Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecological aspects of the free-living ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) on animal trails within Atlantic rainforest in south–eastern Brazil

Abstract In a recent ecological study of the ticks on animal trails within an area of Atlantic rainforest in south–eastern Brazil, Amblyomma aureolatum, A. brasiliense, A. incisum, A. ovale and Haemaphysalis juxtakochi were found questing on the vegetation. Most of the ticks recorded by a small, man-made dam on the forest border were A. dubitatum but a few A. brasiliense and A. cajennense, one A. incisum and one H. juxtakochi were also found. The seasonal activity of the ticks indicated that A. incisum and A. brasiliense had one generation/year. On the animal trails, most tick species and stages quested on the vegetation at a height of 30–40 cm above ground level. The questing larvae and adults of A. incisum tended to be found higher, however, with the greatest numbers recorded 40–50 cm (larvae) or 60–70 cm (adults) above ground level. Most of the adult ticks (81.1%–100%), nymphs (78.6%–100%) and larval clusters (100%) found on a forest trail remained questing at the same location over a 24-h period. Carbon-dioxide traps in the rainforest attracted <50% of the ticks observed questing on the nearby vegetation and, curiously, the CO2 traps set deep in the forest attracted far fewer ticks than similar traps set by the dam. The ecological relationships between the ticks, their hosts and the rainforest environment are discussed.
Safe administration of S-1 after 5-fluorouracil-induced cardiotoxicity in a patient with colorectal cancer

Cardiotoxicity is a rare but challenging complication of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) therapy. Compared with 5-FU, after application of S-1 lower plasma levels of the cardiotoxic metabolite alpha-fluoro-beta-alanine have been reported. Evidence for safe administration of S-1 following 5-FU cardiotoxicity is limited to a case report in an Asian patient. Herein we report the first case of S-1 application after 5-FU cardiotoxicity in a Caucasian patient. A 67-year-old man with right-sided metastatic colorectal cancer and history of 5-FU cardiotoxicity had a progressive disease after 8-month therapy with irinotecan and bevacizumab. In consideration of known 5-FU cardiotoxicity, he was referred to our department for therapy counselling. We started a combination therapy with S-1, oxaliplatin and bevacizumab. The treatment was well tolerated without any cardiac problems. Our report confirms the safety of S-1 in cases of 5-FU cardiotoxicity also in a Caucasian patient.
Assessing Knowledge and Attitudes towards Cervical Cancer Screening among Rural Women in Eastern China

There is a heavy burden of cervical cancer in China. Although the Chinese government provides free cervical cancer screening for rural women aged 35 to 59 years, the screening rate remains low even in the more developed regions of eastern China. This study aimed to assess knowledge and attitudes about cervical cancer and its screening among rural women aged 30 to 65 years in eastern China. A cross-sectional study was conducted in four counties of Jining Prefecture in Shandong Province during August 2015. In total, 420 rural women were randomly recruited. Each woman participated in a face-to-face interview in which a questionnaire was administered by a trained interviewer. A total of 405 rural women (mean age 49 years old) were included in the final study. Among them, 210 (51.9%) participants had high knowledge levels. An overwhelming majority, 389 (96.0%) expressed positive attitudes, whilst only 258 (63.7%) had undergone screening for cervical cancer. Related knowledge was higher amongst the screened group relative to the unscreened group. Age, education and income were significantly associated with a higher knowledge level. Education was the only significant factor associated with a positive attitude. In addition, women who were older, or who had received a formal education were more likely to participate in cervical cancer screening. The knowledge of cervical cancer among rural women in eastern China was found to be poor, and the screening uptake was not high albeit a free cervical cancer screening program was provided. Government led initiatives to improve public awareness, knowledge, and participation in cervical cancer screening programs would likely be highly beneficial in reducing cervical cancer incidence and mortality for rural women.
Janus dendrimersomes coassembled from fluorinated, hydrogenated, and hybrid Janus dendrimers as models for cell fusion and fission

