Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Smokers’ risk perceptions and misperceptions of cigarettes, e‐cigarettes and nicotine replacement therapies

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS To identify the range and coherence of smokers and recent ex-smokers' general beliefs about the harms associated with smoking and the implications of these beliefs for their assessments of the relative harms and addictiveness of various nicotine containing products. DESIGN AND METHODS The study consisted of 18 single participant interviews with current smokers or vapers (13 M, 5 F) and three focus groups (15 M, 14 F) with current smokers/vapers and recent quitters. Both individual interviews and focus groups included semi-structured discussions of how nicotine and cigarette smoke cause disease and addiction, and a structured task involving rating the relative harmfulness and addictiveness of 17 nicotine products against a reference, popular, cigarette. RESULTS Most participants were able to give adequate accounts of what makes cigarette smoking harmful and addictive but this general knowledge was not consistently applied to making harmfulness and addictiveness judgements about specific products. Many participants applied simple affect-based heuristics to harmfulness and addictiveness judgments, even when they had apparently demonstrated more sophisticated knowledge earlier. Most used binary safe/dangerous thinking, with addictiveness and harmfulness strongly linked and a decoupling of satisfaction and addictiveness. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Many smokers appear to have reasonable general knowledge of the risks of smoking but cannot reliably apply this knowledge to practical risk judgements. We need to rethink how we communicate with the public about the risks of smoking, and using other nicotine products, in ways that allow them to make more informed decisions about their smoking.
End-to-End Speech Recognition From the Raw Waveform

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems rely on fixed, hand-crafted features such as mel-filterbanks to preprocess the waveform before the training pipeline. In this paper, we study end-to-end systems trained directly from the raw waveform, building on two alternatives for trainable replacements of mel-filterbanks that use a convolutional architecture. The first one is inspired by gammatone filterbanks (Hoshen et al., 2015; Sainath et al, 2015), and the second one by the scattering transform (Zeghidour et al., 2017). We propose two modifications to these architectures and systematically compare them to mel-filterbanks, on the Wall Street Journal dataset. The first modification is the addition of an instance normalization layer, which greatly improves on the gammatone-based trainable filterbanks and speeds up the training of the scattering-based filterbanks. The second one relates to the low-pass filter used in these approaches. These modifications consistently improve performances for both approaches, and remove the need for a careful initialization in scattering-based trainable filterbanks. In particular, we show a consistent improvement in word error rate of the trainable filterbanks relatively to comparable mel-filterbanks. It is the first time end-to-end models trained from the raw signal significantly outperform mel-filterbanks on a large vocabulary task under clean recording conditions.
The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education

Many teachers and educational researchers have claimed to adopt tenets of culturally relevant education (CRE). However, recent work describes how standardized curricula and testing have marginalized CRE in educational reform discourses. In this synthesis of research, we sought examples of research connecting CRE to positive student outcomes across content areas. It is our hope that this synthesis will be a reference useful to educational researchers, parents, teachers, and education leaders wanting to reframe public debates in education away from neoliberal individualism, whether in a specific content classroom or in a broader educational community.
Assessment of implementation status of Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA) and its awareness among residents in a block of Haryana

Background: Legislative route is one of the known method to control behaviour of population. Cigarette and Other Tobacco Products Act is one of the laws enacted to control the use of tobacco in India lunched in the year 2003. Objective: The objective of this study was to find compliance of COTPA among tobacco stores and to find the knowledge of people regarding COTPA. Methods: All selected communities were studied by community audit. All stores selling tobacco products were assessed for its compliance to COTPA. Thirty participants from selected communities with in the age range of 18- 65 years were selected and interviewed for knowledge regarding COTPA. Results: A total of 218 stores were found to be selling tobacco. None of the stores were fully compliant to all COTPA clauses. Stores in rural areas were found to be more non-complaint than urban areas. 41% of stores were selling tobacco to minors, 10% were within 100 yards of schools.8% of schools have tobacco advertisement on façade and 24% displayed tobacco products openly. Around half of the participants (n-552) had heard about COTPA whereas only 4% were aware of all 4 provisions of COTPA. Conclusion: Although more than a decade passed since the law was enacted poor compliance and knowledge was found among participants.
CRISPR Screen Reveals that EHEC’s T3SS and Shiga Toxin Rely on Shared Host Factors for Infection

