Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Treating major depression with yoga: A prospective, randomized, controlled pilot trial

Background Conventional pharmacotherapies and psychotherapies for major depression are associated with limited adherence to care and relatively low remission rates. Yoga may offer an alternative treatment option, but rigorous studies are few. This randomized controlled trial with blinded outcome assessors examined an 8-week hatha yoga intervention as mono-therapy for mild-to-moderate major depression. Methods Investigators recruited 38 adults in San Francisco meeting criteria for major depression of mild-to-moderate severity, per structured psychiatric interview and scores of 14–28 on Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI). At screening, individuals engaged in psychotherapy, antidepressant pharmacotherapy, herbal or nutraceutical mood therapies, or mind-body practices were excluded. Participants were 68% female, with mean age 43.4 years (SD = 14.8, range = 22–72), and mean BDI score 22.4 (SD = 4.5). Twenty participants were randomized to 90-minute hatha yoga practice groups twice weekly for 8 weeks. Eighteen participants were randomized to 90-minute attention control education groups twice weekly for 8 weeks. Certified yoga instructors delivered both interventions at a university clinic. Primary outcome was depression severity, measured by BDI scores every 2 weeks from baseline to 8 weeks. Secondary outcomes were self-efficacy and self-esteem, measured by scores on the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) at baseline and at 8 weeks. Results In intent-to-treat analysis, yoga participants exhibited significantly greater 8-week decline in BDI scores than controls (p-value = 0.034). In sub-analyses of participants completing final 8-week measures, yoga participants were more likely to achieve remission, defined per final BDI score ≤ 9 (p-value = 0.018). Effect size of yoga in reducing BDI scores was large, per Cohen’s d = -0.96 [95%CI, -1.81 to -0.12]. Intervention groups did not differ significantly in 8-week change scores for either the GSES or RSES. Conclusion In adults with mild-to-moderate major depression, an 8-week hatha yoga intervention resulted in statistically and clinically significant reductions in depression severity. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01210651
Localized scleroderma severity index and global assessments: a pilot study of outcome instruments.

OBJECTIVE To develop a disease outcome instrument measuring localized scleroderma (LS) severity and to determine its reliability. METHODS Patients with LS were evaluated by 2 rheumatologists. The LS Severity Index (LoSSI) comprises the sum of 4 clinical skin scores measured at 14 cutaneous anatomic sites: extent of surface area (SA) affected, erythema score (ES), skin thickness (ST) score, and new lesion/extension (N/E). Physician and patient global assessments (GA) were recorded on a 100 mm visual analog scale. RESULTS Twenty-two patients with LS had 66 visits, during which 91 lesions were assessed. Individual skin scores (SA, ES, ST) and LoSSI showed substantial interrater reliability (kappaw 0.77-0.83; percentage agreement 93.41%-96.70%). Intrarater variability was calculated using 26 anatomic sites and 9 pair-visits. Each skin score demonstrated excellent reliability (kappaw 0.56-0.80, percentage agreement 90.39%-94.23%). Physician GA showed substantial interrater correlation [0.72, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.57, 0.87]. There was only fair correlation between physician and patient GA (0.27, 95% CI 0.00, 0.64). The standardized response means for LoSSI and physician GA were large (1.86 and 2.55) for those who improved after therapy. CONCLUSION LS clinical trials are impeded by the lack of reliable and reproducible outcome measures. We have developed the LoSSI to correct this deficiency. Our pilot study demonstrates that the LoSSI is reliable and reproducible in measuring LS severity and therapeutic effects and can be easily implemented into the clinical examination of patients with LS. Both LoSSI and physician GA were sensitive to clinical changes in patients with LS. A formal study should be conducted to validate these preliminary findings.
Modeling Affect Dynamics: State of the Art and Future Challenges

The current article aims to provide an up-to-date synopsis of available techniques to study affect dynamics using intensive longitudinal data (ILD). We do so by introducing the following eight dichotomies that help elucidate what kind of data one has, what process aspects are of interest, and what research questions are being considered: (1) single- versus multiple-person data; (2) univariate versus multivariate models; (3) stationary versus nonstationary models; (4) linear versus nonlinear models; (5) discrete time versus continuous time models; (6) discrete versus continuous variables; (7) time versus frequency domain; and (8) modeling the process versus computing descriptives. In addition, we discuss what we believe to be the most urging future challenges regarding the modeling of affect dynamics.
Measuring Semantic Relatedness between Words Using Lexical Context

