Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Cyclophosphamide on Hippocampal Cell Proliferation and Spatial Working Memory in Rat

Cyclophosphamide (CP) is a chemotherapy used in combinations that are associated with cognitive impairment. In the present study male Lister-hooded rats (n = 12) were used to investigate the effects of chronic administration of CP (30mg/kg, 7 i.v. doses, or an equivalent volume of saline) on performance in the novel location recognition (NLR) task and on the proliferation and survival of hippocampal cells. The survival of hippocampal cells dividing at the beginning of treatment was significantly reduced by CP. However, no difference was seen between CP treated and control groups for the number of cells proliferating 7 days after the final injection and both groups performed equally well in the NLR task. These results indicate that the given dose of CP acutely reduces the survival of newly born hippocampal cells. However, it does not have a longer term effect on spatial working memory or hippocampal proliferation, suggesting that CP is less neurotoxic than other chemotherapies with which it is used in combination.
Experiencing the Elicitation of User Requirements and Recording them in Use Case Diagrams through Role-Play

This paper describes a role-play exercise used in a second-year tertiary Systems Analysis and Design course, and the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the students' responses to a survey that solicited their perceptions of that role-play experience. The role-play involved students in eliciting user requirements from customers during a Joint Application Development (JAD) session, thus simulating a common industry practice. Each JAD team had to interact to resolve conflicting customer requirements and record in IBM[R] Rational[R] Rose[R] the use cases necessary for a software solution. Completed diagrams were presented to the class using SynchronEyes technology, for review and discussion. The effectiveness of the role-play method was confirmed by students' perceptions collected in the survey following the exercise. The goal of the survey was to discover if students respond positively to learning about JAD, and use case diagrams, through role-play, and if they believe that they have improved their knowledge as a result of that experience. Student responses showed enthusiasm for experiential learning in the form of role-play and belief that learning had occurred. After experiencing the role-plays, students were also able to identify some of the limitations in the use of use cases, thus highlighting aspects that would require their future attention.
The structural basis of the increase in isometric force production with temperature in frog skeletal muscle

X‐ray diffraction patterns were recorded from isolated single fibres of frog skeletal muscle during isometric contraction at temperatures between 0 and 17°C. Isometric force was 43 ± 2% (mean ±s.e.m., n= 10) higher at 17°C than 0°C. The intensity of the first actin layer line increased by 57 ± 18% (n= 5), and the ratio of the intensities of the equatorial 1,1 and 1,0 reflections by 20 ± 7% (n= 10), signalling radial or azimuthal motions of the myosin head domains. The M3 X‐ray reflection from the axial repeat of the heads along the filaments was 27 ± 4% more intense at 17°C, suggesting that the heads became more perpendicular to the filaments. The ratio of the intensities of the higher and lower angle peaks of the M3 reflection (RM3) was 0.93 ± 0.02 (n= 5) at 0°C and 0.77 ± 0.02 at 17°C. These peaks are due to interference between the two halves of each myosin filament, and the RM3 decrease shows that heads move towards the midpoint of the myosin filament at the higher temperature. Calculations based on a crystallographic model of the heads indicated that the observed RM3 change corresponds to tilting of their light‐chain domains by 9 deg, producing an axial displacement of 1.4 nm, which is equal to that required to strain the actin and myosin filaments under the increased force. We conclude that the higher force generated by skeletal muscle at higher temperature can be accounted for by axial tilting of the myosin heads.
Controllability and Observability of Grid Graphs via Reduction and Symmetries

In this paper, we investigate the controllability and observability properties of a family of linear dynamical systems, whose structure is induced by the Laplacian of a grid graph. This analysis is motivated by several applications in network control and estimation, quantum computation and discretization of partial differential equations. Specifically, we characterize the structure of the grid eigenvectors by means of suitable decompositions of the graph. For each eigenvalue, based on its multiplicity and on suitable symmetries of the corresponding eigenvectors, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions to characterize all and only the nodes from which the induced dynamical system is controllable (observable). We discuss the proposed criteria and show, through suitable examples, how such criteria reduce the complexity of the controllability (respectively, observability) analysis of the grid.
Cytokine patterns in cancer patients: A review of the correlation between interleukin 6 and prognosis

