Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disproportionately high incidence of diabetes-related end-stage renal disease in the Canary Islands. An analysis based on estimated population at risk.

BACKGROUND An exceptionally high incidence of diabetes-related end-stage renal disease (DM-ESRD) has been reported in the Canary Islands. This phenomenon was attributed to an increased prevalence of diabetes in this community. We compared the incidence of DM-ESRD in the Canary Islands with the rest of Spain among the estimated number of individuals at risk (people with diabetes in the population). METHODS The population-at-risk was calculated using census population figures and estimates of self-reported diabetes prevalence from the Spanish National Health Survey in the years 2003 and 2006. The incidence of DM-ESRD for the same years was obtained through Spanish regional registries. The independent effect of age, community of residence and calendar year was estimated with a Poisson regression model. Age-standardized acceptance rate ratios were calculated for each community. RESULTS Overall DM-ESRD incidence in the Canary Islands population-at-risk was 1209.9 per million population (pmp) in 2003 and 1477.3 pmp in 2006. Rates for the remaining Spanish regions ranged from 177.3-984.9 pmp. The incidence was higher in the Canary Islands across all age groups, but was most striking for patients > or =75 years. Diabetes prevalence in the general population was greater in the two youngest age strata and diminished from 75 years on in the Canary Islands, in comparison with other areas of Spain. Using a cluster of three communities with the lowest incidence as a reference, the relative risk of DM-ESRD in the Canary Islands population-at-risk was 3.88 [95% confidence interval (CI): 3.07-4.89]. Age-standardized acceptance ratios (95% CI) in the Canary Islands were 2.21 (1.85-2.61) in 2003 and 2.73 (2.34-3.17) in 2006. CONCLUSIONS Individuals with diabetes in the Canary Islands present a disproportionately high incidence of ESRD. Diabetic Canary inhabitants are exposed to the disease for a longer time and therefore, may be more vulnerable to the development of chronic diabetes complications, including ESRD.
Single-Item Screening for Agoraphobic Symptoms: Validation of a Web-Based Audiovisual Screening Instrument

The advent of web-based treatments for anxiety disorders creates a need for quick and valid online screening instruments, suitable for a range of social groups. This study validates a single-item multimedia screening instrument for agoraphobia, part of the Visual Screener for Common Mental Disorders (VS-CMD), and compares it with the text-based agoraphobia items of the PDSS-SR. The study concerned 85 subjects in an RCT of the effects of web-based therapy for panic symptoms. The VS-CMD item and items 4 and 5 of the PDSS-SR were validated by comparing scores to the outcomes of the CIDI diagnostic interview. Screening for agoraphobia was found moderately valid for both the multimedia item (sensitivity.81, specificity.66, AUC.734) and the text-based items (AUC.607–.697). Single-item multimedia screening for anxiety disorders should be further developed and tested in the general population and in patient, illiterate and immigrant samples.
CtIP Mutations Cause Seckel and Jawad Syndromes

Seckel syndrome is a recessively inherited dwarfism disorder characterized by microcephaly and a unique head profile. Genetically, it constitutes a heterogeneous condition, with several loci mapped (SCKL1-5) but only three disease genes identified: the ATR, CENPJ, and CEP152 genes that control cellular responses to DNA damage. We previously mapped a Seckel syndrome locus to chromosome 18p11.31-q11.2 (SCKL2). Here, we report two mutations in the CtIP (RBBP8) gene within this locus that result in expression of C-terminally truncated forms of CtIP. We propose that these mutations are the molecular cause of the disease observed in the previously described SCKL2 family and in an additional unrelated family diagnosed with a similar form of congenital microcephaly termed Jawad syndrome. While an exonic frameshift mutation was found in the Jawad family, the SCKL2 family carries a splicing mutation that yields a dominant-negative form of CtIP. Further characterization of cell lines derived from the SCKL2 family revealed defective DNA damage induced formation of single-stranded DNA, a critical co-factor for ATR activation. Accordingly, SCKL2 cells present a lowered apoptopic threshold and hypersensitivity to DNA damage. Notably, over-expression of a comparable truncated CtIP variant in non-Seckel cells recapitulates SCKL2 cellular phenotypes in a dose-dependent manner. This work thus identifies CtIP as a disease gene for Seckel and Jawad syndromes and defines a new type of genetic disease mechanism in which a dominant negative mutation yields a recessively inherited disorder.
Predictive risk maps

