Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Role of Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers in Clinical Trials for Alzheimer's Disease Modifying Therapies

Until now, a disease-modifying therapy (DMT) that has an ability to slow or arrest Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression has not been developed, and all clinical trials involving AD patients enrolled by clinical assessment alone also have not been successful. Given the growing consensus that the DMT is likely to require treatment initiation well before full-blown dementia emerges, the early detection of AD will provide opportunities to successfully identify new drugs that slow the course of AD pathology. Recent advances in early detection of AD and prediction of progression of the disease using various biomarkers, including cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Aβ1-42, total tau and p-tau181 levels, and imagining biomarkers, are now being actively integrated into the designs of AD clinical trials. In terms of therapeutic mechanisms, monitoring these markers may be helpful for go/no-go decision making as well as surrogate markers for disease severity or progression. Furthermore, CSF biomarkers can be used as a tool to enrich patients for clinical trials with prospect of increasing statistical power and reducing costs in drug development. However, the standardization of technical aspects of analysis of these biomarkers is an essential prerequisite to the clinical uses. To accomplish this, global efforts are underway to standardize CSF biomarker measurements and a quality control program supported by the Alzheimer's Association. The current review summarizes therapeutic targets of developing drugs in AD pathophysiology, and provides the most recent advances in the
Efecto agudo del estiramiento sobre el sprint en jugadores de fútbol de división de honor juvenil. (Acute effect of stretching on sprint in honour division soccer players).

Se valoro el efecto agudo del estiramiento sobre el rendimiento en la flexion maxima de tronco y sprint de 10 y 30 metros en jugadores de futbol de division de honor. Se realizo un estudio aleatorio controlado de medidas repetidas, en el que participaron 28 varones jugadores de futbol (edad 17,6 ± 0,8 anos; peso 71,96 ± 7,9 kg; talla 177,66 ± 5,85 cm). Todos los sujetos fueron aleatoriamente distribuidos en 3 grupos: estiramientos estaticos-pasivos (n=9), estiramientos estaticos-activos (n=11) y estiramientos dinamicos (n=8). Todos los grupos realizaron un calentamiento estandar de 10 minutos de carrera, seguido de la valoracion de la flexion maxima de tronco y del tiempo en el sprint de 10 y 30 metros parado y lanzado. Estas pruebas de valoracion fueron repetidas despues de que cada sujeto completase la rutina de estiramientos que previamente le fue asignada. Todos los grupos consiguieron un aumento de la distancia alcanzada en la flexion de tronco ( p menor que 0.05), sin embargo, tan solo el grupo de estiramientos dinamicos no mostro un descenso en el rendimiento del sprint en cualquiera de sus variantes analizadas ( p menor que 0.05). Por ello se recomienda la realizacion de estiramientos dinamicos como parte fundamental del calentamiento previo a una actuacion deportiva. Palabras clave : estiramientos; futbol; calentamiento; sprint; rendimiento. Abstract The acute effect of stretching on maximum trunk flexion and 10 and 30 meters sprint performances was measured in honour division soccer players. A random controlled repeated measures design was used and 28 honour division soccer players participated in this study (age 17,6 ± 0,8 years; weight 71,96 ± 7,9 kg; height 177,66 ± 5,85 cm). All subjects were assigned randomly to 3 groups: passive static stretch (n=9), active-static stretch (n=11) and dynamic stretch (n=8). All groups performed a standard 10 minute jog warm-up, followed by maximum trunk flexion and stationary and flying 10 and 30 meters sprint time measurements. These measurement tasks were repeated after each subject completed his stretching protocol previously assigned. All groups obtained a improvement in trunk flexion distance ( p less than 0.05), however, only dynamic stretch group did not show a decrease in sprint performance in any of tested variants. Therefore, it recommended perform dynamic stretching as fundamental part of warm-up subsequent sport events. Key words : stretching; soccer; warm-up; sprint; performance. http://dx.doi. org/10.5232/ricyde2010.01801
Implicit relational effects in associative recognition

