Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Study of Brain Networks Associated with Swallowing Using Graph-Theoretical Approaches

Functional connectivity between brain regions during swallowing tasks is still not well understood. Understanding these complex interactions is of great interest from both a scientific and a clinical perspective. In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was utilized to study brain functional networks during voluntary saliva swallowing in twenty-two adult healthy subjects (all females, years of age). To construct these functional connections, we computed mean partial correlation matrices over ninety brain regions for each participant. Two regions were determined to be functionally connected if their correlation was above a certain threshold. These correlation matrices were then analyzed using graph-theoretical approaches. In particular, we considered several network measures for the whole brain and for swallowing-related brain regions. The results have shown that significant pairwise functional connections were, mostly, either local and intra-hemispheric or symmetrically inter-hemispheric. Furthermore, we showed that all human brain functional network, although varying in some degree, had typical small-world properties as compared to regular networks and random networks. These properties allow information transfer within the network at a relatively high efficiency. Swallowing-related brain regions also had higher values for some of the network measures in comparison to when these measures were calculated for the whole brain. The current results warrant further investigation of graph-theoretical approaches as a potential tool for understanding the neural basis of dysphagia.
Gender differences in care home admission risk: partner's age explains the higher risk for women.

BACKGROUND older women have a higher risk of care home admission than men, this difference remains even after accounting for variations in health. A likely reason for this is the difference in social support provided by spouses. Older men may provide less care for their wives than women do for their husbands. OBJECTIVES this study assessed two competing explanations for this. First, older men are less willing to undertake traditionally feminine caring roles; secondly, older men are less physically able to provide care. DESIGN the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS), a representative (c28%) sample of the Northern Ireland population. FINDINGS a total of 20,830 couples were followed over 6 years, with 415 care home admissions among NILS cohort members. Women had a higher admission risk after controlling for cohort members' age and health; however, there was no gender difference after adjusting for partner's age. CONCLUSION these results suggest that advanced age and physical frailty explain why men provide less care for their partners than women do; rather than being unwilling to undertake a caring role. The narrowing gap in life expectancy between men and women may have an effect on the future demand for formal care.
AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON OF TECHNIQUES FOR HANDLING INCOMPLETE DATA USING DECISION TREES

Increasing the awareness of how incomplete data affects learning and classification accuracy has led to increasing numbers of missing data techniques. This article investigates the robustness and accuracy of seven popular techniques for tolerating incomplete training and test data for different patterns of missing data—different proportions and mechanisms of missing data on resulting tree-based models. The seven missing data techniques were compared by artificially simulating different proportions, patterns, and mechanisms of missing data using 21 complete datasets (i.e., with no missing values) obtained from the University of California, Irvine repository of machine-learning databases (Blake and Merz, 1998). A four-way repeated measures design was employed to analyze the data. The simulation results suggest important differences. All methods have their strengths and weaknesses. However, listwise deletion is substantially inferior to the other six techniques, while multiple imputation, that utilizes the expectation maximization algorithm, represents a superior approach to handling incomplete data. Decision tree single imputation and surrogate variables splitting are more severely impacted by missing values distributed among all attributes compared to when they are only on a single attribute. Otherwise, the imputation—versus model-based imputation procedures gave—reasonably good results although some discrepancies remained. Different techniques for addressing missing values when using decision trees can give substantially diverse results, and must be carefully considered to protect against biases and spurious findings. Multiple imputation should always be used, especially if the data contain many missing values. If few values are missing, any of the missing data techniques might be considered. The choice of technique should be guided by the proportion, pattern, and mechanisms of missing data, especially the latter two. However, the use of older techniques like listwise deletion and mean or mode single imputation is no longer justifiable given the accessibility and ease of use of more advanced techniques, such as multiple imputation and supervised learning imputation.
Near-infrared surface photometry of early-type spiral galaxies - I. Bulge and disk decomposition

