Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A two-phase model for compaction and damage: 3. Applications to shear localization and plate boundary formation

A new two-phase theory employing a nonequilibrium relation between interfacial surface energy, pressure, and viscous deformation [Bercovici et al., this issue] provides a model for damage (void generation and microcracking) and thus a continuum description of weakening, failure, and shear localization. Here we demonstrate applications of the theory to shear localization with simple shear flow calculations in which one phase (the matrix, representing, for example, silicate) is much stronger (more viscous) than the other phase (the fluid). This calculation is motivated as a simple model of plate boundary formation in a shear zone. Even without shear the two phases eventually separate due to gradients in surface tension. However, the influence of shear on phase separation is manifest in several ways. As shear velocity increases, the separation rate of the phases increases, demonstrating a basic feedback mechanism: Accumulation of the fluid phase causes focused weak zones on which shear concentrates, causing more damage and void generation and thus greater accumulation of fluid. Beyond a critical shear velocity, phase separation undergoes intense acceleration and focusing, leading to a “tear localization” in which the porosity becomes nearly singular in space and grows rapidly like a tear or crack. At an even higher value of shear velocity, phase separation is inhibited such that shear localization gives way to defocusing of weak zones suggestive of uniform microcracking and failure throughout the layer. Our two-phase damage theory thus predicts a wide variety of shear localization and failure behavior with a continuum model. Applications of the theory to various fields, such as granular dynamics, metallurgy, and tectonic plate boundary formation are numerous.
Paranormal belief and the conjunction fallacy: Controlling for temporal relatedness and potential surprise differentials in component events

Recent research suggests paranormal believers are especially prone to the 'conjunction fallacy'. The current study extends this work by presenting believers and non-believers with eight paranormal plus eight non-paranormal scenarios. Participants were given either a paranormal or virtually identical non-paranormal version of each scenario. Of these, half incorporated component events which were (virtually) co-occurring with half including components which were temporally disjointed. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA; controlling for gender and maths/stats/psychology qualifications) found believers made more conjunction errors than non-believers. Neither event type (paranormal vs. non-paranormal) nor components' temporal relationship (co-occurring vs. disjointed) had a significant effect on conjunction biases. Believers' tendency to produce larger conjunctive estimates was unrelated to group differences in component probability estimates (surprise values) and further, could not be attributed to group differences in the perceived functional relationship between component and conjunctive events. Possible explanations are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Language: en
Genetic Evidence for a Mitochondriate Ancestry in the ‘Amitochondriate’ Flagellate Trimastix pyriformis

Most modern eukaryotes diverged from a common ancestor that contained the α-proteobacterial endosymbiont that gave rise to mitochondria. The ‘amitochondriate’ anaerobic protist parasites that have been studied to date, such as Giardia and Trichomonas harbor mitochondrion-related organelles, such as mitosomes or hydrogenosomes. Yet there is one remaining group of mitochondrion-lacking flagellates known as the Preaxostyla that could represent a primitive ‘pre-mitochondrial’ lineage of eukaryotes. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an expressed sequence tag (EST) survey on the preaxostylid flagellate Trimastix pyriformis, a poorly-studied free-living anaerobe. Among the ESTs we detected 19 proteins that, in other eukaryotes, typically function in mitochondria, hydrogenosomes or mitosomes, 12 of which are found exclusively within these organelles. Interestingly, one of the proteins, aconitase, functions in the tricarboxylic acid cycle typical of aerobic mitochondria, whereas others, such as pyruvate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase and [FeFe] hydrogenase, are characteristic of anaerobic hydrogenosomes. Since Trimastix retains genetic evidence of a mitochondriate ancestry, we can now say definitively that all known living eukaryote lineages descend from a common ancestor that had mitochondria.
Fluidité, complexité et morphosyntaxe dans la production écrite en FLE

