Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changes in Kidney Fat upon Dietary-Induced Weight Loss

As the metabolic role of kidney fat remains unclear, we investigated the effects of dietary weight loss on kidney fat content (KFC) and its connection to kidney function and metabolism. Overweight or obese participants (n = 137) of a dietary intervention trial were classified into quartiles of weight loss in a post hoc manner. Kidney sinus (KSF) and cortex fat (KCF) were measured by magnetic resonance imaging at baseline, week 12 and week 50. Weight loss effects on KFC were evaluated by linear mixed models. Repeated measures correlations between KFC, other body fat measures and metabolic biomarkers were obtained. KSF, but not KCF, decreased significantly across weight loss quartiles at week 12 (quartile 4: −21.3%; p = 0.02) and 50 (−22.0%, p = 0.001), which remained significant after adjusting for VAT. There were smaller improvements regarding creatinine (−2.5%, p = 0.02) at week 12, but not week 50. KSF, but not KCF, correlated with visceral (rrm = 0.38) and subcutaneous fat volumes (rrm = 0.31) and liver fat content (rrm = 0.32), as well as diastolic blood pressure and biomarkers of lipid, glucose and liver metabolism. Dietary weight loss is associated with decreases in KSF, but not KCF, which suggests that KSF may be the metabolically relevant ectopic fat depot of the kidney. KSF may be targeted for obesity-related disease prevention.
Consciousness, splitting, and the dynamic unconscious: Commentary on Kernberg

ABSTRACT Otto Kernberg presents a sophisticated approach integrating neurobiology and object relations and calling for revisions to both drive theory and the dynamic unconscious. This commentary briefly addresses Kernberg’s revision of drive theory before focusing upon his theory of splitting and the dynamic unconscious. Although Kernberg’s theory of affect systems, conflict, and the dynamic unconscious provides an important contribution, there are nevertheless several gaps in his theory that require addressing before being able to fully assess his proposal.
The Evaluation of Gait and Balance for Patients with Early Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objective Falls often occur in patients with diabetic neuropathy due to biomechanical alternation. The implication of diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) on gait and balance remains poorly understood. Methods A total of 11 dynamic gait, balance and electrophysiological parameters were evaluated in 176 participants. The biomechanical parameters were compared between groups. Results Stride length and stride velocity were significantly lower in all subgroups of DPN compared with healthy subjects (p<0.05). Stance phase and double support phase were significantly higher, but swing phase were significantly lower across all subgroups of DPN than healthy subjects (p<0.05). Under eyes-open standing, the ML and AP range parameters of CoM sway, ankle sway and hip sway, CoM sway index, ankle swing index in both subclinical and confirmed DPN patients were all significantly higher compared to healthy subjects (p<0.05). Under eyes-closed standing, AP range parameters of CoM sway in subclinical DPN and confirmed DPN patients were significantly higher than healthy subjects (p<0.05). The hip sway areas in diabetics were significantly higher compared to healthy subjects (p<0.05). Conclusion The abnormal biomechanical parameters existed in the early stages of patients with DPN. The static balance under eyes-open and eye-closed condition is maintained by ankle joint compensation strategy and hip joint protection strategy. An early evaluation and better risk management is essential for diabetic patients with a history of more than 5 years even without DPN clinical symptoms and signs. Clinical Trial Registration Number No. ChiCTR1800019179, www.chictr. org.cn.
Toward Finer Granularity Analysis of Network Trafﬁc

—Fine-grained trafﬁc analysis (FGTA), as an advanced form of trafﬁc analysis (TA), aims to analyze network trafﬁc to deduce information related to application-layer activities, ﬁne-grained user behaviors, or trafﬁc content, even in the presence of trafﬁc encryption or trafﬁc obfuscation. Different from traditional TA, FGTA approaches are usually based on machine learning or high-dimensional clustering, enabling them to discover subtle differences between different network trafﬁc sets. Nowadays, with the increasingly complex Internet architecture, the increasingly frequent transmission of user data, and the widespread use of trafﬁc encryption, FGTA is becoming an essential tool for both network administrators and attackers to gain different levels of visibility over the network. It plays a critical role in intrusion and anomaly detection, quality of experience investigation, user activity inference, website ﬁnger-printing, location estimation, etc. To help scholars and developers research and advance this technology, in this report, we examine the literature that deals with FGTA, investigating the frontier developments in this domain. By comprehensively surveying different approaches toward FGTA, we introduce their input trafﬁc data, elaborate on their operating principles by different use cases, indicate their limitations and countermeasures, and raise several promising future research avenues.
Characterization of 11â-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase activity and corticosteroid receptor expression in human osteosarcoma cell lines

