Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Short term improvement in exercise capacity and symptoms following exercise training in interstitial lung disease

Background: Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is characterised by exertional dyspnoea, exercise limitation and reduced quality of life. The role of exercise training in this diverse patient group is unclear. The aims of this study were to establish the safety of exercise training in ILD; its effects on exercise capacity, dyspnoea and quality of life; and whether patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) had similar responses to those with other types of ILD. Methods: 57 subjects with ILD (34 IPF) were randomised to receive 8 weeks of supervised exercise training or weekly telephone support. The 6 min walk distance (6MWD), incremental exercise test, modified Medical Research Council (MRC) dyspnoea score and Chronic Respiratory Disease Questionnaire (CRDQ) were performed at baseline, following intervention and at 6 months. Results: 80% of subjects completed the exercise programme and no adverse events were recorded. The 6MWD increased following training (mean difference to control 35 m, 95% CI 6 to 64 m). A significant reduction in MRC score was observed (0.7 points, 95% CI 0.1 to 1.3) along with improvements in dyspnoea (p = 0.04) and fatigue (p<0.01) on the CRDQ. There was no change in peak oxygen uptake; however, exercise training reduced heart rate at maximum isoworkload (p = 0.01). There were no significant differences in response between those with and without IPF. After 6 months there were no differences between the training and control group for any outcome variable. Conclusions: Exercise training improves exercise capacity and symptoms in patients with ILD, but these benefits are not sustained 6 months following intervention. Trial registration number: NCT00168285
Forest Restoration and Parasitoid Wasp Communities in Montane Hawai’i

Globally, most restoration efforts focus on re-creating the physical structure (flora or physical features) of a target ecosystem with the assumption that other ecosystem components will follow. Here we investigate that assumption by documenting biogeographical patterns in an important invertebrate taxon, the parasitoid wasp family Ichneumonidae, in a recently reforested Hawaiian landscape. Specifically, we test the influence of (1) planting configurations (corridors versus patches), (2) vegetation age, (3) distance from mature native forest, (4) surrounding tree cover, and (5) plant community composition on ichneumonid richness, abundance, and composition. We sampled over 7,000 wasps, 96.5% of which were not native to Hawai’i. We found greater relative richness and abundance of ichneumonids, and substantially different communities, in restored areas compared to mature forest and abandoned pasturelands. Non-native ichneumonids drive these differences; restored areas and native forest did not differ in native ichneumonid abundance. Among restored areas, ichneumonid communities did not differ by planting age or configuration. As tree cover increased within 120 m of a sampling point, ichneumonid community composition increasingly resembled that found in native forest. Similarly, native ichneumonid abundance increased with proximity to native forest. Our results suggest that restoration plantings, if situated near target forest ecosystems and in areas with higher local tree cover, can facilitate restoration of native fauna even in a highly invaded system.
Assessing the association between pathways of alien plant invaders and their impacts in protected areas

Protected areas face mounting pressures, including invasion by alien plant species. Scientifically sound information is required to advise invasive species management strategies, where early detection and rapid response is particularly important. One approach to this is to determine: (i) the relative importance of pathways of invasion by which a species is introduced, (ii) the range of likely impacts associated with each species, and (iii) the relationship between pathways and impacts, to assess the relative threats posed by different pathways of alien species introductions. This assessment was performed on 139 alien plants that are invasive across the South African National Parks (19 national parks, covering ~39,000 km2), and based on available literature and expert opinion, known to have negative ecological impacts. For each species the likelihood of being introduced by each of eight pathways, and of having negative impacts in each of 13 identified impact categories, was assessed. The similarity of impact and pathway types between species was assessed using the Jaccard index and cladograms. Differences in the prevalence of impacts and pathways and relationships between these were assessed using a Chi-squared contingency and Generalised Linear Model. Nearly 80% of the species are ornamental plants and about 60% are also dispersed by rivers, highlighting the importance of managing ornamental species and surveillance along rivers in preventing future invasions. As to the impacts, ~95% of the species compete directly with native species and 70% change the physical structure of the environment. The majority of species exert multiple impacts, with 70% of species assessed having five or more impacts. There was a significant positive relationship between the number of pathways via which a species can be introduced into an area and the number of potential impacts they can have. This suggests that species using multiple pathways reach a wider range of suitable habitats, increasing the potential for different kinds of impacts over a wider area.
Considering long-term sustainability in the development of world class success

