Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exogenous Neural Precursor Cell Transplantation Results in Structural and Functional Recovery in a Hypoxic-Ischemic Hemiplegic Mouse Model

Abstract Cerebral palsy (CP) is a common pediatric neurodevelopmental disorder, frequently resulting in motor and developmental deficits and often accompanied by cognitive impairments. A regular pathobiological hallmark of CP is oligodendrocyte maturation impairment resulting in white matter (WM) injury and reduced axonal myelination. Regeneration therapies based on cell replacement are currently limited, but neural precursor cells (NPCs), as cellular support for myelination, represent a promising regeneration strategy to treat CP, although the transplantation parameters (e.g., timing, dosage, mechanism) remain to be determined. We optimized a hemiplegic mouse model of neonatal hypoxia-ischemia that mirrors the pathobiological hallmarks of CP and transplanted NPCs into the corpus callosum (CC), a major white matter structure impacted in CP patients. The NPCs survived, engrafted, and differentiated morphologically in male and female mice. Histology and MRI showed repair of lesioned structures. Furthermore, electrophysiology revealed functional myelination of the CC (e.g., restoration of conduction velocity), while cylinder and CatWalk tests demonstrated motor recovery of the affected forelimb. Endogenous oligodendrocytes, recruited in the CC following transplantation of exogenous NPCs, are the principal actors in this recovery process. The lack of differentiation of the transplanted NPCs is consistent with enhanced recovery due to an indirect mechanism, such as a trophic and/or “bio-bridge” support mediated by endogenous oligodendrocytes. Our work establishes that transplantation of NPCs represents a viable therapeutic strategy for CP treatment, and that the enhanced recovery is mediated by endogenous oligodendrocytes. This will further our understanding and contribute to the improvement of cellular therapeutic strategies.
Thyroid Plasmacytoma: A Rare Cause of Hoarseness of Voice

Sir, We read with great pleasure the recent article by Kashyap et al. published in July–September issue of your esteemed journal. [1] We hereby take this opportunity to share our experience with a similar case of thyroid plasmacytoma. With the aid of the present case and our previously reported cases of plasmacytomas involving rare sites such as frontal bone, duodenum, pancreatic head, and ovary, we aim to enrich the knowledge of our readers about the unusual presentations and rare locations of extramedullary plasmacytomas (EMPs). [2,3]
A novel hydrogel scaffold for periodontal ligament stem cells

Periodontal ligament stem cells (PDLSCs) possess extensive regeneration potential. However, their therapeutic application demands a scaffold with appropriate properties. HydroMatrix (HydM) is a novel injectable peptide nanofiber hydrogel developed recently for cell culture. Our aim was to test whether HydM would be a suitable scaffold for proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of PDLSCs. PDLSCs were seeded on non-coated or HydM-coated surfaces. Both real-time impedance analysis and cell viability assay documented cell growth on HydM. PDLSCs showed healthy, fibroblast-like morphology on the hydrogel. After a 3-week-long culture in osteogenic medium, mineralization was much more intense in HydM cultures compared to control. Alkaline phosphatase activity of the cells grown on the gels reached the non-coated control levels. Our data provided evidence that PDLSCs can adhere, survive, migrate, and proliferate on HydM and this gel also supports their osteogenic differentiation. We first applied impedimetry for dental stem cells cultured on a scaffold. HydM is ideal for in vitro studies of PDLSCs. It may also serve not only as a reference material but also in the future as a promising biocompatible scaffold for preclinical studies.
Acari of Canada

