Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental and Analytical Progressive Collapse Evaluation of Actual Reinforced Concrete Structure

One approach to evaluate progressive collapse of structures is to study the effects of instantaneous removal of a load-bearing element such as a column. In this paper, using experimental and analytical results, potential progressive collapse of an actual 10-story reinforced concrete (RC) structure following the explosion of an exterior column is evaluated. Development of Vierendeel action is identified as the dominant mechanism in redistribution of loads in this structure. The concrete modulus of rupture is identified as an important parameter in limiting the maximum recorded vertical deformation of the system to only 0.25 in. (6.4 mm). The changes in the directions of bending moments in the vicinity of the removed column and their effects such as potential reinforcing bar pullout (bond failure) are studied. Potential failure modes and their consequences are studied. Some shortcomings of integrity requirements in current codes are pointed out and effects of beam reinforcement detail on the development of catenary action are discussed.
The economic crisis and lifestyle changes: a survey on frequency of use of medications and of preventive and specialistic medical care, in the Marche Region (Italy)

Background and aim: In the words of one observer, one of the many effects of the economic downturn has been a “health system shock” marked by reductions in the availability of healthcare resources and increases in the demand for health services. The financial situation influences negatively the low-income family groups, particularly those who normally use the government provided primary prevention services. The goal of this study was to assess the impact of the global recession on the use of medicines and medical investigation recession in different areas of the Marche Region. Methods: An anonymous questionnaire prepared by the National Institute of Statistics, modified and validated by the University of Camerino, has been distributed to junior highschool students of Central Italy to provide a statistically representative sample of families. The questionnaire has been administered in 2016-2017. Results: This article examines the results about healthcare habits, specifically, regarding medicines and medical examinations. Data obtained emphasize a reduction in the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). The parents category showed the higher change in medicines use (72.9%). Comparing the data of the Fabriano area with that of the Civitanova Marche area, Fabriano reported a greater reduction in the frequency of taking medicine. Concerning the medical examinations, half of the respondents (62.5%), indicated that they and their family members have regular medical check-up. Conclusions: Respondents who admitted that the economic crisis had reduced their quality of life indicated that the parents were the ones who had experienced the greatest change. This is confirmed by the information on the reduced frequency of medicine use, which affected the parents more than the children, whom they sought to protect and safeguard the most. This reduction was most marked in the Fabriano area. In contrast, in the Civitanova Marche area, with different socioeconomic characteristics, an increase in the use of all the categories of medicines was reported. Concerning visits the situation in the Marche Region appears encouraging. (www.actabiomedica.it)
Correlation between bacterial G+C content, genome size and the G+C content of associated plasmids and bacteriophages

Based on complete bacterial genome sequence data, we demonstrate a correlation between bacterial chromosome length and the G+C content of the genome, with longer genomes having higher G+C contents. The correlation value decreases at shorter genome sizes, where there is a wider spread of G+C values. However, although significant (P<0.001), the correlation value (Pearson R=0.58) suggests that other factors also have a significant influence. A similar pattern was seen for plasmids; longer plasmids had higher G+C values, although the large number of shorter plasmids had a wide spread of G+C values. There was also a significant (P<0.0001) correlation between the G+C content of plasmids and the G+C content of their bacterial host. Conversely, the G+C content of bacteriophages tended to reduce with larger genome sizes, and although there was a correlation between host genome G+C content and that of the bacteriophage, it was not as strong as that seen between plasmids and their hosts.
An Amplifying Cascade of Contact Lens-Related End-of-Day Hyperaemia and Dryness Symptoms

