Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Blood-Brain Barrier Damage in the Pathogenesis of Contrast-Induced Encephalopathy.

Contrast media are widely used in diagnostic and interventional angiographic procedures. While they are generally regarded as safe and effective, some risks are associated with contrast media. Contrast-induced encephalopathy is a rare adverse reaction to contrast media, and a number of cases have been reported in various countries. The condition may manifest with psychiatric symptoms, cortical blindness, epilepsy or focal neurological deficits, and can be difficult to distinguish from other cerebrovascular complications. Therefore, better understanding of the condition would be valuable for determining the most appropriate treatment. A range of evidence suggests that blood-brain barrier damage is involved in the pathogenesis of the disorder. Here we briefly review the properties of iodinated contrast media and corresponding changes of the blood-brain barrier.
Identification of attractant and repellent plants to coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei

Colombia is one of the world's largest producers of coffee [Coffea arabica L. (Rubiaceae)]. The coffee berry borer (CBB), Hypothenemus hampei (Ferrari) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae), is the main pest of coffee. This insect is controlled through an integrated pest management program that includes cultural, biological, and chemical control strategies. Despite research seeking CBB attractants and repellents, these potential management tools have not been successfully incorporated into control programs. This work proposes the use of plant functional diversity for CBB management, for which a number of plants related to coffee and weeds were selected. CBB preference to these plants was determined by olfactometry and volatile compounds emitted by them were identified. Field trials were performed to test CBB preference under field conditions. These trials determined the olfactory preference of CBB to coffee berries accompanied by material of the plants Crotalaria micans Link (Fabaceae), Lantana camara L. (Verbenaceae), Nicotiana tabacum L. (Solanaceae), Artemisia vulgaris L. , Calendula officinalis L. , Stevia rebaudiana (Bertoni) Bertoni, and Emilia sonchifolia (L.) DC. (all four Asteraceae). Under laboratory conditions N. tabacum, L. camara, and C. officinalis were identified as repellents for CBB in olfactometer assays, whereas E. sonchifolia functioned as attractant. Controlled field trials corroborated CBB repellency of N. tabacum and L. camara; both release volatile sesquiterpenes. Selected candidate attractants included E. sonchifolia plants, for showing attraction in the laboratory. The potential use of these plants in agroecological management of coffee plantations is discussed.
Practical Challenges of IA in Frequency Technical Report TR-SEEMOO-2013-01

Interference Alignment (IA) is a promising technique at the physical layer which allows to increase the Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) of a communication by aligning all interfering signals into the same dimension, while the desired signal lies unaffected in an orthogonal dimension. IA has been widely studied in theory, but only limited practical work exists, since it poses significant challenges for real-world deployments. In this report, we study issues which are key to enable IA in practice.
Control mechanism of an organic self-regulating microfluidic system

The control mechanism and fluid dynamic properties of a previously developed organic pH regulation system are analyzed. The system regulates an output fluid stream to a pH of 6.7 with varying input flow rates. A pH sensitive hydrogel post acts as the feedback pH sensor and flow regulator. The control mechanism of the system is studied through numerical modeling of the regulator and the model is validated through experimentation. Analysis of the fluid dynamics at a T-channel junction, in which two buffer streams merge into one, is performed by solving the Navier-Stokes equation with commercial software. Various areas of a star-shaped orifice are occluded by a flexible membrane to throttle the rate that compensating buffer is fed back into the system. The relationship between orifice open area and volume of compensating buffer through the orifice was analyzed numerically. The axial and lateral visualization of the hydrogel post was obtained via optical microscopy. The model of the regulation system successfully predicts experimental results.
Dielectric and Performance Analysis of CdTe Quantum Dots Doped Nematic Liquid Crystal

In this work, cadmium telluride core type quantum dots (CdTe QDs) were dispersed in 4-pentyl-4′cyanobiphenyl (5CB) nematic liquid crystal (LC) with a concentration of 0.05 % wt/wt; and dielectric properties were investigated by using admittance measurements in the frequency range of 100 Hz 10 MHz. In order to determine the effects of CdTe QDs in 5CB nematic LC, dielectric anisotropy (∆ε), crossover frequency (fcrossover), critical frequency (fcritical), real and imaginary parts of permittivity (ε' and ε") of neat LC and CdTe QDs dispersed LC composites were obtained using the experimental data. Moreover, threshold voltage (Vth), splay elastic constant (K11) were also calculated. It was found that Vth and K11 of QDs dispersed LC are significantly decreased due to the existence of CdTe QDs.
Monitoring Coffee Berry Borer, Hypothenemus hampei (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), Populations with Alcohol-Baited Funnel Traps in Coffee Farms in Colombia

