Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Psychometric properties of the Greek NEI-RQL-42

Purpose To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Greek National Eye Institute Refractive Error Quality of Life Questionnaire (NEI-RQL-42). Methods We developed the Greek version of the instrument using forward and backward translation. To examine reliability, Cronbach alpha for each subscale was used as an index of internal consistency. Test-retest reliability was evaluated with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). Regarding construct validity, both convergent and discriminant validities were calculated by means of multi-trait analysis. Furthermore, the instrument was evaluated by Rasch analysis, as well. Results Three patient groups were studied (emmetropes (n=20), myopes (n=41), and hyperopes (n=18)). Emmetropes scored significantly better in the majority of subscales, while myopes scored better than hyperopes in clarity of vision (p=0.012), near vision (p<0.001), and satisfaction with correction (p=0.001). Cronbach alpha ranged from 0.490 (glare) to 0.948 (expectations), with most subscales having high internal consistency. The ICCs ranged from 0.76 to 0.93 for all subscales. All items passed the convergent and discriminant validity tests. Strong correlations were detected between uncorrected visual acuity and near vision, expectations, activity limitations, dependence on correction, worry, and suboptimal correction subscales. Rasch analysis revealed potential weaknesses of the instrument that are associated with the assumptions of the model itself. Specifically, 3 items and 17.5% of the participants fell outside the tolerance box. Moreover, principal component analysis indicated average unidimensionality for the instrument. Conclusions Traditional validation methods indicate that the Greek NEI-RQL-42 scale has adequate psychometric properties for comparative studies in local populations. Rasch analysis indicates significant misfits to the model that should be taken into consideration and evaluated in future studies. These misfits might reflect inherent weaknesses of the original NEI-RQL-42 and not of its adaptation to Greek norms.
Barriers to productive transfection of trabecular meshwork cells.

PURPOSE A critical function of trabecular meshwork cells is to degrade cellular debris, including DNA. We hypothesize that low transfection efficiencies of primary human trabecular meshwork (HTM) cell cultures with plasmid DNA are a function of retained capacity to efficiently degrade exogenous DNA in vitro. METHODS To determine mechanisms responsible for low transfection efficiencies of cultured HTM cells, steps of DNA entry into cytoplasm and nucleus were characterized. Following synchronization with sequential serum starvation and serum reintroduction, the HTM cell cycle was characterized using 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine incorporation into replicating DNA. HTM cells were transfected during S-phase with plasmid DNA encoding green fluorescence protein (GFP) or plasmid DNA conjugated with Cy3. In some experiments, cells were treated with a DNase I inhibitor, 100 nM aurintricarboxylic acid. Uptake of plasmid DNA was measured by intracellular fluorescence of Cy3 and productive transfection efficiency was measured by intracellular fluorescence of GFP. RESULTS HTM cells enter S-phase between 18 and 20 h after synchronization. Plasmid DNA reached the cytosolic compartment in 95% of transfected cells, regardless of synchronization. Synchronization dramatically increased productive transfection efficiency in HTM cells, from 3.0 to 9.0%. DNase I inhibition increased productive transfection efficiency of HTM cells two fold. CONCLUSIONS Cultured HTM cells have a lower transfection efficiency than other primary ocular cell cultures, likely due partially to cytoplasmic digestion of DNA. We suggest that the difficulties in transfecting cultured HTM cells may be related to the filter function of the cells in vivo where the cells must degrade exogenous DNA.
A multicenter survey of childhood asthma in Turkey – II: Utilization of asthma drugs, control levels and their determinants

Many surveys worldwide have consistently demonstrated a low level of asthma control and under‐utilization of preventive asthma drugs. However, these studies have been frequently criticized for using population‐based samples, which include many patients with no or irregular follow‐ups. Our aim, in this study, was to define the extent of asthma drug utilization, control levels, and their determinants among children with asthma attending to pediatric asthma centers in Turkey. Asthmatic children (age range: 6–18 yr) with at least 1‐yr follow‐up seen at 12 asthma outpatient clinics during a 1‐month period with scheduled or unscheduled visits were included and were surveyed with a questionnaire‐guided interview. Files from the previous year were evaluated retrospectively to document control levels and their determinants. From 618 children allocated, most were mild asthmatics (85.6%). Almost 30% and 15% of children reported current use of emergency service and hospitalization, respectively; and 51.4% and 53.1% of children with persistent and intermittent disease, respectively, were on daily preventive therapy, including inhaled corticosteroids. Disease severity [odds ratio: 12.6 (95% confidence intervals: 5.3–29.8)], hospitalization within the last year [3.4 (1.4–8.2)], no use of inhaled steroids [2.9 (1.1– 7.3)], and female gender [2.3 (1.1–5.4)] were major predictors of poor asthma control as defined by their physicians. In this national pediatric asthma study, we found a low level of disease control and discrepancies between preventive drug usage and disease severity, which shows that the expectations of guidelines have not been met even in facilitated centers, thus indicating the need to revise the severity‐based approach of asthma guidelines. Efforts to implement the control‐based approach of new guidelines (Global Initiative for Asthma 2006) would be worthwhile.
Hermes: clustering users in large-scale e-mail services

