Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of lining thermal inertia on small-scale compartment fire

The use of small scale facilities in experimental fire research studies is well estabhshed. This thesis concerns the use of small scale facilities to examine principally the influence of thermal inertia of the lining material on ventilated enclosure fire The radiation error of the thermocouple reading was studied using radiation network models. Previous theoretical studies were implemented to provide improved models appropriate to the more complex arrangements considered here. Modeling was used to assess the radiation error of different sizes of thermocouple in the hot layer measuring position for post and pre flashover fires, and the models were compared with experiment. The current range of thermal inertia values for building products is much wider than those used in the regression by which the classical theory of pre-flashover temperature was derived (McCaffery et al. 1981). The range considered here is greater then has previously been considered by systematic experimental testing whilst maintaining all other independent key variables constant. Using of reasonable assumptions, the mass loss rates of non-flashover and flashover conditions were predicted by numerical calculation integrated with a zone model. Successful prediction was also made for published tests where sufficient information was available, and good agreement was found irrespective of flashover, scale or geometry. Two important and necessary assumptions used in the zone model, concerning specifically radiation heat transfer in the flashover condition are: that an average temperature of hot gas and flashover flame may be represented by a single thermocouple measurement; and that the massive increase in production of flanu-nable vapours from the fuel surface during flashover leads to a "cool core" partial scattering or blocking of the incident radiant heat from the flashover flame and hot gas. A computer programme was developed to implement and test recent flashover theory (Graharn et al. 1995). A logarithinic relationship has here been suggested between the thermal inertia parameter ', 8' and thermal inertia value of lining material. That relationship matches the current experimental results and other published data. The occurrence of flashover and the value of hot gas peak or steady temperature can be predicted using the computer programme, based on the published theory.
Receptor for AGE (RAGE) Mediates Neointimal Formation in Response to Arterial Injury

Background—Receptor for advanced-glycation end products (RAGE) and its ligands AGEs and S100/calgranulins have been implicated in a range of disorders. However, the role of RAGE/ligand interaction in neointimal hyperplasia after vascular injury remains unclear. Methods and Results—We examined the expression of RAGE and its ligands after balloon injury of the carotid artery in both Zucker diabetic and nondiabetic rats. Using a soluble portion of the extracellular domain of RAGE, we determined the effects of suppressing RAGE/ligand interaction on vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) proliferation and neointimal formation after arterial injury. We demonstrate a significantly increased accumulation of AGE and immunoreactivities of RAGE and S100/calgranulins in response to balloon injury in diabetic compared with nondiabetic rats. Blockade of RAGE/ligand interaction significantly decreased S100-stimulated VSMC proliferation in vitro and bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU)–labeled proliferating VSMC in vivo, and suppressed neointimal formation and increased luminal area in both Zucker diabetic and nondiabetic rats. Conclusions—These findings indicate that RAGE/ligand interaction plays a key role in neointimal formation after vascular injury irrespective of diabetes status and suggest a novel target to minimize neointimal hyperplasia.
Childhood overweight and parent- and teacher-reported behavior problems: evidence from a prospective study of kindergartners.

OBJECTIVES To determine if there is a relationship between overweight and behavior problems among children as young as 5 years old by studying the association between overweight and behavioral health at entry into kindergarten and to determine whether overweight status is a risk factor for the onset of new behavior problems during the first 2 years in school. DESIGN We use data from a nationally representative sample of kindergartners in the United States-the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten class. Data on height, weight, and parent- and teacher-reported behavior problems were collected 3 times during their first 2 years in school for 9949 children. We use a multivariate regression analysis that controls for sociodemographic characteristics, parent-child interaction, birth weight, and mother's mental health. RESULTS Among girls, but not boys, there is a significant association between overweight and teacher-reported externalizing behavior problems (odds ratio [OR], 1.81; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.23-2.68), teacher-reported internalizing behavior problems (OR, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.09-2.17), and parent-reported internalizing behavior problems (OR, 1.49; 95% CI, 1.08-2.06) at the beginning of kindergarten. However, overweight status was not a risk factor for the onset of new behavior problems over time for either girls (teacher-reported externalizing behavior problems: OR, 0.58 [95% CI, 0.25-1.33]; teacher-reported internalizing behavior problems: OR, 1.34 [95% CI, 0.88-2.03]; and parent-reported internalizing behavior problems: OR, 1.29 [95% CI, 0.82-2.01]) or boys (teacher-reported externalizing behavior problems: OR, 1.02 [95% CI, 0.67-1.57]; teacher-reported internalizing behavior problems: OR, 1.02 [95% CI, 0.68-1.52]; and parent-reported internalizing behavior problems: OR, 1.42 [95% CI, 0.94-2.15]), whereas low family income and maternal depression were strong predictors of such problems. CONCLUSIONS Childhood overweight is already associated with behavior problems when girls start school, but not boys. In contrast to common belief, overweight status does not predict the onset of new internalizing or externalizing behavior problems during the first 2 years of school.
Lapped biorthogonal transforms for transform coding with reduced blocking and ringing artifacts

