Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Functional consequences of iron deficiency in human populations.

The widespread occurrence of iron deficiency in developing countries is now well documented. Its high prevalence in these countries is attributable not only to the poor availability of iron in diets because of high fiber and phytate content, but also to chronic blood losses due to hookworm, schisto somiasis, and malaria (1). A high prevalence of iron deficiency anemia obviously means an equal or greater prevalence of iron deficiency not severe enough to cause anemia. If it should be demon strated that subclinical iron deficiency has func tional consequences, the significance of iron de ficiency for these countries is even greater than has been recognized. There is growing evidence, as reviewed in this paper, that this is indeed the case. In fact, some of the first evidence for this came from a study of preschool children in Cambridge, Massachusetts that failed to find anemia in this population. However, it demonstrated that iron deficiency per se, as diagnosed by levels of serum iron, ferritin, and transferrin saturation, was suf ficient to affect this performance on some cognitive tests (2). This has led to a broader search for the functional consequences of iron deficiency to in clude subclinical as well as clinical iron deficiency. While neither iron deficiency nor iron deficiency anemia is limited to developing countries, pre valence rates are highest in them. Prevalence rates in the industrialized countries for iron deficiency ane mia are variously reported as from 10 to 20% in the U.S., Europe, and Japan (3, 4). Rates are highest for women of childbearing age, but are by no means limited to this group. There has been a great deal of recent research on the availability of dietary iron in various kinds of diets, on practical ways of fortifying staple food and diets, and on the prevalence of iron deficiency anemia in various populations. To complement such studies, the United Nations University has established a network of institutions in developing countries to investigate the functional consequences of iron deficiency. Extensive work is under way in Egypt, Thailand, Chile, and Indonesia, and ad ditional studies are planned. While the results of these studies are not yet available, there is already evidence that iron deficiency impairs resistance to infection, cognitive performance, physical capacity, work output, and possibly even maintenance of body temperature. This paper will review and eval uate the currently available evidence. The total amount of iron in the body of a 70 kilo man is about 3.5g, of which 70% is contained in hemoglobin. Other iron compounds constitute a very small percentage of the total, and are located primarily in solid tissues. Myoglobin accounts for about 4% of the total, and most of the additional iron is present in a large number of oxidative enzymes, including mitochondria, cytochromes, and flavoproteins. While these latter account for only a minute fraction of the iron in the body, they fulfill
Simplified mechanistic models of gene regulation for analysis and design

Simplified mechanistic models of gene regulation are fundamental to systems biology and essential for synthetic biology. However, conventional simplified models typically have outputs that are not directly measurable and are based on assumptions that do not often hold under experimental conditions. To resolve these issues, we propose a ‘model reduction’ methodology and simplified kinetic models of total mRNA and total protein concentration, which link measurements, models and biochemical mechanisms. The proposed approach is based on assumptions that hold generally and include typical cases in systems and synthetic biology where conventional models do not hold. We use novel assumptions regarding the ‘speed of reactions’, which are required for the methodology to be consistent with experimental data. We also apply the methodology to propose simplified models of gene regulation in the presence of multiple protein binding sites, providing both biological insights and an illustration of the generality of the methodology. Lastly, we show that modelling total protein concentration allows us to address key questions on gene regulation, such as efficiency, burden, competition and modularity.
Identification of Methicillin-Susceptible or Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Carrier Status Preoperatively Using Polymerase Chain Reaction in Patients Undergoing Elective Surgery With Hardware Implantation

We compared bedside polymerase chain reaction to culture for identifying Staphylococcus aureus in patients about to undergo surgery with hardware implantation. Patients were screened for S. aureus carrier status at the preoperative clinic and on the day of surgery. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values, and accuracy were calculated. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2015;00(0): 1–4
Women and men's satisfaction with care related to induced abortion

