Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“I’ve learned to just go with the flow”: Family caregivers’ strategies for managing behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia

Background and objectives Behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia are highly prevalent, stressful, and challenging to manage. Caregivers’ approaches for handling these behaviors have implications for both care partners’ well-being. Yet the specific strategies that caregivers use in their daily management of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia are relatively unknown. This study used in-depth focus group data to examine family caregivers’ strategies for managing behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. Design As part of a larger study (NINR R01NR014200), four focus groups were conducted with a total of 26 family caregivers of older adults with dementia. Caregivers were asked to describe the strategies they use to manage behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. Data from audio-recorded sessions were transcribed, coded to identify relevant concepts, and reduced to determine major categories. Results Caregivers managed behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia through (1) modifying interactions within the care dyad (e.g., simplifying communication); (2) modifying the care environment (e.g., using written prompts); (3) activity engagement; (4) humor; (5) self-care; and (6) social support. Conclusion Family caregivers manage behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia using strategies to minimize stress and address the needs of both care partners. Caregivers’ own accounts of these approaches reveal a window into their everyday management of difficult behaviors. The present findings generate key information for routine clinical care and targeted interventions to promote caregiver well-being.
Neural Correlates of Moral Evaluation and Psychopathic Traits in Male Multi-Problem Young Adults

Multi-problem young adults (18–27 years) present with a plethora of problems, including varying degrees of psychopathic traits. The amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) have been implicated in moral dysfunction in psychopathy in adolescents and adults, but no studies have been performed in populations in the transitional period to adulthood. We tested in multi-problem young adults the hypothesis that psychopathic traits are related to amygdala and vmPFC activity during moral evaluation. Additionally, we explored the relation between psychopathic traits and other regions consistently implicated in moral evaluation. Our final sample consisted of 100 multi-problem young adults and 22 healthy controls. During fMRI scanning, participants judged whether pictures showed a moral violation on a 1–4 scale. Whole brain analysis revealed neural correlates of moral evaluation consistent with the literature. Region of interest analyses revealed positive associations between the affective callous-unemotional dimension of psychopathy and activation in the left vmPFC, left superior temporal gyrus, and left cingulate. Our results are consistent with altered vmPFC function during moral evaluation in psychopathy, but we did not find evidence for amygdala involvement. Our findings indicate the affective callous-unemotional trait of psychopathy may be related to widespread altered activation patterns during moral evaluation in multi-problem young adults.
Whether Moving or Not: Modeling and Predicting Error Rates in Pointing Regardless of Target Motion

Understanding the mechanism by which a user's error rate changes in point-and-click tasks is essential to enhance the usability of various interactions such as typing, gaming, and playing digital instruments. The most well-known explanation for this problem is the inverse relationship between the movement time and the pointing error rate, called the speed--accuracy trade--off. However, recent studies have shown that movement time is not an optimal indicator to explain the change in user's pointing error rate. They also have limitations that can only predict error rates for fixed targets. Based on perceptual control theory and the recent model of moving target selection, this study presents a novel model that accurately predicts pointing error rates regardless of target motion. In two user studies on fixed and moving targets, the model explains the observed error rate with a high coefficient of determination. This allows various interactions that were not previously possible.
Using Online Screening in the General Population to Detect Participants at Clinical High-Risk for Psychosis

