Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cerebrospinal Fluid and Serum Levels of Growth Hormone, Insulinlike Growth Factor 1, Insulinlike Growth Factor Binding Protein 3, and Ghrelin in Patients With Bacterial and Tuberculous Meningitis

Background The somatotropic hormone levels change in acute and prolonged critical illnesses such as tuberculous meningitis (TbM). This study aimed to determine the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum levels of growth hormone (GH), insulinlike growth factor 1 (IGF-1), insulinlike growth factor–binding protein 3 (IGFBP-3), and ghrelin in patients with TbM and to compare the results with those of the patients with bacterial meningitis (BM) and of healthy controls. Methods Nine patients with TbM and 14 patients with BM between the ages of 7 and 12 years were enrolled in this study. The control group was composed of 14 patients with no central nervous system infections. Growth hormone, IGF-1, and IGFBP-3 levels in serum and CSF were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and ghrelin levels were measured by radioimmunoassay. Results Growth hormone and IGF-1 levels in serum and CSF were significantly lower in the TbM group than in the BM and control groups (P < 0.05). Insulinlike growth factor–binding protein 3 levels were lower in the TbM and BM groups than in the control group (P < 0.05). Ghrelin level in the TbM group was significantly higher than in the BM and control groups (P < 0.05). Conclusions Levels of growth factors such as GH and IGF-1 were lower in TbM than in other central nervous system infections. These data suggest that IGF-1, which is known to have a neuroprotective effect, may be the cause of neuronal loss and cerebral atrophy in TbM.
Connectivity for an unlabelled bridge-addable graph class

Let the class A of graphs be bridge-addable; that is, whenever a graph G in A has vertices u and v in different components then the graph G+uv is in A. For a random graph sampled uniformly from the graphs in A on vertex set {1,. ,n}, there are known lower bounds on the probability of being connected (for example, the probability is always at least 1/e). We ask here about similar results when the random graph is sampled uniformly from the unlabelled n-vertex graphs in A.
Expressions of miR-21 and miR-210 in Breast Cancer and Their Predictive Values for Prognosis

Background: We aimed to investigate the expressions of miR-21 and miR-210 in the breast cancer tissue and their correlation with clinicopathological features and prognosis. Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed on 68 patients with breast cancer treated surgically in Wuhan General Hospital of Guangzhou Military in 2014–2015. The breast cancer tissue and the adjacent normal tissue were collected from the patients. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was used to detect the expression levels of miR-21 and miR-210 in the breast cancer and adjacent normal tissues. Results: According to qRT-PCR, the expression levels of miR-210 and miR-21 in the breast cancer tissue were significantly higher than those in the adjacent normal tissue (P<0.05), which were significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis, clinical staging and differentiation of patients (P<0.05). miR-21 and miR-210 were significantly positive correlated in both breast cancer tissues and adjacent normal tissues (r=0.7014, 0.7502, P<0.001). The survival rate in the miR-210 high expression group was significantly lower than that in the miR-210 low expression group (P<0.05), whereas there was no significant difference between the miR-21 high and low expression groups. Conclusion: miR-21 and miR-210 are highly expressed in the breast cancer tissue and significantly correlated with lymph node metastasis, clinical staging and differentiation. miR-210, the up-regulated expression of which is related to the poor prognosis of patients with breast cancer, may be a potential prognostic indicator for breast cancer, which can be used to judge the prognosis.
Use of a Frequency-Modulated System for Veterans with Blast Exposure, Perceived Hearing Problems, and Normal Hearing Sensitivity

Abstract Traumatic brain injury can impact the central auditory system leading to poor auditory recall and increased difficulties hearing in poor acoustic environments. In recent years, audiologists have increasingly encountered blast-exposed veterans who report speech understanding problems that are disproportionate to their essentially normal hearing sensitivity, and thus are thought to have an auditory processing disorder. In light of studies showing frequency-modulated (FM) systems to be effective rehabilitation for auditory processing difficulties, we examined the use of an FM system intervention for blast-exposed veterans with functional hearing problems in the presence of normal hearing sensitivity. The outcomes for three veterans who were provided with an FM system as part of a multisite randomized clinical trial are described. Data indicate that FM systems are beneficial for some patients reporting hearing problems in the presence of normal hearing sensitivity but factors other than audiometric profile and reported complaints influence outcome. These include understanding of speech in noise, patient communication demands, auditory lifestyle, and the presence of posttraumatic stress disorder or other mental health factors. Furthermore, education (and reeducation if necessary) of the patient and their spouse or family is critical to successful outcome.
Leptin gene polymorphism in Boerawa and Peranakan Ettawa (PE) goats from South Sulawesi region