ABSTRACT End-of-day (EOD) symptoms of dryness are too often the cause of poor soft contact lens (SCL) tolerance and abandonment of wear. This review examines an amplifying cascade model for these symptoms, which involve thin tear layers on contact lens (CL) front surfaces being susceptible to evaporation-related short tear breakup (TBU) times. Susceptibility to faster tear loss by evaporation may be exacerbated by other forms of tear instability, such as lipid and mucin deficiencies as well as lens surface soiling. Bulbar and palpebral conjunctival hyperaemia and associated faster evaporation of warmer pre-conjunctival tears could also contribute to evaporative dry eye EOD symptoms. In CL wearers, a cascade of increasing hyperaemia toward the end of day, associated increasing tear temperature and evaporative loss, shortened TBU times (TBUTs) and increased osmolarity, all elevate the risk of higher symptom levels according to progressive amplification of this cascade. Chronic wound healing responses to SCL wear, perhaps related to limbal conjunctival trauma, stem cell deficiency and persistent epitheliopathy, as well as one or more immune responses, may contribute directly or indirectly to inflammation and the amplifying evaporative dryness cascade. A diurnal cycle that culminates in EOD symptoms appears to involve a process of recovery from causal mechanisms after lens removal, which allows lenses to be worn comfortably, at least initially the next day. Possible recovery processes are discussed in this review as are procedures that may help de-amplify an inflammatory, evaporative dryness cascade and alleviate EOD symptoms. Evidence of an accrual of adverse responses over long periods of more or less successful lens wear indicate an incremental failure to recover from EOD hyperaemia. Such incremental failure could help explain how SCL wear too often needs to be abandoned after many years of comfortable wear.
To Mock or Not To Mock? An Empirical Study on Mocking Practices

When writing automated unit tests, developers often deal with software artifacts that have several dependencies. In these cases, one has the possibility of either instantiating the dependencies or using mock objects to simulate the dependencies’ expected behavior. Even though recent quantitative studies showed that mock objects are widely used in OSS projects, scientific knowledge is still lacking on how and why practitioners use mocks. Such a knowledge is fundamental to guide further research on this widespread practice and inform the design of tools and processes to improve it. The objective of this paper is to increase our understanding of which test dependencies developers (do not) mock and why, as well as what challenges developers face with this practice. To this aim, we create MOCKEXTRACTOR, a tool to mine the usage of mock objects in testing code and employ it to collect data from three OSS projects and one industrial system. Sampling from this data, we manually analyze how more than 2,000 test dependencies are treated. Subsequently, we discuss our findings with developers from these systems, identifying practices, rationales, and challenges. These results are supported by a structured survey with more than 100 professionals. The study reveals that the usage of mocks is highly dependent on the responsibility and the architectural concern of the class. Developers report to frequently mock dependencies that make testing difficult and prefer to not mock classes that encapsulate domain concepts/rules of the system. Among the key challenges, developers report that maintaining the behavior of the mock compatible with the behavior of original class is hard and that mocking increases the coupling between the test and the production code.
Rumen Biohydrogenation and Microbial Community Changes Upon Early Life Supplementation of 22:6n-3 Enriched Microalgae to Goats

Dietary supplementation of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)-enriched products inhibits the final step of biohydrogenation in the adult rumen, resulting in the accumulation of 18:1 isomers, particularly of trans(t)-11 18:1. Occasionally, a shift toward the formation of t10 intermediates at the expense of t11 intermediates can be triggered. However, whether similar impact would occur when supplementing DHA-enriched products during pregnancy or early life remains unknown. Therefore, the current in vivo study aimed to investigate the effect of a nutritional intervention with DHA in the early life of goat kids on rumen biohydrogenation and microbial community. Delivery of DHA was achieved by supplementing DHA-enriched microalgae (DHA Gold) either to the maternal diet during pregnancy (prenatal) or to the diet of the young offspring (postnatal). At the age of 12 weeks, rumen fluid was sampled for analysis of long-chain fatty acids and microbial community based on bacterial 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. Postnatal supplementation with DHA-enriched microalgae inhibited the final biohydrogenation step, as observed in adult animals. This resulted particularly in increased ruminal proportions of t11 18:1 rather than a shift to t10 intermediates, suggesting that both young and adult goats might be less prone to dietary induced shifts toward the formation of t10 intermediates, in comparison with cows. Although Butyrivibrio species have been identified as the most important biohydrogenating bacteria, this genus was more abundant when complete biohydrogenation, i.e. 18:0 formation, was inhibited. Blautia abundance was positively correlated with 18:0 accumulation, whereas Lactobacillus spp. Dialister spp. and Bifidobacterium spp. were more abundant in situations with greater t10 accumulation. Extensive comparisons made between current results and literature data indicate that current associations between biohydrogenation intermediates and rumen bacteria in young goats align with former observations in adult ruminants.
Choreomania: An Historical Sketch, with Some Account of an Epidemic Observed in Madagascar

