Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of an EEG Biofeedback Protocol on a Mixed Substance Abusing Population

This study examined whether an EEG biofeedback protocol could improve outcome measures for a mixed substance abusing inpatient population. Method: One hundred twenty-one volunteers undergoing an inpatient substance abuse program were randomly assigned to the EEG biofeedback or control group. EEG biofeedback included training in Beta and SMR to address attentional variables, followed by an alpha-theta protocol. Subjects received a total of 40 to 50 biofeedback sessions. The control group received additional time in treatment equivalent to experimental procedure time. The Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA), and MMPI, were administered with both tester and subject blind as to group placement to obtain unbiased baseline data. Treatment retention and abstinence rates as well as psychometric and cognitive measures were compared. Results: Experimental subjects remained in treatment significantly longer than the control group (p < 0.005). Of the experimental subjects completing the protocol, 77% were abstinent at 12 months, compared to 44% for the controls. Experimental subjects demonstrated significant improvement on the TOVA (p < .005) after an average of 13 beta-SMR sessions. Following alpha-theta training, significant differences were noted on 5 of the 10 MMPI-2 scales at the p < . 005 level. Conclusions: This protocol enhanced treatment retention, variables of attention, and abstinence rates one year following treatment.
Construction and Characterization of Recombinant VLPs and Semliki-Forest Virus Live Vectors for Comparative Evaluation in the SHIV Monkey Model

Abstract For testing of recombinant virus-like particles (VLPs) in the SHIV monkey model, Sivmac239 Pr56gag precursor- based pseudovirions were modified by HIV-1 gp160 derived peptides. First, well-characterized epitopes from the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein were inserted into the Pr56gag precursor by replacing defined regions that were shown to be dispensable for virus particle formation. Expression of these chimeric proteins in a baculovirus expression system resulted in efficient assembly and release of non-infectious, hybrid VLPs. In a second approach the HIV-1IIIB external glycoprotein gp120 was covalently linked to an Epstein-Barr virus derived transmembrane domain. Coexpression of the hybrid envelope derivative with the Pr56gag precursor yielded recombinant SIV derived Pr56gag particles with the HIV-1 gp120 firmly anchored on the VLP surface. Immunization of rhesus monkeys with either naked VLPs or VLPs adsorbed to alum induced substantial serum antibody titers and promoted both T helper cell and cytotoxic T lymphocyte responses. Furthermore, priming macaques with the corresponding set of recombinant Semliki-Forest viruses tended to enhance the immunological outcome. Challenge of the immunized monkeys with chimeric SHIV resulted in a clearly accelerated reduction of the plasma viremia as compared to control animals.
Changes in the incidence and prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis in Kamitonda, Wakayama, Japan, 1965–1996

OBJECTIVE To evaluate secular trends in the incidence and prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Japan. METHODS The incidence and prevalence of RA were determined in a longitudinal population based study in the Kamitonda district, Wakayama, Japan, from 1965 to 1996. RESULTS In the study area consisting of about 3000 inhabitants, 16 incident cases, satisfying definite RA by the Rome criteria were detected during the study period. The age and sex adjusted incidence in both men and women combined and the age adjusted incidence in women significantly decreased (p<0.025 and p<0.01, respectively). The age and sex adjusted prevalence in all inhabitants tended to decrease (p<0.1), and the age adjusted prevalence in women significantly declined (p<0.025). In men, however, neither incidence nor prevalence showed significant change. CONCLUSIONS The decline of incidence and prevalence of female RA may be reducible to some environmental changes preferentially occurring more obviously in Japanese women than in men. Because the use of oral contraceptives has been extremely low in Japan, the decline should be explained by other factors.
Export of Virulence Genes and Shiga Toxin by Membrane Vesicles of Escherichia coli O157:H7

ABSTRACT Membrane vesicles released by Escherichia coli O157:H7 into culture medium were purified and analyzed for protein and DNA content. Electron micrographs revealed vesicles that are spherical, range in size from 20 to 100 nm, and have a complete bilayer. Analysis of vesicle protein by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis demonstrates vesicles that contain many proteins with molecular sizes similar to outer membrane proteins and a number of cellular proteins. Immunoblot (Western) analysis of vesicles suggests the presence of cell antigens. Treatment of vesicles with exogenous DNase hydrolyzed surface-associated DNA; PCR demonstrated that vesicles contain DNA encoding the virulence genes eae,stx1 and stx2, and uidA, which encodes for β-galactosidase. Immunoblot analysis of intact and lysed, proteinase K-treated vesicles demonstrate that Shiga toxins 1 and 2 are contained within vesicles. These results suggest that vesicles contain toxic material and transfer experiments demonstrate that vesicles can deliver genetic material to other gram-negative organisms.
VALIDATION OF AN EMPIRICAL MODEL FOR PHOTOSYNTHETICALLY ACTIVE RADIATION

