Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Working Group Recommendations for the Practice of Teleneuropsychology in Latin America

Abstract Objective Teleneuropsychology (teleNP) could potentially expand access to services for patients who are confined, have limited personal access to healthcare, or live in remote areas. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the use of teleNP for cognitive assessments. The main objective of these recommendations is to identify which procedures can be potentially best adapted to the practice of teleNP in Latin America, and thereby facilitate professional decision-making in the region. Method Steps taken to develop these recommendations included (1) formation of an international working group with representatives from 12 Latin American countries; (2) assessment of rationale, scope, and objectives; (3) formulation of clinical questions; (4) evidence search and selection; (5) evaluation of existing evidence and summary; and (6) formulation of recommendations. Levels of evidence were graded following the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine system. Databases examined included PubMed, WHO-IRIS, WHO and PAHO-IRIS, Índice Bibliográfico Español en Ciencias de la Salud (IBCS), and LILACS. Results Working group members reviewed 18,400 titles and 422 abstracts and identified 19 articles meeting the criteria for level of evidence, categorization, and elaboration of recommendations. The vast majority of the literature included teleNP tests in the English language. The working group proposed a series of recommendations that can be potentially best adapted to the practice of teleNP in Latin America. Conclusions There is currently sufficient evidence to support the use of videoconferencing technology for remote neuropsychological assessments. These recommendations will likely contribute to the advancement of teleNP research and practice in the region.
Fixational eye movements in passive versus active sustained fixation tasks

Human fixational eye movements are so small and precise that high-speed, accurate tools are needed to fully reveal their properties and functional roles. Where the fixated image lands on the retina and how it moves for different levels of visually demanding tasks is the subject of the current study. An Adaptive Optics Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) was used to image, track and present a variety of fixation targets (Maltese cross, disk, concentric circles, Vernier and tumbling-E letter) to healthy subjects. During these different passive (static) or active (discriminating) tasks under natural eye motion, the landing position of the target on the retina was tracked in space and time over the retinal image directly with high spatial (<1 arcmin) and temporal (960 Hz) resolution. We computed both the eye motion and the exact trajectory of the fixated target's motion over the retina. We confirmed that compared to passive tasks, active tasks elicited a partial inhibition of microsaccades, leading to longer drift periods compensated by larger corrective saccades. Consequently, the overall fixation stability during active tasks was on average 57% larger than during passive tasks. The preferred retinal locus of fixation was the same for each task and did not coincide with the location of the peak cone density.
Establishing a recommended duration of blood glucose monitoring in nondiabetic patients following orthopaedic surgery

Previous studies have demonstrated that blood glucose (BG) levels should be monitored for at least 1 week after orthopaedic surgery in diabetic patients, but no study has determined how long nondiabetic patients should be monitored. As postoperative elevations in BG have deleterious effects, determining a duration for monitoring the BG of nondiabetic patients after major orthopaedic surgery is needed to detect hyperglycemic events, create comprehensive protocols for nondiabetic orthopaedic patients, and reduce adverse outcomes. A retrospective study was conducted including consecutive patients who underwent a major orthopaedic surgery at a community hospital. A BG level of 150 mg/dl was the cutoff used to define hyperglycemia according to our institutional guidelines. A χ2, analysis of variance, and subgroup analysis were performed separately. Greater than 67% of nondiabetic patients experienced a high BG level (>150 mg/dl) after surgery. We found that nondiabetic patients reached their postoperative maximum BG level at 20 h, which was sooner compared to diabetic patients. We discovered more than 92% of nondiabetic patients reached a maximum BG levels within the first 72 h of hospitalization, while the BG levels after this period were found to be within normal limits in greater than 87% of cases. We propose that BG management be instituted in nondiabetics from the preoperative period to 72 h after surgery, including patients who are same‐day discharges. There may not be a need to continue inpatient BG monitoring beyond the first 72 h for nondiabetic hospitalized patients with extended hospitalizations.
IL-12 regulates type 3 immunity through interfollicular keratinocytes in psoriasiform inflammation

