Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biomarkers of Oxidative Stress and Personalized Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Emerging Role of Gamma-Glutamyltransferase

Background. The objectives were (i) to evaluate the impact of acute pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) and anti-TB therapy on the relationship between AST, ALT, and GGT levels in absence of conditions related to hepatotoxicity; (ii) to evaluate the rate and the time of alterations of AST, ALT, and GGT. Design and Methods. A prospective followup of 40 adults (21 males; mean age of 34.7 ± 5.8 years) with active PTB on initial phase and continuation phase anti-TB. Results. Only 3% (n = 1) developed a transient and benign ADR at day 30 without interruption of anti-TB treatment. Within normal ranges, GGT decreased significantly from day 0 to day 60, while AST and ALT increased significantly and respectively. During day 0–day 60, there was a significant, negative, and independent association between GGT and AST. Conclusion. The initial two months led to significant improvement of oxidative stress. Values of oxidative markers in normal ranges might predict low rate of ADR.
Mammary blood flow during experimental Escherichia coli endotoxin induced mastitis in goats and cows

Summary The effect of intramammary infusion of Escherichia coli endotoxin upon mammary blood flow was studied in lactating goats and cows. Blood flow was recorded by means of an electromagnetic flow probe chronically implanted around one mammary artery. Endotoxin mastitis was always accompanied by a significant increase in mammary blood flow, characterized by 2 conspicuous peaks. The flow returned to control values by the thirteenth hour after infusion. Other symptoms of acute mastitis were: fever, increased heart rate, swelling, heat and pain of the gland, increased chloride and total cell count in milk.
The Injustice of Singer/Non-Singer labels by Music Educators

Cheri, a successful career woman, when speaking of her elementary school encounters with singing describes them as humiliating and dreadful experiences. Sydney, a retired health care professional, has not sung in 65 years based on an incident involving an elementary teacher. Marjorie, an urban planner, described her elementary music teacher as the wicked witch of the west. Maria, a young instrumentalist, has refrained from singing in the last ten years because of a comment made about her singing ability by a secondary teacher. Cheri, Sydney, Marjorie, and Maria now regard themselves, because of these negative encounters in the education system, as adult non-singers. Their teachers, knowingly or unknowingly, used their position of authority to label these three women as non-singers. Labeling, according to current sociologists, is, “… analogous to prejudice, except that it provides us with a focus on language” (Phillips & Johnston, 2007, p. 182). Once labels are placed on students, dichotomy is emphasized instead of inclusion and there is great potential for inaccuracy and ensuing negative effects (McCall & Simmons, 1978). This concept may be summed up in a quote from John Barth’s novel, The End of the Road, when he writes, “Enough now to say that we are all casting directors a great deal of the time, if not always, and he (sic) is wise who realizes that this role-assigning is at best an arbitrary distortion of the actors’ personalities” (Barth, 1958, p. 24). Students, who have been labeled as non-singers in grade school by one whom they deemed as a musical expert, internalize this judgment and allow it to curtail future singing endeavors throughout adolescence and adulthood. Such students in later life may become adult non-singers. Cheri, Sydney, Marjorie and Maria did become adult nonsingers and thus the value of fair treatment of individuals and groups that should be inherent in the school system was not upheld in their situations.
aMAZEd: designing an affective social game for children

This paper discusses a design case, which explores the potential of psychophysiological measures as an input technique for social gaming applications intended for children. aMAZEd is an example of a tabletop mixed reality game that supports social interaction between players through and around the game. It is clear that sensing technology used to obtain psychophysiological measures needs to be improved and there is still a range of solutions that need to be explored. However, our experience shows that psychophysiological input appeals to children and can be a fun element of games supporting social interaction among players.
Network Working Group Aggregation of Rsvp for Ipv4 and Ipv6 Reservations

This document describes the use of a single RSVP (Resource ReSerVation Protocol) reservation to aggregate other RSVP reservations across a transit routing region, in a manner conceptually similar to the use of Virtual Paths in an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) network. It proposes a way to dynamically create the aggregate reservation, classify the traffic for which the aggregate reservation applies, determine how much bandwidth is needed to achieve the requirement, and recover the bandwidth when the sub-reservations are no longer required. It also contains recommendations concerning algorithms and policies for predictive reservations.
Testing significance relative to a fold-change threshold is a TREAT

