Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The new Roche Vitamin D Total assay: fit for its purpose?

Abstract Background: Measurement of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] is used to assess vitamin D status. We evaluated the analytical performance of a new automated assay, Elecsys Vitamin D Total (Roche Diagnostics, Mannheim, Germany), based on competitive protein binding. Methods: The Elecsys assay was tested for imprecision, linearity and functional sensitivity at three test-sites and compared to a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method, a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method and the Liaison 25(OH) Vitamin D Total immunoassay (Diasorin). Results: Imprecision testing with human serum specimens showed within-run CVs of ≤6% and between-run CVs of ≤8%. The assay was linear from 33 up to at least 111 nmol/L and showed equivalent 25(OH)D levels for matched serum and heparinized plasma samples. The assay correlated reasonable to well with LC-MS/MS (r=0.93; y=1.07x–5.04 nmol/L), HPLC (r=0.91, y=0.90x+3.03 nmol/L) and the Liaison assay (r=0.86, y=1.19x+2.80 nmol/L). Some of the samples showed large between-method differences. Conclusions: The new Elecsys assay fulfilled present analytical performance requirements and showed close agreement to other well-established methods for 25(OH)D analysis, making it fit for routine assessment of vitamin D status.
Signs and symptoms of temporomandibular disorders and their impact on psychosocial status in non-patient university student's population.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) exhibit a combination of signs and symptoms, mainly characterized by pain and dysfunction, which impairs the functional capacity of the mastication system. These symptoms may produce a negative impact on social activities, employment and leisure. The aim of this study was to early identify the signs and symptoms of TMD and their impact on daily life of non-patient university students. METHODS Data were collected from 183 students of the dentistry course. The Axis II of the Research Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders was administered and analyzed using Spearman test at a significance level of 0.05. RESULTS Among the 183 participants, 107 were women (58.47%) and 76 were men (41.53%). Age ranged from 18 to 47, with a mean age of 25.35 years. In relation to pain intensity and disability, 129 participants (70.88%) reported no pain in the previous 6 months. An analysis of depression revealed that 35 (19.67%) had moderate and 7 (3.83%) had severe depression. The assessment of nonspecific physical symptoms including pain revealed that nine (4.92%) exhibited moderate symptoms, and one (0.55%) exhibited severe symptoms. The nonspecific physical symptoms excluding items of pain analysis revealed that 44 (24.04%) exhibited moderate symptoms, and 91 (49.73%) exhibited severe. The functions reported as most adversely affected by jaw disability were yawning, eating hard foods, chewing, smiling and laughing. Regarding the habit, 64 (35%) confirmed having the nighttime and 59 daytime (32.3%) teeth grinding with a significant correlation with the four domains analyzed. A significant correlation was observed among all domains. CONCLUSION This study analyzed a young population that exhibited para-functional habits and nonspecific physical symptoms excluding pain that need some intervention since they could progress to a symptomatic TMD in future.
A discrete‐beta model for testing gene flow after speciation

Due to the polymorphism in the ancestral species and the stochastic fluctuation of the coalescent process, the divergence time between sequences from two closely related species varies throughout the genome. This variation is described by an exponential distribution. Gene flow between the species causes additional variation in the sequence divergence time, beyond the expected variation from the ancestral coalescent process. This prediction can be used to test for gene flow between species using genomic sequence data. A previous implementation of the model used an empirical beta distribution to describe the variation in species divergence time across the genome, with numerical integration used to calculate the 3D integrals involved in the likelihood function. However, with a huge number of loci, the numerical integration is not accurate enough, so the false‐positive rate of the likelihood ratio test may exceed the significance level. In this study, we replace the beta model with a discretized version, so that the likelihood calculation involves 2D integrals. We implement the new discrete‐beta model in the program 3s and also extend our previous implementation to accommodate loci with different data configurations. We use computer simulation to examine the false‐positive rate, the power and the robustness of the likelihood ratio test. The results show that the test had low false‐positive rates and had even higher power in detecting gene flow than a likelihood ratio test based on a proper implementation of the isolation‐with‐migration model. It is, however, not robust to high levels of recombination within locus. Application of the test to two empirical data sets (from the hominoid genomes and from the Drosophila fruit flies) suggests the presence of gene flow for both data sets.
Visual stability.

