Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Homocysteine might increase the risk of recurrence in patients presenting with primary cerebral infarction

Abstract Purpose: Although hyperhomocysteinemia (Hhcy) is a risk factor for cerebral infarction, its effect on recurrent cerebral infarction is less-defined. We aimed to investigate the association of Hhcy and increased risk of recurrent cerebral infarct. Materials and methods: From 2011 to 2013, we recruited 231 primary cerebral infarct patients that were divided to a Hhcy group (n = 105) and a control group (n = 126) according to plasma homocysteinemia (Hcy) levels exceeding 15 μmol/L. In this prospective study, risk factors such as gender, age, blood lipid and glucose levels, history of diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking habits and plasma Hhcy levels were determined. A three-year follow-up compared differences in cerebral infarction recurrence rates. Statistical analyses identified whether plasma Hhcy levels were an independent risk factor for recurrent cerebral infarction. Results: Triglyceride and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels in the Hhcy group were significantly higher than controls, and cerebral infarct recurrence rates in the Hhcy group exceeded control subject rates through the three-year follow-up (p = .021, p = .036 and p = .025). Cox proportional hazards modeling showed that elevated Hhcy levels (hazard ratio [HR] = 3.062, p < .001), increased age (HR = 1.069, p < .01), circulating triglyceride levels (HR = 1.686, p = .048), and relative National Institutes of Health Stroke (NIHSS) score (HR = 1.068, p = .016) were risk factors for recurrent cerebral infarction. Conclusions: Level of Hhcy was a risk factor for recurrent cerebral infarction. Further, particular demographic and clinical outcomes including age, relative NIHSS scores, and circulating triglyceride levels were markedly associated with the occurrence of cerebral infarction.
X-RAY EMISSION FROM MATERIALS PROCESSING LASERS

Abstract The emission of laser induced X-rays from materials processing ultra-short pulsed laser systems was measured. The absolute spectral photon fluence was determined using a thermoluminescence detector based few-channel spectrometer. The spectra at 10 cm from the laser focus were in the energy region between 2 and 25 keV with mean energies of ~4–6 keV (when weighted by fluence or directional dose equivalent) and up to 13 keV (when weighted by ambient dose equivalent). The operational quantities, H·′(0.07), H·′(3) and H·*(10), were determined to be in the order of 1600–7300, 16–71 and 1–4 mSv per hour processing time, respectively, depending on the material and condition of the workpiece. The dose contribution due to photons above 30 keV was for all quantities negligible, i.e. below 10−3.
Reciprocal Kit-Build Concept Map: An Approach for Encouraging Pair Discussion to Share Each Other's Understanding

SUMMARY Collaborative learning is an active teaching and learning strategy, in which learners who give each other elaborated explanations can learn most. However, it is di ﬃ cult for learners to explain their own under- standing elaborately in collaborative learning. In this study, we propose a collaborative use of a Kit-Build concept map (KB map) called “Recipro- cal KB map”. In a Reciprocal KB map for a pair discussion, at ﬁrst, the two participants make their own concept maps expressing their compre- hension. Then, they exchange the components of their maps and request each other to reconstruct their maps by using the components. The di ﬀ er- ences between the original map and the reconstructed map are diagnosed automatically as an advantage of the KB map. Reciprocal KB map is ex- pected to encourage pair discussion to recognize the understanding of each other and to create an e ﬀ ective discussion. In an experiment reported in this paper, Reciprocal KB map was used for supporting a pair discussion and was compared with a pair discussion which was supported by a traditional concept map. Nineteen pairs of university students were requested to use the traditional concept map in their discussion, while 20 pairs of univer- sity students used Reciprocal KB map for discussing the same topic. The results of the experiment were analyzed using three metrics: a discussion score, a similarity score, and questionnaires. The discussion score, which investigates the value of talk in discussion, demonstrates that Reciprocal KB map can promote more e ﬀ ective discussion between the partners compared to the traditional concept map. The similarity score, which evaluates the similarity of the concept maps, demonstrates that Reciprocal KB map can encourage the pair of partners to understand each other better com- pared to the traditional concept map. Last, the questionnaires illustrate that Reciprocal KB map can support the pair of partners to collaborate in the discussion smoothly and that the participants accepted this method for sharing their understanding with each other. These results suggest that Re- ciprocal KB map is a promising approach for encouraging pairs of partners to understand each other and to promote the e ﬀ ective discussions.
NEW APPROACH TO STRESS RESEARCH IN PHOCIDS—POTENTIAL OF DEHYDROEPIANDROSTERONE AND CORTISOL/DEHYDROEPIANDROSTERONE RATIO AS MARKERS FOR STRESS IN HARBOR SEALS (PHOCA VITULINA) AND GRAY SEALS (HALICHOERUS GRYPUS)

