Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distress, denial, and low adherence to behavioral interventions predict faster disease progression in gay men infected with human immunodeficiency virus

This study examined psychological predictors of 2-year disease progression in gay men after finding out their human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) serostatus. Psychological and immune status of asymptomatic gay men who did not know their HIV serostatus was monitored during the 5 weeks before and after serostatus notification. The men were randomly assigned to an exercise, cognitive-behavioral stress-management intervention, or control group. At 2-year follow-up for the 23 men who turned out to be seropositive, 9 had developed symptoms, including 5 with acquired immune deficiency syndrome—4 of whom died. Distress at diagnosis, denial (5 weeks postdiagnosis minus pre-diagnosis), and low adherence during interventions were significant predictors of 2-year disease progression. Denial and adherence remained significant predictors of disease progression even after controlling for CD4 number at entry. Furthermore, change in denial was significantly correlated with immune status 1 year later; 1-year immune status was significantly correlated with 2-year disease progression. The present study therefore demonstrates significant relations between psychological variables on the one hand and both immune measures and IIIV-1 disease progression on the other. We conclude that distress, denial, and low protocol compliance predict subsequent disease progression.
Product Market Competition and Financial Accounting Misreporting

We show that, on average, the level of product market competition acts as a disciplining force constraining managers from misreporting accounting information. Further, in a quasi-natural experiment that uses shifts in import tariffs to identify exogenous intensification of competition, difference-in-difference estimations support the causal nature of the disciplining effect of competition on misreporting. Moreover, we find that the relation is stronger in industries with higher levels of financial statement comparability. Our findings are robust across alternate measures of misreporting including restatements and accounting irregularities as well as to measures of product market competition including those based on the U.S. Census.
Reconceptualizing Multicompetence as a Theory of Language Knowledge

Over the last decade or so, the concept of multicompetence has attracted significant research attention in the field of applied linguistics and in particular in the study of multiple language use and learning. We argue that while research efforts concerned with multicompetence have been useful in advancing a more positive view of second language learners, they have been less successful in transforming understandings of language knowledge. One reason for their lack of success is the fact that these efforts have been mired in a state of theoretical confusion arising from a continued reliance on three assumptions. These assumptions include (1) a view of L1 and L2 language knowledge as distinct systems; (2) the presumption of a qualitative distinction between multicompetence and monocompetence; and (3) the assumption of homogeneity of language knowledge across speakers and contexts. Our intent here is to redress these theoretical inadequacies by making a case for a usage-based view of multicompetence. We do so by drawing on empirical evidence and theoretical insights from other areas concerned with language and language development that expose the theoretical flaws in current research efforts on multicompetence. We then use these new understandings of language to reconsider findings on the language knowledge of multiple language users and to offer new directions for research on multicompetence.
NEUROREHABILITATION USING ‘ LEARNING BY IMITATION ’ IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

This paper describes the theoretical background and key features of a novel virtual environment system for motor re-learning that has been developed in our laboratory. The system has been designed to facilitate the retraining of motor control in patients with neurological impairments, such as stroke or acquired brain injury (ABI). It consists of a computer, specially developed software and an electromagnetic motion-tracking device. During training, the arm movements of the patient and a virtual teacher are displayed simultaneously in the virtual environment. The difference between the two trajectories is used to provide the patient with augmented feedback designed to enhance motor learning. Design considerations relevant to Neurorehabilitation patients are discussed. Preliminary results of recent experiments, in which the device has been used to train upper extremity movements in patients with chronic stroke and acquired brain injury, are also summarized.
Home blood pressure monitoring in CKD.

