Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Compassion meditation increases optimism towards a transgressor

ABSTRACT Past research reveals important connections between meditative practices and compassion. Most studies, however, focus on the effects of one type of meditation (vs. a no-intervention control) on a single expression of compassion (e.g. offering a seat) towards a relatable target (e.g. a person on crutches), without exploring possible mechanisms. Hence, few studies include different types of meditation, active controls, multiple ways to express compassion, unrelatable targets, and potential mediators. To this end, the present study compared the effects of mindfulness meditation with those of compassion meditation on different expressions of compassion towards a convicted murderer. Seventy-four participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness meditation, compassion meditation, or active control class, or a no-class control. After an 8-week programme, we assessed compassion by giving participants the option of fulfilling a murderer’s request that they write him and then coding those letters for empathy, sympathy, forgiveness, and optimism. Participants in the compassion meditation class wrote more optimistic letters compared to participants in the other three conditions, in part because they valued positivity more. No statistically significant differences emerged for the other expressions of compassion. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of how meditation increases compassion towards unrelatable targets.
28-Day inhalation toxicity study with evaluation of lung deposition and retention of tangled multi-walled carbon nanotubes

Abstract Lung deposition and retention measurements are now required by the newly revised OECD inhalation toxicity testing guidelines 412 and 413 when evaluating the clearance and biopersistence of poorly soluble nanomaterials, such as multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). However, evaluating the lung deposition concentration is challenging with certain nanomaterials, such as carbon-based and iron-based nanomaterials, as it is difficult to differentiate them from endogenous elements. Therefore, the current 28-day inhalation toxicity study investigated the lung retention kinetics of tangled MWCNTs. Male Sprague Dawley rats were exposed to MWCNTs at 0, 0.257, 1.439, and 4.253 mg/m3 for 28 days (6 h/day, 5 days/week, 4 weeks). Thereafter, the rats were sacrificed at day 1, 7, and 28 post-exposure and the pulmonary inflammatory response evaluated by analyzing the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid. Plus, the blood biochemistry, hematology, and histopathology of the lungs were also examined. The lung deposition and retention of MWCNTs were determined based on the elemental carbon content in the lungs after tissue digestion. The number of polymorphonuclear cells and LDH concentration were both found to be significantly higher with the medium and high concentrations (1.439 and 4.253 mg/m3) and dose dependent. The estimated retention half-life for the high concentration (4.253 mg/m3) was about 35 days. The results of this study indicate that tangled MWCNTs seem to have a relatively shorter retention half-life when compared to previous reports on rigid MWCNTs, and the no-observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) for the tested tangled MWCNTs was 0.257 mg/m3 in a previous rat 28-day subacute inhalation toxicity study.
Common features of iodate to iodide reduction amongst a diverse range of marine phytoplankton

Abstract. The reaction between ozone and iodide at the sea surface is now known to be an important part of atmospheric ozone cycling, causing ozone deposition and the release of ozone-depleting reactive iodine to the atmosphere. The importance of this reaction is reflected by its inclusion in chemical transport models (CTMs). Such models depend on accurate sea surface iodide fields but measurements are spatially and temporally limited. The ability to predict current and future sea surface iodide fields requires the development of process-based models which in turn require a thorough understanding of the key processes controlling inorganic iodine cycling. The aim of this study was to inform the development of ocean iodine cycling models by exploring if there are common features of iodate to iodide reduction amongst diverse marine phytoplankton. In order to achieve this, rates and patterns of changes in inorganic iodine speciation were determined in 10 phytoplankton cultures grown at ambient iodate concentrations. Where possible these data were analysed alongside results from previous studies. Iodate loss and some iodide production was observed in all cultures studied, confirming that this is a widespread feature amongst marine phytoplankton. We found no significant difference in log-phase, cell-normalised iodide production rates between key phytoplankton groups (diatoms, prymesiophytes including coccolithophores and phaeocystales) suggesting that a Phytoplankton Functional Type (PFT) approach would not be appropriate for building an ocean iodine cycling model. Iodate loss was greater than iodide formation in the majority of the cultures studied, indicating the presence of an as yet unidentified missing iodine fraction. Iodide yield at the end of the experiment was significantly greater in cultures that had reached a later senescence stage. This suggests that models should incorporate a lag between peak phytoplankton biomass and maximum iodide production, and that cell mortality terms in biogeochemical models could be used to parameterize iodide production.
Barriers and Facilitators to Recommendation Adherence Following Discharge From Geriatric Rehabilitation

