Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Person Perception and Self-Awareness : Knowledge of Influences on One ' s Own Judgments

Recent claims that people have no insight into the influences on their own beliefs, decisions, and behavior are overstated. In our research 96 judges watched 50 short interviews and rated the interviewees' intelligence, friendliness, or deceptiveness. They later estimated how the interviewees' characteristics had influenced their judgments. The correlation of the interviewees' characteristics with each judge's ratings is a measure of the degree to which the characteristics influenced that judge. Judges were moderately accurate at estimating the impact of characteristics on their judgments, with the mean correlation between the actual influence and their estimates being 42. To control for judges' use of a priori theories of causation, we had observers who did not see interviews or make person-perception judgments estimate how these characteristics would have influenced their judgments if they had made them. Judges' self-awareness remains even after controlling for observers' estimates of effects. Although judges showed self-awareness, their beliefs about what influenced them were also shaped by a priori theories about what should have influenced them. The degree of their selfawareness varied with the person-perception judgments they had made and the characteristics they were assessing.
Rare case of bilateral aural atresia and cochlear dysplasia: when cochlear implantation is not the answer

Objective and importance: Reports of patients with concurrent middle and inner ear anomalies are rare. These patients present a surgical challenge for cochlear implantation. The surgical risk must be weighed against the predicted benefit of the patient’s hearing outcome and subsequent development of speech and language as well as their quality of life. Clinical presentation: Thirteen-year-old boy presented to the Otology clinic for auditory rehabilitation options. He has mild developmental delay, is non-verbal and communicates via American Sign Language. He was born with bilateral aural atresia and never wore amplification. On exam he has grade 1 microtia and complete ear canal atresia bilaterally. His behavioural hearing test shows profound sensorineural hearing loss of both ears. The computed tomography scan shows bilateral underdeveloped and completely opacified mastoid and middle ear, complete bony atresia of the ear canals, and an under-partitioned cochlea with poorly defined modiolus, among other abnormalities. The patient and his family were counselled on the available options as well as the need for any further studies. Intervention: Counselling of patient and family. Conclusion: While there have been reports in the literature of performing cochlear implantations in patients with a concurrent atresia and cochlear dysplasia, these were patients whose degree of inner ear anomalies was relatively minor and their prognosis of a good audiological outcome was favourable. The presented case is that of a patient for whom the surgical approach to the cochlea alone would be difficult. More importantly, his quality of life would not significantly improve in light of the predicted limited hearing and language development outcomes, given the severity of his inner ear abnormalities, limited communication abilities, prolonged period of deafness and developmental delays.
Delivery systems for Leishmania vaccine development

ABSTRACT Leishmaniasis is a neglected disease and is endemic in tropical and sub-tropical areas worldwide. Lifelong immunity after recovery indicates that vaccination could be a promising approach to overcome the disease. Although different antigens have been successfully tested against all clinical forms, none of them have been shown to fulfill the safety and efficiency requirements for human applications. Hence, strong vehicles are needed to carry antigens of interest and potentiate its presence in the body. So far, various live or chemical carriers have been applied to reinforce the immunological effects of ideal antigens. In the current review, the recent attempts in this field have been summarized.
Na-Doping Effects on Thermoelectric Properties of Cu2−xSe Nanoplates

For this work, a β-phase Cu2−xSe nanowire and nanoplate, and a Na-doped Cu2−xSe nanoplate were successfully synthesized using solution syntheses. The morphologies of the Cu2−xSe nanowire and nanoplate could be easily controlled by changing the synthetic condition. The Na-doped Cu2−xSe nanoplate was prepared by a simple treatment of the Cu2−xSe nanoplate with a sodium hydroxide-ethylene glycol solution. The nanopowders were then consolidated to bulk materials using spark plasma sintering (SPS). The phase structure and the microstructure of all of the samples were checked using X-ray diffraction (XRD), high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HR-TEM), and scanning electron microscope (SEM) analyses. The thermoelectric transport properties, such as the electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, carrier concentration, carrier mobility, and thermal conductivity, were measured at temperature ranges from 323 to 673 K. The results show that Na played two important roles: one is reducing the carrier concentration, thereby improving the Seebeck coefficient, the other is reducing the thermal conductivity. Overall, the maximum thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) of 0.24 was achieved at 673 K in the Na-doped Cu2−xSe nanoplate.
All done procedure by laser in free gingival graft treatment: A case series study

