Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Approach to Evaluate Inhibition of Cyclophilin D-Sensitive Mitochondrial Permeability Transition Pore Formation in Chronic Kidney Disease

The mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) contributes to pathological outcomes in various contexts of tissue injury and disease involving mitochondrial perturbation, including in the kidneys. The prominent stressors leading to formation of the mPTP include increased cellular calcium influx and increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production or accumulation. Subsequent opening of the mPTP can be a key contributor to poor outcome through several possible mechanisms including a decreased ability of cells to produce ATP and the induction of necrotic and apoptotic cell death. Here, we prevented expression of a critical modulator of the mPTP, namely Cyclophilin D (CypD), in mice that develop chronic kidney disease (CKD) by crossing mice with CypD deficiency to those carrying the Col4a3 mutation modeling Alport nephropathy. The mouse model of Alport nephropathy exhibits increased ROS production and tubule epithelium cell death in the kidney, suggesting that mPTP opening may be occurring and driving disease progression. In the present study, we found that human and murine kidneys with CKD exhibited alterations indicative of mitochondrial dysfunction possibly associated with mPTP formation. CypD deletion, however, did not improve survival or renal function in Alport mice nor did it reduce histopathology. Together, these results demonstrate that inhibition of CypD activity as an approach to limit mPTP formation does not appear to be a viable pharmacologic target for the treatment of Alport nephropathy.
SHORT TITLE: Psychological flexibility and self-compassion in gay and heterosexual men Psychological flexibility and self-compassion in gay and heterosexual men: how they relate to childhood memories, shame and depressive symptoms

This study explores differences between gay men (N = 53) and heterosexual men (N = 52) regarding memories of shame events and of warmth and safeness experiences with parents during childhood and adolescence, self-compassion, psychological flexibility, internal shame and depression. Also, it aims to explore whether psychological flexibility and selfcompassion play a role in the association between these memories and internal shame and depressive symptoms. Results confirmed the mediating role of psychological flexibility and self-compassion. These findings suggest the appropriateness of promoting acceptance and self-compassion towards difficult memories in a therapeutic setting with gay men experiencing shame and depressive symptoms.
[Effect of acupuncture and moxibustion on brain functional connectivity network in patients with refractory facial paralysis].

OBJECTIVE To observe the effects of acupuncture on resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) in patients with refractory peripheral facial paralysis, and to preliminarily explore the central mechanism of acupuncture for this disease. METHODS Twenty patients with refractory peripheral facial paralysis were selected as subject and treated with acupuncture at Qianzheng (EX-HN 16), Fengchi (GB 20), Cuanzhu (BL 2), Dicang (ST 4), Jiache (ST 6), Shuigou (GV 26), Chengjiang (CV 24), Yifeng (TE 17), Touwei (ST 8), Sibai (ST 2), Yingxiang (LI 20) and Hegu (LI 4), once every other day, three times a week, 15 times as a course of treatment. The 1-course treatment was given. The score of Sunnybrook (Toronto) facial grading system was used to evaluate the clinical efficacy before and after the treatment. In addition, 20 healthy volunteers were selected as control. For patients, the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) scans were performed before and after treatment, for healthy volunteers, the scans were performed when they were recruited. The brain magnetic resonance images were analyzed with left primary motor area (LMⅠ) and right primary motor area (RMⅠ) as regions of interest. The differences of rs-FC between patients with refractory peripheral facial paralysis before and after treatment and healthy volunteers were compared. RESULTS Compared before treatment, the Sunnybrook score was increased after the treatment (P<0.05). Compared with healthy volunteers, the functional connection between bilateral primary motor areas (MⅠ) and multiple brain areas were enhanced in patients before treatment, and most of brain areas were located in the anterior motor area (middle frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus), posterior central gyrus, anterior cuneiform lobe, middle temporal gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus and cerebellum lobe. Compared before treatment, the left inferior frontal gyrus was the strong functional connection area between LMⅠ and whole brain after acupuncture treatment, and there was no significant difference between RMⅠ and resting-state whole brain. Compared with healthy volunteers, the functional connections between bilateral MⅠ and multiple brain regions were enhanced after acupuncture, and most of the main brain regions were consistent with those before treatment. CONCLUSION (1) Acupuncture could effectively improve the clinical symptoms of refractory peripheral facial paralysis. (2) The brain function of patients with refractory peripheral facial paralysis has been changed before acupuncture, which may be caused by the reactive compensation of the brain. (3) Acupuncture could enhance the functional connection between LMⅠ and left inferior frontal gyrus to promote the compensatory response, which may be one of the central mechanisms of acupuncture for refractory peripheral facial paralysis.
Safety and efficacy of treatment of very small intracranial aneurysms

