Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Matrix Attachment Region-Dependent Function of the Immunoglobulin μ Enhancer Involves Histone Acetylation at a Distance without Changes in Enhancer Occupancy

ABSTRACT Nuclear matrix attachment regions (MARs), which flank the immunoglobulin μ heavy-chain enhancer on either side, are required for the activation of the distal variable-region (VH) promoter in transgenic mice. Previously, we have shown that the MARs extend a local domain of chromatin accessibility at the μ enhancer to more distal sites. In this report, we examine the influence of MARs on the formation of a nucleoprotein complex at the enhancer and on the acetylation of histones, which have both been implicated in contributing to chromatin accessibility. By in vivo footprint analysis of transgenic μ gene constructs, we show that the occupancy of factor-binding sites at the μ enhancer is similar in transcriptionally active wild-type and transcriptionally inactive ΔMAR genes. Chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments indicate, however, that the acetylation of histones at enhancer-distal nucleosomes is enhanced 10-fold in the presence of MARs, whereas the levels of histone acetylation at enhancer-proximal nucleosomes are similar for wild-type and ΔMAR genes. Taken together, these data indicate that the function of MARs in mediating long-range chromatin accessibility and transcriptional activation of the VHpromoter involves the generation of an extended domain of histone acetylation, independent of changes in the occupancy of the μ enhancer.
An Introduction to Anaerobic Digestion of Organic Wastes

Anaerobic digestion is a process which breaks down organic matter in simpler chemicals components without oxygen. This process can be very useful to treat arising organic waste such as:-sewage sludge-organic farm wastes-municipal solid wastes-green/botanical wastes-organic industrial and commercial wastes Before being digested, the feedstock has to und ergo pre-treatment. There are various types of pre-treatment depending on the feedstock. The purpose of such treatment is to mix different feedstock, to add water or to remove undesirable materials such as large items and inert materials (e.g. plastic, glass) to allow a better digestate quality, a more efficient digestion and it will avoid failure in the process. The digestion process itself takes place in a digester, which can be classified in relation to the temperature, the water content of the feedstock and the number of stage (single or multi-stage). Each digester has its characteristics and properties and thus can be more suitable for a specific feedstock. There are at the present more mesophilic (35 o C) than thermophilic digesters (55 o C) but the difference tends to decrease. There used to be more wet digesters than dry digesters but there is no clear trend anymore. Multi-stage processes aim at optimizing digestion and improving control of the process by separating stages of digestion. Only a few of these digesters are used at the present time. Finally, the batch processes are less expensive and less complex but there are also less efficient. The by-products of anaerobic digestion, biogas and digestate, can be used in order to create a source of incomes. Biogas can be upgraded, most of the time by removing the carbon dioxide and the water vapour, and then, used in a CHP unit to produce electricity and heat. The digestate can be used as a fertilizer or further processed into compost to increase its quality. Anaerobic digestion is helped but also limited by legislation. The main UK policies in favour of anaerobic digestion are the Climate Change levy and the new Renewable Obligation. Every premises aiming at treating waste should apply for a waste management license. There are also regulations concerning specific waste such as animal by-products and sewage sludge. The financial aspect of anaerobic digestion includes the capital and the operating costs. Capitol costs are quite high but the source of incomes coming from the sale of electricity, heat and digestate allows important benefits.
IIITH: Domain Specific Word Sense Disambiguation

We describe two systems that participated in SemEval-2010 task 17 (All-words Word Sense Disambiguation on a Specific Domain) and were ranked in the third and fourth positions in the formal evaluation. Domain adaptation techniques using the background documents released in the task were used to assign ranking scores to the words and their senses. The test data was disambiguated using the Personalized PageRank algorithm which was applied to a graph constructed from the whole of WordNet in which nodes are initialized with ranking scores of words and their senses. In the competition, our systems achieved comparable accuracy of 53.4 and 52.2, which outperforms the most frequent sense baseline (50.5).
Does a Prehospital Glasgow Coma Scale Score Predict Pediatric Outcomes?

Background Although the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score is widely used by medical professionals to evaluate and predict neurological outcomes, studies using the prehospital (P) GCS score to predict neurological outcomes in children are few. Objective The objective of this study was to determine the agreement between the P GCS score and the emergency department (ED) GCS score, and the association between P GCS score and outcomes at hospital discharge in pediatric patients 5 to 18 years of age. Methods Medical record review of children 5 to 18 years old with traumatic brain injury (TBI) was conducted. Children with documented P and ED GCS scores were eligible for enrollment. The hospital records of each enrolled child were reviewed, and the Glasgow outcome score and the disability rating scale scores were calculated. Agreement between the P and ED GCS scores was calculated using &khgr;2 (&kgr; statistic). Results One hundred eighty-five subjects were included. There was strong agreement between P and ED GCS scores (&kgr; = +0.69; confidence interval, 0.57–0.81). The Glasgow outcome score category improved with improving GCS category. The median disability rating scale score was also similar for P and ED GCS scores and was higher with decreasing GCS. Conclusions Our data showed strong agreement between P and ED GCS scores. Also, there was strong association between P GCS scores and short-term outcomes in children with TBI. The results support the use of GCS in prehospital transport destination guidelines for children with TBI.
Chronic Hypoxia During Gestation Causes Epigenetic Repression of the Estrogen Receptor-&agr; Gene in Ovine Uterine Arteries via Heightened Promoter Methylation

