Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Normal and abnormal development of the blood‐brain barrier

The blood‐brain barrier is responsible for the maintenance of the neuronal microenvironment. This is accomplished by isolation of the brain from the blood by the tight junctions that join endothelial cells in cerebral microvessels, and by selective transport and metabolism of substances from blood or brain by the endothelial cells. This review describes the growth and maturation of the brain vasculature, and the development of the special properties of the endothelia at the blood‐brain interface. Evidence suggests that the development of the unique properties of the brain microvasculature is a consequence of tissue‐specific interactions between endothelial cells of extraneural origin and developing brain cells. The cellular and molecular mechanisms that control these processes are as yet unknown but this review will include experimental studies which have used in vivo and in vitro systems to investigate what factors may be involved, and some pathological conditions in which abnormal barrier development is thought to be an important aspect of the disease process. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Thrombophilic Genes Mutations in Women with Repeated In-Vitro Fertilization Failure

Problem statement: Thrombophilia has been recently implicated in earl y pregnancy loss and IVF implantation failure, by impairing the init ial vascularization process occurring at implantati on, which is necessary for a successful pregnancy. Approach: The aim of this study is to assess the presence possibility of mutation in thrombophilic g enes (Factor V (FV) gene, Prothrombin (PT) gene and Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase (MTHFR) gene) in women with repeated IVF-embryo transfer failure with unknown causes. The study was performed on patients with two or more previously failed IVF-embryo transfer cycles with u nknown causes. Women who conceived spontaneously with no previous history of miscarria ge and women who have had successful pregnancy after their first IVF-embryo transfer cycle are inc luded as control groups. Results: There are increase in allelic frequencies of thrombophilic genes (fact or V, prothrombin and methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase) mutation, in addition to genotype freque ncies (both homozygote and heterozygote) and increase in frequency of multiple gene mutations am ong women with IVF- embryo transfer failure. Conclusion: Thrombophilia has a significant role in IVF- embry o transfer implantation failure. Women with repeated IVF- embryo transfer failure should be screened for Thrombophilia to avoid repeated IVF- embryo transfer failure.
Greater Early Bactericidal Activity at Higher Rifampicin Doses Revealed by Modeling and Clinical Trial Simulations

Background The currently recommended rifampicin dose (10 mg/kg) for treating tuberculosis is suboptimal. The PanACEA HIGHRIF1 trial evaluated the pharmacokinetics and early bactericidal activity of rifampicin doses of up to 40 mg/kg. Conventional statistical analyses revealed no significant exposure-response relationship. Our objectives were to explore the exposure-response relationship for high-dose rifampicin by using pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling and to predict the early bactericidal activity of 50 mg/kg rifampicin. Methods Data included time to Mycobacterium tuberculosis positivity of liquid cultures of sputum specimens from 83 patients with tuberculosis who were treated with 10 mg/kg rifampicin (n = 8; reference arm) or 20, 25, 30, 35, or 40 mg/kg rifampicin (n = 15/arm) for 7 days. We used a semimechanistic time-to-event approach to model the time-to-positivity data. Rifampicin exposure and baseline time to culture positivity were explored as covariates. Results The baseline time to culture positivity was a significant covariate on the predicted initial bacterial load, and rifampicin exposure was a significant covariate on the bacterial kill rate in sputum resulting in increased early bactericidal activity. The 90% prediction interval for the predicted median day 7 increase in time to positivity for 50 mg/kg rifampicin was 7.25-10.3 days. Conclusions A significant exposure-response relationship was found between rifampicin exposure and early bactericidal activity. Clinical trial simulations showed greater early bactericidal activity for 50 mg/kg rifampicin. Clinical Trials Registration NCT01392911.
Governance methods used in externalizing information technology

Information technology (IT) is the largest capital expenditure in many firms and is an integral part of many organizations’ strategies. However, the benefits that each company receives from its IT investments vary. One study by Weill (2004) found that the top performer in the sample was estimated to have as high as a 40% greater return on its IT investment than its competitors. To expedite the progress toward getting better value from IT investments, along with the need to deal with the increasing complexity and expense of IT, a growing number of companies are turning to outside service providers to develop and/or manage various aspects of their information systems. The governance methods used by firms to maintain control over the quality, services, and cost of IT outsourcing are the focus of this dissertation. Previously in the literature, researchers have looked into the phenomenon of outsourcing from various perspectives. However, existing literature has not constructed or proposed an outsourcing model that examines the important moderating impact of internal technical capabilities to governance mechanisms. Building on existing literature related to IT outsourcing, this dissertation examines governance mechanisms that were used by firms to maintain control over the quality, services, and the cost of outsourcing of IT in order to identify their contribution to the success of IT outsourcing initiatives from the perspective of managers whose companies have engaged in IT outsourcing. In this dissertation, a research model was developed, and through an on-line survey instrument,
Cutaneous Manifestations of Thymoma-associated Multi-organ Autoimmunity: A Fatal Sign.

