Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Urinary Concentrations of Parabens and Serum Hormone Levels, Semen Quality Parameters, and Sperm DNA Damage

Background Parabens are commonly used as antimicrobial preservatives in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and food and beverage processing. Widespread human exposure to parabens has been recently documented, and some parabens have demonstrated adverse effects on male reproduction in animal studies. However, human epidemiologic studies are lacking. Objective We investigated relationships between urinary concentrations of parabens and markers of male reproductive health in an ongoing reproductive epidemiology study. Methods Urine samples collected from male partners attending an infertility clinic were analyzed for methyl paraben (MP), propyl paraben (PP), butyl paraben (BP), and bisphenol A (BPA). Associations with serum hormone levels (n = 167), semen quality parameters (n = 190), and sperm DNA damage measures (n = 132) were assessed using multivariable linear regression. Results Detection rates in urine were 100% for MP, 92% for PP, and 32% for BP. We observed no statistically significant associations between MP or PP and the outcome measures. Categories of urinary BP concentration were not associated with hormone levels or conventional semen quality parameters, but they were positively associated with sperm DNA damage (p for trend = 0.03). When urinary BPA quartiles were added to the model, BP and BPA were both positively associated with sperm DNA damage (p for trend = 0.03). Assessment of paraben concentrations measured on repeated urine samples from a subset of the men (n = 78) revealed substantial temporal variability. Conclusions We found no evidence for a relationship between urinary parabens and hormone levels or semen quality, although intraindividual variability in exposure and a modest sample size could have limited our ability to detect subtle relationships. Our observation of a relationship between BP and sperm DNA damage warrants further investigation.
A Cross-Cultural View of Widowhood

THROUGHOUT man’s span on earth he has been beset by numerous problems. Some have been unique to certain groups of people at specific times and places. Other problems are universal to all mankind throughout time and have been met and dealt with in some manner by the different societies of the world. Death is one such universal problem that, by its very mystery and finality, arouses deep feelings of despair and fear in all people. Cultural customs and rituals surrounding aspects of death are elaborate, dramatic and divergent. They represent man’s varied ways of attempting to give meaning to the incomprehensible, to assuage fear, and to give solace and emotional catharsis to the living. Death involves broken personal and social relationships that are a part of the total of social organization. Therefore, most societies, in an effort to regain social equilibrium as quickly as possible, have established rules regarding the conduct of these closely associated with the deceased as well as for the society as a whole. The amount of this structure and regulation is not constant for all peoples. Sociologically it seems to be most important to nontechnological groups in which there is much interdependence on a person-to-person basis. On an individual psychological level it is probably very important to all.
The effect of androgens on tissue regeneration.

Androgens, male sex hormones, have been shown to increase the overall growth rate of mammals (Brody, 1945; Gaunt, 1954), though there is some doubt as to their influence on reparative growth. Promitotic activity has been demonstrated (Montagna & Kenyon, 1949), and Barbera, Pollice & Mazzarella (1962) have reported that certain doses of androgens stimulate the production of granulation tissue in wounds. It has also been shown (Joseph & Dyson, 1966a) that the administration of synthetic anabolic androgens to females stimulates regeneration. In contrast Taubenhaus & Amromin (1949) have demonstrated that large doses of testosterone have an inhibitory effect on granulation tissue formation, while Cavallero, Maurizio, Baroni & Lami (1963) have reported that anabolic androgens administered alone are unable to influence the growth of granulation tissue. During a quantitative study of tissue regeneration in the rabbit's ear it was observed that growth of the regenerate was significantly faster in males than in females (Joseph & Dyson, 1965). It was suggested that the higher androgen level in males might be concerned in producing this effect, since androgens possess considerable anabolic activity. The present paper describes a series of experiments performed to test this possibility.
Court diversion at 10 years: Can it work, does it work and has it a future?