Estrogen receptor-&agr; (ER&agr;) plays a key role in the adaptation of increased uterine blood flow in pregnancy. Chronic hypoxia is a common stress to maternal cardiovascular homeostasis and causes increased risk of preeclampsia. Studies in pregnant sheep demonstrated that hypoxia during gestation downregulated ER&agr; gene expression in uterine arteries. The present study tested the hypothesis that hypoxia causes epigenetic repression of the ER&agr; gene in uterine arteries via heightened promoter methylation. Ovine ER&agr; promoter of 2035 bp spanning from −2000 to +35 of the transcription start site was cloned. No estrogen or hypoxia-inducible factor response elements were found at the promoter. Two transcription factor binding sites, USF−15 and Sp1−520, containing CpG dinucleotides were identified, which had significant effects on the promoter activity. The USF element binds transcription factors USF1 and USF2, and the Sp1 element binds Sp1, as well as ER&agr; through Sp1. Deletion of the Sp1 site abrogated 17&bgr;-estradiol–induced increase in the promoter activity. In normoxic control sheep, CpG methylation at the Sp1 but not the USF site was significantly decreased in uterine arteries of pregnant as compared with nonpregnant animals. In pregnant sheep exposed to long-term high-altitude hypoxia, CpG methylation at both Sp1 and USF sites in uterine arteries was significantly increased. Methylation inhibited transcription factor binding and the promoter activity. The results provide evidence of hypoxia causing heightened promoter methylation and resultant ER&agr; gene repression in uterine arteries and suggest new insights of molecular mechanisms linking gestational hypoxia to aberrant uteroplacental circulation and increased risk of preeclampsia.
Control of nondeterministic discrete-event systems for bisimulation equivalence

Most prior work on supervisory control of discrete event systems is for achieving deterministic specifications, expressed as formal languages. In this paper we study supervisory control for achieving nondeterministic specifications. Such specifications are useful when designing a system at a higher level of abstraction so that lower level details of system and its specification are omitted to obtain higher level models that may be nondeterministic. Nondeterministic specifications are also meaningful when the system to be controlled has a nondeterministic model due to the lack of information (caused for example by partial observation or unmodeled dynamics). Language equivalence is not an adequate notion of behavioral equivalence for nondeterministic systems, and instead we use the finest known notion of equivalence, namely the bisimulation equivalence. Choice of bisimulation equivalence is also supported by the fact that bisimulation equivalence specification is equivalent to a specification in the temporal logic of /spl mu/-calculus that subsumes the complete branching-time logic CTL*. Given nondeterministic models of system and its specification, we study the design of a supervisor (possibly nondeterministic) such that the controlled system is bisimilar to the specification. We obtain a small model theorem showing that a supervisor exists if and only if it exists over a certain finite state space, namely the power set of Cartesian product of system and specification state spaces. Also, the notion of state-controllability is introduced as part of a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a supervisor. In the special case of deterministic systems, we provide an existence condition that can be verified polynomially in both system and specification states, when the existence condition holds.
Unitary-Group Invariant Kernels and Features from Transformed Unlabeled Data

The study of representations invariant to common transformations of the data is important to learning. Most techniques have focused on local approximate invariance implemented within expensive optimization frameworks lacking explicit theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we study kernels that are invariant to the unitary group while having theoretical guarantees in addressing practical issues such as (1) unavailability of transformed versions of labelled data and (2) not observing all transformations. We present a theoretically motivated alternate approach to the invariant kernel SVM. Unlike previous approaches to the invariant SVM, the proposed formulation solves both issues mentioned. We also present a kernel extension of a recent technique to extract linear unitary-group invariant features addressing both issues and extend some guarantees regarding invariance and stability. We present experiments on the UCI ML datasets to illustrate and validate our methods.
Integrating Portfolios into the L2 Arabic Classroom