Association of thymoma and cutaneous autoimmune disorder has been reported previously. Paraneoplastic pemphigus (PNP) and lichen planus (LP) have been commonly reported as cutaneous complications of thymoma (1, 2). Thymoma-associated multi-organ autoimmunity (TAMA) is a rare paraneoplastic disease that presents manifestations resembling graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) in thymoma. TAMA tends to have an unfavourable prognosis, due to complications of infectious diseases (3, 4). Of the several case reports of TAMA, 4 in the English literature were without extracutaneous GVHD-like manifestations (3, 5–7). Of these, only one case with a fatal outcome has been described (7). We describe here the first case of TAMA developing GVHD-like manifestation solely in the skin, who died of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) one year after being diagnosed with TAMA.
A dimensional approach to understanding severity estimates and risk correlates of marijuana abuse and dependence in adults

While item response theory (IRT) research shows a latent severity trait underlying response patterns of substance abuse and dependence symptoms, little is known about IRT‐based severity estimates in relation to clinically relevant measures. In response to increased prevalences of marijuana‐related treatment admissions, an elevated level of marijuana potency, and the debate on medical marijuana use, we applied dimensional approaches to understand IRT‐based severity estimates for marijuana use disorders (MUDs) and their correlates while simultaneously considering gender‐ and race/ethnicity‐related differential item functioning (DIF). Using adult data from the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (N = 37,897), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM‐IV) criteria for MUDs among past‐year marijuana users were examined by IRT, logistic regression, and multiple indicators–multiple causes (MIMIC) approaches. Among 6917 marijuana users, 15% met criteria for a MUD; another 24% exhibited subthreshold dependence. Abuse criteria were highly correlated with dependence criteria (correlation = 0.90), indicating unidimensionality; item information curves revealed redundancy in multiple criteria. MIMIC analyses showed that MUD criteria were positively associated with weekly marijuana use, early marijuana use, other substance use disorders, substance abuse treatment, and serious psychological distress. African Americans and Hispanics showed higher levels of MUDs than Whites, even after adjusting for race/ethnicity‐related DIF. The redundancy in multiple criteria suggests an opportunity to improve efficiency in measuring symptom‐level manifestations by removing low‐informative criteria. Elevated rates of MUDs among African Americans and Hispanics require research to elucidate risk factors and improve assessments of MUDs for different racial/ethnic groups. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Parental psychological control, adolescent self-criticism, and adolescent depressive symptoms: A latent change modeling approach in Belgian adolescents.

OBJECTIVE At the level of both between-person differences and within-person changes across time, parental achievement-oriented psychological control may influence the development of adolescent self-criticism, which in turn may increase vulnerability for adolescent depression. METHOD In a two-wave prospective study of 368 adolescents (age 13-17 years), Latent Change Modeling was used with Belgian adolescents' self-report measures. RESULTS For mothers and fathers separately, adolescent self-criticism intervened in associations between achievement-oriented psychological control and adolescent depressive symptoms, at the level of both between-person differences and within-person changes. When investigating parents simultaneously, only maternal parenting was related directly and indirectly to adolescent depressive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS Our results underscore the importance of personality-related vulnerability in associations between the parenting environment and symptoms of psychopathology during adolescent development.
Could artificial ocean alkalinization protect tropical coral ecosystems from ocean acidification?

Artificial ocean alkalinization (AOA) is investigated as a method to mitigate local ocean acidification and protect tropical coral ecosystems during a 21st century high CO2 emission scenario. Employing an Earth system model of intermediate complexity, our implementation of AOA in the Great Barrier Reef, Caribbean Sea and South China Sea regions, shows that alkalinization has the potential to counteract expected 21st century local acidification in regard to both oceanic surface aragonite saturation Ω and surface pCO2. Beyond preventing local acidification, regional AOA, however, results in locally elevated aragonite oversaturation and pCO2 decline. A notable consequence of stopping regional AOA is a rapid shift back to the acidified conditions of the target regions. We conclude that AOA may be a method that could help to keep regional coral ecosystems within saturation states and pCO2 values close to present-day values even in a high-emission scenario and thereby might ‘buy some time’ against the ocean acidification threat, even though regional AOA does not significantly mitigate the warming threat.
Pregnancy associated osteoporosis: the familial effect.