Abstract Cortisol is known to reflect the level of the stress response. However, measuring the cortisol concentration only once fails to provide sufficient information about the duration of the stress exposure. Moreover, handling is an acute stressor and increases cortisol secretion especially in wildlife species. Yet, in phocids reliable indicators are missing that reflect potential chronic effects of stress. The adrenal-derived steroid hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) has been described as biomarker for the assessment of the stress status but has not been applied to marine mammal stress research. Therefore, DHEA, the sulfated precursor DHEAS and the cortisol/DHEA ratio were determined in serum of different seals. One group consisted of harbor (Phoca vitulina) and gray seals (Halichoerus grypus) that were habituated to human handling. The other two groups included healthy and free-ranging seals suffering from a disease. Blood samples were taken from 11 habituated (six males, five females), 17 wild_healthy (13 males, four females), and nine wild_diseased seals (four males, five females). No differences in serum cortisol levels could be detected between wild_healthy and wild_diseased seals. On the contrary, wild_diseased seals showed the lowest DHEA concentration compared to the other two groups. Wild_diseased seals also revealed the highest cortisol/DHEA ratio compared to the habituated_zoo (2,074.7 ± 351.4 vs. 121.5 ± 26.8, P < 0.001) and wild_healthy seals (827.9 ± 214.3, P < 0.01). DHEA and the cortisol/DHEA ratio may reflect differences in the functionality of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and therefore represent valuable tools for the assessment of stress-related effects in seals.
IncSQL: Training Incremental Text-to-SQL Parsers with Non-Deterministic Oracles

We present a sequence-to-action parsing approach for the natural language to SQL task that incrementally fills the slots of a SQL query with feasible actions from a pre-defined inventory. To account for the fact that typically there are multiple correct SQL queries with the same or very similar semantics, we draw inspiration from syntactic parsing techniques and propose to train our sequence-to-action models with non-deterministic oracles. We evaluate our models on the WikiSQL dataset and achieve an execution accuracy of 83.7% on the test set, a 2.1% absolute improvement over the models trained with traditional static oracles assuming a single correct target SQL query. When further combined with the execution-guided decoding strategy, our model sets a new state-of-the-art performance at an execution accuracy of 87.1%.
XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations

State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in cross-lingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 14 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.
Magnetically Controlled Growing Rods: The Experience of Mechanical Failure from a Single Center Consecutive Series of 28 Children with a Minimum Follow-up of 2 Years

Study Design Retrospective observational study of a continuous series of 28 children. Purpose To determine the mechanical failure rate in our cohort of children treated with magnetically controlled growth rods (MCGRs). Overview of Literature Previous studies report a MCGR mechanical failure rate of 0%–75%. Methods All patients with MCGR implantation between 2012 and 2015 were examined and followed up for a minimum of 2 years. A retrospective evaluation of contemporaneously documented clinical findings was conducted, and radiographs were retrospectively examined for mechanical failure. The external remote controller (ERC)-specified length achieved in the clinic was compared to the length measured on subsequent radiographs. Results Fourteen mechanical failures were identified in 28 children (50%) across a total of 52 rods (24 pairs and four single constructs). Mechanical failures were due to: failure to lengthen under general anesthesia (seven children), actuator pin fracture (four), rod fracture (one), foundation screw failure (one), and ran out of rod length (one). Of the 14 mechanical failures, six were treated with final fusion operations (reflecting limited further growth potential), and eight patients were treated with the intention for further lengthening. We therefore consider these eight patients to represent the true incidence of mechanical failure in our cohort (29%). The difference between the ERC length and radiographic length was found to be identical in 11% cases; 35% were overestimates, and 54% were underestimates. The median underestimate was 2.45 mm whereas the median overestimate was 3.1 mm per distraction episode. In total, 95% of all ERC distractions were within ±10 mm of the radiographic length achieved over a median of nine distraction episodes. Conclusions Our series is the most comprehensive MCGR series published to date, and we present a mechanical failure rate of 29%. Clinicians should be mindful of the discrepancies between ERC length and radiographic measurements of rod length; other modalities may be more helpful in this regard.
Effect of diammonium glycyrrhizinate on pharmacokinetics of omeprazole by regulating cytochrome P450 enzymes and plasma protein binding rate

