Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ethyl glucuronide discloses recent covert alcohol use not detected by standard testing in forensic psychiatric inpatients.

BACKGROUND Considerable lives and money could be saved if one could detect early stages of lapsing/relapsing behavior in addicted persons (e.g., in safety-sensitive workplaces) and could disclose harmful drinking in social drinkers. Due to the serious public health problem of alcohol use and abuse worldwide, markers of alcohol use have been sought. Both ethyl glucuronide (EtG) and phosphatidyl ethanol (PEth) appear to have high sensitivity and specificity and a time frame of detection that may elucidate alcohol use not detected by standard testing. Our aim was to assess their potential for detecting recent covert alcohol use under controlled conditions. METHODS Thirty-five forensic psychiatric inpatients in a closed ward who had committed a substance-related offense ( section sign 64 StGB), were followed for 12 months. The complete time spectrum of possible alcohol consumption was covered by the complementary use of breath and urinary ethanol (hours), urinary EtG (days), %carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT)/PEth (weeks), and gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase (GGT)/mean corpuscular volume (MCV) (weeks-months). RESULTS Fourteen of the 146 urine samples examined were positive for EtG. In all EtG-positive cases, patients reported alcohol consumption of between 40 and 200 g of ethanol 12-60 hr prior to testing. Urinary and breath ethanol were positive in only one case. In the blood samples, PEth was not positive in any case and %CDT did not exceed the reference value. Isoelectric focusing showed no abnormal Tf subtypes. CONCLUSIONS The findings emphasize the diagnostic and therapeutic usefulness, specificity, and sensitivity of EtG as a marker of recent alcohol use. Such a test is needed in numerous settings, including alcohol and drug treatment (to detect lapse/relapse), in safety-sensitive work settings where use is dangerous or in other settings where use may be inappropriate (e.g., such as driving, workplace, pregnancy, or monitoring physicians or other professionals who are in recovery and working), or for testing other groups (such as children or those with medical problems) where alcohol use would be unhealthy or unsafe. The health, social and socioeconomic benefits arising from the future use of these markers is hard to overestimate.
External perfect hashing for very large key sets

We present a simple and efficient external perfect hashing scheme (referred to as EPH algorithm) for very large static key sets. We use a number of techniques from the literature to obtain a novel scheme that is theoretically well-understood and at the same time achieves an order-of-magnitude increase in the size of the problem to be solved compared to previous "practical" methods. We demonstrate the scalability of our algorithm by constructing minimum perfect hash functions for a set of 1.024 billion URLs from the World Wide Web of average length 64 characters in approximately 62 minutes, using a commodity PC. Our scheme produces minimal perfect hash functions using approximately 3.8 bits per key. For perfect hash functions in the range {0,. ,2n - 1} the space usage drops to approximately 2.7 bits per key. The main contribution is the first algorithm that has experimentally proven practicality for sets in the order of billions of keys and has time and space usage carefully analyzed without unrealistic assumptions.
A proximal conserved repeat in the Xist gene is essential as a genomic element for X-inactivation in mouse

X-inactivation in female mammals is triggered by the association of non-coding Xist RNA in cis with the X chromosome. Although it has been suggested that the A-repeat located in the proximal part of the Xist RNA is required for chromosomal silencing in ES cells, its role in mouse has not yet been addressed. Here, we deleted the A-repeat in mouse and studied its effects on X-inactivation during embryogenesis. The deletion, when paternally transmitted, caused a failure of imprinted X-inactivation in the extraembryonic tissues, demonstrating the essential role of the A-repeat in X-inactivation in the mouse embryo. Unexpectedly, the failure of X-inactivation was caused by a lack of Xist RNA rather than by a defect in the silencing function of the mutated RNA, which we expected to be expressed from the mutated X. Interestingly, the normally silent paternal copy of Tsix, which is an antisense negative regulator of Xist, was ectopically activated in the preimplantation embryo. Furthermore, CpG sites in the promoter region of paternal Xist, which are essentially unmethylated in the extraembryonic tissues of the wild-type female embryo, acquire a significant level of methylation on the mutated paternal X. These findings demonstrate that the DNA sequence deleted on the mutated X, most probably the A-repeat, is essential as a genomic element for the appropriate transcriptional regulation of the Xist/Tsix loci and subsequent X-inactivation in the mouse embryo.
Parkinson's Disease and Home Healthcare Use and Expenditures among Elderly Medicare Beneficiaries

