Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes

Background: The Quality of Life Scale (QOLS), developed originally by John Flanagan in the 1970's, has been adapted for use in chronic illness groups. Evidence for reliability and validity has been published over the years for both English and translations. This paper presents further evidence of construct validity for persons with chronic conditions as well as across two languages, and gender. Methods: A sample of 1241 chronically ill and healthy adults from American and Swedish databases was used to generate factor analyses for both the 15-item original QOLS and the 16-item chronic illness adaptation. Results: Analysis of the data suggested that the QOLS has three factors in the healthy sample and across chronic conditions, two languages and gender. Factors that could be labeled (1) Relationships and Material Well-Being, (2) Health and Functioning, and (3) Personal, Social and Community Commitment were identified. Conclusions: The QOLS is a valid instrument for measuring domains of quality of life across diverse patient groups. Background Quality of life (QOL) measures have become a vital and often required part of health outcome appraisal. For populations with chronic disease, measurement of QOL provides a meaningful way to determine the impact of health care when cure is not possible. Hundreds of instruments have been developed to measure QOL [1]. Many of these instruments measure only health-related aspects of QOL such as functional status, symptoms, disease processes, or treatment side effects. As such they are useful as treatment outcome measures but may not cover the wide-range of domains that are important to an individual's life. The Flanagan Quality of Life Scale (QOLS) takes this issue into account [2,3]. The QOLS was developed in the United States during the 1970's to measure the quality of life across a random sampling of 3000 American adults using an interview technique. In a second step, Flanagan used the instrument to survey a total of 3,000 people, ages 30, 50, and 70. The results of this national survey revealed that most people of both genders and all three ages felt that the items were important to them. The original QOLS contained 15 items representing 5 conceptual domains of QOL: physical and Published: 23 October 2003 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2003, 1:59 Received: 12 June 2003 Accepted: 23 October 2003 This article is available from: http://www.hqlo. com/content/1/1/59 © 2003 Burckhardt et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.
The Importance of the NRG-1/ErbB4 Pathway for Synaptic Plasticity and Behaviors Associated with Psychiatric Disorders

Neuregulin 1 (NRG-1) and its receptor ErbB4 have emerged as biologically plausible schizophrenia risk factors, modulators of GABAergic and dopaminergic neurotransmission, and as potent regulators of glutamatergic synaptic plasticity. NRG-1 acutely depotentiates LTP in hippocampal slices, and blocking ErbB kinase activity inhibits LTP reversal by theta-pulse stimuli (TPS), an activity-dependent reversal paradigm. NRG-1/ErbB4 signaling in parvalbumin (PV) interneurons has been implicated in inhibitory transmission onto pyramidal neurons. However, the role of ErbB4, in particular in PV interneurons, for LTP reversal has not been investigated. Here we show that ErbB4-null (ErbB4−/−) and PV interneuron-restricted mutant (PV-Cre;ErbB4) mice, as well as NRG-1 hypomorphic mice, exhibit increased hippocampal LTP. Moreover, both ErbB4−/− and PV-Cre;ErbB4 mice lack TPS-mediated LTP reversal. A comparative behavioral analysis of full and conditional ErbB4 mutant mice revealed that both exhibit hyperactivity in a novel environment and deficits in prepulse inhibition of the startle response. Strikingly, however, only ErbB4−/− mice exhibit reduced anxiety-like behaviors in the elevated plus maze task and deficits in cued and contextual fear conditioning. These results suggest that aberrant NRG-1/ErbB4 signaling in PV interneurons accounts for some but not all behavioral abnormalities observed in ErbB4−/− mice. Consistent with the observation that PV-Cre;ErbB4 mice exhibit normal fear conditioning, we find that ErbB4 is broadly expressed in the amygdala, largely by cells negative for PV. These findings are important to better understand ErbB4's role in complex behaviors and warrant further analysis of ErbB4 mutant mice lacking the receptor in distinct neuron types.
Application of inulin-type fructans in animal feed and pet food

The inulin-type fructans are non-digestible oligosaccharides that are fermented in the gastrointestinal tract of farm animals and pets. This review focuses on the various effects of inulin-type fructans in pigs, poultry, calves and companion animals. Effects of the inulin-type fructans on gut microflora, digestion and availability of nutrients, gut morphology, fermentation characteristics and animal performance are discussed. Inulin-type fructans can support animal performance and health by affecting nutrient digestion, gut microflora and gut morphology, although results vary depending on composition of the basal diet, inclusion level, type of fructan, adaptation period and experimental hygienic conditions.
Population sizing for entropy-based model building in discrete estimation of distribution algorithms

This paper proposes a population-sizing model for entropy-based model building in discrete estimation of distribution algorithms. Specifically, the population size required for building an accurate model is investigated. The effect of selection pressure on population sizing is also preliminarily incorporated. The proposed model indicates that the population size required for building an accurate model scales as Θ(m log m), where m is the number of substructures of the given problem and is proportional to the problem size. Experiments are conducted to verify the derivations, and the results agree with the proposed model.
Does antibiotic exposure during infancy lead to development of asthma?: a systematic review and metaanalysis.