Purpose Very small intracranial aneurysms (VSIAs) may cause many neurological complications and even death. Thanks to technological progress and higher quality of non-invasive neuroimaging methods, these pathologies can be investigated sooner and treated earlier. Due to the controversy surrounding invasive treatment of these pathologies, the aim of the study was to analyse methods of treatment, their outcome, and complications in a group of patients with VSIAs. Material and methods Out of 444 cases of intracranial aneurysms treated in our centre, 65 aneurysms met the radiological criteria of VSIAs. The parameters – width and length of the aneurysm’s neck and width, length, and height of the aneurysm’s dome – were measured. The analysed parameters were as follows: symptoms upon admission and after treatment, days in hospital, and intraoperative complications. Clinical and radiological intensity of subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) was evaluated by using the Hunt-Hess and Fisher scales. The degree of embolisation of the aneurysm after the procedure was assessed using the Montreal Scale. Clinical outcome was assessed by Glasgow Outcome Scale. Results 50.77% of VSIAs were treated with endovascular procedures and 49.23% with neurosurgical clipping. SAH was presented in 38.46% of patients with VSIAs. Intraoperative complications were presented in 16.92% of patients with VSIAs, and the most common complication was ischaemic stroke. Stents were used in 51.52% of VSIAs. In 69.70% of embolisation procedures at VSIAs complete obliteration was achieved. The average result in the Montreal Scale was 1.31 (SD = 0.66). Conclusion VSIAs can be treated as effectively and safely as larger aneurysms, by both endovascular and surgical methods.
The Effects Of Plant Growth Regulators (Naa+Bap) And Explant Types On Propagation Buds Of Asam Gelugur (Garcinia Atroviridis Griff)

The research was aimed to determine the effect rasio combination of Naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) and 6-Benzylaminopurine (BAP) plant growth regulators and explant types of Asam Gelugur plant (Garcinia atroviridis Griff) and their interaction in the Murashige Skoog (MS) media. This research was conducted in the Tissue Culture Laboratory, Faculty of Agriculture, Universitas Sumatra Utara, Indonesia in February until June 2018. The research was used the completely randomized design with 2 treatment factors with three replications. The first factors is combination of NAA and BAP dosage with nine rates, including G1 (0.2 mg.l -1 NAA + 0.5 mg.l -1 BAP); G2 (0.2 mg.l -1 NAA + 1 mg.l -1 BAP); G3 (0.2 mg.l -1 NAA + 1.5 mg.l -1 BAP); G4 (0.4 mg.l -1 NAA + 0.5 mg.l -1 BAP); G5 (0.4 mg.l -1 NAA + 1 mg.l -1 BAP); G6 (0.4 mg.l -1 NAA + 1.5 mg.l -1 BAP); G7 (0.6 mg.l -1 NAA + 0.5 mg.l -1 BAP); G8 (0.6 mg.l -1 NAA + 1 mg.l -1 BAP); and G9 (0.6 mg.l -1 NAA + 1.5 mg.l -1 BAP). The second factors is the explant types such as apical shoot (E1) and axillary bud (E2). The results were showed that the addition of 0.2 mg.l -1 NAA + 1 mg.l -1 BAP (G2) in the MS media had significant effect on the percentage of bud formed, number of buds, length of buds, and number of leaves. The axillary bud explant (E2) had significant on the number of buds. The interaction of E2G2 had significant on the number of buds in G. Atroviridis plant. The combination of E2G2 in vitro can propagation of buds then recommended to prevent the scarcity of G. atroviridis plant.
Strategic Group Analysis by Using Fuzzy Clustering