Semantic relatedness measurement between words is always a hot issue interested by many researchers. It can be applied to various tasks of NLP and IR with a big challenge. We propose a method for measuring semantic relatedness between words using lexical context in this paper. The method can mainly be divided into two steps. Firstly, for each word of a word-pair, a lexical context is generated exploiting search engine with WordNet, which is constituted by the words highly related to the target word. Secondly, semantic relatedness between words is measured by considering semantic relatedness between a word and lexical context of another word for an original word-pair. Experimental results on Miller-Charles benchmark dataset show our proposed method outperforms all other state of the art related approaches, achieving a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.912. It shows more competitive than other methods.
Automatic human fall detection in fractional fourier domain for assisted living

Fast and accurate detection of elderly falls can significantly reduce the rate of morbidity and mortality. In the past decade, extensive research has been performed to achieve real-time fall monitoring solutions. In this paper, we consider the radar-based modality and utilize the family of fractional Fourier transform to enhance the motion Doppler signature of falls. Compare with the conventional time-frequency analysis approaches, the proposed method achieves higher signal energy concentration and thus yields improved fall detection in low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios. Experimental results are used to validate the theoretical analysis and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
Novel Mechanism of Regulation of Rac Activity and Lamellipodia Formation by RET Tyrosine Kinase*

Rac activation in neuronal cells plays an important role in lamellipodia formation that is a critical event for neuritogenesis. It is well known that the Rac activity is regulated via activation of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) by a variety of receptor tyrosine kinases. Here we show that increased serine phosphorylation on RET receptor tyrosine kinase following cAMP elevation promotes lamellipodia formation of neuronal cells induced by glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF). We identified serine 696 in RET as a putative phosphorylation site by protein kinase A and found that mutation of this serine almost completely inhibited lamellipodia formation by GDNF without affecting activation of the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway. Mutation of tyrosine 1062 in RET, whose phosphorylation is crucial for activation of PI3K, also inhibited lamellipodia formation by GDNF. Inhibition of lamellipodia formation by mutation of either serine 696 or tyrosine 1062 was associated with decrease of the Rac1-guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) activity, suggesting that this activity is regulated by two different signaling pathways via serine 696 and tyrosine 1062 in RET. Moreover, in the presence of serine 696 mutation, lamellipodia formation was rescued by replacing tyrosine 687 with phenylalanine. These findings propose a novel mechanism that receptor tyrosine kinase modulates actin dynamics in neuronal cells via its cAMP-dependent phosphorylation.
Recent Developments in Clean up Techniques of Pesticide Residue Analysis for Toxicology Study: A Critical Review

Clean up is one of the most important steps to remove co-extractives and undesired interfering substances from the sample before analysis in pesticide residue analysis. Some advanced, sophisticated and efficient methods of clean up have emerged out which is able to save time as well as amount of solvents. These are Solid Phase Extraction (SPE), Gel Permeation Chromatography (GPC) and Supercritical Fluid Chromatography (SFC). They are very much efficient for clean up and extraction of pesticide samples. SPE method is successfully used for clean up of pesticide residue from soil and water samples. GPC is now widely used in sample preparation in many residue laboratories and is effectively used for multi-residue analysis. SFC is by far the best method of clean up and extraction, though it involves high cost. Thus, various suitable clean up methods can free pesticide residues from extraneous co-extractive materials in an efficient manner and helps to prepare a good sample for further analysis.
The experiment results of GMTI in low frequency SAR with dual channels

Ground moving target indication (GMTI) in low frequency synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with wide angle and long synthetic aperture time, is more difficult than indication in high frequency system. This paper investigates how to detect and estimate the costant velocities of moving target with low computation load and low false alarm. Based on the 2-dimensional (2D) spectrum of moving target, a moving target processing flow is proposed for the low frequency SAR with dual-channels. This flow first uses multi-looks interferometric images to detect the radial velocity, then extends previous work by detecting cross range velocity with multi-resoultion images. At last, the moving target imaging alogrithm is used to estimate the velocities exactly and to eliminate the false alarms of moving target. The experiment results based on real data show that good estimates could be obtained even in situations with relative high clutter and noise.
Identification of a conserved bacterial protein secretion system in Vibrio cholerae using the Dictyostelium host model system