Abstract Ten years after the inception of psychiatric diversion schemes to magistrates' courts in England and Wales, their results are reviewed in order to examine whether they can work, whether in general they do work, and what directions their development should take in future. Both published and extensive unpublished sources are examined. It is concluded that court diversion can be highly effective in the identification and acceleration into hospital of mentally disordered offenders, as one component of comprehensive diversion arrangements. However, most court diversion services are currently inadequately planned, organized or resourced, and are therefore of limited effect. It is argued that the ‘experimental’ phase of court diversion should now be at an end. A central strategy is required, and properly designed and adequately supported court services should be incorporated into, and understood to be a core part of, mainstream local psychiatric provision. Without such action, the future of court divers.
It’s Not You, it’s Me: Detecting Flirting and its Misperception in Speed-Dates

Automatically detecting human social intentions from spoken conversation is an important task for dialogue understanding. Since the social intentions of the speaker may differ from what is perceived by the hearer, systems that analyze human conversations need to be able to extract both the perceived and the intended social meaning. We investigate this difference between intention and perception by using a spoken corpus of speed-dates in which both the speaker and the listener rated the speaker on flirtatiousness. Our flirtation-detection system uses prosodic, dialogue, and lexical features to detect a speaker's intent to flirt with up to 71.5% accuracy, significantly outperforming the baseline, but also outperforming the human inter-locuters. Our system addresses lexical feature sparsity given the small amount of training data by using an autoencoder network to map sparse lexical feature vectors into 30 compressed features. Our analysis shows that humans are very poor perceivers of intended flirtatiousness, instead often projecting their own intended behavior onto their interlocutors.
Location and spatial profile of category‐specific regions in human extrastriate cortex

Subjects were scanned in a single functional MRI (fMRI) experiment that enabled us to localize cortical regions in each subject in the occipital and temporal lobes that responded significantly in a variety of contrasts: faces > objects, body parts > objects, scenes > objects, objects > scrambled objects, and moving > stationary stimuli. The resulting activation maps were coregistered across subjects using spherical surface coordinates [Fischl et al., Hum Brain Mapp 1999;8:272–284] to produce a “percentage overlap map” indicating the percentage of subjects who showed a significant response for each contrast at each point on the surface. Prominent among the overlapping activations in these contrasts were the fusiform face area (FFA), extrastriate body area (EBA), parahippocampal place area (PPA), lateral occipital complex (LOC), and MT+/V5; only a few other areas responded consistently across subjects in these contrasts. Another analysis showed that the spatial profile of the selective response drops off quite sharply outside the standard borders of the FFA and PPA (less so for the EBA and MT+/V5), indicating that these regions are not simply peaks of very broad selectivities spanning centimeters of cortex, but fairly discrete regions of cortex with distinctive functional profiles. The data also yielded a surprise that challenges our understanding of the function of area MT+: a higher response to body parts than to objects. The anatomical consistency of each of our functionally defined regions across subjects and the spatial sharpness of their activation profiles within subjects highlight the fact that these regions constitute replicable and distinctive landmarks in the functional organization of the human brain. Hum Brain Mapp, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Spontaneous Breathing Trials With T-Piece or Pressure Support Ventilation

