Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Footwear Use and Neglected Tropical Diseases: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background The control of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has primarily focused on preventive chemotherapy and case management. Less attention has been placed on the role of ensuring access to adequate water, sanitation, and hygiene and personal preventive measures in reducing exposure to infection. Our aim was to assess whether footwear use was associated with a lower risk of selected NTDs. Methodology We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the association between footwear use and infection or disease for those NTDs for which the route of transmission or occurrence may be through the feet. We included Buruli ulcer, cutaneous larva migrans (CLM), leptospirosis, mycetoma, myiasis, podoconiosis, snakebite, tungiasis, and soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections, particularly hookworm infection and strongyloidiasis. We searched Medline, Embase, Cochrane, Web of Science, CINAHL Plus, and Popline databases, contacted experts, and hand-searched reference lists for eligible studies. The search was conducted in English without language, publication status, or date restrictions up to January 2014. Studies were eligible for inclusion if they reported a measure of the association between footwear use and the risk of each NTD. Publication bias was assessed using funnel plots. Descriptive study characteristics and methodological quality of the included studies were summarized. For each study outcome, both outcome and exposure data were abstracted and crude and adjusted effect estimates presented. Individual and summary odds ratio (OR) estimates and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated as a measure of intervention effect, using random effects meta-analyses. Principal Findings Among the 427 studies screened, 53 met our inclusion criteria. Footwear use was significantly associated with a lower odds of infection of Buruli ulcer (OR = 0.15; 95% CI: 0.08–0.29), CLM (OR = 0.24; 95% CI: 0.06–0.96), tungiasis (OR = 0.42; 95% CI: 0.26–0.70), hookworm infection (OR = 0.48; 95% CI: 0.37–0.61), any STH infection (OR = 0.57; 95% CI: 0.39–0.84), strongyloidiasis (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38–0.83), and leptospirosis (OR = 0.59; 95% CI: 0.37–0.94). No significant association between footwear use and podoconiosis (OR = 0.63; 95% CI: 0.38–1.05) was found and no data were available for mycetoma, myiasis, and snakebite. The main limitations were evidence of heterogeneity and poor study quality inherent to the observational studies included. Conclusions/Significance Our results show that footwear use was associated with a lower odds of several different NTDs. Access to footwear should be prioritized alongside existing NTD interventions to ensure a lasting reduction of multiple NTDs and to accelerate their control and elimination. Protocol Registration PROSPERO International prospective register of systematic reviews CRD42012003338
Knockdown of Long Non-coding RNA HOTAIR Suppresses Tumor Invasion and Reverses Epithelial-mesenchymal Transition in Gastric Cancer

Background: Over-expression of long non-coding RNA HOTAIR has been reported in several types of cancer. Yet its involvement in gastric cancer (GC) has not been well understood. The aim of present study was to examine the expression pattern of HOTAIR in GC patients, then, explore its role in promoting cancer invasion and underlying molecular mechanism. Methods: The expression level of HOTAIR in the tumor specimens of GC patients was quantified by Realtime RT-PCR. The correlation between HOTAIR level and clinicopathological factors as well as prognosis was then examined. Down-regulation of HOTAIR by RNA interference was applied to investigate its roles in tumor invasiveness via the view of Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Results: The expression level of HOTAIR in cancer tissues was higher than that in adjacent noncancerous tissues. Expression level of HOTAIR was significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis and TNM stage. Furthermore, high expression level of HOTAIR was a predictor of poor over-all survival in GC patients. In vitro, inhibition of HOTAIR in GC cells could reduce invasiveness, as well as the expression of MMP1 and MMP3. In addition, suppression of HOTAIR could reverse EMT process. Conclusions: HOTAIR could act as a potential predictor for over-all survival in patients with GC. Inhibition of HOTAIR could reduce invasiveness and reverse EMT process in GC cells, indicating the potential role of HOTAIR in GC diagnostics and therapeutics.
Observation of halogen species in the Amundsen Gulf, Arctic, by active long-path differential optical absorption spectroscopy

