Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects and Changes on Voice After Rhinoplasty: A Long-Term Report

Introduction: Vocal changes after rhinoplasty have been poorly investigated, although this surgical procedure is nowadays one of the most requested. The production of voice largely depends on the anatomy and the size of the pyramid and the nasal cavity. The authors report 51 cases of both closed and open rhinoplasty and propose a 2-year report to analyze potential effective changes on voice. Materials and Methods: Fifty-one patients were enrolled and evaluated from September of 2012 to January of 2018. All patients were studied before and 2 years after surgery. Vocal changes were assessed with an objective and a subjective evaluation. The first one allowed to perform the measurement of the intensity and frequency of vowel sound (“a”) and nasal consonant sounds (“n” and “m”). For the subjective evaluation, our modified version of Voice Handicap Index Score allowed us to evaluate every single characteristic of the personal perception of voice. Results: The objective evaluation showed an increased frequency of production of the consonant sounds in 62% of cases and an increased frequency of production of the vowel sound in 68% of cases. The subjective evaluation allowed us to notice significant changes after surgery (P = .044). No significant differences were noticed between closed and open approach. Conclusion: Reduction rhinoplasty technique proved to induce several alterations on vocal pattern. The surgeon should always inform patients about the potential effects on the voice, particularly when such changes may produce influences on the working life.
Endothelin-1–Mediated Alteration of Metallothionein and Trace Metals in the Liver and Kidneys of Chronically Diabetic Rats

In the present study, the role of endothelin-1 (ET-1) on alterations of hepatic and renal metallothionein (MT) and trace metals (Zn, Cu, and Fe) were investigated in streptozotocin (STZ)- induced diabetic rats. Diabetic rats, age- and sex-matched controls, as well as control and diabetic animals on a dual ETA/ETB receptor blocker, bosentan, were investigated after 6 months of follow-up. MT was measured by cadmium-heme assay. Metals were measured by atomic absorption spectrometer. ET-1 mRNA was analyzed by reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technique. Hepatic and renal ET-1 mRNA was increased in diabetic rats as compared to control rats, along with an increase in both hepatic and renal MT proteins. The increased hepatic MT protein level was associated with decreases in hepatic Cu and Fe, whereas increased renal MT was associated with increases in renal Cu and Fe accumulation. Zn levels were unaltered in both organs in diabetic rats. Bosentan treatment partially prevented the increase in MT levels in both liver and kidney, along with reduced serum creatinine and increased urinary creatinine levels. Further bosentan treatment corrected the increased Cu and Fe levels in the kidney in diabetic rats, but reduced hepatic Cu and Fe levels. No significant effects of bosentan treatment on nondiabetic rats were observed. The data suggest that the possible effects of ET antagonism in diabetes may be mediated via changes in MT and trace metals.
The NESPOLE! voIP multilingual corpora in tourism and medical domains

In this paper we present the multilingual VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol networks) corpora collected for the second showcase of the Nespole! project in the tourism and medical domains. The corpora comprise over 20 hours of human-tohuman monolingual dialogues in English, French, German and Italian: 66 dialogues in the tourism domain and 49 in the medical domain. We describe in detail the data collection (technical set-up, scenarios for each domain, recording procedure and data transcription), as well as statistically illustrated corpora and a preliminary data analysis.
An Experimental Investigation of Electoral Delegation and the Provision of Public Goods

How effectively do democratic institutions provide public goods? Despite the incentives an elected leader has to free ride or impose majority tyranny, our experiment demonstrates that electoral delegation results in full provision of the public good. Analysis of the experimental data suggests that the result is primarily due to electoral selection: groups elect prosocial leaders and replace those who do not implement full contribution outcomes. However, we also observe outcomes in which a minimum winning coalition exploits the contributions of the remaining players. A second experiment demonstrates that when electoral delegation must be endogenously implemented, individuals voluntarily cede authority to an elected agent only when preplay communication is permitted. Our combined results demonstrate that democratic delegation helps groups overcome the free-rider problem and generally leads to outcomes that are often both efficient and equitable.
Short Communication Characterization of the functional requirements of West Nile virus membrane fusion