Abstract Objectives To investigate satisfaction with abortion care among women and their male partners, and to identify factors associated with high overall contentment with the care received. Methods A multi-centre cross-sectional questionnaire survey conducted in 2009 among 798 Swedish abortion-seeking women and 590 male partners was analysed with logistic regression. Results Overall care satisfaction was rated high by two-thirds (74%) of the women and half (52%) of the men. For women, factors associated with high overall satisfaction with care were: to be well treated by the health care staff (Odds Ratio [OR] = 11.78), sufficient pain relief (OR = 3.87), adequate information about the gynaecological examination (OR = 2.25), suitable contraceptive counselling (OR = 2.23), and ease of access to the clinic by phone (OR = 1.91). For men, the factors were to be well treated by the health care staff (OR = 5.32), and adequate information about the abortion procedure (OR = 2.64). Conclusion Most women and half of the men were pleased with the attention they had received, but one in four women and half the men were not, or not completely, suggesting improvement is needed, especially with regard to men. For both women and men the human aspect of the care, namely, the consideration showed by the attending staff, appears to be the most important factor associated with satisfaction regarding abortion care.
Current Ideas about Prebiological Compartmentalization

Contemporary biological cells are highly sophisticated dynamic compartment systems which separate an internal volume from the external medium through a boundary, which controls, in complex ways, the exchange of matter and energy between the cell’s interior and the environment. Since such compartmentalization is a fundamental principle of all forms of life, scenarios have been elaborated about the emergence of prebiological compartments on early Earth, in particular about their likely structural characteristics and dynamic features. Chemical systems that consist of potentially prebiological compartments and chemical reaction networks have been designed to model pre-cellular systems. These systems are often referred to as “protocells”. Past and current protocell model systems are presented and compared. Since the prebiotic formation of cell-like compartments is directly linked to the prebiotic availability of compartment building blocks, a few aspects on the likely chemical inventory on the early Earth are also summarized.
Automatic Extraction of Subcategorization Frames from Corpora -improving Filtering with Diathesis Alternations

Attempts to extract subcategorization information from textual corpora by shallow parsing followed by statistical ltering of alternatives proposed for speciic predicates have met with some success (Briscoe & Carroll, 1997) but are not yet accurate enough. Examination of the errors suggests that the ltering of spurious hypotheses is the source of most errors in the system. This paper builds on the framework described in (Briscoe and Carroll, 1997) and proposes a knowledge-based approach for improvement of the ltering phase of the system. 1 Background Manual development of large subcategorised lexicons has proved very diicult because predicates change behaviour between sublanguages, domains and across time. Yet current parsers depend crucially on such information, and probabilistic parsers would greatly beneet from accurate information concerning relative likelihood of diierent subcategorization frames of a given predicate. This suggests that automatic construction of subcategorization dictionaries from textual corpora is a more promising method to apply. Briscoe & Carroll (1997) propose a technique and implemented system for constructing a subcategorization dictionary from textual corpora. Their system is capable of distinguishing 160 subcategorization classes, and able to both assign classes to individual verbal predicates and to rank them according to relative frequency. As described in Briscoe & Carroll (1997), the system consists of six overall components which are applied in sequence to sentences containing a speciic predicate in order to retrieve a set of subcategoriza-tion classes for that predicate: a tagger, a lemmatizer, a probabilistic LR parser, a patternset extractor, a pattern classiier, and a patternsets evaluator. Even though the system has met with some success it is not yet accurate enough. The experimental evaluation performed by Briscoe & Carroll shows that the ltering of spurious hypotheses in the patternsets evaluator stage is the weak link of the system. 2 Filtering In the current lter, the set of putative classes are ltered, following Brent (1993) by hypothesis testing on binomial frequency data. The system rst records the total number of patternsets n for a given predicate, the number of these patternsets containing a pattern supporting an entry for given class m, and estimates of the probability that a pattern for a class i will occur with a verb which is not a member of subcategorization class i. Briscoe & Carroll estimate the above probability by rst extracting the number of verbs which are members of each class in the ANLT dictionary (Boguraev et al. 1987), and converting …
Frame pruning for automatic speaker identification

In this paper, we propose a frame selection procedure for text-independent speaker identification. Instead of averaging the frame likelihoods along the whole test utterance, some of these are rejected (pruning) and the final score is computed with a limited number of frames. This pruning stage requires a prior frame level likelihood normalization in order to make comparison between frames meaningful. This normalization procedure alone leads to a significative performance enhancement. As far as pruning is concerned, the optimal number of frames pruned is learned on a tuning data set for normal and telephone speech. Validation of the pruning procedure on 567 speakers leads to a significative improvement on TIMIT and NTIMIT (up to 30% error rate reduction on TIMIT).
Cellular data network infrastructure characterization and implication on mobile content placement