Motivation: Statistical methods are used to test for the differential expression of genes in microarray experiments. The most widely used methods successfully test whether the true differential expression is different from zero, but give no assurance that the differences found are large enough to be biologically meaningful. Results: We present a method, t-tests relative to a threshold (TREAT), that allows researchers to test formally the hypothesis (with associated p-values) that the differential expression in a microarray experiment is greater than a given (biologically meaningful) threshold. We have evaluated the method using simulated data, a dataset from a quality control experiment for microarrays and data from a biological experiment investigating histone deacetylase inhibitors. When the magnitude of differential expression is taken into account, TREAT improves upon the false discovery rate of existing methods and identifies more biologically relevant genes. Availability: R code implementing our methods is contributed to the software package limma available at http://www.bioconductor. org. Contact: smyth@wehi.edu. au
Joint Gap Detection and Inpainting of Line Drawings

We propose a novel data-driven approach for automatically detecting and completing gaps in line drawings with a Convolutional Neural Network. In the case of existing inpainting approaches for natural images, masks indicating the missing regions are generally required as input. Here, we show that line drawings have enough structures that can be learned by the CNN to allow automatic detection and completion of the gaps without any such input. Thus, our method can find the gaps in line drawings and complete them without user interaction. Furthermore, the completion realistically conserves thickness and curvature of the line segments. All the necessary heuristics for such realistic line completion are learned naturally from a dataset of line drawings, where various patterns of line completion are generated on the fly as training pairs to improve the model generalization. We evaluate our method qualitatively on a diverse set of challenging line drawings and also provide quantitative results with a user study, where it significantly outperforms the state of the art.
Rate- and site-dependent effects of propafenone, dofetilide, and the new I(Ks)-blocking agent chromanol 293b on individual muscle layers of the intact canine heart.

BACKGROUND Recent in vitro studies have demonstrated regional differences in electrophysiological properties of individual left ventricular muscle layers. Controversy exists on the relevance of these findings for the situation in vivo. Thus, this study was designed to determine whether the in vivo canine heart exhibits regional differences in left ventricular refractoriness and in the susceptibility to sodium and potassium channel blockers. METHODS AND RESULTS In 16 dogs, 36 needle electrodes (12 mm long, 4 bipolar electrodes, interelectrode distance 2.5 mm) were inserted into the left ventricular wall. By use of a computerized multiplexer-mapping system, the spread of activation in epicardial, endocardial, and midmyocardial muscle was reconstructed during ventricular pacing at 300- and 850-ms basic cycle length (BCL). Effective refractory periods (ERPs) were determined at baseline and after application of propafenone (2 mg/kg), dofetilide (30 microg/kg), or chromanol 293b (10 mg/kg) by the extrastimulus technique (BCL 300 and 850 ms). At baseline, activation patterns and ERPs were uniform in all muscle layers. Propafenone homogeneously decreased conduction velocity and moderately prolonged ERPs without any regional differences. Dofetilide and chromanol 293b did not affect the spread of activation. Dofetilide exhibited reverse use-dependent effects on ERP, still preserving transmural homogeneity of refractoriness. Chromanol 293b led to a regionally uniform but more pronounced increase in local ERPs at faster than at slower pacing rates. CONCLUSIONS At the heart rates applied, the in vivo canine heart does not exhibit regional differences in electrophysiological properties. Given the homogeneity of antiarrhythmic drug effects, induction of local gradients of refractoriness is obviously not a common mechanism of proarrhythmia in normal hearts.
Design of Robust PID Power System Stabilizer for Multimachine Power System Using HS Algorithm

In this paper, the design of a proportional, derivative and integral (PID) based power system stabilizer (PSS) is carried out using a new Meta heuristic harmony search algorithm (HSA) to optimize the parameters. The design of proposed PID controller is considered with an objective function based on eigenvalue shifting to guarantee the stability of nonlinear plant for a wide range of conditions using HSA. The HSA optimized PIDPSS (HSPIDPSS) controller is applied to the standard IEEE ten-machine thirty nine-bus test power system model in decentralized manner and the performance is compared with a robust fuzzy controller. The robustness is tested by considering four plant conditions with change of active power, active load and faults at different buses of the power system to establish, the superior performance with HSPIDPSS over the FPSS.
4D-4 Love Wave Acoustic Array Biosensor Platform for Autonomous Detection