Spontaneous breathing trials (SBTs) are among the most commonly employed techniques to facilitate weaning from mechanical ventilation. The preferred SBT technique, however, is still unclear. To clarify the preferable SBT (T-piece or pressure support ventilation [PSV]), we conducted this systematic review. We then searched the MEDLINE, EMBASE, SciELO, Google Scholar, CINAHL, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Cochrane CENTRAL databases through June 2015, without language restrictions. We included randomized controlled trials involving adult subjects being weaned from mechanical ventilation comparing T-piece with PSV and reporting (1) weaning failure, (2) re-intubation rate, (3) ICU mortality, or (4) weaning duration. Anticipating clinical heterogeneity among the included studies, we compared prespecified subgroups: (1) simple, difficult, or prolonged weaning and (2) subjects with COPD. We summarized the quality of evidence for intervention effects using the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) methodology. We identified 3,674 potentially relevant studies and reviewed 23 papers in full. Twelve studies (2,161 subjects) met our inclusion criteria. Overall, the evidence was of very low to low quality. SBT technique did not influence weaning success (risk ratio 1.23 [0.94–1.61]), ICU mortality (risk ratio 1.11 [0.80–1.54]), or re-intubation rate (risk ratio 1.21 [0.90–1.63]). Prespecified subgroup analysis suggested that PSV might be superior to T-piece with regard to weaning success for simple-to-wean subjects (risk ratio 1.44 [1.11–1.86]). For the prolonged-weaning subgroup, however, T-piece was associated with a shorter weaning duration (weighted mean difference −3.08 [−5.24 to −0.92] d). In conclusion, low-quality evidence is available concerning this topic. PSV may be associated with lower weaning failure rates in the simple-to-wean subgroup. In contrast, in prolonged-weaning subjects, T-piece may be related to a shorter weaning duration, although this is at high risk of bias. Further study of the difficult-to-wean and COPD subgroups is required.
CALL FOR PAPERS Innovative and Emerging Technologies in GI Physiology and Disease Upper esophageal sphincter impedance as a marker of sphincter opening diameter

Upper esophageal sphincter impedance as a marker of sphincter opening diameter Taher I. Omari, Lara Ferris, Eddy Dejaeger, Jan Tack, Dirk Vanbeckevoort, and Nathalie Rommel Gastroenterology Unit, Child, Youth & Women’s Health Service, North Adelaide; School of Paediatrics and Reproductive Health, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia; Departments of Geriatric Medicine and Radiology and Center for Swallowing Disorders, University Hospital Leuven; Translational Research Center for Gastrointestinal Diseases and Department of Neurosciences, ExpORL, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Combining lexical and interactional approaches to therapy for word finding deficits in aphasia

Background: There are two distinct theoretical positions underlying approaches to aphasia therapy. The first addresses the language impairment directly through tasks designed to improve performance in that language function. This form of therapy was employed in a related study involving the participants reported here (Hickin et al., 2002a). The second seeks to bypass the language impairment by, for example promoting alternative forms of communication, and stressing the importance of successful rather than normal communication. There are few studies that combine the structured principled methods of the first with the ecologically valid basis of the second approach. Aims: Our aim was to investigate the effectiveness of combining a lexical therapy, targeting a discrete set of items and using cues to prompt name retrieval, with communicative use of those items, in tasks ranging from naming to definition through to structured conversation. We investigated the effects of the therapy in terms of gains in picture naming, and performance in a task simulating communication situations (production of nouns in everyday communication). Methods & Procedures: The study is a case series design involving six people with aphasia. All were adult English speakers aged 39 and upwards who were aphasic following a single left hemisphere stroke. Picture naming and production of nouns in everyday communication was assessed prior to and after therapy. Outcomes & Results: The combined therapy described here was effective for five of the six participants in terms of gains in picture naming, and an increase in communicatively effective responses in the noun production task. One person, for whom the lexical therapy described in Hickin et al. (2002a) was not effective, did however respond to the therapy reported here. For one of the six participants, the therapy was not effective. Conclusions: Therapy that targets a specific set of words, and encourages their use in tasks approaching everyday communication, can be effective in improving word finding in picture naming and in a functional speech task. As therapy effects are restricted to items undergoing therapy on the whole it is essential that words are selected for therapy on the basis of their functional use to the participant. This therapy was effective for most of the six participants and we are unable at this stage to identify exclusion criteria for undergoing this therapy.
Immunoglobulin and T Cell Receptor Genes: IMGT® and the Birth and Rise of Immunoinformatics

