Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Musicians show general enhancement of complex sound encoding and better inhibition of irrelevant auditory change in music: an ERP study

Using electrophysiology, we have examined two questions in relation to musical training – namely, whether it enhances sensory encoding of the human voice and whether it improves the ability to ignore irrelevant auditory change. Participants performed an auditory distraction task, in which they identified each sound as either short (350 ms) or long (550 ms) and ignored a change in timbre of the sounds. Sounds consisted of a male and a female voice saying a neutral sound [a], and of a cello and a French Horn playing an F3 note. In some blocks, musical sounds occurred on 80% of trials, while voice sounds on 20% of trials. In other blocks, the reverse was true. Participants heard naturally recorded sounds in half of experimental blocks and their spectrally‐rotated versions in the other half. Regarding voice perception, we found that musicians had a larger N1 event‐related potential component not only to vocal sounds but also to their never before heard spectrally‐rotated versions. We therefore conclude that musical training is associated with a general improvement in the early neural encoding of complex sounds. Regarding the ability to ignore irrelevant auditory change, musicians' accuracy tended to suffer less from the change in timbre of the sounds, especially when deviants were musical notes. This behavioral finding was accompanied by a marginally larger re‐orienting negativity in musicians, suggesting that their advantage may lie in a more efficient disengagement of attention from the distracting auditory dimension.
A rule-based blackboard kernel system: some principles in design

A rule-based kernel system to support reasoning within the blackboard problem architecture has been developed, with enough generality to support a number of expert system projects. The blackboard allows diverse expert-system modules to cooperate in solving complex design problems, making use of network communication to reduce difficulties with combining programs in various languages and operating systems. Features of the internal structure of the kernel allow it to be adapted readily to new problem areas and to new configurations of expert modules. From our experience we derive some design principles for enabling multi-expert cooperation, and for using expert knowledge effectively.
In vitro Evaluation of Three Models of Apex Locators in the Determination of Working Length Evaluación in vitro de Tres Modelos de Localizadores de ápice en la Determinación de la Longitud de Trabajo

The aim of this study was to compare the accuracy of three third-generation electronic apex locators to estimate the working length. Thirty extracted human mandibular incisors were explored with a K file # 15 followed by enlargement of the middle third with rotary instruments. The apical foramen was standardized at 300mm. The teeth were embedded in an alginate model. The electronic apex locators were divided as follows: Group I - Root ZX; Group II - RomiApex D-30; and Group III - NovApex. The results were analyzed by the ANOVA-Tukey tests, at a significance level of 5%. The results showed that no statistical differences could be found amongst the three evaluated apex locators. Based on these results, it was concluded that the use of third-generation electronic apex RomiApex D-30 and NovApex are as effective and safe as the Root ZX apex locator.
Data collection and annotation for state-of-the-art NER using unmanaged crowds

This paper presents strategies for generating entity level annotated text utterances using unmanaged crowds. These utterances are then used to build state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) models, a required component to build dialogue systems. First, a wide variety of raw utterances are collected through a variant elicitation task. We ensure that these utterances are relevant by feeding them back to the crowd for a domain validation task. We also flag utterances with potential spelling errors and verify these errors with the crowd before discarding them. These strategies, combined with a periodic CAPTCHA to prevent automated responses, allow us to collect high quality text utterances despite the inability to use the traditional gold test question approach for spam filtering. These utterances are then tagged with appropriate NER labels using unmanaged crowds. The crowd annotation was 23% more accurate and 29% more consistent than in-house annotation.
Chromatin‐mediated regulation of nucleolar structure and RNA Pol I localization by TOR

The target of rapamycin (TOR) protein is a conserved regulator of ribosome biogenesis, an important process for cell growth and proliferation. However, how TOR is involved remains poorly understood. In this study, we find that rapamycin and nutrient starvation, conditions inhibiting TOR, lead to significant nucleolar size reduction in both yeast and mammalian cells. In yeast, this morphological change is accompanied by release of RNA polymerase I (Pol I) from the nucleolus and inhibition of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) transcription. We also present evidence that TOR regulates association of Rpd3–Sin3 histone deacetylase (HDAC) with rDNA chromatin, leading to site‐specific deacetylation of histone H4. Moreover, histone H4 hypoacetylation mutations cause nucleolar size reduction and Pol I delocalization, while rpd3Ü and histone H4 hyperacetylation mutations block the nucleolar changes as a result of TOR inhibition. Taken together, our results suggest a chromatin‐mediated mechanism by which TOR modulates nucleolar structure, RNA Pol I localization and rRNA gene expression in response to nutrient availability.
Clinical significance of serum hepatitis C virus titers in patients with chronic type C hepatitis.

