Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Future Cardiovascular Disease in China: Markov Model and Risk Factor Scenario Projections From the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model–China

Background—The relative effects of individual and combined risk factor trends on future cardiovascular disease in China have not been quantified in detail. Methods and Results—Future risk factor trends in China were projected based on prior trends. Cardiovascular disease (coronary heart disease and stroke) in adults ages 35 to 84 years was projected from 2010 to 2030 using the Coronary Heart Disease Policy Model–China, a Markov computer simulation model. With risk factor levels held constant, projected annual cardiovascular events increased by >50% between 2010 and 2030 based on population aging and growth alone. Projected trends in blood pressure, total cholesterol, diabetes (increases), and active smoking (decline) would increase annual cardiovascular disease events by an additional 23%, an increase of approximately 21.3 million cardiovascular events and 7.7 million cardiovascular deaths over 2010 to 2030. Aggressively reducing active smoking in Chinese men to 20% prevalence in 2020 and 10% prevalence in 2030 or reducing mean systolic blood pressure by 3.8 mm Hg in men and women would counteract adverse trends in other risk factors by preventing cardiovascular events and 2.9 to 5.7 million total deaths over 2 decades. Conclusions—Aging and population growth will increase cardiovascular disease by more than a half over the coming 20 years, and projected unfavorable trends in blood pressure, total cholesterol, diabetes, and body mass index may accelerate the epidemic. National policy aimed at controlling blood pressure, smoking, and other risk factors would counteract the expected future cardiovascular disease epidemic in China.
The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in a University Learning Environment

This article reports three related studies which investigate how undergraduates use and think about information and communication technologies (ICT) in the context of learning at university. Data were obtained via questionnaires, computer diary records and focus group discussions. The studies were intended to help universities decide how to incorporate ICT into student learning, how the cost of equipment should be shared between students and institutions, and how university provision should be organised to best fit student needs, attitudes and perceptions. Presentation of the results from the studies is followed by a discussion, which attempts to draw out the practical implications of the evaluation evidence for university policy-makers.
Burnout in university teaching staff: a systematic literature review

Background: Teacher stress potentially impairs personal and professional competence and compromises productivity. Aversive emotional experience has been most comprehensively encapsulated by the phenomenon of burnout, which is particularly prominent for staff in human service sectors. Burnout reactions have been characterised as tripartite: the depletion of emotional reserves (emotional exhaustion), an increasingly cynical and negative approach towards others (depersonalisation) and a growing feeling of work-related dissatisfaction (personal accomplishment). Purpose: Few studies have investigated the emotional consequences of teachers' stress and even fewer have specifically focused on university educators. A systematic literature review was thus conducted to evaluate the extent of burnout for university teaching staff and specifically to reveal predictive variables, which may explain this experience in this understudied occupational group. Design and methods: Six databases including Educational Resources Information Centre (ERIC), PsychINFO and Scopus were searched using the terms burnout, university, academics, teaching staff, lecturers, research staff and faculty. Papers were limited to English language peer-reviewed empirical investigations ofburnout in full-time university teaching staff. Papers not adopting a clear operationalisation of burnout were rejected. Twelve papers met the criteria and were included in the review. A detailed data extraction form was used to reveal relevant information from each paper. Conclusions: The review revealed that staff exposure to high numbers of students, especially tuition of postgraduates, strongly predicts the experience of burnout. Other predictive variables included gender, with higher depersonalisation scores found in male teachers and female teachers typically scoring higher onthe emotional exhaustion dimension. Age also demonstrated an association, with younger staff appearing more vulnerable to emotional exhaustion. Burnout in university teachers was comparable with other service sector employees such asschoolteachers and healthcare professionals. The current review reveals a scarcity of comparative studies across different university contexts, therefore multi-site studies are required in order to control for the potential influence ofmoderating variables such as institution age when measuring burnout in university teachers.
The Digital Divide, Political Participation, and Place

This article focuses on the persistence of the digital divide and its impact on political participation, and in particular, on the role that geographic location plays in unequal access. The authors findings, based on survey data from the 2007 Pew Internet and American Life project, indicate that physical location continues to play a key role in levels of access to broadband technology and that increased home Internet use is associated with a significantly higher probability of contacting government officials in various ways.
Evidence from phylogenetic and genome fingerprinting analyses suggests rapidly changing variation in Halorubrum and Haloarcula populations

