Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[Cognitive deficiency in mild hypothyroidism].

OBJECTIVE Moderate and severe primary adult hypothyroidism produces cognitive and behavioral disturbances, but the effects of mild hypothyroidism are not well established. We have tried to determine the pattern of cognitive performance and the effect of hormonal treatment in mild hypothyroidism. PATIENTS AND METHODS 15 patients with subclinical or very mild hypothyroidism were compared with other 15 patients suffering from mild diseases without central nervous system damage, who were matched in age, sex and previous intelligence. A neuropsychological battery, including tests of global cognitive performance (Mini Mental Status Examination, WAIS), attention (reaction time), visual memory (Benton test, Rey's Figure), verbal memory (word learning), verbal fluency and executive functions (Trail Making Test), was applied. RESULTS Hypothyroid patients had worse performance in some WAIS subtests, reaction time, verbal fluency, free recall and copy of the Rey's figure. After hormonal treatment, a significant improvement and normal performance in almost all cognitive functions were found. CONCLUSIONS Even mild hypothyroidism produces cognitive defects, mainly in tasks with high attentional requirements, that can and should be corrected with hormonal replacement.
Does Semantic Context Benefit Speech Understanding through “Top–Down” Processes? Evidence from Time-resolved Sparse fMRI

When speech is degraded, word report is higher for semantically coherent sentences (e.g., her new skirt was made of denim) than for anomalous sentences (e.g., her good slope was done in carrot). Such increased intelligibility is often described as resulting from “top–down” processes, reflecting an assumption that higher-level (semantic) neural processes support lower-level (perceptual) mechanisms. We used time-resolved sparse fMRI to test for top–down neural mechanisms, measuring activity while participants heard coherent and anomalous sentences presented in speech envelope/spectrum noise at varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). The timing of BOLD responses to more intelligible speech provides evidence of hierarchical organization, with earlier responses in peri-auditory regions of the posterior superior temporal gyrus than in more distant temporal and frontal regions. Despite Sentence content × SNR interactions in the superior temporal gyrus, prefrontal regions respond after auditory/perceptual regions. Although we cannot rule out top–down effects, this pattern is more compatible with a purely feedforward or bottom–up account, in which the results of lower-level perceptual processing are passed to inferior frontal regions. Behavioral and neural evidence that sentence content influences perception of degraded speech does not necessarily imply “top–down” neural processes.
Parasitism and predation of the planthopper Tagosodes orizicolus (Homoptera: Delphacidae) by a dryinid parasitoid in Costa Rica

We analyzed the effect of predation and parasitism by the native dryinid Haplogonatopus hernan- dezae as a natural enemy of the rice pest Tagosodes orizicolus under controlled conditions in an insectary in Costa Rica. We found no change in the proportion of T. orizicolus nymphs that were fed upon, parasitized, and that showed no apparent damage throughout the adult stage in H. hernandezae, which favors a stable control of the pest. The percentage of T. orizicolus nymphs that were parasitized (37 %) and preyed upon (36.5 %) was similar, eliminating 73,5 % of the total nymphs causing damage to the rice plants (N = 1 099). Of the total 324 parasitized nymphs, female nymphs were more parasitized than male nymphs (95 % and 5 % respectively) and dryinids developed more successfully in female host nymphs. These tendencies did not change with dryinid age. Survival of dryinids was higher in female T. orizicolus, both for larvae that emerged from the host and pupated, and for pupae that moulted to adults. In cages where the nymphs had no contact with dryinids we found a higher amount of males than females (57.44 ± 28.5 vs 45.22 ± 25.85). In contrast, when the nymphs were in contact with dryinids, the sex ratio was two females to one male reaching adulthood since the dryinids fed more on male nymphs (N = 692). Our results indicate that female dryinids prefer to oviposit in female T. orizicolus nymphs and prey on males. Reproduction by parthenogenesis, acceleration of the development in an insectary with controlled conditions and eficiency of H. hernandezae as a parasitoid and predator indicate that this dryinid is an effective biological control agent of T. orizicolus. Rev. Biol. Trop. 57 (Suppl. 1): 203-211. Epub 2009 November 30.
Controlling the Proportion of False Positives in Multiple Dependent Tests

Genome scan mapping experiments involve multiple tests of significance. Thus, controlling the error rate in such experiments is important. Simple extension of classical concepts results in attempts to control the genomewise error rate (GWER), i.e., the probability of even a single false positive among all tests. This results in very stringent comparisonwise error rates (CWER) and, consequently, low experimental power. We here present an approach based on controlling the proportion of false positives (PFP) among all positive test results. The CWER needed to attain a desired PFP level does not depend on the correlation among the tests or on the number of tests as in other approaches. To estimate the PFP it is necessary to estimate the proportion of true null hypotheses. Here we show how this can be estimated directly from experimental results. The PFP approach is similar to the false discovery rate (FDR) and positive false discovery rate (pFDR) approaches. For a fixed CWER, we have estimated PFP, FDR, pFDR, and GWER through simulation under a variety of models to illustrate practical and philosophical similarities and differences among the methods.
Genetic diversity and genetic relationships of japonica rice varieties in Northeast Asia based on SSR markers

