Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How accurate are blood (or breath) tests for identifying self-reported heavy drinking among people with alcohol dependence?

AIMS Managing patients with alcohol dependence includes assessment for heavy drinking, typically by asking patients. Some recommend biomarkers to detect heavy drinking but evidence of accuracy is limited. METHODS Among people with dependence, we assessed the performance of disialo-carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (%dCDT, ≥1.7%), gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT, ≥66 U/l), either %dCDT or GGT positive, and breath alcohol (> 0) for identifying 3 self-reported heavy drinking levels: any heavy drinking (≥4 drinks/day or >7 drinks/week for women, ≥5 drinks/day or >14 drinks/week for men), recurrent (≥5 drinks/day on ≥5 days) and persistent heavy drinking (≥5 drinks/day on ≥7 consecutive days). Subjects (n = 402) with dependence and current heavy drinking were referred to primary care and assessed 6 months later with biomarkers and validated self-reported calendar method assessment of past 30-day alcohol use. RESULTS The self-reported prevalence of any, recurrent and persistent heavy drinking was 54, 34 and 17%. Sensitivity of %dCDT for detecting any, recurrent and persistent self-reported heavy drinking was 41, 53 and 66%. Specificity was 96, 90 and 84%, respectively. %dCDT had higher sensitivity than GGT and breath test for each alcohol use level but was not adequately sensitive to detect heavy drinking (missing 34-59% of the cases). Either %dCDT or GGT positive improved sensitivity but not to satisfactory levels, and specificity decreased. Neither a breath test nor GGT was sufficiently sensitive (both tests missed 70-80% of cases). CONCLUSIONS Although biomarkers may provide some useful information, their sensitivity is low the incremental value over self-report in clinical settings is questionable.
Mouse neutrophilic granulocytes express mRNA encoding the macrophage colony‐stimulating factor receptor (CSF‐1R) as well as many other macrophage‐specific transcripts and can transdifferentiate into macrophages in vitro in response to CSF‐1

The differentiation of macrophages from their progenitors is controlled by macrophage colony‐stimulating factor (CSF‐1), which binds to a receptor (CSF‐1R) encoded by the c‐fms proto‐oncogene. We have previously used the promoter region of the CSF‐1R gene to direct expression of an enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) reporter gene to resident macrophage populations in transgenic mice. In this paper, we show that the EGFP reporter is also expressed in all granulocytes detected with the Gr‐1 antibody, which binds to Ly‐6C and Ly‐6G or with a Ly‐6G‐specific antibody. Transgene expression reflects the presence of CSF‐1R mRNA but not CSF‐1R protein. The same pattern is observed with the macrophage‐specific F4/80 marker. Based on these findings, we performed a comparative array profiling of highly purified granulocytes and macrophages. The patterns of mRNA expression differed predominantly through granulocyte‐specific expression of a small subset of transcription factors (Egr1, HoxB7, STAT3), known abundant granulocyte proteins (e.g., S100A8, S100A9, neutrophil elastase), and specific receptors (fMLP, G‐CSF). These findings suggested that appropriate stimuli might mediate rapid interconversion of the major myeloid cell types, for example, in inflammation. In keeping with this hypothesis, we showed that purified Ly‐6G‐positive granulocytes express CSF‐1R after overnight culture and can subsequently differentiate to form F4/80‐positive macrophages in response to CSF‐1.
De novo Transcriptome Analysis Revealed Genes Involved in Flavonoid and Vitamin C Biosynthesis in Phyllanthus emblica (L.)

Phyllanthus emblica is an affluent source of various therapeutic components. A few of them like vitamin C and flavonoids are predominant bioactive compounds that are being used in immense pharmacological applications. In-spite of numerous applications, the genomic information of this plant was limited to a few expressed sequence tags (ESTs) in DNA databases. Herein, we developed in-depth transcriptome information of P. emblica using Illumina Hiseq 2000 platform and characterized. A total of 31,285,965 high-quality reads were assembled into 91,288 contigs with the N50 value 358. Out of them, 47,267 contigs were functionally annotated using BLASTX search against NCBI-non-redundant (NR) protein database. Further, 31,366 contigs showed similarity with various gene ontology (GO) terms, and 1299 were related to different enzymes and biosynthetic pathways. We identified the transcripts related to each gene involved in flavonoid and vitamin C biosynthesis. Several cytochrome P450s (CYPs) and glucosyltransferases (GTs) genes involved in flavonoid biosynthesis and various other metabolic pathways were also documented. Further, 6510 transcription factors and 4420 EST derived simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were also predicted. The present study enlightened various characteristic features of P. emblica genome, and provided an important resource for future molecular and functional genomics studies.
Human Skin Cells That Express Stage-Specific Embryonic Antigen 3 Associate with Dermal Tissue Regeneration