Studies in vitro and in vivo have shown that corticosteroids play an important role in bone physiology and pathophysiology. It is now established that corticosteroid hormone action is regulated, in part, at the pre-receptor level through the expression of isozymes of 11â-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (11â-HSD), which are responsible for the interconversion of hormonally active cortisol to cortisone. In this report we demonstrate 11â-HSD activity in human osteoblast (OB) cells. Osteosarcoma-derived OB cell lines TE-85, MG-63 and SaOS-2 and fibrosarcoma Hs913T cells express the type 2 isoform of 11â-HSD, as determined by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and specific enzyme assays. Enzyme activity was shown to be strictly NAD dependent with a Km of approximately 71 nM; 11â-HSD type 1 mRNA expression and enzyme activity were not detected. All four cell lines expressed mRNA for the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and mineralocorticoid receptor, but specific binding was only detectable with radiolabelled dexamethasone (Kd=10 nM) and not aldosterone. MG-63 cells had two to three times more GR than the other OB cells, which correlated with the higher levels of 11â-HSD 2 activity in these cells. In contrast to the osteosarcoma cell studies, RT-PCR analysis of primary cultures of human OB cells revealed the presence of mRNA for 11â-HSD 1 as well as 11â-HSD 2. However, enzyme activity in these cells remained predominantly oxidative, i.e. inactivation of cortisol to cortisone (147 pmol/h per mg protein at 500 nM cortisol) was greater than cortisone to cortisol (10·3 pmol/h per mg protein at 250 nM cortisone). Data from normal human OB and osteosarcoma cells demonstrate the presence of an endogenous mechanism for inactivation of glucocorticoids in OB cells. We postulate that expression of the type 1 and type 2 isoforms of 11â-HSD in human bone plays an important role in normal bone homeostasis, and may be implicated in the pathogenesis of steroid-induced osteoporosis. Journal of Endocrinology (1999) 161, 455–464
Power and Dignity in the Low-Wage Labor Market: Theory and Evidence from Wal-Mart Workers

We present a survey-based methodology for estimating employer market power and worker valuations of job amenities. We discuss a simple model of a monopsonistic employer choosing wages jointly with non-wage working conditions. We show that a distinctive prediction of monopsony is that just-binding minimum wages are not offset by lowered workplace characteristics that are complementary with wages. To implement our methodology, we draw on in-depth interviews conducted with 87 Walmart workers to design and implement a survey experiment with over 10,000 Walmart workers recruited online. Using responses to hypothetical outside offers and link click-through rates, we find a quit elasticity of roughly 2, consistent with other recent research showing monopsony power in the low-wage labor market. Motivated by the ethnographic evidence, we expand the set of amenities to include subjective experiences of supervisor respect and fairness, self-expression on the job, and reliable co-workers, which we jointly call "workplace dignity", following a large sociological literature. We find that workers value workplace dignity at approximately six percent of their current wage, comparable to amenities like commute time and more valuable than widely discussed amenities like control over one’s schedule or physical exertion. Second, we use geographic variation in the bite of Walmart’s 2014 voluntary minimum wage policy to estimate the causal impact of higher wages on amenities. Consistent with both employer market power and wage-amenity complementarities, we find that the subjective experience of work does not become worse when wages are increased as a result of the voluntary minimum wage. We can rule out declines in valued experiences of work smaller than 10% of the increase in wages caused by the voluntary minimum wage. We conclude that the interaction of employer market power with worker’s valuations of respect and fairness at work imply that large low-wage employers may under-supply both wages and job amenities, including workplace dignity.
Role of Desire and Implementation of Intention in the Theory of Planned Behavior: A Bibliometric Analysis

