Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of Crack Evaluation Models for Probabilistic Fracture Mechanics Analyses of Japanese Reactor Pressure Vessels

In Japan, a probabilistic fracture mechanics (PFM) analysis code PASCAL has been developed by Japan Atomic Energy Agency for structural integrity assessment of reactor pressure vessels (RPVs). The most recent release is PASCAL Version 4 (hereafter, PSACAL4) which can be used to evaluate the failure frequency of RPVs considering neutron irradiation embrittlement and pressurized thermal shock events. For the integrity assessment of RPVs, development of crack evaluation models is important. In this study, finite element analyses are performed firstly to verify the stress intensity factor calculations of cracks in PASCAL4. In addition, the applicability of the crack evaluation models in PASCAL4 such as the location of embedded cracks, crack shape and depth of surface cracks, and the increment of crack propagation is investigated. Based on sensitivity analyses of crack evaluation models for Japanese RPVs using PASCAL4, the effects of these evaluation models on failure frequency are clarified. From the analysis results, crack evaluation models recommended to the failure frequency evaluation for a Japanese model RPV are discussed.
Antisense suppression of donor splice site mutations in the dystrophin gene transcript

We describe two donor splice site mutations, affecting dystrophin exons 16 and 45 that led to Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), through catastrophic inactivation of the mRNA. These gene lesions unexpectedly resulted in the retention of the downstream introns, thereby increasing the length of the dystrophin mRNA by 20.2 and 36 kb, respectively. Splice‐switching antisense oligomers targeted to exon 16 excised this in‐frame exon and the following intron from the patient dystrophin transcript very efficiently in vitro, thereby restoring the reading frame and allowing synthesis of near‐normal levels of a putatively functional dystrophin isoform. In contrast, targeting splice‐switching oligomers to exon 45 in patient cells promoted only modest levels of an out‐of‐frame dystrophin transcript after transfection at high oligomer concentrations, whereas dual targeting of exons 44 and 45 or 45 and 46 resulted in more efficient exon skipping, with concomitant removal of intron 45. The splice site mutations reported here appear highly amenable to antisense oligomer intervention. We suggest that other splice site mutations may need to be evaluated for oligomer interventions on a case‐by‐case basis.
Treating Refractory Cardiogenic Shock With the TandemHeart and Impella Devices: A Single Center Experience

Background Patients with cardiogenic shock (CS) are routinely treated with intra-aortic balloon pumps (IABPs). The utility of 2 new percutaneous left ventricular assist devices (PLVADs), the Impella and TandemHeart, is unknown. The objective of this study was to describe the use of PLVADs for patients with CS at our institution. Methods All cases involving PLVADs in patients with CS between between January 1, 2008 and June 30, 2010 at a private, tertiary referral hospital were reviewed retrospectively. Results All 76 cases were identified (50 IABP only, 7 Impella, 19 TandemHeart). Most Impella (5/7) and TandemHeart (10/19) patients were initially treated with an IABP before "upgrading" for increased hemodynamic support. All 76 devices (100%) were initiated successfully. Percutaneous revascularization was attempted in 63 patients with angiographic success in 57 (90%). The incidences of major complications were similar between groups, except bleeding occurred less frequently with the IABP. Mean ejection fraction on presentation was 30.4±16.5% and increased by a mean of 6.6±11.4% (P < 0.001). With the institutional approach of treating patients with CS initially with vasopressors and IABPs, then upgrading to an Impella or TandemHeart device for patients refractory to IABP therapy, the overall mortality rate was 40%. Conclusion The Impella and TandemHeart devices can be initiated successfully in patients with CS, are associated with high rates of angiographic success during high risk percutaneous interventions and may benefit the myocardium during myocardial infarction. Randomized trials are warranted investigating use of the Impella and TandemHeart devices in patients with CS and in patients refractory to conventional IABP therapy.
Evaluation of solid‐phase enzyme‐lmmunoassay procedure in immunity surveys and diagnosis of rubella

In the development of optimized micro‐ and macromethods for solid‐phase rubella enzyme‐immunoassay (EIA), the effect of various technical parameters was studied. Special emphasis was placed on elimination of defective polystyrene material, purity and quantity of immobilized antigen, use of reference sera in each microplate or macroprocedure, use of nonionic detergent in washing and diluent buffers, and use of a colourless enzyme substrate. A single serum dilution, analysed in duplicate, was sufficient provided the procedure was standardized. In quantitation of serum rubella antibodies, EIA gave values correlating well with those obtained with the single radial haemolysis test but not with low haemagglutination inhibition titres. The EIA procedure proved to be a useful and reliable serological tool in immunity surveys. When complemented by a rubella IgM test, EIA could also be used in diagnosis of recent rubella infections as a convenient primary serological test.
Empirical comparisons of several derivative free optimization algorithms

