Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Incidence and predictors of early ankle contracture in adults with acquired brain injury

Objective: To determine the incidence and predictors of early ankle contracture in adults with acquired brain injury. Methods: A prospective cohort study of patients admitted to Neurosurgical Intensive Care Unit (NICU), University Malaya Medical Centre and referred for rehabilitation within a period of 12 months. Adult patients with newly diagnosed acquired brain injury with no prior deformity to lower limbs, Glasgow Coma Scale ≤ 12, no concomitant spinal or lower limb injuries, medical stability at inclusion into the study and agreed to participate for the total duration of assessment (3 months) were recruited. We conducted weekly review of ankle muscle tone and measurement of ankle maximum passive dorsiflexion motion. The end point is reached if ankle contracture developed or completed 3 months post injury assessment. Results: The cohort included 70 patients, of which only 46 patients completed the study. Twenty-eight patients suffered from severe brain injury whilst 18 from moderate brain injury. Out of the 46 patients, 13 (28%) developed ankle contracture at the end of the study period. Abnormal motor pattern was significantly associated with incidence of ankle contracture, which included spasticity (p<0.001), spastic dystonia (p=0.001) and clonus (p=0.015). Using univariate analysis, the predictors for ankle contracture were spasticity (OR 51.67, CI 7.53-354.52, p<0.001), spastic dystonia (OR 27.43 CI 2.84-265.35, p=0.004) and clonus (OR 4.18 CI 1.33-13.19, p =0.015). Conclusion: Abnormal motor patterns are strongly associated with early incidence of ankle contracture amongst adult with new diagnosis of moderate to severe acquired brain injury despite a regular standard therapy program. This is an important clinical finding towards early prevention of ankle contracture.
Self-Organizing Hit Avoidance in Distributed Frequency Hopping Multiple Access Networks

In this paper, we investigate the frequency hit avoidance problem in distributed frequency hopping multiple access (FHMA) networks, in which each user intends to avoid the frequency hit with others by choosing the appropriate frequency set and frequency hopping sequence. First, we define the network hit degree as the metric for the hits, and formulate the frequency hit avoidance problem as an optimization problem of the network hit degree. Second, we formulate a non-cooperative game model to solve this optimization problem, and prove the game is an exact potential game, which illustrates that the Nash equilibria (NE) point of the game is the optimal solution of the optimization problem. Finally, we propose a fragment-based distributed hit avoidance (FDHA) learning algorithm and prove that the learning algorithm can converge to the NE point. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can converge to the optimal solution rapidly such that the FHMA network is hit-free.
Noncanonical Alternative Polyadenylation Contributes to Gene Regulation in Response to Hypoxia[OPEN]

Stress affects the production and fate of alternative mRNA isoforms to coordinate and fine-tune the adaptation of plants to the environment. Stresses from various environmental challenges continually confront plants, and their responses are important for growth and survival. One molecular response to such challenges involves the alternative polyadenylation of mRNA. In plants, it is unclear how stress affects the production and fate of alternative mRNA isoforms. Using a genome-scale approach, we show that in Arabidopsis thaliana, hypoxia leads to increases in the number of mRNA isoforms with polyadenylated 3′ ends that map to 5′-untranslated regions (UTRs), introns, and protein-coding regions. RNAs with 3′ ends within protein-coding regions and introns were less stable than mRNAs that end at 3′-UTR poly(A) sites. Additionally, these RNA isoforms were underrepresented in polysomes isolated from control and hypoxic plants. By contrast, mRNA isoforms with 3′ ends that lie within annotated 5′-UTRs were overrepresented in polysomes and were as stable as canonical mRNA isoforms. These results indicate that the generation of noncanonical mRNA isoforms is an important feature of the abiotic stress response. The finding that several noncanonical mRNA isoforms are relatively unstable suggests that the production of non-stop and intronic mRNA isoforms may represent a form of negative regulation in plants, providing a conceptual link with mechanisms that generate these isoforms (such as alternative polyadenylation) and RNA surveillance.
HUBUNGAN SIFAT FISIK TANAH, PERAKARAN DAN HASIL UBI KAYU TAHUN KEDUA PADA ALFISOL JATIKERTO AKIBAT PEMBERIAN PUPUK ORGANIK DAN ANORGANIK (NPK)