This is an action research study that reports on using student portfolios in a second language (L2) Arabic class. The goal of this study was to examine the validity of using portfolios as an L2assessment procedure and to ascertain the effectiveness of portfolios as an L2 learning tool. In this class, portfolios replaced weekly quizzes, which counted for 30% of the final grade. Portfolios were also used to supplement the course textbook, namely Al-Kitaab (Brustad, Al-Batal, & Al-Tonsi, 1995). Data sources for the study included traditional tests grades, oral interview grades, portfolio grades, a sixteen-item survey, and students’ reflections at the end of the course. The findings indicate that there is a strong correlation between portfolio grades, on one hand, and written tests and oral interviews grades on the other hand. It was also found that students perceived using portfolios as an effective L2 learning tool.
Long-Term Control of Arterial Hypertension and Regression of Left Ventricular Hypertrophy With Treatment of Primary Aldosteronism

Primary aldosteronism (PA), a common cause of high blood pressure (BP), induces left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy and an excess rate of cardiovascular events. Whether its treatment provides long-term cure of hypertension and regression of cardiovascular damage remains uncertain. To the aim of assessing the effect of treatment of PA on BP and LV changes, we prospectively recruited 323 patients in a long-term follow-up study entailing serial echocardiography evaluations. Of them, 180 had PA and were assigned to either adrenalectomy (n=110) or medical therapy (n=70) on the basis of the adrenal vein sampling. The remaining 143 were consecutive optimally treated primary hypertensive patients. At baseline, the PA patients had more inappropriate LV mass than PH patients (27.1% versus 16.2%; P=0.020), despite similar BP values. At a median follow-up of 36 months (range, 6–225), BP was lowered (P<0.0001 versus baseline) to similar values in adrenalectomized (135±15/83±9 mm Hg), medically treated PA (133±11/83±7 mm Hg), and PH (139±15/86±9 mm Hg) patients. To this end, the adrenalectomized patients required significantly less drugs than the other groups. In PA patients, the LV mass index and the rate of LV hypertrophy fell through LV inward remodeling to the level of optimally treated PH patients, indicating that the LV work markedly decreased. Findings were similar when long-term (≥5 and ≥10 years) data were examined. Thus, an early diagnosis and a specific treatment of PA warrant normalization of BP and reversal of detrimental LV changes at long term.
The WATCHMAN device for stroke prophylaxis in atrial fibrillation: an evolving niche

Abstract Atrial fibrillation is associated with a markedly increased risk of thromboembolic stroke. At present, lifelong antithrombotic therapy with warfarin or a novel oral anticoagulant is indicated for prophylaxis in the majority of patients. Left atrial appendage occlusion devices have been developed as an alternative to these agents, aiming to avoid issues around consistency of anticoagulation, bleeding risk, and drug-related side effects. The best evidence is available for Boston Scientific’s WATCHMAN device. The safety and efficacy of WATCHMAN and other similar devices have been questioned, although the increasing body of evidence supports a role in selected settings. A recently updated randomized controlled trial of WATCHMAN (WATCHMAN Left Atrial Appendage System for Embolic PROTECTion in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation [PROTECT-AF]) demonstrates its noninferiority to warfarin and suggests an advantage in terms of functional outcome for patients, with superior net clinical benefit 6 to 9 months after starting treatment. The procedural risk associated with device implantation remains substantial, although improving device design and increasing operator experience means that this should decrease in the future. As the body of data and overall experience around WATCHMAN grow, it may come to be recognized as the best option in selected patients.
A Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1-Infected Individual with Low Viral Load Harbors a Virus Variant That Exhibits an In Vitro RNA Dimerization Defect

ABSTRACT We investigated the in vitro RNA dimerization properties of the untranslated leader RNA derived from human immunodeficiency virus type 1 variants circulating in an individual with a low viral load and slow disease progression. The leader sequences of these viruses contain highly unusual polymorphisms within the dimerization initiation site (DIS): an insert that abolishes dimerization and a compensatory substitution. The dimerization of leader RNA from late stages of infection is further improved by additional mutations outside the DIS motif that facilitate a secondary structure switch from a dimerization-incompetent to a dimerization-competent RNA conformation.
Validation of educational booklet for HIV/Aids prevention in older adults.

Objective To describe the process of manufacturing and validation of an educational booklet for HIV/Aids prevention in older adults. Methods Methodological study developed in two phases - manufacturing of the booklet and validation of the educational material by judges. The manufacturing process involved a situational diagnosis with older adults, and its result indicated gaps in the knowledge with respect to HIV/Aids. The validation process was performed by nine judges, selected by convenience. It was considered an agreement index of at least 0.80, analyzed through the content validity index. Results We opted for a dialogue between two older adults divided into three categories: myths and taboos; ignorance; and prevention and importance of diagnosis. The average of the items was 0.90. The suggestions made by the judges were observed and modified for the final version. Conclusion The material had relevant content for the judges, in addition to being able to be used by health professionals in the education and clarification of issues on the subject.
Predicting Gene Functions Using Semi-supervised Clustering Algorithms with Objective Function Optimization

