Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy and Safety of Sitagliptin for the Treatment of New-Onset Diabetes after Renal Transplantation

New-onset diabetes after transplantation (NODAT) is a common comorbidity after renal transplantation. Though metformin is the first-line agent for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, in renal transplant recipients, metformin is frequently avoided due to concerns about renal dysfunction and risk for lactic acidosis. Therefore, alternative first-line agents for the treatment of NODAT in renal transplant recipients are needed. Sitagliptin, a dipeptidyl-peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor, has a low incidence of hypoglycemia, is weight neutral, and, in a small study, did not affect immunosuppressant levels. However, long-term sitagliptin use for the treatment of NODAT in kidney transplant recipients has not been studied. We retrospectively analyzed renal transplant recipients diagnosed with NODAT and treated with sitagliptin to assess safety and efficacy. Twenty-two patients were started on sitagliptin alone. After 12 months of followup, 19/22 patients remained on sitagliptin alone with a significant improvement in hemoglobin A1c. Renal function and immunosuppressant levels remained stable. Analysis of long-term followup (32.5 ± 17.8 months) revealed that 17/22 patients remained on sitagliptin (mean hemoglobin A1c < 7%) with 9/17 patients remaining on sitagliptin alone. Transplant-specific adverse events were rare. Sitagliptin appears safe and efficacious for the treatment of NODAT in kidney transplant recipients.
Self-Presentation of Small Developing Countries on the World Wide Web: A Study of Official Websites

The author analyzes the official national websites of small developing countries for content and function. The surveyed websites are found to emphasize geographical, tourism and identifying information about the small states but contain little in terms of investment information, suggesting that the web is seen as a tool of self-promotion but is not equally perceived as a tool for attracting investment. A positive relationship is observed between literacy and the range of national websites published for each surveyed state. The study considers the content of national websites of small developing nations in the context of the new technologies and traditional geopolitical and information flow issues facing small states.
Genome-wide association mapping in a wild avian population identifies a link between genetic and phenotypic variation in a life-history trait

Understanding the genetic basis of traits involved in adaptation is a major challenge in evolutionary biology but remains poorly understood. Here, we use genome-wide association mapping using a custom 50 k single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array in a natural population of collared flycatchers to examine the genetic basis of clutch size, an important life-history trait in many animal species. We found evidence for an association on chromosome 18 where one SNP significant at the genome-wide level explained 3.9% of the phenotypic variance. We also detected two suggestive quantitative trait loci (QTLs) on chromosomes 9 and 26. Fitness differences among genotypes were generally weak and not significant, although there was some indication of a sex-by-genotype interaction for lifetime reproductive success at the suggestive QTL on chromosome 26. This implies that sexual antagonism may play a role in maintaining genetic variation at this QTL. Our findings provide candidate regions for a classic avian life-history trait that will be useful for future studies examining the molecular and cellular function of, as well as evolutionary mechanisms operating at, these loci.
Specific Na+ Sensors Are Functionally Expressed in a Neuronal Population of the Median Preoptic Nucleus of the Rat

Whole-cell patch-clamp recordings were performed on acute brain slices of male rats to investigate the ability of the neurons of the median preoptic nucleus (MnPO) to detect fluctuation in extracellular osmolarity and sodium concentration ([Na+]out). Local application of hypotonic and hypertonic artificial CSF hyperpolarized and depolarized the neurons, respectively. Similar responses obtained under synaptic isolation (0.5 μM TTX) highlighted the intrinsic ability of the MnPO neurons to detect changes in extracellular osmolarity and [Na+]out. Manipulating extracellular osmolarity, [Na+]out, and [Cl-]out showed in an independent manner that the MnPO neurons responded to a change in [Na+]out exclusively. The specific Na+ response was voltage insensitive and depended on the driving force for Na+ ions, indicating that a sustained background Na+ permeability controlled the membrane potential of the MnPO neurons. This specific response was not reduced by Gd3+, amiloride, or benzamil, ruling out the participation of mechanosensitive cationic channels, specific epithelial Na+ channels, and Phe-Met-Arg-Phe-gated Na+ channels, respectively. Combination of in situ hybridization, using a riboprobe directed against the atypical Na+ channel (NaX), and immunohistochemistry, using an antibody against neuron-specific nuclei protein, revealed that a substantial population of MnPO neurons expressed the NaX channel, which was characterized recently as a concentration-sensitive Na+ channel. This study shows that a neuronal population of the MnPO acts as functional Na+ sensors and that the NaX channel might represent the molecular basis for the extracellular sodium level sensing in these neurons.
μ spider: a CAD tool for efficient NoC design

