Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Randomized Pilot Trial of a Telephone-Based Collaborative Care Management Program for Caregivers of Individuals With Dementia

Dementia care is largely provided in primary care settings. This article describes a pilot project aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of an accessible, telephone-based, patient- and caregiver (CG)-centered, collaborative care management program that involves CG education and psychosocial support in improving CG and patient outcomes. CGs (n = 75) of older veterans with dementia receiving care from Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center primary care practices were randomized to receive either dementia care management or usual care (UC). Of interest in this study were the frequency and severity of patients’ dementia-related symptom, CG distress related to patients’ behavioral and neuropsychiatric symptoms (primary outcomes), and CG coping and mastery (secondary outcomes). Adjusted, intention-to-treat longitudinal models suggest that CGs receiving care management reported significantly greater reductions in distress due to patients’ dementia-related (p = .05) and neuropsychiatric (p = .01) symptoms compared with CGs in UC. Additionally, CGs in the intervention reported significantly larger improvements in their ability to cope (p = .03) and caregiving mastery (p = .03). No significant group differences were found in CG burden or patients’ dementia-related symptom frequency or severity over time. Findings suggest that CGs of veterans with dementia may benefit from a telephone-delivered, care management program in improving CG-related outcomes. Further research of care management programs for CG of veterans with dementia in addressing barriers to care and reducing CG burden is warranted. These findings highlight the potential for such programs as adjuncts to dementia care offered in primary care practices.
Generative Modeling of Pseudo-Whisper for Robust Whispered Speech Recognition

Whisper is a common means of communication used to avoid disturbing individuals or to exchange private information. As a vocal style, whisper would be an ideal candidate for human-handheld/computer interactions in open-office or public area scenarios. Unfortunately, current speech technology is predominantly focused on modal (neutral) speech and completely breaks down when exposed to whisper. One of the major barriers for successful whisper recognition engines is the lack of available large transcribed whispered speech corpora. This study introduces two strategies that require only a small amount of untranscribed whisper samples to produce excessive amounts of whisper-like (pseudo-whisper) utterances from easily accessible modal speech recordings. Once generated, the pseudo-whisper samples are used to adapt modal acoustic models of a speech recognizer toward whisper. The first strategy is based on Vector Taylor Series (VTS) where a whisper “background” model is first trained to capture a rough estimate of global whisper characteristics from a small amount of actual whisper data. Next, that background model is utilized in the VTS to establish specific broad phone classes' (unvoiced/voiced phones) transformations from each input modal utterance to its pseudo-whispered version. The second strategy generates pseudo-whisper samples by means of denoising autoencoders (DAE). Two generative models are investigated-one produces pseudo-whisper cepstral features on a frame-by-frame basis, while the second generates pseudo-whisper statistics for whole phone segments. It is shown that word error rates of a TIMIT-trained speech recognizer are considerably reduced for a whisper recognition task with a constrained lexicon after adapting the acoustic model toward the VTS or DAE pseudo-whisper samples, compared to model adaptation on an available small whisper set.
Judgmental model of the Ebbinghaus illusion.

Two experiments studied the Ebbinghaus illusion as a function of four stimulus variables: the size of the context circles, the number of context circles, the distance between the context circles and the center circle, and the size of the center circle. The results provided a quantitative test of a judgmental model that considers the Ebbinghaus illusion to be comparative in nature. The context circles, then, serve as standards or yardsticks, and the center circle is judged partly relative to them. The model provided a reasonably good description of the magnitude of the illusion as a function of the several stimulus variables. The center circle in Fig. 1 appears larger when surrounded by small circles, smaller when surrounded by large circles. This figure, known as the Ebbinghaus illusion, or Titchener circles, has seen relatively little systematic study. The present article reports two parametric studies done within a judgmental theory of stimulus integration (Anderson, 1970a, 1970b; Massaro &
Toll-like receptor 3 triggers apoptosis of human prostate cancer cells through a PKC-a-dependent mechanism

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are known to play a key role in the innate immune system particularly in inflammatory response against invading pathogens. Recent reports strongly indicate that they play important roles in cancer cells. Prostate cancer represents one of the most common cancer for which no cure is available once metastatic and androgen refractory. Since TLR3 has been recently suggested as a possible therapeutic target in some cancer cell lines, we studied TLR3 expression and functionality in two human prostate cancer cell lines, LNCaP and PC3. We report that both cell lines express TLR3 and that the TLR3 agonist poly (I:C) activates mitogen-activated protein kinases and induces inhibition of proliferation as well as caspase-dependent apoptosis. By using pharmacological and genetic approaches, we demonstrate the involvement of TLR3 in poly (I:C)-induced effects. We also show that a novel interferon-independent pathway involving protein kinase C (PKC)-a activation, upstream of p38 and c-jun N-terminal kinase, is responsible for poly (I:C) proapoptotic effects on LNCaP cells. To our knowledge, this is the first report describing a role of PKC-a in poly (I:C)-mediated apoptosis. The comprehension of the mechanisms underlying TLR3-mediated apoptosis can contribute tools to develop new agonists useful for the treatment of prostate cancer.
Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive

Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain biologically relevant incentives. Second, substances can be strong motivators because they imitate the action of natural incentives but do not produce the fitness gains for which those incentives are instinctively sought. The classic examples of this process are psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the drug concept can also be extended metaphorically to provide an account of money motivation. From a review of theoretical and empirical literature about money, we conclude that (i) there are a number of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a pure Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) supplementing Tool Theory with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to be explained; and (iii) the human instincts that, according to a Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from reciprocal altruism) and object play.
Satellite remote sensing of fires, smoke, and regional radiative energy budgets over South America and Africa

Biomass burning events and their effects are investigated using measurements from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) over Africa in 1997 and South America in 1995. Fires are detected, and aerosol optical thicknesses of the smoke pixels identified from the AVHRR imagery are retrieved using a table look-up approach. The retrieved mean aerosol optical thickness ((tau) 0.64) ranges from 0.3 to 0.6 over Africa and from 1.2 to 1.5 over South America. The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) and surface shortwave aerosol radiative forcings (SWARF) are estimated. Using two different approaches, the mean TOA SWARFs are about -20 and -40 Wm-2, respectively, over Africa and about -50 and -60 Wm-2, respectively, over South America, indicating an aerosol cooling effect. Over four sites where (tau) 0.64 measurements are available, values of aerosol single scattering albedos ((omega) 0) are retrieved and surface downward shortwave irradiances (DSWI) are estimated using a radiative transfer model. Comparison of calculated DSWIs with observed DSWIs shows that, for 9 out of 12 cases, the root-mean-square (RMS) differences are within 35 Wm-2. The largest error is about 70 Wm-2, which is mainly caused by the uncertainties of the retrieved (omega) 0. This suggests that DSWI can be properly estimated from AVHRR measurements if aerosol optical thickness is available.
Asymmetric multi-task learning based on task relatedness and loss

We propose a novel multi-task learning method that minimizes the effect of negative transfer by allowing asymmetric transfer between the tasks based on task relatedness as well as the amount of individual task losses, which we refer to as Asymmetric Multi-task Learning (AMTL). To tackle this problem, we couple multiple tasks via a sparse, directed regularization graph, that enforces each task parameter to be reconstructed as a sparse combination of other tasks selected based on the task-wise loss. We present two different algorithms that jointly learn the task predictors as well as the regularization graph. The first algorithm solves for the original learning objective using alternative optimization, and the second algorithm solves an approximation of it using curriculum learning strategy, that learns one task at a time. We perform experiments on multiple datasets for classification and regression, on which we obtain significant improvements in performance over the single task learning and existing multitask learning models.
Sperm release strategies in marine broadcast spawners: the costs of releasing sperm quickly

SUMMARY When under competition for fertilisations, males are thought to increase their reproductive success by releasing as many sperm as possible into the reproductive arena and in many species, this prediction holds. For marine invertebrates, which utilise the ancestral strategy of broadcast spawning eggs and sperm, however, it appears that males tend to release their sperm more slowly than females release their eggs. Marine invertebrate eggs typically have a relatively slow permanent block to polyspermy (whereby eggs become impermeable to further sperm attachment), and for several minutes after fertilisation, sperm can continue to attach to a fertilised egg. We hypothesised that releasing sperm slowly minimises the `wastage' of sperm on already fertilised eggs. We simulated different sperm release rates in a flume using the broadcast spawning polychaete, Galeolaria caespitosa. Sperm release rates strongly affected overall fertilisation success: higher release rates resulted in lower fertilisation rates. Laboratory studies confirmed that the `permanent' block to polyspermy in G. caespitosa took less than a minute to form but this lag was sufficient to result in some sperm wastage. Thus upstream, fertilised eggs that have not formed a permanent block to polyspermy can remove sperm from the pool that would otherwise fertilise downstream sibling eggs. We suggest that while electrical blocks to polyspermy evolved in response to excess sperm, permanent blocks to polyspermy could have evolved in response to sperm limitation (insufficient sperm).
Deformation and illumination invariant feature point descriptor

Recent advances in 3D shape recognition have shown that kernels based on diffusion geometry can be effectively used to describe local features of deforming surfaces. In this paper, we introduce a new framework that allows using these kernels on 2D local patches, yielding a novel feature point descriptor that is both invariant to non-rigid image deformations and illumination changes. In order to build the descriptor, 2D image patches are embedded as 3D surfaces, by multiplying the intensity level by an arbitrarily large and constant weight that favors anisotropic diffusion and retains the gradient magnitude information. Patches are then described in terms of a heat kernel signature, which is made invariant to intensity changes, rotation and scaling. The resulting feature point descriptor is proven to be significantly more discriminative than state of the art ones, even those which are specifically designed for describing non-rigid image deformations.
Migration and wage growth: a human capital approach.

