Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Associations between Serum Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, Potential Confounders, and Cognitive Decline: A Longitudinal Study

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a role in the maintenance and function of neurons. Although persons with Alzheimer’s disease have lower cortical levels of BDNF, evidence regarding the association between circulating BDNF and cognitive function is conflicting. We sought to determine the correlates of BDNF level and whether BDNF level was prospectively associated with cognitive decline in healthy older adults. We measured serum BDNF near baseline in 912 individuals. Cognitive status was assessed repeatedly with the modified Mini-Mental Status Examination and the Digit Symbol Substitution test over the next 10 years. We evaluated the association between BDNF and cognitive decline with longitudinal models. We also assessed the association between BDNF level and demographics, comorbidities and health behaviors. We found an association between serum BDNF and several characteristics that are also associated with dementia (race and depression), suggesting that future studies should control for these potential confounders. We did not find evidence of a longitudinal association between serum BDNF and subsequent cognitive test trajectories in older adults, although we did identify a potential trend toward a cross-sectional association. Our results suggest that serum BDNF may have limited utility as a biomarker of prospective cognitive decline.
Policy Allocation for Transmission of Embedded Bit Streams over Noisy Channels with Feedback

An efficient policy allocation algorithm for the transmission of embedded bit streams over noisy channels with feedback is proposed. The transmission is based on the Type-II Hybrid ARQ/FEC protocol and uses a nested sequence C of channel codes to protect the packets. There are also constraints on the total bit budget and on the allowed number of retransmissions per packet. The allocation algorithm assigns different protection policies, each policy being a subset of C, to different packets to maximize the average number of correctly received source bits. We study the performance and the complexity of the proposed scheme through the transmission of images encoded by JPEG2000 over mobile channels with correlated Rayleigh fading. We demonstrate by simulations that the proposed multiple-policy scheme provides significant improvements over a purely FEC scheme with no feedback and also the existing fixed-policy (equal error protection) schemes. Our results show that feedback is particularly helpful for poor channel conditions and that the proposed scheme is very robust against changes in the channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the mobile speed.
PrivCheck: privacy-preserving check-in data publishing for personalized location based services

With the widespread adoption of smartphones, we have observed an increasing popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs) in the past decade. To improve user experience, LBSs often provide personalized recommendations to users by mining their activity (i.e., check-in) data from location-based social networks. However, releasing user check-in data makes users vulnerable to inference attacks, as private data (e.g., gender) can often be inferred from the users' check-in data. In this paper, we propose PrivCheck, a customizable and continuous privacy-preserving check-in data publishing framework providing users with continuous privacy protection against inference attacks. The key idea of PrivCheck is to obfuscate user check-in data such that the privacy leakage of user-specified private data is minimized under a given data distortion budget, which ensures the utility of the obfuscated data to empower personalized LBSs. Since users often give LBS providers access to both their historical check-in data and future check-in streams, we develop two data obfuscation methods for historical and online check-in publishing, respectively. An empirical evaluation on two real-world datasets shows that our framework can efficiently provide effective and continuous protection of user-specified private data, while still preserving the utility of the obfuscated data for personalized LBSs.
Pre-Employment Psychological Testing of Police Officers: The MMPI and the IPI as Predictors of Performance

There are strong and compelling reasons for the careful selection of police officers, and careful assessment of candidates includes psychological assessment. The most commonly used instruments include the MMPI, MMPI-2 and the IPI. To assess the relative relationship of validity findings for the respective tests, 18 studies, which empirically related test findings to later police functioning, were reviewed in this study. The findings indicated both MMPI versions and the IPI provide modest correlations and effect size relationships to police behaviour (rs = 0.17 and 0.28, respectively). In addition, the IPI scores provided significantly higher findings along these lines. There continues to be a need for additional studies, as these results are based on only 18 studies, but the findings to date indicate better prediction of police job performance with the IPI. These results argue for increased use of the IPI, at times in combination with the MMPI-2, with increased attention to the normative samples and with increased assessment of the police, academy and corrections populations.
Aqueous Photochemistry of Mercury with Organic Acids.

To understand the dynamic chemical changes of mercury taking place in atmospheric water, a more detailed knowledge of the reactions of mercury with organic acids must be obtained. The rate of the above chemical reactions with different Hg(II) species is especially essential for understanding the dominant pathway of mercury transformation in the atmosphere. The objective of this research is to study the rate of photochemical reactions of dissolved divalent mercury with organic acids such as oxalate, acetate, and formate, which are abundant in atmospheric water. Laboratory photochemical experiments with simulated sunlight were conducted to assess the role of homogeneous photochemistry in changing the redox states of mercury in atmospheric water. It is observed that Hg(II) is readily reduced by hydroperoxyl radicals produced by the photolysis of oxalate. The second-order rate constant for the Hg(II)-hydroperoxyl radical reaction was found to be 1.7 x 104 M-1 s-1 when no chloride is present and 1.1 x 104 M-1 s-1 when chloride is present in the system. Modeling of mercury speciation has been performed using MICROQL equilibrium software.
Psychological stress and disease.

