Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Making Co-Enrolment Feasible for Randomised Controlled Trials in Paediatric Intensive Care

Aims Enrolling children into several trials could increase recruitment and lead to quicker delivery of optimal care in paediatric intensive care units (PICU). We evaluated decisions taken by clinicians and parents in PICU on co-enrolment for two large pragmatic trials: the CATCH trial (CATheters in CHildren) comparing impregnated with standard central venous catheters (CVCs) for reducing bloodstream infection in PICU and the CHIP trial comparing tight versus standard control of hyperglycaemia. Methods We recorded the period of trial overlap for all PICUs taking part in both CATCH and CHiP and reasons why clinicians decided to co-enrol children or not into both studies. We examined parental decisions on co-enrolment by measuring recruitment rates and reasons for declining consent. Results Five PICUs recruited for CATCH and CHiP during the same period (an additional four opened CATCH after having closed CHiP). Of these five, three declined co-enrolment (one of which delayed recruiting elective patients for CATCH whilst CHiP was running), due to concerns about jeopardising CHiP recruitment, asking too much of parents, overwhelming amounts of information to explain to parents for two trials and a policy against co-enrolment. Two units co-enrolled in order to maximise recruitment to both trials. At the first unit, 35 parents were approached for both trials. 17/35 consented to both; 13/35 consented to one trial only; 5/35 declined both. Consent rates during co-enrolment were 29/35 (82%) and 18/35 (51%) for CATCH and CHiP respectively compared with 78% and 51% respectively for those approached for a single trial within this PICU. The second unit did not record data on approaches or refusals, but successfully co-enrolled one child. Conclusions Co-enrolment did not appear to jeopardise recruitment or overwhelm parents. Strategies for seeking consent for multiple trials need to be developed and should include how to combine information for parents and patients.
Optimal orientation estimation for mobile robot in urban area

A vanishing point is a point in a perspective drawing to which parallel lines appear to converge. In this paper, a novel optimal robot orientation estimation method in urban areas is proposed. This method is based on the vertical vanishing point in one view and the horizontal vanishing point correspondences across two views. To obtain an optimal estimation result, an error-aware vanishing point estimation method is developed, leading to a minimum variance solution. By analyzing the error propagation in computing vanishing point, we convert the minimum variance estimation problem to a convex optimization problem, which is well studied in operations research. An orthogonality check is proposed for each candidate horizontal vanishing point. Then, a vanishing point matching method is developed to find the correspondences. Finally, some physical experiments are carried out to validate the proposed method.
RsgA couples the maturation state of the 30S ribosomal decoding center to activation of its GTPase pocket

Abstract During 30S ribosomal subunit biogenesis, assembly factors are believed to prevent accumulation of misfolded intermediate states of low free energy that slowly convert into mature 30S subunits, namely, kinetically trapped particles. Among the assembly factors, the circularly permuted GTPase, RsgA, plays a crucial role in the maturation of the 30S decoding center. Here, directed hydroxyl radical probing and single particle cryo-EM are employed to elucidate RsgA΄s mechanism of action. Our results show that RsgA destabilizes the 30S structure, including late binding r-proteins, providing a structural basis for avoiding kinetically trapped assembly intermediates. Moreover, RsgA exploits its distinct GTPase pocket and specific interactions with the 30S to coordinate GTPase activation with the maturation state of the 30S subunit. This coordination validates the architecture of the decoding center and facilitates the timely release of RsgA to control the progression of 30S biogenesis.
Computers An online task for contrasting auditory processing in the verbal and nonverbal domains and norms for younger and older adults Ay !

Contrasting linguistic and non-linguistic processing has been of interest to many researchers with different scientific, theoretical or clinical questions. However, previous work on this type of comparative analysis and experimentation has been limited. In particular, little is known about the differences and similarities between the perceptual, cognitive and neural processing of nonverbal environmental sounds compared to speech sounds. We developed a new online measure with the aim of contrasting verbal and nonverbal processing in the auditory modality, that can be administered to subjects from different clinical, neurological, or socio-cultural groups. This is an online task of sound to picture matching, where the sounds are either environmental sounds or their linguistic equivalents, which is controlled for potential task and item confounds across the two sound types. Here we describe the design and development of our measure and report norming data for healthy subjects from two different adult age groups: Younger adults (aged 18-24) and older adults (aged 54-78). We also outline other populations to which the test has been or is being administered. In addition to the results reported here, the test can be useful to other researchers who are interested in systematically contrasting verbal and nonverbal auditory processing in other populations.
Reconstruction of Natural RNA Sequences from RNA Shape, Thermodynamic Stability, Mutational Robustness, and Linguistic Complexity by Evolutionary Computation