"The purpose of this paper is to analyze migration as an investment in human capital using panel data. [The authors] focus on two issues. The first is the economic motivation for migration and the reasons some movers receive high returns relative to other migrants. The second issue, and the major focus of the paper, is a test of the human capital model explaining wage profiles of nonmovers, first-time, and repeat migrants. " The data are from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Males, 1966-1971 cross-section, and concern the United States.
On the Monte-Carlo Expectation Maximization for Finding Motifs in DNA Sequences

Finding conserved locations or motifs in genomic sequences is of paramount importance. Expectation maximization (EM)-based algorithms are widely employed to solve motif finding problems. The present study proposes a novel initialization technique and model-shifting scheme for Monte-Carlo-based EM methods for motif finding. Two popular EM-based motif finding algorithms are compared to the proposed method, which offers improved motif prediction accuracy on a synthetic dataset and a true biological dataset.
Qualitative Analysis of Collagen Fibers in Oral Submucous Fibrosis using Picrosirius Red Stain and Polarising Microscope.

INTRODUCTION Oral Submucous Fibrosis (OSMF) is an oral potentially malignant condition caused predominantly by areca nut chewing. Early recognition with accurate staging of the disease and appropriate treatment planning is of utmost importance to prevent the malignant transformation and to improve the quality of life of the patient. Picrosirius red stain is specific for collagen and enhances its birefringence under polarising light producing different colours in different stages of the disease. AIM To compare the clinical and functional staging with histopathologic staging methods used to assess the severity of OSMF and to perform a qualitative analysis of the collagen fibres in various histopathologic stages of OSMF using picrosirius red stain and polarising microscope. MATERIALS AND METHODS It is a retrospective study done on archival samples. The study sample included a total of 30 cases which was divided into two groups. Group I comprised of 20 OSMF samples and Group II comprised of 10 normal tissue samples. Clinical, functional and histopathological staging was performed for all OSMF samples. Comparative analysis between clinical and functional stages with the histopathological staging was done using chi square test. Picrosirius red- stained sections of OSMF were analysed using polarising microscopy to evaluate the qualitative changes in the collagen fibers. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS USED Descriptive data which includes frequency and percentages were calculated for each group. Categorical data were analysed by chi-square test. A p-value of 0.05 or less was considered statistically significant. RESULTS Comparative analysis between clinical and functional stages with the histopathological staging revealed a significant correlation (p < 0.05) between the functional and histopathological stage. Enhanced birefringence of the collagen fibers due to picrosirius red stain yielded characteristic prominent polarising colours in different stages of OSMF. CONCLUSION Comparison of functional staging with histopathologic grading is more reliable in determining the severity of the disease than the clinical staging. Production of characteristic polarising colours by various stages of picrosirius red stained sections of OSMF substantiates the use of picrosirius red stain and polarising microscope as a tool in assessing the severity of this condition thereby aiding in better treatment planning.
Electrostatic high-velocity solid lubricant machining system for performance improvement of turning Ti–6Al–4V alloy

In any machining operation, a major division of energy is converted into heat which creates detrimental effects on tool wear, tool life and surface quality of machined work material. Effective cooling/lubrication in the machining zone is essential to improve friction and temperatures by efficient heat dissipation which increases tool life and surface quality. But adverse health effects caused by use of flood cooling are drawing manufacturers’ attention to develop methods for controlling occupational exposure to cutting fluids. In demanding the improvement of productivity and product quality of machining, use of solid lubricant thin film was suggested as one of the necessary alternative machining techniques to apply lubricants effectively to the high-temperature zone. There is a general concern in the machining process in terms of applying lubricants effectively to the machining zone. Therefore, this research work contributes to the development of a novel approach to apply lubricants effectively to the rake face and flank face of the cutting tool without polluting the environment. Electrostatic high-velocity solid lubricant assisted machining is a novel technique used in the machining process with a very low flow rate (1–20 mL/h) to enhance the process performance of turning difficult-to-cut materials. The performance of electrostatic high-velocity solid lubricant technique is studied in comparison to minimum quantity solid lubricant, minimum quantity lubricant and dry and wet (flood cooling) to assess the performance considering surface roughness, cutting force and tool wear as performance indices. The experimental results revealed that electrostatic high-velocity solid lubricant with MoS2 solid lubricant at low volume and constant flow rate has observed high potential to apply lubricants effectively in the machining zone when compared with the considered environmental conditions. This work is expected to form a scientific basis toward developing electrostatic high-velocity solid lubricant technique for reducing the manufacturing impact in the machining of aerospace components such as Ti–6Al–4V alloy in terms of both machinability and environmental perspectives.
The treatment of hepatoblastoma: Its evolution and the current status as per the SIOPEL trials