Abstract The developmental practice patterns leading to the highest levels of success remain a subject of debate. The present study purposes to extend the body of empirical research by analysing athletic biographies from a large sample of German national squad athletes across all Olympic sports (n=1558; 57% male, 43% female). In a combined retrospective and longitudinal study utilising postal questionnaires, we evaluated the age at onset, volume, domain-specificity, variability in training and competition and success attained at different ages. Developmental practice patterns leading to rapid adolescent success and long-term senior success were inconsistent, and in some aspects contradictory. An early start-age for training and competition, early specialisation, high-intensity specific practice in the respective domain sport and little or no involvement in other sports (OS) favoured early adolescent success. Juvenile success, however, did not contribute to individual differences in success achieved at a senior age (−0.09<r s <0.03). Senior world class performers differed from national class athletes in a later age for onset of training and competition in their domain sport, later specialisation (14.4 vs. 12.1 years), more involvement in OS (training 66% vs. 51%; competitions 53% vs. 39%), but not in practice volume in their domain sport at any age. Findings were confirmed with longitudinal testing and were widely consistent across types of sports. These findings are interpreted relative to correspondence to deliberate practice and DMSP frameworks while drawing on the concept of long-term sustainability.
Les ophiolites des nappes de Semail (Oman) : structures internes des massifs de Nakhl et de Rustaq

Cette note s'integre dans un projet d'etude structurale et de modelisation concernant l'ensemble des nappes ophiolitiques de Semail. Deux massifs sont etudies : Nakhl et Rustaq correspondant au domaine central des nappes. On presente les cartes levees a 1/100 000 des structures internes de la pile ophiolitique. On deduit, de la geometrie des structures et de leur interpretation cinematique dans les peridotites, un modele geometrique de l'expansion concernant cette zone : dorsale orientee NW — SE, ecoulement asthenospherique perpendiculaire a la dorsale, orientation des filons dans les ultrabasites perpendiculaire a la direction d'ecoulement. Le processus d'ecaillage intra-oceanique deja reconnu dans le domaine meridional de Wadi Tayin semble ici porter son empreinte tres haut dans la sequence ultramafique et se produit dans des conditions de temperature particulierement elevees (~ 1000 °C), suggerant l'ecaillage d'un domaine tres proche de la dorsale. L'analyse cinematique de cet ecaillage indique une direction de transport orientee N — S et operant du Nord vers le Sud. Cette direction est a 90° de celle deduite dans le domaine meridional de Wadi Tayin.
Have Agile Techniques been the Silver Bullet for Software Development at Microsoft?

Background. The pressure to release high-quality, valuable software products at an increasingly faster rate is forcing software development organizations to adapt their development practices. Agile techniques began emerging in the mid-1990s in response to this pressure and to increased volatility of customer requirements and technical change. Theoretically, agile techniques seem to be the silver bullet for responding to these pressures on the software industry. Aims. This paper tracks the changing attitudes to agile adoption and techniques, within Microsoft, in one of the largest longitudinal surveys of its kind (2006-2012). Method. We collected the opinions of 1,969 agile and non-agile practitioners in five surveys over a six-year period. Results. The survey results reveal that despite intense market pressure, the growth of agile adoption at Microsoft is slower than would be expected. Additionally, no individual agile practice exhibited strong growth trends. We also found that while development practices of teams may be similar, some perceive and declare themselves to be following an agile methodology while others do not. Both agile and non-agile practitioners agree on the relative benefits and problem areas of agile techniques. Conclusions. We found no clear trends in practice adoption. Non-agile practitioners are less enamored of the benefits and more strongly in agreement with the problem areas. The ability for agile practices to be used by large-scale teams generally concerned all respondents, which may limit its future adoption.
Off-line vs. on-line tuning: a study on MAX–MIN ant system for the TSP