Knowledge of the photosynthetically active radiation is necessary in different applications dealing with plant physiology, biomass production and natural illumination in greenhouses. Nevertheless, as a result of the absence of widespread measurements of this radiometric flux, it is often calculated as a constant ratio of the broadband solar radiation. This ratio is affected by many parameters. In a previous study, the authors analysed the global horizontal component of this flux. In this work, they validate the model against two independent data sets, one acquired at the same place where the previous model was developed and the other acquired at another location characterised by different climatic conditions. The first one is located at the University of Almerı́a, a seashore location (36.83°N, 2.41°W, 20 m a.m.s.l.), while the second one is located at Granada (37.18°N, 3.58°W, 660 m a.m.s.l.), an inland location. The database includes hourly values of the relevant variables that cover the years 1993 and 1994 in Almerı́a and 1994 and 1995 in Granada. The use of data sets registered in two different climatic conditions allows for the verification of the local independence of the proposed technique. The proposed models can provide estimates of the photosynthetically active radiation with negligible bias and root mean square deviations close to instrumental errors. Copyright © 1999 Royal Meteorological Society.
The Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Pathologic Classification Project. Long-term follow-up of 1153 patients with non-Hodgkin lymphomas.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To document the long-term prognosis of patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma treated between 1971 and 1975 and to determine how the prognosis varies by histologic subtype and stage. SETTING Three cancer referral centers in the United States and one center in Italy. PATIENTS A consecutive sample of 1153 previously untreated patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. At the time of analysis, 71% of the patients had died and the median follow-up for patients still alive was 11.2 years. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS The 10-year survival proportions were 45% (CI, 40% to 50%); 26% (CI, 22% to 30%); and 23% (CI, 18% to 30%) for patients with low-, intermediate-, and high-grade lymphomas, respectively. Patients with intermediate- and high-grade lymphomas were curable, but this was not apparent for patients with advanced stage low-grade lymphomas. For the low-grade follicular small cleaved and follicular mixed lymphomas, the Ann Arbor staging system distinguished the prognosis of patients with stage I disease from those with more extensive involvement. For the diffuse large cell and immunoblastic lymphomas, the Ann Arbor staging system distinguished long-term prognosis for patients with stage I disease from patients with stage II disease and those with more disseminated involvement. CONCLUSIONS The probability of long-term survival for unselected patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma can be substantial. Long-term prognosis depends on the histologic subtype of the tumor and the extent of dissemination. The Working Formulation for non-Hodgkin lymphomas is a simple and useful nomenclature for selecting treatment and reporting results. The Ann Arbor staging system is a useful but imperfect prognostic indicator.
Identification of Novel Toxicity-associated Metabolites by Metabolomics and Mass Isotopomer Analysis of Acetaminophen Metabolism in Wild-type and Cyp2e1-null Mice*

CYP2E1 is recognized as the most important enzyme for initiation of acetaminophen (APAP)-induced toxicity. In this study, the resistance of Cyp2e1-null mice to APAP treatment was confirmed by comparing serum aminotransferase activities and blood urea nitrogen levels in wild-type and Cyp2e1-null mice. However, unexpectedly, profiling of major known APAP metabolites in urine and serum revealed that the contribution of CYP2E1 to APAP metabolism decreased with increasing APAP doses administered. Measurement of hepatic glutathione and hydrogen peroxide levels exposed the importance of oxidative stress in determining the consequence of APAP overdose. Subsequent metabolomic analysis was capable of constructing a principal components analysis (PCA) model that delineated a relationship between urinary metabolomes and the responses to APAP treatment. Urinary ions high in wild-type mice treated with 400 mg/kg APAP were elucidated as 3-methoxy-APAP glucuronide (VII) and three novel APAP metabolites, including S-(5-acetylamino-2-hydroxyphenyl)mercaptopyruvic acid (VI, formed by a Cys-APAP transamination reaction in kidney), 3,3′-biacetaminophen (VIII, an APAP dimer), and a benzothiazine compound (IX, originated from deacetylated APAP), through mass isotopomer analysis, accurate mass measurement, tandem mass spectrometry fragmentation, in vitro reactions, and chemical treatments. Dose-, time-, and genotype-dependent appearance of these minor APAP metabolites implied their association with the APAP-induced toxicity and potential biomarker application. Overall, the oxidative stress elicited by CYP2E1-mediated APAP metabolism might significantly contribute to APAP-induced toxicity. The combination of genetically modified animal models, mass isotopomer analysis, and metabolomics provides a powerful and efficient technical platform to characterize APAP-induced toxicity through identifying novel biomarkers and unraveling novel mechanisms.
Energy Efficient Adaptive Approach for Dependable Performance in the presence of Timing Interference

