Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is pulse transit time a good indicator of blood pressure changes during short physical exercise in a young population?

The Pulse Transit Time (PTT) is generally assumed to be a good surrogate measure to comfortably track blood pressure (BP) and blood pressure changes. This paper investigates PTT variations for healthy young subjects during a sequence of short-term physical exercises. PTT was measured by two different methodologies having different measurement accuracies as well as underlying assumptions: the total PTT from heart to fingertip and the difference of fingertip and earlobe PTTs. Small non consistent changes and very low correlation of both PTTs with systolic blood pressure (SBP) have been observed for the study population (−0.19 ± 0.45 and 0.22 ± 0.46). In conclusion, there might be a need for an improved measurement accuracy of the sensors and data processing techniques in use. The applicability of the Moens-Korteweg equation is also questionable for young people having flexible arteries. In this case, significant radius changes do occur in the large arteries during exercise, which might counteract a PTT decrease with the BP elevation. These radius effects are excluded from the Moens-Korteweg model.
The Relationship Between Sexual Satisfaction and Psychological Health of Prison Inmates

Research has found a relationship between sexual satisfaction and psychological health in prisoners, although few studies have focused on possible moderators of this relationship. The main foci of this study of a sample of prison inmates were as follows: (a) the association between sexual satisfaction and psychological health and (b) the moderating effects of heterosexual activity level (abstinent vs. non-abstinent) and gender on the relationship between these two variables. In-person interviews were conducted with 82 males and 91 females who lived in separate modules in Spain’s Topas Penitentiary. Sexual satisfaction was a significant predictor of psychological health only for members of the sexually abstinent group. These findings point to the positive effect of sexual satisfaction on psychological health, especially for the inmates in a less favorable sexual situation (i.e., sexual abstinence).
Prevalence of BRCA1 Mutations in Familial and Sporadic Greek Ovarian Cancer Cases

Germline mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes contribute to approximately 18% of hereditary ovarian cancers conferring an estimated lifetime risk from 15% to 50%. A variable incidence of mutations has been reported for these genes in ovarian cancer cases from different populations. In Greece, six mutations in BRCA1 account for 63% of all mutations detected in both BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of BRCA1 mutations in a Greek cohort of 106 familial ovarian cancer patients that had strong family history or metachronous breast cancer and 592 sporadic ovarian cancer cases. All 698 patients were screened for the six recurrent Greek mutations (including founder mutations c.5266dupC, p.G1738R and the three large deletions of exon 20, exons 23–24 and exon 24). In familial cases, the BRCA1 gene was consequently screened for exons 5, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. A deleterious BRCA1 mutation was found in 43/106 (40.6%) of familial cancer cases and in 27/592 (4.6%) of sporadic cases. The variant of unknown clinical significance p.V1833M was identified in 9/698 patients (1.3%). The majority of BRCA1 carriers (71.2%) presented a high-grade serous phenotype. Identifying a mutation in the BRCA1 gene among breast and/or ovarian cancer families is important, as it enables carriers to take preventive measures. All ovarian cancer patients with a serous phenotype should be considered for genetic testing. Further studies are warranted to determine the prevalence of mutations in the rest of the BRCA1 gene, in the BRCA2 gene, and other novel predisposing genes for breast and ovarian cancer.
Variation in the Human Dentition: Some Past Advances and Future Opportunities

The purpose of this article is to share with the dental research community milestones and creative insights that make dental research what it is today. We have been involved in dental research for some 40 years and have been fortunate enough to see astounding advances in the field of craniofacial biology. Each of us has been influenced by different mentors during our careers and we have pursued different but complementary research initiatives. Now, an exciting new international collaboration is underway using the unique materials available in Adelaide and Oulu and innovative 2D and 3D imaging techniques for data acquisition in Liverpool. Together we are developing new study designs, recording new dental phenotypes and applying novel aetiological modelling methods, utilising association and linkage approaches. In this paper we review some key influences and achievements that have led to our present collaboration, set out plans for the future and offer to collaborate with others.
Assessment of Social Support and Its Association to Depression, Self-Perceived Health and Chronic Diseases in Elderly Individuals Residing in an Area of Poverty and Social Vulnerability in Rio de Janeiro City, Brazil