We study the contribution of implicit relatedness to associative recognition in two experiments. In the first experiment, we showed an implicit improvement in recognition when the stimulus elements of each word pair shared common letters and they were unpaired at test. Moreover, when asked to study the stimuli under divided attention, recollection was affected, but not the effect of perceptual familiarity. In a second experiment, we replicated the effect of divided attention, and we showed that it did not affect the familiarity measured by a choice test at the item level. Overall, both experiments indicated that familiarity acts by unitizing the association, and not simply by establishing some sort of implicit cued recall (recollection). Associative recognition is a task frequently used as a paradigm for studying recollective processes. In theory, given that participants have to distinguish between intact (targets) and rearranged (distracters) equally familiar word pairs by exposure, the acceptance or rejection of a test pair has to be based on the retrieval of the original association and not in any possible difference in familiarity. This view of associative recollection has been challenged recently in an attempt to explain contradictory results obtained in the electrophysiological and neuroimaging literature. In particular, the study of amnesic patients with hippocampal lesions, known to be critical in the processing of relational information (Eichenbaum & Cohen, 2001), has shown inconsistent results regarding the type of deficits found in associative versus item recognition. Some studies (e.g., Giovanello, Keane, & Verfaellie, 2006; Giovanello, Verfaellie, & Keane, 2003; Turriziani, Fadda, Caltagirone, & Carlesimo, 2004) have revealed more deficits in associative recognition than in item recognition in these
NETOCRACY: the new power elite and life after capitalism

1. Technology: the motor of historical motion 2. Three Paradigms: feudalism - capitalism - informationalism 3. The Plurarchic Society: the end of the nation state and the crisis of democracy 4. In search of attention: information - propaganda - entertainment 5. The Netocrats and their worldview 6. Globalization: financial and cultural 7. The new biology and the ethics of the Netocracy 8. The death of man and the birth of the virtual subject 9. The network pyramids: the power hierachies of attentionalism 10. Sex and the new tribalism, virtual education and the inequality of the brains 11. Behind the firewalls: virtual revolutionaries and the civil wars of the Netocracy
Fuzzy Expert Model for Evaluation of Faculty Performance in Technical Educational Institutions

In developing countries, higher education is seen as an essential means for creation and development of resources and for improving the life of people to whom it has to serve. Worldwide National policies on higher education are been given increasing importance to improve the quality of education on offer. Consequently, the evaluation of Faculty performance in teaching activity is especially relevant for the academic institutions. It helps to define efficient plans to guarantee quality of teachers and the teaching learning process. In this paper, an optimization Evolution model for academic performance of the faculty’s in technical institutions based on teaching activity series of qualitative reports is presented. We have proposed a Fuzzy Expert System for evaluating teachers overall performance based on fuzzy logic techniques under uncertain facts in the decision making process. A suitable fuzzy inference mechanism and associated rules are been discussed. It introduces the principles behind fuzzy logic and illustrates how these principles could be applied by educators to evaluating faculty’s performance. This model will help to write the Annual Confidential Reports of all the employees of an organization.
Estimation of hidden Markov models for a partially observed risk sensitive control problem

This paper provides a summary of our recent work on the problem of combined estima­ tion and control of systems described by finite state, hidden Markov models. We establish the stochastic framework for the problem, formulate a separated control policy with risksensitive cost functional, describe an estimation scheme for the parameters of the hidden Markov model that describes the plant, and finally indicate how the combined estimation and control problem can be re-formulated in a framework that permits an application of stochastic approximation techniques to the proof of asymptotic convergence of the estima­ tor.
The French Social Media Bank: a Treebank of Noisy User Generated Content