A Alfisol in South Malang regency many used to intensive on farming with dominant commodity is cassava. Farmers seldom cultivate cassava continuously, the continuous cropping of cassava leads to fast depletion of major nutrients especially N and K and will require fertilizer supplement to give stable yield. Farmers not applied organic fertilizer cause to this soil poor organic materials. The research in first year with organic and inorganic fertilizers can repair soil physics dan tuber yield of cassava.The object of this research was to study the effects of organic fertilizer application to change of soil physics and relation to root system of cassava, and to study the effect of fertilizer application to tuber yield of cassava in the second year.Field observations arranged in a Randomized Block Design of 10 treatment and 3 replications, in Jatikerto, Malang Regency. This research took time on September 2005 until Juli 2006. Observation parameter includes bulk density, particle density, soil porosity, aggregate stability, root system (Lrv and Drv) and tuber yield of cassava. Obtained data tested by using F test (5%), level 5% Duncan test, Orthogonal Contrast test, linear regression and correlation test.Research result is the application of organic fertilizer showed significant difference able to increase the soil porosity and decrease the bulk density. Organic and anorganic combination application higher to tuber yield of cassava when compared to only organic or anorganic fertilizer application. The influence of organic manure addition on repair soil physics show very real difference to root system. Correlations between bulk density with Lrv (r = -0.728*), Lrv with tuber yield (r = 0.706*). Key words: soil phisycs, fertilizer, tuber yield and root system
The impact of a week of simulated night work on sleep, circadian phase, and performance

Aims: To investigate factors that may contribute to performance adaptation during permanent night work. Methods: Fifteen healthy subjects participated in an adaptation and baseline night sleep, directly followed by seven simulated eight-hour night shifts (2300 to 0700 hours). At the end of each shift they were taken outside and exposed to natural light for 20 minutes. They then slept from approximately 0800 hours until they naturally awoke. Results: There was a significant increase in mean performance on a visual psychomotor vigilance task across the week. Daytime sleep quality and quantity were not negatively affected. Total sleep time (TST) for each of the daytime sleeps was reduced, resulting in an average cumulative sleep debt of 3.53 hours prior to the final night shift. TST for each of the daytime sleep periods did not significantly differ from the baseline night, nor did TST significantly vary across the week. There was a significant decrease in wake time after sleep onset and sleep onset latency across the week; sleep efficiency showed a trend towards greater efficiency across the consecutive daytime sleeps. Hours of wakefulness prior to each simulated night shift significantly varied across the week. The melatonin profile significantly shifted across the week. Conclusions: Results suggest that under optimal conditions, the sleep debt that accumulates during consecutive night shifts is relatively small and does not exacerbate decrements in night-time performance resulting from other factors. When sleep loss is minimised, adaptation of performance during consecutive night shifts can occur in conjunction with circadian adaptation.
Coping With First-Time Endoscopy for a Select Sample of Chinese Patients With Functional Dyspepsia and Duodenal Ulcer: An Observational Study

Objective This study examined how patients with functional dyspepsia (FD) and duodenal ulcer (DU) coped with first-time endoscopy, a highly relevant real-life stressor. We adopted an observational method to enhance the ecological validity of the study on stress and coping. Methods A matched case-control design was adopted to compare differences between 30 Chinese FD patients from a select sample and 30 Chinese DU patients (13 females and 17 males in each group) in observed coping behaviors, mood states, and subjective appraisals of endoscopy. A new observation checklist was developed for recording subjects’ coping behaviors, and our validation study showed that this newly developed measure had adequate reliability and criterion-related validity. Results Compared with their DU counterparts, FD subjects 1) used more problem-focused coping, 2) used less emotion-focused coping, and 3) sought more instrumental support. They also had higher levels of anxious mood both before and after the endoscopy than did DU subjects. Moreover, compared with DU subjects, FD subjects reported having more pains and discomfort during the endoscopy and more dissatisfaction with the endoscopy. Conclusions Using an objective observational method in a select sample of FD patients, the present study provided tentative evidence that FD subjects tend to adopt an action-oriented coping pattern when encountering first-time endoscopy.
Improved average-voice-based speech synthesis using gender-mixed modeling and a parameter generation algorithm considering GV

