Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Health care system accessibility. Experiences and perceptions of deaf people.

BACKGROUND People who are deaf use health care services differently than the general population; little research has been carried out to understand the reasons. OBJECTIVE To better understand the health care experiences of deaf people who communicate in American Sign Language. DESIGN Qualitative analyses of focus group discussions in 3 U.S. cities. PARTICIPANTS Ninety-one deaf adults who communicate primarily in American Sign Language. MEASUREMENTS We collected information about health care communication and perceptions of clinicians' attitudes. We elicited stories of both positive and negative encounters, as well as recommendations for improving health care. RESULTS Communication difficulties were ubiquitous. Fear, mistrust, and frustration were prominent in participants' descriptions of health care encounters. Positive experiences were characterized by the presence of medically experienced certified interpreters, health care practitioners with sign language skills, and practitioners who made an effort to improve communication. Many participants acknowledged limited knowledge of their legal rights and did not advocate for themselves. Some participants believed that health care practitioners should learn more about sociocultural aspects of deafness. CONCLUSIONS Deaf people report difficulties using health care services. Physicians can facilitate change to improve this. Future research should explore the perspective of clinicians when working with deaf people, ways to improve communication, and the impact of programs that teach deaf people self-advocacy skills and about their legal rights.
Joint Coupling of Awake EEG Frequency Activity and MRI Gray Matter Volumes in the Psychosis Dimension: A BSNIP Study

Background Many studies have examined either electroencephalogram (EEG) frequency activity or gray matter volumes (GMV) in various psychoses [including schizophrenia (SZ), schizoaffective (SZA), and psychotic bipolar disorder (PBP)]. Prior work demonstrated similar EEG and gray matter abnormalities in both SZ and PBP. Integrating EEG and GMV and jointly analyzing the combined data fully elucidates the linkage between the two and may provide better biomarker- or endophenotype-specificity for a particular illness. Joint exploratory investigations of EEG and GMV are scarce in the literature and the relationship between the two in psychosis is even less explored. We investigated a joint multivariate model to test whether the linear relationship or linkage between awake EEG (AEEG) frequency activity and GMV is abnormal across the psychosis dimension and if such effects are also present in first-degree relatives. Methods We assessed 607 subjects comprising 264 probands [105 SZ, 72 SZA, and 87 PBP], 233 of their first degree relatives [82 SZ relatives (SZR), 71 SZA relatives (SZAR), and 80 PBP relatives (PBPR)], and 110 healthy comparison subjects (HC). All subjects underwent structural MRI (sMRI) and EEG scans. Frequency activity and voxel-based morphometric GMV were derived from EEG and sMRI data, respectively. Seven AEEG frequency and gray matter components were extracted using Joint independent component analysis (jICA). The loading coefficients (LC) were examined for group differences using analysis of covariance. Further, the LCs were correlated with psychopathology scores to identify relationship with clinical symptoms. Results Joint ICA revealed a single component differentiating SZ from HC (p < 0.006), comprising increased posterior alpha activity associated with decreased volume in inferior parietal lobe, supramarginal, parahippocampal gyrus, middle frontal, inferior temporal gyri, and increased volume of uncus and culmen. No components were aberrant in either PBP or SZA or any relative group. No significant association was identified with clinical symptom measures. Conclusion Our data suggest that a joint EEG and GMV model yielded a biomarker specific to SZ, not abnormal in PBP or SZA. Alpha activity was related to both increased and decreased volume in different cortical structures. Additionally, the joint model failed to identify endophenotypes across psychotic disorders.
Non-negative low rank and sparse graph for semi-supervised learning

Constructing a good graph to represent data structures is critical for many important machine learning tasks such as clustering and classification. This paper proposes a novel non-negative low-rank and sparse (NNLRS) graph for semi-supervised learning. The weights of edges in the graph are obtained by seeking a nonnegative low-rank and sparse matrix that represents each data sample as a linear combination of others. The so-obtained NNLRS-graph can capture both the global mixture of subspaces structure (by the low rankness) and the locally linear structure (by the sparseness) of the data, hence is both generative and discriminative. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NNLRS-graph in semi-supervised classification and discriminative analysis. Extensive experiments testify to the significant advantages of NNLRS-graph over graphs obtained through conventional means.
Mychildren's: Integration of a Personally Controlled Health Record with a Tethered Patient Portal for a Pediatric and Adolescent Population

