Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tactile acuity improves during acute experimental pain of the limb

Supplemental Digital Content is Available in the Text. Tactile acuity improved during experimentally induced upper limb pain, not only in the painful area but also at a symmetrical site on the contralateral pain-free limb. Abstract Introduction: Chronic pain is associated with poor tactile acuity, commonly measured with the 2-point discrimination (TPD) test. Although poor tactile acuity across chronic pain conditions is well established, less is known in acute pain. Objective: Recent conflicting findings in experimentally induced neck and back pain led us to conduct a TPD investigation in experimentally induced limb pain. We hypothesised altered TPD during experimental upper limb pain, but we did not speculate on the direction of the change. Methods: Thirty healthy subjects immersed their dominant hand in a circulating cold-water bath at 7°C (cold pressor test [CPT]). Two-point discrimination was measured at baseline (pre-CPT), during pain (during-CPT), and after withdrawal from the water (post-CPT) in 3 different sites: (1) the dominant forearm, (2) dominant arm and (3) contralateral forearm. Results: Repeated-measures analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect of time (F(2,56) = 4.45, P = 0.02, ηp2 = 0.14) on TPD; in all 3 sites, TPD values decreased (ie, tactile acuity improved) during pain. Interestingly, the contralateral forearm followed a similar pattern to the dominant (ie, painful) forearm, and furthermore was the only site that exhibited any correlation with pain, albeit in an intriguing direction (r = 0.57, P = 0.001), ie, the greater the pain the worse the tactile acuity. Conclusion: The improvements in tactile acuity during experimentally induced limb pain may reflect a protective response. The changes in the corresponding site in the contralateral limb may reflect a protective spinal cross talk. Such a response, together with the interesting relationship between tactile acuity and pain, warrant further inquiry.
Haplology within M-Words and P-Words : Revisiting the Stuttering Prohibition in Turkish

We revisit the Stuttering Prohibition (SP) in Turkic languages originally proposed by Kornfilt (1986), which requires that morphemes of the same type cannot co-occur in adjacent positions. Following Nevins' (2010) typology of haplology, we distinguish between haplological restrictions that hold at the M(orphosyntactic)-Word stage and those that hold at the P(honological)-Word stage. We show that morpheme iterations that are subject to the SP are featurally sensitive and phonologically insensitive and are thus crucially repaired at the M-Word stage through deletion, portmanteaux morphology or avoidance before terminals receive phonological form. On the other hand, causative iteration and passive iteration in Turkish, which appear to be counter-examples to the SP at first glance, are phonologically sensitive and are thus repaired by inserting phonologically appropriate allomorphs at Vocabulary Insertion, constituting fitting examples of haplology that hold at the P-Word stage.
Projected adaptive-to-model tests for regression models

This thesis investigates Goodness-of-Fit tests for parametric regression models. With the help of sufficient dimension reduction techniques, we develop adaptive-to-model tests using projection in both the fixed dimension settings and the diverging dimension settings. The first part of the thesis develops a globally smoothing test in the fixed dimension settings for a parametric single index model. When the dimension p of covariates is larger than 1, existing empirical process-based tests either have non-tractable limiting null distributions or are not omnibus. To attack this problem, we propose a projected adaptive-to-model approach. If the null hypothesis is a parametric single index model, our method can fully utilize the dimension reduction structure under the null as if the regressors were one-dimensional. Then a martingale transformation proposed by Stute, Thies, and Zhu (1998) leads our test to be asymptotically distribution-free. Moreover, our test can automatically adapt to the underlying alternative models such that it can be omnibus and thus detect all alternative models departing from the null at the fastest possible convergence rate in hypothesis testing. A comparative simulation is conducted to check the performance of our test. We also apply our test to a self-noise mechanisms data set for illustration. The second part of the thesis proposes a globally smoothing test for parametric single-index models in the diverging dimension settings. In high dimensional data analysis, the dimension p of covariates is often large even though it may be still small compared with the sample size n. Thus we should regard p as a diverging number as n goes to infinity. With this in mind, we devolop an adaptive-to-model empirical process as the basis of our test statistic, when the dimension p of covariates diverges to infinity as the sample size n tends to infinity. We also show that the martingale transformation proposed by Stute, Thies, and Zhu (1998) still work in the diverging dimension settings. The limiting distributions of the adaptive-to-model empirical process under both the null and the alternative are discussed in this new situation. Simulation examples are conducted to show the performance of this test when p grows with the sample size n.
Coherent manipulation of Bose-Einstein condensates with radio-frequency adiabatic potentials on atom chips

