Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ketamine Decreases Cerebral Infarct Volume and Improves Neurological Outcome Following Experimental Head Trauma in Rats

Summary In brain injury, concentrations of extracellular excitatory amino acids are increased and stimulate glutamate receptors in general and the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-preferring subtype in particular. That stimulation causes substantial calcium influx, which appears to initiate a cascade of events leading to neuronal death. Blockage of NMDA receptors with specific antagonists or noncompetitive ion channel blockers provides protection against excitatory amino acid-induced neurotoxicity. We previously reported that the NMDA receptor antagonist dizocilpine maleate improved the neurological severity score (NSS) after head trauma in rats. The present study was designed to determine whether ketamine, a NMDA receptor antagonist like dizocilpine maleate, improves neurological outcome following head trauma in rats. Thirty-two male Sprague-Dawley rats (235-250 g) were divided into four groups. Groups A and B were surgically prepared only. Groups C and D were surgically prepared and then a nonpenetrating impact was delivered to the cranium over the left hemisphere. Groups A and C received no treatment. Groups B and D were treated with ketamine, 180 mg/kg i.p., 1 h after head trauma. The NSS was determined at 1, 2, 4, 10, 24, and 48 h following head trauma. After killing at 48 h, cortical slices were taken adjacent to the lesion on the traumatized hemisphere and from comparable sites on the nontraumatized hemisphere to measure the tissue specific gravity and water content. Brains were then placed in 4% formaldehyde and the volume of hemorrhagic necrosis measured 4 days later. Head trauma increased the NSS and, in the traumatized hemisphere, decreased the specific gravity, increased the water content, and caused cerebral infarction. With ketamine, the NSS at 24 and 48 h following head trauma was 7.4 ± 2.6 and 6.7 ± 2.6 (mean ± SEM), respectively, significantly improved compared to the NSS in the untreated group of 12.6 ± 2.6 and 11.3 ± 2.6, respectively (p <0.02, Mann-Whitney U test). With ketamine, the volume of hemorrhagic necrosis was 88.0 ± 23.1 mm3, significantly less than that in the untreated group (147.4 ± 22.4 mm3; p <0.05, unpaired t test). The brain tissue specific gravity and water content at 48 h and the rectal temperature at 4 and 48 h after head trauma were not significantly different between treated and untreated groups. It is concluded that in this model of closed cranial impact, ketamine improves neurological outcome and decreases the volume of hemorrhagic necrosis without altering brain edema.
Peripheral Vasoconstriction and Abnormal Parasympathetic Response to Sighs and Transient Hypoxia in Sickle Cell Disease at a Glance Commentary

Rationale: Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood disorder characterized by vasoocclusive crises. Although hypoxia and pulmonary disease are known risk factors for these crises, the mechanisms that initiate vasoocclusive events are not well known. Objectives: To study the relationship between transient hypoxia, respiration , and microvascular blood flow in patients with sickle cell. Methods: We established a protocol that mimics nighttime hypoxic episodes and measured microvascular blood flow to determine if transient hypoxia causes a decrease in microvascular blood flow. Significant desaturations were induced safely by five breaths of 100% nitrogen. Measurements and Main Results: Desaturation did not induce change in microvascular perfusion; however, it induced substantial transient parasympathetic activity withdrawal in patients with sickle cell disease , but not controls subjects. Marked periodic drops in peripheral microvascular perfusion, unrelated to hypoxia, were triggered by sighs in 11 of 11 patients with sickle cell and 8 of 11 control subjects. Although the sigh frequency was the same in both groups, the probability of a sigh inducing a perfusion drop was 78% in patients with sickle cell and 17% in control subjects (P , 0.001). Evidence for sigh-induced sympathetic nervous system dominance was seen in patients with sickle cell (P , 0.05), but was not significant in control subjects. Conclusions: These data demonstrate significant disruption of auto-nomic nervous system balance, with marked parasympathetic withdrawal in response to transient hypoxia. They draw attention to an enhanced autonomic nervous system–mediated sigh–vasoconstrictor response in patients with sickle cell that could increase red cell retention in the microvasculature, promoting vasoocclusion. Sickle cell disease (SCD) is an inherited blood disorder that results from an amino acid substitution in the b globin chain of hemoglobin, producing sickle hemoglobin (HbS) (1, 2). HbS polymerizes when it releases oxygen to tissues, causing the normally flexible red blood cells to become rigid and to obstruct blood flow (3). The subsequent ischemia results in chronic organ damage and ultimately premature death (3–5). Although SCD is caused by a single amino acid substitution, significant variability in the frequency of overt sickling episodes has been reported among subjects with the same genotype, suggesting that other factors cause the transition from steady-state sickling to full vaso-occlusive crisis (VOC). The specific factors that affect this transition are incompletely understood. Flexible, oxygenated, HbS-containing red blood cells (SRBC) traverse capillaries and release their oxygen. After HbS releases its oxygen, it polymerizes after a short delay and …
Evaluation of local structure alphabets based on residue burial

