morphology. Only the intrauterine inflammation model resulted in an elevation of inflammatory biomarkers in the maternal serum and amniotic fluid. Exposure to inflammation‐induced preterm birth, but not non‐infectious preterm birth, also resulted in an increase in cytokine mRNA in whole fetal brain and in disrupted fetal neuronal morphology. In particular, Microtubule‐associated protein 2 (MAP2) staining was decreased and the number of dendrites was reduced (P < 0.001, ANOVA between groups). These results suggest that inflammation‐induced preterm birth and not the process of preterm birth may result in neuroinflammation and alter fetal neuronal morphology. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Intranasal Delivery of Neural Stem Cells: A CNS-specific, Non-invasive Cell-based Therapy for Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis.

The therapeutic potential of adult neural stem cells (aNSCs) has been shown in EAE, an animal model of MS, administered by either i.c. v. or i.v. injection. However, i.c. v. is an invasive approach, while the i.v. route of aNSCs is associated with a non-specific immune suppression in the periphery. Here we demonstrate that intranasal (i.n.) delivery of fluorescently labeled aNSCs resulted in their appearance in the olfactory bulb, cortex, hippocampus, striatum, brainstem, and spinal cord. These cells induce functional recovery from ongoing EAE similar to that achieved with i.v. injected aNSCs, with comparable anti-inflammatory and remeylination effects in CNS inflammatory foci. Importantly, unlike the peripheral immune suppression brought about by i.v. NSCs, intranasal delivery did not influence peripheral immune responses. We conclude that aNSCs can be reliably delivered to the CNS via the nasal route to induce functional recovery and confer immunomodulation and remyelination in EAE. Intranasal administration of NSCs provides a highly promising, noninvasive and CNS-specific alternative to current cell-based approaches in treating EAE.
A psychological assessment of chronic fatigue syndrome/chronic epstein-barr virus patients

Abstract Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), the current name for a malady most recently known as Chronic Epstein Barr Virus (CEBV), is a medical puzzle that now is a focus of intense research interest. Although the literature is sparse and studies are either anecdotal or based on small samples, psychological and psychiatric symtoms are frequently reported for patients with symptoms suggestive of CFS/CEBV. Cognitive impairment in this population has been frequently noted but has also received little systematic attention in CFS/CEBV research. Consequently, the aim of this study was twofold: (1) to broaden understanding of the psychological aspects of CFS/CEBV, including cognition, and (2) to place this understanding on a firmer empirical basis by use of a more comprehensive battery and a larger sample than typifies previous research. Twenty-four subjects exhibiting both serological profile and clinical symptomatology indicative of CEBV/CFS infection were investigated. Multiple measures were employed to tap per.
Point processes for unsupervised line network extraction in remote sensing

This paper addresses the problem of unsupervised extraction of line networks (for example, road or hydrographic networks) from remotely sensed images. We model the target line network by an object process, where the objects correspond to interacting line segments. The prior model, called "quality candy," is designed to exploit as fully as possible the topological properties of the network under consideration, while the radiometric properties of the network are modeled using a data term based on statistical tests. Two techniques are used to compute this term: one is more accurate, the other more efficient. A calibration technique is used to choose the model parameters. Optimization is done via simulated annealing using a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) algorithm. We accelerate convergence of the algorithm by using appropriate proposal kernels. The results obtained on satellite and aerial images are quantitatively evaluated with respect to manual extractions. A comparison with the results obtained using a previous model, called the "candy" model, shows the interest of adding quality coefficients with respect to interactions in the prior density. The relevance of using an offline computation of the data potential is shown, in particular, when a proposal kernel based on this computation is added in the RJMCMC algorithm.
Higher in vivo muscarinic‐2 receptor distribution volumes in aging subjects with an apolipoprotein E‐ϵ4 allele