Abstract The process of designing novel RNA sequences by inverse RNA folding, available in tools such as RNAinverse and InfoRNA, can be thought of as a reconstruction of RNAs from secondary structure. In this reconstruction problem, no physical measures are considered as additional constraints that are independent of structure, aside of the goal to reach the same secondary structure as the input using energy minimization methods. An extension of the reconstruction problem can be formulated since in many cases of natural RNAs, it is desired to analyze the sequence and structure of RNA molecules using various physical quantifiable measures. In prior works that used secondary structure predictions, it has been shown that natural RNAs differ significantly from random RNAs in some of these measures. Thus, we relax the problem of reconstructing RNAs from secondary structure into reconstructing RNAs from shapes, and in turn incorporate physical quantities as constraints. This allows for the design of novel RNA sequences by inverse folding while considering various physical quantities of interest such as thermodynamic stability, mutational robustness, and linguistic complexity. At the expense of altering the number of nucleotides in stems and loops, for example, physical measures can be taken into account. We use evolutionary computation for the new reconstruction problem and illustrate the procedure on various natural RNAs.
Maternal transfer of selenium by blood and milk in camels

Ten pregnant female camels were divided into two groups. The control group received no supplement; the experimental (treated) group received a daily oral supplement of 2 mg Se as selenite for the last three months of pregnancy and the first month of lactation. The Se concentration in serum increased significantly in the supplemented group and was threefold higher (305.9 ± 103.3 ng/mL) than in the concentration control group (109.3 ± 33.1 ng/mL). Blood values in camel calves were similar to those of the dams. The selenium concentration increased in similar proportions in milk (167.1 ± 97.3 ng/mL vs 86.4 ± 39.1 ng/mL in the supplemented and control groups respectively). In the colostrum, Se concentration was higher in both groups, but with a similar difference: 108.2 ± 43.9 ng/mL vs 302 ± 94.60. Significant correlations were reported between dam serum Se, camel calf serum Se, milk Se and GSH-Px both in dams and calves.
Determination of the selenium contents of waste rocks of iron ore mining in the Pilbara, Western Australia using ICP-MS

The metalloid element selenium (Se) has very low concentration (estimated mean 0.05 ppm) in rocks of the Earth’s crust but is of increasing environmental interest on account of its critical role in animal and human health. Recently there has been concern regarding the possible environmental risk associated with mining of sedimentary iron ores as practised in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, since the ironstones and associated shales are potential sources of Se. The very low concentrations found in most rocks and the environment, together with selenium’s complex chemical behaviour, make it a difficult subject for geochemical analysis. While a variety of analytical techniques have been used to determine the concentration of Se in geological materials, the most widely applied is inductively-coupled mass spectrometry (ICPMS) and a large majority of Se data obtained by the mining industry in Western Australia has been through routine procedures of sample dissolution and ICP-MS trace element analysis. This study investigates the efficacy of such a routine approach to ICP-MS determination of Se, particularly when applied to rocks with high iron content. The effectiveness of acid digestion of rocks and routine ICP-MS techniques was tested through the preparation and analysis of standard reference materials (geostandards) with known Se content. The concentrations and distribution of Se occurring in waste rocks from three of BHP Billiton’s iron ore mines in the Pilbara was subsequently determined. Experimental work in this study suggests that hot multi-acid (HNO3 + HCLO4 + HF) digestion can be effective for the quantitative dissolution of a wide variety of rock types prior to ICP-MS analysis, with a high level of reproducibility obtained. Variations from the published values were frequently significantly greater than for a suite of other trace elements (As, Cr, V, Mn, Cu) and there is evidence for a more complex behaviour of Se during acid dissolution than for these other trace elements.
Optimal Anycast Technique for Delay-Sensitive Energy-Constrained Asynchronous Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, asynchronous sleep-wake scheduling protocols can significantly reduce energy consumption without incurring the communication overhead for clock synchronization used in typical sleep-wake scheduling protocols. However, the savings could come at a significant cost in delay performance. Recently, researchers have attempted to exploit the inherent broadcast nature of the wireless medium to reduce this delay with virtually no additional energy cost. These schemes are called "anycasting," where each sensor node forwards the packet to the first node that wakes up among a set of candidate next-hop nodes. In this paper, we develop a delay-optimal anycasting scheme under periodic sleep-wake patterns. Our solution is computationally simple and fully distributed. We show that periodic sleep-wake patterns result in the smallest delay among all wake-up patterns under given energy constraints. Simulation results illustrate the benefit of our proposed schemes over the state-of-the art.
Multilingual Mobile-Phone Translation Services for World Travelers