ABSTRACT Objective: In tumor patients, IL-6 appears to be one component of a consistent cancer-associated cytokine network resulting in both a systemic immune stimulation and a microenvironment of cancer-induced immune suppression that ultimately protects the cancer cells. IL-6 has been associated with prognosis in cancer patients, but so far a systemical analysis has not been carried out. Methods: The present meta-analysis studies the relation between IL-6 serum levels and the prognosis of cancer patients in the available clinical literature of 100 articles published between 1993 and 2013 comprising 11,583 patients. Results: The IL-6 serum level was described as significantly correlating with survival in 82/101 series comprising 85.6% of patients (9917/11,583) with 23 different cancer types. A total of 64 studies dichotomized patient cohorts according to various cut-off IL-6 serum levels: in 59/64 of these series corresponding to 94.5% of the reported patients (7694/8142) significant correlations between IL-6 serum level and survival were seen. The median survival of cancer patients had been determined above various cut-off levels of serum IL-6 in 24 dichotomized studies (26 cohorts). There was a highly significant inverse correlation between median survival of the cohorts with IL-6 serum level above cut-off (1272 patients) and their corresponding IL-6 cut-off values (Spearman R -0,48 p= < 0.001) following a linear regression when both parameters were log-transformed (p < 0.001). A significant correlation between increasing serum IL-6 and tumor stage or metastases was described in 39/44 studies and 91% of published patients (4221/4636) where clinical parameters had been specified. Conclusions: Closely associated with the patient's clinical condition and independent of the cancer histology, the increased IL-6 serum level uniformly appears to correlate with survival as paraneoplastic condition in later cancer stages independent of the cancer type. Modifications of this paraneoplastic immune reaction may offer new therapeutic options in cancer.
Treatment of severe diabetic hypoglycemia with glucagon: an underutilized therapeutic approach

Tight glycemic control is important in reducing and delaying vascular complications in type 1 and 2 diabetes patients; however, the benefits achieved through strict metabolic control are counterbalanced by an increased risk of hypoglycemia. Glucagon is an effective therapy for treating severe hypoglycemia. Available as an emergency kit, glucagon is an essential tool for rapid response, but remains underappreciated and underused. This article reviews the role of glucagon in treating severe hypoglycemia and discusses the need for better education on glucagon for people with diabetes and their caregivers in order to alleviate fears of hypoglycemia and of administering glucagon in the event of an emergency.
An alternative front-end for the AT&T WATSON LV-CSR system

In previously published work, we have proposed a novel feature extraction algorithm, based on the Teager-Kaiser energy estimates, that approximates human auditory characteristics and that is more robust to sub-band noise than the mean-square estimates of standard MFCCs. We refer to the novel features as Teager energy cepstrum coefficients (TECC). Herein, we study the TECC performance under additive noise and suggest how to predict the noisy TECC deviations by estimating the subband SNR values. Then, we report on the effectiveness of the TECCs when they are used in the acoustic front-end of the state-of-the-art AT&T WATSON large-vocabulary recognizer. The TECC front-end is tested in the real-life voice-search Speak4it application for mobile devices. It provides a 6% relative word error rate reduction w.r. t. the MFCC front-end, using the same high performance language model, lexicon and acoustic model training.
COMPREHENDING HISTORICAL NARRATIVES: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CAUSAL LANGUAGE AND STUDENTS' MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS OF HISTORY

For over a century, history teachers throughout the United States have selected textbooks as the primary instructional material for their classrooms, while textbook authors and publishers have continuously produced a unified nation-state narrative that presents United States history as a series of objective historical facts for student memorization. Some researchers have suggested that teachers abandon the textbook in favor of primary sources. Yet, due in part to institutional, societal, and political pressures, classroom teachers continue to use these traditional texts. This study, a qualitative investigation of the causal and coherences structures in a sample textbook, a teacher's instructional explanation, and students' related summaries, seeks to determine the influence of a textbook passage and teacher's instructional explanation on students' mental representations of history: What causal and coherence structures are present in a sample US History textbook? To what extent do the causal and coherence structures of the textbook passage influence a teacher's mental representation of a historical event? To what extent do the causal and coherence structures of the textbook passage and the instructional explanation influence students' mental representations of a historical event? Using Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model and Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics, data from participants in a diverse setting east of Pittsburgh was analyzed, comparing the network chains and transitivity structures of the passage, the instructional explanation, and participants' summaries. Among this study's findings, students include information common to both the textbook passage and the teacher's instructional explanation in their summaries. Furthermore, the causal constructions identified in students' summaries are similar to those found in either the textbook or the instructional explanation, not often both. These findings have implications for teaching with textbooks, disciplinary literacy instruction, and the implementation of critical, historical thinking in K-12 history classrooms.
A Measure of Polarization on Social Media Networks Based on Community Boundaries

