Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sepsis-Induced Apoptosis Causes Progressive Profound Depletion of B and CD4+ T Lymphocytes in Humans1

Patients with sepsis have impaired host defenses that contribute to the lethality of the disorder. Recent work implicates lymphocyte apoptosis as a potential factor in the immunosuppression of sepsis. If lymphocyte apoptosis is an important mechanism, specific subsets of lymphocytes may be more vulnerable. A prospective study of lymphocyte cell typing and apoptosis was conducted in spleens from 27 patients with sepsis and 25 patients with trauma. Spleens from 16 critically ill nonseptic (3 prospective and 13 retrospective) patients were also evaluated. Immunohistochemical staining showed a caspase-9-mediated profound progressive loss of B and CD4 T helper cells in sepsis. Interestingly, sepsis did not decrease CD8 T or NK cells. Although there was no overall effect on lymphocytes from critically ill nonseptic patients (considered as a group), certain individual patients did exhibit significant loss of B and CD4 T cells. The loss of B and CD4 T cells in sepsis is especially significant because it occurs during life-threatening infection, a state in which massive lymphocyte clonal expansion should exist. Mitochondria-dependent lymphocyte apoptosis may contribute to the immunosuppression in sepsis by decreasing the number of immune effector cells. Similar loss of lymphocytes may be occurring in critically ill patients with other disorders.
Evaluating different footprint parameters as a predictor of arch height.

Some controversies still exist concerning the validity and efficacy of using footprint parameters to predict arch height. Some investigators have disputed the ability of using the footprint to characterize arch types, since factors other than arch height may contribute to the footprint. Chu and coworkers (1995) used a digital approach and included pressure information with AI, which they termed the modified arch index (MAI). Their results showed that significant correlation existed between the arch height and both the MAI (r=-0.71) and the AI (r=-0.70). The causes of the above-mentioned controversy have been believed to be due to errors introduced during the footprint acquisition and parameter extraction phases. The purpose of this study was to use the same digital approach as Chua to determine whether correlation existed between arch height and the other eight footprint parameters besides the MAI and AI. The objective of classifying foot arch type is to help people with abnormal foot structure prevent injury, and to help athletes enhance performance. The main purpose of footprint parameters is to provide an easily accessible and valid approach to reach this objective.
The long‐lived mollusc Arctica islandica: A new paleoceanographic tool for the reconstruction of bottom temperatures for the continental shelves of the northern North Atlantic Ocean

The carbonate shell of the bivalve Arctica islandica has been recognized, for more than a decade, as a potentially important marine geochemical biorecorder owing to this species' great longevity (200+ years) and wide geographic distribution throughout the northern North Atlantic Ocean, a region vital to global climate and ocean circulation. However, until now this potential has not been realized owing to the difficulty of precisely sampling the shell of this slow growing species. Using newly available automated microsampling techniques combined with micromass stable isotope mass spectrometry, a stable oxygen isotope record (1956–1957 and 1961–1970) has been obtained from a live-captured, 38-year-old A. islandica specimen collected near the former position of the Nantucket Shoals Lightship (41°N. 69°W). The shell's δ18O signal is compared with an expected signal derived from ambient bottom temperature and salinity data recorded at the lightship for the same period. The results show that A islandica's δ18O record (1) is in phase with its growth banding, confirming the annual periodicity of this species' growth bands, (2) is in oxygen isotopic equilibrium with the ambient seawater, (3) shows a consistent shell growth shutdown temperature of ∼6°C. which translates into an ∼8-month (May–December) shell growth period at this location, and (4) records the ambient bottom temperature with a precision of ∼±1.2°C. These results add important information on the life history of this commercially important shellfish species and demonstrate that A. islandica shells can be used to reconstruct inter- and intra-annual records of the continental shelf bottom temperature.
Barriers to Mental Health Care Utilization in Parkinson’s Disease