During this thesis a novel trapping and manipulation technique for neutral atoms on atom chips has been developed and experimentally implemented. Radio-frequency (rf) coupling of internal states of magnetically trapped atoms results in versatile microscopic potentials, which overcome various limitations of static magnetic traps. An extensive experimental analysis of this new technique has been carried out, exploring the state-dependency of the rf potentials and the possible realization of non-trivial trapping geometries. Based on these results, the first coherent matter wave beam splitter on an atom chip has been realized, demonstrating for the first time the all-magnetic coherent splitting of a condensate. This new atom optical tool has then been applied to investigate the phase-properties of one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates. The potential configuration developed during this thesis provides direct access to the phase fluctuations in the system and has allowed the first time-resolved study of equilibrium properties and non-equilibrium dynamics in a one-dimensional Bose gas.
Phosphorylase kinase deﬁcient liver glycogenosis: progression to cirrhosis in infancy associated with PHKG2 mutations

E DITOR —Hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies (HNPP) or tomaculous neuropathy is an autosomal dominant disease. 1 HNPP patients present with acute or recurrent transient muscle palsies and paraesthesias, usually after minor trauma. HNPP is characterised from the pathological point of view by the presence of sausage shaped swelling of the myelin sheath or tomacula 2 in sensory and motor nerves. 3
Alignment of UAV-hyperspectral bands using keypoint descriptors in a spectrally complex environment

ABSTRACT Near earth imaging spectroscopy has gained popularity in the recent past due to its increasing capabilities to acquire data with unprecedented abundance of spatial resolution and spectral purity. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based portable hyperspectral sensors employing snapshot based scanning mechanisms further advances these capabilities with improved spatial co-registration of pixels. However, unavoidable motion of UAV pose challenges in spectral co-registration which is pronounced in spectrally complex environments of heterogeneous ecosystems. In this study, the different feature descriptor techniques such as Harris-Stephens Features (HSF), Min Eigen Features (MEF), Scale Invariant Feature Transformation (SIFT), Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF), Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Keypoints (BRISK), and Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) were evaluated to align hyperspectral bands in a spectrally complex environment. A band alignment workflow was devised and operated in different band-wise arrangements (spectral order and temporal order) of the acquired hypercube. The co-registration accuracy between the adjacent band pairs (reference-transformed) upon registration was estimated using Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (PCC) based approaches. Furthermore, a standard transformation workflow was used to evaluate the efficiency of the different feature descriptor based band-to-band registration approaches.
Efficacy S-formula and Kinetics of Non-oxygen-mediated (Type-I) and Oxygen-mediated (Type-II) Corneal Cross-linking

Aims: To derive analytic formulas for the overall efficacy of corneal collagen crosslinking (CXL) based on coupled kinetic equations including both non-oxygen-mediated (NOM) and oxygenmediated (OM) type-II mechanisms. Study Design: modeling the kinetics of CXL. Place and Duration of Study: Taipei, Taiwan, between June, 2017 and January 2018. Methodology: Coupled kinetic equations are derived under the quasi-steady state condition for the 3-pathway mechanisms of CXL. For type-I CXL, the riboflavin triplet state [T3] may interact directly with the stroma collagen substrate [A] under NOM, or with the ground-state oxygen [O2] to form reactive oxygen species [O-] under OM. For type-II process, [T3] interacts with [O2] to form a singlet oxygen [ 1 O2]. Both reactive oxygen species (ROS), [O-] and [ 1 O2], can relax to [O2], or interact with the extracellular matrix (or the stroma substrate [A]) for crosslinking. Results: In the first 3 to 20 seconds, CXL efficacy is governed by both type-I and –II mechanisms, and after that period type-I, NOM is the predominant contribution, while oxygen for OM only plays a limited and transient role, in contrary to the conventionally believed OM-dominant mechanism. The riboflavin profile has a much slower depletion rate than that of oxygen profile. The ratio between NOM-type-I and OM depends on the relative initial concentration of [A] and [1O2] and their diffusion depths in the stroma. The overall CXL efficacy is proportional to the UV light dose (or fluence), the Original Research Article Lin; OR, 8(1): 1-11, 2018; Article no.OR. 39089 2 riboflavin, C (z, t), and oxygen, [O2], initial concentration, where efficacy is limited by the depletion of either C (z, t) or [O2]. Conclusion: Resupply of riboflavin and/or oxygen concentration under a controlled-concentrationmethod (CCM) during the UV exposure may improve the overall efficacy, specially for the accelerated CXL which has lower efficacy than the standard Dresden low-power (under noncontrolled concentration).
Tuta absoluta-Specific DNA in Domestic and Synanthropic Vertebrate Insectivore Feces