Hermes is an optimization engine for large-scale enterprise e-mail services. Such services could be hosted by a virtualized e-mail service provider, or by dedicated enterprise data centers. In both cases we observe that the pattern of e-mails between employees of an enterprise forms an implicit social graph. Hermes tracks this implicit social graph, periodically identifies clusters of strongly connected users within the graph, and co-locates such users on the same server. Co-locating the users reduces storage requirements: senders and recipients who reside on the same server can share a single copy of an e-mail. Co-location also reduces inter-server bandwidth usage. We evaluate Hermes using a trace of all e-mails within a major corporation over a five month period. The e-mail service supports over 120,000 users on 68 servers. Our evaluation shows that using Hermes results in storage savings of 37% and bandwidth savings of 50% compared to current approaches. The overheads are low: a single commodity server can run the optimization for the entire system.
Spherical DCB-Spline Surfaces with Hierarchical and Adaptive Knot Insertion

This paper develops a novel surface fitting scheme for automatically reconstructing a genus-0 object into a continuous parametric spline surface. A key contribution for making such a fitting method both practical and accurate is our spherical generalization of the Delaunay configuration B-spline (DCB-spline), a new non-tensor-product spline. In this framework, we efficiently compute Delaunay configurations on sphere by the union of two planar Delaunay configurations. Also, we develop a hierarchical and adaptive method that progressively improves the fitting quality by new knot-insertion strategies guided by surface geometry and fitting error. Within our framework, a genus-0 model can be converted to a single spherical spline representation whose root mean square error is tightly bounded within a user-specified tolerance. The reconstructed continuous representation has many attractive properties such as global smoothness and no auxiliary knots. We conduct several experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of our new approach for reverse engineering and shape modeling.
Conception or *conceivation? The processing of derivational morphology in semantic dementia

ABSTRACT Background: Only a few studies have focused on derivational morphology in semantic dementia (SD). The productive and componential nature of derivational morphology as well as recent findings in psycholinguistics suggest that semantic cognition would be involved in the production and comprehension of derivational morphemes and derived words. Therefore, participants with SD might present impairment in derivational morphology. Aims: This study aims to specify semantic cognition’s involvement in the production and comprehension of derivational morphemes and morphologically complex words in SD participants. This involvement was considered in relation to the production of morphologically complex words, the comprehension of the meaning conveyed by morphemes, and the capacity to distinguish between words with a real vs. an apparent morphological structure. Methods and Procedures: Ten French-speaking SD participants completed three tasks of derivational morphology. Their performances were compared to those of a group of 20 age-, gender- and education-matched adults without cognitive impairment. Outcomes and Results: Compared with participants of the control group, SD participants had more difficulty producing nouns derived from verbs that follow less-frequent patterns of root allomorphy, while their performance was less affected when they could rely on basic morphological decomposition/composition abilities. Participants with SD also had more difficulties to match derived words and pseudo-words to a definition and to distinguish between pairs of real morphological antonyms and pseudo-morphological non-antonyms. Conclusions: These results support the involvement of semantic cognition in the validation of morpheme combinations and in derivational morpheme representation. Difficulties in the production and comprehension of derived words and derivational morphemes are another of the many consequences of central semantic impairment that characterises SD. More studies are needed to develop tests and further characterise the involvement of semantic cognition in derivational morphology.
Self-Administered Questions by Telephone: Evaluating Interactive Voice Response

Over the past 25 years, computerization has swept over survey research, making computer-assisted data collection the de facto standard in the United States and Western Europe (Couper and Nicholls 1998). The move to computerization may now be ushering in a golden age for self-administered questions; the newest methods of survey data collection to emerge have reduced the role of the interviewer or eliminated it entirely, allowing the respondents to interact directly with the computer. The new modes of self-administered data collection include Web surveys and a technology variously referred to as interactive voice response (IVR), touchtone data entry (TDE), and telephone audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (T-ACASI). These different labels refer to the same data collection technology in which the computer plays a recording of the questions to the respondents over the telephone, who indicate their answers by pressing keys on the handsets (Appel, Tortora, and Sigman 1992; Blyth 1997; Frankovic 1994; Gribble et al. 2000; Harrell and Clayton 1991; Phipps and Tupek 1990; Turner et al. 1996b, 1998). We will refer to this method of data collection as IVR, the term used at Gallup and at most market research firms. Automated telephone systems for gathering nonsurvey information are now widespread (e.g., for catalog sales, airline reservations, banking, and so on)
The Natural History of Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy and the Rate of Hospitalization Following Spinal Cord Injury: An Updated Systematic Review