In this paper, we present a generic router and a tool that allow the designer to easily and quickly customise a NoC in order to meet the requirements of a set of applications. Our router addresses what we consider as the main features of a realistic and useful NoC. Firstly, it supports the management of different levels quality of service (QoS) allowing guaranteed throughput service in addition to the classical best effort service. Secondly, it is associated to a CAD tool, which can fully configure and generate the NoC VHDL code at the RTL level. The paper presents the muter architecture and its various custom characteristics as well as their impacts on the performance of the system.
Exploring Breast Cancer Estrogen Disposition: The Basis for Endocrine Manipulation

Although normal breast tissue and breast cancer estrogens are known to be elevated compared with plasma estrogen levels, the mechanism behind this phenomenon has been an issue of debate for 2 decades. If local estrogen aromatization were to be confirmed as the main estrogen source in breast cancer tissue, tissue-specific inhibition of estrogen production, avoiding systemic side effects, would become a potentially attractive option for breast cancer treatment and prevention. Based on recent results from our groups exploring tissue estrogens, together with estrogen-synthesizing and estrogen-regulated gene expression levels, we propose a new model to explain elevated breast tissue estrogen levels. Although local estrogen production may be important, the local contribution is overruled by rapid plasma-to-tissue equilibration, including active uptake of circulating estrogens or enhanced tissue binding. As for breast cancer tissue levels, elevated levels of estradiol may be explained to a large extent by estrogen receptor binding and local conversion of estrone into estradiol. This model indicates that effective suppression of benign and malignant tissue estrogens as a treatment for ER+ breast cancer requires systemic suppression and will not be markedly affected by local enzyme targeting. Clin Cancer Res; 17(15); 4948–58. ©2011 AACR.
Differential Distribution and Expression of Panton-Valentine Leucocidin among Community-Acquired Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Strains

ABSTRACT Community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) is an emerging threat worldwide. CA-MRSA strains differ from hospital-acquired MRSA strains in their antibiotic susceptibilities and genetic backgrounds. Using several genotyping methods, we clearly define CA-MRSA at the genetic level and demonstrate that the prototypic CA-MRSA strain, MW2, has spread as a homogeneous clonal strain family that is distinct from other CA-MRSA strains. The Panton-Valentine leucocidin (PVL)-encoding genes, lukF and lukS, are prevalent among CA-MRSA strains and have previously been associated with CA-MRSA infections. To better elucidate the role of PVL in the pathogenesis of CA-MRSA, we first analyzed the distribution and expression of PVL among different CA-MRSA strains. Our data demonstrate that PVL genes are differentially distributed among CA-MRSA strains and, when they are present, are always transcribed, albeit with strain-to-strain variability of transcript levels. To directly test whether PVL is critical for the pathogenesis of CA-MRSA, we evaluated the lysis of human polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNs) during phagocytic interaction with PVL-positive and PVL-negative CA-MRSA strains. Unexpectedly, there was no correlation between PVL expression and PMN lysis, suggesting that additional virulence factors underlie leukotoxicity and, thus, the pathogenesis of CA-MRSA.
COMPARISON OF PROXIMATE AND HEAVY METAL CONTENTS OF VEGETABLES GROWN WITH FRESH AND WASTEWATER

Due to insufficient clean water resources wastewater is largely used for irrigation of vegetables in many developing countries, particularly in Pakistan. As a result, vegetables in spite of providing nutrients also accumulate toxic metals and causes health risks. In the present study, comparison of heavy metal contents, using two digestion methods, in fresh and wastewater-irrigated vegetables was appraised by ICP-AES and also their proximate composition was accessed. Samples of wastewater-irrigated vegetables; cauliflower, green pepper, spring onion and brinjal edibles and leaves were collected from wastewater-irrigated and fresh water-irrigated area of Faisalabad. In all the samples large variation of elemental concentration was found however, wastewater grown vegetables showed more accumulation of heavy metals than their respective fresh water irrigated vegetables. The amount of Pb (1.87 mg kg –1 ), Fe (1.09 mg kg –1 ), Cu (1.01 mg kg –1 ), Zn (1.03 mg kg –1 ), Cr (0.97 mg kg –1 ) showed more accumulation than Mn (0.17 mg kg –1 ), Cd (0.08 mg kg -1 ) and Ni (0.45 mg kg –1 ) both the edible and leaves of investigated vegetables but nearly all metals were found within safe limits. Only Pb (1.87 mg kg –1 ) concentration in wastewater-irrigated vegetables exceeded the permissible limits defined by World Health Organization (WHO). Of the two digestion methods nitric acid showed more recovery of metals as compared to dry ash procedure. The leaves of vegetables showed more intake capacity of heavy metals. Continuous accumulation of these metals can pose severe threats to health of people.
The effects of prefrontal cortex damage on the regulation of emotion