OBJECTIVES To determine the association between antibiotic exposure in the first year of life and the development of childhood asthma. DESIGN Metaanalysis of observational studies retrieved through systematic search of all available electronic data sources. Studies included in the metaanalyses were those with populations exposed to one or more courses of antibiotics during the first year of life, and asthma diagnosis was defined as diagnosis by a physician between the age of 1 to 18 years. SETTING Retrospective and prospective studies published in the English-language literature from 1966 to present. RESULTS Eight studies (four prospective and four retrospective) examined the association between exposure to at least one course of antibiotics and development of childhood asthma. The total number of subjects for the analysis comparing exposure to at least one antibiotic to no exposure in the first year of life was 12,082 children and 1,817 asthma cases. In the dose-response analysis, we included data from a total of 27,167 children and 3,392 asthma cases. The pooled odds ratio (OR) for the eight studies was 2.05 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.41 to 2.99). The association was significantly stronger in the retrospective studies (OR, 2.82; 95% CI, 2.07 to 3.85) than the prospective studies (OR, 1.12; 95% CI, 0.88 to 1.42). Five of the eight studies examined whether the association was related to the number of courses of antibiotics taken in the first year of life. The overall OR for the dose-response analysis was 1.16 (95% CI, 1.05 to 1.28) for each additional course of antibiotics; however, this association was not significantly stronger in the retrospective studies (OR, 1.37; 95% CI, 1.18 to 1.60) relative to the prospective studies (OR, 1.07; 95% CI, 0.95 to 1.20). CONCLUSIONS Exposure to at least one course of antibiotics in the first year of life appears to be a risk factor for the development of childhood asthma. Because of the limitations of the studies conducted to date, additional large-scale, prospective studies are needed to confirm this potential association.
Discovery of Two High Magnetic Field Radio Pulsars

We report the discovery of two young isolated radio pulsars with very high inferred magnetic fields. PSR J1119-6127 has period P = 0.407 s, and the largest period derivative known among radio pulsars, Ṗ = 4.0 × 10-12. Under standard assumptions these parameters imply a characteristic spin-down age of only τc = 1.6 kyr and a surface dipole magnetic field strength of B = 4.1 × 1013 G. We have measured a stationary period second derivative for this pulsar, resulting in a braking index of n = 2.91 ± 0.05. We have also observed a glitch in the rotation of the pulsar, with fractional period change ΔP/P = -4.4 × 10-9. Archival radio imaging data suggest the presence of a previously uncataloged supernova remnant centered on the pulsar. The second pulsar, PSR J1814-1744, has P = 3.975 s and Ṗ = 7.4 × 10-13. These parameters imply τc = 85 kyr, and B = 5.5 × 1013 G, the largest of any known radio pulsar. Both PSR J1119-6127 and PSR J1814-1744 show apparently normal radio emission in a regime of magnetic field strength where some models predict that no emission should occur. Also, PSR J1814-1744 has spin parameters similar to the anomalous X-ray pulsar (AXP) 1E 2259+586, but shows no discernible X-ray emission. If AXPs are isolated, high magnetic field neutron stars ("magnetars"), these results suggest that their unusual attributes are unlikely to be merely a consequence of their very high inferred magnetic fields.
Understanding Writing Contexts for English Language Learners

This article explores the writing opportunities provided to Spanish-speaking and Mandarinspeaking English Language Learners at the fourth and fifth-grade level across the various classroom settings in which they participated daily: an all-English speaking classroom, an Englishas- a-second language (ESL) classroom, and a native-language classroom. The students’ school routines were quite complicated, as each interacted daily with several different teachers, and each setting entailed different tasks, expectations, and rules for governing interaction. As a result, students’ views of writing at school were somewhat fragmented. Even when assignments ostensibly focused on authentic communication, the students did not always recognize the purpose or value. Students primarily wrote expository essays, and seldom engaged in extended talk concerning the purposes and audiences for the texts they produced. Further, students were not encouraged to write in their native languages in settings other than their Chinese or Spanish classes, and, therefore, did not have many opportunities to explore their linguistic and cultural identities in the all-English or ESL settings. Despite these limitations, most of the students successfully negotiated the complex curriculum and found ways to explore their bilingual/bicultural identities.
The geography of mental health