For constructing a speech synthesis system which can achieve diverse voices, we have been developing a speaker independent approach of HMM-based speech synthesis in which statistical average voice models are adapted to a target speaker using a small amount of speech data. In this paper, we incorporate a high-quality speech vocoding method STRAIGHT and a parameter generation algorithm with global variance into the system for improving quality of synthetic speech. Furthermore, we introduce a feature-space speaker adaptive training algorithm and a gender mixed modeling technique for conducting further normalization of the average voice model. We build an English text-to-speech system using these techniques and show the performance of the system.
Involvement of the Conserved Adaptor Protein Alix in Actin Cytoskeleton Assembly*

The conserved adaptor protein Alix, also called AIP1 or Hp95, promotes flattening and alignment of cultured mammalian fibroblasts; however, the mechanism by which Alix regulates fibroblast morphology is not understood. Here we demonstrate that Alix in WI38 cells, which require Alix expression for maintaining typical fibroblast morphology, associates with filamentous actin (F-actin) and F-actin-based structures lamellipodia and stress fibers. Reducing Alix expression by small interfering RNA (siRNA) decreases F-actin content and inhibits stress fiber assembly. In cell-free systems, Alix directly interacts with F-actin at both the N-terminal Bro1 domain and the C-terminal proline-rich domain. In Alix immunoprecipitates from WI38 cell lysates, actin is the most abundant partner protein of Alix. In addition, the N-terminal half of the middle region of Alix binds cortactin, an activator of the ARP2/3 complex-mediated initiation of actin polymerization. Alix is required for lamellipodial localization of cortactin. The C-terminal half of the middle region of Alix interacts with α-actinin, a key factor that bundles F-actin in stress fibers. Alix knockdown decreases the amount of α-actinin that associates with F-actin. These findings establish crucial involvement of Alix in actin cytoskeleton assembly.
How Well Can We Identify the High-Performing Hospital?

Sharing lessons from high-performing hospitals facilitates quality improvement. High-performing hospitals have usually been identified using a small number of performance measures. The objective was to analyze how well 1,006 hospitals performed across a broader range of measures. Five measures were developed from publicly available data: adherence to processes of care, 30-day readmission rates, in-hospital mortality, efficiency, and patient satisfaction. For a subset of hospitals, the authors included two survey-based assessments of patient care quality, one by chief quality officers and one by frontline clinicians. In general, there was little correlation among the publicly available measures (r ≤ .10), though there was notable correlation between objective measures and survey-based measures (r = .23). Hospitals that performed well on a composite measure calculated from the publicly available measures were often not in the top quintile on most individual measures. This highlights the challenge in identifying high-performing hospitals to learn organizational-level best practices.
Perspectives of Electric Field Controlled Switching in Perpendicular Magnetic Random Access

Based on requirements for spin-transfer torque (STT)-magnetic random access memory (MRAM), fundamental challenges in current CoFeB- and MgO-based STT-MRAM with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) are addressed when scaling down to sub-20 nm. Electric-field (EF)-induced PMA modulation has been proposed to significantly reduce the switching current. As EF alone is unable to induce the magnetization reversal but PMA reduction, additional mechanisms should be applied to realize EF switching. We discuss difficulties in the implementation of currently reported two switching approaches and propose a new approach using Oersted field guided EF switching in MRAM arrays. Our latest experimental results on the EF effect show that the spin reorientation transition can be realized at an EF of 0.8 V/nm for the top-pin CoFeB/MgO magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) with the thermal stability factor of as high as 57 in the absence of EF. However, the bidirectional switching of the free layer cannot be achieved at a fixed biasing field, which is attributed to small STT effect and switching uncertainty due to unipolar feature of EF-induced PMA modulation. Perspective of EF-MRAM is analyzed based on currently published data on EF efficiency. We show that the EF switching is very promising for future MRAM applications in spite of challenges in materials and MTJ stack engineering.
Mining structural hole spanners through information diffusion in social networks