ABSTRACT Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) has two critical virulence factors—a type III secretion system (T3SS) and Shiga toxins (Stxs)—that are required for the pathogen to colonize the intestine and cause diarrheal disease. Here, we carried out a genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats with Cas9) loss-of-function screen to identify host loci that facilitate EHEC infection of intestinal epithelial cells. Many of the guide RNAs identified targeted loci known to be associated with sphingolipid biosynthesis, particularly for production of globotriaosylceramide (Gb3), the Stx receptor. Two loci (TM9SF2 and LAPTM4A) with largely unknown functions were also targeted. Mutations in these loci not only rescued cells from Stx-mediated cell death, but also prevented cytotoxicity associated with the EHEC T3SS. These mutations interfered with early events associated with T3SS and Stx pathogenicity, markedly reducing entry of T3SS effectors into host cells and binding of Stx. The convergence of Stx and T3SS onto overlapping host targets provides guidance for design of new host-directed therapeutic agents to counter EHEC infection. IMPORTANCE Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) has two critical virulence factors—a type III secretion system (T3SS) and Shiga toxins (Stxs)—that are required for colonizing the intestine and causing diarrheal disease. We screened a genome-wide collection of CRISPR mutants derived from intestinal epithelial cells and identified mutants with enhanced survival following EHEC infection. Many had mutations that disrupted synthesis of a subset of lipids (sphingolipids) that includes the Stx receptor globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) and hence protect against Stx intoxication. Unexpectedly, we found that sphingolipids also mediate early events associated with T3SS pathogenicity. Since antibiotics are contraindicated for the treatment of EHEC, therapeutics targeting sphingolipid biosynthesis are a promising alternative, as they could provide protection against both of the pathogen’s key virulence factors. Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) has two critical virulence factors—a type III secretion system (T3SS) and Shiga toxins (Stxs)—that are required for colonizing the intestine and causing diarrheal disease. We screened a genome-wide collection of CRISPR mutants derived from intestinal epithelial cells and identified mutants with enhanced survival following EHEC infection. Many had mutations that disrupted synthesis of a subset of lipids (sphingolipids) that includes the Stx receptor globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) and hence protect against Stx intoxication. Unexpectedly, we found that sphingolipids also mediate early events associated with T3SS pathogenicity. Since antibiotics are contraindicated for the treatment of EHEC, therapeutics targeting sphingolipid biosynthesis are a promising alternative, as they could provide protection against both of the pathogen’s key virulence factors.
Electroencephalogram alpha asymmetry in patients with depressive disorders: current perspectives

Purpose Electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha asymmetry (AA) in depressive disorders has been of interest over the last few decades, but it continues to remain unclear whether EEG AA can discriminate between healthy and depressive individuals. Materials and methods A systematic literature search for papers addressing EEG AA using the keywords alpha asymmetry, depression, and EEG was performed in PubMed. All studies were checked for sample size, gender, handedness, reference, recording protocol, EEG band range, impedance, type of analysis, drugs, and comorbidity. Results A total of 61 articles were found, of which 44 met our inclusion criteria. They have been consecutively analyzed in respect of methodology and results. Approximately 25% (11/44) of the studies did not mention or ignored handedness, 41% (18/44) of the studies used data with only self-reported handedness, and only 34.1% (15/44) of all studies tested handedness. Only 35% (15/44) of the studies reported pharmacological treatment, and only 35% (15/44) of the studies controlled for medication. A total of 52% (23/44) of the studies reported comorbidity, and only 30% (13/44) of the studies controlled for comorbidity. Only 29.6% (13/44) of the studies reported education. In all, 30.5% (13/44) of the studies analyzed group differences and correlations, while 15.9 (7/44) of the studies used only correlational analyses. A total of 52.3% (23/44) of the studies analyzed only group differences. Alpha range was fixed (8–13 Hz) in 59.1% (26/44) of all studies. Reference to common average was used in seven of 44 studies (15.9%). In all, nine of 44 (20.5%) studies used the midline central position as reference, 22 of 44 (50%) studies used the ear or the mastoid as reference, and four of 44 (9.1%) studies used the nose as reference. Conclusion Discriminative power of EEG AA for depressed and healthy controls remains unclear. A systematic analysis of 44 studies revealed that differences in methodology and disregarding proper sampling are problematic. Ignoring handedness, gender, age, medication, and comorbidity could explain inconsistent findings. Hence, we formulated a guideline for requirements for future studies on EEG AA in order to allow for better comparisons.
Maximum a Posteriori Policy Optimisation

We introduce a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called Maximum aposteriori Policy Optimisation (MPO) based on coordinate ascent on a relative entropy objective. We show that several existing methods can directly be related to our derivation. We develop two off-policy algorithms and demonstrate that they are competitive with the state-of-the-art in deep reinforcement learning. In particular, for continuous control, our method outperforms existing methods with respect to sample efficiency, premature convergence and robustness to hyperparameter settings while achieving similar or better final performance.
Effect of Formaldehyde Inhalation and Alcohol Consumption on some Kidney Markers of Albino Rats