Two new lapped transforms are introduced: the LBT (lapped biorthogonal transform) and the HLBT (hierarchical lapped biorthogonal transform). The LBT has the same computational complexity of the LOT (lapped orthogonal transform), with much less blocking artifacts. The HLBT has a significantly lower computational complexity than the LOT, essentially no blocking artifacts, and less ringing artifacts than the commonly-used DCT (discrete cosine transform). The LBT and HLBT have a transform coding gain that is typically between 0.5 and 2.5 dB higher than that of the DCT. Image coding examples using JPEG and embedded zerotree coders demonstrate the better performance of the LBT and HLBT.
The ﬁ brinolysis renaissance

Fibrinolysis is the system primarily responsible for removal of ﬁ brin deposits and blood clots in the vasculature. The terminal enzyme in the pathway, plasmin, is formed from its circulating precursor, plasminogen. Fibrin is by far the most legendary substrate, but plasmin is notoriously proli ﬁ c and is known to cleave many other proteins and participate in the activation of other proteolytic systems. Fibrinolysis is often over-shadowed by the coagulation system and viewed as a simplistic poorer relation. However, the primordial plasminogen activators evolved alongside the complement system, approximately 70 million years before coagulation saw the light of day. It is highly likely that the plasminogen activation system evolved with its roots
Circulating tumor DNA: a promising biomarker in the liquid biopsy of cancer

Tissue biopsy is the standard diagnostic procedure for cancers and also provides a material for genotyping, which can assist in the targeted therapies of cancers. However, tissue biopsy-based cancer diagnostic procedures have limitations in their assessment of cancer development, prognosis and genotyping, due to tumor heterogeneity and evolution. Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is single- or double-stranded DNA released by the tumor cells into the blood and it thus harbors the mutations of the original tumor. In recent years, liquid biopsy based on ctDNA analysis has shed a new light on the molecular diagnosis and monitoring of cancer. Studies found that the screening of genetic mutations using ctDNA is highly sensitive and specific, suggesting that ctDNA analysis may significantly improve current systems of tumor diagnosis, even facilitating early-stage detection. Moreover, ctDNA analysis is capable of accurately determining the tumor progression, prognosis and assisting in targeted therapy. Therefore, using ctDNA as a liquid biopsy may herald a revolution for tumor management. Herein, we review the biology of ctDNA, its detection methods and potential applications in tumor diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.
BioCreative V CDR task corpus: a resource for chemical disease relation extraction

Community-run, formal evaluations and manually annotated text corpora are critically important for advancing biomedical text-mining research. Recently in BioCreative V, a new challenge was organized for the tasks of disease named entity recognition (DNER) and chemical-induced disease (CID) relation extraction. Given the nature of both tasks, a test collection is required to contain both disease/chemical annotations and relation annotations in the same set of articles. Despite previous efforts in biomedical corpus construction, none was found to be sufficient for the task. Thus, we developed our own corpus called BC5CDR during the challenge by inviting a team of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) indexers for disease/chemical entity annotation and Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) curators for CID relation annotation. To ensure high annotation quality and productivity, detailed annotation guidelines and automatic annotation tools were provided. The resulting BC5CDR corpus consists of 1500 PubMed articles with 4409 annotated chemicals, 5818 diseases and 3116 chemical-disease interactions. Each entity annotation includes both the mention text spans and normalized concept identifiers, using MeSH as the controlled vocabulary. To ensure accuracy, the entities were first captured independently by two annotators followed by a consensus annotation: The average inter-annotator agreement (IAA) scores were 87.49% and 96.05% for the disease and chemicals, respectively, in the test set according to the Jaccard similarity coefficient. Our corpus was successfully used for the BioCreative V challenge tasks and should serve as a valuable resource for the text-mining research community. Database URL: http://www.biocreative. org/tasks/biocreative-v/track-3-cdr/
Cancer Risk Near a Polluted River in Finland