Boerawa and Peranakan Etawa (PE) goats are potential genetic resources to be developed and utilized as meat production. A crossbreeding between local female PE goat with male Boar goat [1] because has become the main component in many goat improvement programs [2] are a reasonable approach for targeting better performance and meat quality production [1]. A crossbreed goat between Boer and PE goats namely Boerawa which has advantages such as high growth of 0.17 kg / day and good adaptability [3]. PE goat is one of the producers of animal protein whose maintenance can be directed at increasing milk production because it can produce milk as much as 1.5 3 liters every day [4]. Utilization of the genetic potential of local goats is one of the programs carried out by the Soppeng District Agricultural Service to improve the genetic quality of goats, especially the goats from the crossing of the Boer goat and the PE called Boerawa goats. It is known that Boer goats have rapid growth and PE goats that have a high level of adaptation and high milk production. Genetic diversity information in particular of genes that control economical properties on the goat are needed to improve of the genetic quality and development of local goat [5]. The productivity of Boerawa and PE goats can be increased through efforts to improve genetic quality through growth. Growth is a trait that is controlled by many genes. One of the genes that influence the growth of goats is leptin. The leptin gene functions to produce the hormone leptin synthesized from adipose tissue (fat) which then plays an important role in controlling body weight, feed consumption and energy balance [6]. Polymorphism in exon 3 intron 2 leptin genes was reported to occur in Nilagiri sheep [7] and Malpura sheep [8]. In addition, the leptin gene polymorphism is also associated with the nature of production in sheep [9] and is significant with the nature of growth in Kermani sheep [10]. The purpose of this study was to identify the diversity of the leptin gene in Boerawa goats and PE and is expected to be an information material in the genetic quality of Boerawa and PE goats.
Not compromising: measuring the impact of a poverty graduation program on women’s empowerment using experiments

We estimate the impact of a poverty graduation program on female empowerment. We measure female empowerment using an incentivised decision making task designed to derive an objective indicator of empowerment. This measure is compared with traditional survey-based measures of empowerment. A positive impact of participation in the program on empowerment is found when it is measured using an experimental indicator, but no significant effect is found when using traditional survey measures. The experimental indicator is also found to better correlate with indicators of well-being that are associated with more empowered women. ∗The data used in this study were supplied by The BOMA Project. We thank staff of The BOMA Project especially Kathleen Colson, Ahmed Omar, Meshack Omarre, Fredrick Learapo, Sabdio Doti, Bernadette Njoroge, Alex Villec, and Sean Kelly for their assistance in data collection as well as in facilitating the first author’s stay in Kenya. All analyses, interpretations or conclusions based on these data are solely that of the authors. The BOMA Project disclaims responsibility for any such analyses, interpretations or conclusions. †PhD Candidate, Economics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Corresponding author (e-mail: vilas.gobin@monash.edu) ‡Associate Professor, Economics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. §Senior Lecturer, Economics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Banks and Monetary Policy Transmission in the West African Economic and Monetary Union

This paper aims at examining the role of banks in the transmission of the monetary policy in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). By using a simple theoretical model, this paper shows that improving the quality of institutions and an increase in competition strengthens the transmission of monetary policy while capital requirement behaves like an additional cost to the borrowers. Applying a dynamic panel estimator to a large sample of WAEMU banks, the paper finds that bank lending is sensitive to monetary policy and capital-constrained banks reduce further their lending following a tight monetary policy compared to less capital-constrained banks. Moreover, an improvement in the quality of institutions seems to strengthen the transmission of monetary policy.
Fetal Myocardial Reduction in Hyperglycemic Mouse Pregnancy is Associated with Dys-regulated Expression of the Anti-apoptotic Gene Bcl-2 in the Developing Heart. Preliminary Results

____________________________________________________________________________________________ This work was carried out in collaboration between all authors. Authors JCG and PN designed the study, performed the statistical analysis, wrote the protocol, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. Authors MRP and SDH managed the analyses of the study and reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. ABSTRACT Aims: We previously detected significant late-gestation ventricular myocardial reduction in fetal mouse hearts from hyperglycemic dams. Flow cytometric analysis of the myocardial cells showed an enhanced rate of apoptosis, suggesting dysregulated cell death as a mechanism associated with the myocardial defect. The present study therefore examined expression of the anti-apoptotic gene dams on days 14 and 17 of gestation. Methodology: The hyperglycemia was induced in female Rockefeller (inbred CD1) mice, 6 to 8 weeks old, by pre-breeding streptozotocin (STZ) injection. Results: Expression of Bcl-2 in the fetal myocardium from the diabetic dams was decreased by 53% and 51% at GD14 and 17, respectively. Conclusion: These results suggest maternal hyperglycemia may damage the developing myocardium by altering expression of gene pathways that regulate cell death.
Semantic Segmentation With Context Encoding and Multi-Path Decoding