Abstract 1. In clinical practice, diammonium glycyrrhizinate is usually used with omeprazole in patients with viral hepatitis and cirrhosis accompanied by peptic ulcers. However, the drug interaction between diammonium glycyrrhizinate and omeprazole remains unclear. 2. In this study, the effects of diammonium glycyrrhizinate on the pharmacokinetics of omeprazole was investigated by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analytical method. Male Sprague–Dawley rats were randomly assigned to two groups: omeprazole and omeprazole + diammonium glycyrrhizinate, and the main pharmacokinetic parameters were estimated after oral administration. It was found that using the omeprazole along with the diammonium glycyrrhizinate increased the AUC, AUMC, Cmax for omeprazole. 3. For this reason, we used the LC-MS/MS to detect the binding rate of plasma protein (BRPP) of omeprazole in rats, it was found that diammonium glycyrrhizinate could decrease the BRPP in rats. In addition, we found that diammonium glycyrrhizinate specifically inhibited the enzyme activity of the CYP2C19 and CYP3A4, which are involved in the metabolism of the omeprazole. 4. These results mean that diammonium glycyrrhizinate could inhibit the metabolism and increase the plasma concentration of the omeprazole in rats. Overall, diammonium glycyrrhizinate can influence the pharmacokinetics of omeprazole by inhibiting CYP2C19 and CYP3A4 activities and decreasing BRPP of omeprazole.
Improving the Parallel Execution of Behavior Trees

Behavior Trees (BTs) have become a popular framework for designing controllers of autonomous agents in the computer game and in the robotics industry. One of the key advantages of BTs lies in their modularity, where independent modules can be composed to create more complex ones. In the classical formulation of BTs, modules can be composed using one of the three operators: Sequence, Fallback, and Parallel. The Parallel operator is rarely used despite its strong potential against other control architectures such as Finite State Machines. This is due to the fact that concurrent actions may lead to unexpected problems similar to the ones experienced in concurrent programming. In this paper, we outline how to tackle the aforementioned problem by introducing Concurrent BTs (CBTs) as a generalization of BTs in which we include the notions of progress and resource usage. We show how CBTs allow safe concurrent executions of actions and we analyze the approach from a mathematical standpoint. To illustrate the use of CBTs, we provide a set of use cases in realistic robotics scenarios.
Supply Chain Visibility and Social Responsibility: Investigating Consumers' Behaviors and Motives

Consumers today want to know more about where and how the products they purchase are being made. To create transparency requires a company to both gain visibility into its supply chain and disclose information to consumers. In this paper, we focus on the dimension of visibility and investigate when companies can benefit from greater supply chain visibility. To do so, we design an incentivized human-subject experiment to study two key questions: (i) When does supply chain visibility impact consumers' valuations of a company's social responsibility practices in its upstream supply chain? (ii) What roles do consumers' reciprocal motives and prosocial orientations play in affecting their valuations under different levels of visibility? In our design, greater visibility is represented by lower uncertainty in the outcomes of a company's social responsibility efforts. Our results show that consumers value greater visibility either when workers in the upstream supply chain are disadvantaged or when consumers use uncertainty as an excuse not to pay for social responsibility (i.e., they exhibit a self-serving bias). In addition, we observe that high prosocial consumers do not exhibit strong reciprocal motives. Conversely, reciprocal motives significantly increase low prosocial consumers' valuations under high visibility. Our work adds to the experimental literature on transparency in social responsibility (which has primarily studied disclosure) by examining the equally important but understudied dimension of visibility. We identify conditions under which there is a revenue benefit to greater visibility. Our results on consumer heterogeneity offer insights into what social responsibility information resonates with a company's target consumers.
A novel multifunctional anti-CEA-IL15 molecule displays potent antitumor activities

Introduction Interleukin-15 (IL-15) is an immunomodulatory cytokine. It can activate and expand cytotoxic CD8 T lymphocytes and natural killer cells, leading to potent antitumor effects. Various forms of IL-15 are now in different stages of development for cancer immunotherapy. One of the major issues with IL-15 or IL15–IL15Rα fusion is high toxicity due to systemic activation of immune cells. Materials and methods In this study, we engineered a nanobody–cytokine fusion molecule, anti-CEA-IL15, in which an anti-CEA nanobody was linked to an IL15Rα–IL15 fusion. The nanobody–cytokine fusion exhibited multiple mechanisms to kill tumor cells, including promoting immune cell proliferation and directing antibody-dependent cytotoxicity against CEA-positive tumor cells. Results In xenograft models, anti-CEA-IL15 was localized in the tumor microenvironment and exhibited more potent antitumor activities than non-targeting IL-15, supporting potential application of this multifunctional fusion molecule in tumor immunotherapy. Conclusion We generated and validated a tumortargeting fusion protein, anti-CEA-IL15, which has potent cytokine activity to activate and mobilize the immune system to fight cancer cells. Such strategies may also be applied to other cytokines and tumor-targeting molecules to increase antitumor efficacy.
Functional properties of stellate cells in medial entorhinal cortex layer II

