Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reducing Time-dependent Bias in Estimates of the Attributable Cost of Health Care–associated Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Infections: A Comparison of Three Estimation Strategies

Background:Previous estimates of the excess costs due to health care–associated infection (HAI) have scarcely addressed the issue of time-dependent bias. Objective:We examined time-dependent bias by estimating the health care costs attributable to an HAI due to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) using a unique dataset in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that makes it possible to distinguish between costs that occurred before and after an HAI. In addition, we compare our results to those from 2 other estimation strategies. Methods:Using a historical cohort study design to estimate the excess predischarge costs attributable to MRSA HAIs, we conducted 3 analyses: (1) conventional, in which costs for the entire inpatient stay were compared between patients with and without MRSA HAIs; (2) post-HAI, which included only costs that occurred after an infection; and (3) matched, in which costs for the entire inpatient stay were compared between patients with an MRSA HAI and subset of patients without an MRSA HAI who were matched based on the time to infection. Results:In our post-HAI analysis, estimates of the increase in inpatient costs due to MRSA HAI were $12,559 (P<0.0001) and $24,015 (P<0.0001) for variable and total costs, respectively. The excess variable and total cost estimates were 33.7% and 31.5% higher, respectively, when using the conventional methods and 14.6% and 11.8% higher, respectively, when using matched methods. Conclusions:This is the first study to account for time-dependent bias in the estimation of incremental per-patient health care costs attributable to HAI using a unique dataset in the VA. We found that failure to account for this bias can lead to overestimation of these costs. Matching on the timing of infection can reduce this bias substantially.
Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith

Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives.In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and "Politics in Commercial Society" is an account of how they thought about it.Building his argument on the similarity between Smith s and Rousseau s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability. "
Aging and Audio-Visual and Multi-Cue Integration in Motion

The perception of naturalistic events relies on the ability to integrate information from multiple sensory systems, an ability that may change with healthy aging. When two objects move toward and then past one another, their trajectories are perceptually ambiguous: the objects may seem to stream past one another or bounce off one another. Previous research showed that auditory or visual events that occur at the time of disks’ coincidence could bias the percept toward bouncing or streaming. We exploited this malleable percept to assay age-related changes in the integration of multiple inter- and intra-modal cues. The disks’ relative luminances were manipulated to produce stimuli strongly favoring either bouncing or streaming, or to produce ambiguous motion (equal luminances). A sharp sound coincident with the disks’ overlap increased both groups’ perception of bouncing, but did so significantly less for older subjects. An occluder’s impact on motion perception varied with its duration: a long duration occluder promoted streaming in both groups; a brief occluder promoted bouncing in younger subjects, but not older ones. Control experiments demonstrated that the observed differences between younger and older subjects resulted from neither age-related changes in retinal illuminance nor age-related changes in hearing, pointing to weakened inter- and intra-modal integration with aging. These changes could contribute to previously demonstrated age-related perceptual and memory deficits.
On the improvement of phase noise errors in wireless communication systems

Modern wireless communication systems such as 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) are expected to deliver higher data rates. However their performances are heavily impacted by the emergence of Phase noise (PN) in the transceivers. In fact PN has become an integral part of the Frequency Synthesizer design. In the process of generating carrier waves, the local oscillators of the frequency synthesizers generate an unwanted phase noise that limits the performance of the transceivers. Despite several research advances that sought to mitigate and suppress phase noise errors in radio transceivers, phase noise remains a major problem that limits the performance of wireless communication systems. Phase noise is mainly caused by the oscillators' inability to produce a single and clean frequency without spurious tones and harmonics. In this paper a modified Fractional Phase Locked Loop Frequency Synthesizer (FPLL FS) architecture that is capable of suppressing unwanted spurs is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed model achieves significantly low phase noise level at about -145dBc/Hz with minimal spurious tones in the frequency of interest.
MYC-Induced Cancer Cell Energy Metabolism and Therapeutic Opportunities