OBJECTIVES To investigate the relationship between serum hepatitis C virus (HCV) titers and clinicopathological characteristics of chronic type C hepatitis. METHODS Serum HCV cDNA concentrations were determined by a competitive polymerase chain reaction assay in 60 Taiwanese patients with chronic type C hepatitis. RESULTS The concentration of serum HCV cDNA ranged between 10(2) and 10(8) copies/mL. The titers of serum HCV (logarithmic transformed copies of HCV cDNA/mL serum) were not significantly correlated with clinicopathological characteristics with respect to either sex of the patients, source of infection, higher serum ALT level (>150 IU/L) or histological severity. In contrast, serum HCV titers were significantly higher in patients with age above 50 yr and with type 1b HCV infection. Moreover, the influence of advancing age on serum HCV titer was genotype-independent by multivariate analysis. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that advancing age and genotype are both important determinants of HCV viremia and that the pathogenesis of HCV infection might not be caused by direct cytotoxicity of the virus.
Giving Lexical Resources a Second Life: Démonette, a Multi-sourced Morpho-semantic Network for French

Démonette is a derivational morphological network designed for the description of French. Its original architecture enables its use as a formal framework for the description of morphological analyses and as a repository for existing lexicons. It is fed with a variety of resources, which all are already validated. The harmonization of their content into a unified format provides them a second life, in which they are enriched with new properties, provided these are deductible from their contents. Démonette is released under a Creative Commons license. It is usable for theoretical and descriptive research in morphology, as a source of experimental material for psycholinguistics, natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR), where it fills a gap, since French lacks a large-coverage derivational resources database. The article presents the integration of two existing lexicons into Démonette. The first is Verbaction, a lexicon of deverbal action nouns. The second is Lexeur, a database of agent nouns in -eur derived from verbs or from nouns.
Physical Activity, Stress, Disease Activity, and Quality of Life in Adults With Crohn Disease

Physical activity and stress reduction are recognized strategies for chronic disease management. They are recommended for people with a variety of diseases; however, little attention has been paid to the effects of regular physical activity and stress reduction in people with Crohn disease (CD). The aim of this pilot study was to examine the relationship that both physical activity and stress levels have with disease activity (a subscale of a quality of life [QOL] measure). A 2-pronged approach to sampling, using an online Crohn support forum and snowball sampling, was implemented over a period of 3 months to conduct this survey. Seventeen adults with CD completed 3 questionnaires measuring physical activity, stress levels, disease activity, and QOL. Although no significant correlations were found for disease activity with stress or physical activity, significant relationships were revealed for QOL with both stress and physical activity. The direct relationship between physical activity and QOL and the inverse relationship between stress and QOL are noteworthy for persons with CD, as well as their healthcare providers. Suggestions for important research design considerations are presented, along with future research needs.
GENETIC, MORPHOLOGICAL, AND ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE REVEALS LACK OF DIVERSIFICATION IN THE COLONIZATION PROCESS IN AN ISLAND BIRD

Songbirds with recently (i.e., early Holocene) founded populations are suitable models for studying incipient differentiation in oceanic islands. On such systems each colonization event represents a different evolutionary episode that can be studied by addressing sets of diverging phenotypic and genetic traits. We investigate the process of early differentiation in the spectacled warbler (Sylvia conspicillata) in 14 populations separated by sea barriers from three Atlantic archipelagos and from continental regions spanning from tropical to temperate latitudes. Our approach involved the study of sexual acoustic signals, morphology, and genetic data. Mitochondrial DNA did not provide clear population structure. However, microsatellites analyses consistently identified two genetic groups, albeit without correspondence to subspecies classification and little correspondence to geography. Coalescent analyses showed significant evidence for gene flow between the two genetic groups. Discriminant analyses could not correctly assign morphological or acoustic traits to source populations. Therefore, although theory predicting that in isolated populations genetic, morphological, or acoustic traits can lead to radiation, we have strikingly failed to document differentiation on these attributes in a resident passerine throughout three oceanic archipelagos.
Visualizing telomere dynamics in living mammalian cells using PNA probes

Chromosome ends are protected from degradation by the presence of the highly repetitive hexanucleotide sequence of TTAGGG and associated proteins. These so‐called telomeric complexes are suggested to play an important role in establishing a functional nuclear chromatin organization. Using peptide nucleic acid (PNA) probes, we studied the dynamic behavior of telomeric DNA repeats in living human osteosarcoma U2OS cells. A fluorescent cy3‐labeled PNA probe was introduced in living cells by glass bead loading and was shown to specifically associate with telomeric DNA shortly afterwards. Telomere dynamics were imaged for several hours using digital fluorescence microscopy. While the majority of telomeres revealed constrained diffusive movement, individual telomeres in a human cell nucleus showed significant directional movements. Also, a subfraction of telomeres were shown to associate and dissociate, suggesting that in vivo telomere clusters are not stable but dynamic structures. Furthermore, telomeres were shown to associate with promyelocytic leukemia (PML) bodies in a dynamic manner.
Coherent radar processing in sea clutter environments, part 1: modelling and partially adaptive STAP performance