Despite the tremendous growth in the cellular data network usage due to the popularity of smartphones, so far there is rather limited understanding of the network infrastructure of various cellular carriers. Understanding the infrastructure characteristics such as the network topology, routing design, address allocation, and DNS service configuration is essential for predicting, diagnosing, and improving cellular network services, as well as for delivering content to the growing population of mobile wireless users. In this work, we propose a novel approach for discovering cellular infrastructure by intelligently combining several data sources, i.e., server logs from a popular location search application, active measurements results collected from smartphone users, DNS request logs from a DNS authoritative server, and publicly available routing updates. We perform the first comprehensive analysis to characterize the cellular data network infrastructure of four major cellular carriers within the U.S. in our study. We conclude among other previously little known results that the current routing of cellular data traffic is quite restricted, as it must traverse a rather limited number (i.e., 4-6) of infrastructure locations (i.e., GGSNs), which is in sharp contrast to wireline Internet traffic. We demonstrate how such findings have direct implications on important decisions such as mobile content placement and content server selection. We observe that although the local DNS server is a coarse-grained approximation on the user's network location, for some carriers, choosing content servers based on the local DNS server is accurate enough due to the restricted routing in cellular networks. Placing content servers close to GGSNs can potentially reduce the end-to-end latency by more than 50% excluding the variability from air interface.
Retrieval of mandarin broadcast news using spoken queries

Considering the monosyllabic structure of the Chinese language, a whole class of indexing features for retrieval of Mandarin broadcast news using syllable-level statistical characteristics has been previously investigated. This paper presents the improvements achieved over the previous results. The major differences are: (1) Multi-scale characterand word-level indexing terms have been integrated with the syllable-level information. (2) Information cues from the contemporary newswire text corpus have been used to create more accurate syllable indexing terms. (3) Automatic document expansion, blind relevance feedback, and query expansion via the term association matrix have been applied in retrieval. With all these schemes, the average precision can be improved from 55.46% to 71.29%.
A Social Cognitive Perspective of Physical Activity Related Behavior in Physical Education

The purpose of the current study was to examine student and teacher physical activity-related behavior using the theory of planned behavior and self-efficacy theory. Although teachers reported an overwhelmingly positive attitude toward teaching physical activity lessons to promote fitness development, they only devoted 4% of their class time to actually demonstrating and promoting fitness. Students were quite sedentary during class spending 61% of class time sitting, standing or lying down. Using hierarchical regression analyses, teachers’ attitudes toward teaching physically active physical education classes accounted for 50% of the variance in teachers’ intention. Teachers who demonstrated/promoted fitness and who limited their general instruction and management of students were more likely to have students involved in moderate to vigorous physical activity than teachers who spent less time demonstrating/promoting fitness and more time in general instruction and management.
Fair Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks Using Queue-Length-Based Scheduling and Congestion Control

We consider the problem of allocating resources (time slots, frequency, power, etc.) at a base station to many competing flows, where each flow is intended for a different receiver. The channel conditions may be time-varying and different for different receivers. It is well-known that appropriately chosen queue-length based policies are throughput-optimal while other policies based on the estimation of channel statistics can be used to allocate resources fairly (such as proportional fairness) among competing users. In this paper, we show that a combination of queue-length-based scheduling at the base station and congestion control implemented either at the base station or at the end users can lead to fair resource allocation and queue-length stability.
Risk strata-based therapy and outcome in stage Ib–IIa carcinoma cervix: single-centre ten-year experience

Aim To review the outcome of stage (Ib, IIa), cervical cancer patients were primarily treated with radical hysterectomy and risk-based postoperative therapy. Material and methods Between January 2001 and December 2011, 601 cases underwent surgery followed by tailored therapy. Patients were classified into low risk (pelvic lymph node negative, tumour less than 4 cm, no evidence of lympho-vascular invasion, less than one-third of thickness of surgical stoma involved), intermediate risk (positive lympho-vascular space invasion, tumour size more than 4 cm, and deep invasion of cervical stroma), and high risk (pelvic lymph node involved, positive parametrial, or vaginal margins) groups. Postoperative adju-vant therapy in the form of radiotherapy alone to those with intermediate risk and chemo-radiotherapy to those with high risk was given to patients. The median follow-up was 60 months. Results The majority of patients had intermediate risk. The overall event-free survival (EFS) at five years was 74.37%, with EFS of 86.5% in those from the low-risk group, 73% in those from the intermediate-risk group, and 64% in those from the high-risk group. In conclusion, risk strata-based adjuvant postoperative therapy is able to provide a favourable outcome in patients with stage Ib–IIa cervical cancer with a nearly 11% improvement in survival compared with historical control.
Expression of disease-causing lamin A mutants impairs the formation of DNA repair foci