Simple Summary The tomato leaf miner, Tuta absoluta, is one of the most harmful pests to greenhouse tomato crops in the Mediterranean. The biological control of this pest is based on parasitoid and predator insects. However, it may be worthwhile to measure whether the pest is part of the diet of domestic and synanthropic vertebrates like birds, bats, and lizards. We carried out our research in Southern Spain, an area well-known for its extensive tomato farming. TaqMan real-time PCR was used to find T. absoluta in domestic and synanthropic vertebrate feces. The efficiencies of three different DNA extraction methods were also compared. Our research demonstrates that in addition to domestic birds, bats, lizards, and insectivorous birds also consume T. absoluta and may offer an ecosystem service that merits further study. Abstract The ecology of greenhouse pests generally involves parasitoid or predatory insects. However, we investigated whether the leaf miner Tuta absoluta (Meyrick, 1917) (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae) is part of the diet of domestic and synanthropic vertebrate animals, such as birds, reptiles, and mammals, and that take part in an ecosystem that contains a high density of tomato greenhouses. Feces from domesticated partridges, common quails, and chickens, as well as from wild lizards were collected within tomato greenhouses, and fecal pellets from bats, swallows, common swifts, and house martins living in the vicinity of tomato greenhouses were collected outside. The efficiencies of three different DNA extraction methods were compared on bird, reptile, and mammal stool samples, and the DNA extracts were analyzed using probe real-time PCR for the presence of T. absoluta DNA. The results showed that bats fed on the pest, which was also part of the diet of several bird species: partridges and common quails kept within tomato greenhouses and swallows and common swifts living outside but in the vicinity of tomato greenhouses. In addition, fecal samples of three lizard species living near tomato crops also tested positive for T. absoluta DNA. The results suggest that aerial foraging bats and insectivorous birds are part of ecosystems that involve leaf miners and tomato greenhouses.
Convergence of modified S-iteration process for two generalized asymptotically quasi-nonexpansive mappings in CAT(0) spaces

In this paper, we give the sufficient condition of newly defined modified S-iteration process to converge to common fixed point for two generalized asymptotically quasi-nonexpansive mappings in the framework of CAT(0) spaces. Also we establish some strong convergence theorems of the said iteration process and mappings under suitable conditions. Our results extend and improve many known results from the existing literature.
Current state of the art in small mass and force metrology within the International System of Units

This review article summarizes new scientific trends in research for metrology of small mass (1 mg and lower) and small force (10 micronewtons and lower). After a brief introduction to the field, this paper provides an overview of recent developments in methods that demonstrate traceability to the International System of Units (SI) with emphasis on the implications of redefining the kilogram in terms of Planck’s constant. Specific research applications include new metrology facilities, calibration of small mass and force references such as milligram to submilligram masses or atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilevers, and laser power measurement using radiation pressure forces. Also discussed are recent scientific developments that may impact the field moving forward in the study of ultrasmall forces present in trapped and cooled quantum mechanical systems, resonant micro- and nanomechanical mass sensors, and other areas that are potentially well suited for SI metrology. The work reviewed is not intended as a comprehensive review of all research in which small forces are measured, but rather as an overview of a field in which the accurate measurement of small mass and force with quantified uncertainty is the primary goal.
Creating and Validating an Information Quality Scale for E-Commerce Platforms

The rise of e-commerce technology has transformed the traditional retail industry. This study proposes and validates an information quality scale suitable for e-commerce platforms. The scale consists of four dimensions—content validity, information scope, presentation quality, and hedonic quality—and 16 questions. Data analysis results support the second-order structure of information quality. The quality of information on e-commerce platforms has a significant positive impact on consumer behavioral intentions. Thus, operators of e-commerce platforms can improve the competitiveness and sustainability of these platforms by improving the quality of information.
Flight to Lottery Ahead of FOMC Announcements

This paper studies the pre-Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcement drift at the stock level. We hypothesize that investors have a higher propensity to speculate before the monetary policy announcements by the FOMC, due to the resolution of uncertainty and associated reduction in investors’ fear. Indeed, we find evidence that there exists a drift of lottery-like stocks in the pre-FOMC window, when investors’ fear gauge is lower, together with higher demand for lottery-like stocks and higher realized skewness. Moreover, we show that the demand for lottery-like stocks ahead of FOMC announcements is more prominent among institutional investors than retail investors. Our findings also identify the key role of transient and quasi-index institutional investors in our documented flight-to-lottery effect. Our findings advance the ongoing debates about the role of firms’ investor heterogeneity in determining how monetary policy affects corporate managers’ decisions. Our paper has important implications for central banks and managers by showing that investors’ preference for lottery-like stocks increases before FOMC announcements.
Parallel architecture based on transformers and CNNs for renal cell carcinoma image segmentation