DESPITE WIDESPREAD PUBLIC BELIEF THAT PSYCHOlogical stress leads to disease, the biomedical community remains skeptical of this conclusion. In this Commentary, we discuss the plausibility of the belief that stress contributes to a variety of disease processes and summarize the role of stress in 4 major diseases: clinical depression, cardiovascular disease (CVD), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS, and cancer.
A Neural Architecture for Dialectal Arabic Segmentation

The automated processing of Arabic Dialects is challenging due to the lack of spelling standards and to the scarcity of annotated data and resources in general. Segmentation of words into its constituent parts is an important processing building block. In this paper, we show how a segmenter can be trained using only 350 annotated tweets using neural networks without any normalization or use of lexical features or lexical resources. We deal with segmentation as a sequence labeling problem at the character level. We show experimentally that our model can rival state-of-the-art methods that rely on additional resources.
Effects of In Vivo Nitroglycerin Treatment on Activity and Expression of the Guanylyl Cyclase and cGMP-Dependent Protein Kinase and Their Downstream Target Vasodilator-Stimulated Phosphoprotein in Aorta

BackgroundChronic in vivo treatment with nitroglycerin (NTG) induces tolerance to nitrates and cross-tolerance to nitrovasodilators and endothelium-derived nitric oxide (NO). We previously identified increased vascular superoxide formation and reduced NO bioavailability as one causal mechanism. It is still controversial whether intracellular downstream signaling to nitrovasodilator-derived NO is affected as well. Methods and ResultsWe therefore studied the effects of 3-day NTG treatment of rats and rabbits on activity and expression of the immediate NO target soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC) and on the cGMP-activated protein kinase I (cGK-I). Tolerance was induced either by chronic NTG infusion via osmotic minipumps (rats) or by NTG patches (rabbits). Western blot analysis, semiquantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, and Northern blot analysis revealed significant and comparable increases in the expression of sGC &agr;1 and &bgr;1 subunit protein and mRNA. Studies with the oxidative fluorescent dye hydroethidine revealed an increase in superoxide in the endothelium and smooth muscle. Stimulation with NADH increased superoxide signals in both layers. Although cGK-I expression in response to low-dose NTG was not changed, a strong reduction in vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (VASP) serine239 phosphorylation (specific substrate of cGK-I) was observed in tolerant tissue from rats and rabbits. Concomitant in vivo and in vitro treatment with vitamin C improved tolerance, reduced oxidative stress, and improved P-VASP. ConclusionsWe therefore conclude that increased expression of sGC in the setting of tolerance reflects a chronic inhibition rather than an induction of the sGC–cGK-I pathway and may be mediated at least in part by increased vascular superoxide.
Multi-group multi-way relaying with reduced number of relay antennas

In this paper, multi-group multi-way relaying is considered. There are L groups with K nodes in each group. Each node wants to share d data streams with all the other nodes in its group. A single MIMO relay assists the communications. The relay does not have enough antennas to spatially separate the data streams. However, the relay assists in performing interference alignment at the receivers. In order to find the interference alignment solution, we generalize the concept of signal and channel alignment developed for the MIMO Y channel and the two-way relay channel to group signal alignment and group channel alignment. In comparison to conventional multi-group multi-way relaying schemes [1, 2], where at least R ≥ LKd - d antennas are required, in our proposed scheme, exploiting the multiple antennas at the nodes, only R ≥ LKd - Ld antennas are needed. The number of antennas required at the nodes to achieve this is also derived. It is shown that the proposed interference alignment based scheme achieves more degrees of freedom than the reference schemes without interference alignment.
Current issues relating to the transfusion of stored red blood cells

The development of blood storage systems allowed donation and transfusion to be separated in time and space. This separation has permitted the regionalization of donor services with subsequent economies of scale and improvements in the quality and availability of blood products. However, the availability of storage raises the question of how long blood products can and should be stored and how long they are safe and effective. The efficacy of red blood cells was originally measured as the increment in haematocrit and safety began with typing and the effort to reduce the risk of bacterial contamination. Appreciation of a growing list of storage lesions of red blood cells has developed with our increasing understanding of red blood cell physiology and our experience with red blood cell transfusion. However, other than frank haemolysis, rare episodes of bacterial contamination and overgrowth, the reduction of oxygen‐carrying capacity associated with the failure of some transfused cells to circulate, and the toxicity of lysophospholipids released from membrane breakdown, storage‐induced lesions have not had obvious correlations with safety or efficacy. The safety of red blood cell storage has also been approached in retrospective epidemiologic studies of transfused patients, but the results are frequently biased by the fact that sicker patients are transfused more often and blood banks do not issue blood products in a random order. Several large prospective studies of the safety of stored red blood cells are planned.
HAEMATOLOGY OF CAPTIVE RHESUS MACAQUES (Macaca mulatt a)