Abstract Introduction Identification of participants at clinical high-risk (CHR) for the development of psychosis is an important objective of current preventive efforts in mental health research. However, the utility of using web-based screening approaches to detect CHR participants at the population level has not been investigated. Methods We tested a web-based screening approach to identify CHR individuals. Potential participants were invited to a website via e-mail invitations, flyers, and invitation letters involving both the general population and mental health services. Two thousand two hundred seventy-nine participants completed the 16-item version of the prodromal questionnaire (PQ-16) and a 9-item questionnaire of perceptual and cognitive aberrations (PCA) for the assessment of basic symptoms (BS) online. 52.3% of participants met a priori cut-off criteria for the PQ and 73.6% for PCA items online. One thousand seven hundred eighty-seven participants were invited for a clinical interview and n = 356 interviews were conducted (response rate: 19.9%) using the Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental State (CAARMS) and the Schizophrenia Proneness Interview, Adult Version (SPI-A). n = 101 CHR participants and n = 8 first-episode psychosis (FEP) were detected. ROC curve analysis revealed good to moderate sensitivity and specificity for predicting CHR status based on online results for both UHR and BS criteria (sensitivity/specificity: PQ-16 = 82%/46%; PCA = 94%/12%). Selection of a subset of 10 items from both PQ-16 and PCA lead to an improved of specificity of 57% while only marginally affecting sensitivity (81%). CHR participants were characterized by similar levels of functioning and neurocognitive deficits as clinically identified CHR groups. Conclusion These data provide evidence for the possibility to identify CHR participants through population-based web screening. This could be an important strategy for early intervention and diagnosis of psychotic disorders.
Dopamine, BDNF and motor function postbilateral anodal transcranial direct current stimulation in Parkinson's disease.

AIM To examine BDNF, dopamine, and motor function changes after bilateral anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in patients with Parkinson's disease. METHODS 20 patients undertook ten sessions of bilateral anodal tDCS stimulation applied simultaneously over FC1/FC2, targeting left and right prefrontal and motor areas. Dopamine and BDNF serum levels, and Movement Disorders Society - Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale part three (MDS-UPDRS-III) total score and disability sub-scores were examined pre/post-tDCS stimulation. RESULTS BDNF serum level increased significantly and came with significant improvement in motor functions (decrease in MDS-UPDRS-III total score/sub-scores), whereas dopamine level showed no changes. However, there was no significant statistical correlation between the motor functions' improvement and BDNF level increase. CONCLUSION Bilateral anodal tDCS is a safe stimulation protocol that leads to motor functions' improvement and BDNF serum level increase in patients with Parkinson's disease, however the findings of this feasible study are preliminary and further study is needed.
Effects of Ascorbic Acid Injection in Incubated Eggs Submitted to Heat Stress on Incubation Parameters and Chick Quality

Dose-dependent positive effects on hatchability and hatchling weight have been attributed to ascorbic acid (AA) when eggs were submitted or not to intermittent heat stress during incubation. Fertile breeder (Cobb(r)) eggs were used to determine if the pre-incubation injection of AA in ovo affects the incubation and hatchling quality of egg incubated under thermoneutral or intermittent heat stress conditions. Eggs were not injected or injected with 0, 2,4, or 6% AA/100µL water and incubated at continuous thermoneutral (37.5oC) or hot (39.0oC) temperature. Eggshell temperature (EST) increased in the second half of the incubation period in all experimental groups. The EST of non-injected eggs and of those injected with water was higher when incubated at 39°C than at 37.5°C, but EST was not different among eggs injected with AA. Egg mass loss and eggshell conductance were higher in the eggs incubated at 39°C than at 37.5°C.Hatchability was lower in the eggs injected with AA. Liver and yolk sac weights were higher, whereas heart and liver weights were lower in hatchlings from eggs incubated at 39°C; however, hatchling weight was not affected by incubation temperature. The results showed that AA doses affected egg conductive heat loss and hatchability, and that they did not minimize the effects of high incubation temperature on liver and heart development.
Capillary interactions between dynamically forced particles adsorbed at a planar interface and on a bubble

We investigate the dynamic interfacial deformation induced by micrometric particles exerting a periodic force on a planar interface or on a bubble, and the resulting lateral capillary interactions. Assuming that the deformation of the interface is small, neglecting the effect of viscosity and assuming point particles, we derive analytical formulas for the dynamic deformation of the interface. For the case of a planar interface the dynamic point force simply generates capillary waves, while for the case of a bubble it excites shape oscillations, with a dominant deformation mode that depends on the bubble radius for a given forcing frequency. We evaluate the lateral capillary force acting between two particles, by superimposing the deformations induced by two point forces. We find that the lateral capillary forces experienced by dynamically forced particles are non-monotonic and can be repulsive. The results are applicable to micrometric particles driven by different dynamic forcing mechanisms such as magnetic, electric or acoustic fields.
Behavior of Eucalyptus urophylla and Eucalyptus citriodora Seedlings Grown in Soil Contaminated by Arsenate