The theory of structural holes suggests that individuals would benefit from filling the "holes" (called as structural hole spanners) between people or groups that are otherwise disconnected. A few empirical studies have verified that structural hole spanners play a key role in the information diffusion. However, there is still lack of a principled methodology to detect structural hole spanners from a given social network. In this work, we precisely define the problem of mining top-k structural hole spanners in large-scale social networks and provide an objective (quality) function to formalize the problem. Two instantiation models have been developed to implement the objective function. For the first model, we present an exact algorithm to solve it and prove its convergence. As for the second model, the optimization is proved to be NP-hard, and we design an efficient algorithm with provable approximation guarantees. We test the proposed models on three different networks: Coauthor, Twitter, and Inventor. Our study provides evidence for the theory of structural holes, e.g., 1% of Twitter users who span structural holes control 25% of the information diffusion on Twitter. We compare the proposed models with several alternative methods and the results show that our models clearly outperform the comparison methods. Our experiments also demonstrate that the detected structural hole spanners can help other social network applications, such as community kernel detection and link prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address the problem of mining structural hole spanners in large social networks.
Securing visible light communications via friendly jamming

Despite offering higher security than radio frequency (RF) channels, the broadcast nature of the visible light communication (VLC) channel makes VLC links inherently susceptible to eavesdropping by unauthorized users. In this work, we consider the physical-layer security of VLC links aided by friendly jamming. The jammer has multiple light sources, but does not have access to the data transmitted. The eavesdropper's reception is degraded by a jamming signal that causes no interference to the legitimate receiver. Due to the limited dynamic range of typical light-emitting diodes (LEDs), both the data and jamming signals are subject to amplitude constraints. Therefore, we begin with deriving a closed-form secrecy rate expression for the corresponding wiretap channel, and adopt secrecy rate as the performance measure. Then, we formulate a linear programming problem to maximize the secrecy rate when the eavesdropper's channel is accurately known to the jammer. Finally, we consider robust beamforming to maximize the worst-case secrecy rate when information about the eavesdropper's channel is uncertain due to location uncertainty. The robust scheme makes use of simple linear programming, making real-time implementation feasible in a variety of real-world scenarios.
Embryo Sexing and Sex Chromosomal Chimerism Analysis by Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification in Cattle and Water Buffaloes

Abstract In domestic animals of the family Bovidae, sex preselection of offspring has been demanded for convenience of milk/beef production and animal breeding. Development of the nonsurgical embryo transfer technique and sexing methods of preimplantation embryos made it possible. Sexing based on detection of Y chromosome-specific DNA sequences is considered the most reliable method to date. PCR enables amplification of a target sequence from a small number of blastomeres. However, it requires technical skill and is time consuming. Furthermore, PCR has the risk of false positives because of DNA contamination during handling of the PCR products in duplicate PCR procedures and/or electrophoresis. Therefore, for embryo sexing to become widely used in the cattle embryo transfer industry, a simple, rapid and precise sexing method needs to be developed. Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a novel DNA amplification method, and the reaction is carried out under isothermal conditions (range, 60 to 65 C) using DNA polymerase with strand displacement activity. When the target DNA is amplified by LAMP, a white precipitate derived from magnesium pyrophosphate (a by-product of the LAMP reaction) is observed. It is noteworthy that LAMP does not need special reagents or electrophoresis to detect the amplified DNA. This review describes the development and application of an embryo sexing method using LAMP in cattle and water buffaloes.
Polymorphisms in the inflammatory pathway genes and the risk of preeclampsia in Sinhalese women