In recent years, statistical parsers have reached high performance levels on well-edited texts. Domain adaptation techniques have improved parsing results on text genres differing from the journalistic data most parsers are trained on. However, such corpora usually comply with standard linguistic, spelling and typographic conventions. In the meantime, the emergence of Web 2.0 communication media has caused the apparition of new types of online textual data. Although valuable, e.g., in terms of data mining and sentiment analysis, such user-generated content rarely complies with standard conventions: they are noisy. This prevents most NLP tools, especially treebank based parsers, from performing well on such data. For this reason, we have developed the French Social Media Bank, the first user-generated content treebank for French, a morphologically rich language (MRL). The first release of this resource contains 1,700 sentences from various Web 2.0 sources, including data specifically chosen for their high noisiness. We describe here how we created this treebank and expose the methodology we used for fully annotating it. We also provide baseline POS tagging and statistical constituency parsing results, which are lower by far than usual results on edited texts. This highlights the high difficulty of automatically processing such noisy data in a MRL.
Homosexuality in Midlife

However impetuous and unwise, this book began at a dinner party at which were gathered a group of middle-aged gay men. One of the men present began to talk about his experience with commercial masseurs. This came as a surprise to the rest of us, because Ken was on record as disapproving of casual sex. Ken was known to be a romantic. He would sing the praises of those friends who had partners, and the longer they had been together, the more Ken admired them. He was distressed and disappointed whenever he heard of couples breaking up. Ken seemed to wish the same for himself and yet had never had a boyfriend, though he was notorious for having crushes on younger men and suffering from unrequited love. His dinner companions were pleased to learn that Ken was branching out in retirement, and his new interests aroused considerable curiosity. Ken’s story was a mixture of excitement, pleasure, reservations, discovery and self-criticism. Ken seemed pleased to be holding the floor on the matter of sex, which was a new role for him although he was a showman on many other topics. Ken was encouraged in his new interest by the rest of us, who were pleased to see Ken happy and, at long last, getting some sex–an activity that had given us a lot of pleasure. The discussion moved on to the changes that we had all experienced in our sex
Theoretical Limits on Extrasolar Terrestrial Planet Detection with Coronagraphs

Many high-contrast coronagraph designs have recently been proposed. In this paper, their suitability for direct imaging of extrasolar terrestrial planets is reviewed. We also develop a linear algebra based model of coronagraphy that can both explain the behavior of existing coronagraphs and quantify the coronagraphic performance limit imposed by fundamental physics. We find that the maximum theoretical throughput of a coronagraph is equal to 1 minus the nonaberrated noncoronagraphic PSF of the telescope. We describe how a coronagraph reaching this fundamental limit may be designed, and how much improvement over the best existing coronagraph design is still possible. Both the analytical model and numerical simulations of existing designs also show that this theoretical limit rapidly degrades as the source size is increased: the "highest performance" coronagraphs, those with the highest throughput and smallest inner working angle (IWA), are the most sensitive to stellar angular diameter. This unfortunately rules out the possibility of using a small IWA (<λ/d) coronagraph for a terrestrial planet imaging mission. Finally, a detailed numerical simulation that accurately accounts for stellar angular size, zodiacal and exozodiacal light is used to quantify the efficiency of coronagraph designs for direct imaging of extrasolar terrestrial planets in a possible real observing program. We find that in the photon noise-limited regime, a 4 m telescope with a theoretically optimal coronagraph is able to detect Earth-like planets around 50 stars with 1 hr exposure time per target (assuming 25% throughput and exozodi levels similar to our solar system). We also show that at least two existing coronagraph design can approach this level of performance in the ideal monochromatic case considered in this study.
Flood maps in Europe – methods, availability and use