IMGT®, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system®1, (CNRS and Université Montpellier 2) is the global reference in immunogenetics and immunoinformatics. By its creation in 1989, IMGT® marked the advent of immunoinformatics, which emerged at the interface between immunogenetics and bioinformatics. IMGT® is specialized in the immunoglobulins (IG) or antibodies, T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility (MH), and proteins of the IgSF and MhSF superfamilies. IMGT® has been built on the IMGT-ONTOLOGY axioms and concepts, which bridged the gap between genes, sequences, and three-dimensional (3D) structures. The concepts include the IMGT® standardized keywords (concepts of identification), IMGT® standardized labels (concepts of description), IMGT® standardized nomenclature (concepts of classification), IMGT unique numbering, and IMGT Colliers de Perles (concepts of numerotation). IMGT® comprises seven databases, 15,000 pages of web resources, and 17 tools, and provides a high-quality and integrated system for the analysis of the genomic and expressed IG and TR repertoire of the adaptive immune responses. Tools and databases are used in basic, veterinary, and medical research, in clinical applications (mutation analysis in leukemia and lymphoma) and in antibody engineering and humanization. They include, for example IMGT/V-QUEST and IMGT/JunctionAnalysis for nucleotide sequence analysis and their high-throughput version IMGT/HighV-QUEST for next-generation sequencing (500,000 sequences per batch), IMGT/DomainGapAlign for amino acid sequence analysis of IG and TR variable and constant domains and of MH groove domains, IMGT/3Dstructure-DB for 3D structures, contact analysis and paratope/epitope interactions of IG/antigen and TR/peptide-MH complexes and IMGT/mAb-DB interface for therapeutic antibodies and fusion proteins for immune applications (FPIA).
What (If Anything) Is Shared in Pain Empathy? A Critical Discussion of De Vignemont and Jacob’s Theory of the Neural Substrate of Pain Empathy

In a recent article in Philosophy of Science, De Vignemont and Jacob defend the view that empathy involves interpersonal similarity between an empathizer and a target person with respect to internal affective states. Focusing on empathy for pain, they propose a theory of the neural substrate of pain empathy. We point out several flaws in their interpretation of the data and argue that currently available data do not differentiate between De Vignemont and Jacob’s model and alternative models. Finally, we offer some suggestions about how this might be achieved in future research.
Dynamic Safety Cases for Through-Life Safety Assurance

We describe dynamic safety cases, a novel operationalization of the concept of through-life safety assurance, whose goal is to enable proactive safety management. Using an example from the aviation systems domain, we motivate our approach, its underlying principles, and a lifecycle. We then identify the key elements required to move towards a formalization of the associated framework.
Compact Stellar X-Ray Sources: Black hole binaries

4.1. 1 Scope of this review We focus on 18 black holes with measured masses that are located in X–ray binary systems. These black holes are the most visible representatives of an estimated ∼300 million stellar–mass black holes that are believed to exist in the Galaxy (van den Heuvel 1992; Brown & Bethe 1994; Timmes et al. 1996; Agol et al. 2002). Thus the mass of this particular form of dark matter, assuming ∼10M⊙ per black hole, is ∼4% of the total baryonic mass (i.e., stars plus gas) of the Galaxy (Bahcall 1986; Bronfman et al. 1988). Collectively this vast population of black holes outweighs the Galactic–center black hole, SgrA, by a factor of ∼1000. These stellar–mass black holes are important to astronomy in numerous ways. For example, they are one endpoint of stellar evolution for massive stars, and the collapse of their progenitor stars enriches the universe with heavy elements (Woosley et al. 2002). Also, the measured mass distribution for even the small sample of 18 black holes featured here are used to constrain models of black hole formation and binary evolution (Brown et al. 2000a; Nelemans & van den Heuvel 2001; Fryer & Kalogera 2001). Lastly, some black hole binaries appear to be linked to the hypernovae believed to power gamma–ray bursts (Israelian et al. 1999; Brown et al. 2000b; Orosz et al. 2001). This review is focused on the X–ray timing and spectral properties of these 18 black holes, plus a number of black hole candidates, with an eye to their importance to physics as potential sites for tests of general relativity (GR) in the strongest possible gravitational fields. There are now several current areas of research that probe phenomena in these systems that are believed to occur very near the event horizon. These X–ray phenomena include quasi–periodic oscillations (QPOs) at high frequency (40–450 Hz) observed from seven systems, relativistically broadened iron lines from the inner accretion disk, and thermal disk emission from near the innermost stable circular orbit allowed by GR. We also comment on evidence for the existence of the event horizon, which is based on a comparison of black–hole and neutron–star binaries and on models for advective accretion flows. The black hole binaries featured here are mass–exchange binaries that contain an accreting black hole primary and a nondegenerate secondary star. They comprise about 10% of all bright X–ray binaries. For background on X–ray binaries, see Chapter 1, and references therein. For comprehensive reviews on black hole binaries, see
Evaluation of an elementary classroom self-regulated learning program for gifted mathematics underachievers