Summary We monitored dispersing coffee berry borer (CBB), Hypothenemus hampei (Ferrari) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae), with easily-manufactured, alcohol-baited funnel traps and quantified associated berry infestation on 8 coffee farms in 2 regions in Caldas, Colombia. Flight activity and damage to berries was highest in the 2–3 months after the main harvest (Jan through Mar) and was greater in large farms, where insecticides were used, compared with small farms where efficient and frequent cultural control was implemented. The use of traps and attractants will help farmers track CBB populations and localize efforts to control this pest.
From Sex Tourist to Son-in-Law

Farang (foreign, Caucasian) men have played a significant role in Thai society for several decades as sex tourists and, more recently, as farang sons-in-law, men who marry Thai wives and often settle down in rural Thai villages. While both of these phenomena have received considerable attention, in neither case have the experiences and motivations of the farang men involved been adequately examined. Based on fieldwork in Bangkok and the northeast region of Isan, we examine the relationship between emergent masculinities of sex tourist and son-in-law at a societal level and the transient subjectivities of men who experience them. Anthropological theory regularly conflates subjectivities and the cultural and social formations, particularly “identities,” that shape them. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that a distinction between the two is needed in order to adequately theorize changing masculinities. The ways in which men’s subjective experiences of masculinity change are different from the ways in which culturally shared, socially constructed, and politically-economically facilitated masculine identities emerge. We caution that evidence of the former—transient subjectivity at an individual level—is not evidence of the latter—changing or emergent masculine identities at a societal level.
Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Probabilistic Data Structures

This paper presents a lossy weight encoding method which complements conventional compression techniques including weight pruning and clustering. The encoding is based on the Bloomier filter, a probabilistic data structure that can save space at the expense of introducing random errors in the weights. Leveraging the ability of DNNs to tolerate these imperfections and by re-training around them, the proposed technique can compress DNN weights by up to 496× (a 1.51× improvement over the state-of-the-art) without sacrificing model accuracy.
Unifying Identification and Context Learning for Person Recognition

Despite the great success of face recognition techniques, recognizing persons under unconstrained settings remains challenging. Issues like profile views, unfavorable lighting, and occlusions can cause substantial difficulties. Previous works have attempted to tackle this problem by exploiting the context, e.g. clothes and social relations. While showing promising improvement, they are usually limited in two important aspects, relying on simple heuristics to combine different cues and separating the construction of context from people identities. In this work, we aim to move beyond such limitations and propose a new framework to leverage context for person recognition. In particular, we propose a Region Attention Network, which is learned to adaptively combine visual cues with instance-dependent weights. We also develop a unified formulation, where the social contexts are learned along with the reasoning of people identities. These models substantially improve the robustness when working with the complex contextual relations in unconstrained environments. On two large datasets, PIPA [27] and Cast In Movies (CIM), a new dataset proposed in this work, our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance under multiple evaluation policies.
Mechanisms of asthma and allergic inflammation AAAAI / ACAAI Task force report * Sublingual immunotherapy : A comprehensive review

Sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) has been used with increasing frequency in Europe and is viewed with increasing interest by allergists in the United States. To address this interest, a Joint Task Force of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology’s Immunotherapy and Allergy Diagnostic Committees reviewed the available literature on SLIT and prepared this report. The task force concluded that despite clear evidence that SLIT is an effective treatment, many questions remained unanswered, including effective dose, treatment schedules, and overall duration of treatment. Until these have been determined, an assessment of the cost/benefit ratio of the treatment cannot be made. SLIT does appear to be associated with few serious side effects, but it has not been administered in high-risk asthmatic patients, nor in the studies reviewed has it been administered as a mixture of non–cross-reacting allergens. Furthermore, there is currently no allergy extract approved for this use in the United States, nor is there a Current Procedural Terminology code for billing purposes. All of these factors should be given careful consideration by anyone contemplating initiating SLIT treatment for their allergic patients. (J Allergy Clin Immunol 2006;117:1021-35.)
Perceived Family and School Rejection and Adolescents’ Psychological States

This study deals with the perceived acceptance-rejection of male and female adolescents at home and at school and their association with the psychological states experienced by them. A sample of 350 female and 220 male 10th grade students filled out two questionnaires: Dwairy’s Rejection Scale, measuring acceptance-rejection by fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, male teachers, female teachers, male classmates and female classmates, and the Psychological State Scale, measuring anxiety, depression, psychosomatic symptoms and conduct disorders. The results show that all perceived acceptance-rejection circuits are associated with and merged in three major factors of rejection: family, teachers, and classmates. All the factors were associated with psychological states experienced by the adolescents with a cross-gender effect. Experienced psychological states of male adolescents were associated with perceived acceptance-rejection circuits at home and at school, in particular when related to female figures, while psychological states of female adolescents were associated with male and female figures at home. The results highlight the need for a systemic approach in research.
Mainstream or margin? The current use of family group conferences in child welfare practice in the UK