Stochastic local search algorithms require finding an appropriate setting of their parameters in order to reach high performance. The parameter tuning approaches that have been proposed in the literature for this task can be classified into two families: on-line and off-line tuning. In this paper, we compare the results we achieved with these two approaches. In particular, we report the results of an experimental study based on a prominent ant colony optimization algorithm, MAX-MIN Ant System, for the traveling salesman problem. We observe the performance of on-line parameter tuning for different parameter adaptation schemes and for different numbers of parameters to be tuned. Our results indicate that, under the experimental conditions chosen here, off-line tuned parameter settings are preferable.
Cardiomyopathy in Women: Second Heart Failure

Heart failure is characterized by the inability of the heart to maintain sufficient cardiac output (CO) to meet the metabolic demands of the body. Reduced CO activates compensatory mechanisms directed towards reestablishing CO, thereby initiating a cycle which can lead to cardiomyopathy. Therapeutic strategies for addressing heart failure have been developed primarily based on studies of male populations; however, heart failure in women has a distinct phenotype. In women, heart failure develops later in life, generally presents with preserved systolic function, and is less commonly attributable to ischemic heart disease. In many women, the initiating event in heart failure is extrinsic, specifically, poor venous return resulting from inadequate calf muscle (soleus) pump activity during upright posture. Such “second heart” failure has been identified in approximately half of all adult women, an observation which helps to explain the fact that while women’s survival rate with heart failure is better than in men, their quality of life with heart failure is far worse. A determination that inadequate venous return is arising from calf muscle pump failure can permit effective early intervention to slow or reverse cardiomyopathy, while significantly improving quality of life in affected women.
Cost-Effectiveness of Transfers to Centers With Neurological Intensive Care Units After Intracerebral Hemorrhage

Background and Purpose— Our aim was to estimate the cost-effectiveness of transferring patients with intracerebral hemorrhage from centers without specialized neurological intensive care units (neuro-ICUs) to centers with neuro-ICUs. Methods— Decision analytic models were developed for the lifetime horizons. Model inputs were derived from the best available data, informed by a variety of previous cost-effectiveness models of stroke. The effect of neuro-ICU care on functional outcomes was modeled in 3 scenarios. A favorable outcomes scenario was modeled based on the best observational data and compared with moderately favorable and least-favorable outcomes scenarios. Health benefits were measured in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), and costs were estimated from a societal perspective. Costs were combined with QALYs gained to generate incremental cost-effectiveness ratios. One-way sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulations were performed to test robustness of the model assumptions. Results— Transferring patients to centers with neuro-ICUs yielded an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for the lifetime horizon of $47 431 per QALY, $91 674 per QALY, and $380 358 per QALY for favorable, moderately favorable, and least-favorable scenarios, respectively. Models were robust at a willingness-to-pay threshold of $100 000 per QALY, with 95.5%, 75.0%, and 2.1% of simulations below the threshold for favorable, moderately favorable, and least-favorable scenarios, respectively. Conclusions— Transferring patients with intracerebral hemorrhage to centers with specialized neuro-ICUs is cost-effective if observational estimates of the neuro-ICU–based functional outcome distribution are accurate. If future work confirms these functional outcome distributions, then a strong societal rationale exists to build systems of care designed to transfer intracerebral hemorrhage patients to specialized neuro-ICUs.
Beginning to Understand Unstructured, Ungrammatical Text: An Information Integration Approach