Halobacteria require high NaCl concentrations for growth and are the dominant inhabitants of hypersaline environments above 15% NaCl. They are well-documented to be highly recombinogenic, both in frequency and in the range of exchange partners. In this study, we examine the genetic and genomic variation of cultured, naturally co-occurring environmental populations of Halobacteria. Sequence data from multiple loci (~2500 bp) identified many closely and more distantly related strains belonging to the genera Halorubrum and Haloarcula. Genome fingerprinting using a random priming PCR amplification method to analyze these isolates revealed diverse banding patterns across each of the genera and surprisingly even for isolates that are identical at the nucleotide level for five protein coding sequenced loci. This variance in genome structure even between identical multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) haplotypes indicates that accumulation of genomic variation is rapid: faster than the rate of third codon substitutions.
Keep Calm and Don’t Switch: About the Relationship Between Switches and Quality in HAS

Video streaming has established itself as the main method to consume multimedia content on the Internet. The most widespread technique is HTTP Adaptive Streaming which is used by large video service platforms such as YouTube and Netflix. In order to guarantee a high QoE, different adaptation strategies have been developed that lead to different video playout patterns. While some strategies may be more aggressive than others and often adapt the video quality, it is not clear which strategy is the best. ,,In this paper, we want to identify the trade-off between the average video quality and switches in the quality during playout. We do this with a user-centric view and try to optimize the adaptation depending on the user preference with a quadratic program. This work allows to put existing and future video adaptation algorithms in perspective with respect to user preferences. Our results show that the video quality can already be increased greatly by allowing few switches while more switches lead to diminishing gains. This is a novel discovery that is important for user-centric QoE-management which is of high interest for ISPs and video service providers.
The functional properties of the light-sensitive neurons of the posterior parietal cortex studied in waking monkeys: foveal sparing and opponent vector organization

We describe in this paper the results of a new study of the inferior parietal lobule in 10 waking monkeys combining the methods of behavioral control, visual stimulation, and single neuron analysis. In this study, 1682 neurons were identified; 804 were studied in detail. Neurons insensitive to visual stimuli comprise the fixation, oculomotor, and projection-manipulation classes thought to be involved in initiatives toward action. The largest group of the light-sensitive (LS) neurons were activated from large and frequently bilateral response areas that excluded the foveal region; we term this foveal sparing. The remaining cells subtended areas including the fovea, when tested with large stimuli (6 degrees X 6 degrees), but only 8 of 216 cells studied in detail responded to the small fixation target light. We propose that a dynamic central neural process associated with the acts of fixation and visual attention suppresses responses to foveal stimuli. Parietal LS neurons are sensitive to stimulus movement and direction over a wide range of velocities. The vectors point either inward toward the center or outward toward the perimeter of the visual field, and for neurons with bilateral response areas, the vectors commonly point in opposite directions in the two half-fields; we term this opponent vector organization. The functional properties of area 7 LS neurons are such that they could signal motion in the immediate surround and the apparent motion accompanying head movements and forward locomotion. We surmise that they contribute to a central neural image of immediately surrounding space and to the perceptual constancy of that space obtaining during bodily movement. These properties are suitable for the attraction of gaze and attention to objects and events in the peripheral visual fields. It is this system, together with the classes of parietal neurons concerned with action initiatives, whose destruction is thought to account for the hemi-inattention and neglect of the parietal lobe syndrome in primates.
A vaccine strategy with multiple prostatic acid phosphatase-fused cytokines for prostate cancer treatment

Immunotherapy is one of the attractive treatment strategies for advanced prostate cancer. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) previously approved the therapeutic vaccine, sipuleucel-T, which is composed of autologous antigen-presenting cells cultured with a fusion protein [prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP) and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GMCSF)]. Although sipuleucel-T has been shown to prolong the median survival of patients for 4.1 months, more robust therapeutic effects may be expected by modifying the vaccination protocol. In the present study, we aimed to develop and validate a novel vaccination strategy using multiple PAP-fused cytokines for prostate cancer treatment. Using a super gene expression (SGE) system that we previously established to amplify the production of a recombinant protein, significant amounts of PAP-fused cytokines [human GMCSF, interleukin-2 (IL2), IL4, IL7 and mouse GMCSF and IL4] were obtained. We examined the activity of the fusion proteins in vitro to validate their cytokine functions. A significant upregulation of dendritic cell differentiation from monocytes was achieved by PAP-GMCSF when used with the other PAP-fused cytokines. The PAP-fused human IL2 significantly increased the proliferation of lymphocytes, as determined by flow cytometry. We also investigated the in vivo therapeutic effects of multiple PAP-fused cytokines in a mouse prostate cancer model bearing prostate-specific antigen (PSA)- and PAP-expressing tumors. The simultaneous intraperitoneal administration of PAP-GMCSF, -IL2, -IL4 and -IL7 significantly prevented tumor induction and inhibited the tumor growth in the PAP-expressing tumors, yet not in the PSA-expressing tumors. The in vivo therapeutic effects with the multiple PAP-fused cytokines were superior to the effects of PAP-GMCSF alone. We thus demonstrated the advantages of the combined use of multiple PAP-fused cytokines including PAP-GMCSF, and propose a promising prostatic antigen-vaccination strategy to enhance the therapeutic effects.
Highlights on Anopheles nili and Anopheles moucheti, Malaria Vectors in Africa