Amongst the epidemics of the Middle Ages, one of the most peculiar, and to the psychologist one of the most interesting, is the dancing mania which, for at least two centuries and a half, appeared at irregular intervals in various parts of Europe. It received different names in different countries. Throughout Western Europe it was called chorea, chorea Sancti Yiti, choreademonomania, the devil's dance, or the dance of St John; while in Italy, in more modern times, it was known as tar ant ism. The same disease has been observed in Abyssinia about the beginning of the present century, where it was called tigretier. It is not my design to give a full account of this malady in its various epidemics, but simply to sketch some of its leading historical features, for without some acquaintance with its history, the following narrative of what was observed in Madagascar, would be imperfectly understood. This disease, which we shall name Choreomania, was, as I have said, originally called chorea, or Saintf Yitus's dance; but these terms are now inseparably, though inaptly, applied to another and perfectly distinct nervous affection. From this change in name, along with the disappearance of the original chorea from Europe, considerable confusion has arisen. Not a few authors
PyMUS: Python-Based Simulation Software for Virtual Experiments on Motor Unit System

We constructed a physiologically plausible computationally efficient model of a motor unit and developed simulation software that allows for integrative investigations of the input–output processing in the motor unit system. The model motor unit was first built by coupling the motoneuron model and muscle unit model to a simplified axon model. To build the motoneuron model, we used a recently reported two-compartment modeling approach that accurately captures the key cell-type-related electrical properties under both passive conditions (somatic input resistance, membrane time constant, and signal attenuation properties between the soma and the dendrites) and active conditions (rheobase current and afterhyperpolarization duration at the soma and plateau behavior at the dendrites). To construct the muscle unit, we used a recently developed muscle modeling approach that reflects the experimentally identified dependencies of muscle activation dynamics on isometric, isokinetic and dynamic variation in muscle length over a full range of stimulation frequencies. Then, we designed the simulation software based on the object-oriented programing paradigm and developed the software using open-source Python language to be fully operational using graphical user interfaces. Using the developed software, separate simulations could be performed for a single motoneuron, muscle unit and motor unit under a wide range of experimental input protocols, and a hierarchical analysis could be performed from a single channel to the entire system behavior. Our model motor unit and simulation software may represent efficient tools not only for researchers studying the neural control of force production from a cellular perspective but also for instructors and students in motor physiology classroom settings.
Effects of dietary salt on gene and protein expression in brain tissue of a model of sporadic small vessel disease