This Editorial takes a social science perspective of the geography of mental health, drawing upon the work of professional geographers with an interest in mental health and mental health care service provision. The academic discipline of Geography is broadly defined as “the study of the earth’s surface as the space within which the human population lives” (Haggett, 1990). This all-inclusive definition, which basically includes everything that occurs both in the natural and human world, often results in the allegation that professional geographers are basically ‘jack of all trades, and master of none! ’ However, in this Editorial I aim to demonstrate that geographers actually have much to offer to mental health research, both in terms of their social science research expertise and their particular ‘geographical’ view of the world. I hope to illustrate the benefits of including a geographical perspective in mental health services research to assist us in studying both the spatial patterns of mental illhealth, and the geographical distribution of mental health services and facilities at different spatial scales (local, regional, national, global). Geographers (myself included) believe that ‘Geography matters’ when we ask research questions such as ‘Why is there a concentration of people with mental health problems living in this district of City A’? or ‘Why does Client A living in City A have access to services X, Y and Z, but Client B living in City B only has access to service Z’? Rather than simply observing spatial patterns, geographers seek to explore and interrelate the epidemiological, demographic, social, economic, political and spatial relationships which underpin phenomenon such as changing patterns of psychiatric service use or the variations in service provision in different places. This skill is derived from our ‘jack of all trades’ quality we have been trained in all the above mentioned spheres, and thus can think very broadly about complex and interrelated factors when we focus upon a particular topic such as mental health. Firstly I will briefly outline the development of mental health geography. I will then focus upon the research area of the geography of mental health care provision, using the findings of a doctoral research study (Jones, 1999) to demonstrate the huge potential of studying mental health service provision through a ‘geographical lens’.
Impact of a Digital Activity Tracker-Based Workplace Activity Program on Health and Wellbeing

Chronic disease is endemic within the Australian community. 3.6 million Australians have diabetes or pre-diabetes with the number increasing by 7% each year. Fifty three percent of Australians have one or more chronic diseases. Increasing levels of activity has proved relatively straightforward, especially through workplace physical activity interventions. What is still not certain are the short, and long-term, health benefits arising from these workplace activity challenges. Research into workplace activity challenges is beset with a number of methodological obstacles that may, in part, explain why consistent outcomes have not been found from studies of this type. The aim of this study was to assess whether participation in a 16-week activity challenge would result in measurable changes in lipid profile, blood glucose, renal function, blood pressure, weight and health and well being as measured using a health and wellbeing assessment. The study demonstrated that participants could increase their levels of activity and maintain at least 10,000 steps a day for a period of 16 weeks. The study also identified that participants in teams were significantly more active than those participating as individuals. Furthermore, attrition from the activity challenge was greater amongst participants not in a team. This demonstrated the importance of social interactions, support and possibly other factors that being part of a group brought to the experience of participating in the activity challenge. In addition to the above, the challenge resulted in reductions in non-HDL cholesterol, and triglyceride concentrations and health and well being score.
Development of one-legged jumping robot with artificial musculoskeletal system

This paper describes the mechanism of a one-legged jumping robot that can mimic the muscular and skeletal system of a human leg. The jumping robot has a waist, a thigh, a shin, and a foot. It weighs 6.5 [kg], and is 594 [mm] tall. It has a total of 9 actuators: 6 mono-articular types and 3 bi-articular types. A pneumatic artificial muscle actuator that can expand radially and contract axially is used. The actuators for mono-articular and bi-articular muscles are installed in the rear and the front of the thigh and the shin for the muscles to antagonize each other. The effectiveness of the mechanism and the control of the robot are verified through motion experiments.
A context-sensitive methodology for automatic episode creation

Episode creation, the task of classifying medical events and related clinical data to a high-level concept, such as a disease, illness or care, has been primarily an interest of healthcare payers for purposes of cost outcomes analysis. Traditional challenges in episode creation have included: inconsistencies in defining episodes; lack of sufficient information to infer episodes; and differences in methods for diagnosing and resolving episodes. However, with the advent of the electronic medical record, which contains multiple sources of patient-related information, data is now accessible to construct more accurate and refined episodes. This work presents a context-sensitive episode creation methodology that utilizes features extracted from different medical repositories (e.g., claims records, structured medical reports) to associate the data with their respective motivating episodes. The combinatorial approach used to find the optimal clustering of patient-related data into episode groups and the measure used to evaluate candidate episode sets are described.
Playing Hard at Life: A Relational Approach to Treating Multiply Traumatized Adolescents