This study describes the discharge recommendations made following inpatient geriatric rehabilitation, quantifies adherence to different types of recommendations, determines factors related to adherence, and describes the relationship between patient characteristics and adherence. Sixty-three patients admitted to geriatric rehabilitation units participated in this study. Prior to discharge, all patients received a discharge recommendation form that summarized recommendations. Six weeks after the discharge, patients were contacted by telephone to assess adherence. Adherence varied by type of recommendation was facilitated by the availability of transportation and/or the availability of caregivers to assist with recommendations. The perception that the recommendation was unnecessary was a barrier to adherence, as was lack of transportation, particularly for adhering to appointment recommendations. This study describes common types of discharge recommendations made in geriatric rehabilitation, quantifies adherence to specific recommendations, and identifies factors related to adherence. Strategies that address facilitators and barriers to adherence need to be developed and tested.
Microsoft Word-paper.docx

Understanding the shear behavior and resulting fiber failure of fiber-reinforced plastics (FRPs) is required for better prediction of their behavior during the machining process, but knowledge regarding the shear strength of fiber failure is limited. In this study, out-of-plane shear tests were conducted to observe the shear behavior of carbon FRP (CFRP) laminates subjected to high shear stress exceeding the shear strength of matrix failure. The longitudinal fibers in CFRP unidirectional laminates were cut by shear loading without severe internal damage and the maximum shear stress causing progressive fiber breaks was much higher than the shear strength of matrix failure. This result suggested the possibility of out-of-plane shearing as a machining method for FRPs and shear tests were subsequently performed for CFRP crossply laminates. Delamination was generated by high shear stress to cut the reinforcing fibers, but Ac ce pt ed M an us cr ipt
Implications of applied best management practice for peatland forest harvesting

Elevated levels of nutrients and suspended sediment (SS), and changes to other environmental parameters, are frequently associated with forestry harvesting (clearfelling) operations, and are indicative of the potentially complex changing environment associated with clearfelling. Current and future recommended best management practices (BMPs) for forestry clearfelling on upland peat catchments must provide for a healthy soil and good water quality. The aim of this study was to quantify the effects of implementation, or violation, of BMPs in the clearfelling of an upland peat conifer forest. Over periods of 12 months prior to clearfelling and 15 months after clearfelling, two peatland forests, comprising a study control (no clearfelling) and a study site (clearfelling), were monitored for the release of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) species (dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP), total phosphorus (TP), total oxidised nitrogen (TON) and ammonium nitrogen (NH4-N)), SS, dissolved oxygen (DO), electrical conductivity (EC), pH and stream water temperature. Clearfelling was conducted during poor weather conditions and a watercourse, which drained the study site, was not protected. The maximum recorded concentration exported from the study site after clearfelling was 471 g L−1 for DRP, 611 g L−1 for TP, 1336 g L−1 for NH4-N, and 194 g L−1 for TON. Concentrations of SS exiting the study site increased in one of the two samples taken during clearfelling (maximum release of 481 mg L−1, with 68% of this organic) and returned to pre-clearfelling levels, or below, within 6 months of the commencement of clearfelling. Exports of TP and DRP from the study site were 0.9 and 0.4 kg ha−1 yr−1, which were greater than the study control (0.6 and 0.2 kg ha−1 yr−1, respectively). This indicated that the mitigation practices employed on site were not effective in phosphorus retention. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
D ec 2 01 9 l 0 Regularized Structured Sparsity Convolutional Neural Networks

Deepening and widening convolutional neural networks (CNNs) significantly increases the number of trainable weight parameters by adding more convolutional layers and feature maps per layer, respectively. By imposing interand intra-group sparsity onto the weights of the layers during the training process, a compressed network can be obtained with accuracy comparable to a dense one. In this paper, we propose a new variant of sparse group lasso that blends the l0 norm onto the individual weight parameters and the l2,1 norm onto the output channels of a layer. To address the non-differentiability of the l0 norm, we apply variable splitting resulting in an algorithm that consists of executing stochastic gradient descent followed by hard thresholding for each iteration. Numerical experiments are demonstrated on LeNet-5 and wide-residualnetworks for MNIST and CIFAR 10/100, respectively. They showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method in attaining superior test accuracy with network sparsification on par with the current state of the art.
Landmark Prediction of Survival for Breast Cancer Patients: A Case Study in Tehran, Iran