BACKGROUND Blood pressure (BP) control is the mainstay of stalling the progression of cardiorenal disease, yet the performance characteristics of BPs obtained in the clinic (CBPs) by routine or standardized methods or at home (HBP) in diagnosing hypertension or assessing its control are unknown. METHODS Two hundred thirty-two patients (20% black; 4% women; mean age, 67 years; 35% with diabetes) with chronic kidney disease (CKD) underwent a single 24-hour ambulatory BP (ABP) monitoring (ABPM) and concomitant recording of CBP and HBP for 1 week. Hypertension is defined as systolic BP of 130 mm Hg or greater or diastolic BP of 80 mm Hg or greater on average awake 24-hour ABPM. RESULTS Average ABP was 135.2 +/- 15.9/75.6 +/- 11.0 mm Hg. Thirty-five percent of patients had isolated systolic hypertension; 3%, isolated diastolic hypertension; 27%, combined systolic and diastolic hypertension; and 35%, normotension or well-controlled BP. The prevalence of "white-coat effect" was estimated as 28% to 30% by means of CBPs and 24% by means of HBPs. Well-controlled BP in the clinic, but poorly controlled BP by means of ABPM, masked hypertension, was seen in 26% to 29% by means of CBPs, but only 13% with HBP monitoring. CONCLUSION In patients with CKD, HBP is superior in reducing the misclassification of hypertension caused by the white-coat effect and masked hypertension commonly seen with CBPs. An average HBP of approximately 140/80 mm Hg appears to be the best correlate of hypertension defined by means of ABPM.
Associations among physiological and subjective sexual response, sexual desire, and salivary steroid hormones in healthy premenopausal women.

INTRODUCTION Few studies have examined how sexual arousal influences healthy premenopausal women's hormones, limiting our understanding of basic physiology and our ability to transfer knowledge from clinical and nonhuman populations. AIM To examine how sexual arousal and steroid hormones (testosterone [T], cortisol [C], estradiol [E]) were linked, to see whether hormone levels influenced and/or changed in response to sexual arousal elicited via visual erotic stimuli in healthy women. METHODS Participants included 40 healthy premenopausal women not using exogenous hormones. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Change in genital sexual arousal (vaginal pulse amplitude), change in subjective sexual arousal, sexual desire (via the Sexual Desire Inventory and Female Sexual Function Index scales), as well as T, C, and E via saliva samples taken before and following viewing of erotic stimuli as genital arousal was recorded via a vaginal photoplethysmograph. RESULTS E increased in response to sexual stimuli but this was not statistically associated with genital sexual arousal, whereas C decreased in association with genital sexual arousal, and T showed no statistically significant change. Relationship status was linked to genital but not subjective sexual arousal such that dating women exhibited higher genital sexual arousal than single or partnered women. Results indicated that all three hormones were associated with self-reported genital arousal (via the Detailed Assessment of Sexual Arousal scales) and sexual desire in different domains, and both T and E were associated with self-reported orgasms. CONCLUSION Findings point to the need to examine multiple hormones in multiple ways (e.g., baseline, changes, stimulated) and question using erotic stimuli-induced arousal as a model for women's endocrine responses to sexuality.
Changes in temporomandibular joint disc position and form following Herbst and fixed orthodontic treatment.

OBJECTIVE To determine the changes in the position and form of the temporomandibular joint articular disc in adolescents with Class II division 1 malocclusion and mandibular retrognathism treated with the Herbst appliance (phase I) and fixed orthodontic appliance (phase II). MATERIALS AND METHODS Thirty-two consecutive adolescents went through phase I of treatment and 23 completed phase II. The temporomandibular joints were evaluated qualitatively by means of magnetic resonance images at the beginning of treatment (T1), during phase I (T2), at the end of phase I (T3), and at the end of phase II (T4). RESULTS Significant changes in disc position were not observed with the mouth closed between T1 x T3 (P = .317), T3 x T4 (P = .287), or T1 x T4 (P = .261). At T2, on average, the disc was positioned regressively. With the mouth open, no difference was observed between T1 x T3 (P = .223) or T1 x T4 (P = .082). We did observe a significant difference between T3 x T4 (P < .05). Significant changes in the disc form were found with the mouth closed between T1 x T2 (P < .001) and T2 x T3 (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS At the end of the two-phase treatment, in general terms, the position and form of the initial articular discs were maintained; however, in some temporomandibular joints some seemingly adverse effects were observed at T4.
Association of Metabolic Syndrome and Inflammation with Cognitive Decline in Adults Aged 60 Years and Older: Findings from a National Health Survey in the United States