A large percentage of the human populace is directly or indirectly exposed to pollutants in the course of their day-today activities. It is generally reported that those who are occupationally exposed constitute the population at greatest risk of frequent exposure (Carballo et al., 1994; Rabble and Wong, 1996). Formaldehyde is one of the most volatile organic solvents use as a disinfectant in many human medicines and cosmetics, as antiseptics and embalming fluids. Millions of workers are exposed to organic solvents that are used in such products as paints, varnishes, lacquers, adhesives, glues, degreasing/cleaning agents, and in the production of dyes, polymers, plastic, textiles, printing inks, agricultural products, and pharmaceuticals (Nuyts et al., 1995; Radican et al., 2006). In epidemiological and experimental animal studies, formaldehyde induce a variety of toxic effects, especially on liver and kidney tissues after inhalation. These effects included dose related focal hepatic enlargement, decreased weight and hepatocellular fatty degeneration. Prolonged exposure of formaldehyde may cause degeneration in the proximal tubules and necrosis in the kidney (Mensing et al., 2002). Morticians are consistently exposed to formaldehyde during embalmment and most of these workers may indulge in alcohol consumption due to the nature of their jobs.
Continuous glucose monitoring and glycemic control among youth with type 1 diabetes: International comparison from the T1D Exchange and DPV Initiative

To assess the change in rates of pediatric real‐time or intermittent scanning continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) use over the past 5 years, and how it impacts glycemic control, data from two registries were compared: the US‐based type 1 diabetes Exchange Registry (T1DX) and the German/Austrian DPV (Prospective Diabetes Follow‐Up Registry).
Malnutrition in Chronic Kidney Disease

Patients with chronic kidney disease are at substantial risk for malnutrition, characterized by protein energy wasting and micronutrient deficiency. Studies show a high prevalence rate of malnutrition in both children and adults with chronic kidney disease. Apart from abnormalities in growth hormone-insulin like growth factor axis, malnutrition also plays a role in the development of stunted growth, commonly observed in children with chronic kidney disease. The pathogenic mechanisms of malnutrition in chronic kidney disease are complex and involve an interplay of multiple pathophysiologic alterations including decreased appetite and nutrient intake, hormonal derangements, metabolic imbalances, inflammation, increased catabolism, and dialysis related abnormalities. Malnutrition increases the risk of morbidity, mortality and overall disease burden in these patients. The simple provision of adequate calorie and protein intake does not effectively treat malnutrition in patients with chronic kidney disease owing to the intricate and multifaceted derangements affecting nutritional status in these patients. A clear understanding of the pathophysiologic mechanisms involved in the development of malnutrition in chronic kidney disease is necessary for developing strategies and interventions that are effective, and capable of restoring normal development and mitigating negative clinical outcomes. In this article, a review of the pathophysiologic mechanisms of malnutrition in chronic kidney disease is presented.
Emergent Open-Endedness from Contagion of the Fittest

In this paper, we study emergent irreducible information in populations of randomly generated computable systems that are networked and follow a "Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible" contagion model of imitation of the fittest neighbor. We show that there is a lower bound for the stationary prevalence (or average density of "infected" nodes) that triggers an unlimited increase of the expected local emergent algorithmic complexity (or information) of a node as the population size grows. We call this phenomenon expected (local) emergent open-endedness. In addition, we show that static networks with a power-law degree distribution following the Barabasi-Albert model satisfy this lower bound and, thus, display expected (local) emergent open-endedness.
Neuromast topography in anuran amphibians

Generalized anuran tadpoles across families exhibit a similar neuromast morphology on their heads, as follows: (1) all neuromast lines known for anurans are present; (2) within these lines total neuromast number ranges from about 250 to 320; (3) neuromasts form linear stitches composed of two to three, but sometimes up to five, neuromasts; (4) neuromast linear dimensions are ⩽ 10 μm; and (5) neuromasts contain ⩽ 15 hair cells. Compared with generalized forms, stream, arboreal, carnivorous, and desert‐pond forms have fewer neuromasts but they contain more hair cells. They do not, however, form stitches. Obligate midwater suspension‐feeding forms, including Xenopus (Pipidae), Rhinophrynus (Rhinophyrnidae), and Phrynomerus (Microhylidae), form stitches that contain > six, but potentially up to 18 or more, loosely aggregated neuromasts. Xenopus and Rhinophrynus have large neuromasts (up to 40 μm across). Chiasmocleis (Microhylidae) tadpoles form stiches that are linearly arranged with up to ten neuromasts. Whereas urodeles can have more than one neuromast row per line and may form both linear and transverse stitches, anurans have only one row of neuromasts per line and form only transverse stitches. Neuromasts in anurans tend to be smaller and more circular than in urodeles and positioned flush with the epidermal surface. A greater percentage of anurans form stitches, and anurans have greater intrafamilial variation in stitch formation than do urodeles.
Towards Gene Expression Convolutions using Gene Interaction Graphs