Study Method: Systematic review (update). Objective: Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is a degenerative spine disease and the most common cause of spinal cord dysfunction in adults worldwide. The objective of this study is to determine the natural history of DCM by updating the systematic review by Karadimas et al. The specific aims of this review were (1) to describe the natural history of DCM and (2) to determine potential risk factors of disease progression. Method: An updated search based on a previous protocol was conducted in PubMed and the Cochrane Collaboration library for studies published between November 2012 and February 15, 2015. Results: The updated search yielded 3 additional citations that met inclusion criteria and reported the incidence of spinal cord injury and severe disability in patients with DCM. Based on 2 retrospective cohort studies, the incidence rate of hospitalization for spinal cord injury is 13.9 per 1000 person-years in patients with cervical spondylotic myelopathy and 4.8 per 1000 person-years in patients with myelopathy secondary to ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament (OPLL). In a third small prospective study, the risk of being wheelchair bound or bedridden was 66.7% in DCM patients with OPLL. Conclusion: The overall level of evidence for these estimated rates of hospitalization following spinal cord injury was rated as low.
Training Needs of Early Childhood Professionals Who Work With Children and Families Who Are Culturally and Linguistically Diverse

The increase in numbers of children and families who are culturally and linguistically diverse served in early intervention and early childhood special education requires greater awareness and use of family-centered and culturally responsive practices. The purpose of this study was to identify the training needs, challenges, and level of preparation received by early childhood special education professionals working with children and families who are culturally and linguistically diverse. Five hundred seventy-four early childhood professionals responded to a comprehensive electronic survey. Identifying appropriate assessment instruments for assessing children who are culturally and linguistically diverse and working collaboratively with families who are culturally and linguistically diverse were reported as the most important training needs. The recommendations for preservice and inservice training programs are reported.
Explorer Evolutionarily Conserved Herpesviral Protein Interaction Networks

Herpesviruses constitute a family of large DNA viruses widely spread in vertebrates and causing a variety of different diseases. They possess dsDNA genomes ranging from 120 to 240 kbp encoding between 70 to 170 open reading frames. We previously reported the protein interaction networks of two herpesviruses, varicella-zoster virus (VZV) and Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV). In this study, we systematically tested three additional herpesvirus species, herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), murine cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus, for protein interactions in order to be able to perform a comparative analysis of all three herpesvirus subfamilies. We identified 735 interactions by genome-wide yeasttwo-hybrid screens (Y2H), and, together with the interactomes of VZV and KSHV, included a total of 1,007 intraviral protein interactions in the analysis. Whereas a large number of interactions have not been reported previously, we were able to identify a core set of highly conserved protein interactions, like the interaction between HSV-1 UL33 with the nuclear egress proteins UL31/UL34. Interactions were conserved between orthologous proteins despite generally low sequence similarity, suggesting that function may be more conserved than sequence. By combining interactomes of different species we were able to systematically address the low coverage of the Y2H system and to extract biologically relevant interactions which were not evident from single species. Citation: Fossum E, Friedel CC, Rajagopala SV, Titz B, Baiker A, et al. (2009) Evolutionarily Conserved Herpesviral Protein Interaction Networks. PLoS Pathog 5(9): e1000570. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat. 1000570 Editor: Ren Sun, University of California at Los Angeles, United States of America Received September 11, 2008; Accepted August 10, 2009; Published September 4, 2009 Copyright: 2009 Fossum et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by grants provided by BayGene (Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst J.H.), DFG (SFB 576 J.H., Ue50/4 P.U.), University of Edinburgh (Thomas Work Fellowship, E.F), BMBF (NGFN-2 01GS0405, BFAM C.F.), Landesstiftung Baden-Wuerttemberg (P.U. and C.R.), Helmholtz Gemeinschaft (P.U.), Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (B.T.), LMU Muenchen (FoeFoLe C.Z., T.K.) and the National Institutes of Health (GM070743, P30MH62261 T.I.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: juergen.haas@ed.ac. uk
Text Summarization and Discovery of Frames and Relationship from Natural Language Text - A R&D Methodology

The paper deals with the concept of data mining whereby the data resources can be fetched and accessed accordingly with reduced time complexity. Resource sharing is an important aspect in the field of information science. The retrieval techniques are pointed out based on the ideas of binary search tree, Gantt chart, text summarization. A theorem has been cited regarding the summation of total length of codes of each leaf search term. Summarization is a hard problem of Natural Language Processing because, to do it properly, one has to really understand the point of a text. This requires semantic analysis, discourse processing, and inferential interpretation (grouping of the content using world knowledge). The last step, especially, is complex, because systems without a great deal of world knowledge simply cannot do it. Therefore, attempts so far of performing true abstraction--creating
Isoniazid-Induced Transient High-Level Resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