A weak finding of behavioral intention and behavior in the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) from a meta-analysis study by Armitage and Conner in 2001 has led to an increasing number of studies aiming to improve the TPB. Several researchers propose potential constructs to bridge the theoretical and empirical gap by suggesting that the construct of desire and the implementation of intentions can fill the theoretical and empirical gaps in the TPB model. The literature study aimed to retrospectively explore TPB studies with desire and implementation of intentions constructs in the behavioral science domain. The research retrieved 191 SCOPUS indexed papers (2012–2019) from the Google Scholars database. It summarized the descriptive data and produced visualization using VOSviewer. The results show that most studies developing the TPB model with other behavioral theories still focus on constructs to shape behavioral intentions because the behavioral intention construct is the best predictor of behavior. Most studies apply a quantitative approach with a cross-sectional survey design to collect primary data. In contrast, the experimental and longitudinal design approaches are relatively neglected in this TPB behavioral study. Furthermore, the analysis of 191 papers shows that the TPB model is often used in research in environmental, sustainable, and transport settings; health; psychological; hospitality and tourism; and innovation and technology. In addition, the use of the TPB model in research with entrepreneurial and legal settings is still limited. From these findings, the research proposes empirical research on TPB to implement further the relationship between desire and intention implementation to improve the TPB model by integrating the TPB model with several other theories, such as Mindset Theory of Action Phase and Model Goal-Directed Behaviour.
Continuing Medical Education among Ministry of Health Primary Care Physicians in Bahrain: Experiences and Perceptions

Introduction: Continuing medical education (CME) is the process through which health professionals engage in activities designed to support their continuing professional development. It is a requirement for physician relicensing, and recredentialing. Existing literature shows that CME improves physician performance as well as patient health outcomes. It is incumbent to study the experiences and attitudes of physicians towards CME activities in view of the impact of CME on the professional development. Purpose: To describe experiences and perceptions of CME activities among primary care physicians in Bahrain. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study that included all registered primary health care physicians in the ministry of health in Bahrain. Data was collected using self-administered online survey distributed to 350 primary care physicians in Bahrain. The five-point Likert scale questionnaire is composed of five sections: socio-demographic data, participant`s experiences with CME, Reasons for attending CME activities, barriers to attending CME activities and benefits of CME in relation to different delivery methods. Results: Total responses were 210 (60% response rate). The mean age of respondents was 40.8(SD 8.9) and the majority (84.4%) were female. Most of the CMEs were in the form of lectures (88.6%), interdepartmental activities (80.5%) and conferences (78.1%). Driving forces for CME were for credentialing /licensing (92.9%), develop clinical competencies (92.9%), improve clinical services/programs (95.2%) and to introduce new technology/techniques (88.6%). Regarding barriers encountered, financial support was the most encountered (mean 4.11 (SD 0.92)), followed by lack of time (mean 4.05 (SD 1.07)). Conclusion: Despite the barriers encountered, Bahraini physicians had a positive experience and attitude toward undertaking CME. There is a need for financial support and protected time to attend CME activities as well as further studies to explore how best these challenges could be managed and solved.
Fast Detection of Denial Constraint Violations

The detection of constraint-based errors is a critical task in many data cleaning solutions. Previous works perform the task either using traditional data management systems or using specialized systems that speed up error detection. Unfortunately, both approaches may fail to execute in a reasonable time or even exhaust the available memory in the attempt. To address the main drawbacks of previous approaches, we present the FAst Constraint-based Error DeTector (FACET) to detect violations of denial constraints (DCs). FACET uses column sketch information to organize a pipeline of special operators for DC predicates and it implements these operators using a set of efficient algorithms and data structures that adapt to different data characteristics and predicate structures. We evaluate our system on a diverse array of datasets and constraints, showing its robustness and performance gains compared to different types of DBMSs and to a specialized system.
Baumol's model of 'unbalanced growth' revisited

The share of health care expenditure in GDP rises rapidly in virtually all OECD countries, causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public. Yet, economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are. This paper revisits Baumol’s (1967) model of ‘unbalanced growth’, showing that the latter offers a ready explanation for the observed inexorable rise in health care expenditure. The main implication of Baumol’s model in this context is that health care expenditure is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. This hypothesis is tested empirically using data from a panel of 19 OECD countries. Our tests yield robust evidence in favor of Baumol’s theory.
Various Reconstruction Modalities of Ramal Condylar Unit (RCU) in TMJ Ankylosis Patients: Our Experience in a Tertiary Care Centre