In the polar tropospheric boundary layer, reactive halogen species (RHS) are responsible for ozone depletion as well as the oxidation of elemental mercury and dimethyl sulphide. After polar sunrise, air masses enriched in reactive bromine cover areas of several million square kilometers. Still, the source and release mechanisms of halogens are not completely understood. We report measurements of halogen oxides performed in the Amundsen Gulf, Arctic, during spring 2008. Active long-path differential optical absorption spectroscopy (LP-DOAS) measurements were set up offshore, several kilometers from the coast, directly on the sea ice, which was never done before. High bromine oxide concentrations were detected frequently during sunlight hours with a characteristic daily cycle showing morning and evening maxima and a minimum at noon. The, so far, highest observed average mixing ratio in the polar boundary layer of 41 pmol/mol (equal to pptv) was detected. Only short sea ice contact is required to release high amounts of bromine. An observed linear decrease of maximum bromine oxide levels with ambient temperature during sunlight, between -24 °C and -15 °C, provides indications on the conditions required for the emission of RHS. In addition, the data indicate the presence of reactive chlorine in the Arctic boundary layer. In contrast to Antarctica, iodine oxide was not detected above a detection limit of 0.3 pmol/mol.
Suitability of Mobile Learning to Enhance English Language Learning: A Survey among University of Colombo School of Computing Students

Mobile learning is one of the major developing areas in recent years in educational field. Power of computers and laptops has changed the way learning happen and made ease of access to all materials and resources. Growing amount of literature in the area of mobile learning depicts the increasing use of mobile technologies for learning. This study is a part of the ongoing research in University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) based on enhancing English language learning among UCSC undergraduates. This paper focuses on a study which was conducted among University of Colombo School of Computing undergraduates in order to find out the potential of mobile learning to enhance English language proficiency. The methodology used for this study was an online questionnaire survey. The analysis of the results depicted that most of the students are having positive attitude towards mobile learning and believe that mobile phones could be used to enhance English proficiency. Further suggestions have been included to consider on enhancement of oral communication skills. The paper concluded with few implications to enhance mobile language learning. Author
Fusion materials science: Overview of challenges and recent progressa)

A brief review is given of fundamental materials science concepts important for development of structural materials for fusion energy systems. Particular attention is placed on displacement damage effects associated with the unique deuterium-tritium fusion environment. Recent examples of multiscale materials modeling results (closely coupled with experimental studies) are summarized. Fundamental differences in the behavior of body centered cubic versus face centered cubic crystal structures are highlighted. Finally, a brief overview is given of the high-performance reduced-activation materials being developed by fusion.
Deconvolution for an atomic distribution: rates of convergence

Let X 1, …, X n be i.i. d. copies of a random variable X=Y+Z, where X i =Y i +Z i , and Y i and Z i are independent and have the same distribution as Y and Z, respectively. Assume that the random variables Y i ’s are unobservable and that Y=AV, where A and V are independent, A has a Bernoulli distribution with probability of success equal to 1−p and V has a distribution function F with density f. Let the random variable Z have a known distribution with density k. Based on a sample X 1, …, X n , we consider the problem of nonparametric estimation of the density f and the probability p. Our estimators of f and p are constructed via Fourier inversion and kernel smoothing. We derive their convergence rates over suitable functional classes. By establishing in a number of cases the lower bounds for estimation of f and p we show that our estimators are rate-optimal in these cases.
Open-Ended Visual Question-Answering

This thesis report studies methods to solve Visual Question-Answering (VQA) tasks with a Deep Learning framework. As a preliminary step, we explore Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to tackle Question-Answering (text based). We then modify the previous model to accept an image as an input in addition to the question. For this purpose, we explore the VGG-16 and K-CNN convolutional neural networks to extract visual features from the image. These are merged with the word embedding or with a sentence embedding of the question to predict the answer. This work was successfully submitted to the Visual Question Answering Challenge 2016, where it achieved a 53,62% of accuracy in the test dataset. The developed software has followed the best programming practices and Python code style, providing a consistent baseline in Keras for different configurations.
Clathrin structure characterized with monoclonal antibodies. II. Identification of in vivo forms of clathrin