Objectives Social support (SS) influences the elderly ability to cope with the losses of ageing process. This study was aimed at assessing SS among elderly users of a primary healthcare unit in a poor and violent area of Rio de Janeiro City, and at verifying its association with depression, self-perceived health (SPH), marital status and chronic illnesses. Methods A cross-sectional study was performed based on a convenience sample of 180 individuals aged 60 years or older. SS was measured with part of the Brazilian version of Medical Outcomes Study's SS scale, and SPH and depression were assessed, respectively, through one question and the Brazilian version of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders. SS medians were calculated for the categories of SPH, depression, marital status and chronic illnesses variables, and differences were evaluated with the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. Additionally, Pearson's chi-square test and logistic regression were employed to identify unadjusted and adjusted associations between SS and those variables. Results The participant’s mean age was 73 years old, and level of education was 3 years of school education on average. They were predominantly females (73.3%), and non-married (55.0%). Among them, 74.4% perceived their SS as satisfactory, 55.0% perceived their health as good, 27.8% were diagnosed with major depression and 83.3% had hypertension. Especially for those depressed and with bad SPH, the medians of SS measure were much lower than for others, reaching an unsatisfactory level. Moreover, controlling for other factors, non-depressed individuals were more likely (OR = 2.32) to have satisfactory SS. Conclusion in the violent and poor area explored in this research low SS is highly prevalent in the elderly. Depressed individuals are more likely to have low SS and this condition should be investigated in depressed elderly. The reduced scale is useful for low education individuals.
How funny was that? Uncovering humor mechanisms

Purpose – This paper aims to uncover humor mechanisms. Humor mechanisms influencing consumer behaviors seem relatively under-researched. In consequence, the effectiveness of humorous appeals is often questioned and research has yet to provide clear guidelines regarding why, for whom and when these appeals work. After uncovering ads that contain the two main types of humor mechanisms, the distraction and combined-influence hypotheses are tested in combination with dispositional and situation involvement. Design/methodology/approach – Using a focus group to define the ways consumers perceive humor, two pre-tests established a measure to identify arousal-safety (A-S) and incongruity resolution humor mechanisms. Two main studies (n = 486) test these mechanisms for two types of consumer groups (low and high NFC) in studies meant to replicate content-free and content-based media contexts. Findings – The results show that consumers are likely to have higher attitudes towards the humor ads that contain A-S. When .
Leniency: Hidden Threat to Large-Scale, Interview-Based Selection Systems

Many military selection systems operate on a large scale, and this requires pooling of data from multiple raters. When individual raters vary in the quality of their ratings, the overall performance of the selection system can be adversely affected. This study uses multilevel logistic regression to investigate rater effects. Canadian military interviewers (n = 59) completed a self-report questionnaire. Their ratings of interviewees, as well as subsequent training performance of interviewees, were obtained from an archival source. In multilevel models, individual differences in interviewer leniency, but not validity, were observed. These findings have important theoretical and practical consequences.
Cytotoxicity and apoptosis mediated by two peptides of innate immunity.

Antimicrobial peptides are present in a wide range of species, from protozoa to man, as effector molecules of innate immunity. Several bovine precursors of antimicrobial peptides have recently been identified, as deduced from cDNA, and assigned to the cathelicidin family. Two of these are the proforms of the antimicrobial peptides BMAP-27 and BMAP-28, which share a similar amino acid sequence, structural conformation, and toxic activity toward several bacterial and fungal strains. Here we report that they are cytotoxic to human tumor cells and normal proliferating, but not resting, lymphocytes at concentrations comparable to those microbiocidal. This effect is primarily due to damage of plasma membrane integrity. A more detailed investigation of the U937 cell line revealed that a Ca2+ influx into the cytosol occurs in the early steps of permeabilization. The perturbation of the membrane structure and the Ca2+ influx are followed by programmed death. A similar apoptosis inducing effect is also observed on in vitro activated human lymphocytes.
Communicating Information About Medication Side Effects: Effects on Satisfaction, Perceived Risk to Health, and Intention to Comply

