Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel variants identified in a three‑generation family with concomitant exotropia

Concomitant exotropia is a condition where there is a misalignment between both eyes, which is more prevalent in Asians than in Caucasians. It is an eye disease related to the neural development of binocular vision and eye movement control. Studies have indicated that genetic factors contribute to the development of concomitant exotropia; however, the underlying mutations have not been thoroughly investigated to date. In the present study, whole-exome sequencing was performed in a three-generation family with concomitant exotropia. In the proband and the proband's father, bioinformatics analyses identified a duplication of the genomic region spanning genes PCDHA1-7 and a heterozygous mutation c.3775G>A (p.A1259T) of the COL3A1 gene, which is located in the conserved COLFI domain and leads to decreased stability of the encoded protein product. Furthermore, a deletion of amino acid S165 in the gene NCOA7 was discovered in the family members, including the proband, the proband's mother and maternal grandfather. S165 was predicted to be a conserved phosphokinase site of CK1/VRK and CK1/CK1. The genes in which these variants reside are all involved in cortical neuronal development. The present study reveals novel variants of concomitant exotropia and suggests that aberrant cortical neuronal development may contribute to the origin of concomitant strabismus.
Safety and efficacy of topical tacrolimus 0.03% in the management of vernal keratoconjunctivitis: a non-randomized controlled clinical trial

Background: Vernal keratoconjunctivitis (VKC) is a bilateral, recurrent, chronic conjunctival inflammatory disease with seasonal exacerbations. This study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of tacrolimus 0.03% eye ointment in the management of chronic VKC. Methods: This was an open-label, prospective, non-randomized, comparative interventional study that enrolled 50 patients with chronic VKC, who were allocated to one of two groups. The first group was treated with tacrolimus 0.03% eye ointment twice daily for 2 months then once daily for 2 months, followed by once every other day for another 2 months. The control group was treated with standard anti-allergic drugs, topical fluorometholone 0.1% eye drops three times daily for 2 weeks and gradually tapered for another 2 weeks, with topical olopatadine 0.1% administered twice daily during the follow-up period. Disease severity was assessed using a four-point scale for symptoms and signs. Treatment efficacy was assessed by analyzing changes in symptoms and signs, and by clinical photography. Results: Fifty patients with bilateral chronic VKC completed the follow-up. The mean (standard deviation) ages of the tacrolimus and control groups were comparable (16.20 [5.10] years versus 16.48 [4.19] years, P > 0.05). The most commonly reported symptom was itching, and the most common signs were papillary hypertrophy and conjunctival hyperemia. All symptoms and signs were significantly reduced after treatment in both groups. The tacrolimus group showed a more significant improvement at 3 and 6 months in the mean composite symptom score (both P < 0.05) and in the mean composite sign score (both P < 0.05). Regarding complications, one case of increased intraocular pressure occurred in the control group (4%) after 2 weeks of steroid treatment, while there were no complications in the tacrolimus group, except for some reports of stinging sensation, which was well tolerated. Conclusions: Treatment of chronic bilateral VKC with tacrolimus 0.03% eye ointment is effective and safe. It could be considered an alternative treatment to reduce steroid-associated complications in patients with chronic VKC. Future double-blinded clinical trials with a longer follow-up period are necessary to confirm our findings and to determine the long-term safety of topical tacrolimus 0.03% ointment in VKC.
Characteristics of patients with viral infections of the lower respiratory tract: A retrospective study

While the impact of respiratory virus infections has been well researched in some respiratory diseases, no clinical studies have discussed the subject of who would be more likely to develop respiratory virus infections among patients with various respiratory illnesses who come from different backgrounds. This study aimed to identify respiratory diseases that are frequently associated with respiratory virus infections along with the characteristics of patients who develop such infections in clinical settings. Tested specimens were obtained from the lower respiratory tract by bronchoscopy to provide more accurate data. Data of bronchoscopies at Ryukyu University Hospital between August 2012 and September 2016 were reviewed, and patients who underwent multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for detecting respiratory viruses in bronchoscopy specimens were retrospectively recruited for descriptive statistics. Differences among patients’ primary pulmonary diseases and backgrounds were compared between the PCR-positive and -negative patients, and multivariate statistical analysis was performed to analyze factors associated with a positive PCR test result. Overall, 756 bronchoscopies were performed during the study period and PCR tests were performed for 177 patients. Of them, 27 tested positive for respiratory viruses, mainly parainfluenza virus and rhinovirus, and out of those, 7 were hospitalized for >1 month. Overall, all patients did not experience typical upper respiratory infection symptoms. In positive patients, 13 and 7 had diagnoses of interstitial lung disease and bacterial pneumonia, respectively. The diagnoses of 3 bacterial pneumonia cases were changed to viral pneumonia after receiving their PCR-positive tests. Respiratory virus infections were confirmed in 14 patients on immunosuppressant therapy and 4 on maintenance dialysis. Multivariate analysis revealed that immunosuppressant therapy and maintenance dialysis were independently associated with respiratory virus infections. Viruses were commonly detected in patients with interstitial lung diseases and bacterial pneumonia, while few patients were diagnosed with pure viral pneumonia. These illnesses were considered to be induced by respiratory infections. Immunosuppressant therapy and maintenance dialysis were associated with respiratory virus infections. Multiplex PCR testing is an essential diagnostic tool for respiratory virus infections in immunocompromised patients.
YouTube as a source of information and education on endometriosis