Abstract Stage-specific embryonic antigen 3 (SSEA3) is a glycosphingolipid that has previously been used to identify cells with stem cell-like, multipotent, and pluripotent characteristics. A rare subpopulation of SSEA3-expressing cells exists in the dermis of adult human skin. These SSEA3-expressing cells undergo a significant increase in cell number in response to injury, suggesting a possible role in regeneration. These SSEA3-expressing regeneration-associated (SERA) cells were derived through primary cell culture, purified by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), and characterized. Longer in vitro culture of the primary skin cells led to lower SSEA3 expression stability after FACS-based purification, suggesting that the current culture conditions may need to be optimized to permit the large-scale expansion of SERA cells. The SERA cells demonstrated a global transcriptional state that was most similar to bone marrow- and fat-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), and the highest expressing SSEA3-expressing cells co-expressed CD105 (clone 35). However, while a rare population of MSCs was observed in primary human skin cell cultures that could differentiate into adipocytes, osteoblasts, or chondrocytes, SERA cells did not possess this differentiation capacity, suggesting that there are at least two different rare subpopulations in adult human skin primary cultures. The identification, efficient purification, and large-scale expansion of these rare subpopulations (SERA cells and MSCs) from heterogeneous adult human skin primary cell cultures may have applications for future patient-specific cellular therapies.
Challenges in Marketing: Reasons for the Existence of Green Marketing

State of the environment and the antropomorph origin of environmental problems poses the question whether the recent economic system and as a part of it, marketing are able to contribute to environmental protection – not only for economic interest but as a moral obligation. The high interdependency of production and consumption with nature needs paradigm shift in the long run, however there are tools in the hands of managers in short run, too. Green marketing is one of them, which tries to harmonize environmental and individual interests. Those who want to keep up with development and with social expectations, too need to get to know green marketing and its opportunities in the 21st century deeper.
Direct observation of electrically active interfacial layer defects which may cause threshold voltage instabilities in HfO2 based MOSFETs

Recent studies have demonstrated that deep level defects very near the Si/dielectric boundary are important reliability problems in HfO2 based devices. In this study, we provide a partial identification of the chemical and structural nature of an electrically active center which is present in the interfacial layer of HfO2 based devices. The defect almost certainly involves an oxygen deficient silicon which is weakly coupled to a nearby hafnium atom.
First-hop-quality-aware dynamic resource allocation for amplify-and-forward opportunistic relaying assisted SC-FDMA

In this paper we exploit the benefits of the diversity gains arising from a cluster of opportunistic relays (OR) and from the independently fading subcarriers of multiple users. Our goal is to improve the energy-efficiency of the OR assisted single-carrier frequency-division multiple-access (SC-FDMA) uplink using amplify-and-forward (AF), where the direct transmission (DT) link is unavailable. By assuming that the pilot aided channel quality information (CQI) of all the users may be exchanged amongst the cooperating relays, we propose two joint dynamic resource allocation (DRA) schemes based on the so-called `first-hop quality awareness'. Our results demonstrate that compared to the DT benchmark, the proposed joint DRA schemes are capable of achieving a power reduction of 10dB for a single-antenna base station (BS) receiver, albeit for a multi-antenna BS the power-reduction remains more modest.
Stopping Set Distributions of Some Reed–Muller Codes