ABSTRACT Aim: This case series study evaluated the application of Er;Cr:YSGG laser for a free gingival graft procedure and the effect of low level laser therapy on post surgical pain and wound healing. Cases: 6 cases with mucogingival problems needing free gingival grafts were selected. First, the recipient site was anesthetized and de-epithelialization was done with a Er;Cr:YSGG laser. After tracing the palatal donor site with the laser, the graft was harvested. For root modification of the recipient tooth, conditioning of the dentin was done by the same laser. The inner side of graft was trimmed by the laser before suturing at the recipient site. After final adaptation of the grafts and suturing process, the recipient and donor sites were irradiated by therapeutic laser for reduction of post surgical complications. Results: All patients reported the reduction in pain level after day 2 on donor and recipient site. Also, the wound healing was achieved after 14 days in all cases in donor site. Conclusion: According to high surface absorbance, better incision, coagulation and application on both soft and hard tissues, Er;Cr:YSGG laser can be safe, minimally invasive manner and useful for all steps of the free gingival graft procedure.
Experimental investigation on the effect of abrasive grain size on the lapping uniformity of a sapphire wafer

Experiments are taken to investigate the effect of abrasive grain size on the lapping uniformity of sapphire wafer, macro and micro surface profiles are measured and compared by contact and contactless measurement methods. For W14 carbide boron abrasive lapping process, rolling and extruding effects are the main material removal mechanism and leaves high density micro-crack on the lapped sapphire surface. On the other hand, W3.5 carbide boron abrasive grain performs a ductile cutting process for material remove process under the same operated parameters, only scratch on sapphire surface can be viewed by AFM. Experimental results show that abrasive grain size has a great effect on the surface integrity of the lapped sapphire, charging status of abrasive grain into the lapping plate and its effect on the surface integrity should be considered when choosing the abrasive grain size for precision lapping process. Lapping uniformity both for macro and micro level, roughness and flatness of sapphire wafer can be achieved by using W3.5 carbide boron abrasive grain and acceptable by pre-polishing process.
Learning Independent Causal Mechanisms

Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced by physical mechanisms that give rise to dependences between observables. Mechanisms, however, can be meaningful autonomous modules of generative models that make sense beyond a particular entailed data distribution, lending themselves to transfer between problems. We develop an algorithm to recover a set of independent (inverse) mechanisms from a set of transformed data points. The approach is unsupervised and based on a set of experts that compete for data generated by the mechanisms, driving specialization. We analyze the proposed method in a series of experiments on image data. Each expert learns to map a subset of the transformed data back to a reference distribution. The learned mechanisms generalize to novel domains. We discuss implications for transfer learning and links to recent trends in generative modeling.
Radiologic errors, past, present and future

Abstract During the 10-year period beginning in 1949 with publication of five articles in two radiology journals and UKs The Lancet, a California radiologist named L.H. Garland almost single-handedly shocked the entire medical and especially the radiologic community. He focused their attention on the fact now known and accepted by all, but at that time not previously recognized and acknowledged only with great reluctance, that a substantial degree of observer error was prevalent in radiologic interpretation. In the more than half-century that followed, Garland’s pioneering work has been affirmed and reaffirmed by numerous researchers. Retrospective studies disclosed then and still disclose today that diagnostic errors in radiologic interpretations of plain radiographic (as well as CT, MR, ultrasound, and radionuclide) images hover in the 30% range, not too dissimilar to the error rates in clinical medicine. Seventy percent of these errors are perceptual in nature, i.e., the radiologist does not “see” the abnormality on the imaging exam, perhaps due to poor conspicuity, satisfaction of search, or simply the “inexplicable psycho-visual phenomena of human perception. ” The remainder are cognitive errors: the radiologist sees an abnormality but fails to render a correct diagnoses by attaching the wrong significance to what is seen, perhaps due to inadequate knowledge, or an alliterative or judgmental error. Computer-assisted detection (CAD), a technology that for the past two decades has been utilized primarily in mammographic interpretation, increases sensitivity but at the same time decreases specificity; whether it reduces errors is debatable. Efforts to reduce diagnostic radiological errors continue, but the degree to which they will be successful remains to be determined.
Applying informed coding and embedding to design a robust high-capacity watermark

We describe a new watermarking system based on the principles of informed coding and informed embedding. This system is capable of embedding 1380 bits of information in images with dimensions 240/spl times/368 pixels. Experiments on 2000 images indicate the watermarks are robust to significant valumetric distortions, including additive noise, low-pass filtering, changes in contrast, and lossy compression. Our system encodes watermark messages with a modified trellis code in which a given message may be represented by a variety of different signals, with the embedded signal selected according to the cover image. The signal is embedded by an iterative method that seeks to ensure the message will not be confused with other messages, even after addition of noise. Fidelity is improved by the incorporation of perceptual shaping into the embedding process. We show that each of these three components improves performance substantially.
Major technical advancements in apache hive