Objectives. We aimed to test the hypothesis that metabolic syndrome (MetS) is significantly associated with cognitive decline (CoD) in elderly adults and further assess whether MetS and inflammation have a significant joint effect on CoD. Methods. Data (n = 2975) from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1999–2002) in participants aged ≥60 years who had Digit Symbol Substitution Tests (DSS: a standard measure of cognitive function) were studied. CoD was defined as those in the lowest quintile of DSS score. MetS was defined as having ≥3 of 5 MetS traits (large waist circumference (WC), high blood pressure (BP), elevated glucose, triglycerides, and decreased high density lipoprotein cholesterol). Results. Of 2975 participants, the prevalence of CoD (DSS score <25) was 12.1%. After adjusting covariates, individual large WC, high BP, elevated glucose level, and MetS were significantly associated with CoD in logistic regression models (P < 0.001). There was a significant dose-response relationship between an increased number of MetS traits and CoD (P < 0.001). A significant joint effect of MetS and CRP on the odds of CoD was observed. Conclusion. The study, using a nationally representative sample, extended previous studies by highlighting a significant MetS-CoD relationship and a joint effect of MetS and CRP on CoD. These novel findings add to our understanding of the association of neurometabolic disorders and cognition and have implications that may be relevant to primary care practice.
Verbal Interaction Sequences and Group Mood

Employing the framework of emotional contagion, this study investigated the link between group interaction sequences (specifically complaining and interest-in-change messages) and group mood. Fifty-two work group discussions from two German industrial enterprises were coded with the act4teams category system (e.g., Lehmann-Willenbrock & Kauffeld). Lag sequential analysis revealed complaining as well as interest-in-change cycles in the discussion flow. A two-dimension (arousal and pleasure) rating instrument was developed to assess group mood. Results showed that complaining cycles were linked to a passive group mood, and interest-in-change cycles were correlated with an active group mood. Neither complaining nor interest-in-change cycles were correlated with the pleasure dimension. We discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of our findings as well as prospects for future research on interaction cycles and group mood.
Efficient Exemplar Word Spotting

In this paper we propose an unsupervised segmentation-free method for word spotting in document images. Documents are represented with a grid of HOG descriptors, and a sliding window approach is used to locate the document regions that are most similar to the query. We use the Exemplar SVM framework to produce a better representation of the query in an unsupervised way. Finally, the document descriptors are precomputed and compressed with Product Quantization. This offers two advantages: first, a large number of documents can be kept in RAM memory at the same time. Second, the sliding window becomes significantly faster since distances between quantized HOG descriptors can be precomputed. Our results significantly outperform other segmentation-free methods in the literature, both in accuracy and in speed and memory usage.
Chapter 1 Sound Source Separation

When processing a sound recording, sound engineers often face the need to apply specific digital audio effects to certain sounds only. For instance, the remastering of a music recording may require to correct the tuning of a mistuned instrument or relocate that instrument in space without affecting the sound of other instruments. This operation is straightforward when these sounds are available as separate tracks but becomes quite difficult otherwise. Indeed, the digital audio effects reviewed in this book all apply to the recording as a whole. Source separation refers to the range of techniques aiming to extract the signals of individual sound sources from a given recording. The input recording is called mixture signal. The estimated source signals can then be separately processed and added back together for remastering purposes. In this scenario, the number of mixture channels is typically equal to one or two or more rarely up to five, while the number of sources ranges from two to ten or more. The need for source separation also arises in many other application scenarios, such as speech enhancement for hearing aids, high-quality upmixing of mono or stereo content to 3D sound formats and automatic speech and speaker recognition in multi-talker environments. Source separation is a recent field of research compared to the other audio effects reviewed in this book, so that most techniques are less mature and cannot address the above applications scenarios to date. Yet, some established techniques are gradually finding their way to the industry and will soon be part of professional or general consumer software. This chapter will provide an overview of these established techniques as well as more recent ones.
Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Calculation on Floating Point Numbers

