Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuropsychological assessment of patients with late onset GM2 gangliosidosis

Objective: To characterize cognitive status in a sample of individuals with late-onset GM2 gangliosidosis (commonly referred to as late-onset Tay-Sachs disease). Methods: Seventeen subjects (13 men, 4 women) diagnosed with GM2 gangliosidosis were evaluated. Subjects ranged in age from 18 to 56 years and were in various stages of disease progression. Subjects underwent comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. Impairment was defined as performance more than 1.6 SD below the normative mean. Results: Group mean performance was within the denoted normal range on all measures except on a task assessing visual sequencing and set shifting. Approximately one-half of the sample scored in the impaired range on measures of processing speed, visual sequencing, and set shifting. One-third of the sample also scored in the impaired range on measures of delayed verbal recall. Impairment tended to be restricted to a subset of the sample, as 5 of the 14 subjects able to undergo formal testing accounted for 70% of the total number of impaired scores. If the three subjects unable to participate in formal testing are also considered impaired, 47% of the current sample exhibited significant cognitive impairment in at least one cognitive domain. Conclusion: In late-onset GM2 gangliosidosis, there is a risk of impairment in executive functioning and memory as well as cerebellar dysfunction. Dementia was not present in any subjects in the current sample.
Data Rate and Fragmentation Aware Ad hoc Routing

We propose to use two link adaptation strategies together in order to find energy-efficient routing paths in an ad-hoc network: exploiting different modulation techniques supported by the physical layer and the fragmentation size of the packets. Our proposed mechanism finds the best (modulation technique, fragmentation size) pair for a given link and uses this information for finding the minimum energy routing paths. We provide a modified version of the well known AODV protocol and show that our proposed mechanism performs better than the two mechanisms deployed individually and much better than the original protocol.
Cognitive Algebra of Love Through the Adult Life

The study was aimed at characterizing the exact algebraic structure of the love schema in order to trace possible changes in the conceptualization of love throughout the adult life cycle, notably as regards the weight attributed to the three components of love: passion, intimacy, and commitment. The methodological framework was the Functional Theory of Cognition. Irrespective of the gender and age of the participants (from 18 to 93), the structure of the love schema was shown to obey an equal-weight-averaging rule; the love schema was conceived as a strictly compensatory schema. Irrespective of age and gender, passion was the most important factor (w = .51), followed by intimacy (.29) and commitment (.20). The relationship between overall love value and degree of passion (or intimacy or commitment) was not conceived as a linear one, but as an exponential one. The weight of passion was shown to decline over age, and the weight of commitment was shown to increase over age. This change was, however, very limited and observed in elderly participants only.
Twenty Years of Marine Carbon Cycle Observations at Devils Hole Bermuda Provide Insights into Seasonal Hypoxia, Coral Reef Calcification, and Ocean Acidification

Open–ocean observations have revealed gradual changes in seawater carbon dioxide (CO2) chemistry resulting from uptake of atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidification (OA), but, with few long–term records (>five years) of the coastal ocean that can reveal the pace and direction of environmental change. In this paper, observations collected from 1996 to 2016 at Harrington Sound, Bermuda, constitute one of the longest time–series of coastal ocean inorganic carbon chemistry. Uniquely, such changes can be placed into the context of contemporaneous offshore changes observed at the nearby Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site. Onshore, surface dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2; >10% change per decade) have increased and OA indicators such as pH and calcium carbonate (CaCO3) saturation state (Ω) decreased from 1996–2016 at a rate of two to three times that observed offshore at BATS. Such changes, combined with reduction of total alkalinity over time, reveal a complex interplay of biogeochemical processes influencing Bermuda reef metabolism, including net ecosystem production (NEP=gross primary production–autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration) and net ecosystem calcification (NEC=gross calcification–gross CaCO3 dissolution). These long–term data show ae seasonal shift between wintertime net heterotrophy and summertime net autotrophy for the entire Bermuda reef system. Over annual time-scales, the Bermuda reef system does not appear to be in trophic balance, but rather slightly net heterotrophic. In addition, the reef system is net accretive (i.e., gross calcification > gross CaCO3 dissolution), but there were occasional periods when the entire reef system appears to transiently shift to net dissolution. A previous five–year study of the Bermuda reef suggested that net calcification and net heterotrophy have both increased. Over the past twenty years, rates of net calcification and net heterotrophy determined for the Bermuda reef system have increased by ~30%, most likely due to increased coral nutrition occurring in concert with increased offshore productivity in the surrounding subtropical North Atlantic Ocean. Importantly, this long–term study reveals that other environmental factors can mitigate against the effects of ocean acidification on coral reef calcification, at least over the past couple of decades.
HIV‐Related Risk Practices among Glasgow Male Prostitutes: Refraining Concepts of Risk Behavior