We present near-infrared (NIR) surface pho- tometry of a sample of 14 early-type spirals with observed rotation curves. In this rst paper, we report the results of two-dimensional parametric and non-parametric decom- positions to separate the bulge and disk components; the parametric bulge is modeled with a generalized exponen- tial law of integer index n, and the disk with a simple exponential. We nd that the derived bulge parameters, for a given galaxy, vary systematically with the bulge shape index n. The mean early-type bulge has a best- t n = 2.6, and 80% of the sample has best n of 2 or 3. Bulges are rarely spherical; the median bulge intrinsic el- lipticity is 0.33. The median early-type disk has (J K)d more than 0.1 mag bluer than the bulge, and a NIR disk surface brightness more than 1 mag arcsec 2 brighter than later-type disks. Our data are consistent with the well-established correlation of both bulge and disk surface brightness with physical scale length, and we note that the location of bulges within this projection of the fun- damental plane depends on their shape index n. In agree- ment with previous work, the ratios of bulge and disk scale lengths are consistent with a constant value re=rd =0 . 3; however, such value again depends on the bulge index n, implying that claims for a scale-free Hubble sequence may be premature.
Effects of L-amino Acids on Human Peripheral Neutrophil Granulocyte Activation

Objective: The objective was to investigate the early (20 minutes) effects of 21 L-amino acids on the activation of human neutrophils and to determine in healthy individuals the effects of a meal on the 1) number and relative luminescence unit (RLU) of peripheral neutrophils, 2) serum glutamate and glucose levels and 3) mTOR signaling network. Methods: The RLU of neutrophils stimulated by Ca 2+ ionophor (CaI) and phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) following amino acid supplementation (3 x 10 -4 M) or after consuming a meal was determined. L-glutamate was measured by HPLC. Results: All amino acids resulted in significant inhibitions of neutrophil RLU, except for arginine, which stimulated neutrophils. The ratios of amino acid induced inhibition were significantly higher in the cells stimulated by PMA than by CaI. The consumption of a meal resulted in a significant serum glutamate elevation compared to baseline (2.3 versus 0.9 x10 -4 M) 90 minutes after ingestion of the meal. It was independent of the body mass index and returned near fasting levels after 150 minutes. The number of neutrophils was significantly elevated 90 minutes after the meal but the PMA induced RLU was significantly decreased. Conclusion: Our ex vivo and in vivo results suggest that the L-amino acids, independent of their metabolic significance, may continuosly and quickly modify the activity of human peripheral neutrophils, and also the outcome of various immunologic reactions. The activation of the mTORC1 complex likely involves a transient impairment in the function of mTORC2 complex in these processes.
Risk of herpes zoster in children with asthma

BACKGROUND There is literature that indicates the association of asthma with an increased risk of common and serious microbial infections. We recently reported an increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, e.g., herpes zoster (HZ) among children with asthma, defined by predetermined asthma criteria. Little is known about whether this association is persistent if the asthma status is defined by different asthma criteria, e.g., the Asthma Predictive Index, given the heterogeneity of asthma. OBJECTIVE To assess the consistency of the association between asthma and the risk of HZ in children. METHODS This is a population-based case-control study based on all pediatric patients with HZ between 1996 and 2001 in Olmsted County, Minnesota, and 1:1 age- and sex-matched controls without a history of HZ who were enrolled in our previous study. The original Asthma Predictive Index criteria was operationalized by two or more wheezing episodes in a year for the first 3 years of life plus one of the major (physician-diagnosed asthma for a parent or physician-diagnosed eczema for a patient) or two of the minor criteria (physician-diagnosed allergic rhinitis for a patient, wheezing apart from cold, or eosinophilia [≥4%]). Data were fit to traditional logistic regression models to calculate odds ratios and 95% confident intervals. RESULTS Of the original cohort (n = 554), 95 (17%) did not meet the enrollment criteria for this study, which left 459. Of the 221 patients, 53% were female, with a mean (standard deviation) age of 9.7 ± 4.2 years. The risk of HZ was increased in children with asthma defined by the API controlling for a varicella vaccine history and atopic status (adjusted odds ratio 2.56 [95% confidence interval, 1.08-6.56]). CONCLUSIONS The association between asthma and increased risk of HZ in children and adolescents is consistent, independent of asthma definitions. Asthma might be an important clinical condition to be considered in HZ vaccine studies.
Interleukin-10 in the Pathophysiology of Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Increased Serum Concentrations During the Recovery Phase