This paper addresses the problem of risk assessment in dynamic traffic environments for future behavior evaluation and planning. Risk assessment has to be driven from behavioral needs of the acting scene entity to evaluate the best possible future behavior. We present a general approach for a temporally continuous future risk estimation. Using this risk estimation, we introduce predictive risk maps based on the variation of the acting entities' possible dynamics. The predictive risk maps indicate how critical a certain behavior will be in the future and we use them for future behavior evaluation and planning. Explicitly introducing risk indicators for the collision case of moving entities we show the generality of our approach by applying it to several different traffic scene types.
Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Helicopters MEng project report Pedro Antonio Mart́ınez Mediano Supervised by Marc Deisenroth and

This work is framed within the 2014 Reinforcement Learning Competition, an annual gathering in which researchers and students in the field of Reinforcement Learning compete in a variety of problem domains. In this report we describe the basic aspects of Reinforcement Learning and the problems proposed by the Competition. Of those, we tackle the problem of autonomous helicopter control, which consists of learning a controller in an environment with unknown, non-linear dynamics and a black-box reward function without any previous knowledge. We build upon the state-of-the-art, data-efficient pilco algorithm for Reinforcement Learning and propose modifications to suit this specific problem. We were able to successfully learn a controller to perform different aerobatic trajectories. Our method provides an improvement of several orders of magnitude in terms of number of agent-environment interactions compared to the winners of previous Competitions. This approach drastically reduces the experience time needed to learn a controller, while achieving a performance similar to the most sophisticated methods available, showing once again that model-based Reinforcement Learning is a feasible option to learn effective controllers for real-world applications.
‘But I can do the job’: examining disability employment practice through human rights complaint cases

Abstract Natural data on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s website outlining the complaint cases generated from Disability Discrimination Act, 1992 (DDA) were used to examine the social construction of disability employment discrimination. Using a social model and human rights citizenship lens, some 987 complaint cases were analysed to assess the prevalence of disability discrimination in employment, and its relationship to the types of disability, gender, entity undertaking the actions and organisational context. Of all complaint cases across the Australian Human Rights Commission’s operations, by far the largest proportion involves disability discrimination. Within the disability discrimination complaint cases, employment makes up the greatest proportion of these cases. In examining the patterns of discrimination seven major themes emerged involving: distinctive patterns across disability type; access to premises; human resource mismanagement; selection of new employees; integration of assistive technology; perception of cost of disability inclusions; and inflexible organisational workplace practices. The discussion examines the underlying reasons for the emergent themes where employers misunderstood key legal concepts that underpin the DDA including: unjustifiable hardship; inherent requirements; reasonable adjustment; direct; and indirect discrimination. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings as a way of understanding the social construction of disability discrimination in employment to signal ways to better develop inclusive organisational practice.
Neural Correlates of First-Person Perspective as One Constituent of Human Self-Consciousness