The apolipoprotein E‐ϵ4 allele confers an increased susceptibility to age‐related memory problems and Alzheimer's disease. Abnormalities in the cholinergic system are also likely contributors to memory deficits associated with aging and AD. To determine the effect of the APOE‐ϵ4 allele on the muscarinic component of the cholinergic system of aging subjects, 10 healthy subjects with APOE‐ϵ4 alleles (APOE‐ϵ4+) and 10 without (APOE‐ϵ4‐), ranging in age from 52 to 75 years, were tomographically scanned with the F‐18‐labeled muscarinic‐2 (M2) selective agonist, 3‐(3‐(3‐[18F]Flouropropyl)thio)‐1,2,5‐thiadiazol‐4‐yl)‐1,2,5,6‐tetrahydro‐1‐methylpyridine ([18F]FP‐TZTP). The distribution volumes (VT) of [18F]FP‐TZTP were determined by compartmental modeling of partial volume and free fraction corrected PET scans. Regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) measurements with H215O were also performed. Global Gray VT (840 ± 155 ml plasma/ml tissue) was greater in APOE‐ϵ4+ subjects than APOE‐ϵ4‐ subjects (660 ± 113 ml plasma/ml tissue, P = 0.01), and previously studied younger subjects. There were no significant differences between the groups with respect to rCBF, but within the APOE‐ϵ4+ group there was a trend for subjects with the higher Global Gray VTs to have lower Global Gray CBFs (r = −0.65, P < 0.06). A lower concentration of acetylcholine in the synapse of APOE‐ϵ4+ older individuals is a likely explanation for the greater [18F]FP‐TZTP distribution volumes. Synapse 49:150–156, 2003. Published 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Facilitating Conditions for School Motivation: Construct Validity and Applicability

Elementary students (n = 277, in Grades 5-6) and high school students (n = 615, in Grades 7-12) responded to 26 items of McInerney’s Facilitating Conditions Questionnaire (FCQ). Confirmatory factor analyses of the FCQ found seven distinct factors underlying these items. These were perceived value of schooling (Value), affect toward schooling (Affect), peer positive academic climate (Peer Positive), parent positive academic climate (Parent Positive), teacher positive academic climate (Teacher), peer negative academic climate (Peer Negative), and parent negative academic climate (Parent Negative). The Peer and Parent Negative constructs were correlated positively with each other but negatively with all the positive constructs. Also, academic achievement was positively correlated with the five positive factors but negatively correlated with the two negative factors. In addition, the seven factors were invariant across the elementary and high school subsamples. These results provide support for the convergent validity, discriminant validity, and invariance of the FCQ scales.
Benchmark structural control problem for a seismically excited highway bridge: Phase I and II

Benchmark problems in structural response control have served the international structural controls community as virtual test beds to compare different control algorithms since the first benchmark problem was proposed in 1996 through the sponsorship of the ASCE Structural Control Committee and Task Group on Benchmark Problems, the U.S. Panel on structural control, and International Association of Structural Control and Monitoring (IASCM). These problems offer well‐developed models of structural system focusing on the response control of seismic and wind‐excited buildings, seismically excited long‐span cable‐stayed bridges and seismically excited base‐isolated buildings using prescribed earthquakes and standard set of evaluation criteria. They have been used by the entire community of researchers, educators, students and practitioners to investigate numerous control devices and algorithms. In 2004, the authors, in collaboration with Professor Ping Tan of Guangzhou University in China and Professor Jian Zhang of the University of California, Los Angeles, developed the benchmark structural control problem for a seismically excited highway bridge through the sponsorship of the ASCE committee on Structural Control and Task Group on Benchmark Problems, the U.S. Panel on structural control and International Association of Structural Control and Monitoring (IASCM). This special issue focuses on contributions to this benchmark structural control problem for a seismically excited highway bridge. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Seeing our Way into Learning

Recent developments in physics and neurobiology help explain recursive interactions between peripheral images and higher cortical centres that process symbolic representation. Seeing with focused attention to colour, line, depth and form, for example, gains meaning and understanding through this recursive process. Art as representation of constant, essential features of the external extends functions of the 'visual brain' to centres that bring perception to meaning and understanding that are interdependent with aesthetic sensibilities. Collaborative work through art enables verbal explication and explanation about details, abstractions and process that lead to theory building dependent on propositional, procedural and dispositional knowledge. The swirl of verbal, visual and gestural interactions that proceed out of engagement with multiple modes of representation ensures development of abilities to focus, strategise, discern and explicate components and integrate possibilities through future scenarios. The future curriculum needs to integrate visual, verbal and other representational modes as schools move closer in goals and process to non-school learning communities and organisations. Proposed here are ways to create an infrastructure for just such an ecology of learning environments that will link tightly with the information base of the new economy and the communicational needs of a civil society.
The Upside to Hooking Up: College Students’ Positive Hookup Experiences