Polarization in social media networks is a fact in several scenarios such as political debates and other contexts such as same-sex marriage, abortion and gun control. Understanding and quantifying polarization is a long-term challenge to researchers from several areas, also being a key information for tasks such as opinion analysis. In this paper, we perform a systematic comparison between social networks that arise from both polarized and non-polarized contexts. This comparison shows that the traditional polarization metric -modularity - is not a direct measure of antagonism between groups, since non-polarized networks may be also divided into fairly modular communities. To bridge this conceptual gap, we propose a novel polarization metric based on the analysis of the boundary of a pair of (potentially polarized) communities, which better captures the notions of antagonism and polarization. We then characterize polarized and non-polarized social networks according to the concentration of high-degree nodes in the boundary of communities, and found that polarized networks tend to exhibit low concentration of popular nodes along the boundary. To demonstrate the usefulness of our polarization measures, we analyze opinions expressed on Twitter on the gun control issue in the United States, and conclude that our novel metrics help making sense of opinions expressed on online media.
Impact of obstructive airways disease on quality of life in older adults.

BACKGROUND: Obstructive airways disease adversely affects quality of life, although relationships between quality of life and lung function have been shown to be weak. The relationships between the results of a quality of life questionnaire, spirometric tests, and methacholine bronchial challenge were investigated in a population sample of middle aged and elderly people. METHODS: A random population sample of the white population of Central Manchester, UK were contacted by post. Respondents were invited to undergo bronchial challenge with methacholine (Newcastle dosimeter method) and to complete the St George's Respiratory Questionnaire. This self-completed questionnaire quantifies quality of life as three component scores, with higher scores indicating greater impairment of quality of life. RESULTS: Two hundred and twenty seven subjects aged 45-86 years completed the St George's Questionnaire and performed spirometric tests; 190 completed the methacholine challenge. All quality of life scores were higher in subjects with a forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1)/forced vital capacity (FVC) of < 65%, indicating impaired quality of life in subjects with airways obstruction. There was no relationship between quality of life and age. Multiple regression analysis showed independent relationships between quality of life scores and both baseline FEV1 and bronchial responsiveness. However, the amount of variation in quality of life attributable to variation in FEV1 or bronchial responsiveness was less than 10%. Subgroup analysis indicated that the quality of life score was independently associated with bronchial responsiveness and not FEV1 in subjects aged < 65 years, but with baseline FEV1 and not bronchial responsiveness in older subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Obstructive airways disease significantly impairs quality of life in adults. The reduction in quality of life in these patients is related to both baseline pulmonary function and non-specific bronchial responsiveness. The impact of airways obstruction on quality of life does not decrease with advancing age.
A unified approach to various techniques for the non-uniqueness of the inverse gravimetric problem and wavelet-based methods

This paper provides an overview of two topics. First, it presents a unified approach to various techniques addressing the non-uniqueness of the solution of the inverse gravimetric problem; alternative, simple proofs of some known results are also given. Second, it summarizes in a concise and self-contained way a particular multiscale regularization technique involving scaling functions and wavelets.
Online News Tracking for Ad-Hoc Information Needs

Following online news about a specific event can be a difficult task as new information is often scattered across web pages. In such cases, an up-to-date summary of the event would help to inform users and allow them to navigate to articles that are likely to contain relevant and novel details. We propose a three-step approach to online news tracking for ad-hoc information needs. First, we continuously cluster the titles of all incoming news articles. Then, we select the clusters that best fit a user's ad-hoc information need and identify salient sentences. Finally, we select sentences for the summary based on novelty and relevance to the information seen, without requiring an a-priori model of events of interest. We evaluate this approach using the 2013 TREC Temporal Summarization test set and show that compared to existing systems our approach retrieves news facts with significantly higher F-measure and Latency-Discounted Expected Gain.
The effect of abdominal fat parameters on percutaneous nephrolithotomy success.