Anopheles nili Theobald 1904 and An. moucheti Evans 1925 are major human malaria vectors in forested and humid savannah areas of West and Central Africa [1]. Yet, they remain critically understudied and basic knowledge on their biology, ecology and genetics is crucially lacking [2]. To date, most studies of African malaria vectors have focused on An. gambiae, An. arabien‐ sis, and An. funestus, in part, because molecular and cytogenetic tools for characterizing population structure, ecological adaptation, and taxonomic status of other species have been lacking until recently. Further, no laboratory colony is available for experimental work involving these neglected species. This gap in knowledge needs to be addressed for successful implementation of global strategies for malaria elimination and eradication in the Afrotropical region [3].
Purely Sequence-Trained Neural Networks for ASR Based on Lattice-Free MMI

In this paper we describe a method to perform sequence-discriminative training of neural network acoustic models without the need for frame-level cross-entropy pre-training. We use the lattice-free version of the maximum mutual information (MMI) criterion: LF-MMI. To make its computation feasible we use a phone n-gram language model, in place of the word language model. To further reduce its space and time complexity we compute the objective function using neural network outputs at one third the standard frame rate. These changes enable us to perform the computation for the forward-backward algorithm on GPUs. Further the reduced output frame-rate also provides a signiﬁcant speed-up during decoding. We present results on 5 different LVCSR tasks with training data ranging from 100 to 2100 hours. Models trained with LF-MMI provide a relative word error rate reduction of ∼ 11 . 5% , over those trained with cross-entropy objective function, and ∼ 8% , over those trained with cross-entropy and sMBR objec-tive functions. A further reduction of ∼ 2 . 5% , relative, can be obtained by ﬁne tuning these models with the word-lattice based sMBR objective function.
Measuring Online Social Bubbles

Social media have become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view. Here we quantitatively measure this kind of social bias at the collective level by mining a massive datasets of web clicks. Our analysis shows that collectively, people access information from a significantly narrower spectrum of sources through social media and email, compared to a search baseline. The significance of this finding for individual exposure is revealed by investigating the relationship between the diversity of information sources experienced by users at both the collective and individual levels in two datasets where individual users can be analyzed—Twitter posts and search logs. There is a strong correlation between collective and individual diversity, supporting the notion that when we use social media we find ourselves inside “social bubbles. ” Our results could lead to a deeper understanding of how technology biases our exposure to new information.
MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a Museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discover and follow the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present Museum Assistant (MusA), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these applications.
How to Administer the Initial Preference Task

Individuals like their name letters more than non–name letters. This effect has been termed the Name Letter Effect (NLE) and is widely exploited to measure implicit (i.e. automatic, unconscious) self–esteem, predominantly by means of the Initial Preference Task (IPT). Methodological research on how to best administer the IPT is, however, scarce. In order to bridge this gap, the present paper assessed the advantages and disadvantages of different types of IPT administrations with two meta–analyses (k = 49; N = 11,514) and a follow–up experiment (N = 449). As a result, a new type of administration is recommended which (1) treats the effects of the first and the last name initials separately, (2) uses a duplicate administration for reliability reasons, (3) uses the likability as well as the attractiveness item wording and (4) exploits not only letters but also numbers (i.e. birthday number effect) to measure implicit self–esteem. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Subordinating conjunctions as devices for unifying sentences in memory