As information agents become pervasive, they will need to read and understand the vast amount of information on the World Wide Web. One such valuable source of information is unstructured and ungrammatical text that appears in data sources such as online auctions or internet classifieds. One way to begin to understand this text is to figure out the entities that the text references. This can be thought of as the semantic annotation problem, where the goal is to extract the attributes embedded within the text and then annotate the text with these extracted attributes. If enough attributes can be extracted, then the entity referenced in the text can be determined. For example, if we have a used car for sale in a classified ad, and we can identify the make, model and year within the post, we can identify the car for sale. However, information extraction is difficult because the text does not contain reliable structural or grammatical clues. In this paper we present an unsupervised approach to semantically annotating such unstructured and ungrammatical text with the intention that this will help in the problem of machine understanding on the Web. Furthermore, we define an architecture that allows for better understanding over time. We present experiments to show our annotation approach is competitive with the state-of-the-art which uses supervised machine learning, even though our technique is fully unsupervised.
Genomewide Identification of Genes Under Directional Selection: Gene Transcription QST Scan in Diverging Atlantic Salmon Subpopulations

Evolutionary genomics has benefited from methods that allow identifying evolutionarily important genomic regions on a genomewide scale, including genome scans and QTL mapping. Recently, genomewide scanning by means of microarrays has permitted assessing gene transcription differences among species or populations. However, the identification of differentially transcribed genes does not in itself suffice to measure the role of selection in driving evolutionary changes in gene transcription. Here, we propose and apply a “transcriptome scan” approach to investigating the role of selection in shaping differential profiles of gene transcription among populations. We compared the genomewide transcription levels between two Atlantic salmon subpopulations that have been diverging for only six generations. Following assessment of normality and unimodality on a gene-per-gene basis, the additive genetic basis of gene transcription was estimated using the animal model. Gene transcription h2 estimates were significant for 1044 (16%) of all detected cDNA clones. In an approach analogous to that of genome scans, we used the distribution of the QST values estimated from intra- and intersubpopulation additive genetic components of the transcription profiles to identify 16 outlier genes (average QST estimate = 0.11) whose transcription levels are likely to have evolved under the influence of directional selection within six generations only. Overall, this study contributes both empirically and methodologically to the quantitative genetic exploration of gene transcription data.
Automatic Illumination‐Invariant Image‐to‐Geometry Registration in Outdoor Environments

Image‐to‐geometry registration is the basis of many applications for texturing and interpreting 3D surface models. Feature‐based matching is an established, automatic approach which creates 2D–3D correspondences based on salient points and their radiometric neighbourhood. This paper presents an experimental approach for assessing the accuracy of several matching algorithms in challenging imaging environments that are subject to significant outdoor illumination variations. Furthermore, a collection of accuracy assessment metrics and quality heuristics emerge from the presented approach to guide a user during the examination of registration results. As a result of the experiments, two novel salient point descriptor matching combinations outperform the standard scale‐invariant feature transform (SIFT) operator on the task of image‐to‐image and image‐to‐geometry registration under varying illumination conditions.
Role of cleavage by separase of the Rec8 kleisin subunit of cohesin during mammalian meiosis I

Proteolytic activity of separase is required for chiasma resolution during meiosis I in mouse oocytes. Rec8, the meiosis-specific α-kleisin subunit of cohesin, is a key target of separase in yeast. Is the equivalent protein also a target in mammals? We show here that separase cleaves mouse Rec8 at three positions in vitro but only when the latter is hyper-phosphorylated. Expression of a Rec8 variant (Rec8-N) that cannot be cleaved in vitro at these sites causes sterility in male mice. Their seminiferous tubules lack a normal complement of 2 C secondary spermatocytes and 1 C spermatids and contain instead a high proportion of cells with enlarged nuclei. Chromosome spreads reveal that Rec8-N expression has no effect in primary spermatocytes but produces secondary spermatocytes and spermatids with a 4 C DNA content, suggesting that the first and possibly also the second meiotic division is abolished. Expression of Rec8-N in oocytes causes chromosome segregation to be asynchronous and delays its completion by 2-3 hours during anaphase I, probably due to inefficient proteolysis of Rec8-N by separase. Despite this effect, chromosome segregation must be quite accurate as Rec8-N does not greatly reduce female fertility. Our data is consistent with the notion that Rec8 cleavage is important and probably crucial for the resolution of chiasmata in males and females.
Hierarchy of mechanisms involved in generating Na/K-ATPase polarity in MDCK epithelial cells