-Lhe problem of visual stability is normally posed somewhat as follows: When my eye roves over the visual scene, the image of the world dances about on my retina, yet I perceive that world as stable. How does my visual system succeed in restoring and maintaining stability? Conversely, when I press on the canthus of my open eye so as to rotate the eyeball, the visual world seems to move. What differentiates this case from one in which a similar displacement of the retinal image is brought about by the use of my eye muscles? A partial answer to the last question is that, whereas normal exploratory eye movements are saccadic, the image movements produced by pressing on the canthus are usually much slower, and may excite "driftsensitive" elements in the visual system which are not stimulated by normal saccades. But this is not the whole story, for the world is still seen to move even when such artificially produced image displacements are as rapid as saccades. We must therefore conclude that the central nervous system has access to information about a voluntary eye movement which is absent when an image displacement is brought about in some other way. This conclusion raises two questions which are sometimes confused: 1. What is the source of such information? 2. What use is made of it? This paper is not concerned with Question 1. The two most favored answers to
An extensible approach to session polymorphism †

Session types describe and constrain the input/output behaviour of systems. Existing session typing systems have limited support for polymorphism. For example, existing systems cannot provide the most general type for a generic proxy process that forwards messages between two channels. We provide a polymorphic session typing system for the π calculus, and demonstrate the utility of session-type-level functions in combination with polymorphic session typing. The type system guarantees subject reduction and safety properties, but not deadlock freedom. We describe a formalization of the type system in Coq. The proofs of subject reduction and safety properties, as well as typing of example processes, have been mechanically verified.
$\hbox{QB}^{2}\hbox{IC}$: A QoS-Based Broadcast Protocol Under Blind Information for Multihop Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

Broadcasting is an important operation in wireless networks where control information is usually propagated as broadcasts for the realization of most networking protocols. In traditional ad hoc networks, broadcasts are conducted on a common channel, which is shared by all nodes in the network. However, in cognitive radio (CR) ad hoc networks, unlicensed users may observe heterogeneous spectrum availability, which is unknown to other unlicensed users before the control information was broadcast. Thus, it is extremely challenging that broadcasts can be successfully conducted without knowing the spectrum availability information in advance. In addition, since broadcast collisions (i.e., simultaneous reception of broadcast messages at the same node) often lead to the waste of network resources, they should be efficiently mitigated in multihop scenarios. In this paper, a quality-of-service (QoS)-based broadcast protocol under Blind Information for multihop CR ad hoc networks, i.e., QB2IC, is proposed with the aim of having a high success rate and short broadcast delay. In our design, we do not assume that unlicensed users are aware of the network topology, the spectrum availability information, and time synchronization information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that investigates the broadcast issue in multihop CR ad hoc networks under blind information. Simulation results show that our proposed QB2IC protocol outperforms other broadcast schemes in terms of a higher success rate and shorter average broadcast delay.
Revisiting storage for smartphones

Conventional wisdom holds that storage is not a big contributor to application performance on mobile devices. Flash storage (the type most commonly used today) draws little power, and its performance is thought to exceed that of the network subsystem. In this article, we present evidence that storage performance does indeed affect the performance of several common applications such as Web browsing, maps, application install, email, and Facebook. For several Android smartphones, we find that just by varying the underlying flash storage, performance over WiFi can typically vary between 100% and 300% across applications; in one extreme scenario, the variation jumped to over 2000%. With a faster network (set up over USB), the performance variation rose even further. We identify the reasons for the strong correlation between storage and application performance to be a combination of poor flash device performance, random I/O from application databases, and heavy-handed use of synchronous writes. Based on our findings, we implement and evaluate a set of pilot solutions to address the storage performance deficiencies in smartphones.
High incidence of Haemophilus influenzae type b infection in children in Pacific island countries.

The Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) disease burden among children <5 years old in 4 Pacific island countries (PICs) was estimated. The incidence of confirmed Hib meningitis was calculated using the numbers of culture-confirmed isolates. In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) Hib Rapid Assessment Tool (RAT) was used to estimate the true Hib meningitis incidence and the number of Hib meningitis and pneumonia cases, as well as the number of deaths due to Hib meningitis and pneumonia. The Hib meningitis annual incidence in 3 PICs was 70-84 cases per 100,000 children <5 years old. For PICs, the RAT is likely to overestimate the Hib pneumonia burden, as it assumes a 5 : 1 ratio of Hib pneumonia to Hib meningitis. The true ratio is likely to be 1 : 1. The high Hib disease burden and the relative cost-effectiveness of Hib vaccine make the introduction of Hib vaccine a good investment for PICs, costing US1000 dollars-US10,000 dollars for each death prevented--a number that ignores savings from reductions in the cost of treatment.
Gender differences in the pathways of family factors influencing children’s oral health behaviours: a cross-sectional study of primary school students in Beijing, China