The aim of this study is to examine the development of linguistic proficiency in written production of second-language French. In a longitudinal study of 30 months, we follow the written production of 5 guided learners of French as a second language. In order to apprehend proficiency we use the conventional parameters fluency, complexity and accuracy. The fluency and complexity are apprehended by conventional indicators used in the literature, but the accuracy is apprehended in particular morphosyntactic contexts: finiteness, subject-verb agreement and past tense. This study also takes an interest in the use and development of explicit and implicit knowledge, which are closely related to the concept of proficiency. Written production is particularly suitable for this kind of study as it gives more time to control the output before and after the writing than oral production does. The learners? computer-written production is recorded by the means of the program ScriptLog and a video-filmed thinking aloud protocol. This methodology allows us to follow the written production in real time. The protocols from ScriptLog and the TAP provide the material for the analysis of the development of linguistic proficiency. In addition to the results indicating a non-controversial, anticipated general gain in fluency, complexity and accuracy, we observe important inter-individual differences between the 5 learners. One group of learners produces written French L2 with more fluency and less verbalisation, which indicates a lesser use of explicit knowledge. The other group produces with less fluency and more verbalisations, which indicates a more important use of explicit knowledge. It would seem that the learners in the more fluent group control the output somewhat less than the learners in the less fluent group. As hypothesized, the written production of the more fluent group is somewhat less accurate as to the finiteness and the subject-verb agreement. When it comes to the past tense, we must add another parameter to the accuracy, variation between passe compose and imparfait. In this case, the production of the more fluent group is not more accurate, but there is more variation between the two tenses. These learners give more personalised background information to the reader. The less fluent group, seems to concentrate on one of the two tenses, mostly passe compose, and they communicate less background information to the reader. Finally, following Krashen (1981) and Pica (1985) we also made the hypothesis that simple grammatical rules are easier to learn in an explicit way than rules trying to reflect a more complex grammatical structure, complex rules. In this thesis, the simple rule is exemplified by the subject-verb agreement in 3rd person plural, and the complex rule by the distinction between the past tenses passe compose and imparfait. This hypothesis was confirmed : the treatment of the simple rule, measured by pausing, was more explicit than the complex rule. The thesis ends with some research propositions in the psycholinguistic and didactic fields.
International Union of Pharmacology. XXXV. The Glucagon Receptor Family

Peptide hormones within the secretin-glucagon family are expressed in endocrine cells of the pancreas and gastrointestinal epithelium and in specialized neurons in the brain, and subserve multiple biological functions, including regulation of growth, nutrient intake, and transit within the gut, and digestion, energy absorption, and energy assimilation. Glucagon, glucagon-like peptide-1, glucagon-like peptide-2, glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide, growth hormone-releasing hormone and secretin are structurally related peptides that exert their actions through unique members of a structurally related G protein-coupled receptor class 2 family. This review discusses advances in our understanding of how these peptides exert their biological activities, with a focus on the biological actions and structural features of the cognate receptors. The receptors have been named after their parent and only physiologically relevant ligand, in line with the recommendations of the International Union of Pharmacology Committee on Receptor Nomenclature and Drug Classification (NC-IUPHAR).
Cerebral microbleeds on MRI

Objective: To assess the potential role of cerebral microbleeds (CMB) in intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), as indicators of cerebral small-vessel disease, and their possible implications for antithrombotic treatment. Methods: The author reviewed literature published through July 2005 from electronic MEDLINE, PubMed, and hand searches. CMB prevalence analyses were performed for subjects without cerebrovascular disease, with ICH, and with ischemic cerebrovascular disease. Results: Prevalence data from more than 5,200 subjects were analyzed. In elderly subjects without cerebrovascular disease, CMB prevalence is between 5% and 6%, associated with advanced age, while data are inconsistent with regard to CMB and chronic hypertension. CMB are prevalent in 68% of patients with spontaneous ICH and 40% of those with ischemic cerebrovascular disease. Cerebral microangiopathy (lacunes, leukoaraiosis) is associated with the highest prevalence (57%) of CMB among patients with ischemic stroke. In patients with suspected cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) or Alzheimer disease, CMB are predominantly located in the cortical-subcortical area. Current data provide no evidence that CMB increase the risk of ICH among patients on antithrombotic treatment or those treated with thrombolysis for acute stroke. Conclusions: Cerebral microbleeds might indicate a higher risk of future intracerebral hemorrhage and may be a marker of cerebral small-vessel disease and cerebral amyloid angiopathy. However, more prospective data are required in order to confirm these assumptions. Recommendations to guide antithrombotic treatment based on the detection of cerebral microbleeds are presently not justified.
Non-Motor Symptoms in Patients Suffering from Motor Neuron Diseases