Background: The effect of salt on cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is poorly understood. We assessed the effect of dietary salt on cerebral tissue of the stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHRSP) – a relevant model of sporadic SVD – at both the gene and protein level. Methods: Brains from 21-week-old SHRSP and Wistar-Kyoto rats, half additionally salt-loaded (via a 3-week regime of 1% NaCl in drinking water), were split into two hemispheres and sectioned coronally – one hemisphere for mRNA microarray and qRT-PCR, the other for immunohistochemistry using a panel of antibodies targeting components of the neurovascular unit. Results: We observed differences in gene and protein expression affecting the acute phase pathway and oxidative stress (ALB, AMBP, APOH, AHSG and LOC100129193, up-regulated in salt-loaded WKY versus WKY, >2-fold), active microglia (increased Iba-1 protein expression in salt-loaded SHRSP versus salt-loaded WKY, p<0.05), vascular structure (ACTB and CTNNB, up-regulated in salt-loaded SHRSP versus SHRSP, >3-fold; CLDN-11, VEGF and VGF down-regulated >2-fold in salt-loaded SHRSP versus SHRSP) and myelin integrity (MBP down-regulated in salt loaded WKY rats versus WKY, >2.5-fold). Changes of salt-loading were more pronounced in SHRSP and occurred without an increase in blood pressure in WKY rats. Conclusion: Salt exposure induced changes in gene and protein expression in an experimental model of SVD and its parent rat strain in multiple pathways involving components of the glio-vascular unit. Further studies in pertinent experimental models at different ages would help clarify the short- and long-term effect of dietary salt in SVD.
Mining system specific rules from change patterns

A significant percentage of warnings reported by tools to detect coding standard violations are false positives. Thus, there are some works dedicated to provide better rules by mining them from source code history, analyzing bug-fixes or changes between system releases. However, software evolves over time, and during development not only bugs are fixed, but also features are added, and code is refactored. In such cases, changes must be consistently applied in source code to avoid maintenance problems. In this paper, we propose to extract system specific rules by mining systematic changes over source code history, i.e., not just from bug-fixes or system releases, to ensure that changes are consistently applied over source code. We focus on structural changes done to support API modification or evolution with the goal of providing better rules to developers. Also, rules are mined from predefined rule patterns that ensure their quality. In order to assess the precision of such specific rules to detect real violations, we compare them with generic rules provided by tools to detect coding standard violations on four real world systems covering two programming languages. The results show that specific rules are more precise in identifying real violations in source code than generic ones, and thus can complement them.
Putting evolution in elimination: Winning our ongoing battle with evolving malaria mosquitoes and parasites

Since 2000, the world has made significant progress in reducing malaria morbidity and mortality, and several countries in Africa, South America and South‐East Asia are working hard to eliminate the disease. These elimination efforts continue to rely heavily on antimalarial drugs and insecticide‐based interventions, which remain the cornerstones of malaria treatment and prevention. However, resistance has emerged against nearly every antimalarial drug and insecticide that is available. In this review we discuss the evolutionary consequences of the way we currently implement antimalarial interventions, which is leading to resistance and may ultimately lead to control failure, but also how evolutionary principles can be applied to extend the lifespan of current and novel interventions. A greater understanding of the general evolutionary principles that are at the core of emerging resistance is urgently needed if we are to develop improved resistance management strategies with the ultimate goal to achieve a malaria‐free world.
Differential Regulation of NF-κB and Nrf2 by Bojungikki-Tang Is Associated with Suppressing Lung Inflammation

Bojungikki-tang (BT), an Asian herbal remedy, has been prescribed to increase the vitality of debilitated patients. Since a compromised, weakened vitality often leads to illness, BT has been widely used to treat various diseases. However, little is known about the mechanism by which BT exerts its effect. Given that BT ameliorates inflammatory pulmonary diseases including acute lung injury (ALI), we investigated whether BT regulates the function of key inflammatory factors such as NF-κB and Nrf2, contributing to suppressing inflammation. Results show that BT interrupted the nuclear localization of NF-κB and suppressed the expression of the NF-κB-dependent genes in RAW 264.7 cells. In similar experiments, BT induced the nuclear localization of Nrf2 and the expression of the Nrf2-dependent genes. In a lipopolysaccharide-induced ALI mouse model, a single intratracheal administration of BT to mouse lungs ameliorated alveolar structure and suppressed the expression of proinflammatory cytokine genes and neutrophil infiltration to mouse lungs. Therefore, our findings suggest that suppression of NF-κB and activation of Nrf2, by which BT suppresses inflammation, are ways for BT to exert its effect.
MBZip