Introduction: Comprehensive management of TMJ ankylosis including restoration of form, function and aesthetics is a challenging aspect for Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeon. Various treatment modalities have been reported in the literature with their merits, demerits and diverse success rate. Materials and Method: We report our experience in reconstruction of Ramal Condylar Unit (RCU) in temporomandibular joint ankylosis patients in a retrospective review. A total of 06 cases of TMJ ankylosis were included in the review. The cases were managed in our tertiary care centre from June 2019 to June 2020. Demographic distribution of the patients, preoperative findings, surgical modalities used for RCU reconstruction and postoperative outcome were recorded and compared. Results: Average mouth opening increased from 8.5 mm pre-operatively to 29.5 mm 3 months postoperatively. 02 cases of Sawhney’s type I and II ankylosis were managed by interpositional gap arthroplasty using temporalis myofascial flap. 01 case of Sawhney’s type I ankylosis was managed by gap arthroplasty interposed with dermis-fat graft. 02 cases of Sawhney’s type III ankylosis were managed by osteoarthrectomy and reconstruction of RCU by costochondral graft. In 01 case with Sawhney’s type III ankylosis, functional joint was reconstructed using distraction osteogenesis. We encountered 01 case of recurrence in a case managed by costochondral grafting. Conclusion: Amongst the various modalities suggested in the literature, the RCU reconstruction with distraction osteogenesis and costochondral grafting provide best result functionally and aesthetically. The diagnosis, timely management and post-operative follow up are the key to success in TMJ ankylosis.
Heterogeneous Districts, Interests, and Trade Policy

: Congressional districts are political entities with heterogeneous trade policy preferences due to their diverse economic structures. Representation of these interests in Congress is a crucial aspect of trade policymaking that is missing in canonical political economy models of trade. In this paper, we underscore the influence of districts by developing a political economy model of trade with region-specific factors. Using 2002 data from U.S. Congressional Districts, we first characterize the unobserved district-level demand for protection. Extending the model beyond the small country assumption to account for export interests as a force countering protection, we develop a model of national tariff-setting. The model predictions are used to estimate the welfare weights implied by tariff and non-tariff measures enacted nationally. Our supply-side explanation for trade policy, while complementing Grossman and Helpman (1994), reveals district and industry-level patterns of winners and losers, central to understanding the political consequences of trade and the backlash against globalization.
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, in press Raeding with the fingres: Towards a universal model of letter position coding

Letter position coding in word recognition has been widely investigated in the visual modality (e.g., labotarory is confusable with laboratory), but not as much in the tactile modality using braille, leading to an incomplete understanding of whether this process is modalitydependent. Unlike sighted readers, braille readers do not show a transposed-letter similarity effect with nonadjacent transpositions (e.g., labotarory = labodanory; Perea et al., 2012). While this latter finding was taken to suggest that the flexibility in letter position coding was due to visual factors (e.g., perceptual uncertainty in the location of visual objects [letters]), it is necessary to test whether transposed-letter effects occur with adjacent letters to reach firm conclusions. Indeed, in the auditory modality (i.e., another serial modality), a transposedphoneme effect occurs for adjacent but not for nonadjacent transpositions. In a lexical decision task, we examined whether pseudowords created by transposing two adjacent letters of a word (e.g., laboartory) are more confusable with their base word (laboratory) than pseudowords created by replacing those letters (laboestory) in braille. Results showed that transposed-letter pseudowords produced more errors and slower responses than the orthographic controls. Thus, these findings suggest that the mechanism of serial order, while universal, can be shaped by the sensory modality at play.
Transformer for Nonintrusive Load Monitoring: Complexity Reduction and Transferability

Nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) is to obtain individual appliance’s electricity consumption from aggregated smart meter data. In this article, we propose a middle window transformer model, termed Midformer, for NILM. Existing models are limited by high computational complexity, dependency on data, and poor transferability. In Midformer, we first exploit patchwise embedding to shorten the input length, and then reduce the size of queries in the attention layer by only using global attention on a few selected input locations at the center of the window to capture the global context. The cyclically shifted window technique is used to preserve connection across patches. We also follow the pretraining and fine-tuning paradigm to relieve the dependency on data, reduce the computation in modeling training, and enhance transferability of the model to unknown tasks and domains. Our experimental study using two real-world data sets demonstrates the superior performance and transferability of Midformer over three baseline models.
Other Roles Matter! Enhancing Role-Oriented Dialogue Summarization via Role Interactions

Role-oriented dialogue summarization is to generate summaries for different roles in the dialogue, e.g., merchants and consumers. Existing methods handle this task by summarizing each role’s content separately and thus are prone to ignore the information from other roles. However, we believe that other roles’ content could benefit the quality of summaries, such as the omitted information mentioned by other roles. Therefore, we propose a novel role interaction enhanced method for role-oriented dialogue summarization. It adopts cross attention and decoder self-attention interactions to interactively acquire other roles’ critical information. The cross attention interaction aims to select other roles’ critical dialogue utterances, while the decoder self-attention interaction aims to obtain key information from other roles’ summaries. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on two public role-oriented dialogue summarization datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that other roles’ content could help generate summaries with more complete semantics and correct topic structures.