Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic polymorphism of alcohol dehydrogenase in europeans: TheADH2*2 allele decreases the risk for alcoholism and is associated with ADH3*1

Polymorphism at the ADH2 and ADH3 loci of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) has been shown to have an effect on the predisposition to alcoholism in Asian individuals. However, the results are not conclusive for white individuals. We have analyzed the ADH genotype of 876 white individuals from Spain (n = 251), France (n = 160), Germany (n = 184), Sweden (n = 88), and Poland (n = 193). Peripheral blood samples from healthy controls and groups of patients with viral cirrhosis and alcohol‐induced cirrhosis, as well as alcoholics with no liver disease, were collected on filter paper. Genotyping of the ADH2 and ADH3 loci was performed using polymerase chain reaction‐restriction fragment length polymorphism methods on white cell DNA. In healthy controls, ADH2*2 frequencies ranged from 0% (France) to 5.4% (Spain), whereas ADH3*1 frequencies ranged from 47.6% (Germany) to 62.5% (Sweden). Statistically significant differences were not found, however, between controls from different countries, nor between patients with alcoholism and/or liver disease. When all individuals were grouped in nonalcoholics (n = 451) and alcoholics (n = 425), ADH2*2 frequency was higher in nonalcoholics (3.8%) than in alcoholics (1.3%) (P = .0016), whereas the ADH3 alleles did not show differences. Linkage disequilibrium was found between ADH2 and ADH3, resulting in an association of the alleles ADH2*2 and ADH3*1, both coding for the most active enzymatic forms. In conclusion, the ADH2*2 allele decreases the risk for alcoholism, whereas the ADH2*2 and ADH3*1 alleles are found to be associated in the European population.
Psychosocial rehabilitation services in community support systems: a review of outcomes and policy recommendations.

OBJECTIVE This review examines the place of psychosocial rehabilitation services within community support systems in light of the need for mental health service systems to develop policies to direct the use of limited resources. METHODS Literature reporting experimental or quasi-experimental outcome studies of psychosocial rehabilitation interventions for persons with severe and persistent mental illnesses was reviewed, with a focus on skills training, family psychoeducation, and supported employment. A meta-analysis of the findings from recent outcomes studies was done. An integrative cost-outcome analysis examined allocation of resources among various levels of service intensity. RESULTS The clinical characteristics and service needs of persons with serious and persistent mental illness vary significantly throughout the life cycle and course of the illness. Outcomes research strongly supports use of psychosocial rehabilitation but is insufficiently developed to determine the effects of service components used at varying levels of intensity and the interaction of those components with client characteristics, medication levels, or phase of the illness. Cost-effectiveness studies of psychosocial rehabilitation show an average reduction of more than 50 percent in cost of care due to reduced hospitalizations. CONCLUSIONS Continued research is required to further specify the effects of psychosocial interventions and to determine the most effective amount and intensity of those interventions. Current evidence supports a policy of funding the psychosocial rehabilitation components of community support systems and balancing allocations for these systems among various levels of service intensity.
Gaming to sit safe: the restricted body as an integral part of gameplay

This paper presents a design exploration of full-body interaction games played in cars. It describes how we have designed, implemented, and evaluated the core experiences of three different games, which were all aimed at making sitting properly more fun for players/children while travelling by car. By making the restricted body an integral part of gameplay, we hope to, as a side product of gameplay, bring about the best and also most safe body posture for young players/children travelling by car, i.e., sitting reasonably upright and still in their child seat with their head leaning back on the neck rest. Another outcome of this could also be an overall safer situation in the car, in that children not sitting still in their child seats while being driven might be stressful for the driver. By presenting the details of our design efforts in this particular design context, we hope to add also to the knowledge we, in HCI, have for how to design bodily experiences with technology at large.
Voronoi diagrams and arrangements

We propose a uniform and general framework for defining and dealing with Voronoi diagrams. In this framework a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a domainD induced by a finite number of real valued functions onD. Valuable insight can be gained when one considers how these real valued functions partitionD ×R. With this view it turns out that the standard Euclidean Voronoi diagram of point sets inRd along with its order-k generalizations are intimately related to certain arrangements of hyperplanes. This fact can be used to obtain new Voronoi diagram algorithms. We also discuss how the formalism of arrangements can be used to solve certain intersection and union problems.
Canine epilepsy as a translational model?