Background The recently postulated “disease spreading hypothesis” has gained much attention, especially for Parkinson’s disease (PD). The various non-motor symptoms (NMS) in neurodegenerative diseases would be much better explained by this hypothesis than by the degeneration of disease-specific cell populations. Motor neuron disease (MND) is primarily known as a group of diseases with a selective loss of motor function. However, recent evidence suggests disease spreading into non-motor brain regions also in MND. The aim of this study was to comprehensively detect NMS in patients suffering from MND. Methods We used a self-rating questionnaire including 30 different items of gastrointestinal, autonomic, neuropsychiatric, and sleep complaints [NMS questionnaire (NMSQuest)], which is an established tool in PD patients. 90 MND patients were included and compared to 96 controls. Results In total, MND patients reported significantly higher NMS scores (median: 7 points) in comparison to controls (median: 4 points). Dribbling, impaired taste/smelling, impaired swallowing, weight loss, loss of interest, sad/blues, falling, and insomnia were significantly more prevalent in MND patients compared to controls. Interestingly, excessive sweating was more reported in the MND group. Correlation analysis revealed an increase of total NMS score with disease progression. Conclusion NMS in MND patients seemed to increase with disease progression, which would fit with the recently postulated “disease spreading hypothesis. ” The total NMS score in the MND group significantly exceeded the score for the control group, but only 8 of the 30 single complaints of the NMSQuest were significantly more often reported by MND patients. Dribbling, impaired swallowing, weight loss, and falling could primarily be connected to motor neuron degeneration and declared as motor symptoms in MND.
Performance of Multicore Systems on Parallel Datamining Services

Multicore systems are of growing importance and 64128 cores can be expected in a few years. We expect datamining to be an important application class of general importance and are developing such scalable parallel algorithms for managed code (C#) on Windows. We present a performance analysis that compares MPI and a new messaging runtime library CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) with Windows and Linux and using both threads and processes. We investigate effects of cache lines and memory bandwidth and fluctuations of run times of loosely synchronized threads. We give results on message latency and bandwidth for two processor multicore systems based on AMD and Intel architectures with a total of four and eight cores. Generating up to a million messages per second on a single PC, we find on an Intel dual quadcore system, latencies from 5μs in basic asynchronous threading to 20 μs for a full MPI_SENDRECV exchange with all threads (one per core) sending and receiving 2 messages at a traditional MPI style loosely synchronous rendezvous. We compare our C# results with C using MPICH2 and Nemesis and Java with both mpiJava and MPJ Express. We are packaging our core algorithms not as traditional libraries but as services and use DSS (Decentralized System Services built on CCR) to compose workflows or mashups for complete applications. We show initial results from GIS and Cheminformatics clustering problems. Our results suggest that the service composition model and Windows/C# thread programming model will be a flexible parallel programming environment for important commodity applications. C
Automatic Breast-Line and Pectoral Muscle Segmentation