Clathrin was isolated from detergent-solubilized, biosynthetically radiolabeled cells by immunoprecipitation with anti-clathrin monoclonal antibodies. Immunoprecipitates obtained after pulse-chase labeling demonstrated that after biosynthesis the LCa light chain of clathrin could be found either complexed to heavy chain or in a free pool (not associated with heavy chain) which decreased steadily over time. More than half of the free LCa disappeared within the first hour after biosynthesis, but some was still detectable after several hours. Incorporation of clathrin LCa light chain and heavy chain into coated vesicles was coordinate and increased up to 4 h after biosynthesis. Comparison of these kinetics suggested that once incorporated into coated vesicles, LCa and heavy chain did not dissociate, even during depolymerization of the vesicle. There was also little apparent degradation of clathrin found in coated vesicles for up to 22 h after biosynthesis. Immunoprecipitation with anti-clathrin monoclonal antibodies was carried out after fractionation of continuously radiolabeled cell lysates using two different sizing columns. These experiments indicated that the triskelion form of clathrin that has been isolated from coated vesicles in vitro also exists in vivo. They also confirmed the existence of a transient but detectable pool of newly synthesized free LCa light chain.
Kernel CCA for multi-view learning of acoustic features using articulatory measurements

We consider the problem of learning transformations of acoustic feature vectors for phonetic frame classification, in a multi-view setting where articulatory measurements are available at training time but not at test time. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) has previously been used to learn linear transformations of the acoustic features that are maximally correlated with articulatory measurements. Here, we learn nonlinear transformations of the acoustics using kernel canonical correlation analysis (KCCA). We present an incremental SVD approach that makes the KCCA computations feasible for typical speech data set sizes. In phonetic frame classification experiments on data drawn from the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Database, we find that KCCA provides consistent improvements over linear CCA, as well as over single-view unsupervised dimensionality reduction.
Assessment of Febrile Neonates According to Low Risk Criteria for Serious Bacterial Infection

Objective It is propounded that febrile neonates with low risk criteria (LRC) can be carefully observed without parenteral antimicrobial therapy; but yet, reliability of LRC to exclude serious bacterial infection (SBI) is uncertain. Methods The records of all febrile term neonates, seen in the emergency room and admitted in neonatal ward of 17 Shahrivar children's hospital of Rasht, Iran from January 2004 to January 2009 were reviewed. All of them underwent full sepsis workup. The prevalence of SBI in total population and LRC positive and negative neonates were calculated Findings A total of 202 records of previously healthy febrile neonates were evaluated. SBI was shown in 38 (18.8%). The most common type of SBI was urinary tract infection (UTI). Sixty-two (31%) neonates had LRC, and only one (1.6%) had SBI (UTI with E. coli). SBI was significantly more common in neonates without LRC (26.6% versus 1.6%, P<0.001). The negative predictive value (NPV) of LRC to exclude SBI was 98.4% (95%confidence interval: 96.7% to 100%). Conclusion These findings suggest that LRC may be relied upon to exclude SBI in febrile neonates. We propose that all febrile neonates be admitted, ill or LRC negative neonates should undergo a full sepsis work up and be administered systemic antibiotics immediately. LRC positive neonates should be under close observation.
A Spurious-Power Suppression Technique for Multimedia/DSP Applications