Genetic diversity and the relationship among nine japonica rice groups consisting of 288 landraces and varieties in different geographical origins of Northeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and the Russian Far East district of the Russian Federation were evaluated with 154 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. A total of 823 alleles were detected. The observed allele numbers (Na) per locus, Nei's gene diversity (He) and the polymorphism information content (PIC) ranged from 2 to 9, 0.061 to 0.869 and 0.060 to 0.856, with an average of 5.344, 0.624 and 0.586, respectively. Five SSR loci, RM1350, RM1369, RM257, RM336 and RM1374, provided the highest PIC values and are potential for exploring the genetic diversity of rice cultivars in Northeast Asia. Molecular variance analysis showed that a significant difference existed both among groups (91.6%) and within each group (8.4%). The low genetic variation within each group indicated that the gene pool is narrow and alien genetic variation should be introduced into the rice breeding program in Northeast Asia. Based on the He and PIC values, the nine groups were ranked in a descending order: Heilongjiang landraces, Jilin landraces, Japanese improved varieties, Heilongjiang improved varieties, Russian Far East district of the Russian Federation improved varieties, Liaoning improved varieties, Jilin improved varieties, Korean improved varieties and Democratic People's Republic of Korea improved varieties. The nine groups were further divided into three subgroups and the 288 varieties into five clusters. This study provided information for parent selection in order to broaden the gene pool of the japonica rice germplasm in Northeast Asia.
Long term sport involvement and sport injury rate in elite young athletes

Many young athletes have undergone years of intensive training by adolescence.1,2 Intensive training at a young age may cause long term harmful effects.3 Our longitudinal study on the effects of intensive training in young British athletes (TOYA study), which ran from 1987 to 1992, showed a low prevalence of sports injuries from 1988 to 1990.4 Most sports injuries were minor, and did not seem to cause significant short to medium term health problems.4 Given the possible interaction between intensive training and growth during adolescence,5–7 some adolescent athletes may be particularly vulnerable to repetitive microtraumatic injury.2 Despite the perceived benefits of early training on bone mass accumulation,8,9,10 intensive training may have detrimental effects on young athletes’ growth,3 although these concerns are probably unfounded.2,10–12 However, it is possible that the effects of training at a young age may not manifest themselves until later in life. To our knowledge, there are no long term studies in young adulthood of injuries prevalence or sports participation in athletes who started systematic training during or prior to adolescence. As we had already studied a unique population of intensively trained elite young athletes, we planned the present study to establish the frequency and pattern of injuries sustained by the cohort of young intensively trained young British athletes originally enrolled in the TOYA study, 10 years after completion of the survey. ### TOYA study (1987–92) The Training of Young Athletes Study (TOYA) has been extensively described.4,13–15 In brief, the study used a mixed longitudinal design, taking annual measurements for three consecutive years from 1988 to 1990. Five age cohorts were used, with entry ages ranging from 8 to 16 years. During the course of the study the composition of these clusters remained the same; …
Prospective study of cutaneous side-effects associated with the BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib: a study of 42 patients.

BACKGROUND BRAF inhibitors are being developed for the treatment of metastatic melanoma harboring a V600E mutation. The use of vemurafenib significantly increases progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in this population of patients, but is associated with numerous adverse skin reactions. PATIENTS AND METHODS We carried out a systematic dermatologic study of 42 patients treated with vemurafenib. We collected detailed dermatologic symptoms, photos and biopsy specimens of the skin lesions which enabled us to classify the side-effects. The management and evolution of the skin symptoms are also reported. RESULTS All patients presented with at least one adverse skin reaction. The most common cutaneous side-effects consisted in verrucous papillomas (79%) and hand-foot skin reaction (60%). Other common cutaneous toxic effects were a diffuse hyperkeratotic perifollicular rash (55%), photosensitivity (52%) and alopecia (45%). Epidermoid cysts (33%) and eruptive nevi (10%) were also observed. Keratoacanthomas (KA) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) occurred in 14% and 26% of the patients, respectively. CONCLUSIONS These cutaneous side-effects are cause of concern due to their intrinsic potential for malignancy or because of their impact on patients' quality of life. Management of this skin toxicity relies on symptomatic measures and sun photoprotection.
Composition in Hierarchical CLP