Significance Janus particles (JPs) are structures with two distinct faces. This study reports the discovery of an unprecedented class of JPs denoted Janus dendrimersomes (JDSs) coassembled from amphiphilic Janus dendrimers (JDs) with fluorinated, hydrogenated, and hybrid fluorinated–hydrogenated hydrophobic chains. JDSs consist of fluorinated and hydrogenated vesicles connected in a dumbbell-like shape. They appear as one structure in a broader fission-like pathway, which is revealed by varying the ratios of the three JD components. This pathway implies that non–protein-mediated fission and fusion is a likely mechanism by which similar structures form in synthetic and biological systems. These results highlight the potential importance of non–protein-mediated fusion and fission for biology and medicine. A three-component system of Janus dendrimers (JDs) including hydrogenated, fluorinated, and hybrid hydrogenated–fluorinated JDs are reported to coassemble by film hydration at specific ratios into an unprecedented class of supramolecular Janus particles (JPs) denoted Janus dendrimersomes (JDSs). They consist of a dumbbell-shaped structure composed of an onion-like hydrogenated vesicle and an onion-like fluorinated vesicle tethered together. The synthesis of dye-tagged analogs of each JD component enabled characterization of JDS architectures with confocal fluorescence microscopy. Additionally, a simple injection method was used to prepare submicron JDSs, which were imaged with cryogenic transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM). As reported previously, different ratios of the same three-component system yielded a variety of structures including homogenous onion-like vesicles, core-shell structures, and completely self-sorted hydrogenated and fluorinated vesicles. Taken together with the JDSs reported herein, a self-sorting pathway is revealed as a function of the relative concentration of the hybrid JD, which may serve to stabilize the interface between hydrogenated and fluorinated bilayers. The fission-like pathway suggests the possibility of fusion and fission processes in biological systems that do not require the assistance of proteins but instead may result from alterations in the ratios of membrane composition.
Modeling Glucagon Action in Patients With Type 1 Diabetes

The dual-hormone artificial pancreas is an emerging technology to treat type 1 diabetes (T1D). It consists of a glucose sensor, infusion pumps, and a dosing algorithm that directs hormonal delivery. Preclinical optimization of dosing algorithms using computer simulations has the potential to accelerate the pace of development for this technology. However, current simulation environments consider glucose regulation models that either do not include glucagon action submodels or include submodels that were proposed without comparison to other candidate models. We consider here nine candidate models of glucagon action featuring a number of possible characteristics: insulin-independent glucagon action, insulin/glucagon ratio effect on hepatic glucose production, insulin-dependent suppression of glucagon action, and the effect of rate of change of glucagon. To assess the models, we use measurements of plasma insulin, plasma glucagon, and endogenous glucose production collected from experiments involving eight subjects with T1D who receive four subcutaneous glucagon boluses. We estimate each model's parameters using a Bayesian approach, and the models are contrasted based on the deviance information criterion. The model achieving the best fit features insulin-dependent suppression of glucagon action and incorporates effects of both glucagon levels and its rate of change.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates in a hospital of Shanghai

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains are now common both in the health care setting and in the community. Active surveillance is critical for MRSA control and prevention. Specimens of patients (200 patients with 1119 specimens) as well as medical staff and hospital setting (1000 specimens) were randomly sampled in a level 2 hospital in Shanghai from September 2011 to August 2012. Isolation, cultivation and identification of S. aureus were performed. Totally, 67 S. aureus strains were isolated. 32 S. aureus strains were isolated from patient samples; 13 (13/32, 40.6%) of the 32 S. aureus isolates were MRSA; sputum sample and patients in the department of general internal medicine were the most frequent specimen and patient group for S. aureus strains isolation. Remaining 35 S. aureus strains were isolated from the medical staff and hospital setting; 20 (20/35, 57.1%) of the 35 S. aureus isolates were MRSA; specimens sampled from doctors and nurses’ hands and nose and hospital facilities were the most frequent samples to isolate S. aureus. Resistant and virulent genes detection showed that, all 33 MRSA strains were mecA positive which accounts for 49.3% of the 67 S. aureus strains; 38 isolates were Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) gene positive which accounts for 56.7% of the 67 S. aureus strains; and 17 (17/67, 25.4%) isolates are mecA and PVL genes dual positive. Multidrug-resistant strains of MRSA and PVL positive S. aureus are common in patients, medical staff and hospital setting, the potential health threat is worthy of our attention.
Long-term effects of acoustic reafference training (ART)

Abstract In sport visual feedback is often used to enhance performance, mostly neglecting the auditory modality. However, athletes produce natural sounds when they move (acoustic reafferences) which they perceive and use to control their movements. We examined the short- and long-term effects of a training intervention on a complex movement by using acoustic reafferences. Natural step sounds produced during hurdling were recorded and played back to the participants immediately before each trial, with an increase (fast group), decrease (slow group), or no manipulation (control group) in the tempo. All groups increased their hurdling performance regarding overall running time, with the slow group showing the best performance development. After a 10-week retention, the fast and slow group further increased performance, whereas the control group declined. The repeated experience with acoustic information associated with the rhythmic pattern of hurdling may have helped developing a cognitive representation of that movement, especially regarding long-term effects.
An Improved Soft-Input Soft-Output Detector for Generalized Spatial Modulation