Residue burial, which describes a protein residue's exposure to solvent and neighboring atoms, is key to protein structure prediction, modeling, and analysis. We assessed 21 alphabets representing residue burial, according to their predictability from amino acid sequence, conservation in structural alignments, and utility in one fold‐recognition scenario. This follows upon our previous work in assessing nine representations of backbone geometry. 1 The alphabet found to be most effective overall has seven states and is based on a count of Cβ atoms within a 14 Å‐radius sphere centered at the Cβ of a residue of interest. When incorporated into a hidden Markov model (HMM), this alphabet gave us a 38% performance boost in fold recognition and 23% in alignment quality. Proteins 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Interpersonal Disgust, Ideological Orientations, and Dehumanization as Predictors of Intergroup Attitudes

Disgust is a basic emotion characterized by revulsion and rejection, yet it is relatively unexamined in the literature on prejudice. In the present investigation, interpersonal-disgust sensitivity (e.g., not wanting to wear clean used clothes or to sit on a warm seat vacated by a stranger) in particular predicted negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups, even after controlling for concerns with contracting disease. The mechanisms underlying the link between interpersonal disgust and attitudes toward immigrants were explored using a path model. As predicted, the effect of interpersonal-disgust sensitivity on group attitudes was indirect, mediated by ideological orientations (social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism) and dehumanizing perceptions of the out-group. The effects of social dominance orientation on group attitudes were both direct and indirect, via dehumanization. These results establish a link between disgust sensitivity and prejudice that is not accounted for by fear of infection, but rather is mediated by ideological orientations and dehumanizing group representations. Implications for understanding and reducing prejudice are discussed.
Historical Sulfur Dioxide Emissions 1850-2000: Methods and Results

A global, self-consistent estimate of sulfur dioxide emissions over the last one and a half century were estimated by using a combination of bottom-up and best available inventory methods including all anthropogenic sources. We find that global sulfur dioxide emissions peaked about 1980 and have generally declined since this time. Emissions were extrapolated to a 1{sup o} x 1{sup o} grid for the time period 1850-2000 at annual resolution with two emission height levels and by season. Emissions are somewhat higher in the recent past in this new work as compared with some comprehensive estimates. This difference is largely due to our use of emissions factors that vary with time to account for sulfur removals from fossil fuels and industrial smelting processes.
Exploring potential human activities in physical and virtual spaces: a spatio‐temporal GIS approach

Today, the opportunity for potential human activity has gone beyond physical space to virtual space. Based on a proposed conceptual framework that models the relationships between physical and virtual spaces, this paper presents an attempt to adjust the space–time prism concept of Hägerstrand's time geography to identify potential activity opportunities in virtual space, focusing on the virtual space access channels available in physical space. A three‐dimensional (3D) spatio‐temporal Geographic Information System (GIS) design has been developed in this research to accommodate the adjusted space–time prism concept to support the representation, visualization, and analysis of potential human activities and interactions in physical and virtual spaces using the prism representation. Following the design, a prototype system has been successfully implemented in a 3D GIS environment. Such a system can provide powerful analytical tools for studies related to potential human activities and applications such as location‐based services (LBS) and accessibility analysis in the information age.
Event Detection and User Interest Discovering in Social Media Data Streams

Social media plays an increasingly important role in people’s life. Microblogging is a form of social media which allows people to share and disseminate real-life events. Broadcasting events in microblogging networks can be an effective method of creating awareness, divulging important information, and so on. However, many existing approaches at dissecting the information content primarily discuss the event detection model and ignore the user interest which can be discovered during event evolution. This leads to difficulty in tracking the most important events as they evolve including identifying the influential spreaders. There is further complication given that the influential spreaders interests will also change during event evolution. The influential spreaders play a key role in event evolution and this has been largely ignored in traditional event detection methods. To this end, we propose a user-interest model-based event evolution model, named the hot event evolution model. This model not only considers the user interest distribution but also uses the short text data in the social network to model the posts and the recommend methods to discover the user interests. This can resolve the problem of data sparsity, as exemplified by many existing event detection methods, and improve the accuracy of event detection. A hot event automatic filtering algorithm is initially applied to remove the influence of general events, improving the quality and efficiency of mining the event. Then, an automatic topic clustering algorithm is applied to arrange the short texts into clusters with similar topics. An improved user-interest model is proposed to combine the short texts of each cluster into a long text document simplifying the determination of the overall topic in relation to the interest distribution of each user during the evolution of important events. Finally, a novel cosine measure-based event similarity detection method is used to assess correlation between events, thereby detecting the process of event evolution. The experimental results on a real Twitter data set demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our proposed model for both event detection and user interest discovery during the evolution of hot events.
Submodular Point Processes with Applications to Machine learning