Background: Breast cancer is the first non-cutaneous malignancy in women and the second cause of death due to cancer all over the world. There are situations where researchers are interested in dynamic prediction of survival of patients where traditional models might fail to achieve this goal. We aimed to use a dynamic prediction model in analyzing survival of breast cancer patients. Methods: We used a data set originates from a retrospective cohort (registry-based) study conducted in 2014 in Tehran, Iran, information of 550 patients were available analyzed. A method of landmarking was utilized for dynamic prediction of survival of the patients. The criteria of time-dependent area under the curve and prediction error curve were used to evaluate the performance of the model. Results: An index of risk score (prognostic index) was calculated according to the available covariates based on Cox proportional hazards. Therefore, hazard of dying for a high-risk patient with breast cancer within the next five years was 2.69 to 3.04 times of that for a low-risk patient. The value of the dynamic C-index was 0.89 using prognostic index as covariate. Conclusion: Generally, the landmark model showed promising performance in predicting survival or probability of dying for breast cancer patients in this study in a predefined window. Therefore, this model can be used in other studies as a useful model for investigating the survival of breast cancer patients.
Climate change scenarios for the Italian mountains Gualdi

Global warming is impacting mountain regions in a particularly severe way, posing a very serious threat to the environment of these areas. Over the last decades, global warming has caused most of (if not all of) Alpine glaciers to recede, affecting discharge of alpine rivers and increasing natural hazards. Future climate change is projected to exacerbate further these trends. The water regime of the Italian mountain areas is projected to undergo substantial changes and because the Alps are the primary source for such major rivers as the Po, Rhine, Danube, Rhone, the impact of a changed mountain climate, and in particular of the precipitation regimes, will be felt far beyond mountainous regions themselves. Reliable estimates of future climate change in the Alpine region are relevant for large parts of the European society and particularly for the Italian one. At the same time, the complex Alpine region poses considerable challenges to climate models, which translate to uncertainties in the climate projections. In the framework of the NextData project, numerous simulations were collected and conducted and then analyzed, in order to produce an estimate, as reliable as possible, of the signal of climate change that could occur in the next decades in the Alpine region, and in the Italian mountains, as a consequence of future emission scenarios. For this purpose, simulations obtained from global and regional, coupled ocean–atmosphere and atmospheric only models, at different spatial resolutions have been considered and analyzed. As a first step, analyses of the capability of models to reproduce the main features of the observed climate (including extreme events) have been conducted, then the climate change signal provided by the models’ simulations has been evaluated. This Chapter provides a summary of the main results obtained from these analyses, where the climate change signals detectable both in the mean values, variability and extreme events over the Mediterranean area, Italian Peninsula and especially Alpine region are illustrated and discussed. In Section 13.1, the main features of observed climate variability and weather extremes at regional scale, and the capability of numerical models to simulate them, are considered and discussed. Section 13.2 provides an overview of the climate change signal at global scale and for the Mediterranean basin, whereas Section 13.3 illustrates the expected changes projected for the Italian mountain areas.
Non-Cognitive Skills and the Returns to Education

Returns to Higher Education are estimated to be around 6-9% in the UK, and while non-cognitive skills (such as locus of control, traits of work ethics, conscientiousness, self-esteem etc) and their impact on life-outcomes have been increasingly studied in psychology, sociology as well as economics, their effect on returns to higher education did not receive the focus it potentially deserves. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People (LSYPE) this paper estimates the returns to Higher Education in the UK while controlling for these non-cognitive skills using standard OLS as well as Propensity Score Matching and Inverse Probability Weighted Regression Adjustment. Against expectation the inclusion of non-cognitive skills does not affect the estimates for returns to higher education greatly, and out of all non-cognitive skills included a high Locus of Control is the only trait that has a (statistically significant) positive impact on income. Having obtained a degree, therefore, far outweighs the effects of non-cognitive skills on income.
SYNTACTIC FEATURES AND DISCOURSE FACTORS IN CHILDREN'S INTERPRETATION OF DEFINITE DETERMINERS IN INALIENABLE POSSESSIONS

One prevailing assumption within generative approaches to language acquisition is the continuity hypothesis, which states that learners’ intermediate stages are possible adult grammars. As the theoretical construct of parameter has evolved towards a smaller, narrowly lexical view of parametrization, the field’s perspective on the task of learning is changing as well. One important domain of language variation (and thus a central part of the learning task) pertains to how languages partition semantic spaces— how the relevant semantic features are mapped onto the relevant morphosyntactic categories. We assume that there is a universal vocabulary of interpretable features available to children’s language acquisition device. A second assumption about learning properties of the syntax/semantic interface is that forms with comparable morphosyntactic distribution lexically compete for a given semantic space (forms avoid being given identical senses, as in Pinker 1984). These assumptions define the learning task as a bootstrapping process that narrows the set of syntactically relevant interpretable features to those of the target grammar. Form-sense mappings are established when lexical units are associated to specific syntactic and semantic frames. Within the domain of definite determiners, crosslinguistic differences in the syntactic and semantic distribution of determiners constitute part of the learning problem and may give rise to non-target representations in young children. Children learning languages with comparable definite determiners may initially develop the same representation for these items, but can eventually use semantic and syntactic distributional information of competing items to narrow the domain
EFFECT OF DEXMEDETOMIDINE ADDED TO SPINAL BUPIVACAINE FOR TOTAL ABDOMINAL HYSTERECTOMY