Taking the first-person perspective (1PP) centered upon one's own body as opposed to the third-person perspective (3PP), which enables us to take the viewpoint of someone else, is constitutive for human self-consciousness. At the underlying representational or cognitive level, these operations are processed in an egocentric reference frame, where locations are represented centered around another person's (3PP) or one's own perspective (1PP). To study 3PP and 1PP, both operating in egocentric frames, a virtual scene with an avatar and red balls in a room was presented from different camera viewpoints to normal volunteers (n = 11) in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. The task for the subjects was to count the objects as seen either from the avatar's perspective (3PP) or one's own perspective (1PP). The scene was presented either from a ground view (GV) or an aerial view (AV) to investigate the effect of view on perspective taking. The factors perspective (3PP vs. 1PP) and view (GV vs. AV) were arranged in a two-factorial way. Reaction times were increased and percent correctness scores were decreased in 3PP as opposed to 1PP. To detect the neural mechanisms associated with perspective taking, functional magnetic resonance imaging was employed. Data were analyzed using SPM'99 in each subject and non-parametric statistics on the group level. Activations common to 3PP and 1PP (relative to baseline) were observed in a network of occipital, parietal, and prefrontal areas. Deactivations common to 3PP and 1PP (relative to baseline) were observed predominantly in mesial (i.e., parasagittal) cortical and lateral superior temporal areas bilaterally. Differential increases of neural activity were found in mesial superior parietal and right premotor cortex during 3PP (relative to 1PP), whereas differential increases during 1PP (relative to 3PP) were found in mesial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and superior temporal cortex bilaterally. The data suggest that in addition to joint neural mechanisms, for example, due to visuospatial processing and decision making, 3PP and 1PP rely on differential neural processes. Mesial cortical areas are involved in decisional processes when the spatial task is solved from one's own viewpoint, whereas egocentric operations from another person's perspective differentially draw upon cortical areas known to be involved in spatial cognition.
Low-rank kernel learning for semi-supervised clustering

In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in distance function learning for semi-supervised clustering settings. In addition to the earlier methods that learn Mahalanobis metrics (or equivalently, linear transformations), some nonlinear metric learning methods have also been recently introduced. However, these methods either allow limited choice of distance metrics yielding limited flexibility or learn nonparametric kernel matrices and scale very poorly (prohibiting applicability to medium and large data sets). In this paper, we propose a novel method that learns low-rank kernel matrices from pairwise constraints and unlabeled data. We formulate the proposed method as a trace ratio optimization problem and learn appropriate distance metrics through finding optimal low-rank kernel matrices. The proposed optimization problem can be solved much more efficiently than SDP problems introduced to learn nonparametric kernel matrices. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on synthetic and real-world data sets.
Let ’ s Go to the Whiteboard : How and Why Software Developers Draw Code

Software developers are rooted in the written form of their code, yet they often draw diagrams representing their code. Unfortunately, we still know little about how and why they create these diagrams, and so there is little research to inform the design of visual tools to support developers’ work. This paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews that have been validated with a structured survey. Results show that most of the diagrams had a transient nature because of the high cost of changing whiteboard sketches to electronic renderings. Diagrams that documented design decisions were often externalized in these temporary drawings and then subsequently lost. Current visualization tools and the software development practices that we observed do not solve these issues, but these results suggest several directions for future research. Author
Switching Costs as a Mediating Variable for Service Quality, Satisfaction, and Repurchase Intention

This study identified the relationships among perceived service quality, customer satisfaction, switching cost, and repurchase intention. It also examined the antecedents of switching cost which would have a significant effect on repurchase intention in the airline industry. A survey was conducted at Incheon International Airport in South Korea between March 13, and 16, 2014, using the convenience sampling method. Potential participants were asked whether they had an interest in filling out a questionnaire, then the questionnaires were collected immediately upon completion. After 200 self-administered questionnaires were distributed, 193 usable questionnaires were obtained. The proposed model had a satisfactory fit with the data and the inclusion of these variables significantly increased the model’s ability to predict customers’ repurchase intentions. The relationships that this study were able to establish are the following: 1) perceived service quality has a significant effect on customer satisfaction; 2) there is significant relationship between perceived service quality and switching cost; 3) customer satisfaction is a key factor influencing switching cost; and 4) switching cost affects customer repurchase intention. From the results, theoretical and practical implications were suggested.
Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei : are they UV faint and radio loud?

Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are perceived to be radio loud and devoid of a 'big blue bump', indicating a transition from a radiatively efficient, geometrically thin, accretion disc in high-luminosity AGNs, to a geometrically thick, radiatively inefficient accretion flow at low luminosities and accretion rates. I revisit the issue of the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of low-luminosity AGNs using recently published, high angular resolution data at radio, ultraviolet (UV) and X-ray wavelengths, for a sample of 13 nearby galaxies with low-ionization nuclear emission-line region (LINER) nuclei. I show that, contrary to common wisdom, low-luminosity LINERs have significant non-stellar UV flux, and UV/X-ray luminosity ratios similar, on average, to those of Seyfert 1 nuclei ∼10 4 times more luminous. The α ox index that quantifies this ratio is in the range between -0.8 and - 1.4, and is below the extrapolation to low luminosities of the relation between α ox and UV luminosity observed at higher luminosities. In terms of radio loudness, most of the LINERs are indeed radio loud (or sometimes even 'super radio loud') based on their radio/UV luminosity ratios, when compared to the most luminous quasars. However, the entire distribution of radio loudness has been shown to shift to higher radio/UV ratios at low AGN luminosities. In the context of this global shift, some LINERs (the majority) can be considered radio quiet, and some (from among those with black hole masses > ∼ 10 8.5 M ⊙ ) are radio loud. The SEDs of these low-luminosity (∼10 40 erg s ¯1 AGNs are thus quite similar to those of Seyferts up to luminosities of ∼10 44 erg s¯1, and there is no evidence for a sharp change in the SED at the lowest luminosities. Thin AGN accretion discs may therefore persist at low accretion rates, in analogy to some recent findings for Galactic stellar-mass accreting black holes.
Fatty acid ethyl ester synthase inhibition ameliorates ethanol-induced Ca2+-dependent mitochondrial dysfunction and acute pancreatitis

Objective Non-oxidative metabolism of ethanol (NOME) produces fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEEs) via carboxylester lipase (CEL) and other enzyme action implicated in mitochondrial injury and acute pancreatitis (AP). This study investigated the relative importance of oxidative and non-oxidative pathways in mitochondrial dysfunction, pancreatic damage and development of alcoholic AP, and whether deleterious effects of NOME are preventable. Design Intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]C), NAD(P)H, mitochondrial membrane potential and activation of apoptotic and necrotic cell death pathways were examined in isolated pancreatic acinar cells in response to ethanol and/or palmitoleic acid (POA) in the presence or absence of 4-methylpyrazole (4-MP) to inhibit oxidative metabolism. A novel in vivo model of alcoholic AP induced by intraperitoneal administration of ethanol and POA was developed to assess the effects of manipulating alcohol metabolism. Results Inhibition of OME with 4-MP converted predominantly transient [Ca2+]C rises induced by low ethanol/POA combination to sustained elevations, with concurrent mitochondrial depolarisation, fall of NAD(P)H and cellular necrosis in vitro. All effects were prevented by 3-benzyl-6-chloro-2-pyrone (3-BCP), a CEL inhibitor. 3-BCP also significantly inhibited rises of pancreatic FAEE in vivo and ameliorated acute pancreatic damage and inflammation induced by administration of ethanol and POA to mice. Conclusions A combination of low ethanol and fatty acid that did not exert deleterious effects per se became toxic when oxidative metabolism was inhibited. The in vitro and in vivo damage was markedly inhibited by blockade of CEL, indicating the potential for development of specific therapy for treatment of alcoholic AP via inhibition of FAEE generation.
Nucleotide Excision Repair in Cellular Chromatin: Studies with Yeast from Nucleotide to Gene to Genome

