Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The economic impact of air pollution in the townships of Mangaung Metro Municipality: a case study of Phahameng and Rocklands

_____________________________________________________________________________ Economic and domestic activities have been causing a profound deterioration of air quality in developed and developing countries. The health problems arising from air pollution, both indoor and outdoor, have become apparent which result in welfare losses in society such as increased workdays lost and high health cost. The empirical work on welfare losses as a result of air pollution in South Africa has focussed only on urban settlements, hence the need of this study. The main objective of this study was to explore the economic impact of air pollution in two townships of Mangaung metro municipality. The study was conducted in Phahameng and Rocklands areas. The sampling technique used was the stratified random sampling technique. Data was collected through a Contingent Valuation (CV) questionnaire. The 26 questions in the questionnaire were compiled through interaction with knowledgeable individuals and completed via face-to-face interviews. A total sample of 300 households was surveyed with 111 questionnaires administered in Phahameng and 189 in Rocklands. The mitigating cost and the number of workdays lost as a result of an episode of air pollution related illness was estimates from the survey. Mitigating cost is measured as the total cost incurred (include consultation fee, cost of medication, hospitalisation and transportation fees) as a result of treating the last episode (prior to interview) of air pollution related ailments. Workdays lost is measured as the number of days lost for the last episode (prior to interview) of ailment related to air pollution. For employed respondents, it is measured as number of days not able to go to place of work; for self-employed or unemployed respondents, it is measured as the number of days not able to perform daily routine or activities. For respondents that are studying, it is measured as days absent from school. The factors influencing these economic parameters (mitigating cost and workdays lost) were explored using Ordinary Least Square (OLS) Regression Model. The Contingent Valuation questions measured welfare losses by asking a hypothetical question regarding household willingness to pay for improved air quality.
Serum leptin correlates in infertile oligozoospermic males

Leptin is an adipocyte‐secreted protein that participates in the regulation of energy homeostasis. Eighty men were investigated; fertile normozoospermia as a control (n = 30) and infertile oligozoospermia (n = 50). The patients underwent estimation of body weight (kg), height (cm), calculation of body mass index (BMI), semen analysis, serum leptin and testosterone hormones. Mean body weight was significantly higher in infertile oligozoospermia compared with controls. Mean height, BMI and serum testosterone levels showed nonsignificant differences between the two groups. Infertile oligozoospermia had significantly higher mean serum leptin level than controls (mean ± SD; 6.88 ± 8.65, 16.3 ± 13.98 ng ml−1, P < 0.01). Serum leptin demonstrated significant positive correlation with age, body weight, BMI and significant inverse correlation with serum testosterone. It had nonsignificant correlation with the height and sperm concentration. These results are suggestive of a link between the adipocyte derived hormone, leptin and male reproduction.
From range scans to 3D models

Each year, we see a growing number of 3D range scanning products on the SIGGRAPH exhibition floor. You may find yourself asking "how do these technologies work? " and "how can I make use of the shape data they produce? " In this article, I will describe a few of the more common range scanning technologies. Then, I will step through a pipeline that takes the range data into a single geometric model and will conclude with a discussion of the future of range scanning.
Epstein-Barr Virus Infection of Human Astrocyte Cell Lines

ABSTRACT Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is implicated in different central nervous system syndromes. The major cellular receptor for EBV, complement receptor type 2 (CR2) (CD21), is expressed by different astrocyte cell lines and human fetal astrocytes, suggesting their susceptibility to EBV infection. We demonstrated the infection of two astrocyte cell lines, T98 and CB193, at low levels. As infection was mediated by CR2, we used two stable CR2 transfectant astrocyte cell lines (T98CR2 and CB193CR2) to achieve a more efficient infection. We have monitored EBV gene expression for 2 months and observed the transient infection of T98 and T98CR2 cells and persistent infection of CB193 and CB193CR2 cells. The detection of BZLF1, BALF2, and BcLF1 mRNA expression suggests that the lytic cycle is initiated at early time points postinfection. At later time points the pattern of mRNA expressed (EBER1, EBNA1, EBNA2, and LMP1) differs from latency type III in the absence of LMP2A transcription and in the expression of BALF2 and BcLF1 but not BZLF1. A reactivation of the lytic cycle was achieved in CB193CR2 cells by the addition of phorbol esters. These studies identify astrocyte cell lines as targets for EBV infection and suggest that this infection might play a role in the pathology of EBV in the brain.
Stabilized β-Catenin Ameliorates ALPS-Like Symptoms of B6/lpr Mice

Autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome (ALPS) is an incurable disease mainly caused by the defect of Fas-mediated apoptosis and characterized by nonmalignant autoimmune lymphoproliferation. Stabilized β-catenin could not only potentiate Fas-mediated T cell apoptosis via upregulating the expression of Fas on activated T cells, but also potentiate T cell apoptosis via intrinsic apoptotic pathway. In the present study, we introduced β-catTg into lpr/lpr mice and aimed to explore the potential role of stabilized β-catenin (β-catTg) in the development of ALPS-like phenotypes of lpr/lpr mice. We found that the total splenocyte cells and some compositions were slightly downregulated in β-catTglpr/lpr mice, especially the CD4 and CD8 TEM cells were significantly reduced. Meanwhile, stabilized β-catenin obviously decreased the numbers of spleen TCRβ+CD4−CD8− T (DNT) cells, and the levels of some serum proinflammatory factors also were lowered in β-catTglpr/lpr mice. Beyond that, stabilized β-catenin slightly lowered the levels of the serum autoantibodies and the scores of kidney histopathology of β-catTglpr/lpr mice compared with lpr/lpr mice. Our study suggested that stabilized β-catenin ameliorated some ALPS-like symptoms of lpr/lpr mice by potentiating Fas-independent signal-mediated T cell apoptosis, which might uncover a potential novel therapeutic direction for ALPS.
CHRONIC ILLNESS

Like all other children, their growth and development into happy, well-functioning adults is supported by many factors. These include:  personal qualities (optimism, coping skills and confidence),  family supports,  community supports (friends, peers, schools and social networks),  health and medical supports (medical advice and management, medications, physical, psychological, occupational and other therapies),  societal supports (financial benefits and government policies).
A hierarchy of tree-automatic structures

Abstract We consider ωn-automatic structures which are relational structures whose domain and relations are accepted by automata reading ordinal words of length ωn for some integer n ≥ 1. We show that all these structures are ω-tree-automatic structures presentable by Muller or Rabin tree automata. We prove that the isomorphism relation for ω2-automatic (resp. ωn-automatic for n > 2) boolean algebras (respectively, partial orders, rings, commutative rings, non commutative rings, non commutative groups) is not determined by the axiomatic system ZFC. We infer from the proof of the above result that the isomorphism problem for ωn-automatic boolean algebras, n ≥ 2, (respectively, rings, commutative rings, non commutative rings, non commutative groups) is neither a -set nor a -set. We obtain that there exist infinitely many ωn-automatic, hence also ω-tree-automatic, atomless boolean algebras , which are pairwise isomorphic under the continuum hypothesis CH and pairwise non isomorphic under an alternate axiom AT, strengthening a result of [14].
Psychiatric symptoms and leptin in obese patients who were bariatric surgery candidates