Apache Hive is a widely used data warehouse system for Apache Hadoop, and has been adopted by many organizations for various big data analytics applications. Closely working with many users and organizations, we have identified several shortcomings of Hive in its file formats, query planning, and query execution, which are key factors determining the performance of Hive. In order to make Hive continuously satisfy the requests and requirements of processing increasingly high volumes data in a scalable and efficient way, we have set two goals related to storage and runtime performance in our efforts on advancing Hive. First, we aim to maximize the effective storage capacity and to accelerate data accesses to the data warehouse by updating the existing file formats. Second, we aim to significantly improve cluster resource utilization and runtime performance of Hive by developing a highly optimized query planner and a highly efficient query execution engine. In this paper, we present a community-based effort on technical advancements in Hive. Our performance evaluation shows that these advancements provide significant improvements on storage efficiency and query execution performance. This paper also shows how academic research lays a foundation for Hive to improve its daily operations.
Matric suction measurements of compacted subgrade soils

The mechanical response of compacted subgrade soils is highly influenced by matric suction. This paper proposes a detailed procedure for matric suction determination, using the filter paper technique, in samples compacted in the laboratory using the standard Proctor procedure (ASTM D698-12). Special attention is paid to the quantification of errors associated with the measurement of matric suction in compacted soils using the filter paper technique. The procedure is illustrated through suction measurements made for two fine-grained soils obtained from Indiana road sites. Soil samples were compacted at the optimum water content (OWC) and also both wet and dry of optimum. Test results indicated that the matric suction was substantially different for soils compacted on the dry side of the OWC and at the OWC. Matric suction measurements approached zero for soils compacted at water contents greater than the OWC + 2%. At the OWC, the soil with the lowest plasticity index but highest clay content developed higher matric suction than the soil with the highest plasticity index. The proposed test procedure facilitates the estimation of matric suction of subgrade soils in the laboratory.
Endothelial to Mesenchymal Transition Represents a Key Link in the Interaction between Inflammation and Endothelial Dysfunction

Endothelial cells that line the inner walls of blood vessels are in direct contact with blood and display remarkable heterogeneity in their response to exogenous stimuli. These ECs have unique location-dependent properties determined by the corresponding vascular beds and play an important role in regulating the homeostasis of the vascular system. Evidence suggests that vascular endothelial cells exposed to various environments undergo dynamic phenotypic switching, a key biological program in the context of endothelial heterogeneity, but that might result in EC dysfunction and, in turn, cause a variety of human diseases. Emerging studies show the importance of endothelial to mesenchymal transition (EndMT) in endothelial dysfunction during inflammation. EndMT is a complex biological process in which ECs lose their endothelial characteristics, acquire mesenchymal phenotypes, and express mesenchymal cell markers, such as alpha smooth muscle actin and fibroblast-specific protein 1. EndMT is induced by inflammatory responses, leading to pathological states, including tissue fibrosis, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and atherosclerosis, via dysfunction of the vascular system. Although the mechanisms associated with inflammation-induced EndMT have been identified, unraveling the specific role of this phenotypic switching in vascular dysfunction remains a challenge. Here, we review the current understanding on the interactions between inflammatory processes, EndMT, and endothelial dysfunction, with a focus on the mechanisms that regulate essential signaling pathways. Identification of such mechanisms will guide future research and could provide novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of vascular diseases.
Exhausting Multiple Hemodialysis Access Failures

ABSTRACT Introduction: Vascular access is often considered the Achilles heel the of hemodialysis because of its impact on morbidity, all cause mortality and finally costs of these patients. The most common complication of permanent hemodialysis (HD) vascular access is thrombosis, with some cases being related to hypercoagulability states. Antiphospholipid antibody syndrome (APAS) is a cause of increased thrombotic tendency, and this may complicate the management of such patients on HD. Case report: We describe a 41-year-old woman with end stage renal disease (ESRD) from Adult Polycystic Kidney Disease who was referred to our tertiary care center for treatment and selection of renal replacement therapy form. It was thought to initiate with peritoneal dialysis considering her actual conditions. She was putted on hemodialysis for several sessions, and a subclavian cathether was her first vascular access. The surgeon created an arterio-venous fistula which did not mature. After the implantation of the peritoneal cathether she started peritoneal dialysis and continued living with that for 2 years. She felt exhausted and because of a grave peritonitis episode accompanied with procedure failure and a long hospitalization she was transferred to hemodialysis. Renal transplantation was not possible because she didn’t have a kidney donation. She was maintained on regular HD, but her dialysis care was complicated by recurrent vascular access failures. She had multiple interventions for arterio-venous fistulas and grafts but almost all of them failed due to thrombosis to the extent that only one access site was available for her routine renal replacement treatment. A thorough thrombophilia screen confirmed the presence of antiphospholipid antibodies. A diagnosis of APAS was made and she was anticoagulated with warfarin. The AVG made in this last available site is still working from 18 months. If it fails we have no answers and solutions for her. Conclusion: The presence of APAS can complicate HD management by causing recurrent vascular access thrombosis and failure, and nephrologist must remain alert to this possibility. Checking and treating as soon as possible it's our future challenge.
First principles study of the temperature-dependent elastic properties of W