Description IL-12 protects from psoriasiform inflammation via interfollicular keratinocytes by promoting skin homeostasis. IL-12 curtails cutaneous inflammation Psoriasis is primarily a type 3 immune response–driven pathology, motivating the development of IL-23–neutralizing therapies. Despite the initial clinical success of monoclonal antibodies targeting the shared IL-12/IL-23 p40 subunit, the superior efficacy of IL-23–specific antibodies suggests that sparing IL-12 is beneficial. To investigate the cell type–specific role of IL-12 signaling during psoriasiform inflammation, Zwicky et al. developed Il12rb2 conditional knockout/reporter mice. Although Il12rb2 was highly expressed in skin γδ T cells and a subset of interfollicular keratinocytes, mice with Il12rb2 deleted in keratinocytes, but not hematopoietic cells, developed more severe skin inflammation in a mouse model of psoriasis. IL-12 signaling restrained keratinocyte proliferation and counteracted IL-23/IL-17 cytokine signaling, highlighting the noninflammatory, regulatory function of IL-12 in skin pathologies dependent on type 3 immunity. Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disorder underpinned by dysregulated cytokine signaling. Drugs neutralizing the common p40 subunit of interleukin-12 (IL-12) and IL-23 represented a therapeutic breakthrough; however, new drugs that block the IL-23p19 subunit and spare IL-12 are more effective, suggesting a regulatory function of IL-12. To pinpoint the cell type and underlying mechanism of IL-12–mediated immune regulation in psoriasis, we generated a conditional Il12rb2-knockout (KO)/reporter mouse strain. We detected Il12rb2 expression in T cells and a specific subset of interfollicular (IF) keratinocytes. Analysis of single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNAseq) data from patients with psoriasis confirmed a similar expression pattern in the human skin. Deletion of Il12rb2 across the hematopoietic compartment did not alter the development of Aldara-induced psoriasiform inflammation. However, depletion of Il12rb2 in keratinocytes exacerbated disease development, phenocopying the Il12rb2 germline knockout. Protective IL-12 signaling blocked the hyperproliferation of keratinocytes, maintained skin barrier integrity, and diminished disease-driving IL-23/type 3 immune circuits. In line, specific IL-23p19 blockade led to a more profound reduction of psoriatic keratinocyte expression signatures in the skin of patients with psoriasis than combined IL-12/IL-23 inhibition. Collectively, we provide a potential explanation for the superior efficacy of IL-23p19 inhibitors in psoriasis and describe an unperceived role of IL-12 in maintaining skin epithelial cell homeostasis.
Effects of the oil-find on land management in the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis, Western Coast of Ghana

ABSTRACT The recent oil-find at the ‘Jubilee Fields’ has impacted every sector of Ghanaian life. There is a need to understand these changes, to better manage their effects. This study investigated the dynamics surrounding land management in Sekondi-Takoradi following the oil find. Data were collected from the city in 2018 using qualitative approaches like direct observations, in-depth interviews and informal conversation. All in all, 65 informants were consulted using purposive and snowball sampling techniques. This data was analysed by listening, transcribing, coding interviews, identifying relevant information and matching results with the objectives of this study. Our findings indicate a growing demand for land which has resulted in an increase in land conflicts in the metropolis. There is, therefore, the need to revise future land use patterns and land tenure forms as well as strengthening existing institutions and legislation, among others, in a bid to achieve a sustainable city.
Bridging between Data Science and Performance Analysis: Tracing of Jupyter Notebooks

In the last years, an increasing amount of available data has led to new application approaches and an application field that is now called data science (DS). Such applications often require low runtimes while having to deal with restricted compute resources. Up to now, we perceive that the DS community lacks tool support for runtime and resource usage investigations. Thus, we present an approach that combines DS and performance analysis from the High Performance Computing domain. Our concept integrates the measurement framework Score-P in Jupyter, a popular editor for the development of DS applications. We designed and implemented a custom Jupyter kernel that collects runtime data and applied it to a natural language processing application. The measurement overhead was 12.55 seconds. The benefits are, that the collected data can then be visualised using established performance analysis tools.
Playing with the Spirit of a Place: Designing Urban Interactions with Hybrid-Resolution Media Facades

Play is an integral part of the human experience that has been brought into urban city development in the form of digital media, particularly high-resolution interactive screens or projections, and responsive low-resolution LED lighting. While many studies have looked into these media separately, there lies a gap in considering the simultaneous use of high- and low-resolution media facades (hybrid-resolution), particularly in urban interaction. This study involves the creation of an interactive “ghost” character combining projection and LED strips on a large public facade to discover design implications and perceptions towards such an interface. It addressed at first non-hybrid resolution designs, involving observations and semi-structured interviews in-the-wild. The outcomes of that study then supported further studies into designing hybrid media facades, including a discussion on social benefits of playful urban interactions and its potential for creating playful cities.
Application of 2-gram to Obtain Factor Scores of Statements Posted at Q&A Sites

