Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electric-acoustic stimulation suppresses tinnitus in a subject with high-frequency single-sided deafness

Background: A suggested solution to suppress tinnitus is to restore the normal sensory input. This is based on the auditory deprivation hypothesis. It is known that hearing aids can provide sufficient activation of the auditory nervous system and reduce tinnitus in subjects with mild to moderate hearing loss and that cochlear implantation can reduce tinnitus in subjects with severe to profound hearing loss. This applies to subjects with single-sided deafness (SSD) or bilateral hearing loss. Aim: To investigate if electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS) can reduce severe tinnitus in a subject with residual hearing in the ipsilateral ear and contralateral normal hearing (high-frequency SSD) by restoring the auditory input. Methods: Tinnitus reduction was investigated for 1 year after implantation in a subject with high-frequency SSD, who uses EAS, and was compared to 11 subjects with a cochlear implant (CI) with SSD. The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and the Tinnitus Questionnaire (TQ) were administered pre-operatively and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after implantation. Results: Significant tinnitus reduction was observed 1 month after implantation on the VAS in the subjects with SSD using a CI. Tinnitus reduction was also observed in the subject with high-frequency SSD using EAS. A further decrease was observed 3 months after implantation. The TQ and VAS scores remained stable up to 1 year after implantation. Conclusion: A CI can significantly reduce ipsilateral severe tinnitus in a subject with SSD. Ipsilateral severe tinnitus can also be reduced using EAS in subjects with high-frequency SSD.
Development of reactive artificial liner using recycled materials. 2. Chemical transport properties

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have so far been found to permeate through geomembranes within days and potentially pollute the surrounding groundwater if no sufficient depth of underlain soil barrier existed In order to cope with the fast breakthrough of VOCs through high-density polyethylene (HDPE) geomembrane in the composite liner system, a composite material made of recycled materials was proposed and its mechanical properties were analyzed in a previous study. This artificial liner was composed of crumb rubber, organo-clay, silica fume and epoxy binder together with an environmentally-friendly solvent recycled from paper pulping, and dimethyl sulfoxide as a plasticizer. In this study, the new artificial liner and a typical HDPE geomembrane were tested to compare their abilities to mitigate the movement of VOCs, specifically partition coefficient, diffusion coefficient and mass fluxes. It was found that this new artificial liner had 2–3 orders of magnitude less VOC mass flux than the HDPE geomembrane. The new artificial liner is thought to have a great potential for containing VOCs, even with a thickness of 2.5 cm, and as a substitute for the clay liner. The cost of installing the artificial liner was estimated to be $13.78/m2. This is lower than the current geomembrane-related price of $19.70–26.91/m2. The new liner might give a new perspective in future liner design and alleviate the concerning issue of groundwater pollution caused by landfill leachate, which might contain highly mobile VOCs.
Why Is There Less Public Trust in Local Government Than in Central Government in China?

Abstract The public’s trust in government, whether at national, regional, or local levels, is always a subject that arouses interest and debate among researchers as well as politicians. This article presents findings from an analysis of survey research conducted in 2011 and provides insights both on a hierarchical trust pattern of public trust in central and local governments in China, and on the key factors accounting for variance in this respect by multiple regression analysis.
The Role of Visual Noise in Influencing Mental Load and Fatigue in a Steady-State Motion Visual Evoked Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interface

As a spatial selective attention-based brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm, steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) BCI has the advantages of high information transfer rate, high tolerance to artifacts, and robust performance across users. However, its benefits come at the cost of mental load and fatigue occurring in the concentration on the visual stimuli. Noise, as a ubiquitous random perturbation with the power of randomness, may be exploited by the human visual system to enhance higher-level brain functions. In this study, a novel steady-state motion visual evoked potential (SSMVEP, i.e., one kind of SSVEP)-based BCI paradigm with spatiotemporal visual noise was used to investigate the influence of noise on the compensation of mental load and fatigue deterioration during prolonged attention tasks. Changes in α, θ, θ + α powers, θ/α ratio, and electroencephalography (EEG) properties of amplitude, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and online accuracy, were used to evaluate mental load and fatigue. We showed that presenting a moderate visual noise to participants could reliably alleviate the mental load and fatigue during online operation of visual BCI that places demands on the attentional processes. This demonstrated that noise could provide a superior solution to the implementation of visual attention controlling-based BCI applications.
National Commission on Urbanisation: issues and non-issues.