Previous research has shown that people's evaluations of explanations about medication and their intention to comply with the prescription are detrimentally affected by the inclusion of information about adverse side effects of the medication. The present study (Experiment 1) examined which particular aspects of information about side effects (their number, likelihood of occurrence, or severity) are likely to have the greatest effect on people's satisfaction, perception of risk, and intention to comply, as well as how the information about side effects interacts with information about the severity of the illness for which the medication was prescribed. Across all measures, it was found that manipulations of side effect severity had the greatest impact on people's judgements, followed by manipulations of side effect likelihood and then number. Experiments 2 and 3 examined how the severity of the diagnosed illness and information about negative side effects interact with two other factors suggested by Social Cognition models of health behaviour to affect people's intention to comply: namely, perceived benefit of taking the prescribed drug, and the perceived level of control over preventing or alleviating the side effects. It was found that providing people with a statement about the positive benefit of taking the medication had relatively little effect on judgements, whereas informing them about how to reduce the chances of experiencing the side effects had an overall beneficial effect on ratings.
Role of Oxidative Stress in Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a multifactorial disorder affecting many women of reproductive age, typically due to hyperandrogenemia, hyperinsulinemia, and enigmatic genetic factors. The complex nature of PCOS is reflected in the broad spectrum of the disorder's clinical presentation, including metabolic and reproductive disorders. As a result, while the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology and the American Society for Reproduc- tive Medicine (ESHRE/ASRM) have agreed on a consensus definition of PCOS to help clinical investigators, the condi- tion is recognized to have multiple clinical phenotypes. Oxidative stress (OS) occurs when destructive reactive oxygen species (ROS) outbalance antioxidants, causing DNA damage and/or cell apoptosis. Moreover, reactive nitrogen species (RNS), such as nitrogen oxide (NO) with an unpaired electron also are highly reactive and toxic. In a quest to delineate the role of OS in the pathogenesis of PCOS, investiga- tors have examined patients with the disorder for a wide array of OS biomarkers, including malondialdehyde (MDA), protein carbonyl, total antioxidant capacity (TAC), superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), and glutathione (GSH).
Mach bands explained by response normalization

Mach bands are the illusory dark and bright bars seen at the foot and knee of a luminance trapezoid. First demonstrated by Ernst Mach in the latter part of the 19th century, Mach bands are a test bed not only for models of brightness illusions but of spatial vision in general. Up until 50 years ago the dominant explanation of Mach Bands was that they were caused by lateral inhibition among retinal neurons. More recently, the dominant idea has been that Mach bands are a consequence of a visual process that generates a sparse, binary description of the image in terms of “edges” and “bars”. Another recent explanation is that Mach bands result from learned expectations about the pattern of light typically found on sharply curved surfaces. In keeping with recent multi-scale filtering accounts of brightness illusions as well as current physiology, I show however that Mach bands are most simply explained by response normalization, whereby the gains of early visual channels are adjusted on a local basis to make their responses more equal. I show that a simple one-dimensional model of response normalization explains the range of conditions under which Mach bands occur, and as importantly, the conditions under which they do not occur.
Defending polar empire: opposition to India's proposal to raise the ‘Antarctic Question’ at the United Nations in 1956

ABSTRACT This paper examines the international response to India's 1956 proposal to raise the ‘Antarctic Question’ at the United Nations. It focuses in particular on the uneasy alliance that developed between the British Commonwealth and Latin America in opposition to the Indian proposal. Although Great Britain, Argentina, and Chile were bitterly disputing the sovereignty of the Antarctic Peninsula region, they shared a common desire to keep the southern continent off the agenda of the United Nations. This ability to work together for common goals, despite their differences, set an important precedent for the Antarctic Treaty that would be signed in 1959. In this way, opposition to the Indian proposal, more than the proposal itself, played an important role in the history of Antarctica in the 1950s. Latin American opposition to the proposal helped to fragment any ‘anti-imperial’ coalition that might have developed in Antarctica. This fragmentation helps us to place the Antarctic Treaty System into the framework of post-colonial studies.
A Hurricane Tangential Wind Profile Estimation Method for C-Band Cross-Polarization SAR

Hurricane tangential wind profiles are routinely observed by aircraft reconnaissance in order to estimate the surface winds. However, these wind profile estimates are occasionally biased because along-track aircraft observations might not determine the nonaxisymmetric hurricane structure characteristics. In this paper, we resolve this problem by calculating the mean wind speed in all radial directions using cross-polarization SAR wide-swath images. Moreover, we propose a one-half modified Rankine vortex (OHMRV) model to describe the hurricane wind profile, particularly for those wind profiles with a wind speed maximum and an inflection point possibly associated with the degeneration of the inner wind maximum in the hurricane reintensification phase. OHMRV characterizes the hurricane wind profile and represents a model that complements the previously established single-modified Rankine vortex model and the double-modified Rankine vortex model. Moreover, the OHMRV-derived wind profiles are used to estimate hurricane intensity and structure parameters, such as the maximum wind speed and the radius of maximum wind. For validation of the method, the estimated ISPs are compared with measurements by the stepped-frequency microwave radiometer on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aircraft. These parameters contribute to a description of hurricane inner-core intensity and structure associated with eyewall replacement cycles.
Parametric Alignment of Drosophila Genomes