In order to solve the issues of mismatches between the intentions of questioners and respondents of Question and Answer (Q&A) sites, nine factors of impressions for Q&A statements have been obtained through impressive experiments. Factor scores have been then estimated through multiple regression analysis by using the feature values of statements, e.g. syntactic information, etc. The factor scores obtained have been subsequently used for inspecting the possibility of detecting respondents who are expected to post appropriate answer to a newly posted question. However, the method so far has been largely dependent on the syntactic information extracted through morphological analysis. In addition, the number of explanatory variables used for estimating factor scores has been considerably numerous and complicated. Therefore, in this paper, factor scores are estimated using the feature values of syntactic information are extracted through 2-gram, instead of morphological analysis. The feature values based on 2-gram and those other than the syntactic information are set as explanatory variable. As a result of another multiple regression analysis, estimation accuracy with 2-gram shows almost equal to or better than that with morphological analysis for all the nine factors. Moreover, monadic term is sufficient in estimating factor scores, leading to much smaller samples of explanatory variables.
Tip of the Finger or Tip of the Tongue?: The Effects of Verbal Communication on Online Multi-Player Team Performance

Virtual environments are increasingly being used to support team training. However, despite their growing ubiquity, less is known on how task difficulty in such environments mitigates verbal communication patterns. We report on a study investigating this research question, finding that although manipulations of task difficulty did appear to impact broad team level communication measures (e.g. how much they talked), it largely had minimal impact on team communication dynamics (e.g. the flow of communication between various roles in the teams). The implications of this study for the design of future team training environments along with the possibility of artificial agents to support team training as a novel use case are then discussed in turn.
Case study of an Equatorial Plasma Bubble Event investigated by multiple ground‐based instruments at low latitudes over China

Observational evidence is insufficient to understand how equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) form over low latitudes. The mechanism of plasma‐density enhancement (formation of “plasma blobs”) at low latitudes is in dispute. In this paper, we use data from multiple ground‐based instruments (one all‐sky airglow imager, five digisondes, and one Fabry–Perot interferometer) to investigate the evolution of an EPB event that occurred at low latitudes over China on the night of 06 December 2015 (06‐Dec‐2015). We provide observational evidence that an enhanced equatorward wind most likely induced by a substorm could have initiated the Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) that destabilized several EPB depletions in an upwelling region of a large‐scale wave‐like structure (LSWS) in the bottomside ionosphere. Those EPB depletions were forced to surge poleward, from nearly 10° to 19° magnetic latitude, two hours before midnight. Smaller‐scale bifurcations evolved rapidly from tips of airglow depletions by a secondaryE × B instability when the aforementioned substorm‐induced southwestward wind blew through. During the growth phase of the EPB depletions, a westward polarization electric field inside the LSWS is likely to have compressed plasma downward, inducing the two airglow‐type blobs observed in the bottomside ionosphere, by a mechanism of LSWS‐blob connection that we propose. We also provide observational evidence of brightness airglow depletions. We find that an enhanced poleward wind associated with a passing‐by brightness wave (BW) is likely to have transported plasma to fill the airglow depletions, which finally evolved into brightness airglow structures. This study investigates the physical processes accompanied by the EPB event and those two‐airglow blobs observed at low‐latitudes over China.
When Cognitive Proximity Leads to Higher Evaluation Decision Quality: A Study of Public Funding Allocation

Project expert evaluation is the backbone of public funding allocation. A slight change in score can push a proposal below or above a funding line. Academic researchers have discovered many factors that may affect evaluation decision quality, yet the subject of cognitive proximity towards decision quality has not been considered thoroughly. Using 923 observations of the 2017 Beijing Innofund data, the study finds that cognitive proximity has an inverted “U-shape” relation to decision-making quality. Moreover, two contextual factors, evaluation experience and evaluation efforts, exert moderation effects on the inverted U shape. These findings fill the gaps in the current research on cognition-based perspective by specifying the mechanism of cognitive proximity in the evaluation field and contributing to improving decision-making quality by selecting appropriate evaluators. Theoretical contributions and policy implications have been discussed.
A kinesin-1 variant reveals motor-induced microtubule damage in cells