Although cancers have altered glucose metabolism, termed the Warburg effect, which describes the increased uptake and conversion of glucose to lactate by cancer cells under adequate oxygen tension, changes in the metabolism of glutamine and fatty acid have also been documented. The MYC oncogene, which contributes to the genesis of many human cancers, encodes a transcription factor c-Myc, which links altered cellular metabolism to tumorigenesis. c-Myc regulates genes involved in the biogenesis of ribosomes and mitochondria, and regulation of glucose and glutamine metabolism. With E2F1, c-Myc induces genes involved in nucleotide metabolism and DNA replication, and microRNAs that homeostatically attenuate E2F1 expression. With the hypoxia inducible transcription factor HIF-1, ectopic c-Myc cooperatively induces a transcriptional program for hypoxic adaptation. Myc regulates gene expression either directly, such as glycolytic genes including lactate dehydrogenase A (LDHA), or indirectly, such as repression of microRNAs miR-23a/b to increase glutaminase (GLS) protein expression and glutamine metabolism. Ectopic MYC expression in cancers, therefore, could concurrently drive aerobic glycolysis and/or oxidative phosphorylation to provide sufficient energy and anabolic substrates for cell growth and proliferation in the context of the tumor microenvironment. Collectively, these studies indicate that Myc-mediated altered cancer cell energy metabolism could be translated for the development of new anticancer therapies. (Clin Cancer Res 2009;15(21):6479–83)
Regulation of Pentose Catabolic Pathway Genes of Aspergillus niger

Summary The aim of this study was to obtain a better understanding of the pentose catabolism in Aspergillus niger and the regulatory systems that affect it. To this end, we have cloned and characterised the genes encoding A. niger L-arabitol dehydrogenase (ladA) and xylitol dehydrogenase (xdhA), and compared the regulation of these genes to other genes of the pentose catabolic pathway. This demonstrated that activation of the pathway depends on two transcriptional regulators, the xylanolytic activator (XlnR) and an unidentified L-arabinose specific regulator (AraR). These two regulators affect those genes of the pentose catabolic pathway that are related to catabolic conversion of their corresponding inducers (D-xylose and L-arabinose, respectively).
18F-FDG PET/CT imaging of multiple myxofibrosarcoma in left upper abdomen and chest wall

Myxofibrosarcoma (MFS) is a tumour of elder patients (with the average age 65 years), with a roughly equal distribution between sexes. It occurs mostly in extremities with a few in retroperitoneal space, head and neck (3, 7, 9). It is a connective tissue neoplasm of fibroblastic origin and has been classified as myxoid variant of malignant fibrous histiocytoma (4, 7). Lowgrade MFS which is of low attenuation on CT images shows low to intermediate signal on T1-weighted MR images and high signal on T2-weighted MR images (12). To our knowledge, a few cases of MFS have been detected by FDG-PET/CT; moreover, those tumours detected by PET are solitary in elder people (2, 5, 11, 13). We report a unique case of metastatic multiple MFS in left upper abdomen and chest wall detected by FDG-PET/CT in a young man.
Fracking Sarcasm using Neural Network

Precise semantic representation of a sentence and definitive information extraction are key steps in the accurate processing of sentence meaning, especially for figurative phenomena such as sarcasm, Irony, and metaphor cause literal meanings to be discounted and secondary or extended meanings to be intentionally profiled. Semantic modelling faces a new challenge in social media, because grammatical inaccuracy is commonplace yet many previous state-of-the-art methods exploit grammatical structure. For sarcasm detection over social media content, researchers so far have counted on Bag-of-Words(BOW), N-grams etc. In this paper, we propose a neural network semantic model for the task of sarcasm detection. We also review semantic modelling using Support Vector Machine (SVM) that employs constituency parsetrees fed and labeled with syntactic and semantic information. The proposed neural network model composed of Convolution Neural Network(CNN) and followed by a Long short term memory (LSTM) network and finally a Deep neural network(DNN). The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art textbased methods for sarcasm detection, yielding an F-score of . 92.
Analysis of Cardiac Myocyte Maturation Using CASAAV, a Platform for Rapid Dissection of Cardiac Myocyte Gene Function In Vivo