Here we review our development of, and results with, high resolution studies on global genome nucleotide excision repair (GGNER) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We have focused on how GGNER relates to histone acetylation for its functioning and we have identified the histone acetyl tranferase Gcn5 and acetylation at lysines 9/14 of histone H3 as a major factor in enabling efficient repair. We consider results employing primarily MFA2 as a model gene, but also those with URA3 located at subtelomeric sequences. In the latter case we also see a role for acetylation at histone H4. We then go on to outline the development of a high resolution genome-wide approach that enables one to examine correlations between histone modifications and the nucleotide excision repair (NER) of UV-induced cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers throughout entire genomes. This is an approach that will enable rapid advances in understanding the complexities of how compacted chromatin in chromosomes is processed to access DNA damage and then returned to its pre-damaged status to maintain epigenetic codes.
Early Outbreak of 2009 Influenza A (H1N1) in Mexico Prior to Identification of pH1N1 Virus

Background In the aftermath of the global spread of 2009 influenza A (pH1N1) virus, still very little is known of the early stages of the outbreak in Mexico during the early months of the year, before the virus was identified. Methodology/Main Findings We fit a simple mathematical model, the Richards model, to the number of excess laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in Mexico and Mexico City during the first 15 weeks in 2009 over the average influenza case number of the previous five baseline years of 2004-2008 during the same period to ascertain the turning point (or the peak incidence) of a wave of early influenza infections, and to estimate the transmissibility of the virus during these early months in terms of its basic reproduction number. The results indicate that there may have been an early epidemic in Mexico City as well as in all of Mexico during February/March. Based on excess influenza cases, the estimated basic reproduction number R0 for the early outbreak was 1.59 (0.55 to 2.62) for Mexico City during weeks 5–9, and 1.25 (0.76, 1.74) for all of Mexico during weeks 5–14. Conclusions We established the existence of an early epidemic in Mexico City and in all of Mexico during February/March utilizing the routine influenza surveillance data, although the location of seeding is unknown. Moreover, estimates of R0 as well as the time of peak incidence (the turning point) for Mexico City and all of Mexico indicate that the early epidemic in Mexico City in February/March had been more transmissible (larger R0) and peaked earlier than the rest of the country. Our conclusion lends support to the possibility that the virus could have already spread to other continents prior to the identification of the virus and the reporting of lab-confirmed pH1N1 cases in North America in April.
LEXICAL CHARACTERISTIC MEDIATE THE INFLUENCE OF SEX AND SEX TYPICALITY ON VOWEL-SPACE SIZE

Sex differences in vowel acoustics were found to be mediated by words' frequency of use and phonological neighborhood density. Larger sex differences in vowel-space expansion were found for words with high frequency of use and for words with small phonological neighborhoods, than for words than for words with low frequency of use and high neighborhood density. Results suggest that talkers' production of social-indexical variants is constrained by the influence these might have on word recognition.
Assessment of facial golden proportions among central Indian population

Aim: This study aimed to identify and establish the facial and smile proportions in young adults and to compare the results with ideal or divine proportions, compare the proportions of males and females included in our study population and compare them with those established for Caucasian and Japanese populations. Materials and Methods: Two hundred participants (164 females, 36 males) with Angle′s class I malocclusion (M.O). and well-balanced faces were selected and photographed in the frontal repose position. Analysis was done in Adobe Photoshop software. Statistical analysis was done using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 17.0. (IBM Corporation Armonk, New York, United States). Results: Results suggested that females are more near to ideal ratios and males are more deviated from the ideal ratios. The proportions of males and females were not considerably different from each other. In Indian population, upper 3 rd facial height (TR-LC) was increased and mid-face height (LC-LN) was decreased; in lower 3 rd of the face, LN-CH was slightly increased in comparison to CH-ME. In facial widths, outer canthal width (LC-LC) was greater in the Indian population and mouth width (CH-CH) was normal. When compared with Indian population, Japanese participants had wider noses, outer canthal distance, and bitemporal width. Conclusion: It was concluded that significant difference was found between the proportions of the Indian population and ideal ratio. When Indian population was compared with Japanese and Caucasian populations, some parameters of facial proportions showed significant difference, which leads to the need for establishing standardized norms for various facial proportions in Indian population.