Personally controlled health records (PCHRs) and patient portals are increasingly being offered by healthcare institutions, employers, insurance companies and commercial entities to allow patients access to their health information. Both applications offer unique services to provide patients with tools to manage their health. While PCHRs allow users ubiquitous, portable, patient controlled access to their health information, traditional patient portals provide provider-tethered applications allowing patients access, but not control of, certain healthcare information, as well as communication and administrative functions, such as secure messaging, appointment management and prescription refill requests, facilitating care at a specific healthcare facility.We describe our approach for the design, content creation, policy development, and implementation of MyChildren's, a unique web-based application leveraging the advantages of both a provider-tethered patient portal and a PCHR to allow patients and their guardians access to the functionality and convenience of a traditional patient portal, as well as the portability and flexibility of a PCHR.
Do Public Schools Provide Optimal Support for Children With Diabetes?

The obesity epidemic among children has received considerable attention in the media — partly in response to two important reports by the Institute of Medicine on the topic (1,2). The parallel rise in diabetes mellitus among children is an equally important topic but is less discussed, even though diabetes has become one of the most common chronic diseases among youth. The estimated prevalence of type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus among U.S. children or youth aged 17 years or younger was 3.2 per 1,000 (which means that there were about 229,240 children or youth aged <18 years with diabetes in the United States) in 2003–2004 (3). The public schools are important locations for secondary prevention interventions to help these children and youth minimize their risk for complications associated with diabetes. We investigated the diabetes knowledge and preparedness among members of the faculty and staff of schools in Oregon, as well as barriers to school support for students with diabetes.
Sox7, Sox17, and Sox18 Cooperatively Regulate Vascular Development in the Mouse Retina

Vascular development and maintenance are controlled by a complex transcriptional program, which integrates both extracellular and intracellular signals in endothelial cells. Here we study the roles of three closely related SoxF family transcription factors–Sox7, Sox17, and Sox18 –in the developing and mature mouse vasculature using targeted gene deletion on a mixed C57/129/CD1 genetic background. In the retinal vasculature, each SoxF gene exhibits a distinctive pattern of expression in different classes of blood vessels. On a mixed genetic background, vascular endothelial-specific deletion of individual SoxF genes has little or no effect on vascular architecture or differentiation, a result that can be explained by overlapping function and by reciprocal regulation of gene expression between Sox7 and Sox17. By contrast, combined deletion of Sox7, Sox17, and Sox18 at the onset of retinal angiogenesis leads to a dense capillary plexus with a nearly complete loss of radial arteries and veins, whereas the presence of a single Sox17 allele largely restores arterial identity, as determined by vascular smooth muscle cell coverage. In the developing retina, expression of all three SoxF genes is reduced in the absence of Norrin/Frizzled4-mediated canonical Wnt signaling, but SoxF gene expression is unaffected by reduced VEGF signaling in response to deletion of Neuropilin1 (Npn1). In adulthood, Sox7, Sox17, and Sox18 act in a largely redundant manner to maintain blood vessel function, as adult onset vascular endothelial-specific deletion of all three SoxF genes leads to massive edema despite nearly normal vascular architecture. These data reveal critical and partially redundant roles for Sox7, Sox17 and Sox18 in vascular growth, differentiation, and maintenance.
Effects of an anesthetic mixture of medetomidine, midazolam, and butorphanol in rats—strain difference and antagonism by atipamezole