INTRODUCTION Obesity has been suggested to lower the success of percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL). However, the relationship between abdominal fat parameters, such as visceral and subcutaneous abdominal adipose tissue, and PCNL success remained unclear. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effect of abdominal fat parameters on PCNL success. METHODS A total of 150 patients who underwent PCNL were retrospectively enrolled in this study. Group 1 consisted of patients who had no residual stones or residual stone fragments <3 mm in diameter while group 2 included patients with residual stone fragments ≥3 mm. PCNL procedure was defined as successful if all stones were eliminated or if there were residual stone fragments <3 mm in diameter confirmed by non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) performed postoperatively. Preoperative NCCT was used to determine abdominal fat parameters. RESULTS Group 1 consisted of 117 (78.0%) patients while group 2 included 33 (22.0%) patients. On univariate analysis, stone number, stone surface area (SSA), visceral fat area (VFA), abdominal circumference on computerized tomography (ACCT), and duration of procedure were found to be predictive factors affecting PCNL success. Logistic regression analysis revealed that ACCT and SSA were independent prognostic factors for PCNL success. CONCLUSIONS PCNL success was not affected by VFA, subcutaneous fat area (SFA) and body mass index (BMI) in our series. However, ACCT and SSA had negative associations with PCNL success. We conclude that both ACCT and SSA can be used as tools for predicting PCNL outcomes.
Monitoring and numerical modelling of riverbank erosion processes: a case study along the Cecina River (central Italy)

Riverbank retreat along a bend of the Cecina River, Tuscany (central Italy) was monitored across a near annual cycle (autumn 2003 to summer 2004) with the aim of better understanding the factors influencing bank changes and processes at a seasonal scale. Seven flow events occurred during the period of investigation, with the largest having an estimated return period of about 1·5 years. Bank simulations were performed by linking hydrodynamic, fluvial erosion, groundwater flow and bank stability models, for the seven flow events, which are representative of the typical range of hydrographs that normally occur during an annual cycle. The simulations allowed identification of (i) the time of onset and cessation of mass failure and fluvial erosion episodes, (ii) the contributions to total bank retreat made by specific fluvial erosion and mass‐wasting processes, and (iii) the causes of retreat. The results show that the occurrence of bank erosion processes (fluvial erosion, slide failure, cantilever failure) and their relative dominance differ significantly for each event, depending on seasonal hydrological conditions and initial bank geometry. Due to the specific planimetric configuration of the study bend, which steers the core of high velocity fluid away from the bank at higher flow discharges, fluvial erosion tends to occur during particular phases of the hydrograph. As a result fluvial erosion is ineffective at higher peak discharges, and depends more on the duration of more moderate discharges. Slide failures appear to be closely related to the magnitude of peak river stages, typically occurring in close proximity to the peak phase (preferentially during the falling limb, but in some cases even before the peak), while cantilever failures more typically occur in the late phase of the flow hydrograph, when they may be induced by the cumulative effects of any fluvial erosion. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Using Phase Response Curves to Understand Neuronal Synchronization and Sleep.

" The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. " ∼ Einstein To Chrissie: I never would have made it to this point without you. And to my parents, who gave me the gift of curiosity. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The last few years spent working toward my Ph.D. have been the best of my life, and I have a number of people to thank for that. First of all, my wife: thank you, Chrissie, for your encouragement and wisdom throughout this journey. Whenever two paths diverged and I was uncertain of which to take, you were always by my side, helping me to think clearly and bolstering my attitude with the comfort that no matter what happened, we would enjoy the adventure together. My parents have helped me reach this point through innumerable acts of sacrifice and love, many of which I'm sure I am unaware of. But two things do stand out: the joy of learning that they instilled, and the freedom they gave to pursue my passions. My parents were constantly posing riddles and math problems to me as a child, and they struck a good balance between making it fun while at the same time pushing me to improve. I still remember my mom getting me to count all the way up to 28 (but not a number higher–it was too hard! ) in kindergarden. And I remember my dad taking me out to breakfast my senior year of high school to make sure I knew it was all right with him if I deviated from the family tradition by becoming a physicist instead of a physician. Thanks for everything, Mom and Dad. My two advisors, Michal Zochowski and Victoria Booth, are by far the biggest reason that working toward my Ph.D. has been an enjoyable process. They have guided my investigation of very interesting problems while treating me as a colleague, giving me the freedom to disagree and to explore my own ideas. They have taught me iii to communicate scientific ideas efficiently and with excitement, both when writing and giving talks. They have also been enormously helpful …