Based on ethnographic data on relations between 32 male prostitutes and their clients, this article examines variability in HIV-related risk practices. It is argued that risk behavior should be seen as a situated product, emergent from the immediate situation of the sexual encounter. A minority of the prostitutes engaged in unsafe sex with at least some of their clients. Unsafe sex and violence were both associated with client control—with sexual encounters of such covertness and ambiguity that the client was allowed maximum discretion to decide terms and conditions. Safer sex was associated with countervailing prostitute techniques of power. This situated view of risk behavior sits unhappily with conventional psychosocial and sociocultural models of risk behavior. An alternative heuristic framework, based on Schutz's (1970) work on “systems of relevance,” is suggested.
Breaking the Mold: Impacts of Adventure Education on Girls

Adventure education programs have been created to address the developmental needs of adolescent girls. Such programs must be evaluated to determine whether they are having their intended impact. The purpose of this evaluation was to examine whether Dirt Divas, a mountain bike and empowerment program for girls, accomplishes its goals. Using a three-point numerical rating scale and open-ended questions on post-program evaluations and qualitative interviews, the authors evaluated whether Dirt Divas was meeting its goals to: (a) strengthen girls' physical activity and promote positive body image, (b) foster positive gender identity development and resistance to gender role stereotypes, and (c) support girls' resiliency. Findings suggest Dirt Divas impacts girls in the following ways: increased confidence in physical activity, feelings of physical strength, confidence, selfesteem, perseverance, courage, resiliency, a connection with other girls and a sense of self. Less clear are impacts on gender identity development, gender role stereotypes and body image.
SLIK: Scalable Low-Latency Indexes for a Key-Value Store

Many large-scale key-value storage systems sacrifice features like secondary indexing and/or consistency in favor of scalability or performance. This limits the ease and efficiency of application development on such systems. Implementing secondary indexing in a large-scale memory based system is challenging because the goals for low latency, high scalability, consistency and high availability often conflict with each other. This paper shows how a large-scale key-value storage system can be extended to provide secondary indexes while meeting those goals. The architecture, called SLIK, enables multiple secondary indexes for each table. SLIK represents index B+ trees using objects in the underlying key-value store. It allows indexes to be partitioned and distributed independently of the data in tables while providing reasonable consistency guarantees using a lightweight ordered write approach. Our implementation of this design on RAMCloud (a main memory key-value store) performs indexed reads in 11 µs and writes in 30 µs. The architecture supports indexes spanning thousands of nodes, and provides linear scalability for throughput.
Injury-Associated PACAP Expression in Rat Sensory and Motor Neurons Is Induced by Endogenous BDNF