The bacterium Vibrio cholerae, like other human pathogens that reside in environmental reservoirs, survives predation by unicellular eukaryotes. Strains of the O1 and O139 serogroups cause cholera, whereas non-O1/non-O139 strains cause human infections through poorly defined mechanisms. Using Dictyostelium discoideum as a model host, we have identified a virulence mechanism in a non-O1/non-O139 V. cholerae strain that involves extracellular translocation of proteins that lack N-terminal hydrophobic leader sequences. Accordingly, we have named these genes “VAS” genes for virulence-associated secretion, and we propose that these genes encode a prototypic “type VI” secretion system. We show that vas genes are required for cytotoxicity of V. cholerae cells toward Dictyostelium amoebae and mammalian J774 macrophages by a contact-dependent mechanism. A large number of Gram-negative bacterial pathogens carry genes homologous to vas genes and potential effector proteins secreted by this pathway (i.e., hemolysin-coregulated protein and VgrG). Mutations in vas homologs in other bacterial species have been reported to attenuate virulence in animals and cultured macrophages. Thus, the genes encoding the VAS-related, type VI secretion system likely play an important conserved function in microbial pathogenesis and represent an additional class of targets for vaccine and antimicrobial drug-based therapies.
Optimized Password Recovery for SHA-512 on GPUs

One-way hash algorithms, including MD4, MD5 and SHA family, have been widely used in password protection. Focusing on brute force password recovery for one-way hash algorithm, the amount of computation depends on the complexity of the algorithm. This paper introduces an optimized brute force password recovery implementation for SHA-512 on GPU. By using several optimization methods, the performance reaches 1055M hash/second on double AMD R9 290 GPUs. Compared with Hashcat, our implementation is about 11% faster.
The Role of Expository Writing in Mathematical Problem Solving

Mathematical problem-solving is notoriously difficult to teach in a standard university mathematics classroom. The project on which this article reports aimed to investigate the effect of the writing of explanatory strategies in the context of mathematical problem solving on problem-solving behaviour. This article serves to describe the effectiveness of using writing as a tool for deeper engagement with mathematical problems. Students’ claims about, and tutor observations of, problem-solving behaviour were analysed through the lens of Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Examples of enhanced problem-solving behaviour are presented as well as reports from student interviews that writing ‘forces’ deeper engagement. The analysis of students’ work and their reflections indicated that writing about problem-solving processes potentially resulted in a cognitive perturbation when students were forced to confront their incomplete understanding (and hence their unstable knowledge structures) and therefore had to achieve a deeper level of understanding in order to adequately describe the solution process.
Factitious and Malingered Dissociative Identity Disorder

Abstract This paper compares the clinical features of 18 persons given a diagnosis of factitious or malingered Dissociative Identity Disorder with those of 18 matched persons who were given a diagnosis of genuine Dissociative Identity Disorder, taken from a sample of 129 second opinion consultations. Clinical features suggesting a factitious diagnosis or malingering included having a score above 60 on the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), reporting dissociative symptoms inconsistent with the reporting on the DES, being able to tell a chronological life story and to sequence temporal events, using the first person over a range of affect, being able to express strong negative affect, bringing “proof of a dissociative diagnosis to the consultation, having told persons other than close confidants about the alleged abuse or alleged dissociative diagnosis, reporting alleged abuse that was inconsistent with the medical or psychiatric history or volunteering allegations of cult or ritualized abuse, telling of alleged abuse without accompanying shame, guilt, or suffering, having been involved in community self-help groups, not having symptoms of co-morbid posttraumatic stress disorder, and having obvious secondary gain in having a dissociative diagnosis. Given the potential legal ramifications of making afalse positive diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder and recognizing that the treatment for persons with valid dissociative psychopathology differs from the treatment of factitious illness, it is prudent to be able to separate the two groups.
The Relational Value of Network Experience in Teams

Previous studies indicate the importance of experience for the performance of teams. Theory suggests that working together allows individuals to (a) improve their knowledge about who knows (and can do) what and (b) facilitates learning to combine individual resources efficiently. Yet it remains elusive how experience translates into interaction patterns in teams. Drawing on unique data of career histories of 800 players and 283,259 passes between these players in 760 English Premier League soccer matches, I propose a new measure for network experience and demonstrate how it relates to network intensity and decentralization in teams. Soccer teams exhibit a higher passing rate when players know each other from before. At the same time, network experience has no effect on the decentralization of team play. Further dyadic analyses confirm these findings. Controlling for selection effects, two players are more likely to pass the ball between each other when they know each other more. Network experience affects the way team members interact and ultimately leads to performance outcomes.
Content-Selection Based Video Summarization

The paper presents a new framework of video summarization which can extract and summarize the user interested video type from a long video with complicated content. First, the shot detection process adopts the color and edge information to make the shot boundaries more accurate. Then the clustering process classifies the shots according to their similarity of motion type and scene. Finally, we select the important shots of each cluster in the skimming process by adopting shot-importance filter. The filter determines the importance of each shot by computing the motion energy and color variation. The proposed method can produce a classified video summary, which let the user review and search videos more easily.
Fitted policy search

