Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can Long-Term Hearing Preservation be Expected in Children following Cholesteatoma Surgery? Results from a 14-Year-Long Study of Atticotomy-Limited Mastoidectomy with Cartilage Reconstruction

Objective: Following cholesteatoma surgery, effective long-term hearing preservation in children is difficult and is not typically expected. Hence, long-term data on hearing outcomes are lacking. The aim of this study was to analyze long-term hearing outcomes in children following cholesteatoma surgery. Methods: For this study, 49 ears in 47 children (≤16 years) with acquired cholesteatomas following atticotomy-limited mastoidectomy with cartilage reconstruction (inside-out approach) during 1986–2010 were included. Pre- and post-operative recidivism-free audiometric results were compared. Hearing success was defined as a post-operative air conduction (AC) threshold of ≤30 dB (serviceable hearing). Logistic regression analyses were used to evaluate potential prognostic factors that independently contributed to the prediction of hearing success. These factors included stapes condition, pre-operative AC threshold, ossicular chain integrity, disease severity, age, and gender. Results: The mean duration of follow-up was 14.2 years. The post-operative AC (33.55 ± 15.42 dB) and air-bone gap (17.88 ± 12.94 dB) were significantly improved compared with the pre-operative AC (42.90 ± 16.47 dB, p < 0.001) and air-bone gap (30.23 ± 13.68 dB, p < 0.001). The probability of hearing success following surgery (40.8%) was significantly higher than prior to surgery (24.5%, p = 0.008). Multivariate logistic regression analyses revealed a statistically significant correlation between hearing success and stapes integrity only (p = 0.005). Conclusions: This study provides important information on effective long-term hearing preservation over a mean follow-up of 14 years. In addition, stapes destruction is an independent negative prognostic determinant of achieving hearing success. The prediction model in this study provides otologists with useful pre-operative information to inform patients and parents on expected hearing outcomes and may be useful for post-operative observations.
ANTIVIRAL ACTIVITY OF THE PHOTOACTIVE PLANT PIGMENT HYPERICIN

The polycyclic compound hypericin, a known photodynamic agent, was investigated for antiviral activity in the presence and absence of light. The three viruses tested: murine cytomegalovirus; Sindbis virus; and human immunodeficiency virus type 1, were all susceptible to hypericin; but these antiviral activities were considerably enhanced, in a dose‐dependent manner, by exposure to light.
Craniofacial Shape of Arfak People Based on Geometric Morphometric Features

Face and cranial (craniofacial) shape is highly specific to the individual; therefore, craniofacial shape is often used to identify individuals and to analyze variability in the human population. Previous studies, consisting only of verbal descriptions, suggested that the cranial shape of the Papuan people was highly variable. Despite their usefulness, verbal descriptions cannot fully demonstrate common and local variation in cranial shape. They also cannot be used to extract the general trend of variation or to group face shapes based on their similarity . Here we attempt to apply geometric analysis, a method of shape analysis, to measure facial anatomical structural landmarks of Papuan people. The craniofacial shape of Papuan people was constructed from those of Arfak people based on 16 anatomic landmarks on the lateral side . Arfak is one of the traditional Papuan tribes in Manokwari, West Papua Province. O ur result showed great variation in craniofacial shapes among the Arfak. The nose, chin, and mandible differed significantly, whereas other parts of the face were relatively stable and showed small variations. These differences reflected variations in the facial growth rate. The high level of diversity thus indicates that some parts of the face have higher plasticity in their growth pattern than others.
A Problem with Problem Solving: Teaching Thinking without Teaching Knowledge.

Problem solving theory and practice suggest that thinking is more important to solving problems than knowledge and that it is possible to teach thinking in situations where little or no knowledge of the problem is needed. Such an assumption has led problem solving advocates to champion content-less heuristics as the primary element of problem solving while relegating the knowledge base and the application of concepts or transfer to secondary status. In the following theoretical analysis, it will be argued that the knowledge base and transfer of knowledge—not the content-less heuristic—are the most essential elements of problem solving.
Rework Effort Estimation of Self-admitted Technical Debt

Programmers sometimes leave incomplete, temporary workarounds and buggy codes that require rework. This phenomenon in software development is referred to as Self- admitted Technical Debt (SATD). The challenge therefore is for software engineering researchers and practitioners to resolve the SATD problem to improve the software quality. We performed an exploratory study using a text mining approach to extract SATD from developers’ source code comments and implement an effort metric to compute the rework effort that might be needed to resolve the SATD problem. The result of this study confirms the result of a prior study that found design debt to be the most predominant class of SATD. Results from this study also indicate that a significant amount of rework effort of between 13 and 32 commented LOC on average per SATD prone source file is required to resolve the SATD challenge across all the four projects considered. The text mining approach incorporated into the rework effort metric will speed up the extraction and analysis of SATD that are generated during software projects. It will also aid in managerial decisions of whether to handle SATD as part of on-going project development or defer it to the maintenance phase.
Sleep Disorders Reduce Health-Related Quality of Life in Multiple Sclerosis (Nottingham Health Profile Data in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis)