The temperature-dependent elastic constants of body-centred cubic (bcc) phase W are presented from first principles quasi-static approach. With the quasi-harmonic approximation model, the Hugoniot equation of state and temperature-dependence linear thermal expansion coefficient is successfully obtained. The adiabatic elastic constants show a normal behaviour with temperature: decrease with increasing temperature. Based on the obtained adiabatic elastic constants, the structural stability and polycrystalline aggregate properties including bulk modulus B, shear modulus G, and B/G ratio are analysed for bcc phase W. In addition, the sound velocities as a function of temperature for bcc phase W are predicted.
Do miRNAs Play a Role in Fetal Growth Restriction? A Fresh Look to a Busy Corner

Placenta is the crucial organ for embryo and fetus development and plays a critical role in the development of fetal growth restriction (FGR). There are increasing evidences on the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in a variety of pregnancy-related complications such as preeclampsia and FGR. More than 1880 miRNAs have been reported in humans and most of them are expressed in placenta. In this paper, we aimed to review the current evidence about the topic. According to retrieved data, controversial results about placental expression of miRNAs could be due (at least in part) to the different experimental methods used by different groups. Despite the fact that several authors have demonstrated a relatively easy and feasible detection of some miRNAs in maternal whole peripheral blood, costs of these tests should be reduced in order to increase cohorts and have stronger evidence. In this regard, we take the opportunity to solicit future studies on large cohort and adequate statistical power, in order to identify a panel of biomarkers on maternal peripheral blood for early diagnosis of FGR.
Visual Hand Gestures Classification Using Wavelet Transform and Moment Based Features

This paper presents a novel technique for classifying human hand gestures based on stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and classification based on geometrical based moments and compares the results with the classification based on Hu-moments and wavelet approximate images. The technique uses view-based approach for representation of hand actions, and uses a cumulative image-difference technique where the time between the sequences of images is implicitly captured in the representation of action resulting in Motion History Images (MHI). These MHIs are decomposed into wavelet sub-images using SWT. Translation and scaling invariant moments are then computed from the resulting high scale low pass residue of the wavelet sub-images. These geometrical moments are used as the global image descriptors and are fed to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for classification. The recognition criterion is established using backpropagation based multilayer perceptron (MLP). The experiments show that such a system can classify human hand gestures with a classification accuracy of 97%.
Is Excessive Polypharmacy a Transient or Persistent Phenomenon? A Nationwide Cohort Study in Taiwan

Objectives: Target populations with persistent polypharmacy should be identified prior to implementing strategies against inappropriate medication use, yet limited information regarding such populations is available. The main objectives were to explore the trends of excessive polypharmacy, whether transient or persistent, at the individual level. The secondary objectives were to identify the factors associated with persistently excessive polypharmacy and to estimate the probabilities for repeatedly excessive polypharmacy. Methods: Retrospective cohort analyses of excessive polypharmacy, defined as prescription of ≥ 10 medicines at an ambulatory visit, from 2001 to 2013 were conducted using a nationally representative claims database in Taiwan. Survival analyses with log-rank test of adult patients with first-time excessive polypharmacy were conducted to predict the probabilities, stratified by age and sex, of having repeatedly excessive polypharmacy. Results: During the study period, excessive polypharmacy occurred in 5.4% of patients for the first time. Among them, 63.9% had repeatedly excessive polypharmacy and the probabilities were higher in men and old people. Men versus women, and old versus middle-aged and young people had shorter median excessive polypharmacy-free times (9.4 vs. 5.5 months, 5.3 vs. 10.1 and 35.0 months, both p < 0.001). Overall, the probabilities of having no repeatedly excessive polypharmacy within 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year were 59.9, 53.6, and 48.1%, respectively. Conclusion: Although male and old patients were more likely to have persistently excessive polypharmacy, most cases of excessive polypharmacy were transient or did not re-appear in the short run. Systemic deprescribing measures should be tailored to at-risk groups.