The evaluation of an elementary classroom self-regulated learning program aimed at the central causes of academic underachievement is recounted. The participants of the study were 36 Fourth Grade gifted underachievers in mathematics, who were identified in a sample of 1200 students. The training program developed by Zimmerman, Bonner and Kovach (1996) was conducted within the framework of regular classroom instruction of the subject of mathematics over a period of six weeks. A number of positive training effects could be statistically confirmed. In general, the training was deemed to be suitable for interventions to reduce underachievement.
A new and clinically relevant murine model of solid-organ transplant aspergillosis

SUMMARY Invasive fungal infections (IFIs) are a major cause of death in organ transplant patients. The murine hydrocortisone-mediated immunosuppression model of pulmonary aspergillosis is commonly used to characterise IFIs in these patients. However, this model does not take into account the effects of calcineurin inhibitors on transplant immunity to IFIs or the fungal calcineurin pathway, which is required for both virulence and antifungal drug resistance. To address these two issues, a new and clinically relevant transplant immunosuppression model of tacrolimus (FK506) and hydrocortisone-associated pulmonary aspergillosis was developed. We first characterised IFIs in 406 patients with a lung transplant. This showed that all of the patients with pulmonary aspergillosis were immunosuppressed with calcineurin inhibitors and steroids. Murine pharmacokinetic studies demonstrated that an ideal dose of 1 mg/kg/day of FK506 intraperitoneally produced blood trough levels in the human therapeutic range (5–12 ng/ml). There was increased mortality from pulmonary aspergillosis in a transplant-relevant immunosuppression model using both FK506 and hydrocortisone as compared with immunosuppression using hydrocortisone only. Lung histopathology showed neutrophil invasion and tracheobronchitis that was associated with reduced lung tumour necrosis factor-α (TNFα), JE (homologue of human MCP-1) and KC (homologue of human IL-8) at 24 hours, but increased lung TNFα, JE and KC at 48 hours when fungal burden was high. Furthermore, FK506 directly impaired fungal killing in alveolar macrophages in vitro, with FK506-mediated inhibition of the radial growth of Aspergillus fumigatus in vitro occurring at the low concentration of 5 ng/ml. Taken together, these findings show that the immunosuppressive activity of FK506 outweighs its antifungal activity in vivo. These observations demonstrate that FK506 impairs innate immune responses and leads to an incremental increase in susceptibility to IFIs when it is combined with steroids. This new and clinically relevant mouse model of invasive aspergillosis is a valuable addition to the further study of both fungal immunity and antifungal therapy in organ transplantation.
Using Transactional Information to Predict Link Strength in Online Social Networks

Many scientific fields analyzing and modeling social networks have focused on manually-collected datasets where the friendship links are sparse (due to the costs of collection) but relatively noise-free (i.e. they indicate strong relationships). In online social networks, where the notion of ``friendship'' is broader than what would generally be considered in sociological studies, the friendship links are denser but the links contain noisier information (i.e., some weaker relationships). However, the networks also contain additional transactional events among entities (e.g., communication, file transfers) that can be used to infer the true underlying social network. With this aim in mind, we develop a supervised learning approach to predict link strength from transactional information. We formulate this as a link prediction task and compare the utility of attribute-based, topological, and transactional features. We evaluate our approach on public data from the Purdue Facebook network and show that we can accurately predict strong relationships. Moreover, we show that transactional-network features are the most influential features for this task.