Peripheral nerve injury results in dramatic upregulation in pituitary adenylate cyclase activating polypeptide (PACAP) expression in adult rat dorsal root ganglia and spinal motor neurons mirroring that described for the neurotrophin brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Thus, we posited that injury-associated alterations in BDNF expression regulate the changes in PACAP expression observed in the injured neurons. The role of endogenous BDNF in induction and/or maintenance of PACAP mRNA expression in injured adult rat motor and sensory neurons was examined by intrathecally infusing or intraperitoneally injecting BDNF-specific antibodies or control IgGs immediately at the time of L4-L6 spinal nerve injury, or in a delayed fashion one week later for 3 days followed by analysis of impact on PACAP expression. PACAP mRNA in injured lumbar sensory and motor neurons was detected using in situ hybridization, allowing quantification of relative changes between experimental groups, with ATF-3 immunofluorescence serving to identify the injured subpopulation of motor neurons. Both the incidence and level of PACAP mRNA expression were dramatically reduced in injured sensory and motor neurons in response to immediate intrathecal anti-BDNF treatment. In contrast, neither intraperitoneal injections nor delayed intrathecal infusions of anti-BDNF had any discernible impact on PACAP expression. This impact on PACAP expression in response to BDNF immunoneutralization in DRG was confirmed using qRT-PCR or by using BDNF selective siRNAs to reduce neuronal BDNF expression. Collectively, our findings support that endogenous injury-associated BDNF expression is critically involved in induction, but not maintenance, of injury-associated PACAP expression in sensory and motor neurons.
Changes in balance strategy in the third trimester

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to elucidate changes in balance strategy during pregnancy from a kinematics perspective. [Subjects] Eight pregnant women and eight non-pregnant women participated. [Methods] A 3D motion analysis system, two force plates, and 10 infrared cameras were used to measure the kinematics of the balance strategy. The 3D motion analysis system was used to analyze performance of the functional reach test (FRT). Parameters were compared between non-pregnant women and pregnant women during each trimester, and between pregnant women in the second and third trimesters. [Results] The FRT of pregnant women was shorter than that of non-pregnant women. Bilateral hip joint extension moments were smaller in pregnant women in the second and third trimesters compared to non-pregnant women. Bilateral ankle plantar flexion moments were larger in pregnant women in their third trimester compared to non-pregnant women. In pregnant women, the right ankle plantar flexion moment was larger in the third trimester than in the second trimester. [Conclusion] These results suggest that forward reach distance is reduced, and that the ankle joint strategy takes precedence over the hip joint strategy in maintaining balance during pregnancy compared to non-pregnancy.
The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations

We show that the design and decentralized scoring of New York’s high school exit exams—the Regents Examinations—led to systematic manipulation of test scores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Exploiting a series of reforms that eliminated score manipulation, we find heterogeneous effects of test score manipulation on academic outcomes. While inflating a score increases the probability of a student graduating from high school by about 17 percentage points, the probability of taking advanced coursework declines by roughly 10 percentage points. We argue that these results are consistent with test score manipulation helping less advanced students on the margin of dropping out but hurting more advanced students that are not pushed to gain a solid foundation in the introductory material. (JEL H75, I21, I28)
Pupils' views Excluded pupils' views of their educational needs and experiences

Susan de Pear argues that disaffected and excluded pupils are too often blamed for their own difficulties. By interviewing and analysing the responses of such students, she comes to the conclusion that had teaching and learning styles been more sensitively addressed earlier in their careers, most subsequent problems would have been ironed out. This article sits comfortably with the views presented elsewhere in this issue by Banner and Rayner.
Have We Met Before? Pigeons Recognise Familiar Human Faces

Despite growing evidence for the recognition of conspecifics, studies on heterospecific recognition are still scarce. There is some evidence that birds living in urban habitats are able to distinguish between specific humans, depending on their previous experience with them. Nonetheless, the features by which the birds actually discriminated among humans remain unclear. This study investigated whether pigeons are capable of performing such a sophisticated categorisation and the features relevant to making this discrimination. The results revealed that pigeons are able to discriminate reliably between familiar and unfamiliar humans and provide evidence that facial features are important for this recognition. Furthermore, our results suggest that the ability to discriminate between individual heterospecifics is not restricted to bird species that are considered highly cognitive.
Tax Relieves Transcriptional Repression by Promoting Histone Deacetylase 1 Release from the Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus Type 1 Long Terminal Repeat