Using a specific enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, IL-10 concentrations were measured in serum from 62 patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), 43 with Crohn's disease (CD), 25 with other colitides, and 44 normal control subjects. Serum IL-10 concentrations were increased in patients with active UC but not in those with active CD when compared with normal control subjects. A time course study showed that in patients with UC and CD, serum concentrations of IL-6 and C-reactive protein increased during the acute phase and returned to normal as patients go into remission. Notably, serum IL-10 concentrations increased during the phase of disease resolution and declined thereafter regardless of the treatment modality. Gel filtration analysis indicated that IL-10 circulated predominantly as a dimer. In conclusion, this study shows that serum IL-10 is increased during disease recovery in patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and may be a helpful marker in monitoring disease status.
Dimensions of students’ psychosocial well-being and their measurement: Validation of a students’ Psychosocial Well Being Inventory

This paper presents findings from a validation study of a measurement instrument for the dimensions of students’ psychosocial well-being. Researches to date suggest many separate but related dimensions of psychosocial well-being. In the current study, psychosocial well-being is considered to have four dimensions: subjective well-being related to every day’s events, subjective well-being related to faculty events, psychological well-being and social well-being. Diener’s (1985) and Seligman’s (2002) models of subjective well-being and Ryff’s (1995) and Keyes’ (1998) models of psychological and social well-being served as the conceptual basis for the development of this instrument. The sample for the validation study consisted of 449 university students at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest, Romania. Participants completed seven self-report questionnaires that related to the individual’s positive functioning in personal life and in society, including the Psychosocial Well Being Inventory (PSWBI). The validation study consisted of establishing the psychometric properties, factorial structure of the construct, and convergent and divergent validity of the instrument. Results show that PSWBI is a valid instrument, performing at least as well as popular measures of overall well-being but also specifying its dimensions.
One-Dimensional Front Tracking Based on High Resolution Wave Propagation Methods

A simple approach to shock tracking is presented in conjunction with conservative high resolution shock-capturing methods in one space dimension. An underlying uniform grid is used with additional grid interfaces introduced at appropriate points for tracked shocks. Conservative high resolution methods based on the large time step wave propagation approach are used on the resulting nonuniform grid. This method is stable even if some of the small cells created by the tracked interface are orders of magnitude smaller than the regular cells used to determine the time step. A fractional step method is used to handle source terms. Several calculations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, including an unstable detonation wave calculation where mesh refinement in the reaction zone is required in addition to shock tracking. Stability and accuracy results of the method are also shown for some sample problems. The basic ideas described here can be extended to two space dimensions, as will be.
A Formal Characterization of Uniform Peer Sampling Based on View Shuffling

Consider a group of peers, an ideal random peer sampling service should return a peer, which is an unbiased independent random sample of the group. This paper focuses on peer sampling service based on view shuffling (aka gossip-based peer sampling), where each peer is equipped with a local view of size c. This view should correspond to a uniform random sample of size c of the whole system in order to implement correctly a uniform peer sampling service. To this aim, pairs of peers regularly and continuously swap a part of their local views (shuffling operation). The paper provides a proof that (i) starting from any non-uniform distribution of peers in the peers’ local views, after a sequence of pairwise shuffle operations, each local view eventually represents a uniform sample of size c and (ii) once previous property holds, any successive sequence of shuffle operations does not modify this uniformity property. This paper also presents some numerical results concerning the speed of convergence to uniform samples of the local views.
Engaging with Environmental Stakeholders: Routes to Building Environmental Capabilities in the Context of the Low Carbon Economy

The transition to a low carbon economy demands new strategies to enable organizations to take advantage of the potential for “green” growth. An organization's environmental stakeholders can provide opportunities for growth and support the success of its low carbon strategies, as well as potentially acting as a constraint on new initiatives. Building environmental capabilities through engagement with environmental stakeholders is conceptualized as an important aspect for the success of organizational low carbon strategies. We examine capability building across a range of sectors affected by the sustainability agenda, including construction, rail, water, and health care. We identify a number of emergent environmental stakeholders and explore their engagement with the development of environmental capabilities in the context of the transition toward a low carbon economy. Our conceptual framework offers a categorization of environmental stakeholders based on their position in relation to a focal organization and the potential for the development of environmental capabilities.
Religious (de)politicisation in Uganda’s 2016 elections