Flaviviruses infect their host cells by a membrane fusion reaction. In this study, we performed a functional analysis of the membrane fusion properties of West Nile virus (WNV) with liposomal target membranes. Membrane fusion was monitored continuously using a lipid mixing assay involving the fluorophore, pyrene. Fusion of WNV with liposomes occurred on the timescale of seconds and was strictly dependent on mildly acidic pH. Optimal fusion kinetics were observed at pH 6.3, the threshold for fusion being pH 6.9. Preincubation of the virus alone at pH 6.3 resulted in a rapid loss of fusion capacity. WNV fusion activity is strongly promoted by the presence of cholesterol in the target membrane. Furthermore, we provide direct evidence that cleavage of prM to M is a requirement for fusion activity of WNV. West Nile virus (WNV) is a member of the genus Flavivirus which also includes dengue virus (DENV) and tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV). Flaviviruses infect cells via receptor-mediated endocytosis. In the acidic environment of the endosome, the viral envelope (E) glycoproteins undergo a series of orchestrated structural rearrangements, leading to fusion of the viral membrane with the endosomal membrane. Upon RNA replication and protein translation, prM/E-containing immature particles are formed by the budding of newly formed nucleocapsids into the endoplasmic reticulum (Lindenbach & Rice, 2001). These particles mature during transport through the Golgi and trans-Golgi network and shortly before the final release of the virions prM is cleaved to M by the host cell protease furin. Furin cleavage is not very efficient, as a mixture of prM- and M-containing particles are secreted from infected cells (Wengler & Wengler, 1989). The flavivirus E-glycoprotein and alphavirus E1 glycoprotein are representatives of class II fusion proteins (Kielian & Rey, 2006). Class II fusion proteins share a similar architecture and undergo major structural rearrangements during their viral life cycle. For example, in the infected cell, class II fusion proteins are synthesized along with a
A Tree Kernel approach to Question and Answer Classification in Question Answering Systems

A critical step in Question Answering design is the definition of the models for question focus identification and answer extraction. In case of factoid questions, we can use a question classifier (trained according to a target taxonomy) and a named entity recognizer. Unfortunately, this latter cannot be applied to generate answers related to non-factoid questions. In this paper, we tackle such problem by designing classifiers of non-factoid answers. As the feature design for this learning task is very complex, we take advantage of tree kernels to generate large feature set from the syntactic parse trees of passages relevant to the target question. Such kernels encode syntactic and lexical information in Support Vector Machines which can decide if a sentence focuses on a target taxonomy subject. The experiments with SVMs on the TREC 10 dataset show that our approach is an interesting future research.
Effect of Different pH Values on the Compressive Strength of Calcium-Enriched Mixture Cement

Introduction: The aim of this study was to evaluate the compressive strength of calcium-enriched mixture (CEM) cement in contact with acidic, neutral and alkaline pH values. Methods and Materials: The cement was mixed according to the manufacturer’s instructions, it was then condensed into fourteen split molds with five 4×6 mm holes. The specimens were randomly divided into 7 groups (n=10) and were then exposed to environments with pH values of 4.4, 5.4, 6.4, 7.4, 8.4, 9.4 and 10.4 in an incubator at 37° C for 4 days. After removing the samples from the molds, cement pellets were compressed in a universal testing machine. The exact forces required for breaking of the samples were recorded. The data were analyzed with the Kruskal-Wallis and Dunn tests for individual and pairwise comparisons, respectively. The level of significance was set at 0.05. Results: The greatest (48.59±10.36) and the lowest (9.67±3.16) mean compressive strength values were observed after exposure to pH value of 9.4 and 7.4, respectively. Alkaline environment significantly increased the compressive strength of CEM cement compared to the control group. There was no significant difference between the pH values of 9.4 and 10.4 but significant differences were found between pH values of 9.4, 8.4 and 7.4. The acidic environment showed better results than the neutral environment, although the difference was not significant for the pH value of 6.4. Alkaline pH also showed significantly better results than acidic and neutral pH. Conclusion: The compressive strength of CEM cement improved in the presence of acidic and alkaline environments but alkaline environment showed the best results.
Fast and Robust Wrapper Method for $N$ -gram Feature Template Induction in Structured Prediction

<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram feature templates that consider consecutive contextual information comprise a family of important feature templates used in structured prediction. Some previous studies considered the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram feature selection problem but they focused on one or several types of features in certain tasks, e.g., consecutive words in a text categorization task. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust bottom-up wrapper method for automatically inducing <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram feature templates, which can induce any type of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram feature for any structured prediction task. According to the significance distribution for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram feature templates based on the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram and bias (offset), the proposed method first determines the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram that achieves the best tradeoff between the severity of the sparse data problem with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram feature templates and the richness of the corresponding contextual information, before combining the best <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-gram with lower-order gram templates in an extremely efficient manner. In addition, our method uses a template pair, i.e., the two symmetrical templates, rather than a template as the basic unit (i.e., including or excluding a template pair rather than a template). Thus, when the data in the training set change slightly, our method is robust to this fluctuation, thereby providing a more consistent induction result compared with the template-based method. The experimental results obtained for three tasks, i.e., Chinese word segmentation, named entity recognition, and text chunking, demonstrated the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed method.
GraphFrames: an integrated API for mixing graph and relational queries