In two experiments, we provide evidence that the subordinating conjunctions "nachdem" [after] and "weil" [because] unify sentences in immediate memory better than the coordinating conjunctions "erst-dann" [first-then] and "deshalb [therefore] are able to do. Immediate recall of the two clauses of subordinate sentences was equally good, whereas recall of coordinate sentences was better for the first clause than for the second in both experiments. In Experiment 2, it was additionally shown that this recall pattern was not due to prosodic information.
Melatonin Decreases Glucose Metabolism in Prostate Cancer Cells: A 13C Stable Isotope-Resolved Metabolomic Study

The pineal neuroindole melatonin exerts an exceptional variety of systemic functions. Some of them are exerted through its specific membrane receptors type 1 and type 2 (MT1 and MT2) while others are mediated by receptor-independent mechanisms. A potential transport of melatonin through facilitative glucose transporters (GLUT/SLC2A) was proposed in prostate cancer cells. The prostate cells have a particular metabolism that changes during tumor progression. During the first steps of carcinogenesis, oxidative phosphorylation is reactivated while the switch to the “Warburg effect” only occurs in advanced tumors and in the metastatic stage. Here, we investigated whether melatonin might change prostate cancer cell metabolism. To do so, 13C stable isotope-resolved metabolomics in androgen sensitive LNCaP and insensitive PC-3 prostate cancer cells were employed. In addition to metabolite 13C-labeling, ATP/AMP levels, and lactate dehydrogenase or pentose phosphate pathway activity were measured. Melatonin reduces lactate labeling in androgen-sensitive cells and it also lowers 13C-labeling of tricarboxylic acid cycle metabolites and ATP production. In addition, melatonin reduces lactate 13C-labeling in androgen insensitive prostate cancer cells. Results demonstrated that melatonin limits glycolysis as well as the tricarboxylic acid cycle and pentose phosphate pathway in prostate cancer cells, suggesting that the reduction of glucose uptake is a major target of the indole in this tumor type.
Promoting Good Statistical Practices: Some Suggestions

Researchers want to answer three basic questions: (a) Is an observed effect real or should it be attributed to chance? (b) If the effect is real, how large is it? and (c) Is the effect large enough to be useful? The first question concerning whether chance is a viable explanation for an observed effect is usually addressed with a null hypothesis significance test. A null hypothesis significance test tells us the probability of obtaining the effect or a more extreme effect if the null hypothesis is true. A significance test does not tell us how large the effect is or whether the effect is important or useful. Unfortunately, all too often the primary focus of research is on rejecting a null hypothesis and obtaining a small p value. The focus should be on what the data tell us about the phenomenon under investigation. This is not a new idea. Critics of significance testing have been saying it for years. For example, Frank Yates (1951), a contemporary of Ronald Fisher, observed that the use of the null hypothesis significance test
Increased microvascular permeability caused by toxic oxygen metabolites is partly reversed by exchanging the perfusate in isolated rat lungs

Toxic oxygen metabolites (TOM) released from stimulated phagocytes and lung tissue have been shown to injure the pulmonary microcirculation. In the present study we evaluated microvascular injury caused by TOM in rat lungs perfused with plasma. The injury, as indicated by an increase in vascular permeability, was assessed by determining the fluid filtration rate (FFR) after paralysing the pulmonary vascular bed with papaverine (0.1 mg/ml). TOM were generated by adding xanthine oxidase (XO) (0.05–0.125 U/ml) and hypoxanthine (HX) (1 mmol/l) to the perfusate. FFR was measured before, 30 and 60 min after addition of XO and HX. The following interventions were done: 1. the H2O2‐scavenger catalase, 2. substitution of the perfusate after 30 min, 3. BW 755 C, a combined lipoxygenase and cyclooxygenase inhibitor, and 4. indomethacin, a cyclooxygenase inhibitor. Addition of XO and HX caused FFR to increase from 14 ± 4 mg/min (mean ± s.e. mean) at the onset to 56 ± 7 mg/min and 86 ± 10 mg/min after 30 and 60 min, respectively. Replacing the perfusate with fresh plasma after 30 min caused a significant reduction in FFR at 60 min, from 86 ± 11 mg/min to 58 ± 10 mg/min. Catalase prevented the increase in FFR. Indomethacin and BW 755 C had no effect on the increase in FFR. We conclude that TOM induced a partly reversible increase in microvascular permeability of isolated rat lungs. From previous studies, the activity of XO was expected to cease after 30 min. Therefore it is suggested that secondary products of TOM propagate the lung injury. The increase in permeability was not mediated by arachidonic acid metabolites.