Emotion regulation is an ability that humans engage in throughout their lives. Disruption in this ability due to brain injury can have devastating consequences on the ability to function adaptively in complex environments. It has been observed that damage involving certain areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), including the ventromedial PFC (VMPFC), can result in long-lasting impairments in real-world emotional and behavioral functioning. However, the specific areas of the PFC that are critical for the ability to regulate emotion have not been identified. The primary aims of this project were to identify areas of the PFC that are important for the regulation of emotion, and to determine the degree to which impairments in emotion regulation may contribute to realworld dysfunction following damage to the PFC. To address these aims, emotional regulation and real-world functioning were examined in a sample of patients with focal
The advancement of chemical cross-linking and mass spectrometry for structural proteomics: from single proteins to protein interaction networks

During the last 15 years, chemical cross-linking combined with mass spectrometry (MS) and computational modeling has advanced from investigating 3D-structures of isolated proteins to deciphering protein interaction networks. In this article, the author discusses the advent, the development and the current status of the chemical cross-linking/MS strategy in the context of recent technological developments. A direct way to probe in vivo protein–protein interactions is by site-specific incorporation of genetically encoded photo-reactive amino acids or by non-directed incorporation of photo-reactive amino acids. As the chemical cross-linking/MS approach allows the capture of transient and weak interactions, it has the potential to become a routine technique for unraveling protein interaction networks in their natural cellular environment.
Converting A Trained Neural Network To a Decision Tree DecText - Decision Tree Extractor

Neural Networks are very successful in acquiring hidden knowledge in datasets. Their most important weakness is that the knowledge they acquire is represented in a form not understandable to humans. Understandability problem of Neural Networks can be solved by extracting Decision Rules or Decision Trees from the trained network. There are several Decision Rule extraction meth-ods and Mark Craven’s T REPAN which extracts MofN type Decision Trees from trained networks. We introduced new splitting techniques for extracting classical Decision Trees from trained Neural Networks. We showed that the new method (DecText) is effective in extracting high ﬁdelity trees from trained networks. We also introduced a new discretization technique to make DecText be able to handle continuous features and a new pruning technique for ﬁnding simplest tree with the highest ﬁdelity.
Effects of Goal-Orientation on Metacognitive Activity.

This study examined the effect of goal-orientation on subjects' metacognitive activities during problem solving. Twenty female undergraduate students were randomly assigned to a learning or performance goal-orientation condition. The subjects were given an open-ended problem-solving task with instructions highlighting their respective goal-orientation. A questionnaire measuring metacognitive activities was administered before, during, and after the problem-solving task. The results demonstrated that students under a 1-. :arning goal-orientation used metacognitive activities that were less efficient in solving the problem, but more likely to improve the solver's understanding. Performance goal-oriented subjects tended to use metacognitive activities that would lead to an efficient, accurate solution without regard for self-development. A pattern of metacognitive activity under each goal-orientation was illustrated. These results are consistent with research on goal-orientation and motivation, and they provide theoretical and practical conclusions for using metacognition and goal-orientation in education. Four appendixes present sample problems, task instructions, the questionnaire itself, and questionnaire responses by metacognitive activity. (Contains 2 tables and 38 references.) (Author/SLD) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. * *********************************************************************** LI) a Effects of Goal-Orientation Effects of Goal-Orientation on Metacognitive Activity U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office ol Educe:mai Research and Improvemenz EDUCATIONAL f1ESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER 0. :RiC, 1:IY<his document ridc been reproduced as received from the person or organization originatinR it. O Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY Auryvipivy E. 11/2)1E-AeO6iti-. 5 TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC1 Anthony E. Middlebrooks 210 S. 6th St. Mount Horeb, WI 53572 phone 608-437-3437 Department of Educational Psychology University of Wisconsin Madison Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York, NY, April 1996
Evaluation of secure multi-party computation for reuse of distributed electronic health data

There has been an increasing need for reuse of health data (i.e. research, quality assurance, public health, and commercial applications). However, privacy and legal issues have limited the reuse. Several privacy-preserving techniques (both centralized and distributed) have been developed to allow reuse of health data while preserving privacy. The distributed techniques enable institutions to jointly compute on their private data while preserving the privacy of their data. However, the centralize approach applies perturbation or anonymization technique on the private data before giving out the data for computation. This paper presents criteria, such as privacy level, linkability support, efficiency and scalability, to evaluate distributed privacy preserving techniques.
Artificial Neural Networks Applied to Taxi Destination Prediction

We describe our first-place solution to the ECML/PKDD discovery challenge on taxi destination prediction. The task consisted in predicting the destination of a taxi based on the beginning of its trajectory, represented as a variable-length sequence of GPS points, and diverse associated meta-information, such as the departure time, the driver id and client information. Contrary to most published competitor approaches, we used an almost fully automated approach based on neural networks and we ranked first out of 381 teams. The architectures we tried use multi-layer perceptrons, bidirectional recurrent neural networks and models inspired from recently introduced memory networks. Our approach could easily be adapted to other applications in which the goal is to predict a fixed-length output from a variable-length sequence.
Mind bomb 1 is essential for generating functional Notch ligands to activate Notch