OBJECTIVE The etiology and pathogenesis of pregnancy associated osteoporosis is unclear. Whether pregnancy has simply been an aggravating factor or is a direct etiologic cause responsible for severe bone loss needs to be elucidated. METHODS In order to evaluate the contribution of familial factors to pregnancy osteoporosis, we analyzed the bone mass of 15 relatives of 5 women with pregnancy osteoporosis. Most of the patients suffered from severe back pain associated with vertebral fractures in their first pregnancy. Extensive clinical, laboratory and radiological investigations were performed to exclude secondary causes of osteoporosis. Bone mineral density measurements were performed on 15 first order family members and the results were compared with those of a control group of 20 healthy members of 5 families. RESULTS Osteoporosis was present in 53% of the relatives of patients with pregnancy osteoporosis and in 15% of the controls (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION These results highly suggest that some patients with pregnancy associated osteoporosis have a genetic determination of low peak bone mass, and gestation, due to its association with physiological metabolic disturbances, constitutes a risk factor for the development of skeletal fractures in these patients.
Traffic flow prediction using neural network

Traffic flow management and analysis have become essential for both individuals to better manage and route their daily commutes, and for transportation planners to optimally schedule road infrastructure maintenance tasks. Therefore the ability to predict the nature of the traffic stream accurately is one of the most important requirements of traffic management systems. In this research, we will propose an intelligent method to predict traffic flow based on real data for the years 2016 and 2017 provided by the Moroccan center for road studies and research. The proposed solution focuses on training a neural network model to estimate future traffic flow on an hourly basis. Results determined by the simulation gave a good prediction to the traffic data.
Incremental Validity of the Durand Adaptive Psychopathic Traits Questionnaire Above Self-Report Psychopathy Measures in Community Samples

ABSTRACT Although highly debated, the notion of the existence of an adaptive side to psychopathy is supported by some researchers. Currently, 2 instruments assessing psychopathic traits include an adaptive component, which might not cover the full spectrum of adaptive psychopathic traits. The Durand Adaptive Psychopathic Traits Questionnaire (DAPTQ; Durand, 2017) is a 41-item self-reported instrument assessing adaptive traits known to correlate with the psychopathic personality. In this study, I investigated in 2 samples (N = 263 and N = 262) the incremental validity of the DAPTQ over the Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Short Form (PPI–SF) and the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM) using multiple criterion measures. Results showed that the DAPTQ significantly increased the predictive validity over the PPI–SF on 5 factors of the HEXACO. Additionally, the DAPTQ provided incremental validity over both the PPI–SF and the TriPM on measures of communication adaptability, perceived stress, and trait anxiety. Overall, these results support the validity of the DAPTQ in community samples. Directions for future studies to further validate the DAPTQ are discussed.
Community Detection in Attributed Graphs: An Embedding Approach

Community detection is a fundamental and widely-studied problem that finds all densely-connected groups of nodes and well separates them from others in graphs. With the proliferation of rich information available for entities in real-world networks, it is useful to discover communities in attributed graphs where nodes tend to have attributes. However, most existing attributed community detection methods directly utilize the original network topology leading to poor results due to ignoring inherent community structures. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding based model to discover communities in attributed graphs. Specifically, based on the observation of densely-connected structures in communities, we develop a novel community structure embedding method to encode inherent community structures via underlying community memberships. Based on node attributes and community structure embedding, we formulate the attributed community detection as a nonnegative matrix factorization optimization problem. Moreover, we carefully design iterative updating rules to make sure of finding a converging solution. Extensive experiments conducted on 19 attributed graph datasets with overlapping and non-overlapping ground-truth communities show that our proposed model CDE can accurately identify attributed communities and significantly outperform 7 state-of-the-art methods.
A Study of Plasma Parameters in a Capillary Discharge With Calculations Using Ideal and Nonideal Plasma Models for Comparison With Experiment

A study of the plasma parameters in a capillary discharge was conducted using an experimental electrothermal plasma facility. The experimental results are compared to calculations using ideal and nonideal formulas of the Coulomb logarithm in the plasma electrical conductivity model to determine the nature of the plasma regime. Calculations are compared to the measured ablated mass, the measured electrical conductivity. Other calculated parameters are compared to results from similar and typical discharges. The measured ablated mass falls in between the ideal and nonideal calculations suggesting that the plasma is neither ideal nor nonideal; however, the linear fit of the experimental and calculated values shows divergence in the ideal calculations at higher peak currents. Measured plasma electrical conductivity is close to the ideal model predictions at lower values of the peak discharge current and approaches the nonideal model predictions at higher peak currents; the shape of the measured conductivity follows that of the nonideal model.
Competing Platforms