Abstract Summaries of taxonomic knowledge are provided for all acarine groups in Canada, accompanied by references to relevant publications, changes in classification at the family level since 1979, and notes on biology relevant to estimating their diversity. Nearly 3000 described species from 269 families are recorded in the country, representing a 56% increase from the 1917 species reported by Lindquist et al. (1979). An additional 42 families are known from Canada only from material identified to family- or genus-level. Of the total 311 families known in Canada, 69 are newly recorded since 1979, excluding apparent new records due solely to classification changes. This substantial progress is most evident in Oribatida and Hydrachnidia, for which many regional checklists and family-level revisions have been published. Except for recent taxonomic leaps in a few other groups, particularly of symbiotic mites (Astigmata: feather mites; Mesostigmata: Rhinonyssidae), knowledge remains limited for most other taxa, for which most species records are unpublished and may require verification. Taxonomic revisions are greatly needed for a large majority of families in Canada. Based in part on species recorded in adjacent areas of the USA and on hosts known to be present here, we conservatively estimate that nearly 10,000 species of mites occur in Canada, but the actual number could be 15,000 or more. This means that at least 70% of Canada’s mite fauna is yet unrecorded. Much work also remains to match existing molecular data with species names, as less than 10% of the ~7500 Barcode Index Numbers for Canadian mites in the Barcode of Life Database are associated with named species. Understudied hosts and terrestrial and aquatic habitats require investigation across Canada to uncover new species and to clarify geographic and ecological distributions of known species.
Diptera of Canada

Abstract The Canadian Diptera fauna is updated. Numbers of species currently known from Canada, total Barcode Index Numbers (BINs), and estimated numbers of undescribed or unrecorded species are provided for each family. An overview of recent changes in the systematics and Canadian faunistics of major groups is provided as well as some general information on biology and life history. A total of 116 families and 9620 described species of Canadian Diptera are reported, representing more than a 36% increase in species numbers since the last comparable assessment by JF McAlpine et al. (1979). Almost 30,000 BINs have so far been obtained from flies in Canada. Estimates of additional number of species remaining to be documented in the country range from 5200 to 20,400.
Inhalation of hydrogen gas elevates urinary 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanine in Parkinson’s disease

Hyposmia is one of the earliest and the most common symptoms in Parkinson’s disease (PD). The benefits of hydrogen water on motor deficits have been reported in animal PD models and PD patients, but the effects of hydrogen gas on PD patients have not been studied. We evaluated the effect of inhalation of hydrogen gas on olfactory function, non-motor symptoms, activities of daily living, and urinary 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanine (8-OHdG) levels by a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, crossover trial with an 8-week washout period in 20 patients with PD. Patients inhaled either ~1.2–1.4% hydrogen-air mixture or placebo for 10 minutes twice a day for 4 weeks. Inhalation of low dose hydrogen did not significantly influence the PD clinical parameters, but it did increase urinary 8-OHdG levels by 16%. This increase in 8-OHdG is markedly less than the over 300% increase in diabetes, and is more comparable to the increase after a bout of strenuous exercise. Although increased reactive oxygen species is often associated with toxicity and disease, they also play essential roles in mediating cytoprotective cellular adaptations in a process known as hormesis. Increases of oxidative stress by hydrogen have been previously reported, along with its ability to activate the Nrf2, NF-κB pathways, and heat shock responses. Although we did not observe any beneficial effect of hydrogen in our short trial, we propose that the increased 8-OHdG and other reported stress responses from hydrogen may indicate that its beneficial effects are partly or largely mediated by hormetic mechanisms. The study was approved by the ethics review committee of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine (approval number 2015-0295). The clinical trial was registered at the University Hospital Medical Information Network (identifier UMIN000019082).
Intraocular Pressure Effects and Mechanism of Action of Topical Versus Sustained-Release Bimatoprost