We introduce a class of discrete point processes that we call the Submodular Point Processes (SPPs). These processes are characterized via a submodular (or supermodular) function, and naturally model notions of information, coverage and diversity, as well as cooperation. Unlike Log-submodular and Log-supermodular distributions (Log-SPPs) such as determinantal point processes (DPPs), SPPs are themselves submodular (or supermodular). In this paper, we analyze the computational complexity of probabilistic inference in SPPs. We show that computing the partition function for SPPs (and Log-SPPs), requires exponential complexity in the worst case, and also provide algorithms which approximate SPPs up to polynomial factors. Moreover, for several subclasses of interesting submodular functions that occur in applications, we show how we can provide ecient closed form expressions for the partition functions, and thereby marginals and conditional distributions. We also show how SPPs are closed under mixtures, thus enabling maximum likelihood based strategies for learning mixtures of submodular functions. Finally, we argue how SPPs complement existing LogSPP distributions, and are a natural model for several applications.
Random Fourier Features For Operator-Valued Kernels

Devoted to multi-task learning and structured output learning, operator-valued kernels provide a flexible tool to build vector-valued functions in the context of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces. To scale up these methods, we extend the celebrated Random Fourier Feature methodology to get an approximation of operator-valued kernels. We propose a general principle for Operator-valued Random Fourier Feature construction relying on a generalization of Bochner's theorem for translation-invariant operator-valued Mercer kernels. We prove the uniform convergence of the kernel approximation for bounded and unbounded operator random Fourier features using appropriate Bernstein matrix concentration inequality. An experimental proof-of-concept shows the quality of the approximation and the efficiency of the corresponding linear models on example datasets.
Observation and analysis of atmospheric radon in Qingdao, China

To investigate the levels and behaviours of the atmospheric radon concentration in Qingdao, a continuous measurement was carried out and recorded hourly over a three-year period from September 2006 to August 2009. Levels and variations were studied on the basis of 16 817 data points, and the trends of diurnal and seasonal variations were also analysed. The average concentration of atmospheric radon over the three years was 5.00 ± 3.01 Bq m−3. The average diurnal pattern of radon concentration showed that the daily maximum appears in the early morning, and the daily minimum in the late afternoon, which is driven by the atmospheric stability. The annual pattern features a maximum around December and a minimum around June, which correlates with the origin of air mass brought by the monsoon.
Stabilizing Vehicle Lateral Dynamics With Considerations of Parameter Uncertainties and Control Saturation Through Robust Yaw Control

This paper presents a robust yaw-moment controller design for improving vehicle handling and stability with considerations of parameter uncertainties and control saturation. The parameter uncertainties dealt with are the changes of vehicle mass and moment of inertia about the yaw axis and the variations of cornering stiffnesses. The control saturation considered is due to the physical limitations of actuators and tires. Both polytopic and norm-bounded approaches are used to describe parameter uncertainties, and a norm-bounded approach is applied to handle the saturation nonlinearity. The conditions for designing such a controller are derived as linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). A nonlinear vehicle model is utilized to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The simulation results show that the designed controller can improve vehicle handling and stability, regardless of the changes in vehicle mass and moment of inertia and the variations of road surfaces and saturation limitations.
Epidemiology and Molecular Relationships of Cryptosporidium spp. in People, Primates, and Livestock from Western Uganda