BACKGROUND: Various adjuvants are being used with local anaesthetics in spinal anaesthesia for prolongation of intraoperative and post-operative analgesia. Dexmedetomidine, a highly selective α2 adrenergic agonist is a new neuroaxial adjuvant gaining popularity. AIMS: To evaluate the onset and duration of sensory and motor block, hemodynamic effect, post-operative analgesia and adverse effects of dexmedetomidine given intrathecally with hyperbaric 0.5% bupivacaine. METHODOLOGY: A study was carried out in 30 adult female patients aged 18-55 yrs of ASA grade I and II in each group scheduled for Total abdominal hysterectomy under spinal anaesthesia. Group B received 2.5ml of 0.5% hyperbaric bupivacaine with 0.5ml of normal saline. Group D received 2.5ml of 0.5% hyperbaric bupivacaine with 10µg of dexmedetomidine in 0.5ml of normal saline. The onset time to reach peak sensory and motor level, regression time of sensory and motor block, rescue analgesia, hemodynamic changes and side effects were recorded. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS USED: Data obtained were tabulated and analyzed using statistical package for social science (SPSS 16.0 evaluation version) to calculate the sample size. Descriptive data are presented as Mean ± SD and Continuous data are analyzed by unpaired't' test. P<0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULTS: Patients in dexmedetomidine group (group D) had a significantly longer sensory and motor block than patients in bupivacaine group (group B). The mean time of sensory regression to S1 was (323 ± 31 min) in group D and (191 ± 15min) in group B. The regression time of motor block to reach Bromage 0 was (314 ± 30 min) in group D and (163 ± 15 min) in group B. The time to rescue analgesia was significantly longer in group D (383 ± 38 min) as compared to group B (228.6 ± 15 min). CONCLUSION: Intrathecal dexmedetomidine as adjuvant to spinal bupivacaine is associated with prolonged sensory and motor block, hemodynamic stability and reduced demand of rescue analgesia in twenty four hours.
OPRM1 and COMT Gene-Gene Interaction Effects on the Inter-individual Variability in Postoperative Pain and Response to Opioids

Background: Treatment of postoperative pain remains suboptimal. This is attributed, in part, to the individualized physiological and psychological perception of pain. Although the effect of genetic variation on pain is unequivocal, precise understating of the effect of multiple gene interaction is yet to be investigated. Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) interacts with several neuroreceptors in the brain including the mu receptor (OPRM1). Hence, we sought to explore the gene-gene interaction effect of OPRM1 and COMT on postoperative pain and opioid dose required for pain management. Methods: We used genotypes and clinical data for 153 postoperative orthopedic trauma patients. For the COMT gene four single nucleotide polymorphisms (rs6269, rs4633, rs4818 and rs4680), three haplotypes (ACCG, ATCA, and GCGG), and two diplotypes (low and high pain intensity) were considered for their interactions with A118G of OPRM1 on postoperative pain and opioid consumption. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and multiple regression. Analyses were repeated including only the Caucasian subjects. Results: For postoperative opioid consumption; a significant interaction was found between OPRM1 and COMT rs4680 (b=0.093, p=.037) and OPRM1 and COMT rs4633 (b=0.097, p=.037). The interactions between OPRM1 and COMT rs6269 and OPRM1 and COMT diplotypes demonstrated trends toward significance (b=-0.075, p=.080 and b=0.071, p=.070, respectively). The results for OPRM1×COMT rs4680 and OPRM1×COMT rs4633 on opioid consumption were maintained even after restricting the analyses to only Caucasian subjects. For postoperative pain scores, a significant interaction was found between OPRM1 and the GCGG haplotype of COMT (b=-0.926, p=.017). The interaction between OPRM1 and COMT rs4818 demonstrated a trend (b=-0.755, p=.060). When the sample was limited to only Caucasian subjects, only a trend was observed for the interaction effect of OPRM1 and the GCGG haplotype of COMT on postoperative pain (p= .070). The interactions of OPRM1×ACCG haplotype and OPRM1×diplotypes of COMT also showed trends toward significance (b=1.110, p= .058 and b=0.831, p= .050, respectively). Conclusion: OPRM1×COMT interactions may influence the variability in postoperative pain and response to opioids. Individualized pain management based on genetic variation can be an effective strategy to maximize the usefulness of pain management.