Purpose To assess the intraocular pressure (IOP)-lowering effects of bimatoprost sustained-release implant (BimSR) in normotensive monkeys receiving topical bimatoprost. Methods Six eyes from six female, normotensive, cynomolgus monkeys were treated with once-daily topical latanoprost 0.005% plus twice-daily fixed-combination dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5%. At week 5, topical latanoprost was switched to once-daily topical bimatoprost 0.03% and twice-daily dorzolamide 2%/timolol 0.5% was continued. At week 8, BimSR 20 μg was administered intracamerally to three eyes and topical therapy was continued in all eyes. At week 12, all topical therapy was discontinued and animals were monitored for another 4 weeks. IOP was measured with a TonoVet rebound tonometer in nonsedated animals weekly for 16 weeks. Results Average mean (standard deviation) IOP was 19.8 (1.6) mm Hg at baseline, 15.7 (0.9) mm Hg during treatment with topical latanoprost/dorzolamide/timolol from weeks 1 to 5, and 14.2 (0.5) mm Hg during weeks 6 to 8 after topical latanoprost was switched to topical bimatoprost. After BimSR was added, average mean IOP during weeks 9 to 12 was 10.8 (1.3) mm Hg, a decrease of 3.9 mm Hg compared with the topical-only arm. When topical therapy was discontinued, IOP in BimSR-treated eyes remained below that in unmedicated eyes (15.8 [0.9] vs. 20.2 [0.2] mm Hg at weeks 14–16). Conclusions Intracameral BimSR has IOP-lowering effects additive to those of topical bimatoprost, suggesting an additional mechanism of action with intracameral drug delivery. Translational Relevance Compared with topical bimatoprost, intracameral BimSR may have an additional mechanism of action of IOP lowering.
Hemiptera of Canada

Abstract The Canadian Hemiptera (Sternorrhyncha, Auchenorrhyncha, and Heteroptera) fauna is reviewed, which currently comprises 4011 species, including 405 non-native species. DNA barcodes available for Canadian specimens are represented by 3275 BINs. The analysis was based on the most recent checklist of Hemiptera in Canada (Maw et al. 2000) and subsequent collection records, literature records and compilation of DNA barcode data. It is estimated that almost 600 additional species remain to be discovered among Canadian Hemiptera.
Pseudoscorpiones and Scorpiones of Canada

Abstract Twenty-five species of pseudoscorpions are known from Canada, a five-fold increase since an assessment from 1979. The diversity and distribution of Canadian species are poorly known and at least 27 more species are expected to be found in the country. Currently 46 Barcode Index Numbers are assigned to Canadian specimens, suggesting a high level of undocumented diversity. Only one scorpion species is known from Canada and no other species are expected.
Effects of the long-term consumption of hydrogen-rich water on the antioxidant activity and the gut flora in female juvenile soccer players from Suzhou, China

Expending a considerable amount of physical energy inevitably leads to fatigue during both training and competition in football. An increasing number of experimental findings have confirmed the relationship between the generation and clearance of free radicals, fatigue, and exercise injury. Recently, hydrogen was identified as a new selective antioxidant with potential beneficial applications in sports. The present study evaluated the effect of 2-month consumption of hydrogen-rich water on the gut flora in juvenile female soccer players from Suzhou. As demonstrated by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay and 16S rDNA sequence analysis of stool samples, the consumption of hydrogen-rich water for two months significantly reduced serum malondialdehyde, interleukin-1, interleukin-6, tumour necrosis factor-α levels; then significantly increased serum superoxide dismutase, total antioxidant capacity levels and haemoglobin levels of whole blood. Furthermore, the consumption of hydrogen-rich water improved the diversity and abundance of the gut flora in athletes. All examined indices, including the shannon, sobs, ace, and chao indices, were higher in the control group than those proposed to result from hydrogen-rich water consumption prior to the trial, but these indices were all reversed and were higher than those in the controls after the 2-month intervention. Nevertheless, there were some differences in the gut flora components of these two groups before the trial, whereas there were no significant changes in the gut flora composition during the trial period. Thus, the consumption of hydrogen-rich water for two months might play a role modulating in the gut flora of athletes based on its selective antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. The study protocol was approved by the ethics committee of the Suzhou Sports School (approved number: SSS-EC150903).
Crosslingual Document Embedding as Reduced-Rank Ridge Regression