Persistent areas of tailings and deposits from coal and gold mining may present high levels of arsenic (As), mainly in the arsenate form, endangering the environment and human health. The establishment of vegetation cover is a key step to reclaiming these environments. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate the potential of Eucalyptus urophylla and E. citriodora seedlings for use in phytoremediation programs of arsenate-contaminated areas. Soil samples were incubated at increasing rates (0, 50, 100, 200 and 400 mg dm-3) of arsenic (arsenate form, using Na2HAsO4) for 15 days. The seedlings were produced in a substrate (vermiculite + sawdust) and were transplanted to the pots with soil three months after seed germination. The values of plant height and diameter were taken during transplanting and 30, 60 and 90 days after transplanting. In the last evaluation, the total leaf area and biomass of shoots and roots were also determined. The values of available As in soil which caused a 50 % dry matter reduction (TS50%), the As translocation index (TI) from the roots to the shoot of the plants, and its bioconcentration factor (BF) were also calculated. Higher levels of arsenate in the soil significantly reduced the dry matter production of roots and shoots and the height of both species, most notably in E. urophylla plants. The highest levels of As were found in the root, with higher values for E. citriodora (ranging from 253.86 to 400 mg dm-3). The TI and BF were also reduced with As doses, but the values found in E. citriodora were significantly higher than in E. urophylla. E. citriodora plants presented a higher capacity to tolerate As and translocate it to the shoot than E. urophylla. Although these species cannot be considered as hyperaccumulators of As, E. citriodora presented the potential to be used in phytoremediation programs in arsenate-contaminated areas due to the long-term growth period of this species.
Medical Concept Embedding with Time-Aware Attention

Embeddings of medical concepts such as medication, procedure and diagnosis codes in Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are central to healthcare analytics. Previous work on medical concept embedding takes medical concepts and EMRs as words and documents respectively. Nevertheless, such models miss out the temporal nature of EMR data. On the one hand, two consecutive medical concepts do not indicate they are temporally close, but the correlations between them can be revealed by the time gap. On the other hand, the temporal scopes of medical concepts often vary greatly (e.g., common cold and diabetes). In this paper, we propose to incorporate the temporal information to embed medical codes. Based on the Continuous Bag-of-Words model, we employ the attention mechanism to learn a ``soft'' time-aware context window for each medical concept. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets through clustering and nearest neighbour search tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, showing that it outperforms five state-of-the-art baselines.
Probabilistic FastText for Multi-Sense Word Embeddings

We introduce Probabilistic FastText, a new model for word embeddings that can capture multiple word senses, sub-word structure, and uncertainty information. In particular, we represent each word with a Gaussian mixture density, where the mean of a mixture component is given by the sum of n-grams. This representation allows the model to share the “strength” across sub-word structures (e.g. Latin roots), producing accurate representations of rare, misspelt, or even unseen words. Moreover, each component of the mixture can capture a different word sense. Probabilistic FastText outperforms both FastText, which has no probabilistic model, and dictionary-level probabilistic embeddings, which do not incorporate subword structures, on several word-similarity benchmarks, including English RareWord and foreign language datasets. We also achieve state-of-art performance on benchmarks that measure ability to discern different meanings. Thus, our model is the first to achieve best of both the worlds: multi-sense representations while having enriched semantics on rare words.
The Impact of Performance Appraisal on Organizational Commitment of Bank Employees