Graph data is prevalent in many domains, but it has usually required specialized engines to analyze. This design is onerous for users and precludes optimization across complete workflows. We present GraphFrames, an integrated system that lets users combine graph algorithms, pattern matching and relational queries, and optimizes work across them. GraphFrames generalize the ideas in previous graph-on-RDBMS systems, such as GraphX and Vertexica, by letting the system materialize multiple views of the graph (not just the specific triplet views in these systems) and executing both iterative algorithms and pattern matching using joins. To make applications easy to write, GraphFrames provide a concise, declarative API based on the "data frame" concept in R that can be used for both interactive queries and standalone programs. Under this API, GraphFrames use a graph-aware join optimization algorithm across the whole computation that can select from the available views. We implement GraphFrames over Spark SQL, enabling parallel execution on Spark and integration with custom code. We find that GraphFrames make it easy to express end-to-end workflows and match or exceed the performance of standalone tools, while enabling optimizations across workflow steps that cannot occur in current systems. In addition, we show that GraphFrames' view abstraction makes it easy to further speed up interactive queries by registering the appropriate view, and that the combination of graph and relational data allows for other optimizations, such as attribute-aware partitioning.
Effects of Water Restriction on the Growth Performance, Carcass Characteristics and Organ Weights of Naked Neck and Ovambo Chickens of Southern Africa

In semi-arid areas of Southern Africa, dehydration can compromise the performance and welfare of local chickens, particularly during the growing period when confinement is curtailed and birds are left to scavenge for feed and water. The effect of water restriction on the growth performance was compared in Naked Neck (NNK) and Ovambo (OVB) chickens that are predominant in Southern Africa. A total of 54 eight-wk-old pullets each of NNK and OVB chickens with an initial average weight of 641±10 g/bird were randomly assigned to three water intake treatments, each having six birds for 8 wk. The water restriction treatments were ad libitum, 70% of ad libitum and 40% of ad libitum intake. Nine experimental pens with a floor space of 3.3 m2 per strain were used. The pens were housed in an open-sided house with cement floor deep littered with a 20 cm layer of untreated wood shavings. Feed was provided ad libitum. Average daily water intake (ADWI), BW at 16 weeks of age (FBW), ADG, ADFI, feed conversion ratio (FCR) and water to feed ratios (WFR) were determined. Ovambo chickens had superior (p<0.05) FBW, ADG and ADWI than NNK chickens. Body weight of birds at 16 weeks of age, ADG, ADFI, ADWI, and WFR declined progressively (p<0.05) with increasing severity of water restriction while FCR values increased (p<0.05) as the severity of water restriction increased. Naked Neck chickens had better FCR at the 40% of ad libitum water intake level than Ovambo chickens. The dressing percentage per bird was higher in water restricted birds than those on ad libitum water consumption, irrespective of strain. Heart weight was significantly lower in birds on 40% of ad libitum water intake than those on ad libitum and 70% of ad libitum water intake, respectively. In conclusion, NNK chickens performed better than OVB chickens under conditions of water restriction and would be ideal to raise for meat and egg production in locations where water shortages are a major challenge.
Talent identification and promotion programmes of Olympic athletes

Abstract The start of a new Olympic cycle offers a fresh chance for individuals and nations to excel at the highest level in sport. Most countries attempt to develop systematic structures to identify gifted athletes and to promote their development in a certain sport. However, forecasting years in advance the next generation of sporting experts and stimulating their development remains problematic. In this article, we discuss issues related to the identification and preparation of Olympic athletes. We provide field-based data suggesting that an earlier onset and a higher volume of discipline-specific training and competition, and an extended involvement in institutional talent promotion programmes, during adolescence need not necessarily be associated with greater success in senior international elite sport. Next, we consider some of the promising methods that have been (recently) presented in the literature and applied in the field. Finally, implications for talent identification and promotion and directions for future research are highlighted.
Allocation of Decision Rights and the Investment Strategy of Mutual Funds