This demonstration introduces two new multilingual translation services for mobile phones. The first translation service provides state-of-the-art text-to-text translations of Japanese as well as English conversational spoken language in the travel domain into 17 languages using statistical machine translation technologies trained automatically from a large-scale multilingual corpus. The second demonstration is a speech translation service between Japanese and English for real environments. It is based on distributed speech recognition with noise suppression. Flexible interfaces between internal and external speech translation resources ease the portability of the system to other languages and enable real-time location-free communication world-wide.
CTCF induces histone variant incorporation, erases the H3K27me3 histone mark and opens chromatin

Insulators functionally separate active chromatin domains from inactive ones. The insulator factor, CTCF, has been found to bind to boundaries and to mediate insulator function. CTCF binding sites are depleted for the histone modification H3K27me3 and are enriched for the histone variant H3.3. In order to determine whether demethylation of H3K27me3 and H3.3 incorporation are a requirement for CTCF binding at domain boundaries or whether CTCF causes these changes, we made use of the LacI DNA binding domain to control CTCF binding by the Lac inducer IPTG. Here we show that, in contrast to the related factor CTCFL, the N-terminus plus zinc finger domain of CTCF is sufficient to open compact chromatin rapidly. This is preceded by incorporation of the histone variant H3.3, which thereby removes the H3K27me3 mark. This demonstrates the causal role for CTCF in generating the chromatin features found at insulators. Thereby, spreading of a histone modification from one domain through the insulator into the neighbouring domain is inhibited.
Measurement of sprite streamer acceleration and deceleration

Measurements of streamer velocity reflect the detailed internal microphysics of sprite development that is connected to the effects streamers create in the mesosphere. We report intensified high speed video observations of streamer development acquired at 5,000 to 10,000 frames per second that include the entire altitude range of sprites (∼40–90 km). Downward streamers accelerate to a maximum velocity 3–10% of the speed of light c and then immediately decelerate at an almost constant rate close to 1010 m/s2. This deceleration process dominates the downward streamer propagation in both time and distance. Measurements of the complete dynamics of sprite streamers from initiation to termination can give useful insight into their internal processes.
Do not assume that no news is good news: test result management and communication in primary care

To quote Voltaire by way of Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. This phrase rings especially true for medical trainees on reaching the point in their training when they can order tests without seeking sign off from supervisors. However, they quickly learn that ordering tests is the easy part; managing the resulting data becomes the far more challenging task. Failure to follow-up on test results represents a critical breakdown point in the diagnostic process.1 The inherent complexity of test result management, which involves countless steps and handoffs between patients, physicians, nurses and ambulatory office and laboratory staff, is susceptible to failure at multiple provider-level and system-level decision points. Not surprisingly, most primary care physicians express dissatisfaction with their methods for tracking test results,2 ,3 and a substantial percentage admit to having no method at all.4 Delays in reviewing test results commonly occur,3 and approximately one in five errors in the testing process result in patient harm.5 Two articles published in BMJ Quality & Safety remind us just how much work remains to achieve a safe and reliable test result management process.6 ,7 In the first of these articles, Litchfield and colleagues6 conducted a telephone survey of 50 primary care practices in England to evaluate the process of managing and communicating test results. They found that 40% of practices required patients to call for abnormal results, and that the large majority of practices had no system in …
Integrating visibility graph analysis (VGA) with connectivity analysis in landscape ecology

Interest in urban green areas has rapidly increased in recent years as the world becomes increasingly urbanized (see e.g., McDonald, 2008, UN-habitat, 2016). This brings new demands for a deeper understanding of the morphology of green areas in cities that provide us with a range of important ecosystem services (ESS) such as evaporative cooling, water purification, micro climate regulation, recreation and even pollination (MA 2005; Andersson et al., 2007). If we also are to support or even enhance such services, we need to make this knowledge accessible for professionals in urban planning and design. In both regards we see the need to bring the fields of landscape ecology and urban morphology closer to each other. This papers addresses this, taking the ESS pollination as point of departure. It has been acknowledged that besides the amount of green, also connectivity between green areas is important for most of these ESS (Alberti, 2008; Kindleman et al., 2008). The critical issue remains how connections are represented. In this paper we propose an alternative approach inspired by space syntax where we introduce a method to capture urban form and their impact on movement behaviour of bumble bees. A first attempt to do so was discussed by Marcus et al. (2014) but instead of drawing connections using space syntax, we here propose to define the resistance to movement using visibility graph analysis (VGA). The level of visual integration can then be calculated based on the number of visual steps it takes to get from one point to any other point within the system. For species that navigate by sight this can be a rather simple and effective way to measure the cost or resistance to move through an urban landscape. To test the method, observation data on bumble bees collected in 16 sites in Stockholm (Ahrne et al., 2009) are used.
A novel beamforming method for multiple peer-to-peer relay networks