Aim of the Review: To describe the significant improvement in the diagnosis, treatment and outcome of children diagnosed with hepatoblastoma (HB) that has occurred in the past four decades. Recent findings are mainly focused on lessons learned from the experiences of the Childhood Liver Tumors Strategy Group (SIOPEL). Important milestones were the risk stratification of HB that allowed to tailor down therapy for standard-risk HB and intensify treatment for high-risk HB. The multi-institutional international cooperative SIOPEL trials are reviewed and current treatment guidelines are given. Intensified cooperation between the SIOPEL and the Children's Oncology Group (COG) and the national study groups from Germany (GPOH) and Japan (JPLT) led to the acceptance and use of one staging system (PRETEXT) and the formation of a single robust database containing data of 1605 HB patients. This will allow analysis with enough statistical power of treatment directing factors that will form one of the bases of the next-generation clinical trial that is currently designed by all four collaborating study groups. Summary: Successive SIOPEL trials and increasing international collaboration have improved survival rates of patients with HB through risk stratification, advances in chemotherapy and increased complete resection rates including liver transplantation as a surgical option.
New Perspectives in Turbulence: Scaling Laws, Asymptotics, and Intermittency

Intermittency, a basic property of fully developed turbulent flow, decreases with growing viscosity; therefore classical relationships obtained in the limit of vanishing viscosity must be corrected when the Reynolds number is finite but large. These corrections are the main subject of the present paper. They lead to a new scaling law for wall-bounded turbulence, which is of key importance in engineering, and to a reinterpretation of the Kolmogorov--Obukhov scaling for the local structure of turbulence, which has been of paramount interest in both theory and applications. The background of these results is reviewed, in similarity methods, in the statistical theory of vortex motion, and in intermediate asymptotics, and relevant experimental data are summarized.
Poly(ADP-ribose)polymerase inhibition counteracts cataract formation and early retinal changes in streptozotocin-diabetic rats.

PURPOSE This study evaluated the role for poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) in diabetes-induced cataractogenesis and early retinal changes. METHODS Control and streptozotocin (STZ)-diabetic rats were treated with or without the PARP inhibitors 1,5-isoquinolinediol (ISO; 3 mg kg(-1) d(-1) intraperitoneally) and 10-(4-methyl-piperazin-1-ylmethyl)-2H-7-oxa-1,2-diaza-benzo[de]anthracen-3-1 (GPI-15427, 30 mg kg(-1) d(-1) orally) for 10 weeks after the first 2 weeks without treatment. Lens clarity was evaluated by indirect ophthalmoscopy and slit lamp examination, and retinal changes were evaluated by immunohistochemistry and Western blot analysis. In in vitro studies, cultured human lens epithelial cells and bovine retinal pericytes and endothelial cells were exposed to high glucose or palmitate. RESULTS PARP is expressed in lens, and poly(ADP-ribosyl)ated proteins are primarily localized in the 38- to 87-kDa range of the protein spectrum, with several minor bands at 17 to 38 kDa. The 38- to 87-kDa and the 17- to 38-kDa poly(ADP-ribosyl)ated protein expression increased by 74% and 275%, respectively, after 4 weeks of diabetes and by approximately 65% early after exposure of lens epithelial cells to 30 mM glucose. Both PARP inhibitors delayed, but did not prevent, the formation of diabetic cataract. The number of TUNEL-positive nuclei in flatmounted retinas increased approximately 4-fold in STZ diabetic rats, and this increase was prevented by ISO and GPI-15427. Both PARP inhibitors reduced diabetes-induced retinal oxidative-nitrosative and endoplasmic reticulum stress and glial activation. GPI-15427 (20 microM) prevented oxidative-nitrosative stress and cell death in palmitate-exposed pericytes and endothelial cells. CONCLUSIONS PARP activation is implicated in the formation of diabetic cataract and in early retinal changes. These findings provide a rationale for the development of PARP inhibitors for the prevention of diabetic ocular complications.