Rationale: Loss-of-function studies in cardiac myocytes (CMs) are currently limited by the need for appropriate conditional knockout alleles. The factors that regulate CM maturation are poorly understood. Previous studies on CM maturation have been confounded by heart dysfunction caused by whole organ gene inactivation. Objective: To develop a new technical platform to rapidly characterize cell-autonomous gene function in postnatal murine CMs and apply it to identify genes that regulate transverse tubules (T-tubules), a hallmark of mature CMs. Methods and Results: We developed CRISPR/Cas9/AAV9-based somatic mutagenesis, a platform in which AAV9 delivers tandem guide RNAs targeting a gene of interest and cardiac troponin-T promoter–driven Cre to RosaCas9GFP/Cas9GFP neonatal mice. When directed against junctophilin-2 (Jph2), a gene previously implicated in T-tubule maturation, we achieved efficient, rapid, and CM-specific JPH2 depletion. High-dose AAV9 ablated JPH2 in 64% CMs and caused lethal heart failure, whereas low-dose AAV9 ablated JPH2 in 22% CMs and preserved normal heart function. In the context of preserved heart function, CMs lacking JPH2 developed T-tubules that were nearly morphologically normal, indicating that JPH2 does not have a major, cell-autonomous role in T-tubule maturation. However, in hearts with severe dysfunction, both adeno-associated virus–transduced and nontransduced CMs exhibited T-tubule disruption, which was more severe in the transduced subset. These data indicate that cardiac dysfunction disrupts T-tubule structure and that JPH2 protects T-tubules in this context. We then used CRISPR/Cas9/AAV9-based somatic mutagenesis to screen 8 additional genes for required, cell-autonomous roles in T-tubule formation. We identified RYR2 (Ryanodine Receptor-2) as a novel, cell-autonomously required T-tubule maturation factor. Conclusions: CRISPR/Cas9/AAV9-based somatic mutagenesis is a powerful tool to study cell-autonomous gene functions. Genetic mosaics are invaluable to accurately define cell-autonomous gene function. JPH2 has a minor role in normal T-tubule maturation but is required to stabilize T-tubules in the failing heart. RYR2 is a novel T-tubule maturation factor.
PINK1 mutations in sporadic early‐onset Parkinson's disease

Pathogenic PINK1 mutations have been described in PARK6‐linked Parkinson's disease (PD) patients of Asian origin. However, data on the frequency of PINK1 mutations in sporadic early‐onset Parkinson's disease (EOPD) Asian patients are lacking. The objectives of this study were to report the frequency of PINK1 mutations of sporadic EOPD in an Asian cohort comprising of ethnic Chinese, Malays, and Indians, and to highlight a PINK1‐positive patient who presented with restless legs symptoms. Eighty consecutive sporadic EOPD patients from the movement disorder clinics of two major tertiary institutions in the country were included. We performed sequence analysis of all the coding and exon–intron junctions of the PINK1 using specific primer sets. In addition, we genotyped polymorphisms detected from the analysis in a group of sporadic PD patients and controls. Three different mutations (two homozygous nonsense and one heterozygous missense) in the putative kinase domain were found in three patients, giving a 3.7% frequency of PINK1 mutations in our EOPD cohort. All the mutations were absent in 200 healthy controls. One patient with a novel homozygous nonsense PINK1 mutation presented unusually with restless legs symptoms. Separately, analysis of the frequency of four PINK1 polymorphisms in a group of sporadic PD and controls did not reveal any significant differences. We highlight a 3.7% frequency of PINK1 mutations in an Asian cohort (ethnic Chinese, Malay, and Indian) of EOPD. The phenotypic spectrum associated with PINK1‐positive patients may be wider than previously reported. Polymorphisms of PINK1 do not appear to modulate risk of PD in our population. © 2006 Movement Disorder Society
Ground: A Data Context Service

Ground is an open-source data context service , a system to manage all the information that informs the use of data. Data usage has changed both philosophically and practically in the last decade, creating an opportunity for new data context services to foster further innovation. In this paper we frame the challenges of managing data context with basic ABCs: Applications , Behavior , and Change . We provide motivation and design guidelines, present our initial design of a common metamodel and API, and explore the current state of the storage solutions that could serve the needs of a data context service. Along the way we highlight opportunities for new research and engineering solutions.
Synthesis of all known analytical permittivity reconstruction techniques of nonmagnetic materials from reflection and transmission measurements

This letter shows that all published analytical reconstruction formulas for the permittivity of a nonmagnetic material from the measured total reflection and transmission responses-the Nicolson-Ross, Weir, and Stuchly-Matuszewsky equations-are equal to either the impedance or propagation methods. We also show that the measured total reflection and transmission are independent measurements and hence allow for simultaneous and unique reconstruction of the complex electric permittivity, including conductivity, and the complex magnetic permeability.
Estimating the costs of diarrhoea and epidemic dysentery in KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa

Inadequate water supply and sanitation are largely responsible for the high levels of diarrhoeal disease in developing countrie s. With more than 12 m. people without adequate levels of water supply and sanitation, South Africa is no exception. This paper presents a preliminary screening assessment of the impacts and costs of diarrhoeal disease in South Africa, which indicates tha t every year in South Africa about 43 000 deaths, 3 m. incidences of illness requiring treatment and R3.4 bn. may be directly att ributed to diarrhoeal disease. It also indicates that the current Shigella dysenteriae type 1 epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal may have cost about R120 m. and caused 1 000 deaths during 1995. This re-emphasises the need for urgent action in the provision of water supply an d sanitation infrastructure, together with appropriate hygiene education and health services, to all disadvantaged South Africans .
Optimal velocity estimation in ultrasound color flow imaging in presence of clutter