Performance of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) with adaptive matched filter detection for maritime surveillance is assessed using simulated maritime surface targets embedded in real radar sea clutter data and compared with conventional pulse-Doppler processing. Pre-Doppler and post-Doppler suboptimal STAP are examined, with pulse repetition interval (PRI)-staggered post-Doppler shown to provide best overall detection and constant false alarm rate performance. A two-component clutter model fit is used to explain variations of clutter characteristics and detector performance with Doppler frequency.
Zero-Shot Learning via Category-Specific Visual-Semantic Mapping and Label Refinement

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify a test instance from an unseen category based on the training instances from seen categories in which the gap between seen categories and unseen categories is generally bridged via visual-semantic mapping between the low-level visual feature space and the intermediate semantic space. However, the visual-semantic mapping (i.e., projection) learnt based on seen categories may not generalize well to unseen categories, which is known as the projection domain shift in ZSL. To address this projection domain shift issue, we propose a method named adaptive embedding ZSL (AEZSL) to learn an adaptive visual-semantic mapping for each unseen category, followed by progressive label refinement. Moreover, to avoid learning visual-semantic mapping for each unseen category in the large-scale classification task, we additionally propose a deep adaptive embedding model named deep AEZSL sharing the similar idea (i.e., visual-semantic mapping should be category specific and related to the semantic space) with AEZSL, which only needs to be trained once, but can be applied to arbitrary number of unseen categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve the state-of-the-art results for image classification on three small-scale benchmark datasets and one large-scale benchmark dataset.
Detection of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL)-producing strains by the Etest ESBL screen

Resistance to contemporary broad-spectrum beta-lactams, mediated by extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) enzymes, is an increasing problem worldwide. The Etest (AB Biodisk, Solna, Sweden) ESBL screen uses stable gradient technology to evaluate the MIC of ceftazidime alone compared with the MIC of ceftazidime with clavulanic acid (2 micrograms/ml) to facilitate the recognition of strains expressing inhibitable enzymes. In the present study, ESBL-producing strains (17 Escherichia coli transconjugants) were studied to define "sensitive" interpretive criteria for the Etest ESBL screen. These criteria (reduction of the ceftazidime MIC by > 2 log2 dilution steps in the presence of clavulanic acid) defined a group of 92 probable ESBL-positive organisms among the 225 tested strains of Klebsiella species and E. coli having suspicious antibiogram phenotypes. With a subset of 82 clinical strains, the Etest ESBL screen was more sensitive (100%) than the disk approximation test (87%) and was more convenient. The MICs of ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, and tobramycin at which 50% of isolates are inhibited were 16- to 128-fold higher (coresistance) for the ESBL screen-positive group of strains than for the ESBL screen-negative group of strains. Some strains for which cephalosporin MICs were elevated and which were Etest ESBL screen negative were also cefoxitin resistant, i.e., consistent with a chromosomally mediated AmpC resistance phenotype. The Etest ESBL screen test with the ceftazidime substrate appears to be a useful method for detecting or validating the presence of enteric bacilli potentially producing this type of beta-lactamase.
De novo membranous nephropathy (MN) in kidney allografts. A peculiar form of alloimmune disease?

De novo membranous nephropathy (MN) is an uncommon complication of kidney transplantation, which shows histological findings similar to those seen in recurrent MN, but with some distinct differences. The clinical presentation may be variable, from asymptomatic to nephrotic proteinuria. The disease may run an indolent course or may have an accelerated course leading to allograft loss. De novo membranous nephropathy (MN) can develop in transplant recipients with viral hepatitis, Alport syndrome, ureteral obstruction, renal infarction, or in conjunction with recurrent IgA nephritis. Histologic signs of allograft rejection are often associated with or can antedate de novo MN. These findings suggest that donor‐specific antibodies and antibody‐mediated rejection might play a pathogenetic role in some patients with de novo MN. However, signs of rejection were absent in a number of cases, and in some instances the disease developed in recipients of “full house” HLA‐ matched kidneys. Thus, it seems possible that de novo MN is not because of allograft rejection per se, but is triggered by different injuries that can create an inflammatory environment, activate innate immunity, and expose hidden (cryptic) antigens, probably different from those observed to be involved in idiopathic MN. These events can lead to the production of circulating antibodies and in situ formation of immune complexes (IC) and the morphological lesion of MN.
A post-marketing study on interferon β 1b and 1a treatment in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis: different response in drop-outs and treated patients

