Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prospective comorbidity-matched study of Parkinson's disease and risk of mortality among women

Background Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) may have an increased risk of overall mortality compared to the general population. Women may have lower mortality rates from PD than men; however, studies among women on the effect of PD on mortality have been limited and may not have adequately controlled for confounding by comorbidities. Methods We conducted a matched cohort study among participants in the Women's Health Study. 396 incident PD cases were identified through self-report. Each PD case was matched by age to a comparator who was alive and had the same modified Charlson comorbidity score as the PD case. The PD cases and matched comparators were followed for all-cause mortality. Cox proportional hazards models adjusted for age at the index date, smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise and body mass index were used to determine the association between PD and mortality. Results During a median of 6.2 years of follow-up, 72 women died (47 PD cases and 25 comparators). The multivariable-adjusted HR for mortality was 2.60 (95% CI 1.56 to 4.32). Conclusions PD was associated with more than a twofold increased risk of all-cause mortality among women. Results are similar to those observed among men.
Optimization of cellulose nanocrystal length and surface charge density through phosphoric acid hydrolysis

Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are emerging nanomaterials with a large range of potential applications. CNCs are typically produced through acid hydrolysis with sulfuric acid; however, phosphoric acid has the advantage of generating CNCs with higher thermal stability. This paper presents a design of experiments approach to optimize the hydrolysis of CNCs from cotton with phosphoric acid. Hydrolysis time, temperature and acid concentration were varied across nine experiments and a linear least-squares regression analysis was applied to understand the effects of these parameters on CNC properties. In all but one case, rod-shaped nanoparticles with a high degree of crystallinity and thermal stability were produced. A statistical model was generated to predict CNC length, and trends in phosphate content and zeta potential were elucidated. The CNC length could be tuned over a relatively large range (238–475 nm) and the polydispersity could be narrowed most effectively by increasing the hydrolysis temperature and acid concentration. The CNC phosphate content was most affected by hydrolysis temperature and time; however, the charge density and colloidal stability were considered low compared with sulfuric acid hydrolysed CNCs. This study provides insight into weak acid hydrolysis and proposes ‘design rules’ for CNCs with improved size uniformity and charge density. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘New horizons for cellulose nanotechnology’.
Serum cytokine profiling and enrichment analysis reveal the involvement of immunological and inflammatory pathways in stable patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major global health problem. It results from chronic inflammation and causes irreversible airway damage. Levels of different serum cytokines could be surrogate biomarkers for inflammation and lung function in COPD. We aimed to determine the serum levels of different biomarkers in COPD patients, the association between cytokine levels and various prognostic parameters, and the key pathways/networks involved in stable COPD. In this study, serum levels of 48 cytokines were examined by multiplex assays in 30 subjects (control, n=9; COPD, n=21). Relationships between serum biomarkers and forced expiratory volume in 1 second, peak oxygen uptake, body mass index, dyspnea score, and smoking were assessed. Enrichment pathways and network analyses were implemented, using a list of cytokines showing differential expression between healthy controls and patients with COPD by Cytoscape and GeneGo Metacore™ software (Thomson-Reuters Corporation, New York, NY, USA). Concentrations of cutaneous T-cell attracting chemokine, eotaxin, hepatocyte growth factor, interleukin 6 (IL-6), IL-16, and stem cell factor are significantly higher in COPD patients compared with in control patients. Notably, this study identifies stem cell factor as a biomarker for COPD. Multiple regression analysis predicts that cutaneous T-cell-attracting chemokine, eotaxin, IL-6, and stem cell factor are inversely associated with forced expiratory volume in 1 second and peak oxygen uptake change, whereas smoking is related to eotaxin and hepatocyte growth factor changes. Enrichment pathways and network analyses reveal the potential involvement of specific inflammatory and immune process pathways in COPD. Identified network interaction and regulation of different cytokines would pave the way for deeper insight into mechanisms of the disease process.
Academic success among Mexican-American women in a community college

This field study examined a model of attrition in young Mexican American women at a community college. It was hypothesized that those who achieved low academic performance would drop out in response to a series ofpsychosocial and sociocultural barriers in education. The model in vestigated a process by which Mexican American women matriculate into the community college system and either bring with them or encounter for the first time a set of well‐documented barriers to education. At this juncture, they either possess or do not possess the personality characteristics and background that help them overcome the consequences of the barriers. If the students are able to sustain themselves through the difficulty posed by the barriers, they are more likely to experience depression, which may manifest as somatic symptoms. To the extent that a student succumbs to depression, her academic performance would fall and she would opt to leave school. The results of this study suggest that the greatest impact of educati.
Hospital-wide infection control practice and Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the intensive care unit (ICU): an observational study