The present study investigated the impact of performance appraisal on the organizational commitment of 172 bank employees randomly selected from 10 public sector banks of Uttarakhand state in India. The results of the study concluded that performance appraisal has a significant and positive impact on the organizational commitment of employees. The awareness of performance appraisal, fairness in the appraisal & performance based payment practices significantly predicted the organizational commitment of bank employees.
Assessing the impact of machine intelligence on human behaviour: an interdisciplinary endeavour

This document contains the outcome of the first Human behaviour and machine intelligence (HUMAINT) workshop that took place 5-6 March 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. The workshop was organized in the context of a new research programme at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, which focuses on studying the potential impact of artificial intelligence on human behaviour. The workshop gathered an interdisciplinary group of experts to establish the state of the art research in the field and a list of future research challenges to be addressed on the topic of human and machine intelligence, algorithm's potential impact on human cognitive capabilities and decision making, and evaluation and regulation needs. The document is made of short position statements and identification of challenges provided by each expert, and incorporates the result of the discussions carried out during the workshop. In the conclusion section, we provide a list of emerging research topics and strategies to be addressed in the near future.
DN2 Thymocytes Activate a Specific Robust DNA Damage Response to Ionizing Radiation-Induced DNA Double-Strand Breaks

For successful bone marrow transplantation (BMT), a preconditioning regime involving chemo and radiotherapy is used that results in DNA damage to both hematopoietic and stromal elements. Following radiation exposure, it is well recognized that a single wave of host-derived thymocytes reconstitutes the irradiated thymus, with donor-derived thymocytes appearing about 7 days post BMT. Our previous studies have demonstrated that, in the presence of donor hematopoietic cells lacking T lineage potential, these host-derived thymocytes are able to generate a polyclonal cohort of functionally mature peripheral T cells numerically comprising ~25% of the peripheral T cell pool of euthymic mice. Importantly, we demonstrated that radioresistant CD44+ CD25+ CD117+ DN2 progenitors were responsible for this thymic auto-reconstitution. Until recently, the mechanisms underlying the radioresistance of DN2 progenitors were unknown. Herein, we have used the in vitro “Plastic Thymus” culture system to perform a detailed investigation of the mechanisms responsible for the high radioresistance of DN2 cells compared with radiosensitive hematopoietic stem cells. Our results indicate that several aspects of DN2 biology, such as (i) rapid DNA damage response (DDR) activation in response to ionizing radiation-induced DNA damage, (ii) efficient repair of DNA double-strand breaks, and (iii) induction of a protective G1/S checkpoint contribute to promoting DN2 cell survival post-irradiation. We have previously shown that hypoxia increases the radioresistance of bone marrow stromal cells in vitro, at least in part by enhancing their DNA double-strand break (DNA DSB) repair capacity. Since the thymus is also a hypoxic environment, we investigated the potential effects of hypoxia on the DDR of DN2 thymocytes. Finally, we demonstrate for the first time that de novo DN2 thymocytes are able to rapidly repair DNA DSBs following thymic irradiation in vivo.
Effect of UV-B radiation on the content of UV-B absorbing compounds and photosynthetic parameters in Parmotrema austrosinense from two contrasting habitats.

We studied the resistance of Parmotrema austrosinense to UV-B stress. We focused on the effects of a high dose UV-B radiation on the content of chlorophylls, carotenoids and UV-B screening compounds. Photosynthetic parameters were measured by chlorophyll fluorescence (potential and effective quantum yields, photochemical and non-photochemical quenching) and evaluated in control and UV-B-treated lichens. Lichens from two different locations in Cordoba, Argentina, were selected: (i) high altitude and dry plots at (Los Gigantes) and (ii) lowland high salinity plots (Salinas Grandes). UV-B treatment led to a decrease in the content of photosynthetic pigments and UV-B screens (absorbance decrease in 220-350 nm) in the samples from Salinas Grandes, while in Los Gigantes samples, an increase in UV-B screen content was observed. Chlorophyll fluorescence parameters showed a UV-B-induced decline in FV /FM , ΦPSII and qP indicating limitation of primary photosynthetic processes in photosystem II (PSII) of symbiotic alga, more pronounced in Salinas Grandes samples. Protective mechanism of PSII were activated by the UV-B treatment to a higher extent in samples from Salinas Grandes (NPQ 0.48) than in Los Gigantes samples (NPQ 0.26). We concluded that site-related characteristics, and in particular different UV-B radiation regimen, had a strong effect on resistance of the photosynthetic apparatus of P. austrosinense to UV-B radiation.
Phyto-Fabrication of ZnO Nanoparticles Using Piper betel Aqueous Extract and Evaluation of its Applicability in Dentistry.