In this paper, we propose a framework for privacy-preserving outsourced calculation on floating point numbers (POCF). Using POCF, a user can securely outsource the storing and processing of floating point numbers to a cloud server without compromising on the security of the (original) data and the computed results. In particular, we first present privacy-preserving integer processing protocols for common integer operations. We then present an approach to outsourcing floating point numbers for storage in a privacy-preserving way, and securely processing commonly used floating point number operations on-the-fly. We prove that the proposed POCF achieves the goal of floating point number processing without privacy leakage to unauthorized parties, and demonstrate the utility and the efficiency of POCF using simulations.
Interactive Computation of Type-Threshold Functions in Collocated Broadcast-Superposition Networks

In wireless sensor networks, various applications involve learning one or multiple functions of the measurements observed by sensors, rather than the measurements themselves. This paper focuses on type-threshold functions, e.g., the maximum and indicator functions. Previous work studied this problem under the collocated collision network model and showed that under many probabilistic models for the measurements, the achievable computation rates converge to zero as the number of sensors increases. This paper considers two network models reflecting both the broadcast and superposition properties of wireless channels: the collocated linear finite field network and the collocated Gaussian network. A general multi-round coding scheme exploiting not only the broadcast property but particularly also the superposition property of the networks is developed. Through careful scheduling of concurrent transmissions to reduce redundancy, it is shown that given any independent measurement distribution, all type-threshold functions can be computed reliably with a non-vanishing rate in the collocated Gaussian network, even if the number of sensors tends to infinity.
Type I Interferon Elevates Co-Regulatory Receptor Expression on CMV- and EBV-Specific CD8 T Cells in Chronic Hepatitis C

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) readily sets up persistence in a large fraction of infected hosts. Mounting epidemiological and immunological evidence suggest that HCV’s persistence could influence immune responses toward unrelated pathogens and vaccines. Nonetheless, the fundamental contribution of the inflammatory milieu during persistent HCV infection in impacting immune cells specific for common pathogens such as CMV and EBV has not been fully studied. As the co-regulatory receptors PD-1, Tim-3, and 2B4 have all been shown to be vital in regulating CD8+ T cell function, we assessed their expression on CMV/EBV-specific CD8+ T cells from patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) and healthy controls ex vivo and upon stimulation with virus-specific peptides in vitro. Total and CMV/EBV-specific CD8+ T cells expressing PD-1, Tim-3, and 2B4 were highly enriched in patients with CHC compared to healthy individuals ex vivo. In vitro peptide stimulation further potentiated the differential co-regulatory receptor expression of PD-1, Tim-3, and 2B4, which then culminated in an enhanced functionality of CMV/EBV-specific CD8+ T cells in CHC patients. Comprehensively analyzing plasma cytokines between the two cohorts, we observed that not only was IFNα-2a dominant among 21 other inflammatory mediators elevated in CHC patients but it also correlated with PD-1 and Tim-3 expressions ex vivo. Importantly, IFNα-2a further caused upregulation of these markers upon in vitro peptide stimulation. Finally, we could prospectively study patients receiving novel IFN-free antiviral therapy. Here, we observed that treatment-induced clearance of HCV resulted in a partial reversion of the phenotype of CMV/EBV-specific CD8+ T cells in patients with CHC. These data reveal an alteration of the plasma concentrations of IFNα-2a together with other inflammatory mediators during CHC, which appeared to pervasively influence co-regulatory receptor expression on CMV/EBV-specific CD8+ T cells.
Allergy to betalactam antibiotics in children: results of a 20‐year study based on clinical history, skin and challenge tests