ABSTRACT Objectives: Popular media and research have predominately focused on the risks of hooking up, which may stigmatize young people. In the current study, we identify factors that facilitate positive hookups. Methods: College students (N = 250) in the United States reported hookup motives, sexual self-concept, sexual satisfaction, and emotional reactions to a hookup. Results: Emotional reactions were more positive than negative. Intimacy and pleasure motives predicted sexual satisfaction; self-affirmation motives predicted positive emotional reactions. Hookups with a previous partner were rated as more satisfying. Conclusions: Understanding qualities associated with positive hookups may better equip young adults to make informed decisions about their sexual lives.
Sobre los significados de ser hombre en varones jóvenes en el área metropolitana de Buenos Aires

El objetivo del articulo es analizar algunos significados que dan varones jovenes sobre ser hombre y las implicancias de estos significados en sus interacciones sociales. Se utilizan datos de una investigacion cualitativa en hombres adolescentes de dos estratos socioeconomicos: bajo y medio-alto residentes en el Area Metropolitana de Buenos Aires (AMBA). Uno de los hallazgos muestra que la concepcion sobre un deseo sexual masculino arrollador y mayor que el deseo sexual femenino, si bien se justifica principalmente desde argumentos de tipo esencialistas, tambien se justifica desde argumentos sociales o desde una combinacion de ambos. Un determinismo social, o un determinismo combinado entre argumentos sociales y biologicos tambien pueden orientar hacia una naturalizacion de las relaciones sociales que obstruyen la posibilidad del cambio individual y del cambio social.
Exploiting Fine-Grained Idle Periods in Networks of Workstations

Studies have shown that for a significant fraction of the time, workstations are idle. In this paper, we present a new scheduling policy called Linger-Longer that exploits the fine-grained availability of workstations to run sequential and parallel jobs. We present a two-level workload characterization study and use it to simulate a cluster of workstations running our new policy. We compare two variations of our policy to two previous policies: Immediate-Eviction and Pause-and-Migrate. Our study shows that the Linger-Longer policy can improve the throughput of foreign jobs on a cluster by 60 percent with only a 0.5 percent slowdown of local jobs. For parallel computing, we show that the Linger-Longer policy outperforms reconfiguration strategies when the processor utilization by the local process is 20 percent or less in both synthetic bulk synchronous and real data-parallel applications.
Online Primal-Dual Algorithms with Configuration Linear Programs

Non-linear, especially convex, objective functions have been extensively studied in recent years in which approaches relies crucially on the convexity property of cost functions. In this paper, we present primal-dual approaches based on configuration linear programs to design competitive online algorithms for problems with arbitrarily-grown objective. This approach is particularly appropriate for non-linear (non-convex) objectives in online setting. We first present a simple greedy algorithm for a general cost-minimization problem. The competitive ratio of the algorithm is characterized by the mean of a notion, called smoothness, which is inspired by a similar concept in the context of algorithmic game theory. The algorithm gives optimal (up to a constant factor) competitive ratios while applying to different contexts such as network routing, vector scheduling, energy-efficient scheduling and non-convex facility location. Next, we consider the online $0-1$ covering problems with non-convex objective. Building upon the resilient ideas from the primal-dual framework with configuration LPs, we derive a competitive algorithm for these problems. Our result generalizes the online primal-dual algorithm developed recently by Azar et al. for convex objectives with monotone gradients to non-convex objectives. The competitive ratio is now characterized by a new concept, called local smoothness --- a notion inspired by the smoothness. Our algorithm yields tight competitive ratio for the objectives such as the sum of $\ell_{k}$-norms and gives competitive solutions for online problems of submodular minimization and some natural non-convex minimization under covering constraints.
Lack of prognostic significance of adiponectin immunohistochemical expression in patients with triple-negative breast cancer

Introduction Triple-negative breast cancers (TNBCs) – which lack the expression of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2) – have no established markers that can be used for prognostic stratification. As adiponectin has been previously implicated in a more aggressive phenotype of primary breast cancer, we explored the relation between adiponectin immunohistochemical expression and prognosis in TNBCs. Material and methods Immunohistochemical staining for adiponectin was performed in 38 TNBC patients. Disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) served as the main outcome measures. Results Of the 38 TNBC patients, 18 (47%) had negative and 20 (53%) positive adiponectin immunohistochemical expression. We did not find any significant association between adiponectin immunohistochemical expression and the baseline characteristics. In addition, there were no associations between adiponectin immunohistochemical expression and prognosis. Conclusions Although our results suggest that adiponectin immunohistochemical expression is not of prognostic significance in TNBCs, further studies are warranted to determine the role of this adipokine in breast cancer biology.
International consensus statement on an update of the classification criteria for definite antiphospholipid syndrome (APS)