In an Introduction to a volume on ‘‘Theoretical and technical approaches to psychic trauma’’ for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Hoffman, 2003), I wrote how, ‘‘In 1927, Freud described the nonpsychotic disavowal of reality of two young men who lost their fathers in childhood. In these men, two mental states existed side by side: one which fitted in with the wish and the other with reality. ’’ In his posthumously published, ‘‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis,’’ Freud (1940) discussed further the idea that splitting, as a mechanism, was ubiquitous in childhood. Children, he stated, in addition to coping with undesirable instinctual demands by repressions, often find themselves in positions needing to fend off distressing demands from the external world. They do this by means of disavowal of the perceptions from reality. ‘‘The disavowal is always supplemented by an acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego’’ (pp. 203–204). Etty Cohen provides the reader of this volume with her experiences treating patients with such profound splitting mechanisms, as described by Freud long ago. Her focus is on the work with multiply traumatized adolescents. My first thought in reading this book was: How does any analyst or therapist, of any theoretical bent, cope day in and day out listening to these tragic stories of rape, murder, mutilation, and abandonment? How does a therapist deal with his or her inner experiences of dread, anxiety, fear, shame, guilt, rage, guilt-ridden sexual excitement, and countless other unpleasant affects? Undoubtedly supervision, study groups, and having one’s own listening ear seem to be singularly important to prevent one’s own burnout. Cohen copes through the use of countertransference analysis. For Cohen, this process seems to privilege the analyst’s associations, to include self-disclosure, one outcome of countertransference analysis, but hopefully, not the only one. Cohen provides us The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 65, No. 1, March 2005 ( 2005) DOI: 10.1007/s11231-004-1820-0
Control of tumbling during the locust jump

SUMMARY Locust can jump precisely to a target, yet they can also tumble during the trajectory. We propose two mechanisms that would allow the locust to control tumbling during the jump. The first is that prior to the jump, locusts adjust the pitch of their body to move the center of mass closer to the intended thrust vector. The second is that contraction of the dorsolongitudinal muscles during the jump will produce torques that counter the torque produced by thrust. We found that locusts increased their take-off angle as the initial body pitch increased, and that little tumbling occurred for jumps that observed this relationship. Simulations of locust jumping demonstrated that a pitch versus take-off angle relationship that minimized tumbling in simulated jumps was similar to the relationship observed in live locusts. Locusts were strongly biased to pitch head-upward, and performed dorsiflexions far more often than ventral flexions. The direction and magnitude of tumbling could be controlled in simulations by adjusting the tension in the dorsolongitudinal muscles. These mechanisms allowed the simulations to match the data from the live animals. Control of tumbling was also found to influence the control of jump elevation. The bias to pitch head-upwards may have an evolutionary advantage when evading a predator and so make control of tumbling important for the locust.
Analysis of network node behavior based on MapReduce

With the widespread popularity and rapid development of Internet, the network is becoming more complex. Analysis of network node behavior can be crucial for network management and service provisioning. In this paper, we conduct the detailed measurement analysis of the network node (NN) traffic characteristics based on a large-scale data set collected from an enterprise network traffic monitoring device, which is deployed at the entry of enterprise network covering the Guangdong province in China. We analyze the distribution of NN traffic volume and visitor number. We discuss the rank of NN in terms of traffic volume distribution and visitor number distribution, which follows power law distribution. Furthermore, we illustrate the traffic characteristics of NN in terms of visitor number. To handle the problem of big data processing, we make use of Hadoop framework and MapReduce programming model to analyze huge traffic data, which handles a large collection data efficiently and quickly for scalable storage and analysis. Thus, in this paper, we propose a network traffic analysis method based on MapReduce in enterprise internet.
A Joint Model of Intent Determination and Slot Filling for Spoken Language Understanding

Two major tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU) are intent determination (ID) and slot filling (SF). Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been proved effective in SF, while there is no prior work using RNNs in ID. Based on the idea that the intent and semantic slots of a sentence are correlative, we propose a joint model for both tasks. Gated recurrent unit (GRU) is used to learn the representation of each time step, by which the label of each slot is predicted. Meanwhile, a max-pooling layer is employed to capture global features of a sentence for intent classification. The representations are shared by two tasks and the model is trained by a united loss function. We conduct experiments on two datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on both tasks.