This study estimated excess home healthcare use and expenditures among elderly Medicare beneficiaries (age ≥ 65 years) with Parkinson's disease (PD) compared to those without PD and analyzed the extent to which predisposing, enabling, need factors, personal health choice, and external environment contribute to the excess home healthcare use and expenditures among individuals with PD. A retrospective, observational, cohort study design using Medicare 5% sample claims for years 2006-2007 was used for this study. Logistic regressions and Ordinary Least Squares regressions were used to assess the association of PD with home health use and expenditures, respectively. Postregression nonlinear and linear decomposition techniques were used to understand the extent to which differences in home healthcare use and expenditures among elderly Medicare beneficiaries with and without PD can be explained by individual-level factors. Elderly Medicare beneficiaries with PD had higher home health use and expenditures compared to those without PD. 27.5% and 18% of the gap in home health use and expenditures, respectively, were explained by differences in characteristics between the PD and no PD groups. A large portion of the differences in home healthcare use and expenditures remained unexplained.
D1HT: a distributed one hop hash table

Distributed hash tables (DHTs) have been used in a variety of applications, but most DHTs so far have opted to solve lookups with multiple hops, which sacrifices performance in order to keep little routing information and minimize maintenance traffic. In this paper, we introduce D1HT, a novel single hop DHT that is able to maximize performance with reasonable maintenance traffic overhead even for huge and dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. We formally define the algorithm we propose to detect and notify any membership change in the system, prove its correctness and performance properties, and present a quarantine-like mechanism to reduce the overhead caused by volatile peers. Our analyses show that D1HT has reasonable maintenance bandwidth requirements even for very large systems, while presenting at least twice less bandwidth overhead than previous single hop DHT
Developmental changes in cell wall structure of phloem fibres of the bamboo Dendrocalamus asper.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Bamboo culms have excellent physical and mechanical properties, which mainly depend on their fibre content and anatomical structure. One of the features which is known to contribute to the high tensile strength in bamboo is the multilayered structure of the fibre cell wall. The aim of this study was to characterize the development of the layered structure in fibre cell walls of developing and maturing culms of Dendrocalamus asper. METHODS Cell wall development patterns were investigated in phloem fibre caps of vascular bundles in the inner culm wall areas of Dendrocalamus asper of three different age classes (<6 months old, 1 year old, 3 years old). A combination of light microscopy and image analysis techniques were employed to measure cell wall thickness and to determine number of cell wall layers, as well as to describe the layering structure of fibre walls. Two-dimensional maps showing the distribution pattern of fibres according to the number of cell wall layers were produced. KEY RESULTS The cell walls of fibres in phloem fibre caps located in the inner part of the culm wall of D. asper developed rapidly during the first year of growth. Six different fibre types could be distinguished based upon their cell wall layering and all were already present in the young, 1-year-old culm. In the mature stage (3 years of age) the multilayering was independent of the cell wall thickness and even the thinner-walled fibres could have a large number of wall layers. The multilayered nature of cell wall structure varied considerably between individual cells and was not exclusively related to the cell wall thickness. Nevertheless, fibres at the periphery of the fibre bundles and immediately adjacent to the phloem elements exhibited a consistent and high degree of layering in their cell walls. CONCLUSIONS The multilayered structure of fibre cell walls was formed mainly during the first year of growth by the deposition of new wall layers of variable thickness, resulting in a high degree of heterogeneity in the layering patterns amongst individual fibres. A degree of 'order' in the distribution of multilayered fibres within the caps does exist, however, with multilayered cell walls common in fibres adjacent to phloem elements and around the edge of the fibre cap. These findings confirm the observations, primarily in Phyllostachys viridi-glaucescens. The layering structure was not found to be specifically related to the thickness of the cell wall.
Spin Diagrams for Equal-Mass Black Hole Binaries with Aligned Spins

Binary black hole systems with spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum are of special interest, as they may be the preferred end state of the inspiral of generic supermassive binary black hole systems. In view of this, we have computed the inspiral and merger of a large set of binary systems of equal-mass black holes with spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum but otherwise arbitrary. By least-square fitting the results of these simulations, we have constructed two “spin diagrams” which provide straightforward information about the recoil velocity |vkick| and the final black hole spin afin in terms of the dimensionless spins a1 and a2 of the two initial black holes. Overall, they suggest a maximum recoil velocity of |vkick| ≃ 441.94 km s−1, and minimum and maximum final spins afin≃ 0.3471 and afin = 0.9591, respectively.
The Epidemiology, Diagnosis, and Management of Aristolochic Acid Nephropathy

It has been 20 years since the first description of a rapidly progressive renal disease that is associated with the consumption of Chinese herbs containing aristolochic acid (AA) and is now termed aristolochic acid nephropathy (AAN). Recent data have shown that AA is also the primary causative agent in Balkan endemic nephropathy and associated urothelial cancer. Aristolochic acid nephropathy is associated with a high long-term risk for renal failure and urothelial cancer, and the potential worldwide population exposure is enormous. This evidence-based review of the diagnostic approach to and management of AAN draws on the authors' experience with the largest and longest-studied combined cohort of patients with this condition. It is hoped that a better understanding of the importance of this underrecognized and severe condition will improve epidemiologic, preventive, and therapeutic strategies to reduce the global burden of this disease.
Experimenting Broadcast Storm Mitigation Techniques in FANETs

Civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) usually have modest sizes and also physical limitations that restrict their use. Using more than one aircraft can bring more efficiency and better results to missions. In order to coordinate the mission execution by a team, a flying ad hoc network (FANET) is set up and UAVs can exchange information through broadcast messages. This ad hoc communication among aircraft has new challenges that need investigation, such as the Broadcast Storm Problem (BSP). In this paper we present an evaluation of solutions, commonly used to mitigate BSP in other types of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and apply them to FANET scenarios. We have adapted three algorithms to three different scenarios and applied those algorithms to an embedded platform called Gumstix Overo. Results presented here show algorithms performance concerning network coverage and avoidance of redundant broadcasts in three distinct topologies, also showing techniques adaptation needed for each scenario.
Interleukin-17 cytokine signalling in patients with asthma

Asthma remains a global health problem and, therefore, more effective pharmacotherapy is needed. This is particularly true for chronic and severe asthma. In these clinical phenotypes, chronic inflammation involving neutrophils is likely to play a pathogenic role, making it interesting to target cytokine signalling involved in the accumulation of neutrophils. Therefore, it is of interest that the archetype T-helper 17 cell cytokine interleukin (IL)-17A, perhaps also IL-17F, controls neutrophil accumulation, mucus secretion, macrophage mobilisation and smooth muscle reactivity in various experimental airway models. However, much less is known about the involvement of signalling via IL-17 cytokines in humans with asthma. Existing evidence suggests that these cytokines are released from several types of immune cells in asthma and, for IL-17A, there is a local increase associated with disease severity, with the mobilisation of neutrophils and smooth muscle cells locally in the airways. Even though the causative role of IL-17 cytokines remains unclear, there is potential for clinical utility in targeting IL-17A specifically in patients with moderate-to-severe asthma and high reversibility. There is a need for new and well-powered clinical investigations of signalling via IL-17 cytokines in this clinical phenotype. There is potential utility for drugs targeting IL-17 cytokine signalling in a sub-group of patients with asthma http://ow.ly/wPw5p
Novel Fuzzy logic Based Edge Detection Technique

This paper is based on the development of a fuzzy logic based edge detection technique in digital images. The proposed technique used three linear spatial filters to generate three edge strength values at each pixel of a digital image through spatial convolution process. These edge strength values are utilized as fuzzy system inputs. Decision on whether pixels in focus belong to an edge or non-edge is made in the proposed technique based on the Gaussian membership functions and fuzzy rules. Mamdani defuzzifier method is employed to produce the final output pixel classification of a given image. Experimental results show the ability and high performance of proposed algorithm compared with Sobel and Kirsch operators.
'Whatever is, is Right'? Economic Institutions in Pre-Industrial Europe

Institutions – the structures of rules and norms governing economic transactions – are widely assigned a central role in economic development. Yet economic history is still dominated by the belief that institutions arise and survive because they are economically efficient. This paper shows that alternative explanations of institutions – particularly those incorporating distributional effects – are consistent with economic theory and supported by empirical findings. Distributional conflicts provide a better explanation than efficiency for the core economic institutions of pre-industrial Europe – serfdom, the community, the craft guild, and the merchant guild. The paper concludes by proposing four desiderata for any future economic theory of institutions.
Semantic annotations for security policy matching in WS-Policy

Service computing technology enables B2B scenarios where the provision of a service may require a collaboration among several service providers across multiple independent and heterogeneous administrative domains. In these environments, several new security and privacy challenges arise, mainly related to resource sharing and interoperability among different providers. Policy management frameworks are a powerful mechanism to deal with this heterogeneity, although many issues still have to be faced with. In particular, policy matching is today carried out following a syntactical approach, which may impair the selection of suitable services on the one hand, and the flexibility of the matching process on the other one. In this work we propose a semantic approach that, by allowing WS-Policy assertions to reference semantic concepts, provides for a better matching of security requirements and capabilities. The proposed approach has been validated through a case study that shows how a pure syntactic-based mechanism of WS-Policy would have failed in matching two actually compatible policies.
Susceptibility-Weighted Imaging Provides Insight into White Matter Damage in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Background Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, progressive neurodegenerative disorder, characterised by widespread white matter damage. There is growing evidence that disturbances in iron metabolism contribute to white matter alterations. Materials & Methods We analysed the data of susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) of white matter in a cohort of 27 patients with ALS and 30 healthy age-matched controls. Results Signal alterations were found on SWI in the corpus callosum; along the corticospinal tract (subcortical motor cortex, posterior limb of the internal capsule and brainstem levels) and in the subgyral regions of frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital and limbic lobes. Alterations of white matter in the corpus callosum correlated with disease severity as assessed by the revised ALS functional rating scale. Conclusion SWI is capable of indicating iron and myelin disturbances in white matter of ALS patients. The SWI patterns observed in this study suggest that widespread alterations due to iron disturbances occur in patients with ALS and correlate with disease severity.
Correction of the UDP-glucuronosyltransferase gene defect in the gunn rat model of crigler-najjar syndrome type I with a chimeric oligonucleotide.