In this paper, the performances of the quasi-Newton BFGS algorithm, the NEWUOA derivative free optimization algorithm, the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm and a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm are compared experimentally on benchmark functions reflecting important challenges encountered in real-world optimization problems. Dependence of the performances in the conditioning of the problem and rotational invariance of the algorithms are in particular investigated.
An Incentive Mechanism under Fairness Preference

Some empirical studies from the fields of behavioral economics and psychology game theory have indicated that the people concern about fairness in monetary distribution rather than only pursue private profits. Through using fair psychological regularity to weaken rationality assumption of traditional economics, this paper builds a new principal-agent model based on fairness preference theory. And then the model parameters are concretized to study incentive contracts and incentive efficiency of players under fairness preference of agents. As a result, the concern about fairness has considerable influences on the structure and efficiency of incentive contracts, and it also can impact positively on optimal effort level of agents. And the reciprocal contract based on new model is a Pareto improvement for traditional ones.
Nest Bacterial Environment Affects Microbiome of Hoopoe Eggshells, but Not That of the Uropygial Secretion

The study of associations between symbiotic bacterial communities of hosts and those of surrounding environments would help to understand how bacterial assemblages are acquired, and how they are transmitted from one to another location (i.e. symbiotic bacteria acquisition by hosts). Hoopoes (Upupa epops) smear their eggshells with uropygial secretion (oily secretion produced in their uropygial gland) that harbors antibiotic producing bacteria. Trying to elucidate a possible role of nest material and cloaca microbiota in determining the bacterial community of the uropygial gland and the eggshells of hoopoes, we characterized bacterial communities of nest material, cloaca, uropygial gland and eggshells by the ARISA fingerprinting. Further, by adding material with scarce bacteria and antimicrobial properties, we manipulated the bacterial community of nest material and thus tested experimentally its effects on the microbiomes of the uropygial secretion and of the eggshells. The experiment did not influence the microbiome of the uropygial secretion of females, but affected the community established on eggshells. This is the first experimental evidence indicating that nest material influences the bacterial community of the eggshells and, therefore, probability of embryo infection. Some of the bacterial strains detected in the secretion were also in the bacterial communities of the nest material and of cloaca, but their occurrence within nests was not associated, which suggests that bacterial environments of nest material and cloaca are not sources of symbiotic bacteria for the gland. These results do not support a role of nest environments of hoopoes as reservoirs of symbiotic bacteria. We discuss possible scenarios explaining bacterial acquisition by hoopoes that should be further explored.
Natural scene statistics mediate the perception of image complexity

Humans are sensitive to complexity and regularity in patterns (Falk & Konold, 1997; Yamada, Kawabe, & Miyazaki, 2013). The subjective perception of pattern complexity is correlated to algorithmic (or Kolmogorov-Chaitin) complexity as defined in computer science (Li & Vitányi, 2008), but also to the frequency of naturally occurring patterns (Hsu, Griffiths, & Schreiber, 2010). However, the possible mediational role of natural frequencies in the perception of algorithmic complexity remains unclear. Here we reanalyze Hsu et al. (2010) through a mediational analysis, and complement their results in a new experiment. We conclude that human perception of complexity seems partly shaped by natural scenes statistics, thereby establishing a link between the perception of complexity and the effect of natural scene statistics.
Stress effects in structure formation

Residual velocity dispersion in cold dark matter induces stresses which lead to effects that are absent in the idealized dust model. A previous Newtonian analysis showed how this approach can provide a theoretical foundation for the phenomenological adhesion model. We develop a relativistic kinetic theory generalization which also incorporates the anisotropic velocity dispersion that will typically be present. In addition to density perturbations, we consider the rotational and shape distortion properties of clustering. These quantities together characterize the linear development of density inhomogeneity, and we find exact solutions for their evolution. As expected, the corrections are small and arise only in the decaying modes, but their effect is interesting. One of the modes for density perturbations decays less rapidly than the standard decaying mode. The new rotational mode generates precession of the axis of rotation. The new shape modes produce additional distortion that remains frozen in during the subsequent (linear) evolution, despite the rapid decay of the terms that caused it.
The Deficit of Pain Inhibition in Fibromyalgia Is More Pronounced in Patients With Comorbid Depressive Symptoms

BackgroundOn pathophysiologic grounds, fibromyalgia (FM) is characterized by a deficit in diffuse noxious inhibitory controls (DNIC), but the role of depressive symptoms on these mechanisms has not been investigated. We hypothesized that the deficit in pain inhibition would be more pronounced in FM patients with depressive symptoms (FM+D), relative to patients without such symptoms (FM−D). MethodsFifty-two women diagnosed with FM (American College of Rheumatology criteria) and 10 healthy women participated in this study. Thermal stimuli were used to measure pain thresholds and DNIC efficacy (spatial summation paradigm). Clinical pain was measured using visual analog scales. ResultsWe found that the amplitude of DNIC was smaller in FM+D patients, relative to the FM−D group; and that daily pain (unpleasantness) was higher in the FM+D group, relative to FM−D patients. DiscussionWe found that FM+D patients have a more pronounced deficit in pain inhibition as well increased clinical pain. As such, these results show the usefulness of combining psychologic factors and psychophysical measures to identify subgroups of FM patients. These results may have implications for future treatment of FM patients with and without comorbid depressive symptoms.
Recurrent versus Recursive Approaches Towards Compositionality in Semantic Vector