The literature suggests that while decentralized decision making can allow for greater specialization in an organization, it heightens the cost of coordinating decisions. The mutual fund industry—in particular, sole- and team-managed balanced funds—provides an ideal setting to test the specialization versus coordination trade-off, as information on decision structures and fund actions is easily obtained. We show that sole-managed balanced funds, with centralized decision rights, exhibit significant market timing that requires reallocation across asset classes. However, consistent with coordination difficulties between managers specializing in particular asset classes, no market timing is evident in team-managed balanced funds. Team-managed funds exhibit greater returns from specialization, in the form of better security selection performance than sole-managed funds. These results hold cross-sectionally and for funds that switch management structures. The overall returns across different management structures are similar, indicating a market equilibrium. Investor flows reward market-timing performance for sole- but not team-managed funds.
Cotton bracts are adapted to a microenvironment of concentrated CO2 produced by rapid fruit respiration.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Elucidation of the mechanisms by which plants adapt to elevated CO2 is needed; however, most studies of the mechanisms investigated the response of plants adapted to current atmospheric CO2. The rapid respiration rate of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) fruits (bolls) produces a concentrated CO2 microenvironment around the bolls and bracts. It has been observed that the intercellular CO2 concentration of a whole fruit (bract and boll) ranges from 500 to 1300 µmol mol(-1) depending on the irradiance, even in ambient air. Arguably, this CO2 microenvironment has existed for at least 1·1 million years since the appearance of tetraploid cotton. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the mechanisms by which cotton bracts have adapted to elevated CO2 will indicate how plants will adapt to future increased atmospheric CO2 concentration. Specifically, it is hypothesized that with elevated CO2 the capacity to regenerate ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate (RuBP) will increase relative to RuBP carboxylation. METHODS To test this hypothesis, the morphological and physiological traits of bracts and leaves of cotton were measured, including stomatal density, gas exchange and protein contents. KEY RESULTS Compared with leaves, bracts showed significantly lower stomatal conductance which resulted in a significantly higher water use efficiency. Both gas exchange and protein content showed a significantly greater RuBP regeneration/RuBP carboxylation capacity ratio (Jmax/Vcmax) in bracts than in leaves. CONCLUSIONS These results agree with the theoretical prediction that adaptation of photosynthesis to elevated CO2 requires increased RuBP regeneration. Cotton bracts are readily available material for studying adaption to elevated CO2.
Controlling Cell-Free Gene Expression Behavior by Tuning Membrane Transport Properties

Controlled transport of molecules across boundaries for energy exchange, sensing, and communication is an essential step toward cell-like synthetic systems. This communication between the gene expression compartment and the external environment requires reaction chambers that are permeable to molecular species that influence expression. In lipid vesicle reaction chambers, species that support expression – from small ions to amino acids – may diffuse across membranes and amplify protein production. However, vesicle-to-vesicle variation in membrane permeability may lead to low total expression and high variability in this expression. We demonstrate a simple optical treatment method that greatly reduces the variability in membrane permeability. When transport across the membrane was essential for expression, this optical treatment increased mean expression level by ~6-fold and reduced expression variability by nearly two orders of magnitude. These results demonstrate membrane engineering may enable essential steps toward cell-like synthetic systems. The experimental platform described here provides a means of understanding controlled transport motifs in individual cells and groups of cells working cooperatively through cell-to-cell molecular signaling.
Investigating the relationship between self-reported oral health status, oral health-related behaviours and self-consciousness in Romania.

PURPOSE The aim of the present study was to investigate whether self-consciousness, self-reported oral health status and oral-health-related behaviours were associated. MATERIAL AND METHODS The present study sample consisted of 253 first year medical students in Romania. The questionnaire included information about socio-demographic factors, behavioural variables, self-reported oral health status and three self-consciousness subscales (Private Self-Consciousness, Public Self-Consciousness, and Social Anxiety). RESULTS Significant differences were found in Public Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety according to several variables: anxiety, stress, depression and current non-treated caries. There were significant differences in Social Anxiety for the variables of gender, smoking, perceived dental health, self-reported gum bleeding and reason for dental visit (p < 0.05). A significant difference was found in Public Self-Consciousness for the reason for dental visits (p < 0.05). Total Self-Consciousness is correlated with anxiety, stress, depression, current non-treated caries, gingival bleeding and reason for dental visit. Oral health behaviours such as tooth brushing, flossing, mouth washing and last dental visit were not influenced by each of the self-consciousness subscales. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that self-consciousness might be a psychosocial risk marker that influences self-reported oral health status.