An anesthetic mixture of medetomidine (MED), midazolam (MID), and butorphanol (BUT) has been used in laboratory animals. We previously reported that this anesthetic mixture produced closely similar anesthetic effects in BALB/c and C57BL/6J strains. We also demonstrated the efficacy of atipamezole (ATI), an antagonist of MED that produced quick recovery from anesthesia in mice. Anesthetics have various anesthetic effects among animal strains. However, the differences in the effects of anesthetic mixtures in rats are unclear. In the present study, we first examined effects of the abovementioned anesthetic mixture using three different rat strains: Wistar (WST), Sprague-Dawley (SD), and Fischer 344 (F344). Second, we examined how different dosages and optimum injection timing of ATI affected recovery from anesthesia in rats. We used the anesthetic score to measure anesthetic duration and a pulse oximeter to monitor vital signs. We found no significant differences in anesthetic duration among the three different strains. However, recovery from anesthesia in the SD strain took significantly longer than in the other strains. The antagonistic effects of ATI (0.15 mg/kg and 0.75 mg/kg) were equivalent when administered at 30 min after anesthetic mixture administration. The antagonistic effects of ATI 0.75 mg/kg were stronger than those of ATI 0.15 mg/kg at 10 min after anesthetic mixture administration. This anesthetic mixture is a useful drug that can induce similar anesthetic effects in three different strains and has an antagonist, ATI, that makes rats quickly recover from anesthesia. These results may contribute to the welfare of laboratory animals.
Neuronal Apoptosis by Apolipoprotein E4 through Low-Density Lipoprotein Receptor-Related Protein and Heterotrimeric GTPases

The ε4 genotype of apolipoprotein E (apoE4) is the most established predisposing factor in Alzheimer's disease (AD); however, it remains unclear how apoE4 contributes to the pathophysiology. Here, we report that the apoE4 protein (ApoE4) evokes apoptosis in neuronal cells through the low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein (LRP) and heterotrimeric GTPases. We examined neuron/neuroblastoma hybrid F11 cells and found that these cells were killed by 30 μg/ml ApoE4, but not by 30 μg/ml ApoE3. ApoE4-induced death occurred with typical features for apoptosis in time- and dose-dependent manners, and was observed in SH-SY5Y neuroblastomas, but not in glioblastomas or non-neuronal Chinese hamster ovary cells. Activated, but not native, α2-macroglobulin suppressed this ApoE4 toxicity. Suppression by the antisense oligonucleotide to LRP and inhibition by low nanomolar concentrations of LRP-associated protein RAP provided evidence for the involvement of LRP. The involvement of heterotrimeric GTPases was demonstrated by the findings that (1) ApoE4-induced death was suppressed by pertussis toxin (PTX), but not by heat-inactivated PTX; and (2) transfection with PTX-resistant mutant cDNAs of Gαi restored the toxicity of ApoE4 restricted by PTX. We thus conclude that one of the neurotoxic mechanisms triggered by ApoE4 is to activate a cell type-specific apoptogenic program involving LRP and the Gi class of GTPases and that the apoE4 gene may play a direct role in the pathogenesis of AD and other forms of dementia.
Purlieus: Locality-aware resource allocation for MapReduce in a cloud

We present Purlieus, a MapReduce resource allocation system aimed at enhancing the performance of MapReduce jobs in the cloud. Purlieus provisions virtual MapReduce clusters in a locality-aware manner enabling MapReduce virtual machines (VMs) access to input data and importantly, intermediate data from local or close-by physical machines. We demonstrate how this locality-awareness during both map and reduce phases of the job not only improves runtime performance of individual jobs but also has an additional advantage of reducing network traffic generated in the cloud data center. This is accomplished using a novel coupling of, otherwise independent, data and VM placement steps. We conduct a detailed evaluation of Purlieus and demonstrate significant savings in network traffic and almost 50% reduction in job execution times for a variety of workloads.
The weakening relationship between the impact factor and papers' citations in the digital age

Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published; but in the digital age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and cited based on their own merits, independently of the journal's physical availability, reputation, or impact factor (IF). We compare the strength of the relationship between journals' IFs and the actual citations received by their respective papers from 1902 to 2009. Throughout most of the 20th century, papers' citation rates were increasingly linked to their respective journals' IFs. However, since 1990, the advent of the digital age, the relation between IFs and paper citations has been weakening. This began first in physics, a field that was quick to make the transition into the electronic domain. Furthermore, since 1990 the overall proportion of highly cited papers coming from highly cited journals has been decreasing and, of these highly cited papers, the proportion not coming from highly cited journals has been increasing. Should this pattern continue, it might bring an end to the use of the IF as a way to evaluate the quality of journals, papers, and researchers. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A predictive study of reading comprehension in third-grade Spanish students.