One multi-antenna relay can support multiple peer-to-peer communications in AF (amplify-and-forward) manner. All sources transmit their signals to the relay in the first time slot. In the second time slot, the relay multiplies its received signal with an amplifying matrix, and broadcasts it to the destinations. We propose a novel method to specify the amplifying matrix in which we decompose the amplifying matrix into two parts. The first part is an MMSE (minimum mean square error) receiving matrix, and the second part is a beamforming matrix based on the maximization of VSLNR (virtual signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio). To apply our proposed algorithm, we first propose two simple power allocation methods: EPA (equal power allocation) and EGA (equal gain allocation), and then propose an optimization method using projection gradient algorithm. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing ZFBF (zero-forcing beamforming) algorithm and the optimal power allocation improves system performance significantly under asymmetric channel conditions.
Poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation of Methyl CpG Binding Domain Protein 2 Regulates Chromatin Structure*

The epigenetic information encoded in the genomic DNA methylation pattern is translated by methylcytosine binding proteins like MeCP2 into chromatin topology and structure and gene activity states. We have shown previously that the MeCP2 level increases during differentiation and that it causes large-scale chromatin reorganization, which is disturbed by MeCP2 Rett syndrome mutations. Phosphorylation and other posttranslational modifications of MeCP2 have been described recently to modulate its function. Here we show poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation of endogenous MeCP2 in mouse brain tissue. Consequently, we found that MeCP2 induced aggregation of pericentric heterochromatin and that its chromatin accumulation was enhanced in poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) 1−/− compared with wild-type cells. We mapped the poly(ADP-ribosyl)ation domains and engineered MeCP2 mutation constructs to further analyze potential effects on DNA binding affinity and large-scale chromatin remodeling. Single or double deletion of the poly(ADP-ribosyl)ated regions and PARP inhibition increased the heterochromatin clustering ability of MeCP2. Increased chromatin clustering may reflect increased binding affinity. In agreement with this hypothesis, we found that PARP-1 deficiency significantly increased the chromatin binding affinity of MeCP2 in vivo. These data provide novel mechanistic insights into the regulation of MeCP2-mediated, higher-order chromatin architecture and suggest therapeutic opportunities to manipulate MeCP2 function.
Wetland Hydrologic Modeling through Physically-based and Data-driven Approaches

ii Acknowledgments.v List of Tables . xi List of Figures . xiii Chapter 1 : Introduction . 1 1. Problem Definition and Objectives of the Study . 3 2. Dissertation organization. 11 Appendix . 13 A Review on Wetland Hydrology/Hydraulic Modeling . 13 Chapter 2 : Wetland Water Level Prediction using ANN in Conjunction with Baseflow Recession Analysis . 31
Recent advances in determining protein and amino acid requirements in humans

During the past 25 years a significant amount of research has been conducted to determine amino acid requirements in humans. This is primarily due to advancements in the application of stable isotopes to examine amino acid requirements. The indicator amino acid oxidation (IAAO) method has emerged as a robust and minimally invasive technique to identify requirements. The IAAO method is based on the concept that when one indispensable dietary amino acid (IDAA) is deficient for protein synthesis, then the excess of all other IDAA, including the indicator amino acid, will be oxidized. With increasing intakes of the limiting amino acid, IAAO will decrease, reflecting increasing incorporation into protein. Once the requirement for the limiting amino acid is met there will be no further change in the indicator oxidation. The IAAO method has been systematically applied to determine most IDAA requirements in adults. The estimates are comparable to the values obtained using the more elaborate 24h-indicator amino acid oxidation and balance (24h-IAAO/IAAB) model. Due to its non-invasive nature the IAAO method has also been used to determine requirements for amino acids in neonates, children and in disease. The IAAO model has recently been applied to determine total protein requirements in humans. The IAAO method is rapid, reliable and has been used to determine amino acid requirements in different species, across the life cycle and in disease. The recent application of IAAO to determine protein requirements in humans is novel and has significant implications for dietary protein intake recommendations globally.