This paper presents the design exploration and applications of a spurious-power suppression technique (SPST) which can dramatically reduce the power dissipation of combinational VLSI designs for multimedia/DSP purposes. The proposed SPST separates the target designs into two parts, i.e., the most significant part and least significant part (MSP and LSP), and turns off the MSP when it does not affect the computation results to save power. Furthermore, this paper proposes an original glitch-diminishing technique to filter out useless switching power by asserting the data signals after the data transient period. This paper adopts two multimedia/DSP design examples, i.e., a multitransform design for H.264 and a versatile multimedia functional unit (VMFU), to evaluate the proposed SPST. These two design examples have quite different hardware configurations, thus, the realization issues of the SPST on every design also remarkably differ from each other. The multitransform design can compute three transforms which are required in H.264 encoding while the VMFU possesses six commonly used multimedia/DSP functions, namely, addition, subtraction, multiplication, MAC, interpolation, and sum-of-absolute-difference. After optimizing the design elaborately, we find that the proposed SPST can, respectively, save 27% and 24% power dissipation on average of the H.264 multitransform design and the VMFU at the expense of less than 20% area augmentation.
Conducting Neuroscience to Guide the Development of AI

Study of the human brain through fMRI can potentially benefit the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Four examples are presented. First, fMRI decoding of the brain activity of subjects watching video clips yields higher accuracy than state-of-the-art computer-vision approaches to activity recognition. Second, novel methods are presented that decode aggregate representations of complex visual stimuli by decoding their independent constituents. Third, cross-modal studies demonstrate the ability to decode the brain activity induced in subjects watching video stimuli when trained on the brain activity induced in subjects seeing text or hearing speech stimuli and vice versa. Fourth, the time course of brain processing while watching video stimuli is probed with scanning that trades off the amount of the brain scanned for the frequency at which it is scanned. Techniques like these can be used to study how the human brain grounds language in visual perception and may motivate development of novel approaches in AI.
Sarcomere Lattice Geometry Influences Cooperative Myosin Binding in Muscle

In muscle, force emerges from myosin binding with actin (forming a cross-bridge). This actomyosin binding depends upon myofilament geometry, kinetics of thin-filament Ca2+ activation, and kinetics of cross-bridge cycling. Binding occurs within a compliant network of protein filaments where there is mechanical coupling between myosins along the thick-filament backbone and between actin monomers along the thin filament. Such mechanical coupling precludes using ordinary differential equation models when examining the effects of lattice geometry, kinetics, or compliance on force production. This study uses two stochastically driven, spatially explicit models to predict levels of cross-bridge binding, force, thin-filament Ca2+ activation, and ATP utilization. One model incorporates the 2-to-1 ratio of thin to thick filaments of vertebrate striated muscle (multi-filament model), while the other comprises only one thick and one thin filament (two-filament model). Simulations comparing these models show that the multi-filament predictions of force, fractional cross-bridge binding, and cross-bridge turnover are more consistent with published experimental values. Furthermore, the values predicted by the multi-filament model are greater than those values predicted by the two-filament model. These increases are larger than the relative increase of potential inter-filament interactions in the multi-filament model versus the two-filament model. This amplification of coordinated cross-bridge binding and cycling indicates a mechanism of cooperativity that depends on sarcomere lattice geometry, specifically the ratio and arrangement of myofilaments.
Transcriptional Regulation of the rsbV Promoter Controlling Stress Responses to Ethanol, Carbon Limitation, and Phosphorous Limitation in Bacillus subtilis

The σ B-dependent promoter in front of the rsbV gene of Bacillus subtilis is induced ∼5-fold in response to (1) the addition of 4% ethanol, (2) carbon starvation, and (3) phosphorous starvation. Binding sites for the global carbon and nitrogen regulators, CcpA and TnrA, were mutated, and the consequences of their loss and that of CcpA or TnrA were studied using rsbV-lacZ fusions. These responses proved to be dependent on CcpA, TnrA, and their putative binding sites upstream of the promoter. Induction in response to glucose limitation was largely abolished by loss of CcpA or the upstream region, while induction in response to phosphorous limitation was largely abolished only by the upstream mutations. The results suggest that CcpA directly influences the carbon starvation response and that both proteins exert indirect effects on all three stress responses. The integrity of the DNA sequence is important for all three responses.
Penetration of telithromycin into the nasal mucosa and ethmoid bone of patients undergoing rhinosurgery for chronic sinusitis.