Stopping sets and stopping set distribution of a linear code are used to determine the performance of this code under iterative decoding over a binary erasure channel (BEC). Let <i>C</i> be a binary [<i>n</i>,<i>k</i>] linear code with parity-check matrix <i>H</i>, where the rows of <i>H</i> may be dependent. A stopping set <i>S</i> of <i>C</i> with parity-check matrix <i>H</i> is a subset of column indices of <i>H</i> such that the restriction of <i>H</i> to <i>S</i> does not contain a row of weight one. The stopping set distribution {<i>Ti</i>(<i>H</i>)}<i>i</i>=0<i>n</i> enumerates the number of stopping sets with size <i>i</i> of <i>C</i> with parity-check matrix <i>H</i>. Note that stopping sets and stopping set distribution are related to the parity-check matrix <i>H</i> of <i>C</i>. Let <i>H</i><sup>*</sup> be the parity-check matrix of <i>C</i> which is formed by all the nonzero codewords of its dual code <i>C</i><sup>⊥</sup>. A parity-check matrix <i>H</i> is called BEC-optimal if <i>Ti</i>(<i>H</i>)=<i>Ti</i>(<i>H</i><sup>*</sup>), <i>i</i>=0,1,. , <i>n</i> and <i>H</i> has the smallest number of rows. In this paper, we study stopping sets, stopping set distributions and BEC-optimal parity-check matrices of binary linear codes. Using finite geometry in combinatorics, we obtain BEC-optimal parity-check matrices and then determine the stopping set distributions for the Simplex codes, the Hamming codes, the first order Reed-Muller codes, and the extended Hamming codes, which are some Reed-Muller codes or their shortening or puncturing versions.
Visualizing Image Query Senses by Social Tags

In this paper, we present an approach for visualizing image query senses. Image queries usually have several senses, which can describe the meanings of themselves. However, senses like ‘hot’ might not be concrete, thus we need to find out visual concepts to visualize these image query senses. We propose a novel approach to discover the visual concepts for image queries based on several statistical scores and social tags from Flickr, and further help improve image search by visualizing their senses. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we test the found concepts on real world queries and images. Both the experimental results, conducted for image retrieval and concepts evaluation, demonstrate that the approach can substantially improve the traditional image search engine, which retrieve only relevant images, and show that the visual concepts for image query senses can be utilized to enhance the effectiveness of image retrieval.
A Low ML-Decoding Complexity, High Coding Gain, Full-Rate, Full-Diversity STBC for 4 × 2 MIMO System

This paper proposes a full-rate, full-diversity space-time block code (STBC) with low maximum likelihood (ML) decoding complexity and high coding gain for the 4 transmit antenna, 2 receive antenna (4×2) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system that employs 4/16-QAM. For such a system, the best code known is the DjABBA code and recently, Biglieri, Hong and Viterbo have proposed another STBC (BHV code) for 4-QAM which has lower ML-decoding complexity than the DjABBA code but does not have full-diversity like the DjABBA code. The code proposed in this paper has the same ML-decoding complexity as the BHV code for any square M-QAM but has full-diversity for 4- and 16-QAM. Compared with the DjABBA code, the proposed code has lower ML-decoding complexity for square M-QAM constellation, higher coding gain for 4- and 16-QAM, and hence a better codeword error rate (CER) performance. Simulation results confirming this are presented.
A Complete Wn1.5 to Wn1.6 Mapping

We describe a robust approach for linking already existing lexical/semantic hierarchies. We use a constraint satisfaction algorithm (relaxation labelling) to select {among a set of candidates{ the node in a target taxonomy that bests matches each node in a source taxonomy. In this paper we present the complete mapping of the nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial parts of WordNet 1.5 onto WordNet 1.6.
Fluctuations of company yearly profits vs. scaled revenue: Fat-tail distribution of Lévy type

We analyze annual revenues and earnings data for the 500 largest-revenue U.S. companies during the period 1954–2007. We find that mean year profits are proportional to mean year revenues, exception made for few anomalous years, from which we postulate a linear relation between company expected mean profit and revenue. Mean annual revenues are used to scale both company profits and revenues. Annual profit fluctuations are obtained as difference between actual annual profit and its expected mean value, scaled by a power of the revenue to get a stationary behavior as a function of revenue. We find that profit fluctuations are broadly distributed having approximate power law tails with a Lévy-type exponent α≃1.7, from which we derive the associated break-even probability distribution. The predictions are compared with empirical data.
Scheduling of stochastic distributed assembly flowshop under complex constraints

The distributed assembly permutation flowshop scheduling problem (DAPFSP) is a kind of typical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, and represents important area in operational research. This paper presents a new type of DAPFSP with four realistic extensions, i.e., random nature of processing times and assembly times, stochastic sequence-dependent setup times (SDST) on processing machines, stochastic job release times, as well as the no-wait constraint in the processing stage. To address the above mentioned stochastic version of DAPFSP with complex constraints, our previously proposed optimization framework, labeled as PSOSAHT which is characterized by PSO-based exploration, SA-based local search and HT method for evaluating and comparing the stochastic makespan, is adapted and investigated. Computational tests are conducted on benchmark problems, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of the PSOSAHT method. To the best of knowledge, it is the first attempt to study the DAPFSP with job release time and sequence-dependent setup time both of which are stochastic.
Implications of cosmological gamma-ray absorption - II. Modification of gamma-ray spectra