A decade has passed since family group conferences were initially introduced into the UK by Family Rights Group. Ten years on, this paper examines the extent to which family group conferences have developed and become embedded into current social work practice. Despite the initial interest by social work practitioners and the picture often painted of a growing radical movement, the degree to which family group conferencing has become part of mainstream practice has until now remained fairly anecdotal. A number of difficulties have been identified with implementing the model, including fitting it into an existing system and the challenge it poses to professionals to hand over power. Two surveys, the first undertaken in 1999 and the second in 2001, describe the current use of the model in the UK by Councils with Social Services Responsibilities (Councils). The surveys reveal the areas of practice within which family group conferences are being used, the size and capacity of projects and why some Councils have adopted the model whilst others remain hesitant. It concludes by considering why family group conferences remain on the margins of practice.
The Determinants of Economic Growth in Ghana: New Empirical Evidence

This article deals with an investigation into the determinants of economic growth in Ghana over the period from 1975 to 2014. In particular, we investigated the impact of physical capital, human capital, labour, government expenditure, inflation, foreign aid, foreign direct investment, financial development, globalization and debt servicing on economic performance within an augmented Solow growth model. It was found that, in the long run, both human capital and foreign aid have a positive influence on output, while labour, financial development and debt servicing have a negative impact on output. It was also found that, in the short run, government expenditure and foreign aid have a positive influence on economic growth, while labour, inflation and financial development have a negative impact on economic growth. These findings hold important policy implications for the country.
Target sequence capture of nuclear‐encoded genes for phylogenetic analysis in ferns

Premise of the Study Until recently, most phylogenetic studies of ferns were based on chloroplast genes. Evolutionary inferences based on these data can be incomplete because the characters are from a single linkage group and are uniparentally inherited. These limitations are particularly acute in studies of hybridization, which is prevalent in ferns; fern hybrids are common and ferns are able to hybridize across highly diverged lineages, up to 60 million years since divergence in one documented case. However, it not yet clear what effect such hybridization has on fern evolution, in part due to a paucity of available biparentally inherited (nuclear‐encoded) markers. Methods We designed oligonucleotide baits to capture 25 targeted, low‐copy nuclear markers from a sample of 24 species spanning extant fern diversity. Results Most loci were successfully sequenced from most accessions. Although the baits were designed from exon (transcript) data, we successfully captured intron sequences that should be useful for more focused phylogenetic studies. We present phylogenetic analyses of the new target sequence capture data and integrate these into a previous transcript‐based data set. Discussion We make our bait sequences available to the community as a resource for further studies of fern phylogeny.
Differences between men and women in the quality of their diet: a study conducted on a population in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

1 Faculdade de Ciências Médicas, Departamento de Saúde Coletiva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas. R. Tessália Vieira de Camargo 126, Cidade Universitária. 13083-887 Campinas SP Brasil. danideassumpcao@ gmail.com 2 Curso de Nutrição, Departamento de Políticas Públicas e Saúde Coletiva, Universidade Federal de São Paulo. São Paulo SP Brasil. 3 Faculdade de Saúde Pública, Departamento de Nutrição, Universidade de São Paulo. São Paulo SP Brasil. Diferenças entre homens e mulheres na qualidade da dieta: estudo de base populacional em Campinas, São Paulo
The Relationship between Time Pressure and Burnout Syndrome: A Cross-Sectional Survey among Jordanian Nurses

Burnout among nurses is well documented in literature. Precursors of burnout such as time pressure need further study for better understanding. In Jordan literature, studies regarding time pressure and burnout among Jordanian nurses are scarce. This study aimed to 1) evaluate the relationship between time pressure and burnout, and 2) identify participants’ characteristics that may have relationship with time pressure and burnout. A descriptive correlational design was utilized using a self-reported cross-sectional survey to collect data from 175 Jordanian nurses. Participants reported high level of time pressure (24.8 out of 126) and burnout (72.9 out of 126). Time pressure was correlated with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (r = 0.561, 0.491, P < 0.01, respectively). Burnout was highest on the emotional exhaustion (72%) compared to 53.9% for depersonalization and 49.2% for personal achievement. Depersonalization showed the most frequent correlation with participants’ characteristics. Burnout was found to be common among Jordanian nurses, and time pressure is a precursor of this phenomenon, giving rise to the consequences on both patients’ and nurses’ health. Healthcare administrators have to modify the nursing work environment to be less stressful and more appealing to overcome the causes of nurses’ burnout.
Validation of the Food Frequency Questionnaire Used to Assess the Association between Dietary Habits and Cardiovascular Risk Factors inthe NESCAV Study