We propose a variant of the Hierarchical Constraint Logic Programming (HCLP) scheme of Borning, Wilson, and others. We consider compositionality and incrementality in Constraint Logic Programming, introduce HCLP, and present Wilson's proof that it is non-compositional. We define a scheme for composing together solutions to individual hierarchies and show that hierarchy composition can be expressed very simply using filtering functions over bags (multisets); we present some properties of these functions, and define and explain an alternative to bag intersection which is also used in our scheme. We present an example involving three strength levels and show that we can achieve a close approximation to the solutions produced by standard HCLP. 1 Introduction The HCLP (Hierarchical Constraint Logic Programming) scheme [Borning et al, 1989; Wilson and Borning, 1993] greatly extends the expressibility of the general CLP scheme [jaffar and Lassez, 1987]. There is also related work by Satoh [1990]. A semantics has been defined for HCLP [Wilson and Borning, 1989] and some instances of it have been implemented [Menezes et a/. , 1993]. However, the semantics is not as natural as one might hope, and the implementations are inherently less efficient than those of CLP. We believe that these two issues may be related, and suggest that an equally expressive scheme which gives similar but not identical answers may go some way to overcoming both of them. Therefore we propose a weakening of the semantics of HCLP, in which the results of composing solutions to individual hierarchies approximate the solutions that would be obtained from combining the programs and starting from scratch. Our semantics are adequate for some of the standard examples in the literature. They are definitely not sufficient to solve some of the other examples exactly, but our approximations are very reasonable. 2 Incrementality and compositionality An important difference between logic programming languages and, say, theorem provers, is that the former are more efficient; expressibility and completeness are traded-off against efficiency. Standard HCLP is beautifully expressive, but the efficiency of its implementations may be poor, and its semantics lacks certain desirable properties. Our proposal in this paper involves tradirig-off completeness to gain efficiency and more tractable semantics. In constraint logic programming, efficiency is discussed with reference to 'incrementality', and semantics can be discussed with reference to compositionality, which is what we will do in the rest of this section. Compositionality is a desirable property for a system to have because …
Fuzzy logic arbiters for multiple-bus multiprocessor systems

This paper describes and evaluates the use of fuzzy logic arbiters for multiple-bus shared memory multiprocessor system. Multiple-bus systems allow multiple and simultaneous bus transfer in addition to a high degree of fault tolerance. In such systems, arbiters are used to resolve conflicts to system resources, which are the shared memory modules and the buses. Typically, these conflicts are resolved by using two-stage arbitration schemes that employ policies such as random choice, daisy chaining, round-robin, etc. A new way of implementing these arbiters is the use of fuzzy logic to resolve resource request conflicts based on the system state and performance variables. This paper describes a new technique for implementation of fuzzy logic in the system arbiters and presents a simulation program that evaluates the system performance. The program is coded in such a way as to accommodate any arbitration scheme, from which the fixed priority and fuzzy priority have been implemented. Parameters affecting multiple-bus system performance are considered and used as inputs to the fuzzy arbiters. The inputs are fuzzified by using appropriate membership functions, and rules have been defined in such a way as to increase and distribute evenly the acceptance probability of each processor in the system. Results from the simulation program using a prioritized arbitration scheme are compared against other published results and show very close agreement. Furthermore, results show an increase in the acceptance probability of the processors using fuzzy arbiters.
Vision-based engagement detection in Virtual Reality

User engagement modeling for manipulating actions in vision-based interfaces is one of the most important case studies of user mental state detection. In a Virtual Reality environment that employs camera sensors to recognize human activities, we have to know were user intend to perform an action and when he/she is disengaged. Without a proper algorithm for recognizing engagement status, any kind of activities could be interpreted as manipulating actions, called “Midas Touch” problem. Baseline approach for solving this problem is activating gesture recognition system using some focus gestures such as waiving or raising hand. However, a desirable natural user interface should be able to understand user's mental status automatically. In this paper, a novel multi-modal model for engagement detection, DAIA 1, is presented. using DAIA, the spectrum of mental status for performing an action is quantized in a finite number of engagement states. For this purpose, a Finite State Transducer (FST) is designed. This engagement framework shows how to integrate multi-modal information from user biometric data streams such as 2D and 3D imaging. FST is employed to make the state transition smoothly using combination of several boolean expressions. Our FST true detection rate is 92.3% in total for four different states. Results also show FST can segment user hand gestures more robustly.
Variable-Stride Multi-Pattern Matching For Scalable Deep Packet Inspection

Accelerating multi-pattern matching is a critical issue in building high-performance deep packet inspection systems. Achieving high-throughputs while reducing both memory-usage and memory-bandwidth needs is inherently difficult. In this paper, we propose a pattern (string) matching algorithm that achieves high throughput while limiting both memory-usage and memory-bandwidth. We achieve this by moving away from a byte-oriented processing of patterns to a block-oriented scheme. However, different from previous block-oriented approaches, our scheme uses variable-stride blocks. These blocks can be uniquely identified in both the pattern and the input stream, hence avoiding the multiplied memory costs which is intrinsic in previous approaches. We present the algorithm, tradeoffs, optimizations, and implementation details. Performance evaluation is done using the Snort and ClamAV pattern sets. Using our algorithm, the throughput of a single search engine can easily have a many-fold increase at a small storage cost, typically less than three bytes per pattern character.
Deep forest