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is frequently complicated by co-occurring psychiatric problems such as depression and anxiety that negatively affect the course and management of the illness. Yet, in most cases, these psychiatric comorbidities are neither recognized nor treated to remission. The primary purpose of this study was to identify and describe barriers to mental health care utilization for people with PD. Secondary objectives included the assessment of attitudes and preferences regarding the need for mental health services in the PD community and the acceptability of telehealth interventions as a method for improving access and quality of care. Methods: A total of 769 people with PD completed an anonymous cross-sectional questionnaire assessing barriers to mental health care utilization in this medical population. Respondents were drawn from a national sample. Results: Commonly endorsed barriers to mental health care utilization in PD reflect the patients’ incomplete understanding of mental health problems, access issues, and illness-specific concerns, as well as the inadequate screening and detection of psychiatric complications by medical providers and the need for more effective treatments in this medical population. Several demographic, medical, and psychiatric variables also influenced the likelihood of accessing mental health care. Interest in telehealth approaches to mental health treatment was high and, in several instances, correlated with perceived barriers to mental health care utilization. Conclusions: People with PD may encounter a multitude of barriers that impede their pursuit of mental health care. Clinical implications are discussed and further research is needed to replicate and extend these findings.
Different Aggregation Strategies for Generically Contextualized Sentiment Lexicons

Sentiment detection has gained relevance in the last years due to the vast amount of publicly available opinion in the form of Web forums or blogs. Yet, it still suffers from the ambiguity of language, lowering the efficacy and accuracy of sentiment detection systems. Thus, it is important to also invoke context information to refine the initial values of sentiment terms. Moreover, domain-independence is desirable to avoid using a topic determination beforehand. This work investigates strategies for extracting non-generic features to be integrated into a so-called contextualized sentiment lexicon, capable of getting the context correctly and assigning sentiment terms the proper sentiment value. The proposed approach will be applied in an online-media aggregation and visualization portal, covering a vast number of news media sources.
The Directional Sensitivity of the Retina and the Spectral Sensitivities of the Rods and Cones

It is now well established that light rays of the same spectral character and physical intensity entering the eye through different points of the pupil may produce visual impressions which differ in brightness and colour even though the patch of retina stimulated (the fovea) is kept the same. Rays entering the eye through different points of the pupil and terminating on the same point of the retina are incident on the retina in different directions. Also, they have traversed different paths in the refractive media of the eye and may have suffered different losses by absorption, scattering or reflexion. It has been shown, however, that differences in the light losses in the refractive media do not account for the observed variations in visual response, which must therefore be attributed to variations in the reaction of the retina to light incident on it in different directions or, briefly, to a directional sensitivity of the retina. Further evidence that this is so is given later in the paper (p. 81).
Unlearning versus savings in visuomotor adaptation: comparing effects of washout, passage of time, and removal of errors on motor memory

Humans are able to rapidly adapt their movements when a visuomotor or other systematic perturbation is imposed. However, the adaptation is forgotten or unlearned equally rapidly once the perturbation is removed. The ultimate cause of this unlearning remains poorly understood. Unlearning is often considered to be a passive process due to inability to retain an internal model. However, we have recently suggested that it may instead be a process of reversion to habit, without necessarily any forgetting per se. We compared the timecourse and nature of unlearning across a variety of protocols where unlearning is known to occur: error-clamp trials, removal of visual feedback, removal of the perturbation, or simply a period of inactivity. We found that, in agreement with mathematical models, there was no significant difference in the rate of decay between subject who experienced zero-error clamp trials, and subjects who made movements with no visual feedback. Time alone did lead to partial unlearning (over the duration we tested), but the amount of unlearning was inconsistent across subjects. Upon re-exposure to the same perturbation, subjects who unlearned through time or by reverting to veridical feedback exhibited savings. By contrast, no savings was observed in subjects who unlearned by having visual feedback removed or by being placed in a series of error-clamp trials. Thus although these various forms of unlearning can all revert subjects back to baseline behavior, they have markedly different effects on whether long-term memory for the adaptation is spared or is also unlearned. On the basis of these and previous findings, we suggest that unlearning is not due to passive forgetting of an internal model, but is instead an active process whereby adapted behavior gradually reverts to baseline habits.
H0LiCOW - II. Spectroscopic survey and galaxy-group identification of the strong gravitational lens system HE 0435-1223