The author analyzes the final report of Indias National Commission on Urbanisation with a focus on factors underlying public criticism of the report. The Commissions recommendations for urban policy are discussed. The author concludes that "the commissions recommendations will have the effect of accentuating the segmentation of our cities into rich and poor localities and tilting the flow of resources further in favour of the former. " (EXCERPT)
Immune surveillance in melanoma: From immune attack to melanoma escape and even counterattack

ABSTRACT Pharmacologic inhibition of the cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen 4 (CTLA4) and the programmed death receptor-1 (PD1) has resulted in unprecedented durable responses in metastatic melanoma. However, resistance to immunotherapy remains a major challenge. Effective immune surveillance against melanoma requires 4 essential steps: activation of the T lymphocytes, homing of the activated T lymphocytes to the melanoma microenvironment, identification and episode of melanoma cells by activated T lymphocytes, and the sensitivity of melanoma cells to apoptosis. At each of these steps, there are multiple factors that may interfere with the immune surveillance machinery, thus allowing melanoma cells to escape immune attack and develop resistance to immunotherapy. We provide a comprehensive review of the complex immune surveillance mechanisms at play in melanoma, and a detailed discussion of how these mechanisms may allow for the development of intrinsic or acquired resistance to immunotherapeutic modalities, and potential avenues for overcoming this resistance.
Organizational Maintenance: The Internal Operation of Interest Groups

O rganization analysts have ignored one important type of bureaucracy-the organized interest group. As a result very little is written about their internal operation and administration. The study of these associations has been monopolized by political scientists concerned with the group's policy involvement and who, consequently, focus on lobbying and coalition-building. But, as James Q. Wilson so effectively demonstrates in taking exception to this general rule, no interest group is just a lobby. ' All must face problems of internal organization and system maintenance similar to other bureaucratically structured entities. Still, however, no studies specifically examine how groups organize internally in response to these problems. Interest group research has focused instead on the presumably dominant linkage between internal organization and the group's political needs. Accordingly, this practice has resulted in a public policy emphasis which may be more a result of the directional bias of the researcher than a reflection of organizational reality. They assume lobbying to be the association's raison d'etre and all logical analysis follows that belief.
Deep Attentional Structured Representation Learning for Visual Recognition

Structured representations, such as Bags of Words, VLAD and Fisher Vectors, have proven highly effective to tackle complex visual recognition tasks. As such, they have recently been incorporated into deep architectures. However, while effective, the resulting deep structured representation learning strategies typically aggregate local features from the entire image, ignoring the fact that, in complex recognition tasks, some regions provide much more discriminative information than others. In this paper, we introduce an attentional structured representation learning framework that incorporates an image-specific attention mechanism within the aggregation process. Our framework learns to predict jointly the image class label and an attention map in an end-to-end fashion and without any other supervision than the target label. As evidenced by our experiments, this consistently outperforms attention-less structured representation learning and yields state-of-the-art results on standard scene recognition and fine-grained categorization benchmarks.
Extraction and Quantitation of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide Redox Cofactors.

AIMS Accurate analysis of dinucleotide redox cofactors nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate reduced (NADPH), nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP+), nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide reduced (NADH), and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) from biological samples is important to understanding cellular redox homeostasis. In this study, we aimed to develop a simple protocol for quenching metabolism and extracting NADPH that avoids interconversion among the reduced forms and the oxidized forms. RESULTS We compared seven different solvents for quenching and extraction of cultured mammalian cells and mouse tissues: a cold aqueous buffer commonly used in enzyme assays with and without detergent, hot aqueous buffer, and cold organic mixtures (80% methanol, buffered 75% acetonitrile, and acidic 40:40:20 acetonitrile:methanol:water with either 0.02 M or 0.1 M formic acid). Extracts were analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). To monitor the metabolite interconversion, cells were grown in 13C6-glucose medium, and unlabeled standards were spiked into the extraction solvents. Interconversion between the oxidized and reduced forms was substantial except for the enzyme assay buffer with detergent, 80% methanol and 40:40:20 acetonitrile:methanol:water, with the 0.1 M formic acid mix giving the least interconversion and best recoveries. Absolute NAD+, NADH, NADP+, and NADPH concentrations in cells and mouse tissues were measured with this approach. INNOVATION We found that the interconversion between the reduced and oxidized forms during extraction is a major barrier to accurately measuring NADPH/NADP+ and NADH/NAD+ ratios. Such interconversion can be monitored by isotope labeling cells and spiking NAD(P)(H) standards. CONCLUSION Extraction with 40:40:20 acetonitrile:methanol:water with 0.1 M formic acid decreases interconversion and, therefore, is suitable for measurement of redox cofactor ratios using LC-MS. This solvent is also useful for general metabolomics. Samples should be neutralized immediately after extraction to avoid acid-catalyzed degradation. When LC-MS is not available and enzyme assays are accordingly used, inclusion of detergent in the aqueous extraction buffer reduces interconversion. Antioxid. Redox Signal. 28, 167-179.
A Systematic Review of Supported Accommodation Programs for People Released From Custody