The classic algorithms of Needleman–Wunsch and Smith–Waterman find a maximum a posteriori probability alignment for a pair hidden Markov model (PHMM). To process large genomes that have undergone complex genome rearrangements, almost all existing whole genome alignment methods apply fast heuristics to divide genomes into small pieces that are suitable for Needleman–Wunsch alignment. In these alignment methods, it is standard practice to fix the parameters and to produce a single alignment for subsequent analysis by biologists. As the number of alignment programs applied on a whole genome scale continues to increase, so does the disagreement in their results. The alignments produced by different programs vary greatly, especially in non-coding regions of eukaryotic genomes where the biologically correct alignment is hard to find. Parametric alignment is one possible remedy. This methodology resolves the issue of robustness to changes in parameters by finding all optimal alignments for all possible parameters in a PHMM. Our main result is the construction of a whole genome parametric alignment of Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila pseudoobscura. This alignment draws on existing heuristics for dividing whole genomes into small pieces for alignment, and it relies on advances we have made in computing convex polytopes that allow us to parametrically align non-coding regions using biologically realistic models. We demonstrate the utility of our parametric alignment for biological inference by showing that cis-regulatory elements are more conserved between Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila pseudoobscura than previously thought. We also show how whole genome parametric alignment can be used to quantitatively assess the dependence of branch length estimates on alignment parameters.
A Novel Space-Time Representation on the Positive Semidefinite Cone for Facial Expression Recognition

In this paper, we study the problem of facial expression recognition using a novel space-time geometric representation. We describe the temporal evolution of facial landmarks as parametrized trajectories on the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank. Our representation has the advantage to bring naturally a second desirable quantity when comparing shapes – the spatial covariance – in addition to the conventional affine-shape representation. We derive then geometric and computational tools for rate-invariant analysis and adaptive re-sampling of trajectories, grounding on the Riemannian geometry of the manifold. Specifically, our approach involves three steps: 1) facial landmarks are first mapped into the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of rank 2, to build time-parameterized trajectories; 2) a temporal alignment is performed on the trajectories, providing a geometry-aware (dis-)similarity measure between them; 3) finally, pairwise proximity function SVM (ppfSVM) is used to classify them, incorporating the latter (dis-)similarity measure into the kernel function. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach on four publicly available benchmarks (CK+, MMI, Oulu-CASIA, and AFEW). The results of the proposed approach are comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art methods when involving only facial landmarks.
Setting Priorities for DSS Development

Traditional project management and design methods used for data processing and MIS applications are ill-suited to decision support systems (DSS). The authors argue that effective management of DSS development requires: a) An explicit plan for the full development life cycle; b) Careful assignment of responsibility for DSS development; c) Appropriate user involvement and direction; and d) On-going user needs assessment and problem diagnosis A 13-stage tactical plan for DSS development, called the DSS development life cycle, is described. Results are presented from an in-depth survey of users of 34 different DSS to show that the tasks performed most ineffectively in DSS development are planning, assessment of user needs, and system evaluation. Results from the survey are also presented that show the factors responsible for DSS project approval, and the factors responsible for DSS success.
“Thank You, Sorry, Love” (TSL) Therapy With North Korean Refugee Women

Objectives: This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of The “Thank You, Sorry, Love” (TSL) family therapy program in potentially improving the marital relationships and health of North Korean refugee women. Methods: The participants included 12 married North Korean female refugees in their 20s to 40s. Using a blinded assignment, six received the TSL family therapy program and six did not receive any treatment. Pretests (just before the program), posttests (just after termination of the program), and follow-up tests (1 month after termination of the program) were conducted. Results: The program participants experienced a statistically significant decrease in marital violence and an increase in their total antioxidant activity levels. Conclusions: TSL family therapy has the potential to contribute to improving the lives of traumatized North Korean refugee women. Larger scale replication studies involving random assignment would be a useful next step in evaluating the TSL program.
Generalized MIMO Transmit Preprocessing Using Pilot Symbol Assisted Rateless Codes

In this paper, we propose a generalized multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmit preprocessing system, where both the channel coding and the linear MIMO transmit precoding components exploit the knowledge of the channel. Moreover, we also propose a novel technique, hereby referred to as pilot symbol assisted rateless (PSAR) coding, where a predetermined fraction of binary pilot symbols is interspersed with the channel-coded bits at the channel coding stage, instead of multiplexing the pilots with the data symbols at the modulation stage, as in classic pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM). We will subsequently demonstrate that the PSAR code-aided transmit preprocessing scheme succeeds in gleaning more beneficial knowledge from the inserted pilots, because the pilot bits are not only useful for estimating the channel at the receiver, but they are also beneficial in terms of significantly reducing the computational complexity of the rateless channel decoder.