Galaxies located in the environment or along the line of sight towards gravitational lenses can significantly affect lensing observables, and can lead to systematic errors on the measurement of H-0 from the time-delay technique. We present the results of a systematic spectroscopic identification of the galaxies in the field of view of the lensed quasar HE 0435-1223 using the W. M. Keck, Gemini and ESO-Very Large telescopes. Our new catalogue triples the number of known galaxy redshifts in the direct vicinity of the lens, expanding to 102 the number of measured redshifts for galaxies separated by less than 3 arcmin from the lens. We complement our catalogue with literature data to gather redshifts up to 15 arcmin from the lens, and search for galaxy groups or clusters projected towards HE 0435-1223. We confirm that the lens is a member of a small group that includes at least 12 galaxies, and find 8 other group candidates near the line of sight of the lens. The flexion shift, namely the shift of lensed images produced by high-order perturbation of the lens potential, is calculated for each galaxy/group and used to identify which objects produce the largest perturbation of the lens potential. This analysis demonstrates that (i) at most three of the five brightest galaxies projected within 12 arcsec of the lens need to be explicitly used in the lens models, and (ii) the groups can be treated in the lens model as an external tidal field (shear) contribution.
Kelvin-Type Coastal Surges Generated by Tropical Cyclones

Abstract Measurements of sea level along the coat of Western Australia during the period 1969 to 1982. when 12 southward moving tropical cyclones occurred, showed distinct peaks with amplitudes of about 1 to 2 m propagating southwards with speeds ranging between 400–600 km day−1. Similar observations of sea level along the east coast of Australia during the period 1971 to 1980, of 7 southward moving tropical cyclones, showed no such peaks. These data suggest that the large peaks occurring on the west coast are a result of a resonance phenomenon when the southward component of the cyclone speed is close to that of southward propagating shallow-water Kelvin waves. 11 is shown that the coastal response to moving atmospheric forcing fields may be described by a Kelvin-type disturbance, which at any instant is confined to a localized coastal region dependent on the Kelvin wave speed and the longshore speed of the tropical cyclone. This region expands in the longshore direction at a rate equal to the difference.
Hidden Boosted MMI and Hierarchical State Posterior Feature for Automatic Speech Recognition Based on Hidden Conditional Neural Fields

We have investigated automatic speech recognition using Hidden Conditional Neural Fields (HCNF). In this paper, we propose a new objective function, Hidden Boosted MMI (HBMMI) that considers the number of errors in the training data even if the correct state sequence is not known for training the HCNF. The experimental results show that HB-MMI can improve recognition accuracy if overfitting does not occur. We also present an automatic speech recognition method using a hierarchical state posterior feature where the output from the first stage HCNF is used as input for the second stage HCNF. The experimental results show that the feature improves recognition accuracy. By combining both of the proposed methods, we obtain further improvements. Index Terms: hidden conditional neural fields, automatic speech recognition, hidden boosted MMI, state posterior feature
Pulling back stability with applications to Out(Fn) and relatively hyperbolic groups

We prove that stability — a strong quasiconvexity property — pulls back under proper actions on proper metric spaces. This result has several applications, including that convex cocompact subgroups of both mapping class groups and outer automorphism groups of free groups are stable. We also characterize stability in relatively hyperbolic groups whose parabolic subgroups have linear divergence.
Seasonal Changes in Quality and Quantity of Food Available for Benthic Suspension-feeders in the Golfo Marconi (North-western Mediterranean)