Silicon design miniaturization has dramatically improved the integration scale in one chip, highlighting in the same time reliability issues. Error-correction mechanisms deal with these issues ensuring the operation Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS), paying a price in performance. The current study deploys a run-time mechanism that mitigates the correction overhead, guaranteeing the performance dependability. In this direction, a closed-loop controller absorbs the RAS-induced delay by triggering Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) schemes. The novelty is the run-time adjustment of the DVFS responses to the identified performance variability norms. To achieve this, we exploit an adaptive scenario scheduler that reorganizes the scenario hierarchy at run-time. Compared against an approach utilizing a 30% operation frequency guardband, the proposed configuration achieves an 83.9% exploitation of the nominal improvement margins that corresponds to an energy gain up to 15%.
Unsupervised Object Discovery and Segmentation of RGBD-images

In this paper we introduce a system for unsupervised object discovery and segmentation of RGBD-images. The system models the sensor noise directly from data, allowing accurate segmentation without sensor specific hand tuning of measurement noise models making use of the recently introduced Statistical Inlier Estimation (SIE) method. Through a fully probabilistic formulation, the system is able to apply probabilistic inference, enabling reliable segmentation in previously challenging scenarios. In addition, we introduce new methods for filtering out false positives, significantly improving the signal to noise ratio. We show that the system significantly outperform state-of-the-art in on a challenging real-world dataset.
Current challenges in optimizing systemic therapy for patients with pancreatic cancer: expert perspectives from the Australasian Gastrointestinal Trials Group (AGITG) with invited international faculty

ABSTRACT Introduction: Despite recent progress, the outlook for most patients with pancreatic cancer remains poor. There is variation in how patients are managed globally due to differing interpretations of the evidence, partly because studies in this disease are challenging to undertake. This article collates the evidence upon which current best practice is based and offers an expert opinion from an international faculty on how latest developments should influence current treatment paradigms. Areas covered: Optimal chemotherapy for first and subsequent lines of therapy; optimal management of locally advanced, non-metastatic cancer including the role of neoadjuvant chemo(radio)therapy, current evidence for adjuvant chemotherapy, major advances in pancreatic cancer genomics and challenges in supportive care particularly relevant to patients with pancreatic cancer. For each section, literature was reviewed by comprehensive search techniques, including clinical trial websites and abstracts from international cancer meetings. Expert commentary: For each section, a commentary is provided. Overall the challenges identified were: difficulties in diagnosing pancreatic cancer early, challenges for performing randomised clinical trials in all stages of the disease, some progress in systemic therapy with new agents and in identifying molecular subtypes that may be clinically relevant and move towards personalized therapy, but still, pancreatic cancer remains a very poor prognosis cancer with significant palliative care needs.
Iterative decoding in analog CMOS

In this paper, a novel current-mode approach is proposed for implementing basic building blocks of an analog iterative decoder. The decoder is based on the so-called min-sum algorithm (also referred to as max-sum or max-product) and can be used to decode powerful coding schemes such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and turbo codes. The proposed circuits can be implemented by standard CMOS technology, which means lower fabrication cost and/or simpler design compared to previously reported analog iterative decoders that are based on BiCMOS or sub-threshold CMOS technology. To demonstrate the functionality of the proposed design, simulation results based on TSMC 0.18mm CMOS technology for a (7,4) Hamming code are also presented.
Inferior olivary neurons innervate multiple zones of the flocculus in pigeons (Columba livia)

Complex spike activity of floccular Purkinje cells responds to patterns of rotational optic flow about the vertical axis (rVA neurons) or a horizontal axis 45° to the midline (rH45 neurons). The pigeon flocculus is organized into four parasagittal zones: two rVA zones (zones 0 and 2) interdigitated with two rH45 zones (zones 1 and 3). Climbing fiber input to the rVA and rH45 zones arises in the caudal and rostral regions of the medial column of the inferior olive (mcIO), respectively. To determine whether the two rVA zones and the two rH45 zones receive input from different areas of the caudal and rostral mcIO and whether individual neurons project to both zones of the same rotational preference, different colors of fluorescent retrograde tracer were injected into the two rVA or two rH45 zones. For the rVA injections, retrogradely labeled cells from the two zones were intermingled in the caudal mcIO, but the distribution of cells labeled from zone 0 was slightly caudal to that from zone 2. On average, 18% of neurons were double labeled. For the rH45 injections, cells retrogradely labeled from the two zones were intermingled in the rostral mcIO, but the distribution of cells labeled from zone 1 was slightly rostral to that from zone 3. On average, 22% of neurons were double labeled. In sum, each of the two rVA zones and the two rH45 zones receives input from slightly different regions of the mcIO, and about 20% of the neurons project to both zones. J. Comp. Neurol. 486:159–168, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Graph-based Analysis of Semantic Drift in Espresso-like Bootstrapping Algorithms