Compression techniques at the last-level cache and the DRAM play an important role in improving system performance by increasing their effective capacities. A compressed block in DRAM also reduces the transfer time over the memory bus to the caches, reducing the latency of a LLC cache miss. Usually, compression is achieved by exploiting data patterns present within a block. But applications can exhibit data locality that spread across multiple consecutive data blocks. We observe that there is significant opportunity available for compressing multiple consecutive data blocks into one single block, both at the LLC and DRAM. Our studies using 21 SPEC CPU applications show that, at the LLC, around 25% (on average) of the cache blocks can be compressed into one single cache block when grouped together in groups of 2 to 8 blocks. In DRAM, more than 30% of the columns residing in a single DRAM page can be compressed into one DRAM column, when grouped together in groups of 2 to 6. Motivated by these observations, we propose a mechanism, namely, MBZip, that compresses multiple data blocks into one single block (called a zipped block), both at the LLC and DRAM. At the cache, MBZip includes a simple tag structure to index into these zipped cache blocks and the indexing does not incur any redirectional delay. At the DRAM, MBZip does not need any changes to the address computation logic and works seamlessly with the conventional/existing logic. MBZip is a synergistic mechanism that coordinates these zipped blocks at the LLC and DRAM. Further, we also explore silent writes at the DRAM and show that certain writes need not access the memory when blocks are zipped. MBZip improves the system performance by 21.9%, with a maximum of 90.3% on a 4-core system.
Incremental and Bulk-fill Techniques With Bulk-fill Resin Composite in Different Cavity Configurations.

PURPOSE: To compare the microtensile bond strengths of incremental and bulk-fill techniques under different C-factor and compliance conditions. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Extracted human third molars were divided into three experimental groups. For group I, Class I cavities were prepared. For group II, MOD cavities of the same size were prepared. For group III, the cavities were prepared the same way as group II only with high compliance cavity walls. The cavity wall compliance of the specimens was evaluated. Each of these groups was divided into four subgroups. The teeth were restored using two different materials: TB (Tetric N-Ceram Bulk Fill; Ivoclar Vivadent, Hanau, Germany) and VB (Venus Bulk Fill; Heraeus Kulzer, Armonk, NY, USA), and two methods, either an incremental or bulk-fill technique. Then, the microtensile bond strengths (μ-TBSs) were measured and compared. The polymerization stresses of the composites were calculated using a custom-made device. The results were statistically analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis test and Weibull analysis. RESULTS: In group I, the μ-TBS obtained using the incremental technique was significantly higher than that obtained by the bulk-fill technique ( p<0.05). In contrast, no difference of the μ-TBS value was observed between the two techniques in groups II and III. The μ-TBS value of group I was significantly lower than those of groups II and III ( p<0.05). No statistical difference in the μ-TBS was observed when the cavities were filled with either TB or VB ( p>0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The incremental technique showed higher bond strength than did the bulk-fill technique in high C-factor cavities. However, no difference was found between the two techniques in the low C-factor cavities. The bond strength in the high C-factor cavities was significantly lower than that of the low C-factor cavities.
Are Games Effective Learning Tools? A Review of Educational Games

The literature around the use, efficacy and design of educational games and game-based learning approaches has been building up gradually and in phases, across different disciplines and in an ad hoc way. This has been problematic in a number of ways and resulted in fragmented literature and inconsistent referencing patterns between different sub-disciplines and countries. This is mainly because no distinct single-disciplinary perspective has emerged because of: the cross-disciplinary nature of educational games, a reliance on single-disciplinary contexts for studies, changing terminologies in different contexts and the use of multi-methodological approaches. Distinct perspectives from education science, game science, neuroscience and information science have deepened our understanding of play and games. This research has become more quantitative, rigorous and nuanced as a result of more studies focused upon therapeutic health applications of games, the serious games research movement and more efficacy and comparative studies that examine and quantify utility.