Many patients seek information online, including on social media, regarding various health topics. This study aimed to investigate whether YouTube videos on endometriosis could be a useful source for the general population, surgical trainees, and specialists. A YouTube search was conducted on December 26, 2021, using the search terms “endometriosis,” “endometrioma,” and “endometriotic cyst. ” Videos were sorted by view count, and the 100 videos with the highest view counts were chosen. After excluding 48 videos for various reasons, 52 were included in the final analysis. The number of views, duration, likes and dislikes, content type, and source of each video were recorded. We referred to a previous study to evaluate video quality. The 52 videos related to endometriosis had a total of 35,220,141 views (median 233,688, range 48,874–10,452,366). Based on authorship, the videos were categorized into videos uploaded by the medical group and the nonmedical group. The medical group mainly uploaded videos directly related to endometriosis, such as explanations or detailed surgical procedures for endometriosis (26/27, 96%), whereas the nonmedical group mainly uploaded videos about personal experiences and others (24/25, 96%; P <.001). Evaluating the score by each type of content, videos containing personal experiences (median score 6, range 3–10) scored significantly lower than videos containing other content such as explanations of the disease (median score 14, range 7–18; P < .001) and surgical procedures (median score 9, range 5–17; P < .001). Analysis according to the source, the number of views and video power index was significantly higher in the videos uploaded by the nonmedical group (P < .05). YouTube is currently not an appropriate source for patients to gain information on endometriosis. Credible videos with accurate information and clear, high-quality operative clips with proper scientific commentary should be uploaded by medical professionals and medical institutions to critically and rapidly appraise the quality of online video-disseminated information on endometriosis. In addition, advanced filtering using categories by YouTube’s staff appears to be necessary.
Effect of Tactical Game Models on Formation of Basic Techniques in Handball Players: Mixed Method

Study purpose. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of a tactical game model program on improving formation of basic techniques in male handball players. Materials and methods. This study adopted a mixed method (quantitative and qualitative). 20 students from Indonesian education universities were willing to be the subjects of this study. The experimental group (n=10) received treatment, namely the tactical game model program, and the control group (n=10) carried out daily training activities or did not receive any program. The tactical game model program was held 16 times with once a week meetings. After the tactical game model program was completed, 10 athletes were interviewed. The quantitative instrument in this study used a test for shooting, passing and dribbling. Meanwhile, the instrument for qualitative research used in-depth interviews about the experiences, strengths and weaknesses of the tactical game model program. Analysis of quantitative data was carried out using IBM SPSS, and analysis of qualitative data was carried out using thematic analysis. Results. The results of this quantitative study showed that there was a significant effect of tactical game models on improving the formation of basic techniques in male handball players (p<0.05), but the control group showed no significant effect (p>0.05). Meanwhile, the results of qualitative research showed that the subjects provided positive and diverse perceptions about the tactical game model program. Conclusions. This study confirms that the tactical game models program has proven to be an alternative teaching method for lecturers at the university level to improve the formation of basic techniques in male handball players.
Output Feedback Control of Hydraulic Active Suspensions With Experimental Validation

This brief presents a novel control method for half-vehicle active suspension systems driven by hydraulic actuators. First, a coordinate transform approach is introduced to reformulate the strict-feedback system into a canonical form, by which the widely used backstepping method is not required. Then, a modified high-gain observer (HGO) is studied to rebuild the unknown system states of the nonlinear active suspension system. To eliminate the effect of unknown nonlinearities, a simple robust unknown system dynamics estimator (USDE) with only one tuning parameter is developed in terms of the system input and output only. Finally, the observer and estimator are integrated to design an output feedback controller to regulate the vehicle motion. Comparative experiments are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
MetaCAR: Cross-Domain Meta-Augmentation for Content-Aware Recommendation