The River Kymijoki in southern Finland is heavily polluted with polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans and may pose a health threat to local residents, especially farmers. In this study we investigated cancer risk in people living near the river (< 20.0 km) in 1980. We used a geographic information system, which stores registry data, in 500 m × 500 m grid squares, from the Population Register Centre, Statistics Finland, and Finnish Cancer Registry. From 1981 to 2000, cancer incidence in all people (N = 188,884) and in farmers (n = 11,132) residing in the study area was at the level expected based on national rates. Relative risks for total cancer and 27 cancer subtypes were calculated by distance of individuals to the river in 1980 (reference: 5.0–19.9 km, 1.0–4.9 km, < 1.0 km), adjusting for sex, age, time period, socioeconomic status, and distance of individuals to the sea. The respective relative risks for total cancer were 1.00, 1.09 [95% confidence interval (CI), 1.04–1.13], and 1.04 (95% CI, 0.99–1.09) among all residents, and 1.00, 0.99 (95% CI, 0.85–1.15), and 1.13 (95% CI, 0.97–1.32) among farmers. A statistically significant increase was observed for basal cell carcinoma of the skin (not included in total cancers) in all residents < 5.0 km. Several other common cancers, including cancers of the breast, uterine cervix, gallbladder, and nervous system, showed slightly elevated risk estimates at < 5.0 km from the river. Despite the limitations of exposure assessment, we cannot exclude the possibility that residence near the river may have contributed to a small increase in cancer risk, especially among farmers.
Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Novel Pharmacogenomic Loci For Therapeutic Response to Montelukast in Asthma

Background Genome-wide association study (GWAS) is a powerful tool to identify novel pharmacogenetic single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Leukotriene receptor antagonists (LTRAs) are a major class of asthma medications, and genetic factors contribute to variable responses to these drugs. We used GWAS to identify novel SNPs associated with the response to the LTRA, montelukast, in asthmatics. Methods Using genome-wide genotype and phenotypic data available from American Lung Association - Asthma Clinical Research Center (ALA-ACRC) cohorts, we evaluated 8-week change in FEV1 related to montelukast administration in a discovery population of 133 asthmatics. The top 200 SNPs from the discovery GWAS were then tested in 184 additional samples from two independent cohorts. Results Twenty-eight SNP associations from the discovery GWAS were replicated. Of these, rs6475448 achieved genome-wide significance (combined P = 1.97 x 10-09), and subjects from all four studies who were homozygous for rs6475448 showed increased ΔFEV1 from baseline in response to montelukast. Conclusions Through GWAS, we identified a novel pharmacogenomic locus related to improved montelukast response in asthmatics.
Randomised controlled trial of effect of leaflets to empower patients in consultations in primary care

Abstract Objective To assess the impact of leaflets encouraging patients to raise concerns and to discuss symptoms or other health related issues in the consultation. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting Five general practices in three settings in the United Kingdom. Participants 636 consecutive patients, aged 16-80 years, randomised to receive a general leaflet, a depression leaflet, both, or neither. Main outcomes Mean item score on the medical interview satisfaction scale, consultation time, prescribing, Rerral, and investigation. Results The general leaflet increased patient satisfaction and was more effective with shorter consultations (leaflet 0.64, 95% confidence interval 0.19 to 1.08; time 0.31, 0.0 to 0.06; interaction between both −0.045, −0.08 to—0.009), with similar results for subscales related to the different aspects of communication. Thus for a 10 minute consultation the leaflet increased satisfaction by 7% (seven centile points) and for a five minute consultation by 14%. The leaflet overall caused a small non-significant increase in consultation time (0.36 minutes, −0.54 to 1.26). Although there was no change in prescribing or Rerral, a general leaflet increased the numbers of investigations (odds ratio 1.43, 1.00 to 2.05), which persisted when controlling for the major potential confounders of perceived medical need and patient pRerence (1.87, 1.10 to 3.19). Most of excess investigations were not thought strongly needed by the doctor or the patient. The depression leaflet had no significant effect on any outcome. Conclusions Encouraging patients to raise issues and to discuss symptoms and other health related issues in the consultation improves their satisfaction and perceptions of communication, particularly in short consultations. Doctors do, however, need to elicit expectations to prevent needless investigations.
ANNALES DE L’INSTITUT FOURIER

— We establish uniqueness and stability results for the inverse spectral problem of recovering the magnetic ﬁeld and the electric potential in a Riemannian manifold from the knowledge of boundary spectral data of the corresponding magnetic Schrödinger operator with Dirichlet boundary condition. The spectral data consist in the knowledge of asymptotic properties, that we specify hereafter, of the sequence of eigenvalues and Neumann traces of the corresponding sequence of eigenfunctions. We also prove similar results for Schrödinger operators with Neumann boundary conditions. To our knowledge our results are the ﬁrst ones involving such weak boundary spectral data.
Gene Therapy for Chronic Relapsing Experimental Allergic Encephalomyelitis Using Cells Expressing a Novel Soluble p75 Dimeric TNF Receptor1