Background: In epidemiological studies, the validation of dietary assessment instruments is important to avoid biased associations with outcome measures. Objective: Our objective was to assess the validity of the 134-item food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) used in the Nutrition Environment and Cardiovascular Health (NESCAV) study. Methods: The FFQ was validated against a 3-day dietary record (DR) on a sample of 29 women. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland and Altman plots were used to assess absolute agreement, whereas relative agreement was appraised by Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Cohen kappa coefficient based on cross classification of 3-category nutrient intake. Results: The two methods differed significantly for the majority of micronutrients with FFQ yielding higher intakes than the DR. The bias between the two methods was nonetheless acceptable with an average overestimation by the FFQ of 11% for macronutrients and 29% for micronutrients. Regarding precision, results differed by 48% for micronutrients and 50% for macronutrients. Correlations on energy-adjusted data by the two methods were satisfactory with an average correlation of 0.47 and 16/25 coefficients above 0.40. Only vitamin A and cholesterol showed poor correlations of 0.02 and 0.05, respectively. On average, the correct classification rate in 3 categories was 50.3% and 19/25 kappa coefficients were above 0.20. Poor agreement was found for protein, cholesterol, starch, vitamins A, B12 and E with weighted kappa coefficient less than 0.20. Conclusion: Although absolute values of dietary intakes were not always accurate, the relationship and agreement between FFQ and DR may be considered as satisfactory. In particular, the FFQ was able to categorize subjects into 3 broad categories of intakes for most nutrients. Results for proteins, cholesterol, starch, vitamins A, E and B12 however ought to be interpreted with caution
Conservation genetics of threatened Mexican axolotls (Ambystoma)

The loss of genetic diversity in small or isolated populations can increase inbreeding, decrease fitness and adaptive potential and increase a species’ probability of extinction. In species with life histories that naturally result in small populations and/or low levels of gene flow, patterns of anthropogenically induced genetic erosion can be obscured by evolutionary history; yet these species may still be susceptible to genetic loss. We assess genetic diversity among populations of Ambystoma salamanders endemic to Mexico, including populations that are facultatively or obligately paedomorphic, to test whether paedomorphic lineages have lower genetic diversity than metamorphic ones, and whether gene flow contributes to the maintenance of diversity in divergent forms with either life history. We also test the utility of our markers in assigning illegally harvested individuals to populations of origin. We found reduced genetic diversity in paedomorphic compared with some, but not all, metamorphic populations. Populations of both forms showed genetic signatures of bottlenecks, underscoring that factors other than paedomorphosis contribute to historical reductions in population size. In general, Ambystoma populations have low interpopulation gene flow and admixture, but paedomorphic populations have higher within‐population relatedness than most metamorphic populations. We discuss historical and current landscape attributes that impact populations and their connectivity, the implications of our findings for ongoing captive propagation programs and the prospects for continued genetic health of Ambystoma in México.
Use of tannins to improve fatty acids profile of meat and milk quality in ruminants: A review

This paper reviews how tannins, through their effects on rumen lipid metabolism, can affect the composition of ruminants' meat and milk fat. Tannins are a heterogeneous group of plant secondary compounds known for both beneficial and detrimental effects on animals' digestive physiology. Tannins supplementation of ruminants' diets alters both in vivo and in vitro unsaturated fatty acids biohydrogenation and hence the profile of fatty acids outflowing the rumen, which can influence milk and meat content of beneficial fatty acids such as linolenic acid (c9,c12,c15-18:3), vaccenic acid (ti 1-18:1) and rumenic acid (c9,t11-18:2), among others. Published information indicates that tannins could inhibit biohydrogenation though affecting ruminal microorganisms. Some studies found increments in linolenic, rumenic and/or vaccenic acids in meat and milk fat using different sources of tannins; however, the effects of tannins supplementation on milk and meat fatty acid profile are not consistent, and there are contradictory results published in the literature. Effects of tannin supplementation on fatty acids biohydrogenation are affected by the chemical type of tannins, the complexity of their interactions with dietary components, and the potential microbial adaptation to tannins. In addition, the duration of the tannins-feeding period may also affect milk and meat fatty acid profile. Characterizing the effects of each specific tannic compound on different biohydrogenation steps and on the microbial species conducting them, as well as the interaction between specific tannin compounds and other dietary components can help to take greater advantage of tannins potential to contribute to improve human health through promoting beneficial fatty acids in ruminants products.