We have studied mechanisms involved in generating a polarized distribution of Na/K-ATPase in the basal-lateral membrane of two clones of MDCK II cells. Both clones exhibit polarized distributions of marker proteins of the apical and basal-lateral membranes, including Na/K- ATPase, at steady state. Newly synthesized Na/K-ATPase, however, is delivered from the Golgi complex to both apical and basal-lateral membranes of one clone (II/J), and to the basal-lateral membrane of the other clone (II/G); Na/K-ATPase is selectively retained in the basal- lateral membrane resulting in the generation of complete cell surface polarity in both clones. Another basal-lateral membrane protein, E- cadherin, is sorted to the basal-lateral membrane in both MDCK clones, demonstrating that there is not a general sorting defect for basal- lateral membrane proteins in clone II/J cells. A glycosyl- phosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored protein (GP-2) and a glycosphingolipid (glucosylceramide, GlcCer) are preferentially transported to the apical membrane in clone II/G cells, but, in clone II/J cells, GP-2 and GlcCer are delivered equally to both apical and basal-lateral membranes, similar to Na/K-ATPase. To examine this apparent inter-relationship between sorting of GlcCer, GP-2 and Na/K- ATPase, sphingolipid synthesis was inhibited in clone II/G cells with the fungal metabolite, Fumonisin B1 (FB1). In the presence of FB1, GP-2 and Na/K-ATPase are delivered to both apical and basal-lateral membranes, similar to clone II/J cells; FB1 had no effect on sorting of E-cadherin to the basal-lateral membrane of II/G cells. Addition of exogenous ceramide, to circumvent the FB1 block, restored GP-2 and Na/K- ATPase sorting to the apical and basal-lateral membranes, respectively. These results show that the generation of complete cell surface polarity of Na/K-ATPase involves a hierarchy of sorting mechanisms in the Golgi complex and plasma membrane, and that Na/K-ATPase sorting in the Golgi complex of MDCK cells may be regulated by exclusion from an apical pathway(s). These results also provide new insights into sorting pathways for other apical and basal-lateral membrane proteins.
Surveillance and outbreak reports Legionnaires ’ disease in Europe , 2009-2010

The surveillance of Legionnaires’ disease (LD) in Europe is carried out by the European Legionnaires’ Disease Surveillance Network (ELDSNet) and coordinated by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). All cases reported in 2009 and 2010 and meeting the European case definition were electronically transmitted to The European Surveillance System (TESSy) database. A total of 5,551 and 6,305 cases were reported by 29 European countries in 2009 and 2010, respectively. The age-standardised rate of all cases was 1.20 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010, 12% higher than in 2009, which was consistent with the increasing trend observed since 2005. Most of this increase consisted of community-acquired cases reported by France, Germany and the Netherlands with dates of onset in August–September. The exceptionally hot summer of 2010 in some parts of Europe may have played a role in this increase.
Compiling Constraint Networks into Multivalued Decomposable Decision Graphs

We present and evaluate a top-down algorithm for compiling finite-domain constraint networks (CNs) into the language MDDG of multivalued decomposable decision graphs. Though it includes Decision-DNNF as a proper subset, MDDG offers the same key tractable queries and transformations as Decision-DNNF, which makes it useful for many applications. Intensive experiments showed that our compiler cn2mddg succeeds in compiling CNs which are out of the reach of standard approaches based on a translation of the input network to CNF, followed by a compilation to Decision-DNNF. Furthermore, the sizes of the resulting compiled representations turn out to be much smaller (sometimes by several orders of magnitude).