ABSTRACT Expression of human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1) is regulated by the viral transcriptional activator Tax. Tax activates viral transcription through interaction with the cellular transcription factor CREB and the coactivators CBP/p300. In this study, we have analyzed the role of histone deacetylase 1 (HDAC1) on HTLV-1 gene expression from an integrated template. First we show that trichostatin A, an HDAC inhibitor, enhances Tax expression in HTLV-1-transformed cells. Second, using a cell line containing a single-copy HTLV-1 long terminal repeat, we demonstrate that overexpression of HDAC1 represses Tax transactivation. Furthermore, a chromatin immunoprecipitation assay allowed us to analyze the interaction of transcription factors, coactivators, and HDACs with the basal and activated HTLV-1 promoter. We demonstrate that HDAC1 is associated with the inactive, but not the Tax-transactivated, HTLV-1 promoter. In vitro and in vivo glutathione S-transferase-Tax pull-down and coimmunoprecipitation experiments demonstrated that there is a direct physical association between Tax and HDAC1. Importantly, biotinylated chromatin pull-down assays demonstrated that Tax inhibits and/or dissociates the binding of HDAC1 to the HTLV-1 promoter. Our results provide evidence that Tax interacts directly with HDAC1 and regulates binding of the repressor to the HTLV-1 promoter.
Fast Tracking of Deformable Objects in Depth and Colour Video

One challenge in computer vision is the joint reconstruction of deforming objects from colour and depth videos. So far, a lot of research has focused on deformation reconstruction based on colour images only, but as range cameras like the recently released Kinect become more and more common, the incorporation of depth information becomes feasible. In this article, a new method is introduced to track object deformation in depth and colour image data. The tracking is done by translating, rotating, and deforming a prototype of an object such that it fits the depth and colour data best. The prototype can either be cut out from the first depth/colour frame of the input sequence or an already known textured geometry can be used. A NURBS [2] based deformation function allows to decouple the geometrical object complexity from the complexity of the deformation itself, providing a relatively low dimensional space to describe arbitrary ’realistic’ deformations. This is done by first approximating the object surface using a standard NURBS function N and then registering every object vertex to the surface as depicted in figure 1.
Dynamic range independent image quality assessment

The diversity of display technologies and introduction of high dynamic range imagery introduces the necessity of comparing images of radically different dynamic ranges. Current quality assessment metrics are not suitable for this task, as they assume that both reference and test images have the same dynamic range. Image fidelity measures employed by a majority of current metrics, based on the difference of pixel intensity or contrast values between test and reference images, result in meaningless predictions if this assumption does not hold. We present a novel image quality metric capable of operating on an image pair where both images have arbitrary dynamic ranges. Our metric utilizes a model of the human visual system, and its central idea is a new definition of visible distortion based on the detection and classification of visible changes in the image structure. Our metric is carefully calibrated and its performance is validated through perceptual experiments. We demonstrate possible applications of our metric to the evaluation of direct and inverse tone mapping operators as well as the analysis of the image appearance on displays with various characteristics.
Modular monadic meta-theory