ABSTRACT An American Type Culture Collection reference strain and eight clinical strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, all of which were susceptible to isoniazid (INH) (mean MIC, 0.06 mg/liter) and negative for the Ser315Thr katG mutation, were left in their BACTEC 12B vials (for use with the BACTEC 460-TB method) containing 0.1 mg of INH per liter for periods of up to 28 days after the completion of the antibiotic susceptibility test. Each eventually grew to levels compatible with those of INH-resistant strains. Successive passages in INH-containing BACTEC 12B vials and onto solid media showed that the resistance noted above was maintained. Successive passages of these M. tuberculosis strains in which INH resistance had been induced into BACTEC 12B vials or solid media containing stepwise increases in INH concentrations eventually yielded organisms resistant to 20 mg of INH per liter. Transfer of cells in which INH resistance had been induced to drug-free medium followed by repeated passages in that medium eventually yielded organisms whose susceptibility to INH was identical to that of the original parent strains. The cycle of induced INH resistance could be repeated with these now INH-susceptible cells. The use of M. tuberculosis identification probes and IS6110-based restriction fragment length polymorphism analyses of cultures throughout the induction of INH resistance and the reversal of resistance in drug-free medium eliminated the possibility that the culture was contaminated or that the initial specimen had a mixed type of infection. Induced high-level resistance to INH (20 mg/liter) could be reduced 100-fold with a subinhibitory concentration of reserpine but not with verapamil. These results collectively suggest that high-level resistance to INH can be induced in INH-susceptible M. tuberculosis strains by the induction of a reserpine-sensitive efflux mechanism.
TAON: an ontology-based approach to mitigating targeted attacks

Targeted attacks on IT systems are a rising threat against the confidentiality of sensitive data and the availability of systems and infrastructures. Planning for the eventuality of a data breach or sabotage attack has become an increasingly difficult task with the emergence of advanced persistent threats (APTs), a class of highly sophisticated cyber-attacks that are nigh impossible to detect using conventional signature-based systems. Understanding, interpreting, and correlating the particulars of such advanced targeted attacks is a major research challenge that needs to be tackled before behavior-based approaches can evolve from their current state to truly semantics-aware solutions. Ontologies offer a versatile foundation well suited for depicting the complex connections between such behavioral data and the diverse technical and organizational properties of an IT system. In order to facilitate the development of novel behavior-based detection systems, we present TAON, an OWL-based ontology offering a holistic view on actors, assets, and threat details, which are mapped to individual abstracted events and anomalies that can be detected by today's monitoring data providers. TOAN offers a straightforward means to plan an organization's defense against APTs and helps to understand how, why, and by whom certain resources are targeted. Populated by concrete data, the proposed ontology becomes a smart correlation framework able to combine several data sources into a semantic assessment of any targeted attack.
Principal Manifolds and Probabilistic Subspaces for Visual Recognition

Investigates the use of linear and nonlinear principal manifolds for learning low-dimensional representations for visual recognition. Several leading techniques - principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA) and nonlinear kernel PCA (KPCA) - are examined and tested in a visual recognition experiment using 1,800+ facial images from the "FERET" (FacE REcognition Technology) database. We compare the recognition performance of nearest-neighbor matching with each principal manifold representation to that of a maximum a-posteriori (MAP) matching rule using a Bayesian similarity measure derived from dual probabilistic subspaces. The experimental results demonstrate the simplicity, computational economy and performance superiority of the Bayesian subspace method over principal manifold techniques for visual matching.
Common-duty-ratio control of input-series connected modular DC-DC converters with active input voltage and load-current sharing

This paper proposes a simple control method to achieve active sharing of input voltage and load current among modular converters that are connected in series at the input and in parallel at the output. The input-series connection enables a fully modular power-system architecture, where low voltage and low power modules can be connected in any combination at the input and/or at the output, to realize any given specifications. Further, the input-series connection enables the use of low-voltage MOSFETs that are optimized for very low RDSON , thus, resulting in lower conduction losses. In the proposed scheme, the duty ratio to all the converter modules connected in input-series and output-parallel (ISOP) configuration is made common. This scheme does not require a dedicated input-voltage or load-current-share controller. It relies on the inherent self-correcting characteristic of the ISOP connection when the duty ratio of all the converters is the same. The proposed scheme is analyzed using the average model of a forward converter. The stability and performance of the scheme are verified through numerical simulation, both in frequency domain and in time domain. The proposed control method is also validated on an experimental prototype ISOP system comprising of two forward converters