In this paper we address the combination of batch reinforcement-learning (BRL) techniques with direct policy search (DPS) algorithms in the context of robot learning. Batch value-based algorithms (such as fitted Q-iteration) have been proved to outperform online ones in many complex applications, but they share the same difficulties in solving problems with continuous action spaces, such as robotic ones. In these cases, actor-critic and DPS methods are preferable, since the optimization process is limited to a family of parameterized (usually smooth) policies. On the other hand, these methods (e.g., policy gradient and evolutionary methods) are generally very expensive, since finding the optimal parameterization may require to evaluate the performance of several policies, which in many real robotic applications is unfeasible or even dangerous. To overcome such problems, we exploit the fitted policy search (FPS) approach, in which the expected return of any policy considered during the optimization process is evaluated offline (without resorting to the robot) by reusing the data collected in the initial exploration phase. In this way, it is possible to take the advantages of both BRL and DPS algorithms, thus achieving an effective learning approach to solve robotic problems. A balancing task on a real two-wheeled robotic pendulum is used to analyze the properties and evaluate the effectiveness of the FPS approach.
Fairness Perceptions of Performance Appraisal System: An Empirical Study of Civil Servants in District Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan

This study was undertaken to explore appraisees’/ratees’ fairness perceptions of performance appraisal system (PAS) in the civil service of Pakistan. Previously, this aspect of PAS in the civil service has never been investigated. We determined appraisees’ fairness perceptions of PAS by applying four factor of organizational justice namely; procedural, distributive, interpersonal and informational. Data was collected from the civil servants working in two departments in far flung district Dera Ismail Khan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The results show that appraisees’ perceive the system fair as diagnosed by four factors of justice. Moreover, high interpersonal justice and distributive justice also revealed issues with the system. However, on few aspects of the system, appraisees’ have mentioned their neutral responses. In the article we discuss literature on PAS and organizational justice along with methods. Subsequently, we proffer some recommendations. Finally, we give directions for future research in the PAS of civil service.
Kalman Filtering for networked control systems with random delay and packet loss

In this paper we study optimal estimation design for sampled linear systems where the sensors measurements are transmitted to the estimator site via a generic digital communication network. Sensor measurements are subject to random delay or might even be completely lost. We show that the minimum error covariance estimator is timevarying, stochastic, and it does not converge to a steady state. Moreover, this estimator is independent of the communication protocol and can be implemented using a finite memory buffer if and only if the delivered packets have a finite maximum delay. We also present an alternative estimator with constant gains and finite buffer menory for which, surprisingly, the stability does not depend on packet delay but only on the packet loss probability. Finally, algorithms to compute critical packet loss probability and estimators performance in terms of their error covariance are given and applied to some numerical examples. Keywords— Networked control systems, packet loss, random delay, optimal estimation, stability
Playing Infinite Games in Finite Time

Robert Wright dashes through ancient history to demonstrate how a certain type of information already present in nature—a type of mutual altruism known in game theory as a " non-zero sum game " — first shaped human societies and gave rise to civilization. This century, the cycles of non-zero games are accelerating, leading our economy to new heights and our culture to new horizons. But one of the many consequences of progress, Wright argues, is that certain forms of culture become inevitable—for instance, mass democracy, or the emerging Internet. The question of whether any technology is inevitable is one of the great unanswered social issues of our time; Wright has the most articulated answer on the politically incorrect side of those who argue that technology determines our fate. —KK Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. • If you explore the murky recesses of just about any famously civilized people, you'll find this dark secret: they started out as barbarians. • Keep your eye on the memes. People and peoples come and go, live and die. But their memes, like their genes, persist. When all the trading and plundering and warring is done, bodies may be lying everywhere , and social structures may seem in disarray. Yet in the process, culture, the aggregate menu of memes on which society can draw, may well have evolved. • …Consider how hard people in nonliterate societies work to etch financial obligations in the public memory. The ostentatious Potlatch seems less absurd when viewed as a way to assemble a large audience to witness the incurring of a large debt. • For to deny any directionality in cultural evolution is to say that the aborigines, or the Shoshone, or the ! Kung, left to their own devices, would show no natural tendency to propel their culture toward higher levels of technological sophistication and social complexity. • Today [a] vast interconnectedness, on a global scale, is obvious. But even in the Middle Ages, all of Eurasia and northern Africa had begun to constitute a single data-processing system. A slow system, yes, especially when trade would fall off after political dislocation—but a big system. The iron horseshoe and the windpipe friendly harness seem to have been invented in Asia …