Bootstrapping has a tendency, called semantic drift, to select instances unrelated to the seed instances as the iteration proceeds. We demonstrate the semantic drift of bootstrapping has the same root as the topic drift of Kleinberg's HITS, using a simplified graph-based reformulation of bootstrapping. We confirm that two graph-based algorithms, the von Neumann kernels and the regularized Laplacian, can reduce semantic drift in the task of word sense disambiguation (WSD) on Senseval-3 English Lexical Sample Task. Proposed algorithms achieve superior performance to Espresso and previous graph-based WSD methods, even though the proposed algorithms have less parameters and are easy to calibrate.
The cognitive vulnerability to depressive rumination in people diagnosed with major depressive disorder

This research project focuses on the cognitive process of rumination and its association to depression. Part one of the project is a literature review, which aimed to provide a comprehensive summary of the current state of research on the relations between rumination and the major cognitive processes in people with depression. A systematic search identified 25 studies in the existing literature which fulfilled the basic requirements of studying rumination and at least one other cognitive process with valid measure(s) or experimental manipulations in people with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. These studies covered 8 domains of cognitive deficits and biases related to rumination. They included overgeneralised memory, memory biases, thinking biases, attentional biases, inhibitory deficits, impairments in general resource allocation, maladaptive thought control strategies, and problem-solving deficits. The review investigated the conclusions made by these studies in terms of their suggestions on the interrelations between depressive symptoms, rumination, the cognitive process in question. Particular attention was paid to each study's conceptualisation of rumination, and whether it addressed subcomponents of rumination which underlie its negative effects. Part two consisted of the empirical paper. The empirical study focussed on the ability of one particular hypothesis - the mood-as-input model -to explain the mechanisms underlying the perseverative thinking style which characterised depressive rumination. Using a rumination interview paradigm, it compared participants with major depressive disorder (MDD) with healthy controls for the extent of their perseverative thinking during the rumination task. The performance of each participant in both the depressed and control group was also measured and contrasted across two experimental conditions. In each these conditions, participants were asked to adopt either an 'as-much-as-can' or a 'feel-like-continuing' stop-rule as guidelines for decision making on how and when to terminate the task. Results indicated that the interaction of depressive symptoms and 'stop-rule' significantly influenced perseveration in all participants. Participants' changes of mood during the rumination task, as well as their spontaneous selection of stop-rule in their daily life were also explored. Finally, the critical appraisal in part three offered a reflection on the my motivations for undertaking this research and some reasons for the important decisions made in the process. It also provided further discussions on the designs and methodologies of the experimental study, and the research and clinical implications of its findings.
Graduate Social Workers’ Perceived Level of Competency in Working with Couples

This research study explores graduate social workers’ self-perceived competence in couples work. While literature on this topic is sparse, previous studies have indicated that graduate social work programs lack adequate incorporation of couples work material into their curricula. As a result, social work students are graduating with little confidence in their ability to be couples therapists. The current study consisted of an online survey, which was emailed to licensed graduate social workers in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Information collected by the survey included demographic characteristics of respondents and their graduate school experiences, such as coursework and internship(s). Results showed that respondents believed their graduate training could have better prepared them for couples work, and that the majority of their couples work experience was gained after graduating with their MSWs. Implications for future research based on these results include closer analysis of how graduate social work programs can be improved to provide students with more couples work experience, comparing graduate curricula and students’ competency ratings over time to assess programs’ progress in incorporating more couples work material, and investigating specific reasons why graduate social workers do not feel competent in couples work and how they believe these reasons should be addressed. Running Head: COMPETENCY IN WORKING WITH COUPLES ii
On Reliable Dissemination in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Reliable broadcast is a basic service for many collaborative applications as it provides reliable dissemination of the same information to many recipients. This paper studies three common approaches for achieving scalable reliable broadcast in ad hoc networks, namely probabilistic flooding, counter-based broadcast, and lazy gossip. The strength and weaknesses of each scheme are analyzed, and a new protocol that combines these three techniques, called RAPID, is developed. Specifically, the analysis in this paper focuses on the trade-offs between reliability (percentage of nodes that receive each message), latency, and the message overhead of the protocol. Each of these methods excel in some of these parameters, but no single method wins in all of them. This motivates the need for a combined protocol that benefits from all of these methods and allows to trade between them smoothly. Interestingly, since the RAPID protocol only relies on local computations and probability, it is highly resilient to mobility and failures and even selfish behavior. By adding authentication, it can even be made malicious tolerant. Additionally, the paper includes a detailed performance evaluation by simulation. The simulations confirm that RAPID obtains higher reliability with low latency and good communication overhead compared with each of the individual methods.