Abstract Current deep-learning models are mostly built upon neural networks, i.e. multiple layers of parameterized differentiable non-linear modules that can be trained by backpropagation. In this paper, we explore the possibility of building deep models based on non-differentiable modules such as decision trees. After a discussion about the mystery behind deep neural networks, particularly by contrasting them with shallow neural networks and traditional machine-learning techniques such as decision trees and boosting machines, we conjecture that the success of deep neural networks owes much to three characteristics, i.e. layer-by-layer processing, in-model feature transformation and sufficient model complexity. On one hand, our conjecture may offer inspiration for theoretical understanding of deep learning; on the other hand, to verify the conjecture, we propose an approach that generates deep forest holding these characteristics. This is a decision-tree ensemble approach, with fewer hyper-parameters than deep neural networks, and its model complexity can be automatically determined in a data-dependent way. Experiments show that its performance is quite robust to hyper-parameter settings, such that in most cases, even across different data from different domains, it is able to achieve excellent performance by using the same default setting. This study opens the door to deep learning based on non-differentiable modules without gradient-based adjustment, and exhibits the possibility of constructing deep models without backpropagation.
Theoretical Population Biology Mathematical Properties of F St between Admixed Populations and Their Parental Source Populations

We consider the properties of the F st measure of genetic divergence between an admixed population and its parental source populations. Among all possible populations admixed among an arbitrary set of parental populations, we show that the value of F st between an admixed population and a specific source population is maximized when the admixed population is simply the most distant of the other source populations. For the case with only two parental populations, as a function of the admixture fraction, we further demonstrate that this F st value is monotonic and convex, so that F st is informative about the admixture fraction. We illustrate our results using example human population-genetic data, showing how they provide a framework in which to interpret the features of F st in admixed populations.
Proliferation of Naive CD 4 IL-27-Induced T-bet Expression but Not An Indispensable Role for STAT 1 in

C ytokines play pivotal roles in the regulation of various biological responses including immune responses and inflammation. Most important, cytokine signal-transduc-tion pathways are the JAKs and STATs (1–3). Immediately after receptor ligation by the cytokine, STATs are phosphorylated by JAKs, dimerized, and translocated into the nucleus, and modulate the expression of target genes. Each cytokine uses selective members of the JAK and STAT families to mediate its specific biological responses. Recently, a novel member of the IL-12 family was identified and termed IL-27 (4). IL-27 is a heterodimeric cytokine that consists of a p40-related protein, EBV-induced gene 3 (EBI3), 3 and a newly discovered IL-12 p35-related protein, p28. IL-27 is produced by activated APCs, and is able to induce proliferation of naive but not memory CD4 ϩ T cells and synergizes with IL-12 in IFN-␥ production by naive CD4 ϩ T cells (4). Previously, an orphan receptor designated type 1 cytokine receptor (TCCR; Ref. 5) or WSX-1 (6) with similarity to the IL-12R␤2 subunit was shown to be important for early initiation of Th1 responses. This receptor was then identified as one of the receptor subunits for IL-27, and is necessary, but not sufficient for IL-27 function (4). Notably, it is not necessary for the maintenance of Th1 responses although activation of TCCR or WSX-1 is required for the early initiation of Th1 responses (6). Therefore, IL-27 and IL-12 were considered to function sequentially in the initiation and maintenance of Th1 responses, respectively (4, 6). Consistent with this notion, it has been recently reported that IL-27 induces T-bet and subsequent IL-12R␤2 expression, which is a key Th1 commitment step where naive Th precursor cells commence differentiation into Th1 cells, by naive CD4 ϩ T cells through JAK1/STAT1 activation (7). However, in this report, only JAK/STAT signaling molecules that associate with one subunit of IL-27R, WSX-1/TCCR, were analyzed and identified by in vitro binding assay. The other JAK/STAT signal-ing molecules activated by IL-27 remain unexplored. In the present study, we further investigated the JAK/STAT sig-naling molecules activated by IL-27 and also the role of STAT1 in IL-27-mediated responses using STAT1-deficient mice (8, 9). In addition to JAK1 and STAT1, we have found that IL-27 activates JAK2, tyrosine kinase (TYK)2, and STAT2,-3, and-5 in naive CD4 ϩ T cells, and that STAT1 plays an indispensable role in IL-27-induced T-bet and subsequent IL-12R␤2 expression and MHC class I expression as well but not …