In color flow imaging (CFI), the rejection of tissue clutter signal is treated separately from blood velocity estimation by high-pass filtering the received Doppler signal. The complete suppression of clutter is then difficult to achieve without affecting the subsequent velocity estimates. In this work, a different approach to velocity estimation is investigated, based on a statistical model of the signal from both clutter and blood. An analytic expression for the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is developed, and used to determine the existence of an efficient maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of blood velocity in CFI when assuming full knowledge of the clutter statistics. We further simulate and compare the performance of the MLE to that of the autocorrelation method (ACM) using finite-impulse response (FIR) and polynomial regression clutter filters. Two signal scenarios are simulated, representing a central and peripheral vessel. Simulations showed that, by including 3-9 (independent) spatial points, the MLE variance approached the CRLB in both scenarios. The ACM was approximately unbiased only for the central scenario in the clutter filter pass band, then with a variance of up to four times the CRLB. The ACM suffered from a severe bias in the filter transition region, and a significant performance gain was achieved here using the MLE. For practical use, the clutter properties must be estimated. We finally replaced the known clutter statistics with an estimate obtained from low-rank approximations of the received sample correlation matrix. Used in the model-based framework, this method came close to the performance of the MLE, and it may be an important step toward a practical model-based estimator, including tissue clutter with optimal performance
The Synovium in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease targeting multiple joints. The synovium is the primary site of the inflammatory process, which if untreated leads to irreversible damage to the adjacent cartilage and bone. It is now well established that autoantibodies that are characteristic of RA, including rheumatoid factor (RF) and anti-citrulluninated protein antibodies (ACPA), are present before clinical disease onset. Studies in both humans and animal models are beginning to provide new insights into how this asymptomatic autoimmunity evolves into an inflammatory process that is localized in the synovium. Once RA synovitis established, a number of amplification mechanisms serve to sustain the process leading to the persistence of the disease. These mechanisms include engagement of the resident mesenchymal cells and the establishment of ectopic lymphoid structures in the synovium, although the relationship between these lymphoid structures and the presence of RA autoantibodies remains unclear. An enhanced understanding of the mechanisms that initiate and sustain RA synovitis offers unprecedented opportunities for therapeutics, and ultimately prevention strategies.
The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ agonist troglitazone inhibits transforming growth factor-β–mediated glioma cell migration and brain invasion

Gliomas are the most common primary tumors of the central nervous system, with glioblastomas as the most malignant entity. Rapid proliferation and diffuse brain invasion of these tumors are likely to determine the unfavorable prognosis. Considering its promigratory properties, the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling pathway has become a major therapeutic target. Analyses of resected glioma tissues revealed an intriguing correlation between tumor grade and the expression of TGF-β1-3 as well as their receptors I and II. Here, we analyzed the effects of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPAR-γ) agonists on glioma proliferation, migration, and brain invasion. Using an organotypic glioma invasion model, we show that micromolar doses of the PPAR-γ activator troglitazone blocked glioma progression without neurotoxic damage to the organotypic neuronal environment observed. This intriguing antiglioma property of troglitazone seems to be only partially based on its moderate cytostatic effects. We identified troglitazone as a potent inhibitor of glioma cell migration and brain invasion, which occurred in a PPAR-γ–independent manner. The antimigratory property of troglitazone was in concordance with the transcriptional repression of TGF-β1-3 and their receptors I and II and associated with reduced TGF-β release. Due to its capacity to counteract TGF-β release and glioma cell motility and invasiveness already at low micromolar doses, troglitazone represents a promising drug for adjuvant therapy of glioma and other highly migratory tumor entities. [Mol Cancer Ther 2007;6(6):1745–54]
Synchronization of periodic movements with external events and interlimb coordination: phase entrainment or phase resetting? *

The aim of this study is to investigate of the synchronization of periodic rhythmic movements with single discrete movements as reaction to external trigger signals. The underlying coordination principle derived from the experimental results is supposed to be either phase entrainment or phase reset. In phase entrainment, the response is more probable to occur during the phase, when the periodic rhythm is in the same direction as the discrete movement, but less probable, when directions are opposite. When the rhythm of the periodic movement is disturbed by the discrete movement, two types of phase reset can be obtained: type 1 resets provoked at weak perturbations show a small phase shift on the ongoing rhythm, whereas type 0 resets occur at strong perturbations and cause large phase shifts.