Why do competing platforms or networks exist? This paper focuses on instances where the value of a platform depends on the adoption decisions of a small number of firms, and analyzes the strategic competition among platforms to get this oligopolistic side on‐board. I study a bilateral contracting game among platforms and firms that allows for general externalities across both contracting and noncontracting partners, and examine when a market will sustain a single or multiple platforms. When firms can join only one platform, I provide conditions under which market‐tipping and/or market‐splitting equilibria may exist. In particular, even without coordination failure, congestion effects, or firm multihoming, multiple platforms can co‐exist in equilibrium despite being inefficient from the perspective of the contracting parties. Expanding the contracting space to include contingent contracts may exacerbate this inefficiency.
A model on the evolution of cryptobiosis

Cryptobiosis is an ametabolic state of life entered by some lower organisms (among metazoans mainly rotifers, tardigrades and nematodes) in response to adverse environmental conditions. Despite a long recognition of cryptobiotic organisms, the evolutionary origin and life history consequences of this biological phenomenon have remained unexplored. We present one of the first theoretical models on the evolution of cryptobiosis, using a hypothetical population of marine tardigrades that migrates between open sea and the tidal zone as the model framework. Our model analyses the conditions under which investments into anhydrobiotic (cryptobiosis induced by desiccation) functions will evolve, and which factors affect the optimal level Of Such investments. In particular, we evaluate how the probability of being exposed to adverse conditions (getting stranded) and the consequences for survival Of Such exposure (getting desiccated) affects the option for cryptobiosis to evolve. The optimal level of investment into anhydrobiotic traits increases with increasing probability of being stranded as well as with increasing negative survival effects of being stranded. However, our analysis shows that the effect on survival of being stranded is a more important parameter than the probability of stranding for the evolution of anhydrobiosis. The existing, although limited, evidence from empirical studies seems to support some of these predictions.
Continued functioning of the secretory pathway is essential for ribosome synthesis

To explore the regulatory elements that maintain the balanced synthesis of the components of the ribosome, we isolated a temperature-sensitive (ts) mutant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in which transcription both of rRNA and of ribosomal protein genes is defective at the nonpermissive temperature. Temperature sensitivity for growth is recessive and segregates 2:2. A gene that complements the ts phenotype was cloned from a genomic DNA library. Sequence analysis revealed that this gene is SLY1, encoding a protein essential for protein and vesicle transport between the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi apparatus. In the strain carrying our ts allele of SLY1, accumulation of the carboxypeptidase Y precursor was detected at the nonpermissive temperature, indicating that the secretory pathway is defective. To ask whether the effect of the ts allele on ribosome synthesis was specific for sly1 or was a general result of the inactivation of the secretion pathway, we assayed the levels of mRNA for several ribosomal proteins in cells carrying ts alleles of sec1, sec7, sec11, sec14, sec18, sec53, or sec63, representing all stages of secretion. In each case, the mRNA levels were severely depressed, suggesting that this is a common feature in mutants of protein secretion. For the mutants tested, transcription of rRNA was also substantially reduced. Furthermore, treatment of a sensitive strain with brefeldin A at a concentration sufficient to block the secretion pathway also led to a decrease of the level of ribosomal protein mRNA, with kinetics suggesting that the effect of a secretion defect is manifest within 15 to 30 min. We conclude that the continued function of the entire secretion pathway is essential for the maintenance of ribosome synthesis. The apparent coupling of membrane synthesis and ribosome synthesis suggest the existence of a regulatory network that connects the production of the various structural elements of the cell.
The effect of flipped learning on academic performance as an innovative method for overcoming ebbinghaus' forgetting curve

Recently, flipped learning has been attracting as an alternative teaching and learning method for university education. The purpose of this study is to propose flipped learning as an effective review method overcoming forgetting curve. This study is also aimed to provide empirical evidence for the effect of flipped learning in terms of both self-efficacy and academic performance. Three research questions guided the study: 1) Is there a difference in self-efficacy between traditional lecture style classroom and flipped classroom? ;2) Is there a difference in academic performance between traditional and flipped classroom? ; 3) If so, what is the main factor of the improvement? In this paper, a model of flipped learning supported by LMS is designed to allow students to practice 4 times of review methods while students follow the process of flipped learning of pre-, in- and post- class and reviewing as a self-directed learning.