Generalized spatial modulation (GSM) is a recently proposed appealing multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission technique, which is capable of striking a tradeoff between the achievable transmission rate and the cost of radio frequency (RF) chains. In this letter, a novel low-complexity near-optimal soft decision (SoD)-aided detector is proposed for GSM, which considerably reduces the search space by employing a block minimum mean-squared error (B-MMSE) algorithm. Our simulation results show that the proposed detector is capable of achieving a better tradeoff between bit-error-rate (BER) performance and computational complexity compared with the existing matched filter (MF)-based SoD algorithms.
Instance flow based online multiple object tracking

We present a method to perform online Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) of known object categories in monocular video data. Current Tracking-by-Detection MOT approaches build on top of 2D bounding box detections. In contrast, we exploit state-of-the-art instance aware semantic segmentation techniques to compute 2D shape representations of target objects in each frame. We predict position and shape of segmented instances in subsequent frames by exploiting optical flow cues. We define an affinity matrix between instances of subsequent frames which reflects locality and visual similarity. The instance association is solved by applying the Hungarian method. We evaluate different configurations of our algorithm using the MOT 2D 2015 train dataset. The evaluation shows that our tracking approach is able to track objects with high relative motions. In addition, we provide results of our approach on the MOT 2D 2015 test set for comparison with previous works. We achieve a MOTA score of 32.1.
A rotation invariant 3D indoor scene labeling approach based on conditional random fields

In this paper, we present an efficient framework for 3D indoor scene labeling based on a Conditional Random Field model. To make this framework invariant to camera rotation, a novel feature vector is developed, which is simple but discriminative. Meanwhile, we re-define the pairwise potential to improve the performance. A method for learning the labeling compatibility is proposed to exploit the strong contextual relations between class labels. We evaluate our approach on three datasets and the experimental results show that it achieves higher accuracy compared with several state of the art researches.
LTE/LTE-A Network Security Data Collection and Analysis for Security Measurement: A Survey

The long-term evolution (LTE)/LTE-advanced (LTE-A) network provides advanced services for billions of users with its higher bandwidths, better spectrum efficiency, and lower latency than legacy cellular networks. But it still suffers from new security threats due to its all IP-based heterogeneous architecture. Therefore, there is a critical need to perform a rapid and accurate network security measurement in the LTE/LTE-A network. To achieve LTE/LTE-A network security measurement, security-relevant data (in short security data) collection and data analysis for attack detection are required as prerequisites. However, most of the existing work only focuses on data collection and analysis for a certain type of LTE/LTE-A attacks. Little work has been done to comprehensively perform data collection and analysis for detecting various attacks on the LTE/LTE-A network. Different from previous work, in this paper, we review the security data collection and data analysis methods in terms of various attacks in order to provide the basis of security measurement in the LTE/LTE-A network. We first present a comprehensive taxonomy of attacks according to the LTE/LTE-A network structure. Then, we propose a number of criteria for evaluating the performance of data collection and analysis methods. And we lay our emphasis on the survey of data collection and analysis methods for significant active attack detection in the LTE/LTE-A network. All the reviewed methods are analyzed and discussed based on the proposed evaluation criteria. Furthermore, current open issues and future research challenges are presented with a view to stimulating future research. Finally, an adaptive data collection and data analysis model for security measurement in the LTE/LTE-A network is proposed.
The effects of rate on single-word reading assessment.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of introducing rapid stimulus presentation durations while limiting response durations on the decoding profiles of college students with reading disorders. METHOD Eighteen college-aged individuals with typical reading abilities and 12 college-aged adults who exhibited reading difficulties participated. Participants completed a series of 4 experimental word-naming tasks. Two Word Attack subtests and 2 Word Identification subtests were administered while introducing more rapid stimulus presentation durations along with limited response times. Standard scores and response times were collected. Each individual's results were subjected to a subtyping procedure based on relative decoding strengths and weaknesses. RESULTS More rapid conditions were associated with higher sight word decoding scores and lower phonological decoding scores. The results indicated that the subtyping patterns differed drastically depending on the presentation conditions. CONCLUSIONS The authors hypothesize that the experimental conditions potentially yield a more reliable assessment of the 2 independent methods of single-word reading. The ability to subtype or categorize readers on the basis of their relative strengths and weaknesses is highly dependent on the reliability of the measures used to assess those relative strengths and weaknesses.
Item analysis of the Spanish version of the Boston Naming Test with a Spanish speaking adult population from Colombia