ABSTRACT Religion has influenced Ugandan politics ever since colonial times. While the interrelations of religion and politics have altered since the coming to power of president Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), religion continues to influence Ugandan public culture and formal politics in important ways. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Kampala and Acholi, as well as analysis of media reporting and discussions in social media, this article focuses on the role of religious leaders during Uganda’s 2016 parliamentary and presidential elections. We argue that the striking differences between Ugandan clerics’ teaching on politics relate in part to genuine differences in religious beliefs, but also to patronage, intimidation, and ethnicity, and to the strategic calculations religious leaders make about how best to affect change in a constricted political environment. In discussion with previous research on religion and politics in Africa, and utilising analytical concepts from the study of publics, the article proposes a model of religious (de)politicisation, whereby both the politicising and depoliticising effects of religion are acknowledged. To do so, the analysis distinguishes between NGO-ised and enchanted planes of religion, and shows that on both planes, religion contributed simultaneously to enhancing and diminishing the space for public debate in election-time Uganda. While many religious leaders actively or silently supported the incumbent regime, religious leaders also took vocal public stands, fostered political action, and catered for vernacular imaginaries of political critique, by so doing expanding the space of public debate. However, by performing public debate that remained vague on crucial issues, and by promoting a religious narrative of peace, religious leaders participated in the enactment of a façade of political debate, in so doing legitimising the autocratic facets of Museveni’s hybrid regime. Acknowledging religion as an important constituent of public culture contributes to more nuanced understandings of election dynamics in Eastern Africa.
Addressing Violent Intergroup Conflict from the Bottom Up

How might interventions that engage ordinary citizens in settings of violent conflict affect broader conflict dynamics? Given the volume of resources committed every year to citizen-oriented programs that attempt to promote peace, this is an important question. We develop a framework to analyze processes through which individual-level interventions could mitigate violent conflict escalation more broadly. Individual-level interventions may increase positive feelings toward the outgroup, as well as psychological, social, and material resources among participants. These have the potential to influence behaviors such as policing of the ingroup, public advocacy, and political action that can contribute to peace. Yet, the effectiveness of interventions to influence the conflict is moderated by contextual factors like groups’ access to material resources, their positions in society, and political institutions. We use this analytical framework to assess evidence from recent intervention studies. We find that the current evidence base is quite small, does not cover the diversity of relevant contexts, and gives too little attention to resources and capacities that enable people to engage in conflict mitigation behaviors. Researchers and policy makers should go beyond thinking only about
Australian School Student Aspirations for Military Careers

Modern military organizations are making a concerted effort to recruit a more diverse range of people, with the role of women in the military at the forefront of debate. In Australia, in response to the changing role of the military and with the aim of positioning the military as an “employer of choice” for women, females are targeted as early as high school. Using data from a study of 6,492 Australian school students in Years 3–12, we examine student aspirations for military careers. Student aspirations were influenced by traditional perceptions of the military as a primarily masculine enterprise. Key reasons for student interest included dominant notions of masculinity, familial military experience, career options, and enlistment benefits. We argue that current views of the military among school children signal the need to shift such perceptions to appeal to a wider range of people and attract a more diverse workforce.
Estimating Risky Behavior with Multiple-Item Risk Measures

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how they robustly explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex ante. To close this knowledge gap, greater diversification across risk measures is helpful. We do, indeed, find that performance increases considerably if single-item risk measures are combined to form multiple-item risk measures. They tend to improve results the more single-item measures they contain and if these single-item risk measures have different framings. Interestingly, survey items perform as well as incentivized experimental items in explaining risky behavior.
A Contract-Based Methodology for Aircraft Electric Power System Design

In an aircraft electric power system, one or more supervisory control units actuate a set of electromechanical switches to dynamically distribute power from generators to loads, while satisfying safety, reliability, and real-time performance requirements. To reduce expensive redesign steps, this control problem is generally addressed by minor incremental changes on top of consolidated solutions. A more systematic approach is hindered by a lack of rigorous design methodologies that allow estimating the impact of earlier design decisions on the final implementation. To achieve an optimal implementation that satisfies a set of requirements, we propose a platform-based methodology for electric power system design, which enables independent implementation of system topology (i.e., interconnection among elements) and control protocol by using a compositional approach. In our flow, design space exploration is carried out as a sequence of refinement steps from the initial specification toward a final implementation by mapping higher level behavioral and performance models into a set of either existing or virtual library components at the lower level of abstraction. Specifications are first expressed using the formalisms of linear temporal logic, signal temporal logic, and arithmetic constraints on Boolean variables. To reason about different requirements, we use specialized analysis and synthesis frameworks and formulate assume guarantee contracts at the articulation points in the design flow. We show the effectiveness of our approach on a proof-of-concept electric power system design.