Dogs with spontaneous diseases can exhibit a striking similarity in etiology, clinical manifestation, and disease course when compared to human patients. Therefore, dogs are intensely discussed as a translational model of human disease. In particular, genetic studies in selected dog breeds serve as an excellent tool to identify epilepsy disease genes. In addition, canine epilepsy is discussed as a translational platform for drug testing. On one hand, epileptic dogs might serve as an interesting model by allowing the evaluation of drug efficacy and potency under clinical conditions with a focus on chronic seizures resistant to standard medication, preventive strategies, or status epilepticus. On the other hand, several limitations need to be considered including owner‐based seizure monitoring, species differences in pharmacokinetics and drug interactions, as well as cost‐intensiveness. The review gives an overview on the current state of knowledge regarding the etiology, clinical manifestation, pathology, and drug response of canine epilepsy, also pointing out the urgent need for further research on specific aspects. Moreover, the putative advantages, the disadvantages, and limitations of antiepileptic drug testing in canine epilepsy are critically discussed.
The mechanical properties and tribological behavior of epoxy resin composites modified by different shape nanofillers

Mechanical properties and tribological behavior of epoxy resin (EP) and EP nanocomposites containing different shape nanofillers, such as spherical silica (SiO2), layered organo-modified montmorillonite (oMMT) and oMMT-SiO2 composites, were investigated. The SiO2-oMMT composites were prepared by in situ deposition method and coupling agent modification, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis shows that spherical SiO2 is self-assembled on the surface of oMMT, which forms a novel layered-spherical nanostructure. The mechanical properties test results show that oMMT obviously improves the strength of EP and SiO2 enhances its toughness, but oMMT-SiO2 exhibits a synergistic effect on toughening and reinforcing EP simultaneously. A pin-on-disc rig was used to test friction and wear loss of pure EP and EP nanocomposites. The tribological test results prove that these nanofillers with different shapes play different roles for improving the wear resistance of EP nanocomposites. Morphologies of the worn surfaces were studied further by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) observations, and it was clarified that the EP and EP nanocomposites undergo similar wear mechanisms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Plastics, the environment and human health: current consensus and future trends

Plastics have transformed everyday life; usage is increasing and annual production is likely to exceed 300 million tonnes by 2010. In this concluding paper to the Theme Issue on Plastics, the Environment and Human Health, we synthesize current understanding of the benefits and concerns surrounding the use of plastics and look to future priorities, challenges and opportunities. It is evident that plastics bring many societal benefits and offer future technological and medical advances. However, concerns about usage and disposal are diverse and include accumulation of waste in landfills and in natural habitats, physical problems for wildlife resulting from ingestion or entanglement in plastic, the leaching of chemicals from plastic products and the potential for plastics to transfer chemicals to wildlife and humans. However, perhaps the most important overriding concern, which is implicit throughout this volume, is that our current usage is not sustainable. Around 4 per cent of world oil production is used as a feedstock to make plastics and a similar amount is used as energy in the process. Yet over a third of current production is used to make items of packaging, which are then rapidly discarded. Given our declining reserves of fossil fuels, and finite capacity for disposal of waste to landfill, this linear use of hydrocarbons, via packaging and other short-lived applications of plastic, is simply not sustainable. There are solutions, including material reduction, design for end-of-life recyclability, increased recycling capacity, development of bio-based feedstocks, strategies to reduce littering, the application of green chemistry life-cycle analyses and revised risk assessment approaches. Such measures will be most effective through the combined actions of the public, industry, scientists and policymakers. There is some urgency, as the quantity of plastics produced in the first 10 years of the current century is likely to approach the quantity produced in the entire century that preceded.
Differential Gene Expression in Incompatible Interaction between Phytophthora capsici and Capsicum annuum

Pepper (Capsicum annuum L) is an important economic vegetable crop in worldwide, however the pepper blight caused by Phytophthora capsici has been epidemic in many countries. Little is known about pepper–oomycete interactions at the molecular and genetic levels. The objective of this study was to identify transcriptionally regulated genes during an incompatible interaction between pepper and P.capsici using cDNA-AFLP technique. A total of 100 transcript-derived fragments (TDFs) were sequenced. The result revealed that 84 (88.0%) TDFs produced specific sequences, among which 19 TDFs had relatively clear functions in various categories. Seven TDFs (9.5%) shared high similarities with defense- or stress-related proteins. The TDFs identified in this study will serve as candidates for further studies to determine their functions and dissect the molecular networks involved in the pepper- P.capsici interactions.
On-the-fly pipeline parallelism