Quality of Life (QoL) is decreased in multiple sclerosis (MS), but studies about the impact of sleep disorders (SD) on health-related quality of Life (HRQoL) are lacking. From our original cohort, a cross-sectional polysomnographic (PSG) study in consecutive MS patients, we retrospectively analysed the previously unpublished data of the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP). Those MS patients suffering from sleep disorders (n = 49) showed significantly lower HRQoL compared to MS patients without sleep disorders (n = 17). Subsequently, we classified the patients into four subgroups: insomnia (n = 17), restless-legs syndrome, periodic limb movement disorder and SD due to leg pain (n = 24), obstructive sleep apnea (n = 8) and patients without sleep disorder (n = 17). OSA and insomnia patients showed significantly higher NHP values and decreased HRQoL not only for the sleep subscale but also for the “energy” and “emotional” area of the NHP. In addition, OSA patients also showed increased NHP values in the “physical abilities” area. Interestingly, we did not find a correlation between the objective PSG parameters and the subjective sleep items of the NHP. However, this study demonstrates that sleep disorders can reduce HRQoL in MS patients and should be considered as an important confounder in all studies investigating HRQoL in MS.
Approximate Repeating Pattern Mining with Gap Requirements

In this paper, we define a new research problem for mining approximate repeating patterns (ARP) with gap constraints, where the appearance of a pattern is subject to an approximate matching, which is very common in biological sciences. To solve the problem, we propose an ArpGap (Approximate repeating pattern mining with Gap constraints) algorithm with three major components for approximate repeating pattern mining: (1) a data-driven pattern generation approach to avoid generating unnecessary patterns; (2) a back-tracking pattern search process to discover approximate occurrences of a pattern under gap constraints; and (3) an Apriori-like deterministic pruning approach to progressively prune patterns and cease the search process if necessary. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world protein sequences assert that ArpGap is efficient in terms of memory consumption and computational cost.
Associations Between Dry Land Strength and Power Measurements with Swimming Performance in Elite Athletes: a Pilot Study

Associations Between Dry Land Strength and Power Measurements with Swimming Performance in Elite Athletes: a Pilot Study The main aim of the present study was to analyze the relationships between dry land strength and power measurements with swimming performance. Ten male national level swimmers (age: 14.9 ± 0.74 years, body mass: 60.0 ± 6.26 kg, height: 171.9 ± 6.26, 100 m long course front crawl performance: 59.9 ± 1.87 s) volunteered as subjects. Height and Work were estimated for CMJ. Mean power in the propulsive phase was assessed for squat, bench press (concentric phase) and lat pull down back. Mean force production was evaluated through 30 s maximal effort tethered swimming in front crawl using whole body, arms only and legs only. Swimming velocity was calculated from a maximal bout of 50 m front crawl. Height of CMJ did not correlate with any of the studied variables. There were positive and moderate-strong associations between the work during CMJ and mean propulsive power in squat with tethered forces during whole body and legs only swimming. Mean propulsive power of bench press and lat pull down presented positive and moderate-strong relationships with mean force production in whole body and arms only. Swimming performance is related with mean power of lat pull down back. So, lat pull down back is the most related dry land test with swimming performance; bench press with force production in water arms only; and work during CMJ with tethered forces legs only.
Measurements On Delay And Hop-Count Of The Internet

To (cid:12)nd out how big the Internet is, we measured the round-trip delays and hop-counts from a UCLA host computer to a randomly selected set of three thousand Internet hosts around the world. Our results show that over 90% of these hosts in continental US are within 18 hops from UCLA, and the round-trip delays to 90% of these hosts are less than 153ms. There seems no strong correlation between the delay and hop-count, although the average delay increases with hop-count. Measurements to international hosts show that the delay and hop-count strongly depend on the countries the hosts locate. Physical distances and link speeds are the most important factors that determine the round-trip delay.
Using population genetics for management of bobcats in oregon