Summary. New clinical, laboratory and experimental insights, since the 1999 publication of the Sapporo preliminary classification criteria for antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), had been addressed at a workshop in Sydney, Australia, before the Eleventh International Congress on antiphospholipid antibodies. In this document, we appraise the existing evidence on clinical and laboratory features of APS addressed during the forum. Based on this, we propose amendments to the Sapporo criteria. We also provide definitions on features of APS that were not included in the updated criteria.
The acquisition of spoken forms and written words: An empirical study of opacity in the speech/reading/writing interface in Danish

The present study examines the complex interactions between the spoken and the written language in twenty Funish children’s oral and written narratives and a read out task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. First, a comparison of the distribution of the reduction phenomena in the children’s language across the two spoken conditions was made. The second analysis looked at the distribution of spelling errors in the written narratives with respect to sound and reduction related errors both at a general and individual level. Finally, a qualitative analysis of three children’s distribution of the large weak class was performed to evaluate a possible interaction between the children’s three registers: spontaneous speech, reading and writing. The results indicated that (a) there was a significant difference in the distribution of forms across the two spoken modalities, e.g. schwa-assimilations and schwa-drop and Funish forms occurred less in the read out condition than in the spoken narratives; (b) spelling errors were predominately sound related and could be explained as either related to the opaque phoneme to grapheme relation in Danish or to reduction phenomena in the children’s own language; (c) furthermore, there was a significant correlation between spelling errors and a high frequency of reduced forms in the read out condition indicating a close relation between these two modalities.
A comprehensive study of outage rates of air blast breakers

This paper presents results of an extensive study launched by Hydro One Networks aimed at determining air blast circuit breaker reliability measures from a statistical analysis of outage data. The study examines how the breaker failure rate depends on such factors as equipment age, voltage level, manufacturer, and number of repairs. Planned outage rates due to equipment maintenance were also investigated. Results presented in this paper are based on outage records involving 318 breakers and covering a period of 12 years. The results can form input information for probabilistic risk analysis studies.
Association of Ambient Air Pollution with Respiratory Hospitalization in a Government-Designated “Area of Concern”: The Case of Windsor, Ontario

This study is part of a larger research program to examine the relationship between ambient air quality and health in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. We assessed the association between air pollution and daily respiratory hospitalization for different age and sex groups from 1995 to 2000. The pollutants included were nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, particulate matter ≤10 μm in diameter (PM10), coefficient of haze (COH), and total reduced sulfur (TRS). We calculated relative risk (RR) estimates using both time-series and case-crossover methods after controlling for appropriate confounders (temperature, humidity, and change in barometric pressure). The results of both analyses were consistent. We found associations between NO2, SO2, CO, COH, or PM10 and daily hospital admission of respiratory diseases especially among females. For females 0–14 years of age, there was 1-day delayed effect of NO2 (RR = 1.19, case-crossover method), a current-day SO2 (RR = 1.11, time series), and current-day and 1- and 2-day delayed effects for CO by case crossover (RR = 1.15, 1.19, 1.22, respectively). Time-series analysis showed that 1-day delayed effect of PM10 on respiratory admissions of adult males (15–64 years of age), with an RR of 1.18. COH had significant effects on female respiratory hospitalization, especially for 2-day delayed effects on adult females, with RRs of 1.15 and 1.29 using time-series and case-crossover analysis, respectively. There were no significant associations between O3 and TRS with respiratory admissions. These findings provide policy makers with current risks estimates of respiratory hospitalization as a result of poor ambient air quality in a government designated “area of concern. ”
Zero-Resource Translation with Multi-Lingual Neural Machine Translation

In this paper, we propose a novel finetuning algorithm for the recently introduced multi-way, mulitlingual neural machine translate that enables zero-resource machine translation. When used together with novel many-to-one translation strategies, we empirically show that this finetuning algorithm allows the multi-way, multilingual model to translate a zero-resource language pair (1) as well as a single-pair neural translation model trained with up to 1M direct parallel sentences of the same language pair and (2) better than pivot-based translation strategy, while keeping only one additional copy of attention-related parameters.