Abstract Suspended particulate matter was collected, from the water layer at 10 cm above the sediments, over a period of 13 months in the Golfo Marconi (Ligurian Sea, NW Mediterranean). Measurements of seston concentration as well as the elemental (particulate organic carbon and nitrogen; POC and PON, respectively) and biochemical composition (lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, DNA) of particulate organic matter were carried out to assess quality and quantity of food potentially available to benthic suspension-feeders. Particulate organic matter showed wide qualitative and quantitative variations during the sampling year. Seston concentrations and POC did not reflect the quantity and quality of the food available to benthic suspension-feeders. The biopolymeric fraction of particulate matter (C-BPF, i.e. the sum of lipid, protein and carbohydrate carbon) was mostly composed of phytoplankton (which accounted for about 60% of C-BPF). The ratio of C-BPF to POC was utilized as a measure of the fraction which had the potential to be more readily available to consumers. Suspended organic matter showed higher values of the C-BPF:POC ratio during spring, and lower values in summer and autumn–winter. Quantitative estimates of the energy content of the suspended particulate matter were obtained from its biochemical composition. Bacterial dynamics were significantly related to changes in phytoplankton biomass. Bacteria accounted for a significant fraction of the biopolymeric carbon pool (annual average about 15%) and of the total particulate DNA (21·5%), thus enhancing the nutritional value of the particulate organic matter. The results achieved in this study indicate that the biochemical composition of the particulate matter provides additional information on the origin, quality and characteristics of the seston more readily available to benthic suspension-feeders.
Maternal education, lone parenthood, material hardship, maternal smoking, and longstanding respiratory problems in childhood: testing a hierarchical conceptual framework

Background: Maternal smoking and low socioeconomic status are known to be associated with each other and with longstanding respiratory problems in childhood but their interrelation has received little attention. In this paper, the interrelations is studied using a conceptual hierarchical framework among children aged 0–11 years in a representative sample of British households with children. Method: With data from the family and children study, this paper tested a conceptual hierarchical framework, in which maternal education acting through lone parenthood would influence material hardship and all three would have effects on maternal smoking increasing the risk of children’s longstanding respiratory problems. Results: Among children 0–2, maternal education and material hardship had indirect effects on respiratory problems mediated through more proximal variables. After adjustment for maternal education, the effect of lone parenthood was partially mediated through material hardship and maternal smoking. Adjustment for socioeconomic status variables attentuated but did not eliminate the effect of maternal smoking (odds ratio = 2.04, 95% confidence interval = 1.30, 3.20). Among children 3–11, the effect of maternal education was partially mediated through proximal variables. Lone parenthood and material hardship had indirect effects only. Adjustment for confounding eliminated the effect of maternal smoking (odds ratio = 1.06, 95% confidence interval = 0.88, 1.26). Conclusions: Reducing childhood longstanding respiratory problems will require attention to background socioeconomic status factors in addition to maternal smoking.
Nonlinear system and control of the model-scale helicopter

A nonlinear model and control of a small-scale helicopter near hovering are investigated. Aiming at the characteristics of the model helicopter, the stabilizer bar dynamics is studied, and the tail rotor with the electronic gyro is discussed in detail. In addition, the main rotor inflow dynamics is modeled basing on the three-state nonlinear Pitt/Peters model. Then, a simplified nonlinear model is proposed for system identification and controller design. It is proved that the attitude-heave subsystem can be linearized by the dynamic feedback linearization technique. So, we conclude that the full nonlinear model can also be feedback linearized.
Spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation in Spain for the period 1880–1992