There has recently been much interest in extending vector-based word representations to multiple languages, such that words can be compared across languages. In this paper, we shift the focus from words to documents and introduce a method for embedding documents written in any language into a single, language-independent vector space. For training, our approach leverages a multilingual corpus where the same concept is covered in multiple languages (but not necessarily via exact translations), such as Wikipedia. Our method, Cr5 (Crosslingual reduced-rank ridge regression), starts by training a ridge-regression-based classifier that uses language-specific bag-of-word features in order to predict the concept that a given document is about. We show that, when constraining the learned weight matrix to be of low rank, it can be factored to obtain the desired mappings from language-specific bags-of-words to language-independent embeddings. As opposed to most prior methods, which use pretrained monolingual word vectors, postprocess them to make them crosslingual, and finally average word vectors to obtain document vectors, Cr5 is trained end-to-end and is thus natively crosslingual as well as document-level. Moreover, since our algorithm uses the singular value decomposition as its core operation, it is highly scalable. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a crosslingual document retrieval task. Finally, although not trained for embedding sentences and words, it also achieves competitive performance on crosslingual sentence and word retrieval tasks.
Damage Classification for Masonry Historic Structures Using Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Still Images

Manual inspection (i.e., visual inspection and/or with professional equipment) is the most predominant approach for identifying and assessing superficial damage of masonry historic structures at present. However, this method is costly and at times difficult to apply to remote structures or components. Existing convolutional neural network (CNN)‐based damage detection methods have not been specifically designed for the multiple damage identification of masonry historic structures. To overcome these limits, a deep architecture of CNN damage classification techniques for masonry historic structures is proposed in this article using a sliding window‐based CNN method to identify and locate four categories of damage (intact, crack, efflorescence, and spall) with an accuracy of 94.3%. This is the first attempt to identify the multidamage of historic masonry structures based on CNN techniques and achieve excellent classification results. The data are only trained and tested from images of the Forbidden City Wall in China, and the pixel resolutions of stretcher brick images and header brick images are 480 × 105 and 210 × 105, respectively. Two CNNs (AlexNet and GoogLeNet) are both trained on a small dataset (2,000 images for training, 400 images for validation and testing) and a large dataset (20,000 images for training, 4,000 images for validation and testing). The performance of the trained model (94.3% accuracy) is examined on five new images with 1,860 × 1,260 pixel resolutions.
Offline Evaluation to Make Decisions About PlaylistRecommendation Algorithms

Evaluating algorithmic recommendations is an important, but difficult, problem. Evaluations conducted offline using data collected from user interactions with an online system often suffer from biases arising from the user interface or the recommendation engine. Online evaluation (A/B testing) can more easily address problems of bias, but depending on setting can be time-consuming and incur risk of negatively impacting the user experience, not to mention that it is generally more difficult when access to a large user base is not taken as granted. A compromise based on \em counterfactual analysis is to present some subset of online users with recommendation results that have been randomized or otherwise manipulated, log their interactions, and then use those to de-bias offline evaluations on historical data. However, previous work does not offer clear conclusions on how well such methods correlate with and are able to predict the results of online A/B tests. Understanding this is crucial to widespread adoption of new offline evaluation techniques in recommender systems. In this work we present a comparison of offline and online evaluation results for a particular recommendation problem: recommending playlists of tracks to a user looking for music. We describe two different ways to think about de-biasing offline collections for more accurate evaluation. Our results show that, contrary to much of the previous work on this topic, properly-conducted offline experiments do correlate well to A/B test results, and moreover that we can expect an offline evaluation to identify the best candidate systems for online testing with high probability.
LENA computerized automatic analysis of speech development from birth to three

This study investigated the relationship between the linguistic input children receive and the number of children’s vocalizations by using computerized LENA (Language Environment Analysis) system software which is able to collect and analyze the data automatically, instantly, and objectively. Data from three children (two boys and one girl) at ages of 10, 20, and 30 months were analyzed. The results indicated that: 1) child vocalizations (CV) and child-caregiver conversational turns (CT) increased with time while adult word counts (AWC) children overheard in the background decreased; 2) CT is highly correlated with CV. LENA automatic device can substantially shorten the time of data analysis in the study of child language, and provide preliminary results for further analysis.
Predicting Shopping Behavior with Mixture of RNNs