A-type lamins are components of the nuclear lamina. Mutations in the gene encoding lamin A are associated with a range of highly degenerative diseases termed laminopathies. To evaluate sensitivity to DNA damage, GFP-tagged lamin A cDNAs with disease-causing mutations were expressed in HeLa cells. The inner nuclear membrane protein emerin was mislocalised upon expression of the muscular dystrophy mutants G232E, Q294P or R386K, which aberrantly assembled into nuclear aggregates, or upon expression of mutants causing progeria syndromes in vivo (lamin A del50, R471C, R527C and L530P). The ability of cells expressing these mutants to form DNA repair foci comprising phosphorylated H2AX in response to mild doses of cisplatin or UV irradiation was markedly diminished, unlike the nearly normal response of cells expressing wild-type GFP-lamin A or disease-causing H222P and R482L mutants. Interestingly, mutants that impaired the formation of DNA repair foci mislocalised ATR (for `ataxia telangiectasia-mutated and Rad3-related') kinase, which is a key sensor in the response to DNA damage. Our results suggest that a subset of lamin A mutants might hinder the response of components of the DNA repair machinery to DNA damage by altering interactions with chromatin.
Response and damage propagation of polymer-matrix fibre-reinforced composites: Predictions for WWFE-III Part A

This paper showcases the authors’ predictions for the 13 challenging test cases of the third World Wide Failure Exercise. The cases involve the prediction of lamina biaxial stress–strain curves, matrix cracking and delamination in various cross-ply and quasi-isotropic laminates under uniaxial loading, variation of thermal expansion coefficient of a laminate with matrix cracking, bending of a general laminate, loading-unloading behaviour and the strength of various thin and thick laminates containing an open hole. The laminates were made of various glass and carbon fibre/epoxy materials. The constitutive model is based on plasticity theory, includes hydrostatic pressure effects and accounts for multiaxial load combination effects. The failure criteria distinguish between matrix failure, fibre kinking and fibre tensile failure. In-situ strengths are used for matrix failure. Propagation of failure takes into consideration the fracture energy associated with each failure mode and, for matrix failure, the accumulation of cracks in the plies. The model is used to make blind predictions of all test cases from the third World-Wide Failure Exercise.
Bacterial Diversity Assessment in Antarctic Terrestrial and Aquatic Microbial Mats: A Comparison between Bidirectional Pyrosequencing and Cultivation

The application of high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene has increased the size of microbial diversity datasets by several orders of magnitude, providing improved access to the rare biosphere compared with cultivation-based approaches and more established cultivation-independent techniques. By contrast, cultivation-based approaches allow the retrieval of both common and uncommon bacteria that can grow in the conditions used and provide access to strains for biotechnological applications. We performed bidirectional pyrosequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene diversity in two terrestrial and seven aquatic Antarctic microbial mat samples previously studied by heterotrophic cultivation. While, not unexpectedly, 77.5% of genera recovered by pyrosequencing were not among the isolates, 25.6% of the genera picked up by cultivation were not detected by pyrosequencing. To allow comparison between both techniques, we focused on the five phyla (Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Deinococcus-Thermus) recovered by heterotrophic cultivation. Four of these phyla were among the most abundantly recovered by pyrosequencing. Strikingly, there was relatively little overlap between cultivation and the forward and reverse pyrosequencing-based datasets at the genus (17.1–22.2%) and OTU (3.5–3.6%) level (defined on a 97% similarity cut-off level). Comparison of the V1–V2 and V3–V2 datasets of the 16S rRNA gene revealed remarkable differences in number of OTUs and genera recovered. The forward dataset missed 33% of the genera from the reverse dataset despite comprising 50% more OTUs, while the reverse dataset did not contain 40% of the genera of the forward dataset. Similar observations were evident when comparing the forward and reverse cultivation datasets. Our results indicate that the region under consideration can have a large impact on perceived diversity, and should be considered when comparing different datasets. Finally, a high number of OTUs could not be classified using the RDP reference database, suggesting the presence of a large amount of novel diversity.