Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What's special about task in dystonia? A voxel‐based morphometry and diffusion weighted imaging study

Numerous brain imaging studies have demonstrated structural changes in the basal ganglia, thalamus, sensorimotor cortex, and cerebellum across different forms of primary dystonia. However, our understanding of brain abnormalities contributing to the clinically well‐described phenomenon of task specificity in dystonia remained limited. We used high‐resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with voxel‐based morphometry and diffusion weighted imaging with tract‐based spatial statistics of fractional anisotropy to examine gray and white matter organization in two task‐specific dystonia forms, writer's cramp and laryngeal dystonia, and two non–task‐specific dystonia forms, cervical dystonia and blepharospasm. A direct comparison between both dystonia forms indicated that characteristic gray matter volumetric changes in task‐specific dystonia involve the brain regions responsible for sensorimotor control during writing and speaking, such as primary somatosensory cortex, middle frontal gyrus, superior/inferior temporal gyrus, middle/posterior cingulate cortex, and occipital cortex as well as the striatum and cerebellum (lobules VI‐VIIa). These gray matter changes were accompanied by white matter abnormalities in the premotor cortex, middle/inferior frontal gyrus, genu of the corpus callosum, anterior limb/genu of the internal capsule, and putamen. Conversely, gray matter volumetric changes in the non–task‐specific group were limited to the left cerebellum (lobule VIIa) only, whereas white matter alterations were found to underlie the primary sensorimotor cortex, inferior parietal lobule, and middle cingulate gyrus. Distinct microstructural patterns in task‐specific and non–task‐specific dystonias may represent neuroimaging markers and provide evidence that these two dystonia subclasses likely follow divergent pathophysiological mechanisms precipitated by different triggers. © 2014 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society
Fully Sampled Maps of Ices and Silicates in Front of Cepheus A East with the Spitzer Space Telescope

We report the first fully sampled maps of the distribution of interstellar CO2 ices, H2O ices, and total hydrogen nuclei, as inferred from the 9.7 μm silicate feature, toward the star-forming region Cepheus A East with the IRS instrument on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. We find that the column density distributions for these solid state features all peak at, and are distributed around, the location of HW2, the protostar believed to power one of the outflows observed in this star-forming region. A correlation between the column density distributions of CO2 and water ice with that of total hydrogen indicates that the solid state features we mapped mostly arise from the same molecular clumps along the probed sight lines. We therefore derive average CO2 ice and water ice abundances with respect to the total hydrogen column density of X(CO2)ice ∼ 1.9 × 10−5 and X(H2O)ice ∼ 7.5 × 10−5. Within errors, the abundances for both ices are relatively constant over the mapped region exhibiting both ice absorptions. The fraction of CO2 ice with respect to H2O ice is also relatively constant at a value of 22% over that mapped region. A clear triple-peaked structure is seen in the CO2 ice profiles. Fits to those profiles using current laboratory ice analogs suggest the presence of both a low-temperature polar ice mixture and a high-temperature methanol-rich ice mixture along the probed sight lines. Our results further indicate that thermal processing of these ices occurred throughout the sampled region.
Diet quality and adherence to a healthy diet in Japanese male workers with untreated hypertension