Abstract Objective: Elevated pro-inflammatory cytokines play an important role in the pathogenesis of preeclampsia. We investigated the prevalence of functional polymorphisms in genes regulating inflammation in preeclamptic women. Methods: One hundred seventy-five nulliparous Sinhalese women with preeclampsia (cases) and 171 normotensive women matched for age, ethnicity, parity and body mass index (BMI) (controls) were recruited. Preeclampsia was diagnosed using international guidelines. Genotyping was performed on DNA extracted from peripheral blood using the Sequenom MassARRAY system. Results: The prevalence of the CT genotype of IL1A rs17561 polymorphism was increased in preeclamptic women compared with controls {p = 0.04, odds ratio (OR) [95% class interval (CI)] = 1.6 (1.0–2.5)}. The prevalence of the CT genotype [p = 0.01, OR (95% CI) = 1.8 (1.1–2.8)] and the dominant model (CT + TT) [p = 0.03, OR (95% CI) = 1.6 (1.1–2.5)] of the IL1A rs1800587 polymorphism were increased in preeclamptic women compared with controls. The prevalence of the GA genotype [p = 0.04, OR (95% CI) = 0.6 (0.4–0.9)] and the dominant model (GA + AA) [p = 0.03, OR (95% CI) = 0.6 (0.4–0.9)] of the MBL1 rs1800450 polymorphism were reduced in preeclamptic women compared to controls. Conclusion: Genotypes conferring a pro-inflammatory phenotype are increased in preeclamptic women.
Urinary Excretion and Bactericidal Activities of a Single Oral Dose of 400 Milligrams of Fleroxacin versus a Single Oral Dose of 800 Milligrams of Pefloxacin in Healthy Volunteers

ABSTRACT Twelve healthy volunteers participated in this randomized crossover study to compare the concentrations and recovery levels of fleroxacin and pefloxacin in urine and to assess their bactericidal activities against 12 strains of urinary pathogens with different susceptibilities over a wide range of MICs. The volunteers received a single oral dose of 400 mg of fleroxacin or 800 mg of pefloxacin. The mean cumulative renal excretion of unchanged fleroxacin,N-demethyl-fleroxacin, and N-oxide-fleroxacin accounted for 67, 7, and 6% of the total dose, respectively. The total urinary recovery of pefloxacin and the active metabolite norfloxacin was 34%. In the time-kill and the urinary bactericidal titer (UBT) studies, only the subjects’ urine not supplemented with broth was used. With most tested organisms and both quinolones it took more than 8 h to achieve a reduction in CFU of 99.9% (3 log units). Overall, there was a good correlation between UBTs and MICs for the strains. Against Escherichia coli ATCC 25922 the median UBTs were similar for both antibiotics and at least 1:8 for 96 h; against the E. coli strain for which the MIC was 0.5 μg/ml the UBT was at least 1:4 for 48 h. The UBTs of both drugs against Klebsiella pneumoniae were at least 1:16 for 72 h. The UBTs for Staphylococcus aureus (the MIC for which was 16 μg/ml) of both antibiotics were low, and in some of the samples, no bactericidal titers were observed. UBTs for Proteus mirabilis of pefloxacin are significantly higher than those of fleroxacin. For Pseudomonas aeruginosa the median UBTs were present for the 24-to-48-h interval. The same is true forEnterococcus faecalis. Against Staphylococcus saprophyticus, UBTs were present for at least 48 h with both quinolones. Overall, a single oral dose of 400 mg of fleroxacin exhibits UBTs comparable to those of 800 mg of pefloxacin. Therefore, it may be expected that half of the dose of fleroxacin gives comparable results in the treatment of urinary tract infections; this should be substantiated in comparative clinical trials.
Encapsulating a C++ Library

Encapsulation is the hiding of internal details from the user of an abstract data type, class or module. Encapsulating a class library requires more than combining a set of classes that are encapsulated individually. Libraries need to hide the details of how objects are created because some kinds of objects may be represented by composites as opposed to single instances. Implementation classes and members also must be hidden from the user of a library, even if this hiding conflicts with the user’s desire to reuse library code. In this paper, we present the encapsulation techniques used in the InterViews 3.1, a C++ class library for building user interfaces. These techniques have been formulated from the experience of building and releasing InterViews over a period of several years.