Cold-start has become critical for recommendations, especially for sparse user-item interactions. Recent approaches based on meta-learning succeed in alleviating the issue, owing to the fact that these methods have strong generalization, so they can fast adapt to new tasks under cold-start settings. However, these meta-learning-based recommendation models learned with single and spase ratings are easily falling into the meta-overfitting, since the one and only rating <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r_{ui}$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:msub><mml:mi>r</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mi>u</mml:mi><mml:mi>i</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq1-3209005.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> to a specific item <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$i$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mi>i</mml:mi></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq2-3209005.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> cannot reflect a user's diverse interests under various circumstances(e.g., time, mood, age, etc), i.e., if <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r_{ui}$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:msub><mml:mi>r</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mi>u</mml:mi><mml:mi>i</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq3-3209005.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> equals to 1 in the historical dataset, but <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$r_{ui}$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:msub><mml:mi>r</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mi>u</mml:mi><mml:mi>i</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="zhang-ieq4-3209005.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> could be 0 in some circumstance. In meta-learning, tasks with these single ratings are called Non-Mutually-Exclusive(Non-ME) tasks, and tasks with diverse ratings are called Mutually-Exclusive(ME) tasks. Fortunately, a meta-augmentation technique is proposed to relief the meta-overfitting for meta-learning methods by transferring Non-ME tasks into ME tasks by adding noises to labels without changing inputs. Motivated by the meta-augmentation method, in this paper, we propose a cross-domain meta-augmentation technique for content-aware recommendation systems (MetaCAR) to construct ME tasks in the recommendation scenario. Our proposed method consists of two stages: meta-augmentation and meta-learning. In the meta-augmentation stage, we first conduct domain adaptation by a dual conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with a multi-view information bottleneck constraint, and then apply the learned CVAE to generate ratings for users in the target domain. In the meta-learning stage, we introduce both the true and generated ratings to construct ME tasks that enables the meta-learning recommendations to avoid meta-overfitting. Experiments evaluated in real-world datasets show the significant superiority of MetaCAR for coping with the cold-start user issue over competing baselines including cross-domain, content-aware, and meta-learning-based recommendations.
X-Ray Nova XTE J1550–564: Discovery of a Quasi-periodic Oscillation near 185 Hz

We have investigated the X-ray timing properties of XTE J1550-564 during 60 Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer Proportional Counter Array observations made between 1998 September 18 and November 28. We detect quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) near 185 Hz during four time intervals. The QPO widths (FWHM) are ~50 Hz, and the rms amplitudes are ~1% of the mean flux at 2-30 keV. This is the third Galactic black hole candidate known to exhibit a transient X-ray timing signature above 50 Hz, following the 67 Hz QPO in GRS 1915+105 and the 300 Hz QPO in GRO J1655-40. However, unlike the previous cases, which appear to show stationary frequencies, the QPO frequency in XTE J1550-564 must vary by at least ~10% to be consistent with observations. The occurrences and properties of the QPO were insensitive to large changes in the X-ray intensity (1.5-6.8 crab). However, the QPO appearance was accompanied by changes in the energy spectrum, namely, an increase in the temperature and a decrease in the normalization of the thermal component. The QPO is also closely related to the hard X-ray power-law component of the energy spectrum since the fractional amplitude of the QPO increases with photon energy. The fast QPOs in accreting black hole binaries are thought to be effects of general relativity; however, the relevance of the specific physical models that have been proposed remains largely uncertain. Low-frequency QPOs in the range 3-13 Hz were often observed. Occasionally, at high luminosity, the rms QPO amplitude was ~15% of the flux, a level previously reached only by GRS 1915+105. These extraordinary oscillations have a coherence parameter (ν/Δν) in the range 4-12 and are tied to the power-law component in the energy spectrum.
Teachers of Color and Precarious Work: The Inequality of Job Security

The teacher workforce has undergone macrostructural economic and political changes tied to privatization, deunionization, and deregulation. These forms of neoliberal restructuring have resulted in employment precarity or job insecurity for teachers, but have acutely impacted teachers of color. Drawing on the literature from economic sociology and the sociology of work, this conceptual paper outlines three defining features of precarity in teaching: (1) precarity as a process of neoliberalism; (2) precarity as a socioeconomic condition; and (3) precarity as an ontological experience. By applying these aspects of precarity, this article casts light on the historical and contemporaneous work experiences of teachers of color that render them at risk for job insecurity and social and economic vulnerability.
Reallocation of Mutual Fund Managers and Capital Raising Ability

This paper establishes the fund manager’s capital raising ability as an important managerial skill that fund firms exploit to generate higher firm revenues. Fund firms reallocate fund managers with high capital raising ability to other funds with large outflows. Investors demand the capital raising ability of managers and reward it by investing more capital despite lower future alphas. A team with a larger experience difference between reallocated managers and existing managers attracts more capital inflows, suggesting that there is a synergy effect on the fund manager’s capital raising ability.
ACF: An Armed CCTV Footage Dataset for Enhancing Weapon Detection