The Delta-Notch signaling pathway is an evolutionarily conserved intercellular signaling mechanism essential for cell fate specification. Mind bomb 1 (Mib1) has been identified as a ubiquitin ligase that promotes the endocytosis of Delta. We now report that mice lacking Mib1 die prior to embryonic day 11.5, with pan-Notch defects in somitogenesis, neurogenesis, vasculogenesis and cardiogenesis. The Mib1–/– embryos exhibit reduced expression of Notch target genes Hes5, Hey1, Hey2 and Heyl, with the loss of N1icd generation. Interestingly, in the Mib1–/– mutants, Dll1 accumulated in the plasma membrane, while it was localized in the cytoplasm near the nucleus in the wild types, indicating that Mib1 is essential for the endocytosis of Notch ligand. In accordance with the pan-Notch defects in Mib1–/– embryos, Mib1 interacts with and regulates all of the Notch ligands, jagged 1 and jagged 2, as well as Dll1, Dll3 and Dll4. Our results show that Mib1 is an essential regulator, but not a potentiator, for generating functional Notch ligands to activate Notch signaling.
Use of contrast agents in oncological imaging: magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract Magnetic resonance plays a leading role in the management of oncology patients, providing superior contrast resolution and greater sensitivity compared with other techniques, which enables more accurate tumor identification, characterization and staging. Contrast agents are widely used in clinical magnetic resonance imaging; approximately 40–50% of clinical scans are contrast enhanced. Most contrast agents are based on the paramagnetic gadolinium ion Gd3+, which is chelated to avoid the toxic effects of free gadolinium. Multiple factors such as molecule structure, molecule concentration, dose, field strength and temperature determine the longitudinal and transverse relaxation rates (R1 and R2, respectively) and thus the T1- and T2-relaxivities of these chelates. These T1- and T2-relaxivities, together with their pharmacokinetic properties (i.e. distribution and concentration in the area of interest), determine the radiologic efficacy of the gadolinium-based contrast agents.
QUANTUM CAPACITY IS PROPERLY DEFINED WITHOUT ENCODINGS

We show that no source encoding is needed in the definition of the capacity of a quantum channel for carrying quantum information. This allows us to use the coherent information maximized over all sources and block sizes, but not encodings, to bound the quantum capacity. We perform an explicit calculation of this maximum coherent information for the quantum erasure channel and apply the bound in order find the erasure channel’s capacity without relying on an unproven assumption as in an earlier paper. @S1050-2947~98! 00911-1#
Smaller neocortical gray matter and larger sulcal cerebrospinal fluid volumes in neuroleptic-naive women with schizotypal personality disorder.

CONTEXT Structural brain abnormalities, including larger cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volumes, have been observed in men diagnosed as having schizotypal personality disorder (SPD). OBJECTIVES To determine whether women with SPD have abnormalities similar to those of men with SPD and to elucidate specific SPD regional volume deficits and symptom correlations. DESIGN Naturalistic study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Thirty neuroleptic-naive women with SPD and 29 female control subjects, both recruited from the community. Participants were group matched for age, parental socioeconomic status, handedness, and IQ. INTERVENTIONS A new segmentation method was applied to magnetic resonance images to automatically parcel the images into CSF, gray matter, and white matter. The neocortex was manually separated from subcortical and other nonneocortical structures. Voxel-based morphometry was applied to determine global and regional volume deficits. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Left and right neocortical gray matter, white matter, and CSF relative volumes as well as clinical symptoms from the Structured Interview for Schizotypy and the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief Version. RESULTS Smaller left (3.84%) and right (3.83%) neocortical gray matter relative volumes associated with larger left (9.66%) and right (9.61%) sulcal CSF relative volumes were found in women with SPD compared with controls. Voxel-based morphometry showed that the neocortical deficits in SPD were especially prominent in the left superior and middle temporal gyri, left inferior parietal region with postcentral gyrus, and right superior frontal and inferior parietal gyri. In the SPD group, larger lateral ventricle volumes correlated with more severe symptoms on the Structured Interview for Schizotypy and the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief Version. CONCLUSIONS The smaller neocortical gray matter volume and larger sulcal CSF volume provide evidence of the brain basis of this personality disorder and emphasize the communality of brain abnormalities in the schizophrenia spectrum.
Sightsinging in the Secondary Choral Ensemble: A Review of the Research

This article reviews the research on sightsinging instruction and achievement in the secondary choral ensemble and the variables that are related to student success at both the group and individual level. Research on instructional time, methods, materials, and achievement in sightsinging are divided into descriptive and predictive studies. The article concludes with implications and suggestions for future research. It is hoped that this information will stimulate further research in this area that can help choral teachers better prepare their students to be musically literate singers.