Pre-processing of mammograms is a crucial step in computer-aided analysis systems. The aim of segmentation is to extract a breast region by estimation of a breast skin-line and a pectoral muscle as well as removing ra- diographic artifacts and the background of the mammogram. Knowledge of the breast contour also allows further analysis of breast abnormalities such as bilateral asymmetry. In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm for segmentation of a breast region, based on two types of global image threshold- ing: the multi-level Otsu and minimizing the measure of fuzziness as well as the gradient estimation and linear regression. The results of our experiments showed that our method can be used to nd a breast line and a pectoral muscle accurately.
Automatic left ventricle detection in MRI images using marginal space learning and component-based voting

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is currently the gold standard for left ventricle (LV) quantification. Detection of the LV in an MRI image is a prerequisite for functional measurement. However, due to the large variations in orientation, size, shape, and image intensity of the LV, automatic detection of the LV is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose to use marginal space learning (MSL) to exploit the recent advances in learning discriminative classifiers. Instead of learning a monolithic classifier directly in the five dimensional object pose space (two dimensions for position, one for orientation, and two for anisotropic scaling) as full space learning (FSL) does, we train three detectors, namely, the position detector, the position-orientation detector, and the position-orientation-scale detector. Comparative experiments show that MSL significantly outperforms FSL in both speed and accuracy. Additionally, we also detect several LV landmarks, such as the LV apex and two annulus points. If we combine the detected candidates from both the whole-object detector and landmark detectors, we can further improve the system robustness. A novel voting based strategy is devised to combine the detected candidates by all detectors. Experiments show component-based voting can reduce the detection outliers.
Uterine Sarcoma: Clinical Presentation, Treatment and Survival Outcomes in Thailand.

BACKGROUND Uterine sarcoma is a group of rare gynecologic tumors with various natures, and different lines of treatment. Most have a poor treatment outcome. This study targeted clinical characteristics, treatment, overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), and prognostic factors in uterine sarcoma patients in one tertiary center for cancer care. MATERIALS AND METHODS Uterine sarcoma patients who were treated at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Faculty of Medicine Vajira Hospital between January 1994 and December 2014 were identified. Clinico-pathological data were analyzed. Prognostic outcomes were examined by Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox regression analysis. RESULTS We identified 46 uterine sarcoma patients: 25 carcinosarcoma (CS) (54.3%), 15 leiomyosarcoma (LMS) (32.6%), and 6 undifferentiated uterine sarcoma (UUS) (13.1%) cases. Mean age was 54.0±11.9 years (range 25-82 years). Abnormal uterine bleeding was the most common presenting symptom (63.0%). Among 33 patients (71.7%) who had pre-operative tissue collected, diagnosis of malignancy was correct in 29 (87.9%). All patients received primary surgery and retroperitoneal lymph nodes were resected in 34 (73.9%). After surgery, 5 (10.9%) had gross residual tumors. Stage I disease was most commonly found (56.5%). Adjuvant treatment was given to 27 (58.7%), most commonly chemotherapy. After a median follow-up of 16.0 months (range 0.8-187.4 months), recurrence was encountered in 22 patients (47.8%). Median time to recurrence was 5.8 months (range1.0-105.5 months). Distant metastasis was more common than local or loco- regional failure. The 2-year PFS was 45.2% (95% confidence interval [CI], 30.6%-59.7%) and the 2-year OS was 48.3% (95% CI, 33.3%-60.7%). Multivariable analyses found residual disease after surgery as a significant factor only for PFS. CONCLUSIONS Uterine sarcoma is a rare tumor entity. Even with multimodalities of treatment, the prognosis is still poor. Successful cytoreductive surgery is a key factor for a good survival outcome.
Normospermic Versus Teratospermic Domestic Cat Sperm Chromatin Integrity Evaluated by Flow Cytometry and Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection1