OBJECTIVES Telithromycin has a broad spectrum of activity against respiratory tract pathogens including penicillin- and macrolide-resistant streptococci. The aim of the study was to investigate the penetration of telithromycin into nasal tissue following a single oral dose of 800 mg. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 29 patients undergoing rhinosurgery for chronic sinusitis were evaluated. Samples of blood, nasal mucus, nasal mucosa and ethmoid bone were collected during surgery in groups of 5-6 patients after 3, 6, 9, 15 and 24 h following a single oral dose of 800 mg telithromycin. Drug concentrations were determined by HPLC with fluorimetric detection. RESULTS The highest telithromycin concentrations were observed after 3 h in plasma as well as in all tissues sampled. The mean plasma concentrations were 0.73 mg/L in the 3 h group and 0.02 mg/L in the 24 h group. The concomitant tissue concentrations were higher. The tissue penetration, expressed by the ratio of the area under the concentration-time curve in tissue versus plasma, was 1.0 for nasal mucus, 5.9 for nasal mucosa and 1.6 for ethmoid bone. CONCLUSIONS Telithromycin achieved tissue concentrations that were generally above the MIC(90) for common pathogens in upper respiratory tract infections. These results indicate that telithromycin diffuses rapidly into the nasal tissues and achieves high and prolonged concentrations in nasal mucosa and ethmoid bone.
Gender recognition from speech. Part II: Fine analysis.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential effectiveness of digital speech processing and pattern recognition techniques for the automatic recognition of gender from speech. In part I Coarse Analysis [K. Wu and D. G. Childers, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 1828-1840 (1991)] various feature vectors and distance measures were examined to determine their appropriateness for recognizing a speaker's gender from vowels, unvoiced fricatives, and voiced fricatives. One recognition scheme based on feature vectors extracted from vowels achieved 100% correct recognition of the speaker's gender using a database of 52 speakers (27 male and 25 female). In this paper a detailed, fine analysis of the characteristics of vowels is performed, including formant frequencies, bandwidths, and amplitudes, as well as speaker fundamental frequency of voicing. The fine analysis used a pitch synchronous closed-phase analysis technique. Detailed formant features, including frequencies, bandwidths, and amplitudes, were extracted by a closed-phase weighted recursive least-squares method that employed a variable forgetting factor, i.e., WRLS-VFF. The electroglottograph signal was used to locate the closed-phase portion of the speech signal. A two-way statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to test the differences between gender features. The relative importance of grouped vowel features was evaluated by a pattern recognition approach. Numerous interesting results were obtained, including the fact that the second formant frequency was a slightly better recognizer of gender than fundamental frequency, giving 98.1% versus 96.2% correct recognition, respectively. The statistical tests indicated that the spectra for female speakers had a steeper slope (or tilt) than that for males. The results suggest that redundant gender information was imbedded in the fundamental frequency and vocal tract resonance characteristics. The feature vectors for female voices were observed to have higher within-group variations than those for male voices. The data in this study were also used to replicate portions of the Peterson and Barney [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175-184 (1952)] study of vowels for male and female speakers.
Situated cognition, dynamic systems, and art: On artistic creativity and aesthetic experience

It is argued that the theory of situated cognition together with dynamic systems theory can explain the core of artistic practice and aesthetic experience, and furthermore paves the way for an account of how artist and audience can meet via the artist’s work. The production and consumption of art is an embodied practice, firmly based in perception and action, and supported by features of the local, agent-centered and global, socio-cultural contexts. Artistic creativity and aesthetic experience equally result from the dynamic interplay between agent and context, allowing for artist and viewer to relate to the artist’s work in similar ways.