Strategic group is a group of firms in an industry following the same or similar strategy along a set of strategic dimensions. The aim of strategic group analysis is to find out if clusters of firms that have a similar strategic position exist within an industry or not, therefore it can be used as one of the methods for revealing the competitive structure. Using a theoretical conceptual framework applicable for the construction industry and fuzzy clustering, the objective of this research is to identify possible strategic groups within the Turkish construction industry. In this research, by considering the cluster validation techniques developed for fuzzy clustering, the number of the strategic groups is determined as three. The membership degrees of the companies to all clusters are obtained at the end of the analysis. It is concluded that the companies in the same strategic group do not necessarily implement the strategic recipe of the group at the same degree. Therefore, the traditional strategic group concept in which the clusters are wholly separated does not reflect the real strategic group structure of the Turkish construction industry and heterogeneity of strategies implemented in each group. Findings of this study can be used by professionals to understand their current strategic positions within the competitive environment and even in their strategic groups.
A Closer Look at Metacognitive Scaffolding: Solving Test Cases Before Programming

Prior research has shown that novices face metacognitive difficulties associated with understanding problem statements. Metacognition refers to the processes that an individual uses to plan, monitor, and assess their own understanding and performance and is often described as "thinking about thinking. " Metacognitive awareness is a higher-order thinking skill that includes knowing when and how to use particular strategies for problem-solving. However, novice students often lack metacognitive skills. This can be a disadvantage, particularly when learning in unfamiliar domains. For instance, students who misinterpret a problem statement will most likely form an invalid mental model of the problem which they may find difficult to correct. A prior think-aloud study that used an intervention focused on this initial step in the problem-solving process showed promising results at a small scale. In this paper, we report on a large (n = 976) controlled experiment to examine the scalability of the aforementioned study. We measure the effect on novice programmer performance of metacognitive scaffolding that requires deliberate reflection on the problem statement before any code is written. Although control and experimental groups exhibited similar completion rates overall, students in the experimental group encountered significantly fewer errors that related to the formation of an incorrect mental model of the problem. These results hold promise in moving towards more reliable methods for developing metacognitive awareness in novice programmers.
Digital Participation in Prison - A Public Discourse Analysis of the Use of ICT by Inmates

Digital participation has become an important issue in modern societies, typically focusing on groups prone to marginalization. From this perspective, less attention has yet been paid to imprisoned persons. Many penitentiary systems are formally characterized by the basic requirement of resocialization. Accordingly, life in prison should be largely adapted to conditions outside and to fundamental social changes, which must be considered in designing the framework for prison systems. Still, the digital opening of the prison is debated controversially, not least due to anticipated security issues. Hence, to raise awareness about challenges for digital participation of prisoners, we conducted a knowledge-sociological analysis (SKAD) of the public discourse on the use of ICT by prison inmates in Germany. We thereby seek to advance knowledge and insights from social and organizational practice arising from the use of ICT in context of total institutions and create the basis for action from a socio-informatics perspective.
Creativity, Copyright, and Close-Knit Communities