Abstract. To support the transition from traditional flood defence strategies to a flood risk management approach at the basin scale in Europe, the EU has adopted a new Directive (2007/60/EC) at the end of 2007. One of the major tasks which member states must carry out in order to comply with this Directive is to map flood hazards and risks in their territory, which will form the basis of future flood risk management plans. This paper gives an overview of existing flood mapping practices in 29 countries in Europe and shows what maps are already available and how such maps are used. Roughly half of the countries considered have maps covering as good as their entire territory, and another third have maps covering significant parts of their territory. Only five countries have very limited or no flood maps available yet. Of the different flood maps distinguished, it appears that flood extent maps are the most commonly produced floods maps (in 23 countries), but flood depth maps are also regularly created (in seven countries). Very few countries have developed flood risk maps that include information on the consequences of flooding. The available flood maps are mostly developed by governmental organizations and primarily used for emergency planning, spatial planning, and awareness raising. In spatial planning, flood zones delimited on flood maps mainly serve as guidelines and are not binding. Even in the few countries (e.g. France, Poland) where there is a legal basis to regulate floodplain developments using flood zones, practical problems are often faced which reduce the mitigating effect of such binding legislation. Flood maps, also mainly extent maps, are also created by the insurance industry in Europe and used to determine insurability, differentiate premiums, or to assess long-term financial solvency. Finally, flood maps are also produced by international river commissions. With respect to the EU Flood Directive, many countries already have a good starting point to map their flood hazards. A flood risk based map that includes consequences, however, has yet to be developed by most countries.
Neural-Network-Based Contouring Control for Robotic Manipulators in Operational Space

This brief presents a contouring control scheme for robotic manipulators. The geometric properties of the desired contour are incorporated in the controller design phase, and the resulting controller has been structured as a two-layered hierarchical control scheme that consists of an outer loop and an inner loop. The outer loop is formed by kinematic control system in operational space, which can be designed to assign different dynamics to the tangential, normal, and binormal direction of the desired contour. It is shown that the outer loop can provide a joint velocity reference signal to the inner one. The inner loop is used to implement a velocity servo control system at the robot joint level. Meanwhile, a radial basis function network is adopted to compensate for the nonlinear dynamics of the robotic manipulator, where a robust control strategy is used to suppress the modeling error of neural networks. Experimental results on the Zebra-Zero robotic manipulator have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in comparison with other control strategies.
Gastric pneumatosis in neonates: Revisited

Abstract: Pneumatosis intestinalis, found commonly in neonatal necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), can occur in any part of the gastrointestinal tract, from the oesophagus to the rectum. Gastric pneumatosis, defined as air within the wall of the stomach, however, is an extremely rare sign during infancy and is usually secondary to gastric outlet obstruction. The clinical course and outcome of a neonate with gastric pneumatosis associated with NEC is reported along with a brief review of the literature. The findings illustrate that gastric pneumatosis can be the presenting feature of fulminant NEC and may indicate widespread, severe gastrointestinal insult.
Variational Learning of Inducing Variables in Sparse Gaussian Processes

Sparse Gaussian process methods that use inducing variables require the selection of the inducing inputs and the kernel hyperparameters. We introduce a variational formulation for sparse approximations that jointly infers the inducing inputs and the kernel hyperparameters by maximizing a lower bound of the true log marginal likelihood. The key property of this formulation is that the inducing inputs are defined to be variational parameters which are selected by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the variational distribution and the exact posterior distribution over the latent function values. We apply this technique to regression and we compare it with other approaches in the literature.
Information Search Patterns in E-Commerce Product Comparison Services

To facilitate product selection and purchase decisions on e-commerce Web sites, the presentation of product information is very important. In this research, the authors study how disposition styles influence users' search patterns in product comparison services of e-commerce Web sites. The results show that people use relatively more feature paths and less product paths in vertical disposition style than horizontal disposition style. The findings also indicate that there are relatively more feature paths and less product paths in the first half than second half of the information search paths. This is consistent with Gensch's two-stage choice model which suggests that people use attribute processing to derive a consideration set before they apply alternative processing to arrive at a final choice in product comparison services.
Automated prediction of CASP‐5 structures using the Robetta server