Despite the complete sequencing of human genome, most of the gene functions are still unknown. Micro array techniques provides a fast and reliable means to analysis of the gene expression and the understanding of their function. In this context, clustering gene expression data is an essential step for gene function discovery, as groups of genes with similar expressions potentially having the same biological function. In this work, we analyze the use of external biological knowledge, such as the ones provided in ontologies to improve the functional grouping of gene expression measured from micro array data set. We propose here application of semi-supervised clustering algorithms that optimize an objective function for clustering functionally related genes. These algorithms demonstrated improvements on finding functionally related genes in relation to a previously proposed model based approach.
Raoult's law‐based method for determination of coal tar average molecular weight

A Raoult's law‐based method for determining the number average molecular weight of coal tars is presented. The method requires data from two‐phase coal tar/water equilibrium experiments, which readily are performed in environmental laboratories. An advantage of this method for environmental samples is that it is not impacted by the small amount of inert debris often present in coal tar samples obtained from contaminated sites. Results are presented for 10 coal tars from nine former manufactured gas plants located in the eastern United States. Vapor pressure osmometry (VPO) analysis provided similar average molecular weights to those determined with the Raoult's law‐based method, except for one highly viscous coal tar sample. Use of the VPO‐based average molecular weight for this coal tar resulted in underprediction of the coal tar constituents' aqueous concentrations. Additionally, one other coal tar was not completely soluble in solvents used for VPO analysis. The results indicate that the Raoult's law‐based method is able to provide an average molecular weight that is consistent with the intended application of the data (e.g., modeling the dissolution of coal tar constituents into surrounding waters), and this method can be applied to coal tars that may be incompatible with other commonly used methods for determining average molecular weight, such as vapor pressure osmometry.
Why Do They Stay? Building a Conceptual Model to Understand Worker Retention and Turnover in Public Child Welfare

Retention of public child welfare workers has been a recognized problem and a topic of interest among child welfare researchers for many years. However, findings in the literature are conflicting and the research is largely atheoretical. While many variables relevant to retention and turnover have been identified, the literature lacks explanation of how the variables are related. The goals of this study were, thus, twofold. The first objective was to build a conceptual model using qualitative data generated from interviews of child welfare workers, theoretical works, as well empirical research which might explain retention and turnover specifically in the field of child welfare. The second objective was to test the conceptual model using logistic regression techniques on a large quantitative sample (N=1,121). This study employs mixed methods and draws its data from a larger ongoing study, utilizing a voluntary sample of child welfare workers who have participated in a Title IV-E MSW program in the state of California, have completed their work obligation period, and have either chosen to remain in public child welfare (stayers) or leave (leavers). Results suggest that the conceptual model successfully identifies the complexity of the process that leads to retention and turnover behavior. Variables from three categories (individual, organizational, and response to job factors) are identified as predicting retention. Previous county employment, supervisor support, and client-related stress were all related to predicting retention. The implications of the study findings for social work education, agency practice, theory building and research are offered.
Reduction in mortality by pharmacological therapy in congestive heart failure.

Mortality in congestive heart failure remains high. In analysis of heart failure in the perspective of pathophysiological mechanisms, some approaches to treatment to improve survival become particularly interesting. The concept of unloading myocardial performance by reducing systemic vascular resistance has received general acceptance. This approach was associated with improved survival with nitrates and hydralazine in the V-HeFT I study. Stimulation of the myocardium in excess of what is achieved by endogenous stimulation might be dangerous. Long-term therapy with positive inotropic agents, therefore, is not an appropriate approach at present. However, addition of beta-blockers may protect the myocardium from the intense endogenous sympathetic stimulation in congestive heart failure. There are favorable trends with this approach in several small trials. An ongoing trial in idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy may help to clarify this question. Counteraction of neuroendocrine activation may also be obtained by the addition of an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor. The CONSENSUS I study demonstrated a clear improvement in survival among very compromised patients by addition of enalapril. A positive effect was significantly associated with the degree of neuroendocrine activation at baseline. Two recent large-scale trials have emphasized the importance of adding an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor to other treatments in patients with mild to moderate symptoms and left ventricular dysfunction. These trials also support the importance of myocardial protection from neuroendocrine stimulation with symptomatic or asymptomatic myocardial failure. Antiarrhythmic agents have not been documented to improve survival. On the contrary, class I agents are deleterious in some patients with left ventricular dysfunction. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Susceptibility of Acinetobacter Strains Isolated from Deployed U.S. Military Personnel

ABSTRACT The susceptibilities of 142 Acinetobacter baumannii-calcoaceticus complex isolates (95 from wounded U.S. soldiers deployed overseas) to 13 antimicrobial agents were determined by broth microdilution. The most active antimicrobial agents (≥95% of isolates susceptible) were colistin, polymyxin B, and minocycline.