Thailand, like other countries worldwide, has experienced instability in recent years. If current trends continue, the number of crimes endangering people or property will expand. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) technology is now commonly utilized for surveillance and monitoring to ensure people’s safety. A weapon detection system can help police officers with limited staff minimize their workload through on-screen surveillance. Since CCTV footage captures the entire incident scenario, weapon detection becomes challenging due to the small weapon objects in the footage. Due to public datasets providing inadequate information on our interested scope of CCTV image’s weapon detection, an Armed CCTV Footage (ACF) dataset, the self-collected mockup CCTV footage of pedestrians armed with pistols and knives, was collected for different scenarios. This study aimed to present an image tilling-based deep learning for small weapon object detection. The experiments were conducted on a public benchmark dataset (Mock Attack) to evaluate the detection performance. The proposed tilling approach achieved a significantly better mAP of 10.22 times. The image tiling approach was used to train different object detection models to analyze the improvement. On SSD MobileNet V2, the tiling ACF Dataset achieved an mAP of 0.758 on the pistol and knife evaluation. The proposed method for enhancing small weapon detection by using the tiling approach with our ACF Dataset can significantly enhance the performance of weapon detection.
Development of beta-carotene-loaded poly(lactic acid)/hydroxyapatite core-shell nanoparticles for osteoblast differentiation

ABSTRACT Beta-carotene (BC) is a nutrient in vegetables and a precursor of vitamin A. BC has been reported to have anticarcinogenic, antiaging, and antioxidation properties and prevents heart diseases. Recently, BC has gained significant attention due to stimulating effect on osteoblast differentiation. Poly(lactic acid)/hydroxyapatite (PLA/HAp) core-shell nanoparticles have been reported earlier with a load capacity of 250% for water-insoluble substances, using a surfactant-free emulsification method. In this work, PLA/HAp core-shell nanoparticles loaded with BC were prepared, and osteoblast differentiation behavior was evaluated. BC was successfully loaded into PLA/HAp core-shell nanoparticles with diameters of approximately 30 nm. BC/loaded PLA/HAp core-shell nanoparticles stimulated osteoblast differentiation by upregulating collagen type I, osteopontin, and osteocalcin expression. In addition, the gene expression levels of these osteoblasts were significantly larger than those stimulated by PLA/HAp core-shell nanoparticles without BC and cultured in a differential medium (with ascorbic acid and β-glycerophosphate). PLA/HAp core-shell nanoparticles showed satisfactory cytocompatibility because they were attached to the osteoblasts. Consequently, BC was effectively delivered to osteoblasts by nanoparticles. These results suggested that BC-loaded PLA/HAp core-shell nanoparticles could enhance bone formation. Graphical Abstract
Wind turbine power prediction via deep neural network using hybrid approach

Due to the chaotic nature of wind speed, short-term wind power prediction is a challengeable one. A reliable and accurate wind power prediction model is necessary for the wind turbine industry. Based on their improved ability to cope with complicated nonlinear issues, an increasing number of deep learning-based models are being explored for wind power prediction as artificial intelligence technologies, especially in deep neural networks. In this research, the wind power prediction model is divided into three stages. The first stage is to collect data from wind turbines. The second stage is to apply the optimal tuning of the Deep Neural Network (DNN) to predict the wind power. Here, the hybrid algorithm termedBird Swarm Merged Seagull Optimizer(BSMSO) stipulates DNN’s weight optimization points for wind power prediction; in addition, it reduces the time required for the same. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed BSMSO-DNN prediction model is proved by matching the statistical performance measures as regards toerror metrics with other existing techniques. The simulation results reveal thatthe proposed hybrid modelreduces the prediction errors significantly.
External fields and the dynamics of fundamental flavours in holographic duals of large N gauge theories

Using the gauge-gravity duality we study strongly coupled dynamics of fundamental flavours in large N_c gauge theories in a constant external field. We primarily focus on the effects of an external magnetic field. We use two holographic models realized in the Type IIB and Type IIA supergravity and present a comparative case study. In both these models, by studying the dynamics of probe branes, we explicitly demonstrate and discuss the magnetically induced chiral symmetry breaking effect ("magnetic catalysis") in the flavour sector. We also study the associated thermodynamics and the meson spectrum and realize e.g. Zeeman splitting, stability enhancement of the mesons in the presence of an external magnetic field etc. By studying the quasinormal modes of the probe brane fluctuation in the hydrodynamic limit we also obtain an analytic dispersion relation in the presence of a magnetic field in the Type IIA model. This dispersion relation consists of a propagating sound mode in the otherwise diffusive channel and is sourced by the quantum anomaly of the global U(1) current. We briefly discuss the effects of an external electric field and observe that the flavour bound states dissociate for sufficiently high electric fields and an electric current is induced.