Objectives As Japanese societies rapidly undergo westernisation, the prevalence of hypertension is increasing. We investigated the association between dietary quality and the prevalence of untreated hypertension in Japanese male workers. Design and methods We conducted a cross-sectional study of 433 male workers who completed a brief food frequency questionnaire. Adherence to the WHO-based Healthy Diet Indicator (HDI), the American Heart Association 2006 Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations, the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, and Mediterranean-style diet was assessed using four adherence indexes (HDI score, AI-84 score, DASH score and MED score). Hypertension classes were classified into three categories: non-hypertension, untreated hypertension and treated hypertension (ie, taking antihypertensive medication). Results The prevalence of untreated hypertension and treated hypertension was 22.4% and 8.5%, respectively. Patients with untreated hypertension had significantly lower HDI and AI-84 scores compared with non-hypertension. DASH and MED scores across the three hypertension classes were comparable. After adjusting for age, energy intake, smoking habit, alcohol drinking, physical activity and salt intake, a low adherence to HDI and a lowest quartile of AI-84 score were associated with a significantly higher prevalence of untreated hypertension, with an OR of 3.33 (95% CI 1.39 to 7.94, p=0.007) and 2.23 (1.09 to 4.53, p=0.027), respectively. Conclusions A lower dietary quality was associated with increased prevalence of untreated hypertension in Japanese male workers. Our findings support a potential beneficial impact of nutritional assessment using diet qualities.
Divorce and the Onset of Alcohol Use Disorder: A Swedish Population-Based Longitudinal Cohort and Co-Relative Study.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to clarify the magnitude and nature of the relationship between divorce and risk for alcohol use disorder (AUD). METHOD In a population-based Swedish sample of married individuals (N=942,366), the authors examined the association between divorce or widowhood and risk for first registration for AUD. AUD was assessed using medical, criminal, and pharmacy registries. RESULTS Divorce was strongly associated with risk for first AUD onset in both men (hazard ratio=5.98, 95% CI=5.65-6.33) and women (hazard ratio=7.29, 95% CI=6.72-7.91). The hazard ratio was estimated for AUD onset given divorce among discordant monozygotic twins to equal 3.45 and 3.62 in men and women, respectively. Divorce was also associated with an AUD recurrence in those with AUD registrations before marriage. Furthermore, widowhood increased risk for AUD in men (hazard ratio=3.85, 95% CI=2.81-5.28) and women (hazard ratio=4.10, 95% CI=2.98-5.64). Among divorced individuals, remarriage was associated with a large decline in AUD in both sexes (men: hazard ratio=0.56, 95% CI=0.52-0.64; women: hazard ratio=0.61, 95% CI=0.55-0.69). Divorce produced a greater increase in first AUD onset in those with a family history of AUD or with prior externalizing behaviors. CONCLUSIONS Spousal loss through divorce or bereavement is associated with a large enduring increased AUD risk. This association likely reflects both causal and noncausal processes. That the AUD status of the spouse alters this association highlights the importance of spouse characteristics for the behavioral health consequences of spousal loss. The pronounced elevation in AUD risk following divorce or widowhood, and the protective effect of remarriage against subsequent AUD, speaks to the profound impact of marriage on problematic alcohol use.
Asymmetrical Reinforcement and Wolbachia Infection in Drosophila

Reinforcement refers to the evolution of increased mating discrimination against heterospecific individuals in zones of geographic overlap and can be considered a final stage in the speciation process. One the factors that may affect reinforcement is the degree to which hybrid matings result in the permanent loss of genes from a species' gene pool. Matings between females of Drosophila subquinaria and males of D. recens result in high levels of offspring mortality, due to interspecific cytoplasmic incompatibility caused by Wolbachia infection of D. recens. Such hybrid inviability is not manifested in matings between D. recens females and D. subquinaria males. Here we ask whether the asymmetrical hybrid inviability is associated with a corresponding asymmetry in the level of reinforcement. The geographic ranges of D. recens and D. subquinaria were found to overlap across a broad belt of boreal forest in central Canada. Females of D. subquinaria from the zone of sympatry exhibit much stronger levels of discrimination against males of D. recens than do females from allopatric populations. In contrast, such reproductive character displacement is not evident in D. recens, consistent with the expected effects of unidirectional cytoplasmic incompatibility. Furthermore, there is substantial behavioral isolation within D. subquinaria, because females from populations sympatric with D. recens discriminate against allopatric conspecific males, whereas females from populations allopatric with D. recens show no discrimination against any conspecific males. Patterns of general genetic differentiation among populations are not consistent with patterns of behavioral discrimination, which suggests that the behavioral isolation within D. subquinaria results from selection against mating with Wolbachia-infected D. recens. Interspecific cytoplasmic incompatibility may contribute not only to post-mating isolation, an effect already widely recognized, but also to reinforcement, particularly in the uninfected species. The resulting reproductive character displacement not only increases behavioral isolation from the Wolbachia-infected species, but may also lead to behavioral isolation between populations of the uninfected species. Given the widespread occurrence of Wolbachia among insects, it thus appears that there are multiple ways by which these endosymbionts may directly and indirectly contribute to reproductive isolation and speciation.
AVal: an Extensible Attribute-Oriented Programming Validator for Java

Attribute Oriented Programming (@OP ) permits programmers to extend the semantics of a base program by annotating it with attributes that are related to a set of concerns. Examples of this are applications that rely on XDoclet (such as Hibernate) or, with the release of Java5's annotations, EJB3. The set of attributes that implements a concern defines a Domain Specific Language, and as such, imposes syntactic and semantic rules on the way attributes are included in the program or even on the program itself. We propose a framework for the definition and checking of these rules for @OP that uses Java5 annotations. We define an extensible set of meta-annotations to allow the validation of @OP programs, as well as the means to extend them using a compile-time model of the program's source code. We show the usefulness of the approach by presenting two examples of its use: an @OP extension for the Fractal component model called Fraclet, and the JSR 181 for web services definition.
Domestic violence surveillance system: a model.