One of the challenges that people recently released from custody face is securing housing. Many individuals rely on supported accommodation programs for housing in the immediate post-release period. However, the value of supported accommodation programs in producing positive criminal justice and health outcomes for people released from custody has not been widely examined. This article reviews the current literature on supported accommodation programs and the elements of these services that contribute to positive outcomes for individuals released from custody. We focused on programs that provided temporary, transitional group residences for adults recently released from a correctional setting. The systematic review identified only nine publications that met the inclusion criteria. Studies were frequently at high risk of bias and few consistent findings emerged about either effectiveness of accommodation programs or program characteristics associated with participant outcomes. Methodologically rigorous research is needed to determine the effectiveness of post-release supported accommodation programs.
egular drinking may strengthen the beneficial influence of social upport on depression : Findings from a representative Israeli sample uring a period of war and terrorism eremy

Background: Social support is consistently associated with reduced risk of depression. Few studies have investigated how this relationship may be modified by alcohol use, the effects of which may be particularly relevant in traumatized populations in which rates of alcohol use are known to be high. Methods: In 2008 a representative sample of 1622 Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel were interviewed by phone at two time points during a period of ongoing terrorism and war threat. Two multivariable mixed effects regression models were estimated to measure the longitudinal association of social support from family and friends on depression symptoms. Three-way interaction terms between social support, alcohol use and time were entered into the models to test for effect modification. Results: Findings indicated that increased family social support was associated with less depression symptomatology (p = <.01); this relationship was modified by alcohol use and time (p = <.01). Social support from friends was also associated with fewer depression symptoms (p = <.01) and this relationship was modified by alcohol use and time as well (p = <.01). Stratified analyses in both models revealed that the effect of social support was stronger for those who drank alcohol regularly than those who did not drink or drank rarely. Conclusions: These findings suggest that social support is a more important protective factor for depression among regular drinkers than among those who do not drink or drink rarely in the context of political violence. Additional research is warranted to determine whether these findings are stable in other populations and settings.
Emerging role of ivabradine for rate control in atrial fibrillation

Control of ventricular rate is recommended for patients with paroxysmal, persistent, or permanent atrial fibrillation (AF). Existing rate-control options, including beta-blockers, nondihydropyridine calcium channel blockers, and digoxin, are limited by adverse hemodynamic effects and their ability to attain target heart rate (HR). Ivabradine, a novel HR-controlling agent, decreases HR through deceleration of conduction through If (‘funny’) channels, and is approved for HR reduction in heart failure patients with ejection fraction less than 35% and elevated HR, despite optimal pharmacological treatment. Because If channels were thought to be expressed solely in sinoatrial (SA) nodal tissue, ivabradine was not investigated in heart failure patients with concomitant AF. Subsequent identification of hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated cation channel 4 (HCN4), the primary gene responsible for If current expression throughout the myocardium, stimulated interest in the potential role of ivabradine for ventricular rate control in AF. Preclinical studies of ivabradine in animal models with induced AF demonstrated a reduction in HR, with no significant worsening of QT interval or mean arterial pressure. Preliminary human data suggest that ivabradine provides HR reduction without associated hemodynamic complications in patients with AF. Questions remain regarding efficacy, safety, optimal dosing, and length of therapy in these patients. Prospective, randomized studies are needed to determine if ivabradine has a role as a rate-control treatment in patients with AF.
Whole-body computed tomography in trauma patients: optimization of the patient scanning position significantly shortens examination time while maintaining diagnostic image quality

Background The study was conducted to compare examination time and artifact vulnerability of whole-body computed tomographies (wbCTs) for trauma patients using conventional or optimized patient positioning. Patients and methods Examination time was measured in 100 patients scanned with conventional protocol (Group A: arms positioned alongside the body for head and neck imaging and over the head for trunk imaging) and 100 patients scanned with optimized protocol (Group B: arms flexed on a chest pillow without repositioning). Additionally, influence of two different scanning protocols on image quality in the most relevant body regions was assessed by two blinded readers. Results Total wbCT duration was about 35% or 3:46 min shorter in B than in A. Artifacts in aorta (27 vs 6%), liver (40 vs 8%) and spleen (27 vs 5%) occurred significantly more often in B than in A. No incident of non-diagnostic image quality was reported, and no significant differences for lungs and spine were found. Conclusion An optimized wbCT positioning protocol for trauma patients allows a significant reduction of examination time while still maintaining diagnostic image quality.
Survey Measures of Expected Inflation and the Inflation Process