Abstract Objective: The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is a widely used measure of confrontation naming ability that has been criticized for its questionable construct validity for non-English speakers. This study investigated item difficulty and construct validity of the Spanish version of the BNT to assess cultural and linguistic impact on performance. Methods: Subjects were 1298 healthy Spanish speaking adults from Colombia. They were administered the 60- and 15-item Spanish version of the BNT. A Rasch analysis was computed to assess dimensionality, item hierarchy, targeting, reliability, and item fit. Results: Both versions of the BNT satisfied requirements for unidimensionality. Although internal consistency was excellent for the 60-item BNT, order of difficulty did not increase consistently with item number and there were a number of items that did not fit the Rasch model. For the 15-item BNT, a total of 5 items changed position on the item hierarchy with 7 poor fitting items. Internal consistency was acceptable. Conclusions: Construct validity of the BNT remains a concern when it is administered to non-English speaking populations. Similar to previous findings, the order of item presentation did not correspond with increasing item difficulty, and both versions were inadequate at assessing high naming ability.
Distributed spectrum sensing and channel selection in opportunistic wireless personal area networks

This demonstrator showcases a distributed spectrum sensing and channel selection service running on a small-scale IEEE 802.15. 4 opportunistic WPAN network. This service can provide spectrum awareness to the network itself or to other co-located networks. In case an interfering signal is detected the network devices are able to identify less used spectrum portions such that the network can reallocate to the best available channel. The channel occupancy can be observed in real-time via a graphical user interface.
The influence of coercive measures on patients’ stances towards psychiatric institutions

Abstract Objective: To examine the impact of coercive interventions (CI) on patients’ evaluations of psychiatric hospitals as adversaries versus allies. Methods: Self-constructed interviews were conducted relating to quantitative and subjective aspects of coercion and the attitude towards psychiatry of 79 patients with psychotic and bipolar disorders. The Coercion Experience Scale (CES) and the Admission Experience Survey (AES) were used to establish the subjective impact of CI. Instruments measuring psychopathological symptoms and the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) were applied alongside the Schedule for the Assessment of Illness (SAI) and the Beck Cognitive Insight Scale (BCIS). Using a logistic regression approach, considered influencing factors such as number, type and patients’ subjective experiences of CI, cognitive and clinical insight, psychopathological symptoms and patients' global perceptions of their hospitalisation were analysed for their predictive value of patients’ attitudes towards psychiatry. Results: Binary logistic regression revealed that the subjective experience of CI and the perception of fairness and effectiveness during the treatment process predict patients’ attitudes towards psychiatry to a greater extent than symptom-related measures or the quantity of CI. Patients presenting a higher degree of self-reflectiveness perceive psychiatric institutions more likely as allies. Conclusions: The manner in which coercion is subjectively experienced has direct influence on patients’ perceptions of psychiatry.
Community-wide stable isotope analysis reveals two distinct trophic groups in a service-providing carabid community

Abstract Disentangling trophic interactions among species is important for elucidating mechanisms underlying ecosystem functioning and services. Carabid beetles are an important guild of predators that may regulate pest populations in arable landscapes, but their generalist feeding behavior hinders predictions about their actual contribution to pest control. In order to assess carabids’ potential for pest control, we simultaneously analyzed the carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios of a community of 45 co-occurring species in wheat and oilseed rape fields. With the expectation to identify distinct trophic groups based on the mean and the variance of carabid isotopic signatures, we observed a high degree of overlap in trophic positions between species. However, we also observed that species could be successfully categorized into two groups according to whether or not their carbon signatures varied independently from variations in the crop baseline. We interpret these results as differential primary resource uptake or by differential mobility aptitude in foraging. Accordingly, we propose that the isotopic signal can inform us on the presence/absence of links between generalist predators and cultivated plants through the trophic networks they belong to, and consequently on their potential role as pest natural enemies. We therefore suggest the complementarity of stable isotope analysis for obtaining a time-integrated assessment of carabid trophic behavior that may be combined with more direct molecular diet analysis allowing the simultaneous quantification of specific trophic links within agricultural landscapes.
Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice

The paper presents the findings of two studies of Copenhagen multiethnolect. The first study depicts a set of linguistic features that constitutes the linguistic variety which is termed multiethnolect. This study was by and large carried out from a perspective which in the paper is called a variety perspective. The second study was carried out from a stylistic practice perspective where multiethnolect is analyzed in more holistic terms as part of a broad range of stylistic repertoires in a local community of practice. The two studies serve in this article as illustrations of different approaches to studying language use and variation in multiethnic urban areas.