Summary Objectives To estimate trends in infection/colonisation with meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in an intensive care unit (ICU). Design Observational study of results of ICU admission and weekly screens for MRSA. Setting and Participants All ICU admissions in 2001–2012. Interventions ICU admissions were screened for MRSA throughout. In late 2006, screening was extended to the whole hospital and extra measures taken in ICU. Main outcome measures Prevalence of MRSA in ICU admissions and number acquiring MRSA therein. Results In all, 366 of 6565 admissions to ICU were MRSA positive, including 270 of 4466 coming from within the hospital in which prevalence increased with time prior to transfer to ICU. Prevalence in this group was 9.4% (8.2–10.6) in 2001–2006, decreasing to 3.4% (2.3–4.5) in 2007–2009 and 1.3% (0.6–2.0) in 2010–2012, p < 0.001, due to decreased prevalence in those spending >5 days on wards before ICU admission: 18.9% (15.6–22.2) in 2001–2006, 7.1% (4.0–10.2) in 2007–2009 and 1.6% (0.1–3.1) in 2010–2012, p < 0.001. In addition, 201 patients acquired MRSA within ICU, the relative risk being greater when known positives present: 4.34 (3.98–4.70), p < 0.001. Acquisition rate/1000 bed days decreased from 13.3 (11.2–15.4) in 2001–2006 to 3.6 (2.6–4.6) in 2007–2012, p < 0.0001. Of 41 ICU-acquired MRSA bacteraemias, 38 were in 2001–2006. The risk of bacteraemia in those acquiring MRSA decreased from 25% (18.1–31.9) in 2001–2006 to 6.1% (0–12.8) thereafter, p = 0.022. Conclusions Following better hospital-wide infection control, fewer MRSA-positive patients were admitted to ICU with a parallel decrease in acquisition therein. Better practice there reduced the risk of bacteraemia.
Emotion regulation difficulties are relevant to persecutory ideation.

OBJECTIVES Persecutory delusions are preceded and accompanied by negative emotions, which may be prolonged or even amplified by difficulties in the ability to regulate negative emotions. This study aims to gain insight into emotion regulation difficulties in persecutory ideation. DESIGN AND METHOD A correlational approach was adopted to explore bivariate and multivariate associations between emotion regulation difficulties and persecutory ideation in a subclinical sample. Furthermore, general psychopathology as well as positive symptoms of schizophrenia were assessed in order to estimate the specificity of emotion regulation difficulties. Data from 151 participants acquired via an Internet-based survey were analyzed. RESULTS There were substantial bivariate correlations between paranoid ideation and emotion regulation difficulties. However, only impulse control difficulties were specific to persecutory ideation after controlling for general psychopathology. Additionally, a multivariate analysis revealed unexpected positive associations between the acceptance of emotional responses and paranoid ideation as well as positive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS Besides the general difficulties in regulating emotion that are common to many clinical disorders and were associated with overall psychopathology, subclinical psychotic symptoms seem to be specifically associated with certain aspects of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation difficulties are likely to contribute to symptom formation and maintenance in persecutory delusions and might therefore present a valuable treatment target.
Segregation Models for Disomic, Tetrasomic and Intermediate Inheritance in Tetraploids: A General Procedure Applied to Rorippa (Yellow Cress) Microsatellite Data

Tetraploid inheritance has two extremes: disomic in allotetraploids and tetrasomic in autotetraploids. The possibility of mixed, or intermediate, inheritance models has generally been neglected. These could well apply to newly formed hybrids or to diploidizing (auto)tetraploids. We present a simple likelihood-based approach that is able to incorporate disomic, tetrasomic, and intermediate inheritance models and estimates the double-reduction rate. Our model shows that inheritance of microsatellite markers in natural tetraploids of Rorippa amphibia and R. sylvestris is tetrasomic, confirming their autotetraploid origin. However, in F1 hybrids inheritance was intermediate to disomic and tetrasomic inheritance. Apparently, in meiosis, chromosomes paired preferentially with the homolog from the same parental species, but not strictly so. Detected double-reduction rates were low. We tested the general applicability of our model, using published segregation data. In two cases, an intermediate inheritance model gave a better fit to the data than the tetrasomic model advocated by the authors. The existence of inheritance intermediate to disomic and tetrasomic has important implications for linkage mapping and population genetics and hence breeding programs of tetraploids. Methods that have been developed for either disomic or tetrasomic tetraploids may not be generally applicable, particularly in systems where hybridization is common.
Personality Profile of Female Public Accountants