We study the challenges of applying deep learning to gene expression data. We find experimentally that there exists non-linear signal in the data, however is it not discovered automatically given the noise and low numbers of samples used in most research. We discuss how gene interaction graphs (same pathway, protein-protein, co-expression, or research paper text association) can be used to impose a bias on a deep model similar to the spatial bias imposed by convolutions on an image. We explore the usage of Graph Convolutional Neural Networks coupled with dropout and gene embeddings to utilize the graph information. We find this approach provides an advantage for particular tasks in a low data regime but is very dependent on the quality of the graph used. We conclude that more work should be done in this direction. We design experiments that show why existing methods fail to capture signal that is present in the data when features are added which clearly isolates the problem that needs to be addressed.
A personalized, Monte Carlo‐based method for internal dosimetric evaluation of radiopharmaceuticals in children

PURPOSE Herein, we introduce a methodology for estimating the absorbed dose in organs at risk that is based on specified clinically derived radiopharmaceutical biodistributions and personalized anatomical characteristics. METHODS To evaluate the proposed methodology, we used realistic Monte Carlo (MC) simulations and computational pediatric models to calculate a parameter called in this work the "specific absorbed dose rate" (SADR). The SADR is a unique quantitative metric in that it is specific to a particular organ. It is defined as the absorbed dose rate in an organ when the biodistribution of radioactivity over the whole body is considered. Initially, we applied a validation procedure that calculated specific absorbed fractions (SAFs) from mono-energetic photon sources in the range of 10 keV-2 MeV and compared them with previously published data. We calculated the SADRs for five different radiopharmaceuticals (99m Tc-MDP, 123 I-mIBG, 131 I-MIBG, 131 I-NaI, and 153 Sm-EDTMP) based on their biodistributions at four or five different times; the biodistributions were derived from the clinical scintigraphic data of pediatric patients. We used six models representing male and female patients aged 5, 8, and 14 yr to investigate the absorbed dose variability due to anatomical variations. The GATE Monte Carlo toolkit was used to calculate absorbed doses per organ. Finally, we compared the SADR methodology to that of OLINDA/EXM 1.1 using rescaled masses according to the studied models. Four target organs were considered for calculating the absorbed doses. RESULTS The ratios of SAFs calculated with GATE simulations to those based on previously published data were between 0.9 and 2.2 when the liver was used as a source organ. Subsequently, we used GATE to calculate a dataset of SADRs for the six pediatric models. The SADRs for pediatric models whose total body weights ranged from 20 to 40 kg varied up to approximately 90%, whereas those for models of similar body masses varied less than 15%. Finally, we found absorbed dose discrepancies of approximately 10-150% between the SADR methodology and OLINDA for two different radiopharmaceuticals. Absorbed doses from SADRs and from individualized S-values in the same pediatric model differed approximately 1-50%. CONCLUSIONS Because pediatric radiopharmaceutical dosimetric estimates demonstrate large variation due to the patient's anatomical characteristics, personalized data should be considered. Using our SADR method in a larger population of phantoms and for a variety of radiopharmaceuticals could enhance the personalization of dosimetry in pediatric nuclear medicine. The proposed methodology provides the advantage of creating time-dependent organ dose rate curves.
Identification of Potential Prostate Cancer-Related Pseudogenes Based on Competitive Endogenous RNA Network Hypothesis

Background Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been revealed to function as competing endogenous RNAs (ceRNAs), which can seclude the common microRNAs (miRNAs) and hence prevent the miRNAs from binding to their ancestral gene. Nonetheless, the role of lncRNA-mediated ceRNAs in prostate cancer has not yet been elucidated. Material/Methods Using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, lncRNA, miRNA, and mRNA profiles from 499 prostate cancer tissues and 52 normal prostate tissues were analyzed with the R package “DESeq” to identify the differentially expressed RNAs. GO and KEGG pathway analyses were performed using “DAVID6.8” and R packages “Clusterprofile. ” The ceRNA network in prostate cancer was constructed using miRDB, miRTarBase, and TargetScan databases. Survival analysis was performed with Kaplan-Meier analysis. Results A total of 376 lncRNAs, 33 miRNAs, and 687 mRNAs were identified as significant factors in tumorigenesis. Based on the hypothesis that the ceRNA network (lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA regulatory axis) is involved in prostate cancer and forms competitive interrelations between miRNA and mRNA or lncRNA, we constructed a ceRNA network that included 23 lncRNAs, 6 miRNAs, and 2 mRNAs that were differentially expressed in prostate cancer. Only 3 lncRNAs (LINC00308, LINC00355, and OSTN-AS1) had a significant association with survival (P<0.05). The 3 prostate cancer-specific lncRNA were validated in prostate cancer cell lines PC3 and DU145 using qRT-PCR. Conclusions We demonstrated the differential lncRNA expression profiles in prostate cancer, which provides new insights for future studies of the ceRNA network and its regulatory mechanisms in prostate cancer.