Health status of non-human primates reared at Arignar Anna Zoological Park, Vandalur were determined by studying the haematolgoical parameters. A total of six Rhesus macaques aged from three to seven years were subjected to haematological analysis. Mean values of PCV, Hb, RBC, ESR, WBC, differential count and erythrocyte indices were studied. From this study, baseline information on haematology profile was obtained for the Rhesus macaques.
Essential Public Health Services’ Accessibility and its Determinants among Adults with Chronic Diseases in China

Background Along with three years implementation of health reform in China, this study aimed at providing the up-to-date evidence about the accessibility of essential public health services (EPHS) among adults with chronic diseases (CDs) in both urban and rural areas, as well as determinants in access to EPHS. Methods The data were collected from a cross-sectional survey conducted in 2013, which used a multistage stratified random sampling method to select 54 urban communities and 54 rural villages. Hypertension patients and diabetes patients were the target population who are the main beneficiaries of EPHS. Single factor analysis of influencing factors on difference access to EPHS was performed by Chi-Square analysis. Logistic regression analysis was used to determine the predictors of effective management and effective control. Results Patients with hypertension or diabetes were predominantly middle-aged or older persons and had a mean age of 65.26 year. People with CDs in China have a higher basic accessibility rate in EPHS with more than 90% of them having experience in receiving EPHS. And those who are willing to receive services from doctors have the most positive influence on effective management and control in blood pressure or blood glucose. But unsatisfied quality and equity of EPHS still exist in primary health system. 90% of participants could receive EPHS, but just 44% of them could control their diseases effectively. And participants from cities had the higher rates in effective management (urban: rural = 57%: 50.6%) and effective control (urban: rural = 39.5%: 27.8%). Conclusion People with CDs have a high level in geography and economic accessibility to EPHS, but the effectiveness of health management also needs to be improved, especially for those living in rural areas. Our study highlights the continuing need for improving ability to provide EPHS and the equality among regions. Meanwhile, strengthen health education and promotion for patients with CDs to improve their willingness to receive EPHS is also highlighted.
A Peptide Sequence of Heparin/Heparan Sulfate (HP/HS)-interacting Protein Supports Selective, High Affinity Binding of HP/HS and Cell Attachment*

We previously have identified a novel cell surface heparan sulfate/heparin (HS/HP)-interacting protein (HIP) found in human uterine epithelia and a variety of other human epithelial and endothelial cells and cell lines (Liu, S., Smith, S. E., Julian, J., Rohde, L. H., Karin, N. J., and Carson, D. D. (1996)J. Biol. Chem. 271, 11817–11823; Rohde, L. H. , Julian, J., Babaknia, A. , and Carson, D. D. (1996) J. Biol. Chem. 271, 11824–11830). The amino acid sequence predicted for HIP revealed a potential HS/HP-binding motif. In the present studies, a synthetic peptide corresponding to this putative HS/HP-binding motif, HIP peptide, was synthesized and examined with regard to its HS/HP binding and cell attachment promoting activity. Results using solid phase binding assays demonstrate that HIP peptide binds HS/HP with high selectivity and has high affinity for bulk HP (50% saturation ≅ 300 nm) and even higher affinity for a subset of polysaccharides found in commercial [3H]HP (half-saturation ≅ 10 nm). Moreover, HIP peptide binds subsets of cell and extracellular matrix-associated HS and dermatan sulfate expressed by RL95 cells, a human uterine adenocarcinoma cell line. HIP peptide also binds a similar fraction of HS as well as dermatan sulfate expressed by JAR cells, a human choriocarcinoma cell line. In contrast to binding of cell- or extracellular matrix-associated HS, HIP peptide does not bind secreted or released forms of HS or DS from either RL95 or JAR cells to a significant extent. HS species that bind to HIP peptide are generally larger, have a higher negative charge density, and have a larger proportion of di- and trisulfated disaccharide units than HS species that do not bind to HIP peptide, demonstrating structural differences among these polysaccharides. This same peptide supports HS-dependent JAR cell attachment. Collectively, these data demonstrate that a linear peptide sequence found within HIP can account, at least in part, for the HS/HP binding and cell adhesion promoting activities of this protein.
Finite group extensions and the Atiyah conjecture