In Oregon, USA, bobcats on either side of the Cascade Mountain Range are recognized as distinct subspecies, with Lynx rufus fasciatus west and Lynx rufus pallescens east of the Cascades. These subspecies are currently managed for harvest as separate populations primarily because of substantial differences in regional pelt values. We used genetic data to determine whether bobcats in Oregon are subdivided into genetically discernible populations that support current regional management regulations. We collected 250 tissue samples from 12 a priori sampling districts, and generated data from 15 microsatellite markers and approximately 1 kB of mtDNA sequence. Results of clustering analyses based on the microsatellite data indicated strong support for the presence of 2 genetic populations, generally corresponding to the 2 subspecies. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) indicated significant structure between the east and west regions, which accounted for 1.7% of the total variation in microsatellites. AMOVA based on the mtDNA sequences indicated significant structure between regions, accounting for 12.8% of the mtDNA variation. With both microsatellite and mtDNA data, we observed a significant pattern of isolation-by-distance, whereby geographically proximate sampling districts were more genetically similar than were more distant districts. We identified 21 putative migrants, individuals with genotypes more likely to have originated from the opposite region, showing that the Cascade Mountain Range apparently is not an absolute barrier to gene flow. Given the potential for differential harvest effort by region based on differences in pelt values and bobcat densities, and the vulnerability of bobcats to harvest, our results support the current management framework. © 2013 The Wildlife Society.
Frequency Analysis of Medical Concepts in Clinical Trials and their Coverage in MeSH and SNOMED-CT

Summary Background: Eligibility criteria (EC) of clinical trials play a key role in selecting appropriate study candidates and the validity of the outcome of a clinical trial. However, in most cases EC are provided in unstandardised ways such as free text, which raises significant challenges for machine-readability. Objectives: To establish a list of most frequent medical concepts in clinical trials with semantic annotations. This concept list contributes to standardisation of EC and identifies relevant data items in electronic health records (EHRs) for clinical research. The coverage of the list in two major clinical vocabularies, MeSH and SNOMED-CT, will be assessed. Methods: Four hundred and twenty-fivec linical trials conducted between 2000 and 2011 at a German university hospital were analysed. 6671 EC were manually annotated by a medical coder using Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) provided by the Unified Medical Language System. Two physicians performed a semi-automatic CUI code revision. Concept frequency was analysed and clusters of concepts were manually identified.A binomial significance test was applied to quantify coverage differences of the most frequent concepts in MeSH and SNOMED-CT. Results: Based on manual medical coding of 425 clinical trials, 7588 concepts were identified, of which 5236 were distinct. A top 100 list containing 101 most frequent medical concepts was established. The concepts of this list cover 25 % of all concept occur-rences in all analysed clinical trials. This list reveals six missing entries in SNOMED-CT, 12 in MeSH. The median of EC frequency per trial has increased throughout the trial years (2000 –2005: 8 EC/trial, 2011: 14 EC/ trial). Conclusions: Relatively few concepts cover one quarter of concept occurrences that represent EC in recent studies. Therefore, these concepts can serve as candidate data elements for integration into EHRs to optimise patient recruitment in clinical research.
Vocalization development in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

PURPOSE In this study, the authors aimed to examine the vocalizations of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the second year of life and their relationship to other areas of development. METHOD Vocalizations were examined in 125 children between ages 18 and 24 months: 50 later diagnosed with ASD, 25 with developmental delays (DD) in which ASD was ruled out, and 50 with typical development (TD). Precise measures of vocalizations were obtained through coding of video-recorded behavior samples from the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales Developmental Profile (Wetherby & Prizant, 2002b). RESULTS The ASD group used a significantly lower proportion of vocalizations with speech sounds and a significantly higher proportion of atypical vocalizations than children with TD. The ASD group used a significantly higher proportion of distress vocalizations than the TD and DD groups. For the ASD group, the frequency of vocalizations with speech sounds correlated significantly with developmental levels both concurrently and predictively. In the ASD group, communicative vocalizations late in the second year were found to uniquely predict expressive language outcome at age 3 years above noncommunicative vocalizations. CONCLUSIONS Further examination of distress vocalizations as a potential early indicator of ASD is recommended. In addition, the importance of early communicative vocalizations for later language development is highlighted.
Germline stem cells in the Drosophila ovary descend from pole cells in the anterior region of the embryonic gonad