BACKGROUND Facile, environmental friendly synthesis of metal oxide nanoparticles is of paramount importance when its biological applications are considered. OBJECTIVE Current study reports phyto-fabrication of Zinc oxide nanoparticles using aqueous extract of Piper betel leaves as stabilizing and capping agent using co-precipitation method. RESULTS P betel synthesized ZnO nanoparticles (PZnO) was characterized using Powder X-ray diffraction, UV-Visible spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and dynamic light scattering. PXRD pattern demonstrated hexagonal wurtzite structure with preferred orientation (100) plane confirmed by JCPDS file 36-1451. UV- Vis spectroscopy showed peak at 370 nm due to band edge of semiconductor, the PZnO. The average particle size determined by DLS measurement was 69 nm and morphologically the particles were short rod shaped and agglomerated as demonstrated by SEM images. Antibacterial activity of PZnO against dental pathogens namely Streptococcus mutans and Lactobacillus acidphillus was performed using well-diffusion method and antioxidant activity against 2, 2 diphenyl 1 picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radicals and were compared with ZnO used in clinical dentistry (DZnO). PZnO showed higher antioxidant activity of ~70% at 200 µg/mL with consistent activity at lower aliquots. PZnO showed higher antimicrobial activity than DZnO against both tested microbes and also exhibited inhibitory effects in concentration as low as 3.25 µg/mL. Cytotoxicity study using Balb 3T3 mouse fibroblast cell lines showed <40% cellular growth inhibition by both PZnO and DZnO, indicating their benignity towards selected cell lines. CONCLUSION Phyto-fabricated facile PZnO nanoparticles having demonstrable antibacterial and antioxidant activity can be considered for use in clinical dentistry after further clinical trials.
The value of bedside ocular ultrasound assessment of optic nerve sheath diameter in the detection of increased intracranial pressure in patients presenting to the emergency room with headache

Introduction: Headache is one of the most important complaints in emergency room (ER) admissions, and the rate of the increase in intracranial pressure in these cases should not be overlooked. This study was performed to investigate the value of the measurement of optic nerve sheath diameter (ONSD) by ocular ultrasound in ER patients with the complaint of headache and increase in intracranial pressure regarding this. Materials and Methods: A total of 100 patients who applied to the ER with the complaint of headache were included in this prospective study. Fifty patients with increased ONSD (≥5 mm) and 50 patients with normal ONSD (<5 mm) were obtained. ONSD measurements were performed with 7.5–10 MHz linear probe and closed-eye technique. In addition to this, all patients underwent cranial computerized tomography (CT) examinations, and CT results were compared with the results of the ocular ultrasound. Results: The median right and left ONSD values were detected to be 4.3 mm (3.6–5.5 mm) and 4.4 mm (3.6–5.6 mm) in patients whose cranial CT results were within normal limits. However, the median right and left ONSD values were detected to be 5.5 mm (5.1–6.3 mm) and 5.5 mm (5.1–6.4 mm) in patients whose cranial CT examination results were abnormal. In all cases with abnormal CT findings, the right and the left ONSD measurements were significantly higher (P < 0.001). Furthermore, ONSD value in the ipsilateral side with the lesion was significantly higher than the contralateral side (P < 0.001). Conclusion: Bedside ocular ultrasound is a noninvasive and easily applicable method in ER for the detection and evaluation of intracranial hypertension with headache.