Image segmentation of Renal Cell Carcinoma is a crucial prerequisite for pathologists to diagnose the disease and implement treatment. In various previous medical image segmentation tasks, convolutional neural networks(CNNs) have been widely used and have become a practical benchmark with significant success. However, the inherently local nature of the convolution operation leads to its inability to balance long-range relations and local dependencies in the modeling process, resulting in redundancy-deepening networks and the loss of local details. With its innate global self-attention mechanism, transformers were designed for sequence-to-sequence prediction to better extract global information. However, on account of the lack of low-level details, it may cause limited localization abilities. In this paper, we propose a parallel architecture based on Transformers and CNNs, combining Transformers and CNNs in a parallel manner to obtain global and local information by utilizing location-encoded Transformers model and local convolution neural networks, respectively. So that global contextual information can be captured more efficiently while maintaining a strong grasp of low-level spatial detailed information for Renal Cell Carcinoma image segmentation. Through a series of comparative experiments and extension experiments, the effectiveness and progressiveness of our method were validated, demonstrating remarkable potential in the image segmentation task of Renal Cell Carcinoma.
QoE Optimization in DASH-Based Multiview Video Streaming

Multiview video based on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) allows users to freely navigate between available viewpoints. However, achieving seamless transition during viewpoint switching is still challenging, especially in free-viewpoint video streaming, where user navigation is unpredictable. When bandwidth is limited, delivering all viewpoints in high quality is nearly impossible. The streaming system needs to prioritize high video quality for the selected viewpoint. The problem arises when the switching event occurs because the new video may not yet be available in the buffer. This paper introduces multiview video quality of experience (QoE). We discuss how viewpoint transition delay and viewpoint quality delay affect the overall user experience in watching multiview videos. We propose quality-based adaptive bitrate (ABR) for multiview video by specifying viewpoint priority and a target quality of the main viewpoint, namely multiview video priority (MVP). Although it may select a lower bitrate level than rate-based ABR, it performs better in perceptual video quality, especially when the viewpoint changes frequently. The simulation results show that the MVP algorithm effectively allocates available bandwidth to the required viewpoints. Hence, it can eliminate transition delay and decrease viewpoint quality delay. As a result, the user gets better video quality, smoothness, continuity, and seamless transition during video switching.
Identification of a Novel Eight-Gene Risk Model for Predicting Survival in Glioblastoma: A Comprehensive Bioinformatic Analysis

Simple Summary People with glioblastoma (GBM) universally have poor survival despite undergoing aggressive treatments. In this study, we aimed to determine genetic biomarkers of GBM that exhibit prognostic implications and examine their role in the tumor microenvironment. To this end, we performed differential gene expression analysis in three independent GBM datasets, followed by establishing a risk model for disease progression. Containing eight genes, this model demonstrated robustness in identifying patient subgroups with poor survival outcome in independent datasets. Abstract Glioblastoma (GBM) is one of the most progressive and prevalent cancers of the central nervous system. Identifying genetic markers is therefore crucial to predict prognosis and enhance treatment effectiveness in GBM. To this end, we obtained gene expression data of GBM from TCGA and GEO datasets and identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs), which were overlapped and used for survival analysis with univariate Cox regression. Next, the genes’ biological significance and potential as immunotherapy candidates were examined using functional enrichment and immune infiltration analysis. Eight prognostic-related DEGs in GBM were identified, namely CRNDE, NRXN3, POPDC3, PTPRN, PTPRN2, SLC46A2, TIMP1, and TNFSF9. The derived risk model showed robustness in identifying patient subgroups with significantly poorer overall survival, as well as those with distinct GBM molecular subtypes and MGMT status. Furthermore, several correlations between the expression of the prognostic genes and immune infiltration cells were discovered. Overall, we propose a survival-derived risk score that can provide prognostic significance and guide therapeutic strategies for patients with GBM.
The perceptions and performance of family-centered care among pediatric nurses at a children's hospital in South Korea: a descriptive study

Purpose This study aimed to examine pediatric hospital nurses' perceptions and performance of family-centered care. Methods A descriptive study design was used. This study surveyed 162 nurses who worked at a single tertiary children's hospital in South Korea. The modified Family-Centered Care Scale was used to assess nurses' perceptions and performance of family-centered care. Barriers to the implementation of family-centered care were described in an open-ended format. Results Pediatric hospital nurses had a higher score for perceptions (mean score=4.07) than for performance (mean score=3.77). The collaboration subscale had the lowest scores for both perceptions and performance. The perceptions of family-centered care differed significantly according to the nurses’ clinical career in the pediatric unit and familiarity with family-centered care, while performance differed according to clinical career only. Perceptions and performance were positively correlated (r=.594, p<.001). Barriers to implementation included a shortage of nursing personnel, a lack of time, and the absence of a family-centered care system. Conclusion To improve the performance of family-centered care, nurses’ perceptions of family-centered care should be improved by offering education programs and active support, including sufficient staffing, and establishing systems within hospitals.