The rapid autonomous detection of pathogenic microorganisms and bioagents by field deployable platforms is critical to human health and safety. To achieve a high level of sensitivity for fluidic detection applications, we have developed a 330 MHz Love wave acoustic biosensor on 36deg YX lithium tantalate (LTO). Each die has four delay-line detection channels, permitting simultaneous measurement of multiple analytes or for parallel detection of single analyte containing samples. Crucial to our biosensor was the development of a transducer that excites the shear horizontal (SH) mode, through optimization of the transducer, minimizing propagation losses and reducing undesirable modes. Detection was achieved by comparing the reference phase of an input signal to the phase shift from the biosensor using an integrated electronic multi- readout system connected to a laptop computer or PDA. The Love wave acoustic arrays were centered at 330 MHz, shifting to 325-328 MHz after application of the silicon dioxide waveguides. The insertion loss was -6 dB with an out-of-band rejection of 35 dB. The amplitude and phase ripple were 2.5 dB p-p and 2-3deg p-p, respectively. Time-domain gating confirmed propagation of the SH mode while showing suppression of the triple transit. Antigen capture and mass detection experiments demonstrate a sensitivity of 7.19plusmn0. 74deg mm2/ng with a detection limit of 6.7plusmn0. 40 pg/mm2 for each channel.
Implicit User-centric Personality Recognition Based on Physiological Responses to Emotional Videos

We present a novel framework for recognizing personality traits based on users' physiological responses to affective movie clips. Extending studies that have correlated explicit/implicit affective user responses with Extraversion and Neuroticism traits, we perform single-trial recognition of the big-five traits from Electrocardiogram (ECG), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Electroencephalogram (EEG) and facial emotional responses compiled from 36 users using off-the-shelf sensors. Firstly, we examine relationships among personality scales and (explicit) affective user ratings acquired in the context of prior observations. Secondly, we isolate physiological correlates of personality traits. Finally, unimodal and multimodal personality recognition results are presented. Personality differences are better revealed while analyzing responses to emotionally homogeneous (e.g., high valence, high arousal) clips, and significantly above-chance recognition is achieved for all five traits.
Health service managers in Australia Part 4: Hours worked, marital status, country of birth and indigenous status

This fourth article adds to the findings of the three previous articles in a four-part series. These articles are concerned with the composition and characteristics of health service managers in Australia. The data and analyses present factual bases with a bearing on policy formulation and planning of the health labour force in Australia and the training of managers. The first article provided analyses on the specific characteristics of service, geographical and category distributions of health service managers, the second on age and sex, and the third on fields of study, level of education and income characteristics of health service managers. This fourth article investigates hours worked, marital status, country of birth and Indigenous status of health service managers in Australia. Findings confirm that a large proportion of health service managers worked part time and female managers more so than males. Partly as a result of this difference, male managers worked on average longer hours than females, but even full-time female managers worked on average shorter hours than males. The average hours worked was lower than the average for managers in all industries in Australia. When adjusted for differences in age from the average for all industries, a larger proportion of health service managers than average had never married and were divorced or widowed. Conversely, a lower proportion than average were married. More than the average proportion of managers in hospitals were born in Australia, while the inverse was the situation in medical and other health services. The share of Australian-born was about average in aged care residential services. Indigenous health service managers constituted a larger percentage of managers than the average in all industries. Their participation in hospitals was lower than in medical and health services; and about the average for all industries in aged care residential services. In all cases, their participation in the management of health services was lower than their proportion in the adult population. The article presents challenges in policy formulation regarding working conditions and the participation of varied segments of society in the management of health services. It also points to a related research agenda.
Steganalytic Features for JPEG Compression-Based Perturbed Quantization

Perturbed quantization (PQ) data hiding is almost undetectable with the current steganalysis methods. We briefly describe PQ and propose singular value decomposition (SVD)-based features for the steganalysis of JPEG-based PQ data hiding in images. We show that JPEG-based PQ data hiding distorts linear dependencies of rows/columns of pixel values, and proposed features can be exploited within a simple classifier for the steganalysis of PQ. The proposed steganalyzer detects PQ embedding on relatively smooth stego images with 70% detection accuracy on average for different embedding rates
A comprehensive set of simulations studying the influence of gas expulsion on star cluster evolution

We have carried out a large set of N-body simulations studying the effect of residual-gas expulsion on the survival rate, and final properties of star clusters. We have varied the star formation efficiency (SFE), gas expulsion time-scale and strength of the external tidal field, obtaining a three-dimensional grid of models which can be used to predict the evolution of individual star clusters or whole star cluster systems by interpolating between our runs. The complete data of these simulations are made available on the internet.
STM, SECPM, AFM and Electrochemistry on Single Crystalline Surfaces

Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) techniques have had a great impact on research fields of surface science and nanotechnology during the last decades. They are used to investigate surfaces with scanning ranges between several 100 μm down to atomic resolution. Depending on experimental conditions, and the interaction forces between probe and sample, different SPM techniques allow mapping of different surface properties. In this work, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) in air and under electrochemical conditions (EC-STM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) in air and scanning electrochemical potential microscopy (SECPM) under electrochemical conditions, were used to study different single crystalline surfaces in electrochemistry. Especially SECPM offers potentially new insights into the solid-liquid interface by providing the possibility to image the potential distribution of the surface, with a resolution that is comparable to STM. In electrocatalysis, nanostructured catalysts supported on different electrode materials often show behavior different from their bulk electrodes. This was experimentally and theoretically shown for several combinations and recently on Pt on Au(111) towards fuel cell relevant reactions. For these investigations single crystals often provide accurate and well defined reference and support systems. We will show heteroepitaxially grown Ru, Ir and Rh single crystalline surface films and bulk Au single crystals with different orientations under electrochemical conditions. Image studies from all three different SPM methods will be presented and compared to electrochemical data obtained by cyclic voltammetry in acidic media. The quality of the single crystalline supports will be verified by the SPM images and the cyclic voltammograms. Furthermore, an outlook will be presented on how such supports can be used in electrocatalytic studies.
Concept of Word and Phoneme Awareness in the Beginning Reader.

Children's awareness of phoneme units within spoken words is considered to play an important role in their learning to read an alphabetic language. However, it is not clear as to when and how phoneme awareness actually develops in the beginning reading process. The present study briefly reviews two competing theoretical positions and then poses a testable question. Does there exist a relationship between beginning readers' awareness of word units in text and their ability to segment words into phonemes? In two separate experiments, a concept of word task and two phoneme awareness tasks were administered to beginning first grade readers. The concept of word task involved finger-point reading a four-line memorized rhyme and then identifying individual words within the rhyme. The phoneme awareness measures included a structured phoneme segmentation test and a phonemic analysis of the children's invented spellings. Results in both experiments revealed a significant relationship between concept of word and phoneme awareness in the beginning reading process. One of the primary tasks facing a beginning reader is to negotiate a match between an internalized spoken language system and that language system's representation in printed form. Moreover, for reading to advance, the beginner must eventually make this spoken language written language match simultaneously at several different linguistic levels: syntactic, lexical, and phonemic. The matching or "mapping" task facing the child presents a theoretical question (How does the process occur? ) as well as an important pedagogical problem (How can instruction facilitate its occurrence? ). Despite much research effort, the linguistic level (sentence, word, syllable, phoneme) at which beginning reading instruction should focus is still a contested issue: witness the debates in the professional literature (Gleitman & Rozin vs. Goodman, 1973; Golinkoff vs. Venezky, 1978; Groff vs. Hoskisson, 1979) as well as the continued proliferation of alternative teaching methodologies in kindergarten and first grade classrooms. Nevertheless, a few recent lines of beginning reading research have highlighted specific theoretical concerns and contributed some interesting pedagogical suggestions. One group of reading researchers (Elkonin, 1973; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974; Liberman & Shankweiler, 1979; Wallach & Wallach, 1976) has suggested that a crucial prerequisite for Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 1983
Measuring concurrent partnerships: potential for underestimation in UNAIDS recommended method

Research on concurrent sexual partnerships has been constrained by inconsistent and inaccurate measurements of these partnerships. Recently, a UNAIDS working group recommended a method based on sexual partner histories to improve the measurement of concurrency. Using recent survey data for young adults living in Cape Town, South Africa, we found that this method could result in underestimates of concurrency due to respondents’ failure to report additional sexual partners.
Instrumental Variable Bias with Censored Regressors

This note examines the inconsistency of instrumental variables (IV) estimators when endogenous regressors are censored. Using a bivariate setting, asymptotic bias is characterized for various types of random censoring and for top-coding and bottom-coding. With independent censoring, expansion bias always occurs, with IV estimates proportionately too large. With dependent censoring, expansion bias typically arises, and we study conditions that assure this with top-coding and bottom-coding. We illustrate these structures graphically for the case with random assignment. Various aspects of estimation with censored regressors are discussed.