Pipeline parallelism organizes a parallel program as a linear sequence of s stages. Each stage processes elements of a data stream, passing each processed data element to the next stage, and then taking on a new element before the subsequent stages have necessarily completed their processing. Pipeline parallelism is used especially in streaming applications that perform video, audio, and digital signal processing. Three out of 13 benchmarks in PARSEC, a popular software benchmark suite designed for shared-memory multiprocessors, can be expressed as pipeline parallelism. Whereas most concurrency platforms that support pipeline parallelism use a "construct-and-run" approach, this paper investigates "on-the-fly" pipeline parallelism, where the structure of the pipeline emerges as the program executes rather than being specified a priori. On-the-fly pipeline parallelism allows the number of stages to vary from iteration to iteration and dependencies to be data dependent. We propose simple linguistics for specifying on-the-fly pipeline parallelism and describe a provably efficient scheduling algorithm, the Piper algorithm, which integrates pipeline parallelism into a work-stealing scheduler, allowing pipeline and fork-join parallelism to be arbitrarily nested. The Piper algorithm automatically throttles the parallelism, precluding "runaway" pipelines. Given a pipeline computation with T1 work and T∞ span (critical-path length), Piper executes the computation on P processors in TP≤ T1/P + O(T∞ + lg P) expected time. Piper also limits stack space, ensuring that it does not grow unboundedly with running time. We have incorporated on-the-fly pipeline parallelism into a Cilk-based work-stealing runtime system. Our prototype Cilk-P implementation exploits optimizations such as lazy enabling and dependency folding. We have ported the three PARSEC benchmarks that exhibit pipeline parallelism to run on Cilk-P. One of these, x264, cannot readily be executed by systems that support only construct-and-run pipeline parallelism. Benchmark results indicate that Cilk-P has low serial overhead and good scalability. On x264, for example, Cilk-P exhibits a speedup of 13.87 over its respective serial counterpart when running on 16 processors.
Scaling the Dynamic Approach to Path Planning and Control: Competition among Behavioral Constraints

The dynamic-systems approach to robotpathplanningdefinesa dynamics ofrbotbehavior in which task constraints contribute independently to a nonlinear vector field that governs robot actions. We address problems that arise in scaling this approach to handle complex behavioral requirements. We propose a dynamics that operates in the space of task constraints, determining the relative contribution of each constraint to the behavioral dynamics. Competition among task constraints is able to deal with problems that arise when combining constraint contributions, making it possible to specify tasks that are mome complex than simple navigation. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we design a system of two agents to perform a cooperative navigation task We show how competition among constraints enables agents to make decisions regarding which behavior to execute in a given situation, resulting in the execution of sequences of behaviors that satisfy task requirements. We discuss the scalability of the competitive-dynamics approach to the design of more complex autonomous systems.
Careers in software: is there life after programming?

Students interested in information systems and information technology careers can see a clear career path - from programmer to chief information officer (CIO). However, those interested in computer science or software engineering are attracted to the technology and seem not to consider what happens at later stages of their careers. This paper draws on a three-year study where senior software practitioners across a variety of roles were interviewed about their work. The findings show profound difficulties in making the transition from hands-on technical work to a role where they achieve through guiding the efforts of others.
Prospective Analysis of the Association of a Common Variant of FTO (rs9939609) with Adiposity in Children: Results of the IDEFICS Study

Objectives We investigated cross-sectionally and longitudinally the relationship between FTO rs9939609 and obesity-related characteristics in the European children of the IDEFICS project and the interaction of this variant with a lifestyle intervention. Population and Methods A cohort of 16224 children (2–9 years) was recruited into a population-based survey (T0) from eight European countries. A second survey (T1) reassessed the children two years later. A random sample of 4405 children was extracted for genetic studies. 3168 children were re-examined two years later. Half of them underwent a lifestyle intervention program. The FTO rs9939609 was genotyped. Weight, height, waist circumference, triceps and subscapular skinfolds were measured at T0 and T1. Results At T0, the risk A allele of rs9939609 was significantly associated with higher values of body mass index (BMI), waist circumference and skinfolds (age, sex, and country-adjusted p-values: all p<0.001) and with a statistically significant increased risk of overweight/obesity. Over the two year follow-up, no interaction between genotype and intervention was observed. The A allele was associated to a significantly higher increase in all the anthropometric variables examined at T0 independently from the study group (intervention versus control) (p-values: all p<0.002, adjusted for age, sex, country, intervention/control study group, T0 values, and individual time interval between T0 and T1). Over the two-year follow–up, 210 new cases of overweight/obesity occurred. A statistically significant higher incidence of overweight/obesity was associated to the A allele [ORA = 1.95, 95% CI = (1.29; 2.97)]. Conclusions We confirmed the association between the FTO rs9939609 and body mass and overweight/obesity risk in European children. The main finding of the study is that the A allele carriers present higher increase of body mass and central adiposity over time and higher risk of developing overweight/obesity during growth, independently from intervention measures.
Dispersal ability and habitat requirements determine landscape‐level genetic patterns in desert aquatic insects