Objective There is a significant relationship between obesity and common mental symptoms (depression and anxiety symptoms). But the association between depression (or anxiety symptoms) and serum leptin is still unclear and controversial, despite the growing body of evidence supporting the existence of “leptin resistance” in obese persons. So we investigated whether common mental symptoms, obesity, and the interactive effect of these two factors have a relationship with leptin in obese patients who were candidates for bariatric surgery. Methods In all, 139 participants (mean age: 31.4 years, standard deviation: 9.3 years, 73.4% female) were enrolled at an obesity treatment center in southern Taiwan. Serum leptin levels and body mass index (BMI) were measured. The Chinese Health Questionnaire and Taiwanese Depression Questionnaire were administered. Results The mean BMI of our participants was 39.4 kg/m2 (±6.8), and the mean leptin level was 24.5 ng/mL (±9.4). In the multivariate regression models, Chinese Health Questionnaire-by-BMI and Taiwanese Depression Questionnaire-by-BMI interaction terms remained significant predictors of leptin level (β=0.16, P<0.0001; β=0.04, P<0.0001, respectively), after adjustment for age, sex, and history of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia, despite the inverse correlation between Chinese Health Questionnaire (or Taiwanese Depression Questionnaire) and leptin. In addition, female patients had significantly higher leptin levels than male patients. Conclusion The present findings confirmed that the relationship between common mental symptoms and leptin is modulated by obesity in severely obese patients. Future studies should focus on further measures of leptin receptors or signaling on the basis of these interactive effects in psychiatry.
Perceptions among Swedish hospital physicians on prescribing of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance

Objective To explore and describe perceptions of antibiotic prescribing among Swedish hospital physicians, with special reference to whether the perceptions included awareness of antibiotic resistance (AR). Design A phenomenographic approach was used and data were collected in face-to-face interviews. Setting Hospitals in seven different counties in central Sweden. Participants A strategic sample of 20 hospital physicians specialising in internal medicine, surgery or urology. Main outcome The variation of perceptions of antibiotic prescribing. Results Five qualitative different perceptions were found. AR was considered in two of the perceptions. Reasons for not considering AR included a dominating focus on the care of the patient combined with lack of focus on restrictive antibiotic use, or uncertainty about how to manage infectious diseases or the pressure from the healthcare organisation. Parallels between the five perceptions and the stages in the transtheoretical model of health behaviour change were seen. Conclusions In three of the perceptions, AR was not considered when antibiotics were prescribed. Physicians who primarily express these three perceptions do not seem to be prepared to change to restrictive prescribing. Our findings can be useful in designing activities that encourage AR prevention. Organisational changes are also needed.
Investigation of the Use of Drained Blood Reinfusion after Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Prospective Randomised Controlled Study

Purpose. To compare the use of a blood salvage and reinfusion system with standard allogeneic blood transfusion after total knee arthroplasty—a procedure associated with significant postoperative blood loss. Methods. Between June 2002 and May 2004, 60 patients undergoing total knee arthroplasty were randomly allocated into a reinfusion group (n=26) or a control group (n=34). Patients in the reinfusion group had their blood reinfused from drains within 6 hours of surgery. Both groups received allogeneic blood transfusions according to specified transfusion criteria if the haemoglobin level fell below 90 g/l, or in the presence of severe anaemic symptoms. Haemoglobin levels and drain output were recorded daily for 3 consecutive days after surgery. Results. There was no significant difference between the 2 groups in demographic data, drain output, total blood loss, and mean postoperative haemoglobin levels. Significantly more allogeneic blood was required by the control group than by the reinfusion group (p=0.022). Conclusion. Postoperative reinfusion of drained blood reduced the need for blood transfusion after total knee arthroplasty, while having an effect on postoperative haemoglobin level equivalent to standard allogeneic blood transfusion.
Segmentation Driven Object Detection with Fisher Vectors

We present an object detection system based on the Fisher vector (FV) image representation computed over SIFT and color descriptors. For computational and storage efficiency, we use a recent segmentation-based method to generate class-independent object detection hypotheses, in combination with data compression techniques. Our main contribution is a method to produce tentative object segmentation masks to suppress background clutter in the features. Re-weighting the local image features based on these masks is shown to improve object detection significantly. We also exploit contextual features in the form of a full-image FV descriptor, and an inter-category rescoring mechanism. Our experiments on the VOC 2007 and 2010 datasets show that our detector improves over the current state-of-the-art detection results.
Robust design methods for hardware accelerators for iterative algorithms in scientific computing