Semantic vector spaces have long been useful for representing word tokens; however, they cannot express the meaning of longer phrases without some notion of compositionality. Recursive neural models explicitly encode syntactic properties that combine word representations into phrases; whereas recurrent neural models attain compositionality by processing word representations sequentially. A natural question that arises is whether recursive models are strictly necessary for attaining meaningful compositionality or are recurrent models sufficient? In this paper, we demonstrate that for the task of fine-grained sentiment analysis, recurrent models augmented with neural attention can outperform a recursive model. Specifically, we introduce a new type of recurrent attention mechanism that allows us to achieve 47.4% accuracy for the rootlevel sentiment analysis task on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank, which outperforms the Recursive Neural Tensor Network’s (RNTN) previous 45.7% accuracy on the same dataset.
Towards Self-explaining Intelligent Environments

Intelligent environments and assistants increasingly pervade and shape all areas of our daily life. They are characterised by dynamically varying numbers of coexisting, ideally cooperating but at least coordinated assistants and devices and users. This makes it difficult not only for technically inexperienced individual users to understand what is happening around them. It also does not help to know that the overall behaviour is correct in any sense whatsoever. From Human-Computer- Interaction research it is well known that systems providing explanations of their decision can improve the user’s trust in the systems. Illustrated by examples from our research on developing smart assistance in intelligent environments we motivate the need for self-explainability capabilities of intelligent environments. We shed a light on different aspects of self-explainability, motivate the need for explanations for the target user groups and provide criteria that are relevant to address for the design of self-explaining intelligent environments.
Chronic rhinosinusitis and occupational risk factors among 20- to 75-year-old Danes-A GA(2) LEN-based study.

BACKGROUND Very little is known about occupational risk factors for chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS). The aim of this study was to evaluate occupational and other potential risk factors for CRS in a Danish population. METHODS A cross sectional survey study among 4,554 Danes aged 20-75 years evaluated self-reported symptoms of CRS, asthma, and nasal allergy, along with information on smoking habits and occupation. RESULTS A total of 3,099 returned completed questionnaires (response rate 68.1%). The overall CRS prevalence was 7.8% with no significant differences related to age or gender. Risk ratio estimates revealed an increased risk of CRS among female blue collar workers compared to female white collar workers. Among men the effect of occupation depended on smoking status. Occupational exposure to gasses, fumes, dust, or smoke increased the overall risk of CRS. CRS was reported approximately four times as often in subjects with asthma and in subjects with nasal allergy. Current smoking doubled the CRS prevalence. CONCLUSIONS CRS prevalence was affected by occupation (blue vs. white collar), but the observed effect depended on gender and smoking status. Exposure to airway irritants (occupational or smoking) increased the CRS prevalence. Studies on larger cohorts are needed to fully assess these tendencies, for example, by more extensive use of Job Exposure Matrix models.
Yttrium Doping Effect on Varistor Properties of Zinc-Vanadium-Based Ceramics

The influence of yttrium doping on varistor properties of zinc-vanadium-based ceramics was comprehensively investigated. The average grain size varied slightly between 5.2 and 5.5 µm as the yttrium content increased; and similarly, the sintered density varied slightly between 5.47 and 5.51 g/cm 3 . The threshold field exhibited a maximum value (5387 V/cm) when the yttrium content was 0.1 mol%. The highest nonlinear exponent (67) was obtained when the yttrium content was 0.05 mol%. The donor concentration increased in the range of (2.46–5.56) × 10 17 cm −3 as the yttrium content increased, and the maximum barrier height was obtained (1.24 eV) when the yttrium content reached 0.05 mol%.
Assessing the Temporal Stability of the Accuracy of a Time Series of Burned Area Products