Species occupying the same geographic range can exhibit remarkably different population structures across the landscape, ranging from highly diversified to panmictic. Given limitations on collecting population‐level data for large numbers of species, ecologists seek to identify proximate organismal traits—such as dispersal ability, habitat preference and life history—that are strong predictors of realized population structure. We examined how dispersal ability and habitat structure affect the regional balance of gene flow and genetic drift within three aquatic insects that represent the range of dispersal abilities and habitat requirements observed in desert stream insect communities. For each species, we tested for linear relationships between genetic distances and geographic distances using Euclidean and landscape‐based metrics of resistance. We found that the moderate‐disperser Mesocapnia arizonensis (Plecoptera: Capniidae) has a strong isolation‐by‐distance pattern, suggesting migration–drift equilibrium. By contrast, population structure in the flightless Abedus herberti (Hemiptera: Belostomatidae) is influenced by genetic drift, while gene flow is the dominant force in the strong‐flying Boreonectes aequinoctialis (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae). The best‐fitting landscape model for M. arizonensis was based on Euclidean distance. Analyses also identified a strong spatial scale‐dependence, where landscape genetic methods only performed well for species that were intermediate in dispersal ability. Our results highlight the fact that when either gene flow or genetic drift dominates in shaping population structure, no detectable relationship between genetic and geographic distances is expected at certain spatial scales. This study provides insight into how gene flow and drift interact at the regional scale for these insects as well as the organisms that share similar habitats and dispersal abilities.
Children’s Integration in Communities and Segregation From People of Differing Ages

This article reviews cultural differences in the extent of segregation of children from community life and their integration with people of differing ages, focusing especially on children’s engagement with older children or similar-age children. We highlight cultural differences in children’s everyday companionship with older children and with peers by discussing a study using naturalistic observations of young children’s days in four cultural communities. Young children were more often involved with older children (who were often related to them) among the Efe of the Ituri Forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Guatemalan Mayan town of San Pedro, whereas middle-class European American children from two regions in the United States were more frequently involved with children of similar ages (who were often unrelated to them). The mainstream research focus on similar-age (unrelated) peer involvements, often regarded as the “norm,” needs to be broadened to consider the various patterns of children’s social engagements worldwide, which often involve integration of children in broader communities, engaging with adults and children of all ages.
Design of a Measurement System for Temperature Distribution in Continuous-Flow Microwave Heating of Pumpable Fluids Using Infrared Imaging and Fiber Optic Technology

Continuous microwave heating has the potential to revolutionize processing operations in which high energy densities per unit volume are required. The adoption of microwave heating for large scale commercial application has been hampered by a lack of reliable information on the temperature distribution during heating of pumpable fluids. This study represents an initial attempt to design a system that quantifies the temperature distribution during continuous microwave heating and its relationship with processing tube surface temperature distribution. The novel measurement system designed consisted of a semi-rigid thin axial support system on which fiber optic probes were attached at different lengths in the microwave heating cavity. Inlet, outlet and in-line longitudinal temperatures were monitored during continuous flow microwave heating (1.5 kW, 2.5 kW, 3.5 kW, and 4.5 kW) of water of three different salinities (0 ppt, 15 ppt, and 30 ppt) at a flow rate of 1.6 l/min. Inlet and exit temperatures were measured using standard thermocouples; in line temperatures were determined using fiber optic temperature probes. The surface temperature distribution of the applicator tube was measured using an infrared camera. Results showed that fiber optic-based internal temperatures were 10°C higher than observed external infrared temperatures for fresh water and 14.6°C higher for 30 ppt salt water. The measurement system and method presented are intended to provide experimental validation of numerical models of continuous flow microwave heating, as well as to help develop empirical models of temperature distribution under varying processing parameters.