The ubiquity of embedded systems of increasing complexity in domains like scientific computing requires computation on models whose complexity has grown beyond what is economical to manage purely in software to requiring hardware acceleration - a key part of which is selecting numerical data representations (bit-width allocation). To address the shortcomings of existing techniques when applied to scientific computing dataflows, we propose a methodology for determining custom hybrid fixed/floating-point data representations for iterative scientific computing applications.
HYENA-live: Fine-Grained Online Entity Type Classification from Natural-language Text

Recent research has shown progress in achieving high-quality, very fine-grained type classification in hierarchical taxonomies. Within such a multi-level type hierarchy with several hundreds of types at different levels, many entities naturally belong to multiple types. In order to achieve high-precision in type classification, current approaches are either limited to certain domains or require time consuming multistage computations. As a consequence, existing systems are incapable of performing ad-hoc type classification on arbitrary input texts. In this demo, we present a novel Webbased tool that is able to perform domain independent entity type classification under real time conditions. Thanks to its efficient implementation and compacted feature representation, the system is able to process text inputs on-the-fly while still achieving equally high precision as leading state-ofthe-art implementations. Our system offers an online interface where natural-language text can be inserted, which returns semantic type labels for entity mentions. Further more, the user interface allows users to explore the assigned types by visualizing and navigating along the type-hierarchy.
Automatic and Human Evaluation Study of a Rule-based and a Statistical Catalan-Spanish Machine Translation Systems

Machine translation systems can be classified into rule-based and corpus-based approaches, in terms of their core technology. Since both paradigms have largely been used during the last years, one of the aims in the research community is to know how these systems differ in terms of translation quality. To this end, this paper reports a study and comparison of a rule-based and a corpus-based (particularly, statistical) Catalan-Spanish machine translation systems, both of them freely available in the web. The translation quality analysis is performed under two different domains: journalistic and medical. The systems are evaluated by using standard automatic measures, as well as by native human evaluators. Automatic results show that the statistical system performs better than the rule-based system. Human judgements show that in the Spanish-to-Catalan direction the statistical system also performs better than the rule-based system, while in the Catalan-to-Spanish direction is the other way round. Although the statistical system obtains the best automatic scores, its errors tend to be more penalized by human judgements than the errors of the rule-based system. This can be explained because statistical errors are usually unexpected and they do not follow any pattern.
Involvement of Rho GTPases and their regulators in the pathogenesis of hypertension

Proper regulation of arterial blood pressure is essential to allow permanent adjustment of nutrient and oxygen supply to organs and tissues according to their need. This is achieved through highly coordinated regulation processes controlling vascular resistance through modulation of arterial smooth muscle contraction, cardiac output, and kidney function. Members of the Rho family of small GTPases, in particular RhoA and Rac1, have been identified as key signaling molecules playing important roles in several different steps of these regulatory processes. Here, we review the current state of knowledge regarding the involvement of Rho GTPase signaling in the control of blood pressure and the pathogenesis of hypertension. We describe how knockout models in mouse, genetic, and pharmacological studies in human have been useful to address this question.
Stable Signal Reconstruction via  $\ell^1$-Minimization in Redundant, Non-Tight Frames

In many signal and image processing applications, a desired clean signal is distorted from blur and noise. Reconstructing the clean signal usually yields to a high dimensional ill-conditioned system of equations, where a direct solution would severely amplify the noise. Stable signal reconstruction requires the use of regularization techniques, which incorporate a priori knowledge about the signal. A particular successful property for that purpose is the sparsity of the analysis coefficients of the clean signal in a suitable frame or dictionary, which can be implemented via l1 -minimization. Most existing stable recovery results for l1-analysis minimization require the frame to be an orthonormal basis. This contrasts practical applications, where redundant frames often perform better than bases. In this paper we address this issue and derive stable recovery results for l1-analysis minimization in redundant, possibly non-tight frames.
Preferential Water Infiltration Path in a Slow-Moving Clayey Earthslide Evidenced by Cross-Correlation of Hydrometeorological Time Series (Charlaix Landslide, French Western Alps)