The accuracy of inflation forecasts obtained from household and professional surveys has deteriorated noticeably of late, to the extent that a simple autoregressive specification outperforms survey forecasts. The decline in (absolute and relative) accuracy has taken place at about the same time as an apparent change in the inflation process. Projections of household forecasts on realized inflation suggests that households have not recognized this change. For the professionals, projections of expected inflation on headline inflation have changed, but on core inflation have not. By contrast, projections of realized headline inflation on core have changed sharply.
Capsaicin in Metabolic Syndrome

Capsaicin, the major active constituent of chilli, is an agonist on transient receptor potential vanilloid channel 1 (TRPV1). TRPV1 is present on many metabolically active tissues, making it a potentially relevant target for metabolic interventions. Insulin resistance and obesity, being the major components of metabolic syndrome, increase the risk for the development of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. In vitro and pre-clinical studies have established the effectiveness of low-dose dietary capsaicin in attenuating metabolic disorders. These responses of capsaicin are mediated through activation of TRPV1, which can then modulate processes such as browning of adipocytes, and activation of metabolic modulators including AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα), uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1), and glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1). Modulation of these pathways by capsaicin can increase fat oxidation, improve insulin sensitivity, decrease body fat, and improve heart and liver function. Identifying suitable ways of administering capsaicin at an effective dose would warrant its clinical use through the activation of TRPV1. This review highlights the mechanistic options to improve metabolic syndrome with capsaicin.
Coagulation Profile Is Not a Predictor of Acute Cerebrovascular Events in Pediatric Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Patients

We performed a retrospective matched case–control study evaluating whether the traditional coagulation profile predicts cerebrovascular events in children on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) in a 71 bed intensive care unit at a tertiary children’s hospital. Between 2009 and 2014, 241 neonates and children were initiated on ECMO. The cumulative 5 year incidence of intracranial hemorrhage and infarct was 9.2% and 7.9%, respectively. Thirty-six cases were individually matched 1:1 with control subjects based on age, primary diagnosis, ECMO type, cannulation site, and the presence of pre-ECMO coagulopathy. In-hospital mortality was higher among the cases compared with control subjects (78 vs. 22%, p < 0.01). The median laboratory values that assisted with heparin anticoagulation monitoring (activated clotting time, partial thromboplastin time, and antifactor Xa) and the laboratory data that assisted with blood product administration (platelet count, prothrombin time, fibrinogen, and d-dimer) during the 24 and 72 hour periods before the cerebrovascular event did not show any significant difference between the hemorrhage group and their controls or between the infarct group and their controls. The traditional coagulation profile did not predict acute cerebrovascular events in our cohort. Other markers of neurologic injury on ECMO are yet to be elucidated. Prospective studies to determine better predictors of cerebrovascular complications in pediatric ECMO patients are required.
Integrated Analysis of Biopsies from Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients Identifies SAA1 as a Link Between Mucosal Microbes with TH17 and TH22 Cells

Background: Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are believed to be driven by dysregulated interactions between the host and the gut microbiota. Our goal is to characterize and infer relationships between mucosal T cells, the host tissue environment, and microbial communities in patients with IBD who will serve as basis for mechanistic studies on human IBD. Methods: We characterized mucosal CD4+ T cells using flow cytometry, along with matching mucosal global gene expression and microbial communities data from 35 pinch biopsy samples from patients with IBD. We analyzed these data sets using an integrated framework to identify predictors of inflammatory states and then reproduced some of the putative relationships formed among these predictors by analyzing data from the pediatric RISK cohort. Results: We identified 26 predictors from our combined data set that were effective in distinguishing between regions of the intestine undergoing active inflammation and regions that were normal. Network analysis on these 26 predictors revealed SAA1 as the most connected node linking the abundance of the genus Bacteroides with the production of IL17 and IL22 by CD4+ T cells. These SAA1-linked microbial and transcriptome interactions were further reproduced with data from the pediatric IBD RISK cohort. Conclusions: This study identifies expression of SAA1 as an important link between mucosal T cells, microbial communities, and their tissue environment in patients with IBD. A combination of T cell effector function data, gene expression and microbial profiling can distinguish between intestinal inflammatory states in IBD regardless of disease types.