OBJECTIVE To develop a domestic violence surveillance system. MATERIAL AND METHODS The strategies included implementation of a standard digitalized reporting and analysis system along with advocacy with community decision makers, strengthening inter-institutional attention networks, consultation for constructing internal flow charts, sensitizing and training network teams in charge of providing health care in cases of domestic violence and supporting improved public policy prevention initiatives. RESULTS A total of 6 893 cases were observed using 2004 and 2005 surveillance system data. The system reports that 80% of the affected were women, followed by 36% children under 14 years. The identified aggressors were mainly females' partners. The system was useful for improving victim services. CONCLUSIONS Findings indicate that significant gains were made in facilitating the attention and treatment of victims of domestic violence, improving the procedural response process and enhancing the quality of information provided to policy-making bodies.
Intersection of Convex Objects: The Method of Separating Axes

Separating Axes David Eberly, Geometric Tools, Redmond WA 98052 https://www.geometrictools. com/ This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Created: January 28, 2001 Last Modified: June 20, 2022
Real time handwritten digit recognition on mobile devices

Handwritten digit recognition (HDR) is an important problem in computer vision and has been studied for many years. However, real time HDR on mobile devices still faces the challenge because of hardware limitation and algorithm computation complexity. To address this problem, we propose a method which adopts a non-overlapped pyramid histogram of oriented gradients (PHOG) for HDR in this paper. Each cell in every layer of the PHOG can be calculated from the cells in the lower layers except the first layer. Our experimental results show that the recognition speed using the proposed non-overlapped PHOG is about 4 times faster than the half-overlapped PHOG and keep a relative high accuracy with a feature that only has hundreds of dimensions. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to achieve a real time HDR application on mobile devices.
Burkholderia cenocepacia O polysaccharide chain contributes to caspase‐1‐dependent IL‐1β production in macrophages

Burkholderia cenocepacia infections in CF patients involve heightened inflammation, fatal sepsis, and high antibiotic resistance. Proinflammatory IL‐1β secretion is important in airway inflammation and tissue damage. However, little is known about this pathway in macrophages upon B. cenocepacia infection. We report here that murine macrophages infected with B. cenocepacia K56‐2 produce proinflammatory cytokine IL‐1β in a TLR4 and caspase‐1‐mediated manner. We also determined that the OPS (O antigen) of B. cenocepacia LPS contributes to IL‐1β production and pyroptotic cell death. Furthermore, we showed that the malfunction of the CFTR channel augmented IL‐1β production upon B. cenocepacia infection of murine macrophages. Taken together, we identified eukaryotic and bacterial factors that contribute to inflammation during B. cenocepacia infection, which may aid in the design of novel approaches to control pulmonary inflammation.
Visual Fine Art: Documenting change, influencing change, and subjected to change

I begin with a selective chronology with pictures, mainly photographs. Every moment accounts for the state of things in the universe. A photograph is a sample of sequential moments. Photographs that are symptomatic of the times, emblematic of place, or foreshadow historical significance are notable markers in the universal ledger. Photographs, like memories, assist in the comprehension of time and with the perception of change.
On the use of snakes for 3-D robotic visual tracking

A new approach for robotic visual tracking and servoing is discussed. Deformable active models are introduced as a powerful means for tracking a moving rigid object (an eye-in-hand robot arm is used). Deformable models imitate, in real-time, the dynamic behavior of elastic structures. These computer-generated models are designed to capture the silhouette of rigid objects with well defined boundaries in terms of image gradient. By means of an eye-in-hand robot arm configuration, the desired motion of the end-effector is computed with the objective of keeping the target's position and shape invariant with respect to the camera frame. Experimental results are presented for the tracking of a rigid object moving in the three-dimensional space. <<ETX>>
Measuring Fecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites in Mammals and Birds: The Importance of Validation

Abstract: In recent years, the noninvasive monitoring of steroid hormone metabolites in feces of mammals and droppings of birds has become an increasingly popular technique. It offers several advantages and has been applied to a variety of species under various settings. However, using this technique to reliably assess an animal's adrenocortical activity is not that simple and straightforward to apply. Because clear differences regarding the metabolism and excretion of glucocorticoid metabolites (GCMs) exist, a careful validation for each species and sex investigated is obligatory. In this review, general analytical issues regarding sample storage, extraction procedures, and immunoassays are briefly discussed, but the main focus lies on experiments and recommendations addressing the validation of fecal GCM measurements in mammals and birds. The crucial importance of scrutinizing the physiological and biological validity of fecal GCM analyses in a given species is stressed. In particular, the relevance of the technique to detect biologically meaningful alterations in adrenocortical activity must be shown. Furthermore, significant effects of the animals' sex, the time of day, season, and different life history stages are discussed, bringing about the necessity to seriously consider possible sex differences as well as diurnal and seasonal variations. Thus, comprehensive information on the animals' biology and stress physiology should be carefully taken into account. Together with an extensive physiological and biological validation, this will ensure that the measurement of fecal GCMs can be used as a powerful tool to assess adrenocortical activity in diverse investigations on laboratory, companion, farm, zoo, and wild animals.
Heterotrimeric G proteins control stem cell proliferation through CLAVATA signaling in Arabidopsis