The Atiyah conjecture for a discrete group G states that the L 2 -Betti numbers of a finite CW-complex with fundamental group G are integers if G is torsion-free, and in general that they are rational numbers with denominators determined by the finite subgroups of G. Here we establish conditions under which the Atiyah conjecture for a torsion-free group G implies the Atiyah conjecture for every finite extension of G. The most important requirement is that H (G,Z/p) is isomorphic to the cohomology of the p-adic completion of G for every prime p. An additional assumption is necessary, e.g. that the quotients of the lower central series or of the derived series are torsion-free. We prove that these conditions are fulfilled for a certain class of groups, which contains in particular Artin’s pure braid groups (and more generally fundamental groups of fiber-type arrangements), free groups, fundamental groups of orientable compact surfaces, certain knot and link groups, primitive positive one-relator groups, and products of these. Therefore every finite, in fact every elementary amenable extension of these groups satisfies the Atiyah conjecture. As a consequence, if such an extension H is torsion-free then the group ring CH contains no non-trivial zero divisors, i.e. H fulfills the zero-divisor conjecture. In the course of the proof we prove that if these extensions are torsionfree, then they have plenty of non-trivial torsion-free quotients which are virtually nilpotent. All of this applies in particular to Artin’s full braid group, therefore answering question B6 on www.grouptheory. org. Our methods also apply to the Baum-Connes conjecture. This is discussed in [47], where for example the Baum-Connes conjecture is proved for the full braid groups. MSC: 55N25 (homology with local coecients), 16S34 (group rings, Laurent rings), 57M25 (knots and links)
Dimensions of test anxiety: Relations to ways of coping with pre-exam anxiety and uncertainty

Cumulative evidence has shown that four dimensions can be differentiated in the experience of test anxiety: worry, emotionality, interference, and lack of confidence. To investigate whether these dimensions show specific relationships with ways of coping, a study with 162 students (75 male, 87 female) examined how students cope with anxiety and uncertainty in the run-up to important exams. Coping strategies included task-orientation and preparation, seeking social support, and avoidance. Results showed that overall test anxiety was related to seeking social support. When dimensions of test anxiety were inspected individually while controlling for interdimensional overlap, however, results showed a specific pattern of relationships: (a) worry was related to task-orientation and preparation and inversely related to cognitive avoidance, (b) emotionality was related to task-orientation and preparation and seeking social support, and (c) interference was related to avoidance and inversely related to task-orientation and preparation, whereas (d) lack of confidence was related to avoidance only. Although some gender differences emerged, the findings indicate that the main components of test anxiety display different relationships with coping. Moreover, they confirm that it is important to differentiate between worry and interference because these dimensions, albeit closely related, may show opposite relationships with ways of coping.
Personality–event interaction models of depression

Several theorists have suggested that excessive concerns about social relatedness or autonomous achievement create vulnerabilities to depression in response to negative interpersonal or achievement events, respectively. In this paper, I describe these models and review empirical studies of them. I then discuss a number of methodological and conceptual issues that arise from these studies and that need to be addressed as this research area matures. Finally, I discuss findings that need to be incorporated by these models, which suggest that the relations among personality, events, and depression are more complex, bi‐directional, and recursive.
Correlation of host immune response with quantitative recovery of Chlamydia trachomatis from the human endocervix

We studied 95 women with uncomplicated Chlamydia trachomatis cervical infection. Quantitative isolation of C. trachomatis was performed in HeLa 229 cells, and the results were correlated with serum immunoglobulin M and immunoglobulin G antibody to the organism. We found that quantitative cultures for C. trachomatis can provide a meaningful measurement by which to evaluate the effect of the acquired immune response. In particular, secretory immunoglobulin A antibody to C. trachomatis in cervical secretion demonstrated a striking and inverse correlation with recovery of the organism from the cervix. It is suggested that this component of the immune response may regulate shedding of the organism.
Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory: Quality and Quantity of Retention Over Time

Individuals who have Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) are able to recall, with considerable accuracy, details of daily experiences that occurred over many previous decades. The present study parametrically investigates the quantity and quality of details of autobiographical memories acquired 1-week, 1-month, 1-year, and 10-years prior in HSAMs and controls. In addition, we tested the consistency of details provided at the 1-week delay by testing the subjects 1 month later with a surprise assessment. At the 1-week delay, HSAMs and controls recalled an equivalent number of events. In contrast, HSAM recall performance was superior at more remote delays, with remarkable consistency following a 1-month delay. Further, we revealed a relationship between the consistency of recall and HSAMs’ obsessive–compulsive tendencies. These data suggest that HSAMs experience normal encoding, yet enhanced consolidation and later recall of autobiographical events.