Robetta is a fully automated protein structure prediction server that uses the Rosetta fragment‐insertion method. It combines template‐based and de novo structure prediction methods in an attempt to produce high quality models that cover every residue of a submitted sequence. The first step in the procedure is the automatic detection of the locations of domains and selection of the appropriate modeling protocol for each domain. For domains matched to a homolog with an experimentally characterized structure by PSI‐BLAST or Pcons2, Robetta uses a new alignment method, called K*Sync, to align the query sequence onto the parent structure. It then models the variable regions by allowing them to explore conformational space with fragments in fashion similar to the de novo protocol, but in the context of the template. When no structural homolog is available, domains are modeled with the Rosetta de novo protocol, which allows the full length of the domain to explore conformational space via fragment‐insertion, producing a large decoy ensemble from which the final models are selected. The Robetta server produced quite reasonable predictions for targets in the recent CASP‐5 and CAFASP‐3 experiments, some of which were at the level of the best human predictions. Proteins 2003;53:524–533. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Prospective, Randomized, Multicenter Trial of Tacrolimus‐Based Therapy with or without Basiliximab in Pediatric Renal Transplantation

In a 6‐month, multicenter, randomized, controlled, open‐label, parallel‐group trial, we investigated the efficacy and safety of adding basiliximab to a standard tacrolimus‐based regimen in pediatric renal transplant recipients. Patients <18 years received tacrolimus/azathioprine/steroids (TAS, n = 93) or tacrolimus/azathioprine/steroids/basiliximab (TAS + B, n = 99). Target tacrolimus levels were 10–20 ng/mL between days 0–21 and 5–15 ng/mL thereafter. Steroid dosing was identical in both groups. Basiliximab was administered at 10 mg (patients <40 kg) or 20 mg (patients ≥40 kg) within 4 h of reperfusion; the same dose was repeated on day 4. Biopsy‐proven acute rejection rates were 20.4% (TAS) and 19.2% (TAS + B); steroid‐resistant acute rejection rates were 3.2% and 3.0%, respectively. Patient survival was 100%; graft survival rates were 95% in both arms. The nature and incidence of adverse events were similar in both arms except toxic nephropathy and abdominal pain, which were significantly higher in the TAS + B arm (14.1% vs. 4.3%; p = 0.03 and 11.1% vs. 2.2%; p = 0.02; respectively). Median serum creatinine concentrations at 6 months were 86 μmol/L in the TAS and 91 μmol/L in the TAS + B arm; glomerular filtration rate was 79.4 and 77.6 (mL/min/1.73 m2), respectively. Adding basiliximab to a tacrolimus‐based regimen is safe in pediatric patients, but does not improve clinical efficacy.
Hiding from the Moonlight: Luminosity and Temperature Affect Activity of Asian Nocturnal Primates in a Highly Seasonal Forest

The effect of moonlight and temperature on activity of slow lorises was previously little known and this knowledge might be useful for understanding many aspects of their behavioural ecology, and developing strategies to monitor and protect populations. In this study we aimed to determine if the activity of the pygmy loris (Nycticebus pygmaeus) is affected by ambient temperature and/or moonlight in a mixed deciduous forest. We radio-collared five females and five males in the Seima Protection Forest, Cambodia, in February to May, 2008 and January to March, 2009 and recorded their behaviour at 5 minutes intervals, totalling 2736 observations. We classified each observation as either inactive (sleeping or alert) or active behaviour (travel, feeding, grooming, or others). Moon luminosity (bright/dark) and ambient temperature were recorded for each observation. The response variable, activity, was binary (active or inactive), and a logit link function was used. Ambient temperature alone did not significantly affect mean activity. Although mean activity was significantly affected by moonlight, the interaction between moonlight and temperature was also significant: on bright nights, studied animals were increasingly more active with higher temperature; and on dark nights they were consistently active regardless of temperature. The most plausible explanation is that on bright cold nights the combined risk of being seen and attacked by predators and heat loss outweigh the benefit of active behaviours.