Slow-moving clayey earthslides frequently exhibit seasonal activity suggesting that deformation processes do not only depend on slope and intrinsic geomechanical parameters. On the contrary, seasonal motion patterns are frequently observed with acceleration during the wet season and deceleration during the dry season. Within landslides, it is mainly the phreatic water table which is monitored. However, in the case of deep-seated landslides made of heterogeneous lithological units and with several slip surfaces, the characterization of the phreatic water table does not allow to relate satisfactorily the activity of the landslide with environmental parameters such as rainfall and subsequent water infiltration at depth. This paper presents a seasonal analysis of water infiltration within a slow-moving clayey landslide. Results of an extensive geotechnical and geophysical prospect are first exposed. Then, rainfall and water table level time series are analysed for two water tables using the cross-correlation technique: the phreatic water table located a few metres deep and a water table located above a shear surface located 12 m deep. Results show that water infiltrates faster down to the deepest water table. Then, time series were split between “dry” and “wet” seasons and the effective rainfall was computed from the original rainfall time series. Cross-correlation results show that the phreatic water table responds identically to rainfall in both seasons. On the contrary, the water table located above the shear surface has a very contrasting behaviour between summer (mainly drainage) and winter (behaviour similar to the phreatic water table with storage of water during a few weeks). This difference in behaviour is in agreement with the landslide kinematics.
miRNA-375 a Sensor of Glucotoxicity Is Altered in the Serum of Children with Newly Diagnosed Type 1 Diabetes

Background. The use of miRNAs as biomarkers for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) risk is attractive as T1D is usually diagnosed in front of acute symptoms. As miR-375 is highly expressed in the endocrine pancreas, we postulated that its circulating level might reflect beta cell alterations and might be altered in the blood of T1D patients recently diagnosed. Methods. Sera were obtained from 22 T1D children at onset of the disease, before subcutaneous insulin treatment, and from 10 nondiabetic pediatric controls. MiR-375 seric level was quantified by stem-loop RT-PCR-based assay. MiRNAs regulations in isolated human islets in response to high glucose concentrations were determined by TaqMan Low-Density Array. Results. The abundance of miR-375, among the 410 miRNAs detected in human islets, mirrored its well-established role in rodent islet biology. Upregulated miRNAs targeted genes involved in islet homeostasis and regulation of beta cell mass. Downregulated miRNAs, including miR-375, were involved in pancreas secretion and protein turnover. Seric level of miR-375 was lower in T1D children versus age-matched controls, without any correlations with HbA1c, glycaemia, and number of autoantibodies. Conclusion. Altered circulating level of miR-375 at onset of T1D might be a general biomarker of metabolic alterations and inflammation associated with the disease.
EFFECT OF IN VITRO CYCLOSPORIN A TREATMENT ON HUMAN NATURAL AND ANTIBODY‐DEPENDENT CELL‐MEDIATED CYTOTOXICITY

Concentrations of 0.1 to 10.0 μg of cyclosporin A (Cy A) per ml do not directly inhibit the lysis of 51Cr-labeled K562 target cells by human peripheral blood natural killer (NK) cells nor of antibody-coated chicken red blood cells by antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) effector cells. Pretreatment of effector cells with Cy A for 18 hr still failed to affect NK or ADCC effector function. However, induction of NK cell activity by overnight pretreatment of effector cells by polyinosinate-polycytidylate (PolyIC) is inhibited by as little as 1 μg of Cy A per ml. The mechanism of inhibition may involve a direct effect of Cy A on “induced” or “activated” NK cells or inhibition of the release of Poly IC-induced interferon from lymphocytes.