Kinesins drive the transport of cellular cargoes as they walk along microtubule tracks, however, recent work has suggested that the physical act of kinesins walking along microtubules can stress the microtubule lattice. Here, we describe a kinesin-1 KIF5C mutant with an increased ability to generate defects in the microtubule lattice as compared to the wild-type motor. Expression of the mutant motor in cultured cells resulted in microtubule breakage and fragmentation, suggesting that kinesin-1 variants with increased damage activity would have been selected against during evolution. The increased ability to damage microtubules is not due to the altered motility properties of the mutant motor as expression of the kinesin-3 motor KIF1A, which has similar single-motor motility properties, also caused increased microtubule pausing, bending, and buckling but not breakage. In cells, motor-induced microtubule breakage could not be prevented by increased a-tubulin K40 acetylation, a post-translational modification known to increase microtubule flexibility. In vitro, lattice damage induced by wild-type KIF5C was repaired by soluble tubulin and resulted in increased rescues and microtubule growth whereas lattice damage induced by the KIF5C mutant resulted in larger repair sites that made the microtubule vulnerable to breakage and fragmentation when under mechanical stress. These results demonstrate that kinesin-1 motility causes defects in and damage to the microtubule lattice in cells. While cells have the capacity to repair lattice damage, conditions that exceed this capacity result in microtubule breakage and fragmentation and may contribute to human disease.
Molecular pathology of a cystic fibrosis mutation is explained by loss of a hydrogen bond

The phosphorylation-activated anion channel CFTR is gated by an ATP hydrolysis cycle at its two cytosolic nucleotide binding domains, and is essential for epithelial salt-water transport. A large number of CFTR mutations cause cystic fibrosis. Since recent breakthrough in targeted pharmacotherapy, CFTR mutants with impaired gating are candidates for stimulation by potentiator drugs. Thus, understanding the molecular pathology of individual mutations has become important. The relatively common R117H mutation affects an extracellular loop, but nevertheless causes a strong gating defect. Here we identify a hydrogen bond between the side chain of arginine 117 and the backbone carbonyl group of glutamate 1124 in the cryo-electronmicroscopic structure of phosphorylated, ATP-bound CFTR. We address the functional relevance of that interaction for CFTR gating using macroscopic and microscopic inside-out patch-clamp recordings. Employing thermodynamic double-mutant cycles, we systematically track gating-state dependent changes in the strength of the R117-E1124 interaction. We find that the H-bond is formed only in the open state, but neither in the short-lived “flickery” nor in the long-lived “interburst” closed state. Loss of this H-bond explains the entire gating phenotype of the R117H mutant, including robustly shortened burst durations and strongly reduced intraburst open probability. The findings may help targeted potentiator design.
Human Milk Oligosaccharides Reduce Murine Group B Streptococcus Vaginal Colonization with Minimal Impact on the Vaginal Microbiota

During pregnancy, GBS ascension into the uterus can cause fetal infection or preterm birth. In addition, GBS exposure during labor creates a risk of serious disease in the vulnerable newborn and mother postpartum. ABSTRACT Group B Streptococcus (GBS) colonizes the vaginal mucosa of a significant percentage of healthy women and is a leading cause of neonatal bacterial infections. Currently, pregnant women are screened in the last month of pregnancy, and GBS-positive women are given antibiotics during parturition to prevent bacterial transmission to the neonate. Recently, human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) isolated from breastmilk were found to inhibit GBS growth and biofilm formation in vitro, and women that make certain HMOs are less likely to be vaginally colonized with GBS. Using in vitro human vaginal epithelial cells and a murine vaginal colonization model, we tested the impact of HMO treatment on GBS burdens and the composition of the endogenous microbiota by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. HMO treatment reduced GBS vaginal burdens in vivo with minimal alterations to the vaginal microbiota. HMOs displayed potent inhibitory activity against GBS in vitro, but HMO pretreatment did not alter adherence of GBS or the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus to human vaginal epithelial cells. In addition, disruption of a putative GBS glycosyltransferase (Δsan_0913) rendered the bacterium largely resistant to HMO inhibition in vitro and in vivo but did not compromise its adherence, colonization, or biofilm formation in the absence of HMOs. We conclude that HMOs are a promising therapeutic bioactive to limit GBS vaginal colonization with minimal impacts on the vaginal microenvironment. IMPORTANCE During pregnancy, GBS ascension into the uterus can cause fetal infection or preterm birth. In addition, GBS exposure during labor creates a risk of serious disease in the vulnerable newborn and mother postpartum. Current recommended prophylaxis consists of administering broad-spectrum antibiotics to GBS-positive mothers during labor. Although antibiotics have significantly reduced GBS neonatal disease, there are several unintended consequences, including altered neonatal gut bacteria and increased risk for other types of infection. Innovative preventions displaying more targeted antimicrobial activity, while leaving the maternal microbiota intact, are thus appealing. Using a mouse model, we found that human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) reduce GBS burdens without perturbing the vaginal microbiota. We conclude that HMOs are a promising alternative to antibiotics to reduce GBS neonatal disease.