Background Cryptosporidium is one of the most common parasitic diarrheal agents in the world and is a known zoonosis. We studied Cryptosporidium in people, livestock, and non-human primates in the region of Kibale National Park, Uganda. Land use change near the park has resulted in fragmented forest patches containing small, remnant populations of wild primates that interact intensively with local people and livestock. Our goal was to investigate risk factors for Cryptosporidium infection and to assess cross-species transmission using molecular methods. Methodology/Principal Findings Diagnostic PCR revealed a prevalence of Cryptosporidium of 32.4% in humans, 11.1% in non-human primates, and 2.2% in livestock. In the case of humans, residence in one particular community was associated with increased risk of infection, as was fetching water from an open water source. Although 48.5% of infected people reported gastrointestinal symptoms, this frequency was not significantly different in people who tested negative (44.7%) for Cryptosporidium, nor was co-infection with Giardia duodenalis associated with increased reporting of gastrointestinal symptoms. Fecal consistency was no different in infected versus uninfected people or animals. DNA sequences of the Cryptosporidium oocyst wall protein gene placed all infections within a well-supported C. parvum/C. hominis clade. However, the only two sequences recovered from primates in the core of the park's protected area fell into a divergent sub-clade and were identical to published sequences from C. parvum, C. hominis, and C. cuniculus, suggesting the possibility of a separate sylvatic transmission cycle. Conclusions/Significance Cryptosporidium may be transmitted frequently among species in western Uganda where people, livestock, and wildlife interact intensively as a result of anthropogenic changes to forests, but the parasite may undergo more host-specific transmission where such interactions do not occur. The parasite does not appear to have strong effects on human or animal health, perhaps because of persistent low-level shedding and immunity.
Decentralization Policies and Practices Under Structural Adjustment and Democratization in Africa

This paper approaches decentralization as a complex, relative, multidimensional process by highlighting the motivations and dilemmas of recent decentralization policies; providing an overview of African decentralization policies and practices since 1945 (with special focus on structural adjustment and liberalization); evaluating decentralization policies during the 80's and 90's; and proposing a framework for analysing decentralization policies and programmes in developing countries.
Diffusiophoresis of gold in silica driven by the nanometric interfacial layer

This paper describes a model to describe diffusiophoresis of a gold nanoparticle inside a solid silica substrate. The motion of the particle is powered by the flow of a liquid-silica interfacial layer due to a gradient of gold concentration inside this layer. This mechanism can help explain the experiments of de Vreede et al. [1] in which the authors observed that gold nanoparticles become engulfed into the solid silica substrate at high temperature. Indeed our model describes precisely their experimental measurement.
Environmental factors in the aetiology of lung cancer and bronchitis.

Inan earlier communication(Ashley, 1967) I examined data on themortality experience forthe countyboroughs andadministrative counties of England andWalesandshowed that thefrequency oflungcancerwas lower thanwouldbeexpected inareaswhere thedusty coal andtextile industries wereprominent, andthat inthose areasthedeath rate frombronchitis washigher than might havebeen expected. Preliminary analyses in thatpaper suggested that population density, social class, and airpollution werenotresponsible forthis difference andthat thelowfrequency oflung cancerwas due tosomeother independent cause. Thepresentinvestigation comprises a more detailed analysis bythetechnique ofmultiple regression (Seal, 1964) ofthedataavailable for53 countyboroughs ofEngland andWales.The standardized mortality ratios forlungcancerin men andwomen andforbronchitis inmen were determined as inthepreviouspaper(Ashley, 1967) fortheyears1958to1963using thedeath ratedataandpopulation distribution given by theRegistrar General inhisreports (1960a, 1960b, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965;General Register Office, 1964), making a separate calculation according to whether thecountyborough formedpartofa conurbation or was greater orsmaller insize than 100,000 people. Thepopulation density was given as personsperacrebytheGeneral Register Office (1964). Thesocial classindex was thatused previously inan examination ofthedistribution of perinatal mortality rates (Ashley, 1968a) andcom
Stereoscopic displays in medical domains: a review of perception and performance effects

In this paper we review empirical studies that investigate performance effects of stereoscopic displays for medical applications. We focus on four distinct application areas: diagnosis, pre-operative planning, minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and training/teaching. For diagnosis, stereoscopic displays can augment the understanding of complex spatial structures and increase the detection of abnormalities. Stereoscopic viewing of medical data has proven to increase the detection rate in breast imaging. A stereoscopic presentation of noisy and transparent images in 3D ultrasound results in better visualization of the internal structures, however more empirical studies are needed to confirm the clinical relevance. For MRI and CT, where images are frequently rendered in 3D perspective, the added value of binocular depth has not yet been convincingly demonstrated. For MIS, stereoscopic displays can decrease surgery time and increase accuracy of surgical procedures. Performance of surgical procedures is similar when high resolution 2D displays are compared with lower resolution stereoscopic displays, indicating an image quality improvement for stereoscopic displays. Training and surgical planning already use computer simulations in 2D, however more research is needed to the benefit of stereoscopic displays in those applications. Overall there is a clear need for more empirical evidence that quantifies the added value of stereoscopic displays in medical domains, such that the medical community will have ample basis to invest in stereoscopic displays in all or some of the described medical applications.