Abstract Objective: Research on what family factors influence children’s oral health behaviours (COHB) in developing countries is limited, and there have been no path analyses accounting for gender differences in these factors. Thus, our study evaluated gender differences in COHB including the influencing pathways of family factors in China. Materials and methods: Through multistage cluster sampling, 915 pairs of mothers and children from six public elementary schools in Beijing completed self-administered questionnaires regarding COHB, parents’ modelling behaviours (PMB), parents’ controlling behaviours (PCB), parents’ oral health knowledge and attitudes (PKA), and children’s oral health knowledge and attitudes (CKA). The influencing factors were analysed using path analysis. Results: Compared with boys, girls showed significantly better performance in drinking less carbonated drinks regularly (8.6% vs. 16.9%). For both genders, PMB shad a significant direct influence on COHB, while PKA had an indirect influence through PMB. In the boys’ model, PKA indirectly influenced COHB through CKA. In the girls’ model, socioeconomic status had a positive direct effect on COHB. Conclusions: The gender differences were not as large as expected. Given that slightly different influential factors for COHB exist between boys and girls, interventions should take note of the similarities and differences in pathways.
Approximations for Monotone and Nonmonotone Submodular Maximization with Knapsack Constraints

Submodular maximization generalizes many fundamental problems in discrete optimization, including Max-Cut in directed/undirected graphs, maximum coverage, maximum facility location, and marketing over social networks. In this paper we consider the problem of maximizing any submodular function subject to d knapsack constraints, where d is a fixed constant. We establish a strong relation between the discrete problem and its continuous relaxation, obtained through extension by expectation of the submodular function. Formally, we show that, for any nonnegative submodular function, an α-approximation algorithm for the continuous relaxation implies a randomized α-e-approximation algorithm for the discrete problem. We use this relation to obtain an e-1-e-approximation for the problem, and a nearly optimal 1-e-1-e-approximation ratio for the monotone case, for any e > 0. We further show that the probabilistic domain defined by a continuous solution can be reduced to yield a polynomial-size domain, given an oracle for the extension by expectation. This leads to a deterministic version of our technique.
A Feedback-Type Phase Voltage Compensation Strategy Based on Phase Current Reconstruction for ACIM Drives

Insertion of dead time, transfer links between micro control unit (MCU) and voltage source inverter (VSI), VSI's nonideal characteristics all lead to deviation that cannot be ignored between the actual output voltage and the command voltage, which seriously affects the performance of the ac induction motor (ACIM) control system. Among many dead-time effect compensation methods, VSI usually operates under an open-loop condition, thus making complete compensation hard to achieve. This paper studies methods to obtain the two key elements of compensation voltage amplitude and current polarity and a novel phase voltage compensation method is proposed. In this method, a simple hardware circuit is applied to obtain the actual output of the VSI as feedback with which precise compensation amplitude can be calculated. And judgment of current polarity is accurately realized by reconstructing phase current from filtered current components under M-T coordinate with a Kalman filter. The compensation in a zero-crossing region is also closely discussed in this paper. To verify the validity of the method, simulations and experiments are carried out. The experiments emphasize on the efficacy of feedback, steady-state, and transient performance of current reconstruction; and the performance of a conventional method to that of the proposed method are also compared. Results show that the proposed method proves to be effective.
The Cellular and Physiological Functions of the Lowe Syndrome Protein OCRL1

Phosphoinositide lipids play a key role in cellular physiology, participating in a wide array of cellular processes. Consequently, mutation of phosphoinositide‐metabolizing enzymes is responsible for a growing number of diseases in humans. Two related disorders, oculocerebrorenal syndrome of Lowe (OCRL) and Dent‐2 disease, are caused by mutation of the inositol 5‐phosphatase OCRL1. Here, we review recent advances in our understanding of OCRL1 function. OCRL1 appears to regulate many processes within the cell, most of which depend upon coordination of membrane dynamics with remodeling of the actin cytoskeleton. Recently developed animal models have managed to recapitulate features of Lowe syndrome and Dent‐2 disease, and revealed new insights into the underlying mechanisms of these disorders. The continued use of both cell‐based approaches and animal models will be key to fully unraveling OCRL1 function, how its loss leads to disease and, importantly, the development of therapeutics to treat patients.
Improving Data Driven Dependency Parsing using Clausal Information