Social norms as a regulatory mechanism often carry more weight than formal law--particularly in contexts when legal rules are gray. In online creative communities that focus on remix, community members must navigate copyright complexities regarding how they are permitted to re-use existing content. This paper focuses on one such community--transformative fandom--where strong social norms regulate behavior beyond copyright law. We conducted interviews with fan creators about their "unwritten rules" surrounding copying and remix and identified highly consistent social norms that have been remarkably effective in policing this community. In examining how these norms have formed over time, and how they are enforced, we conclude that the effectiveness of norms in encouraging cooperative behavior is due in part to a strong sense of social identity within the community. Furthermore, our findings suggest the benefits of creating formal rules within a community that support existing norms, rather than imposing rules from external sources.
Control Algorithms for a Mobile Robot Application in a Fog Computing Environment

The growing demand of industrial, automotive and service robots presents a challenge to the centralized Cloud Robotics model in terms of privacy, security, latency, bandwidth, and reliability. Especially, mobile robots have limited on-board computational power which restricts their mission planning in autonomous applications. With the evolution of Fog computing, computations may be offloaded to Fog devices and/or smart gateway devices which together form a distributed computing platform in close proximity to the mobile robot. In this work, we demonstrate the application of Fog computing for mobile robots with a specific case study of color-based object detection, tracking and mapping in a confined area. The computations required for image processing are offloaded to the Fog devices via Fog nodes and the results are acquired back in real-time. The control algorithms for tracking predefined paths and mapping a pre- defined area are validated using a controlled mobile robot with an on-board camera and processing unit. Also, the effects of improvement in latency due to fog environment as compared to on-board computation on the mobile robot is demonstrated.
Space-Time Drift Point Detection in Mobility Patterns

Location-aware information is now commonplace, as the ubiquity and pervasiveness of technology enabled its generation and storage at large scale. These data constitute a rich representation of entities’ whereabouts and behavior as they move on the map. Although several studies reported considerable predictability of such mobility patterns, several factors may impose significant changes on moving behavior. Being able to detect these changes can benefit several applications. In this article, we formalize and address the problem of detecting mobility drifts in mobility patterns. This problem is particularly challenging due to the noisy and incomplete nature of the data. We design non-parametric tests and present two algorithms to detect mobility drifts when the putative drift point is known in advance and there is no previous knowledge about the existence of potential changes, and we need to search for the most likely drift point rigorously. To evaluate our algorithms, we perform an extensive experimental study with real-world data coming from a variety of scenarios, such as geo-tagged social media data and GPS traces of connected vehicles. The results show the effectiveness of our algorithms, being able to identify existing drift points on spatial mobility patterns correctly.
An Automatic Relevance Determination Prior Bayesian Neural Network for Controlled Variable Selection

We present an Automatic Relevance Determination prior Bayesian Neural Network(BNN-ARD) weight l2-norm measure as a feature importance statistic for the model-x knockoff filter. We show on both simulated data and the Norwegian wind farm dataset that the proposed feature importance statistic yields statistically significant improvements relative to similar feature importance measures in both variable selection power and predictive performance on a real world dataset.
From deep learning to mechanistic understanding in neuroscience: the structure of retinal prediction

Recently, deep feedforward neural networks have achieved considerable success in modeling biological sensory processing, in terms of reproducing the input-output map of sensory neurons. However, such models raise profound questions about the very nature of explanation in neuroscience. Are we simply replacing one complex system (a biological circuit) with another (a deep network), without understanding either? Moreover, beyond neural representations, are the deep network's computational mechanisms for generating neural responses the same as those in the brain? Without a systematic approach to extracting and understanding computational mechanisms from deep neural network models, it can be difficult both to assess the degree of utility of deep learning approaches in neuroscience, and to extract experimentally testable hypotheses from deep networks. We develop such a systematic approach by combining dimensionality reduction and modern attribution methods for determining the relative importance of interneurons for specific visual computations. We apply this approach to deep network models of the retina, revealing a conceptual understanding of how the retina acts as a predictive feature extractor that signals deviations from expectations for diverse spatiotemporal stimuli. For each stimulus, our extracted computational mechanisms are consistent with prior scientific literature, and in one case yields a new mechanistic hypothesis. Thus overall, this work not only yields insights into the computational mechanisms underlying the striking predictive capabilities of the retina, but also places the framework of deep networks as neuroscientific models on firmer theoretical foundations, by providing a new roadmap to go beyond comparing neural representations to extracting and understand computational mechanisms.
CIGARETTE PACKAGE WARNING LABELS : INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GRAPHIC IMAGES AMONG NEW AND OCCASIONAL SMOKERS Submitted