Semantic image segmentation aims to classify every pixel of a scene image to one of many classes. It implicitly involves object recognition, localization, and boundary delineation. In this paper, we propose a segmentation network called CGBNet to enhance the segmentation performance by context encoding and multi-path decoding. We first propose a context encoding module that generates context-contrasted local feature to make use of the informative context and the discriminative local information. This context encoding module greatly improves the segmentation performance, especially for inconspicuous objects. Furthermore, we propose a scale-selection scheme to selectively fuse the segmentation results from different-scales of features at every spatial position. It adaptively selects appropriate score maps from rich scales of features. To improve the segmentation performance results at boundary, we further propose a boundary delineation module that encourages the location-specific very-low-level features near the boundaries to take part in the final prediction and suppresses them far from the boundaries. The proposed segmentation network achieves very competitive performance in terms of all three different evaluation metrics consistently on the six popular scene segmentation datasets, Pascal Context, SUN-RGBD, Sift Flow, COCO Stuff, ADE20K, and Cityscapes.
Mutations in chromatin modifiers and Ephrin signaling components in Vein of Galen malformation

Daniel Duran1*, Jungmin Choi2,22*, Xue Zeng2*, Sheng Chih Jin2,22*, Carol Nelson-Williams2, Bogdan Yatsula4, Jonathan Gaillard1, Charuta Gavankar Furey1, Andrew T. Timberlake2, Weilai Dong2, Michelle A. Sorscher5, Erin Loring2, Jennifer Klein6, Qiongshi Lu7, August Allocco1, Ava Hunt1, Jason K. Karimy1, Mark W. Youngblood1,2, Jinwei Zhang8, Michael L. DiLuna1, Charles C. Matouk1, Shrikant Mane9, Irina Tikhonova9, Christopher Castaldi9, Francesc LópezGiráldez9, James Knight9, Shozeb Haider10, Mariya Soban10,11, Seth L. Alper12, Masaki Komiyama13, Andrew F. Ducruet14, Joseph M. Zabramski14, Alan Dardik4, Brian P. Walcott15, Christopher J. Stapleton16, Beverly Aagaard-Kienitz17, Georges Rodesch18, Eric Jackson19, Edward R. Smith20, Darren B. Orbach6,20, Alejandro Berenstein5, Kaya Bilguvar2,9, Miikka Vikkula21, Murat Gunel1,2, Richard P. Lifton2,22#, and Kristopher T. Kahle1,23,24#
Understanding Social Roles of Learners in Transdisciplinary Education via Social Network Analysis

Transdisciplinary education focuses on teaching and learning across domains where societal issues are addressed by linking them to science. As technology is rapidly growing, more social platforms are integrated in transdisciplinary education in the aim of facilitating learning towards becoming a more social and connected learning community. Social network platforms are capable of providing such means – yet, social roles in these environments are still not fully understood. As such, the study investigates the social roles of learners on social networks in transdisciplinary learning at higher education. Transdisciplinary learning is carried out in a core university course where participants were from economics and social sciences backgrounds. Social roles are assessed using social network analysis, where it is conducted through measurements such as betweeness and closeness centrality. Social diagrams are also illustrated to visualize different social roles of learners. Via the analysis, the findings indicate social roles of learners and their importance towards facilitation of transdisciplinary learning. The findings could assist future educators and researchers in understanding social roles of learners in transdisciplinary learning.
Running head : Cantonese-English loanword priming Full title : No significant loanword priming advantage in Cantonese-English bilinguals

Bilingual speakers can process a word more quickly if it is primed by its translation equivalent than if it is primed by an unrelated word. This translation priming effect is particularly large when the words are cognates or loanwords. This pattern, however, has only been tested in bilinguals for whom both languages are written with phonology-based writing systems. In this high-power study we test whether there is a similar magnification of the translation priming effect in loanwords when the two languages use different kinds of writing systems. Using data from 200 Cantonese-English bilinguals, we find significant translation priming but no advantage for loanword pairs relative to non-loanword pairs. This suggests that the priming advantage reported for loanwords and cognates in many languages is not cross-linguistically general, but may depend on certain properties shared by the two languages in question, such as the writing system or the nature of the relation between the loanwords and their translation equivalents.
Analyzing the characteristics of music playlists using song lyrics and content-based features / Stefan Wurzinger, BSc