Abstract: Temporal stability, defined as the change of accuracy through time, is one of the validation aspects required by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites’ Land Product Validation Subgroup. Temporal stability was evaluated for three burned area products: MCD64, Globcarbon, and fire_cci. Traditional accuracy measures, such as overall accuracy and omission and commission error ratios, were computed from reference data for seven years (2001–2007) in seven study sites, located in Angola, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Portugal, and South Africa. These accuracy measures served as the basis for the evaluation of temporal stability of each product. Nonparametric tests were constructed to assess different departures from temporal stability, specifically a monotonic trend in accuracy over time (Wilcoxon test for trend), and differences in median accuracy among years (Friedman test). When applied to the three burned area products, these tests did not detect a statistically significant temporal trend or significant differences among years, thus, based on the small sample size of seven sites, there was insufficient evidence to claim these products had temporal instability. Pairwise Wilcoxon tests comparing yearly accuracies provided a measure of the proportion of year-pairs with significant differences and these proportions of significant pairwise differences were in turn used to compare temporal stability between BA products. The proportion of year-pairs with different accuracy (at the 0.05 significance level) ranged from 0% (MCD64) to 14% (fire_cci),
Andrographolide: A New Plant-Derived Antineoplastic Entity on Horizon

Plant-derived natural products occupy an important position in the area of cancer chemotherapy. Molecules such as vincristine, vinblastine, paclitaxel, camptothecin derivatives, epipodophyllotoxin, and so forth, are invaluable contributions of nature to modern medicine. However, the quest to find out novel therapeutic compounds for cancer treatment and management is a never-ending venture; and diverse plant species are persistently being studied for identification of prospective anticancer agents. In this regard, Andrographis paniculata Nees, a well-known plant of Indian and Chinese traditional system of medicines, has drawn attention of researchers in recent times. Andrographolide, the principal bioactive chemical constituent of the plant has shown credible anticancer potential in various investigations around the globe. In vitro studies demonstrate the capability of the compound of inducing cell-cycle arrest and apoptosis in a variety of cancer cells at different concentrations. Andrographolide also shows potent immunomodulatory and anti-angiogenic activities in tumorous tissues. Synthetic analogues of the compound have also been created and analyzed, which have also shown similar activities. Although it is too early to predict its future in cancer chemotherapy, the prologue strongly recommends further research on this molecule to assess its potential as a prospective anticancer agent.
Recommodification, Unemployment, and Health Inequalities

Recommodification, the withdrawal of social welfare, has been going on for some decades in both Sweden and England. Recommodification disproportionately affects the unemployed because of their weak market position. We investigated the impact recommodification has had on health inequalities between the employed and unemployed in Sweden and England. Using national surveys, odds ratios for the likelihood of reporting less than good health between the employed and unemployed were computed annually between 1991 and 2011. The correlation between these odds ratios and net replacement rates was then examined. Health inequalities between the employed and unemployed were greater in 2011 than in 1991 in both countries. Sweden began with smaller health inequalities, but by 2011, they were in line with those in England. Sweden experienced more recommodification than England during this period, although it started from a much less commodified position. Correspondingly, correlation between unemployment benefit generosity and health inequalities was stronger in Sweden than in England. Recommodification is linked to ill health among the unemployed and to the health gap between the employed and unemployed. We propose that further recommodification will be associated with increased health inequalities between the employed and unemployed.
What Makes the Wood? Exploring the Molecular Mechanisms of Xylem Acclimation in Hardwoods to an Ever-Changing Environment

Wood, also designated as secondary xylem, is the major structure that gives trees and other woody plants stability for upright growth and maintains the water supply from the roots to all other plant tissues. Over recent decades, our understanding of the cellular processes of wood formation (xylogenesis) has substantially increased. Plants as sessile organisms face a multitude of abiotic stresses, e.g., heat, drought, salinity and limiting nutrient availability that require them to adjust their wood structure to maintain stability and water conductivity. Because of global climate change, more drastic and sudden changes in temperature and longer periods without precipitation are expected to impact tree productivity in the near future. Thus, it is essential to understand the process of wood formation in trees under stress. Many traits, such as vessel frequency and size, fiber thickness and density change in response to different environmental stimuli. Here, we provide an overview of our current understanding of how abiotic stress factors affect wood formation on the molecular level focussing on the genes that have been identified in these processes.
Disulfide locking a sodium channel voltage sensor reveals ion pair formation during activation

The S4 transmembrane segments of voltage-gated ion channels move outward on depolarization, initiating a conformational change that opens the pore, but the mechanism of S4 movement is unresolved. One structural model predicts sequential formation of ion pairs between the S4 gating charges and negative charges in neighboring S2 and S3 transmembrane segments during gating. Here, we show that paired cysteine substitutions for the third gating charge (R3) in S4 and D60 in S2 of the bacterial sodium channel NaChBac form a disulfide bond during activation, thus “locking” the S4 segment and inducing slow inactivation of the channel. Disulfide locking closely followed the kinetics and voltage dependence of activation and was reversed by hyperpolarization. Activation of D60C:R3C channels is favored compared with single cysteine mutants, and mutant cycle analysis revealed strong free-energy coupling between these residues, further supporting interaction of R3 and D60 during gating. Our results demonstrate voltage-dependent formation of an ion pair during activation of the voltage sensor in real time and suggest that this interaction catalyzes S4 movement and channel activation.