To cite this article: Ponvert C, Perrin Y, Bados‐Albiero A, Le Bourgeois M, Karila C, Delacourt C, Scheinmann P, De Blic J. Allergy to betalactam antibiotics in children: results of a 20‐year study based on clinical history, skin and challenge tests. Pediatr Allergy Immunol 2011; 22: 411–418.
Relapse to heroin-seeking in rats under opioid maintenance: the effects of stress, heroin priming, and withdrawal

It is widely believed that opioid withdrawal symptoms contribute to relapse to opioid use, but relapse is highly probable in experienced users even after prolonged abstinence and during opioid maintenance therapy. We have found using an animal model of relapse, the reinstatement procedure, that the two events that reliably reinstate heroin-seeking behavior are reexposure to heroin, and brief exposure to footshock stress. Contrary to expectation, opioid antagonist-induced withdrawal does not reinstate heroin-seeking. We now report on reinstatement of heroin-seeking in rats trained to self-administer heroin and subsequently exposed to a maintenance dose of heroin via minipump and allowed to self-administer saline. With the minipump in, naloxone-induced withdrawal did not reinstate drug-seeking, a priming injection on heroin was only mildly effective, and footshock was highly effective. Twenty-four hours after removal of the minipump (spontaneous withdrawal), animals reinitiated heroin-seeking and, subsequently, both heroin and footshock reinstated heroin-seeking. In summary, brief exposure to stress reinstated heroin-seeking in both heroin-maintained and withdrawn animals. The heroin prime reliably reinstated drug- seeking only in the absence of the minipump; opioid “withdrawal,” as such, did not reinstate drug-seeking behavior. Naloxone given to heroin- maintained animals induced withdrawal symptoms, caused a mild depression in the levels of dopamine and its metabolites in the nucleus accumbens septi (NAS), but did not reinstate drug-seeking. Reinstatement of heroin-seeking during spontaneous withdrawal was not accompanied by reductions in basal dopamine and its metabolites in NAS.
Evaluation of Existing Teaching Learning Process on Bloom’s Taxonomy

Professional teaching is not up to mark throughout Sindh in general and district Mirpurkhas in particular. It is generally assumed and accepted that the teachers only touch knowledge and comprehension levels of Bloom’s cognitive domain. The other two affective and psychomotor domains are openly ignored in both the curricula and professional teaching. Present qualitative study is an attempt to evaluate the existing teaching regarding Bloom’s three domains at secondary school level in District Mirpurkhas. The purposive sampling included the 30 students; out of them 10 students (05 boys and girls each) were interviewed and 20 students (10 boys and girls each) were selected for focus-group-discussions separately. Findings revealed that the existing teaching was teacher centered rather than learner-centered. Teaching strategies mostly involved knowledge and rote learning with a little focus on comprehension that is of course the lower levels of cognitive domain while the affective and psychomotor domains remained untouched throughout.
Impact of ciprofloxacin on theophylline clearance and steady-state concentrations in serum

The effect of a multiple-dose regimen of oral ciprofloxacin (750 mg every 12 h for 11 doses) on the clearance and steady-state concentrations of theophylline in trough (predose) serum was evaluated in nine healthy male subjects, each serving as his own control. Theophylline was taken as a sustained release tablet per os in a dose of 200 mg every 12 h for 19 doses. Theophylline concentrations in serum were measured immediately before each theophylline dose. Ciprofloxacin was administered on study day 4 through the first dose of study day 8. Theophylline concentrations in serum were also measured on study days 3, 6, 8, and 10 at the following times after the first dose of each day: 0, 0.25, 0.50, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 h. Steady-state theophylline concentrations in trough serum were significantly higher during ciprofloxacin treatment (day 8) than before (day 3) or after (day 10) ciprofloxacin administration (P less than 0.01). Likewise, theophylline clearance was significantly slower (P less than 0.01) during ciprofloxacin treatment (day 8) than before it (day 3) or after it (day 10). The magnitude of ciprofloxacin-induced changes was approximately 30%. These results suggest that a multidose regimen of ciprofloxacin significantly slows the clearance of theophylline and elevates theophylline concentrations in serum.