Abstract Teratospermia (>60% of morphologically abnormal spermatozoa) is well documented in felids. Even morphologically normal spermatozoa from teratospermic ejaculates have reduced ability to undergo tyrosine phosphorylation, acrosome react, and bind and penetrate oocytes compared with normospermic (<40% abnormal spermatozoa) counterparts. However, it is unknown whether fertilization deficiencies originate at a nuclear level. This study examined whether fertilization failure also was attributable to abnormal sperm chromatin, using the sperm chromatin structure assay (SCSA), in vitro fertilization (IVF), and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Aliquots of unprocessed and swim-up-processed (to isolate morphologically normal spermatozoa) spermatozoa from teratospermic and normospermic domestic cats were analyzed by the flow cytometric SCSA. Swim-up-processed sperm were incubated with in vivo-matured oocytes or used for ICSI. Teratospermic ejaculates expressed more (P < 0.05) chromatin heterogeneity (abnormal chromatin structure) than their normospermic counterparts, both in unprocessed and swim-up-processed samples. Fertilization success in vitro was higher (P < 0.05) from normo- compared with teratospermic inseminates. Similar (P > 0.05) proportions of oocytes fertilized after ICSI using spermatozoa from normo- and teratospermic cats. Results reveal that teratospermia in the cat is expressed at the nuclear level as increased sperm chromatin heterogeneity, but ICSI showed that this does not apparently affect fertilization rates if the zona pellucida and oolemma can be bypassed.
Comparison of FAIR perfusion kinetics with DSC‐MRI and functional histology in a model of transient ischemia

Flow‐sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR) is a noninvasive method for perfusion imaging. It has been shown that the FAIR signal may depend on hemodynamic parameters other than perfusion, the most important one being transit delays of labeled spins to the observed tissue. These parameters are expected to change with ischemia. The goal of this study was to assess the effect of these changes on the interpretation of FAIR results in the case of altered perfusion. This was investigated in a rat model of transient cerebral ischemia. It was shown that the ratio of FAIR signal in the infarct compared to the contralateral side was lower at short inflow times, which suggests that transit times affected the effective FAIR signal. The FAIR results were compared with those from functional histology and dynamic susceptibility contrast MRI, and the findings indicated that the altered kinetics of the FAIR signal were related to reduced and delayed inflow in the infarct region—not to a decrease in the number of functional vessels. Magn Reson Med 51:312–320, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The double burden of malnutrition in indigenous and nonindigenous Guatemalan populations.

BACKGROUND As the prevalence of obesity increases in developing countries, the double burden of malnutrition (DBM) has become a public health problem, particularly in countries such as Guatemala with a high concentration of indigenous communities where the prevalence of stunting remains high. OBJECTIVE The aim was to describe and analyze the prevalence of DBM over time (1998-2008) in indigenous and nonindigenous Guatemalan populations. DESIGN We used 3 National Maternal and Child Health Surveys conducted in Guatemala between 1998 and 2008 that include anthropometric data from children aged 0-60 mo and women of reproductive age (15-49 y). We assessed the prevalence of childhood stunting and both child and adult female overweight and obesity between 1998 and 2008. For the year 2008, we assessed the prevalence of DBM at the household (a stunted child and an overweight mother) and individual (stunting/short stature and overweight or anemia and overweight in the same individual) levels and compared the expected and observed prevalence rates to test if the coexistence of the DBM conditions corresponded to expected values. RESULTS Between 1998 and 2008, the prevalence of childhood stunting decreased in both indigenous and nonindigenous populations, whereas overweight and obesity in women increased faster in indigenous populations than in nonindigenous populations (0.91% compared with 0.38%/y; P-trend < 0.01). In 2008, the prevalence of stunted children was 28.8 percentage points higher and of overweight women 4.6 percentage points lower in indigenous compared with nonindigenous populations (63.7% compared with 34.9% and 46.7% compared with 51.3%, respectively). DBM at the household and individual levels was higher in indigenous populations and was higher in geographic areas in which most of the population was indigenous, where there was also a greater prevalence of stunting and DBM at the individual level, both in women and children. CONCLUSIONS In Guatemala, DBM is more prevalent in indigenous than in nonindigenous populations at the household and individual levels. To enhance effectiveness, current strategies of national policies and programs should consider DBM and focus on indigenous populations.