Layer II of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) contains two principal cell types: pyramidal cells and stellate cells. Accumulating evidence suggests that these two cell types have distinct molecular profiles, physiological properties, and connectivity. The observations hint at a fundamental functional difference between the two cell populations but conclusions have been mixed. Here, we used a tTA-based transgenic mouse line to drive expression of ArchT, an optogenetic silencer, specifically in stellate cells. We were able to optogenetically identify stellate cells and characterize their firing properties in freely moving mice. The stellate cell population included cells from a range of functional cell classes. Roughly one in four of the tagged cells were grid cells, suggesting that stellate cells contribute not only to path-integration-based representation of self-location but also have other functions. The data support observations suggesting that grid cells are not the sole determinant of place cell firing.
Synthetic Occlusion Augmentation with Volumetric Heatmaps for the 2018 ECCV PoseTrack Challenge on 3D Human Pose Estimation

In this paper we present our winning entry at the 2018 ECCV PoseTrack Challenge on 3D human pose estimation. Using a fully-convolutional backbone architecture, we obtain volumetric heatmaps per body joint, which we convert to coordinates using soft-argmax. Absolute person center depth is estimated by a 1D heatmap prediction head. The coordinates are back-projected to 3D camera space, where we minimize the L1 loss. Key to our good results is the training data augmentation with randomly placed occluders from the Pascal VOC dataset. In addition to reaching first place in the Challenge, our method also surpasses the state-of-the-art on the full Human3.6M benchmark among methods that use no additional pose datasets in training. Code for applying synthetic occlusions is availabe at this https URL.
Prognostic Significance of the Neutrophil/Lymphocyte Ratio in Patients with Non-Human Papilloma Virus-Related Oropharyngeal Cancer: A Retrospective Cohort Study

Purpose: To investigate the effects of the pretreatment neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (N/L) on non-human papilloma virus (HPV)-related oropharyngeal cancer. Materials and Methods: N/L was calculated by dividing the neutrophil count by the lymphocyte count. Survival outcomes were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared by the log-rank test. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to evaluate the prognostic impact of N/L and other clinical factors on survival outcomes. High/low N/L groups were defined as > 4.7 and ≤4.7, respectively. Results: Data of 57 consecutive patients with non-HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer were analyzed. The 3-year disease-free survival was 79 versus 36.9% in favor of the low N/L group (p = 0.04). The 5-year overall survival was 71.6 versus 53.3% in the low N/L and high N/L group, respectively (p = 0.07). Conclusion: N/L could play an important role in non-HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer progression and indicate prognosis.
‘Do horses cause divorces?’ Autoethnographic insights on family, relationships and resource-intensive leisure

ABSTRACT Equestrian leisure is resource-intensive and requires significant investment of time, money, effort and emotion. In this paper we consider these demands within the context of personal and family relationships. Using autoethnographic methods we use our own relationships with horses and with our human partners to explore the issues and tensions than can arise when one person engages in such an intense and demanding leisure pursuit. We argue that support from partners is essential, but may often be underpinned by some resentment towards the horse(s) and the commitment they entail. Framed within the context of gendered family relationships and gendered leisure, we suggest that women’s involvement in resource-hungry leisure, such as equestrianism, is filtered through traditional gender power relations and that constant negotiation and compromise is required to enable women to engage in demanding leisure activities.
Values of serum LDL and PCT levels in evaluating the condition and prognosis of acute cerebral infarction

Values of low density lipoprotein (LDL) and procalcitonin (PCT) levels in evaluating the condition and prognosis of patients with acute cerebral infarction (ACI) were investigated. According to the volume of cerebral infarction, 150 patients with ACI (observation group) were divided into the mild infarction group (n=50), moderate infarction group (n=50), and severe infarction group (n=50). Besides, another 50 healthy subjects were enrolled during the same period as the control group. The levels of serum LDL and PCT on admission and at the 1st, 3rd, 7th and 10th day after treatment were detected, which were compared with those in the control group. Ten days after treatment, patients were divided into two groups, the effective group and non-effective group, based on the clinical efficacy. The differences in LDL and PCT levels were compared between the two groups. After 1 month, the clinical efficacy was evaluated again, and the correlations of LDL and PCT levels with prognosis were analyzed. The levels of serum LDL and PCT in the observation group 1 day after admission were higher than those in the control group (P<0.05), which reached the peak at the 3rd day and continuously declined after the 7th day. The LDL and PCT levels had statistically significant differences between the effective group and non-effective group (P<0.05). Pearson's correlation analysis showed that the serum LDL and PCT levels in acute phase were negatively correlated with the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score after 1 month of treatment (P<0.05). The dynamic monitoring of serum LDL and PCT levels in ACI patients can help evaluate the condition and prognosis of patients.