GRAPHIC CIGARETTE PACKAGE WARNING LABELS: INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GRAPHIC IMAGES AMONG NEW AND OCCASIONAL SMOKERS Smoking is a major public health concern. As a result of recent legislation, cigarette manufacturers will soon be required to display graphic pictorial depictions of the health consequences of tobacco on all products sold in the U.S. Research has shown that fear appeal messages can be effective for health behavior change, but little research has examined the effects of graphic imagery in warning messages. The present study explored the effectiveness of graphic and non-graphic cigarette package warning labels and examined potential mediating processes among occasional and recently initiating smokers. No significant direct effects of the graphic warning labels (as compared to non-graphic labels) on explicit attitudes, implicit attitudes, and intentions to not smoke were found. The results also show that graphic warning labels were associated with increased perceived personal relevance and negative affective reactions compared to non-graphic warning labels. Personal relevance was also found to mediate the relationship between warning label condition and negative implicit attitudes. Implications for prevention are discussed.
Meta-analyses of the association between the PPARGC1A Gly482Ser polymorphism and athletic performance

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ coactivator 1α (PGC1α) encoded by the PPARGC1A gene is a vital regulator of glucose and fatty acid oxidation, mitochondrial biogenesis, and skeletal muscle fibre conversion. Several studies have investigated the association between PPARGC1A Gly482Ser polymorphism and athletic performance in humans. However, the results were contradictory. In the present study, two meta-analyses were performed to assess the association between the Gly482Ser polymorphism and endurance or power athletic performance to resolve this inconsistency. Ten articles were identified, including a total of 3,708 athletes and 6,228 controls. Higher frequencies of the Gly/Gly genotype (OR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.11–1.42) and the Gly allele (OR, 1.29; 95% CI, 1.09–1.52) were observed in Caucasian endurance athletes. Furthermore, higher incidences of the Gly/Gly genotype (OR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.16–1.46) and the Gly allele (OR, 1.22; 95% CI, 1.12–1.33) were observed in power athletes compared to controls. This finding demonstrates that the Gly/Gly genotype and the Gly allele of the PPARGC1A Gly482Ser polymorphism may facilitate athletic performance regardless of the type of sport, as well as providing solid evidence to support the possible influence of genetic factors on human athletic performance.
WHO EMRO | Complementary and alternative medicine use for weight management among females in Jordan; a community-based survey

Background: The relationship between obesity and various chronic diseases is well documented. In Jordan, the prevalence of overweight (30.0%) and obesity (38.8%) among females is on the rise, encouraging many adults to rely on alternative health care methods to manage their weight. Aims: We explored the status of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use for weight management among adult females in Jordan and the possible relationship between CAM use and body mass index. Methods: An interviewer-administered, structured questionnaire was used to collect data on the use and safety of CAM for weight management from 858 women in 2015. Responses were coded and analysed using SPSS, version 20. Results: Around 40% of the respondents reported using some form of CAM for weight management. Commercial dietary supplements (31.2%), herbal remedies (26.7%) and folk remedies (18.0%) were commonly used. Green tea and fibre tablets were the most widely used herbal supplements. Logistic regression analysis indicated that overweight participants are more frequent CAM users compared to obese. Relatives and friends were the main sources of information about CAM. Only 31.9% of women believed that CAM modalities were safe; around half believed they were not safe during pregnancy (52.5%) and lactation (48.0%). Only 49.7% were aware of side-effects and 41.5% of drug interactions.