Crigler-Najjar syndrome type I is characterized by unconjugated hyperbilirubinemia resulting from an autosomal recessive inherited deficiency of hepatic UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) 1A1 activity. The enzyme is essential for glucuronidation and biliary excretion of bilirubin, and its absence can be fatal. The Gunn rat is an excellent animal model of this disease, exhibiting a single guanosine (G) base deletion within the UGT1A1 gene. The defect results in a frameshift and a premature stop codon, absence of enzyme activity, and hyperbilirubinemia. Here, we show permanent correction of the UGT1A1 genetic defect in Gunn rat liver with site-specific replacement of the absent G residue at nucleotide 1206 by using an RNA/DNA oligonucleotide designed to promote endogenous repair of genomic DNA. The chimeric oligonucleotide was either complexed with polyethylenimine or encapsulated in anionic liposomes, administered i.v. , and targeted to the hepatocyte via the asialoglycoprotein receptor. G insertion was determined by PCR amplification, colony lift hybridizations, restriction endonuclease digestion, and DNA sequencing, and confirmed by genomic Southern blot analysis. DNA repair was specific, efficient, stable throughout the 6-month observation period, and associated with reduction of serum bilirubin levels. Our results indicate that correction of the UGT1A1 genetic lesion in the Gunn rat restores enzyme expression and bilirubin conjugating activity, with consequent improvement in the metabolic abnormality.
A Survey of Social Network Forensics Authors

Social networks in any form, specifically online social networks (OSNs), are becoming a part of our everyday life in this new millennium especially with the advanced and simple communication technologies through easily accessible devices such as smartphones and tablets. The data generated through the use of these technologies need to be analyzed for forensic purposes when criminal and terrorist activities are involved. In order to deal with the forensic implications of social networks, current research on both digital forensics and social networks need to be incorporated and understood. This will help digital forensics investigators to predict, detect and even prevent any criminal activities in different forms. It will also help researchers to develop new models/techniques in the future. This paper provides literature review of the social network forensics methods, models, and techniques in order to provide an overview to the researchers for their future works as well as the law enforcement investigators for their investigations when crimes are committed in the cyber space. It also provides awareness and defense methods for OSN users in order to protect them against to social attacks.
The International Handbook of Road Traffic Accidents and Psychological Trauma: Current Understanding, Treatment and Law

Section headings and selected chapters: Section 1: Overview and Background. Presentation of symptons in adults (D. Alexander). Survival, fear, post-traumatic stress disorder and all that (G. Turnbull). Acute stress disorder following motor vehicle accidents (R.A. Bryant, A.G. Harvey). Medical, social and legal consequences (R. Mayou). Brain injury and the mind: the neuropsychology of mild traumatic brain injury (N.H. Walton). Injuries to the brain (D. Silverman, T. Devineni). Road accidents and the mind: the post-concussional syndrome (R. Jacobson). Children and young people: the neglected victims of road traffic accidents (P. Stallard). The hidden victims of disasters and vehicular accidents: the problem and recommended solutions (J.T. Mitchell et al.). Section 2: Understanding of PTSD. The complex web of causation: motor vehicle accidents, co-morbidity and PTSD (S. Bloom). Psychophysiological dimensions of motor vehicle accident survivors (E.B. Blanchard et al.). Psychosocial effects of road traffic accidents (E.J. Hickling et al.). The bendigo road accident research project: predicting who suffers psychological trauma in the first year after a road accident. (S. Jeavons). Section 3: Legal Issues. Malingering and litigation stress in motor vehicle accident victims (W.J. Koch et al.). The forensic value of psychophysiological measures of post-traumatic stress disorder (L. Neal et al.). Section 4: Psychological Treatment. The psychological treatment of motor vehicle accident-related post-traumatic stress disorder: conceptualization and two pilot studies (E.J. Hickling, E.B. Blanchard). Psychology approaches to the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (A. Harvey). Post-traumatic stress disorder due to motor vehicle accidents: patterns and predictors or response to cognitive-behavior therapy (S. Taylor et al.).