In a murine relapsing experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE) model, gene therapy to block TNF was investigated with the use of a retroviral dimeric p75 TNF receptor (dTNFR) construct. To effectively produce these TNF inhibitors in vivo, a conditionally immortalized syngeneic fibroblast line was established, using a temperature-sensitive SV40 large T Ag-expressing retrovirus. These cells were subsequently infected with a retrovirus expressing soluble dTNFR. CNS-injected cells could be detected 3 mo after transplantation and were shown to produce the transgene product by immunocytochemistry and ELISA of tissue fluids. These levels of dTNFR protein were biologically active and could significantly ameliorate both acute and relapsing EAE. This cell-based gene-vector approach is ideal for delivering proteins to the CNS and has particular relevance to the control of inflammatory CNS disease.
Circulatory Level of Interferon Gamma and its Relation to Disease Circulatory Level of Interferon Gamma and its Relation to Disease Severity and Activity among Vitiligo Patients Severity and Activity among Vitiligo Patients

Background : A skin depigmentation illness known as vitiligo is brought on by malfunctioning epidermal melanocytes. Cytokines are tiny immune-regulatory chemicals that may cause an unwarranted immunological response. An important immune system regulator is the pleiotropic cytokine interferon-gamma (IFN-g ). IFN-g induces autoantibodies, activates autologous cytotoxic T cells, and causes target cells to undergo apoptosis, all of which support host defense in addition to contributing to autoimmune disease. It is crucial to vitiligo depigmentation induction. Aim : To measure the IFN-g concentration in the serum of vitiligo patients and to explain how this level relates to the disease degree and activity. Methods : This research was cross-sectional and analytical, carried out at dermatology the outpatient clinic of the Suez Canal University Hospitals, Ismailia on 60 participants divided into 2 groups: Patient group: comprised 30 patients who had segmental and nonsegmental vitiligo that was stable and active, as determined by the conventional clinical characteristics, and a control group: included 30 healthy people without vitiligo symptoms or indicators were chosen ages and sexes matched to the patients. Results : There is statistically signi ﬁ cant statistically relation between IFN-g concentration and each of vitiligo area score index (VASI) and vitiligo area score index (VIDA) score activity and the duration of disease. Conclusion : In vitiligo, cytokines control the immune response and depigmentation process. Patients with vitiligo have unbalanced amounts of cytokines. The autoimmune cause of vitiligo involves the expression IFN-g . In the active stage of vitiligo lesions, the production of the cytokine IFN-g is connected to the destruction of melanocytes.
A Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression Model for Ground-Level PM2.5 Estimation from Satellite-Derived 500 m Resolution AOD

Regional haze episodes have occurred frequently in eastern China over the past decades. As a critical indicator to evaluate air quality, the mass concentration of ambient fine particulate matters smaller than 2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5) is involved in many studies. To overcome the limitations of ground measurements on PM2.5 concentration, which is featured in disperse representation and coarse coverage, many statistical models were developed to depict the relationship between ground-level PM2.5 and satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD). However, the current satellite-derived AOD products and statistical models on PM2.5–AOD are insufficient to investigate PM2.5 characteristics at the urban scale, in that spatial resolution is crucial to identify the relationship between PM2.5 and anthropogenic activities. This paper presents a geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model to generate ground-level PM2.5 concentrations from satellite-derived 500 m AOD. The GTWR model incorporates the SARA (simplified high resolution MODIS aerosol retrieval algorithm) AOD product with meteorological variables, including planetary boundary layer height (PBLH), relative humidity (RH), wind speed (WS), and temperature (TEMP) extracted from WRF (weather research and forecasting) assimilation to depict the spatio-temporal dynamics in the PM2.5–AOD relationship. The estimated ground-level PM2.5 concentration has 500 m resolution at the MODIS satellite’s overpass moments twice a day, which can be used for air quality monitoring and haze tracking at the urban and regional scale. To test the performance of the GTWR model, a case study was carried out in a region covering the adjacent parts of Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, and Anhui provinces in central China. A cross validation was done to evaluate the performance of the GTWR model. Compared with OLS, GWR, and TWR models, the GTWR model obtained the highest value of coefficient of determination (R2) and the lowest values of mean absolute difference (MAD), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE).
Predicting Thread Discourse Structure over Technical Web Forums

Online discussion forums are a valuable means for users to resolve specific information needs, both interactively for the participants and statically for users who search/browse over historical thread data. However, the complex structure of forum threads can make it difficult for users to extract relevant information. The discourse structure of web forum threads, in the form of labelled dependency relationships between posts, has the potential to greatly improve information access over web forum archives. In this paper, we present the task of parsing user forum threads to determine the labelled dependencies between posts. Three methods, including a dependency parsing approach, are proposed to jointly classify the links (relationships) between posts and the dialogue act (type) of each link. The proposed methods significantly surpass an informed baseline. We also experiment with "in situ" classification of evolving threads, and establish that our best methods are able to perform equivalently well over partial threads as complete threads.