Describes the personality characteristics of a sample of female accountants from public accounting firms in a large Canadian city. Comparisons are made with the general population of all women, with male accountants, between accountants in firms of different sizes, and between accountants at different position levels in the firms. Indicates from the findings that female professional accountants, as a group, have personality profiles which are different from women in general and from their male colleagues. Their impact on accounting firms and on the accounting profession will be substantial once they achieve management positions in significant numbers.
A Mechanism of Repression by Acute Myeloid Leukemia-1, the Target of Multiple Chromosomal Translocations in Acute Leukemia*

AML1 is one of the most frequently translocated genes in human leukemia. Here we demonstrate that acute myeloid leukemia-1 (AML-1) (Runx-1) represses transcription from a native promoter, p21 Waf1/Cip1 . Unexpectedly, this repression did not require interactions with the Groucho co-repressor. To define the mechanism of repression, we asked whether other co-repressors could interact with AML-1. We demonstrate that AML-1 interacts with the mSin3 co-repressors. Moreover, endogenous AML-1 associated with endogenous mSin3A in mammalian cells. A deletion mutant of AML-1 that did not interact with mSin3A failed to repress transcription. The AML-1/mSin3 association suggests a mechanism of repression for the chromosomal translocation fusion proteins that disrupt AML-1.
A Generic Framework for Multiword Expressions Treatment: from Acquisition to Applications

This paper presents an open and flexible methodological framework for the automatic acquisition of multiword expressions (MWEs) from monolingual textual corpora. This research is motivated by the importance of MWEs for NLP applications. After briefly presenting the modules of the framework, the paper reports extrinsic evaluation results considering two applications: computer-aided lexicography and statistical machine translation. Both applications can benefit from automatic MWE acquisition and the expressions acquired automatically from corpora can both speed up and improve their quality. The promising results of previous and ongoing experiments encourage further investigation about the optimal way to integrate MWE treatment into these and many other applications.
Factor analysis for speaker segmentation and improved speaker diarization

Speaker diarization includes two steps: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation searches for speaker boundaries, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments of the same speaker. In this work, the segmentation is improved by replacing the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) with a new iVector-based approach. Unlike BIC-based methods which trigger on any acoustic dissimilarities, the proposed method suppresses phonetic variations and accentuates speaker differences. More specifically our method generates boundaries based on the distance between two speaker factor vectors that are extracted on a frame-by frame basis. The extraction relies on an eigenvoice matrix so that large differences between speaker factor vectors indicate a different speaker. A Mahalanobis-based distance measure, in which the covariance matrix compensates for the remaining and detrimental phonetic variability, is shown to generate accurate boundaries. The detected segments are clustered by a state-of-the-art iVector Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis system. Experiments on the COST278 multilingual broadcast news database show relative reductions of 50% in boundary detection errors. The speaker error rate is reduced by 8% relative.
Reconstruction of turbulent velocity fields from punctual measurements. (Reconstruction de champs aérodynamiques à partir de mesures ponctuelles)

Real time monitoring of turbulent flows is a challenging task that concerns a large range of applications. Evaluating wake vortices around the approach runway of an airport, in order to optimize the distance between lined-up aircraft, is an example. Another one touches to the broad subject of active flow control. In aerodynamic, control of detached flows is an essential issue. Such a control can serve to reduce noise produced by airplanes, or improve their aerodynamic performances. This work aims at developing tools to produce real time prediction of turbulent velocity fields from a small number of punctual sensors. After a literature review focused on a popular reconstruction method in fluid mechanics, the Stochastic Estimation (SE), the first step was to evaluate its overall prediction performances on several turbulent flows of gradual complexity. The accuracy of the SE being very limited in some cases, a deeper characterization of the method was performed. The filtering effect of the SE in terms of spatial and temporal content was particularly highlighted. This characterization pointed out the strong influence of the sensor locations on the estimation quality. Therefore, a sensor location optimization algorithm was proposed and extended to the choice of time delays when using Multi-Time-Delay SE. While using optimized locations for the sensors hold some accuracy improvements, they were still insufficient for some test cases. The opportunity to use a data assimilation method, the Kalman filter that combines a dynamic model of the flow with sensor information, was investigated. For some cases, the results were promising and the Kalman filter outperforms all SE methods.
Effects of bacterial direct-fed microbials on ruminal fermentation, blood variables, and the microbial populations of feedlot cattle.