A fundamental yet unexplored question in stem cell biology is how the fate of tissue stem cells is initially determined during development. In Drosophila, germline stem cells (GSCs) descend from a subset of primordial germ cells (PGCs) at the onset of oogenesis. GSC determination may occur at the onset of oogenesis when a subset of PGCs is induced to become GSCs by contacting niche cells. Alternatively, the GSC fate could be predetermined for a subset of PGCs before oogenesis, due to either their interaction with specific somatic cells in the embryonic/larval gonads, or their inherently heterogeneous potential in becoming GSCs, or both. Here, we show that anterior somatic cells in the embryonic gonad already differ from posterior somatic cells and are likely to be the precursors of niche cells in the adult ovary. Furthermore, only pole cells in the anterior half of the embryonic gonad give rise to the PGCs that frequently acquire contact with nascent niche cells in the late larval ovary. Eventually, only these contacting PGCs become GSCs, whereas non-contacting PGCs directly differentiate into cystoblasts. The strong preference of these `anterior PGCs' towards contacting niche cells does not require DE-cadherin-mediated adhesion and is not correlated with either orientation or rate of their divisions. These data suggest that the GSC fate is predetermined before oogenesis. The predetermination probably involves soma/pole-cell interaction in the anterior half of the embryonic gonad, followed by an active homing mechanism during PGC proliferation to maintain the contact between the `anterior PGCs' and anterior somatic cells.
Detection of Cervical Cancer Biomarker Patterns in Blood Plasma and Urine by Differential Scanning Calorimetry and Mass Spectrometry

Improved methods for the accurate identification of both the presence and severity of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) and extent of spread of invasive carcinomas of the cervix (IC) are needed. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) has recently been shown to detect specific changes in the thermal behavior of blood plasma proteins in several diseases. This methodology is being explored to provide a complementary approach for screening of cervical disease. The present study evaluated the utility of DSC in differentiating between healthy controls, increasing severity of CIN and early and advanced IC. Significant discrimination was apparent relative to the extent of disease with no clear effect of demographic factors such as age, ethnicity, smoking status and parity. Of most clinical relevance, there was strong differentiation of CIN from healthy controls and IC, and amongst patients with IC between FIGO Stage I and advanced cancer. The observed disease-specific changes in DSC profiles (thermograms) were hypothesized to reflect differential expression of disease biomarkers that subsequently bound to and affected the thermal behavior of the most abundant plasma proteins. The effect of interacting biomarkers can be inferred from the modulation of thermograms but cannot be directly identified by DSC. To investigate the nature of the proposed interactions, mass spectrometry (MS) analyses were employed. Quantitative assessment of the low molecular weight protein fragments of plasma and urine samples revealed a small list of peptides whose abundance was correlated with the extent of cervical disease, with the most striking plasma peptidome data supporting the interactome theory of peptide portioning to abundant plasma proteins. The combined DSC and MS approach in this study was successful in identifying unique biomarker signatures for cervical cancer and demonstrated the utility of DSC plasma profiles as a complementary diagnostic tool to evaluate cervical cancer health.
Non-parametric robustness analysis for feedback motion control for a high precision stage with large mass uncertainty

Robust feedback control with large parameter uncertainties in a high precision stage with large sample mass variation is presented. Instead of expressing the nominal plant and its uncertainty by parametric models, they are expressed using the identified frequency response data. The open loop transfer function is mapped onto a Nyquist plot, to assess robust stability. Next, the complementary sensitivity function is derived from this data to describe tracking performance, which is verified by experiments. The advantage is that the parameter estimation step is omitted, without compromising robust stability and performance.
Learned helplessness and learned resourcefulness: effects of noncontingent success and failure on individuals differing in self-control skills.

We designed two experiments to investigate the role of self-control processes in learned-helplessness studies by assessing the differential reactions to uncontrollability of subjects who presumably had either a rich (high resourceful, or HR) or poor (low resourceful, or LR) repertoire of self-control skills. HR and LR subjects received noncontingent success feedback, failure feedback, or no feedback on a task that ostensibly assessed "therapeutic abilities. " Subjects were subsequently tested on insolvable puzzles (Experiment 1) or on solvable anagrams (Experiment 2). According to Kanfer and Hagerman's (1981) self-regulation model, self-regulatory activities are evoked primarily in situations in which subjects are faced with repeated failure. Hence we predicted that individual differences in self-control would influence performance on the insolvable puzzles and not anagram performance after exposure to noncontingent failure. This prediction was confirmed: Only the performance of LR subjects on the insolvable puzzles was debilitated by the helplessness induction, whereas HR and LR subjects showed equal helplessness-induced deficits on the anagrams. The latter finding was interpreted in terms of the learned-helplessness model without the mediating effects of self-regulatory processes. As predicted from the self-control model, HR subjects more frequently checked statements indicating positive self-evaluations and task-oriented thoughts and less frequently checked negative self-evaluations than did LR subjects during exposure to uncontrollability in both experiments. We concluded that the self-control model accounts best for subjects' self-reactions during exposure to uncontrollability or failure, whereas the learned-helplessness model accounts for the generalization of helplessness from uncontrollable situations to controllable ones.
Towards query log based personalization using topic models

We investigate the utility of topic models for the task of personalizing search results based on information present in a large query log. We define generative models that take both the user and the clicked document into account when estimating the probability of query terms. These models can then be used to rank documents by their likelihood given a particular query and user pair.