BACKGROUND The study of the contribution of language and cognitive skills to reading comprehension is an important goal of current reading research. However, reading comprehension is not easily assessed by a single instrument, as different comprehension tests vary in the type of tasks used and in the cognitive demands required. METHOD This study examines the contribution of basic language and cognitive skills (decoding, word recognition, reading speed, verbal and nonverbal intelligence and working memory) to reading comprehension, assessed by two tests utilizing various tasks that require different skill sets in third-grade Spanish-speaking students. RESULTS Linguistic and cognitive abilities predicted reading comprehension. A measure of reading speed (the reading time of pseudo-words) was the best predictor of reading comprehension when assessed by the PROLEC-R test. However, measures of word recognition (the orthographic choice task) and verbal working memory were the best predictors of reading comprehension when assessed by means of the DARC test. CONCLUSION These results show, on the one hand, that reading speed and word recognition are better predictors of Spanish language comprehension than reading accuracy. On the other, the reading comprehension test applied here serves as a critical variable when analyzing and interpreting results regarding this topic.
Stability of Data Networks: Stationary and Bursty Models

This paper studies stability of network models that capture macroscopic features of data communication networks, including the Internet. The network model consists of a set of links and a set of possible routes that are fixed subsets of links. A connection is dynamically established along one of the routes to transmit data as requested and is terminated after the transmission is over. The transmission bandwidth of a link is dynamically allocated, according to specific bandwidth allocation policy, to ongoing connections that traverse the link. A network model is said to be stable under a given bandwidth allocation policy if, roughly, the number of ongoing connections in the network will not blow up over time. We consider a stationary and a bursty network model; the former assumes stochastically stationary arrival processes of connections as did many theoretical studies, while the latter allows more realistic bursty and correlated arrival processes. For both models under a necessary stability condition (i.e., the average offered transmission load on each link is within its bandwidth capacity), we show that the proportionally fair, the minimum potential delay, the max-min fair, and a class of utility-maximizing bandwidth allocation policies ensure network model stability, while some priority-oriented and maximum throughput policies do not. Interestingly, the bandwidth allocation policy that maximizes the arctan(Â·) utility ensures the stability of the stationary model butnot the bursty model. This raises a serious concern about the current practice in the Internet protocol design, since such a policy is thought of as a good approximation of one of the most widely used TCP in the Internet.
Fast and scalable layer four switching

In Layer Four switching, the route and resources allocated to a packet are determined by the destination address as well as other header fields of the packet such as source address, TCP and UDP port numbers. Layer Four switching unifies firewall processing, RSVP style resource reservation filters, QoS Routing, and normal unicast and multicast forwarding into a single framework. In this framework, the forwarding database of a router consists of a potentially large number of filters on key header fields. A given packet header can match multiple filters, so each filter is given a cost, and the packet is forwarded using the least cost matching filter.In this paper, we describe two new algorithms for solving the least cost matching filter problem at high speeds. Our first algorithm is based on a grid-of-tries construction and works optimally for processing filters consisting of two prefix fields (such as destination-source filters) using linear space. Our second algorithm, cross-producting, provides fast lookup times for arbitrary filters but potentially requires large storage. We describe a combination scheme that combines the advantages of both schemes. The combination scheme can be optimized to handle pure destination prefix filters in 4 memory accesses, destination-source filters in 8 memory accesses worst case, and all other filters in 11 memory accesses in the typical case.
Relationship between the inoculum dose of Streptococcus pneumoniae and pneumonia onset in a rabbit model