The longest series of precipitation records in Spain are analysed using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. EOF analysis was used to spatially summarise the rainfall data and to enable clarification of the role of the dominant circulation regimes affecting the region. Three significant EOFs have been obtained in general, except for summer, when four EOFs are found. The first EOF is associated with Andalusia and the Spanish interior, the second and third EOFs with the Mediterranean and Cantabric coasts, alternatively, depending on the season. The analysis of the principal components series using a moving average and the Mann‐Kendall test, shows significant long term decreases in precipitation for the Mediterranean and interior regions (at least in some seasons), and an increase in precipitation for the Northern coastal region. More of these changes can be related to variations in the large scale circulation features over Western Europe and North Atlantic. The results are also compared with GCM outputs. © 1998 Royal Meteorological Society.
Application of wavelet transform in the study of coastal trapped waves off the west coast of South America

Wavelet transform and cross wavelet transform were applied for analyzing long time series of sea level and alongshore wind stress to identify intraseasonal variability off western South America and the relations with remote and local forcings. Hydrographic data were used to estimate properties of coastal trapped waves with a theoretical model. For El Niño years, we found the existence of intraseasonal oscillations with periods 20–90 days, between 2S and 27S. At the peak of 91–92 and 97–98 EL Niños, we found perturbations in the northern region, probably associated with remotely forced internal Kelvin waves, with periods 6–11 days and phase velocities 160–260 km/day. Between 12S and 15S, during two El Niño events, our calculations show perturbations which appear to be barotropic shelf waves propagating southward with velocities between 110 and 150 km/day and periods between 30 and 50 days.
ARE ALL SHORT–HARD GAMMA-RAY BURSTS PRODUCED FROM MERGERS OF COMPACT STELLAR OBJECTS?

The origin and progenitors of short–hard gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remain a puzzle and a highly debated topic. Recent Swift observations suggest that these GRBs may be related to catastrophic explosions in degenerate compact stars, denoted as “Type I” GRBs. The most popular models include the merger of two compact stellar objects (NS–NS or NS–BH). We utilize a Monte Carlo approach to determine whether a merger progenitor model can self-consistently account for all the observations of short–hard GRBs, including a sample with redshift measurements in the Swift era (z-known sample) and the CGRO/BATSE sample. We apply various merger time delay distributions invoked in compact star merger models to derive the redshift distributions of these Type I GRBs, and then constrain the unknown luminosity function of Type I GRBs using the observed luminosity–redshift (L–z) distributions of the z-known sample. The best luminosity function model, together with the adopted merger delay model, is then applied to confront the peak flux distribution (log N–log P distribution) of the BATSE and Swift samples. We find that for all the merger models invoking a range of merger delay timescales (including those invoking a large fraction of “prompt mergers”), it is difficult to reconcile the models with all the data. The data are instead statistically consistent with the following two possible scenarios. First, that short/hard GRBs are a superposition of compact-star–merger–origin (Type I) GRBs and a population of GRBs that track the star formation history, which are probably related to the deaths of massive stars (Type II GRBs). Second, the entire short/hard GRB population is consistent with a typical delay of 2 Gyr with respect to the star formation history with modest scatter. This may point toward a different Type I progenitor than the traditional compact star merger models.
Direct Observation of Near-Equilibrium Pore Geometry in Synthetic Quartzites at 600°-800°C and 2-10.5 Kbar

A primary factor affecting geochemical transport and bulk-rock physical properties in the mid- and lower continental crust is the grain-scale distribution of fluid-filled porosity. Of particular significance is the continuity of the fluid phase in the direction of potential transport. SEM images reveal that $$H_{2}O-CO_{2}-NaCl$$ fluids in quartzites synthesized at 600°-800°C and 2-6 kbar are present as isolated pores at the corners of mineral grains. At higher pressures (e.g., 10 kbar), pore connectivity is established for aqueous fluids in quartzite, providing a path for fluid flow and a short circuit for such processes as diffusion and electrical conduction. Pore geometries in synthetic quartzites resemble those predicted to exist in an ideal model of isotropic solid/solid and solid/fluid interfacial energies. To describe pore geometries in more complicated crustal lithologies, the equilibrium model should be modified to account for anisotropy of interfacial energies.