A study was conducted to determine whether bacterial direct-fed microbials (DFM) could be used to minimize the risk of acidosis in feedlot cattle receiving high concentrate diets. Six ruminally cannulated steers, previously adapted to a high concentrate diet, were used in a double 3 x 3 Latin square to study the effects of DFM on feed intake, ruminal pH, and ruminal and blood characteristics. Steers were provided ad libitum access to a diet containing steam-rolled barley, barley silage, and a protein-mineral supplement at 87, 9, and 4% (DM basis), respectively. Treatments were as follows: control, Propionibacterium P15 (P15), and Propionibacterium P15 and Enterococcus faecium EF212 (PE). The bacterial treatments (10(9) cfu/g) plus whey powder carrier, or whey powder alone for control, were top-dressed once daily at the time of feeding (10 g/[steer/d]). Periods consisted of 2 wk of adaptation and 1 wk of measurements. Ruminal pH was continuously measured for 6 d using indwelling electrodes. Dry matter intake and ruminal pH (mean, minimum, hours, and area pH < 5.8 or < 5.5) were not affected by treatment (P > 0.05). However, supplementation with P15 increased protozoal numbers (P < 0.05) with a concomitant increase in ruminal NH3 concentration (P < 0.01) and a decrease in the number of amylolytic bacteria (P < 0.05) compared with the control. Streptococcus bovis, enumerated using a selective medium, was numerically reduced with supplementation of PE. Although blood pH and blood glucose were not affected by DFM supplementation, steers fed PE had numerically lower concentrations of blood CO2 than control steers, which is consistent with a reduced risk of metabolic acidosis. Although the bacterial DFM used in this study did not induce changes in DMI or ruminal and blood pH, some rumen and blood variables indicated that the bacterial DFM used in this study may decrease the risk of acidosis in feedlot cattle.
Adaptive Boosting for Synthetic Aperture Radar Automatic Target Recognition

We propose a novel automatic target recognition (ATR) system for classification of three types of ground vehicles in the MSTAR public release database. First, MSTAR image chips are represented as fine and raw feature vectors, where raw features compensate for the target pose estimation error that corrupts fine image features. Then, the chips are classified by using the adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) algorithm with the radial basis function (RBF) network as the base learner. Since the RBF network is a binary classifier, we decompose our multiclass problem into a set of binary ones through the error-correcting output codes (ECOC) method, specifying a dictionary of code words for the set of three possible classes. AdaBoost combines the classification results of the RBF network for each binary problem into a code word, which is then "decoded" as one of the code words (i.e., ground-vehicle classes) in the specified dictionary. Along with classification, within the AdaBoost framework, we also conduct efficient fusion of the fine and raw image-feature vectors. The results of large-scale experiments demonstrate that our ATR scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art systems reported in the literature.
Face-to-Face Versus Computer-Mediated Communication: A Synthesis of the Experimental Literature

This paper synthesizes the findings of published experimental studies (n = 18) that compared face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The literature is pulled together by way of ten propositions, each pre sented with the supporting evidence. In general, discussions on CMC take longer, produce more ideas, and have greater equality of participation. There is reduced normative pressure and poorer comprehension of the discussion in CMC. Findings regarding quality of performance, uninhibited behavior, choice shift, attitude change, and evaluation of communication partner are not defini tive. Factors limiting the internal and external validity of these studies are also discussed.
Randomised trial of an asthma self-management programme for adults.

BACKGROUND--A hospital based, community service asthma education programme for adults to improve asthma knowledge, promote compliance with medication, and reduce morbidity was evaluated. METHODS--The programme was evaluated using a randomised experimental and control group design with repeated measurements over 12 months. A volunteer community sample of 192 respondents was recruited of whom 116 satisfied the inclusion criteria. At the 12 month follow up some data were obtained for all subjects. Intervention subjects attended four 2.5 hour education sessions at weekly intervals. An asthma knowledge questionnaire was administered and compliance was assessed from diary records. Morbidity was assessed retrospectively by questionnaire, prospectively by diary, and objectively by spirometry and serial peak expiratory flow rate monitoring. The adequacy of medical treatment was also assessed. Data were collected at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and at three, six, nine, and 12 months after intervention. RESULTS--Improvements occurred in knowledge and compliance in the intervention group but the impact on morbidity was modest; this was due, at least in part, to the inadequacy of medical treatment. CONCLUSIONS--Treatment of asthma should be reviewed and optimised in conjunction with self-management programmes in order to improve health outcomes.
Examining the Impact of School Quality on School Outcomes and Improvement: A Value-Added Approach

There has been a recent state-level emphasis on monitoring student outcomes to develop comprehensive school accountability. Such monitoring systems can include content standards and benchmarks to measure progress, statewide assessment instruments, and school report card data that policy makers, school personnel, and parents can also use to compare schools. To be fair, school comparisons should somehow take into consideration differences in communities and the background characteristics of students who live in these communities. Little previous research has examined what report card information might be used to identify school indicators that are related to student achievement and improvement gains across school settings with diverse student composition. The purpose of this study is to present an approach to statewide school comparison that focuses on the value-added effects of report card indicators of elementary schools’ educational environments on school achievement and school improvement after making school-level adjustments for student differences.