It is generally assumed that the development of bacterial pneumonia becomes possible when the dose of inhaled or aspirated pathogens overwhelms the respiratory tract host defence system, but this hypothesis has not yet been tested either clinically or experimentally. This study evaluated inoculum dose in relation to onset of experimental pneumococcal pneumonia, and estimated the median effective dose resulting in pneumonia in healthy New Zealand White rabbits (mean±sd 4.75±0.25 kg (n = 27)). Rabbits were endobronchially inoculated with increasing doses of Streptococcus pneumoniae and pneumonia onset was observed over the following 96 h. The diagnostic approach was based on the Clinical Pulmonary Infection Score, modified for use in rabbits. Inoculation of S. pneumoniae at doses of >4.60 log10 cfu made the development of pneumonia in rabbits more predictable (up to 90%). Lower doses of bacteria failed to cause pneumonia in 80% of inoculated animals. The median effective dose was estimated by means of logistical regression, probit analyses and the Reed–Muench method, and corresponded to 4.32, 4.38 and 4.67 log10 cfu, respectively. It is speculated that development of pneumococcal pneumonia becomes more likely when the inoculum dose exceeds a threshold of antibacterial protection, making inoculum dose a risk factor for disease onset.
SHEAR-WAVE SPLITTING : AN EFFICIENT TOOL TO DETECT 3 D FRACTURE PATTERNS AT THE GEYSERS

Shear-wave splitting, observed in microearthquake records at The NW and SE Geysers geothermal fields, CA has proved to be effective in the detection of subsurface crack orientations and crack densities. Crust anisotropy due to patterns of stress-aligned fractures causes approaching shear-waves to split into fast and slow arrivals. Within the shear-wave window of a given seismic station, the measured polarization angle of the fast S-wave is in theory parallel to the predominant crack orientation beneath the station. Exceptions, however, caused by complex geometry of the crack system have been discerned. The predominant polarization directions recorded in NW Geysers range between N-S and N60E. In SE Geysers, two major sets of polarization angles are detected. The first set varies from N-S to N80E while the second set strikes generally NW. The time delay between the arrival of the fast and the slow shearwave is proportional to the crack density (or number of cracks per unit volume) along the ray-path. When normalized to the ray length, time delays at The Geysers range typically between 8 and 40 ms/km. The sizeable collection of high-resolution shear-wave splitting parameters we compiled (polarization direction and time delay pairs) is presented in this paper. In the accompanying paper, the data is used in the inversion for crack geometry and fracture distribution within the reservoir.
Association between oral malodor and adult periodontitis: a review.

BACKGROUND Bad breath has a significant impact on our daily social life to those who suffer from it. The majority of bad breath originates within the oral cavity. However, it is also possible that it can come from other sources such as gastric-intestine imbalance. The term "oral malodor" is used to describe a foul or offensive odor emanating from the oral cavity, in which proteolysis, metabolic products of the desquamating cell, and bacterial putrefaction are involved. Recent evidence has demonstrated a link between oral malodor and adult periodontitis. The process of developing bad breath is similar to that noted in the progression of gingivitis/periodontitis. Oral malodor is mainly attributed to volatile sulfur compounds (VSC) such as hydrogen sulfide, methyl mercaptan and dimethyl sulfide. The primary causative microbes are gram-negative, anaerobic bacteria that are similar to the bacteria causing periodontitis. These bacteria produce the VSC by metabolizing different cells/tissues (i.e., epithelial cells, leukocytes, etc.) located in saliva, dental plaque, and gingival crevicular fluid. Tongue surface is composed of blood components, nutrients, large amounts of desquamated epithelial cells and bacteria, suggesting that it has the proteolytic and putrefactive capacity to produce VSC. One of the challenges in dealing with oral malodor is to identify a reliable test for detecting bad breath. AIMS The purposes of this review article were: (1) to correlate the relationship between oral malodor and adult periodontitis; (2) to analyze current malodor tests and discuss available treatment regimens.