This paper presents 3MT, a framework for modular mechanized meta-theory of languages with effects. Using 3MT, individual language features and their corresponding definitions -- semantic functions, theorem statements and proofs-- can be built separately and then reused to create different languages with fully mechanized meta-theory. 3MT combines modular datatypes and monads to define denotational semantics with effects on a per-feature basis, without fixing the particular set of effects or language constructs. One well-established problem with type soundness proofs for denotational semantics is that they are notoriously brittle with respect to the addition of new effects. The statement of type soundness for a language depends intimately on the effects it uses, making it particularly challenging to achieve modularity. 3MT solves this long-standing problem by splitting these theorems into two separate and reusable parts: a feature theorem that captures the well-typing of denotations produced by the semantic function of an individual feature with respect to only the effects used, and an effect theorem that adapts well-typings of denotations to a fixed superset of effects. The proof of type soundness for a particular language simply combines these theorems for its features and the combination of their effects. To establish both theorems, 3MT uses two key reasoning techniques: modular induction and algebraic laws about effects. Several effectful language features, including references and errors, illustrate the capabilities of 3MT. A case study reuses these features to build fully mechanized definitions and proofs for 28 languages, including several versions of mini-ML with effects.
Two-tailed RT-qPCR: a novel method for highly accurate miRNA quantification

Abstract MicroRNAs are a class of small non-coding RNAs that serve as important regulators of gene expression at the posttranscriptional level. They are stable in body fluids and pose great potential to serve as biomarkers. Here, we present a highly specific, sensitive and cost-effective system to quantify miRNA expression based on two-step RT-qPCR with SYBR-green detection chemistry called Two-tailed RT-qPCR. It takes advantage of novel, target-specific primers for reverse transcription composed of two hemiprobes complementary to two different parts of the targeted miRNA, connected by a hairpin structure. The introduction of a second probe ensures high sensitivity and enables discrimination of highly homologous miRNAs irrespectively of the position of the mismatched nucleotide. Two-tailed RT-qPCR has a dynamic range of seven logs and a sensitivity sufficient to detect down to ten target miRNA molecules. It is capable to capture the full isomiR repertoire, leading to accurate representation of the complete miRNA content in a sample. The reverse transcription step can be multiplexed and the miRNA profiles measured with Two-tailed RT-qPCR show excellent correlation with the industry standard TaqMan miRNA assays (r2 = 0.985). Moreover, Two-tailed RT-qPCR allows for rapid testing with a total analysis time of less than 2.5 hours.
Higher Prostate Cancer Grade Groups Are Detected in Patients Undergoing Multiparametric MRI-targeted Biopsy Compared With Standard Biopsy

Recent studies have suggested that multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)/ultrasound (US) fusion–guided prostate biopsy can detect more clinically significant prostate cancers, which could impact patient management. As many of the studies evaluating MRI/US fusion–guided prostate biopsy were conducted in specialized quaternary care centers, the question remains whether this technology is transferable to general practice. Our study assesses the diagnostic ability of MRI/US fusion–guided prostate biopsy compared with standard biopsy in the new era of prostate cancer Grade Grouping. We reviewed our prostate biopsy database evaluating men who underwent MRI/US fusion–guided prostate biopsy with concurrent standard 12-core extended-sextant biopsy. Patient demographics and pathologic findings were reviewed. All patient biopsies were performed by 1 of 2 urologic oncologists. Tumors were given a Grade Group for each biopsy based on the core with the highest grade in each case. A total of 191 patients underwent MRI/US fusion–guided biopsy with concurrent 12-core extended sextant biopsy, with a cancer detection rate of 56%. The average number of biopsy cores obtained via the targeted approach was significantly less than those obtained by standard biopsy, 4.8 cores versus 12 cores, respectively, P<0.001. There was no difference in cancer detection between targeted and standard biopsy, 41.4% and 49.2%, respectively, P=0.15. However, when comparing the 2 techniques, the degree of detection of ≥Grade Group 3 tumors significantly favored targeted biopsy over standard biopsy (P=0.009). MRI/US fusion–guided prostate biopsy is equivalent to the standard-of-care 12-core biopsy in terms of cancer detection and superior in detecting higher grade disease.
Quantifying perceived differences in type styles: An exploratory study

This article reports on the results of an experiment to determine whether type style is a significant influence on readers' affective response to print. A repeated-measures, full-factorial design employing 250 subjects revealed that readers respond differently to both serif and sans serif general print types and to specific types within these major classifications. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.