Cell‐to‐cell communication is a fundamental mechanism for coordinating developmental and physiological events in multicellular organisms. Heterotrimeric G proteins are key molecules that transmit extracellular signals; similarly, CLAVATA signaling is a crucial regulator in plant development. Here, we show that Arabidopsis thaliana Gβ mutants exhibit an enlarged stem cell region, which is similar to that of clavata mutants. Our genetic and cell biological analyses suggest that the G protein beta‐subunit1 AGB1 and RPK2, one of the major CLV3 peptide hormone receptors, work synergistically in stem cell homeostasis through their physical interactions. We propose that AGB1 and RPK2 compose a signaling module to facilitate meristem development.
Involvement of the TPR2 subdomain movement in the activities of ϕ29 DNA polymerase

The polymerization domain of ϕ29 DNA polymerase acquires a toroidal shape by means of an arch-like structure formed by the specific insertion TPR2 (Terminal Protein Region 2) and the thumb subdomain. TPR2 is connected to the fingers and palm subdomains through flexible regions, suggesting that it can undergo conformational changes. To examine whether such changes take place, we have constructed a ϕ29 DNA polymerase mutant able to form a disulfide bond between the apexes of TPR2 and thumb to limit the mobility of TPR2. Biochemical analysis of the mutant led us to conclude that TPR2 moves away from the thumb to allow the DNA polymerase to replicate circular ssDNA. Despite the fact that no TPR2 motion is needed to allow the polymerase to use the terminal protein (TP) as primer during the initiation of ϕ29 TP–DNA replication, the disulfide bond prevents the DNA polymerase from entering the elongation phase, suggesting that TPR2 movements are necessary to allow the TP priming domain to move out from the polymerase during transition from initiation to elongation. Furthermore, the TPR2-thumb bond does not affect the equilibrium between the polymerization and exonuclease activities, leading us to propose a primer-terminus transference model between both active sites.
On compositional Image Alignment, with an application to Active Appearance Models

Efficient and accurate fitting of active appearance models (AAM) is a key requirement for many applications. The most efficient fitting algorithm today is inverse compositional image alignment (ICIA). While ICIA is extremely fast, it is also known to have a small convergence radius. Convergence is especially bad when training and testing images differ strongly, as in multi-person AAMs. We describe “forward” compositional image alignment in a consistent framework which also incorporates methods previously termed “inverse” compositional, and use it to develop two novel fitting methods. The first method, compositional gradient descent (CoDe), is approximately four times slower than ICIA, while having a convergence radius which is even larger than that achievable by direct quasi-Newton descent. An intermediate convergence range with the same speed as ICIA is achieved by LinCoDe, the second new method. The success rate of the novel methods is 10 to 20 times higher than that of the original ICIA method.
Automated Brain Tumor Biopsy Prediction Using Single-labeling cDNA Microarrays-based Gene Expression Profiling

Aims Gene signatures obtained from microarray experiments may be of use to improve the prediction of brain tumor diagnosis. Nevertheless, automated and objective prediction with accuracy comparable to or better than the gold standard should be convincingly demonstrated for possible clinician uptake of the new methodology. Herewith, we demonstrate that primary brain tumor types can be discriminated using microarray data in an automated and objective way. Methods Postsurgical biopsies from 35 patients [17 glioblastoma multiforme (Gbm) and 18 meningothelial meningioma (Mm)] were stored in liquid nitrogen, total RNA was extracted, and cDNA was labeled with Cy3 fluorochrome and hybridized onto a cDNA-based microarray containing 11,500 cDNA clones representing 9300 loci. Scanned data were preprocessed, normalized, and used for predictor development. The predictive functions were fitted to a subset of samples and their performance evaluated with an independent subset. Expression results were validated by means of real time-polymerase chain reaction. Results Some gene expression-based predictors achieved 100% accuracy both in training resampling validation and independent testing. One of them, composed of GFAP, PTPRZ1, GPM6B and PRELP, produced a 100% prediction accuracy for both training and independent test datasets. Furthermore, the gene signatures obtained, increased cell detoxification, motility and intracellular transport in Gbm, and increased cell adhesion and cytochrome-family genes in Mm, agree well with the expected biologic and pathologic characteristics of the studied tumors. Conclusions The ability of gene signatures to automate prediction of brain tumors through a fully objective approach has been demonstrated. A comparison of gene expression profiles between Gbm and Mm may provide additional clues about patterns associated with each tumor type.