We compare two machine learning approaches for early prediction of shoppers’ behaviors, leveraging features from clickstream data generated during live shopping sessions. Our baseline is a mixture of Markov models to predict three outcomes: purchase, abandoned shopping cart, and browsing-only. We then experiment with a mixture of Recurrent Neural Networks. When sequences are truncated to 75% of their length, a relatively small feature set predicts purchase with an F-measure of 0.80 and browsing-only with an F-measure of 0.98. We also investigate an entropy-based decision procedure.
Unsupervised Topic Modelling in a Book Recommender System for New Users

Book recommender systems (RSs) are useful in libraries, schools and e-commerce applications. To our knowledge, no book RS exploits social networks other than book-cataloguing websites. We propose a recommendation component that learns the user’s interests from social media data and recommends books accordingly. Our new method of modelling users’ interests acquires a user’s distinctive topics using tf-idf and represents them as word embeddings. Even though the system is designed to complement other systems, we evaluated it against content-based RS, a traditional book RS, and obtained similar performance. So, the system’s new user would receive recommendation as accurate as current users.
SNS Dependency and Community Engagement in Urban Neighborhoods: The Moderating Role of Integrated Connectedness to a Community Storytelling Network

The purposes of the current study were (1) to examine the relationship between social networking service (SNS) dependency and local community engagement among Seoul residents, (2) to test the hypothesis that integrated connectedness to a community storytelling network (ICSN) is positively related to local community engagement, and (3) to investigate the moderating role of ICSN between SNS dependency and local community engagement. The current study is theoretically guided by communication infrastructure theory (CIT). We used online survey data collected during summer 2013 from a sample of 890 SNS users between the ages of 19 and 59 who lived in 25 districts in Seoul. We focused on four variables as local community engagement outcomes: neighborhood belonging, two collective efficacy variables (informal social control and social cohesion), and community activity participation. We found that SNS dependency and ICSN were positively associated with all local community engagement variables. We also identified the moderating role of ICSN between SNS dependency and the two collective efficacy variables. In addition, we found that closed SNSs (e.g., KakaoTalk) are more likely to facilitate community engagement than open SNSs (e.g., Facebook or Twitter).
clstk: The Cross-Lingual Summarization Tool-Kit

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to create summaries in a target language, from a document or document set given in a different, source language. Cross-lingual summarization can play a critical role in enabling cross-lingual information access for millions of people across the globe who do not speak or understand languages having large representation on the web. It can also make documents originally published in local languages quickly accessible to a large audience which does not understand those local languages. Though cross-lingual summarization has gathered some attention in the last decade, there has been no serious effort to publish rigorous software for this task. In this paper, we provide a design for an end-to-end CLS software called clstk. Besides implementing a number of methods proposed by different CLS researchers over years, the software integrates multiple components critical for CLS. We hope that this extremely modular tool-kit will help CLS researchers to contribute more effectively to the area.
Socioeconomic, environmental and personal correlates of asthma in a community population of men and women.

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii TABLE OF CONTENTS . iv LIST OF TABLES . vii LIST OF FIGURES . ix INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Study Rationale . 2 1.2 Research Question and Study Objectives . 2 LITERATURE REVIEW . 4 2.1 Asthma Classification . 4 2.2 Sex-Related Associations with Adult Asthma . 5 2.2.1 Demographic/biological factors and sex . 6 2.2.1.1 Age . 6 2.2.1.2 Atopy . 7 2.2.1.3 Parental history of asthma . 8 2.2.2 Socioeconomic factors and sex . 8 2.2.3 Environmental factors and sex . 15 2.2.3.1 Home dampness . 15 2.2.3.2 Farming . 16 2.2.3.3 Household pets . 18 2.2.3.4 Gas cooking . 19 2.2. 4 Personal factors and sex . 19 2.2. 4.1 Overweight/obesity . 19 2.2. 4.2 Smoking status . 20 2.3 Summary . 21 METHODOLOGY . 28 3.1 Original Study . 28 3.2 Present Study . 28