In the recent years, music streaming services evolved which facilitate new research possibilities in the field of music information retrieval. Publicly available user-generated playlists offered by the music streaming platform Spotify allow to disclose properties of tracks shared within a playlist. Therefore, about 12,000 playlists consisting of more than 200,000 unique English tracks created by approximately 1,000 persons are explored through applying a multimodal supervised classification approach. Various state-of-the-art algorithms are surveyed while incorporating with a bunch of acoustic and lyrics (lexical, linguistic, semantic and syntactic) properties. A novel data set consisting of preprocessed lyrics gathered from ten different websites serves as a source for extracting lyrics features. Examinations revealed that acoustic features are superior than lyrics features in representing a music playlist with respect to the classification accuracy. Nonetheless, combinations of lyrics features are rather equally capable to capture the characteristics of playlists.
Impact of Periampullary Diverticulum on ERCP Papillary Cannulation

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the association between periampullary diverticulum (PAD) and difficult biliary cannulation, as well as to evaluate the impact of different types of PAD on the cannulation success rate and adverse events. Methods: A total of 636 patients who underwent endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) during the study period were prospectively studied and divided into two groups based on the presence or absence of PAD. In group A, 126 patients had PAD compared with 510 patients in group B without PAD. The primary outcome measurements were ERCP procedures time, selective cannulation techniques, and cannulation difficulty in addition to cannulation success rate and ERCP-related adverse events. The difficult cannulation was analyzed using logistic regression considering age, co-morbidities, the presence of PAD types, and indications as independent factors. Results: The average cohort age was 65.30±16.67 years, and 52.7% were male. Significant higher rates of choledocholithiasis, cholangitis, and biliary pancreatitis were reported in the group of PAD (p<0.05). Successful selective cannulation was achieved in 97.6% in group A and 95.3% in group B (p>0.05). The cannulation time was significantly longer in the presence of PAD (5.1 min, vs. 4.09 min, p<0.05). There was no significant difference in the rate of overall adverse events and post ERCP pancreatic PEP. Conclusions: The presence of PAD did not affect the duration or success of the ERCP procedure. Furthermore, it was associated with longer cannulation time and increase in the cannulation difficulty, especially with PAD type 1. The presence of PAD did not affect the duration or success of the ERCP procedure. Furthermore, it was associated with longer cannulation time and increase in the cannulation difficulty, especially with PAD type 1.
Rapport BIPM-2004/04: Determining the temperature coefficient of remanent magnetization for the magnets used to servocontrol the FB-2 balance

An experiment was devised to determine the reversible temperature coefficient of remanance, α, for small magnets operating near room temperature. Such magnets are used to servocontrol the FB-2 balance. The manufacturer specifies that α is within the limits ±50 × 10 -6 /°C and this has now been confirmed. The analysis also reveals an ambiguity in the customary specification of α.
Effects of MACC1 polymorphisms on hepatocellular carcinoma development and clinical characteristics

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a major malignancy of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Metastasis-associated in colon cancer-1 (MACC1) was suggested as a marker for vascular invasive HCC. This study investigated the MACC1 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to evaluate HCC susceptibility and clinicopathological characteristics. In this study, real-time polymerase chain reaction was applied to analyze five SNPs of MACC1 rs1990172, rs975263, rs3095007, rs4721888, and rs3735615 in 378 patients with HCC and 1199 cancer-free controls. The results showed that in 151 HCC patients among smokers who carried MACC1 rs1990172 "CA + AA" variants had a lower risk of developing a large tumor (odds ratio [OR] = 0.375, p = 0.026), more advanced clinical stage ([OR] = 0.390, p=0.032), and vascular invasion ([OR] = 0.198, p = 0.034). In 137 HCC patients among drinkers who carried MACC1 rs4721888 "GC + CC" variants had a higher risk to develop vascular invasion ([OR] = 3.780, p = 0.009). Further analyses revealed a statistical significance of aberrant AST/ALT ratio in HCC patients with MACC1 rs975263 "AG+GG" variants before adjustment of age and alcohol drinking. In conclusion, our results suggested that the MACC1 SNPs rs1990172, rs4721888, and rs975263 are involved in HCC progression and clinical characteristics. MACC1 polymorphisms may serve as a marker or a predictor to evaluate HCC progression and prognosis.
A data driven and tool supported CLD creation approach

The creation of Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) is a major phase in the System Dynamics (SD) life-cycle, since the created CLDs express dependencies and feedback in the system under study, as well as, guide modellers in building meaningful simulation models. The creation of CLDs is still subject to the modeller’s domain expertise (mental model) and her ability to abstract the system, because of the strong dependency on semantic knowledge. Since the beginning of SD, available system data sources (written and numerical models) have always been sparsely available, very limited and imperfect and thus of little benefit to the whole modelling process. However, in recent years, we have seen an explosion in generated data, especially in all business related domains that are analysed via Business Dynamics (BD). In this paper, we introduce a systematic tool supported CLD creation approach, which analyses and utilises available disparate data sources within the business domain. We demonstrate the application of our methodology on a given business use-case and evaluate the resulting CLD. Finally, we propose directions for future research to further push the automation in the CLD creation and increase confidence in the generated CLDs.