The paper describes a data driven dependency parsing approach which uses clausal information of a sentence to improve the parser performance. The clausal information is added automatically during the parsing process. We demonstrate the experiments on Hindi, a language with relatively rich case marking system and free-word-order. All the experiments are done using a modified version of MSTParser. We did all the experiments on the ICON 2009 parsing contest data. We achieved an improvement of 0.87% and 0.77% in unlabeled attachment and labeled attachment accuracies respectively over the baseline parsing accuracies.
Semantic Verbal Fluency of Animals: A Normative and Predictive Study in a Spanish Population

Semantic verbal fluency is a very sensible but rather unspecific tool for the detection of neuropsychological deficits. This test is highly influenced by socio-cultural factors. Normative and predictive data for semantic verbal fluency of animals in a Spanish population are presented. The studied sample (n = 445) was stratified according to age and schooling. Statistical analysis reconfirmed a significant negative correlation (- 5.34) for age, and a significant positive correlation (5.34) for years of formal education. A predictive function for the production of names of animals during 1 min was established based on the subject's age and level of education: F(x) = 23.89 +age (-.144) + education (.39). The neuropsychological value and limitations of normative data and the predictive equation are discussed.
A controlled trial of colchicine to reduce the elastase load in the lungs of ex-cigarette smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

A great deal of experimental evidence suggests that emphysema in smokers is caused by the action of neutrophil elastase on lung elastin. In order to test this hypothesis, it is necessary to find a drug that reduces the load of neutrophil elastase in the lungs of patients with emphysema. In a previous study we treated smokers with emphysema with colchicine, a drug that prevents neutrophil elastase secretion, to determine if it would reduce the elastase burden in the lungs. Colchicine was unable to reduce the elastase load while the stimulus of smoking continued. In this study we treated ex-smokers with emphysema to determine if colchicine could reduce the elastase burden in the lungs. The objective of the study was to determine if colchicine can reduce the elastase load and putative indicators of elastase load in the lungs of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The study was a prospective, double-blind, randomized, and placebo-controlled clinical trial. The subjects were outpatients seeking treatment at the University of Texas Health Center at Tyler. We studied 16 ex-cigarette smokers between 45 and 75 yr of age with lung disease defined by FEV1 less than 70% of predicted but greater than 1.2 L whose airflow obstruction was less than 20% reversible with bronchodilators. Colchicine or placebo was taken by mouth in disguised capsules, 0.6 mg three times per day. Volunteers were placed on a baseline bronchodilator regimen of theodur by mouth and albuterol by inhalation. Blood, urine, and bronchoalveolar lavage fluids were obtained after 1 wk of stabilization. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Filter-Based Adaptive Vibration Control for Active Vehicle Suspensions With Electrohydraulic Actuators

Vehicle suspension systems are important for significantly improving passenger comfort and handling characteristics. A well-designed suspension system can improve the entire performance of the automobile chassis. In this paper, an adaptive vibration control strategy is proposed for nonlinear uncertain suspension systems to stabilize both the vertical and pitch motions of the car and, thus, to contribute to ride comfort. Simultaneously, ride holding performance is preserved within allowable limits in the controller design. Moreover, differing from the existing results, in most of which the effect of actuator dynamic is neglected, this paper considers the electrohydraulic systems as actuators to supply active forces into suspension systems. Furthermore, to overcome the “exploration of terms” problem existing in standard backstepping, a filter-based adaptive control strategy is subsequently proposed. Finally, a design example is shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed active controllers, where different road conditions are considered in order to reveal the closed-loop system performance in detail.
The Dublin principles revisited for WSS

Recent international gatherings such as the second world water forum in the Hague continue to give international backing to Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) as the holistic framework within which the worlds water should be managed. Vision 21 identifies IWRM as a crucial challenge to the drinking water supply and sanitation (WSS) sub-sector (WSSCC, 2000). However, while at the international level agreements are signed and consensus reached, at the local level, and within water subsectors there continues to be much confusion as to what exactly the new paradigm implies, and how it should be addressed. This paper outlines a methodology for participatory self assessment of WSS projects, that by using the 1992 Dublin principles as a basis, helps to initiate a process of inclusion of IWRM principles within WSS projects.
Climate Change and Food Systems: Assessing Impacts and Opportunities

While there is growing discussion and dialogue about climate change and agriculture, relatively little analysis and focus has been put on climate change and food systems. A narrower focus on climate change and agriculture, which is often associated with production, limits the ability to pursue a broad range of mitigation and adaptation strategies that support necessary system-level changes. Adopting a food systems perspective for climate change mitigation and adaption will be critical to addressing GHG emissions and to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).