Background: Interferon β 1b (Betaferon) and 1a (Avonex) were licensed in Italy for treating relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis in February 1996 and August 1997, respectively. Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of these agents on the basis of clinical experience in northern Italian multiple sclerosis centres. Design: Clinical data on patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis were collected on an appropriate form from 65 centres in northern Italy. Intention to treat analysis was not possible, so patients who discontinued treatment (drop-outs) and who continued treatment (treated) were analysed separately. The main outcome measures were annual relapse frequency, number of relapse-free patients, mean change in extended disability status scale score (EDSS), and number of patients who worsened. Results: 1481 patients were included; 834 were treated with Betaferon and 647 with Avonex for mean periods of 21.4 and 12.0 months, respectively. Basal EDSS was 2.37 and 2.17, respectively, and relapse frequency was 1.62 and 1.45. The annual relapse rate decreased by more than 60% with Betaferon and 55% with Avonex. The proportions of relapse-free, improved, and worsened patients were similar in the two groups. More patients interrupted treatment with Betaferon (41.1%) than with Avonex (15.3%); such patients showed more active disease at baseline and during treatment. The incidence of side effects was higher in Betaferon treated patients. Conclusions: The effectiveness of Betaferon and Avonex is confirmed. There was a more marked effect than expected from the experimental trial results. This might reflect differences in inclusion criteria, or, more likely, loss of drop-outs, favouring selective retention of responders.
Pregnancy and neonatal outcome in primary antiphospholipid syndrome

The objective of this study was to verify the possible in uence of maternal disease on neonatal and gestational outcome in women with primary APS (PAPS). Eighty nine pregnancies in 64 patients with PAPS diagnosed according to the International Classi cation Criteria were prospectively evaluated by our obstetrical – rheumatological team. Sixty-nine pregnancies (77.5%) in 58 patients ended in 71 livebirths and were included in this study. In addition we retrospectively analysed the neonatal outcome of the cohort of newborns from mothers with PAPS compared with 69 control newborns from healthy mothers matched for gestational age, birthweight, mode of delivery and obstetrical complications. In the 69 index pregnancies (including two sets of twins) we recorded a mean gestational age at delivery of 37 weeks (range 41.2– 27.5); 47 patients (68%) were delivered by cesarean section. The main obstetrical complications were: preeclampsia (11%), preterm delivery < 37 weeks’ gestation (19%, 21), preterm delivery < 34 weeks’ gestation (13%), preterm premature rupture of the membranes (4.3%), small for gestational age (birthweight< 10 percentile; 5.6%). Table 1 summarizes the neonatal outcome of babies who entered the case-control study. In patients with PAPS, the rate of obstetrical complications (also excluding early or late miscarriages) are signi cantly higher than is seen in the general population. However the neonatal outcome in our cohort does not seem to be different if we compare cases and appropriately matched controls.
Alcohol, Marijuana, Cocaine Use, and Relationship Quality Among HIV Serodiscordant Male Couples

The association between substance use and relationship quality was explored in a sample of 117 serodiscordant male couples. Several measures of relationship quality were used including dyadic satisfaction, affection, commitment, sexual satisfaction, and domestic violence. Although frequency of use was assessed for several substances, only alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine were used frequently enough for statistical analyses. The highest frequency of use within the couple in the past 2 months as well as the discrepancy in the frequency of use between the 2 members of the couple were considered. Although daily substance use was relatively rare in this sample, alcohol use was reported by 79%, marijuana use by 35%, and cocaine use by 15% of the men. Domestic violence was not associated with any substance use variable. Marijuana use was generally not associated with relationship quality. Alcohol and cocaine use were moderately associated with several indicators of poorer relationship quality.
Lombard speech impact on perceptual speaker recognition

It is well known that stress and Lombard effect impact speech production. The goal in this study is to investigate how Lombard effect impacts perceptual speaker recognition. We report results from In-Set/Out-of-Set speaker identification (ID) tasks performed by human subjects with a comparison to automatic algorithms. The main trends show that mismatch in reference and test data causes a significant decrease in speaker ID accuracy. The results also indicate that Lombard speech contributes to higher accuracy for In-Set speaker ID, but interferes with correct detection of Out-of-Set speakers. In addition, it is observed that the mismatched conditions cause a higher false reject rate, and that the matched conditions result in higher false acceptance. We further discuss automated system performance in comparison to human performance. Overall observations suggest that deeper understanding of cognitive factors involved in perceptual speaker ID offers meaningful insights for further development of automatic systems and combined automatic-human based systems.