Bearing on the model for the time-dependent metagalactic radiation field developed in the first paper of this series, we compute the gamma-ray attenuation due to pair production in photon-photon scattering. Emphasis is on the effects of varying the star formation rate and the fraction of UV radiation assumed to escape from the star forming regions, the latter being important mainly for high-redshift sources. Conversely, we investigate how the metagalactic radiation field can be measured from the gamma-ray pair creation cutoff as a function of redshift, the Fazio-Stecker relation. For three observed TeV-blazars (Mkn501, Mkn421, H1426+428) we study the effects of gamma-ray attenuation on their spectra in detail.
65.1: A Vertically‐Aligned LCOS with Submillisecond Response Time

We demonstrated a TFT‐grade fluorinated, UV‐stable, high birefringence and low viscosity negative Δε LC mixture and characterized its physical properties. With this mixture in a thin‐cell‐gap LCOS, we can achieve submillisecond response time at an elevated temperature, which enables color sequential projection displays without noticeable color breakup.
Training set optimization and classifier performance in a top-down diabetic retinopathy screening system

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) affects more than 4.4 million Americans age 40 and over. Automatic screening for DR has shown to be an efficient and cost-effective way to lower the burden on the healthcare system, by triaging diabetic patients and ensuring timely care for those presenting with DR. Several supervised algorithms have been developed to detect pathologies related to DR, but little work has been done in determining the size of the training set that optimizes an algorithm’s performance. In this paper we analyze the effect of the training sample size on the performance of a top-down DR screening algorithm for different types of statistical classifiers. Results are based on partial least squares (PLS), support vector machines (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and Naïve Bayes classifiers. Our dataset consisted of digital retinal images collected from a total of 745 cases (595 controls, 150 with DR). We varied the number of normal controls in the training set, while keeping the number of DR samples constant, and repeated the procedure 10 times using randomized training sets to avoid bias. Results show increasing performance in terms of area under the ROC curve (AUC) when the number of DR subjects in the training set increased, with similar trends for each of the classifiers. Of these, PLS and k-NN had the highest average AUC. Lower standard deviation and a flattening of the AUC curve gives evidence that there is a limit to the learning ability of the classifiers and an optimal number of cases to train on.
A syndrome of mutualism reinforces the lifestyle of a sloth

Arboreal herbivory is rare among mammals. The few species with this lifestyle possess unique adaptions to overcome size-related constraints on nutritional energetics. Sloths are folivores that spend most of their time resting or eating in the forest canopy. A three-toed sloth will, however, descend its tree weekly to defecate, which is risky, energetically costly and, until now, inexplicable. We hypothesized that this behaviour sustains an ecosystem in the fur of sloths, which confers cryptic nutritional benefits to sloths. We found that the more specialized three-toed sloths harboured more phoretic moths, greater concentrations of inorganic nitrogen and higher algal biomass than the generalist two-toed sloths. Moth density was positively related to inorganic nitrogen concentration and algal biomass in the fur. We discovered that sloths consumed algae from their fur, which was highly digestible and lipid-rich. By descending a tree to defecate, sloths transport moths to their oviposition sites in sloth dung, which facilitates moth colonization of sloth fur. Moths are portals for nutrients, increasing nitrogen levels in sloth fur, which fuels algal growth. Sloths consume these algae-gardens, presumably to augment their limited diet. These linked mutualisms between moths, sloths and algae appear to aid the sloth in overcoming a highly constrained lifestyle.
Interactive Semantic Image Retrieval

The big challenge in current content-based image retrieval systems is to reduce the semantic gap between the low level-features and high-level concepts. In this paper, we have proposed a novel framework for efficient image retrieval to improve the retrieval results significantly as a means to addressing this problem. In our proposed method, we first extracted a strong set of image features by using the dual-tree rotated complex wavelet filters (DT-RCWF) and dual tree-complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) jointly, which obtains features in 12 different directions. Second, we presented a relevance feedback (RF) framework for efficient image retrieval by employing a support vector machine (SVM), which learns the semantic relationship among images using the knowledge, based on the user interaction. Extensive experiments show that there is a significant improvement in retrieval performance with the proposed method using SVMRF compared with the retrieval performance without RF. The proposed method improves retrieval performance from 78.5% to 92.29% on the texture database in terms of retrieval accuracy and from 57.20% to 94.2% on the Corel image database, in terms of precision in a much lower number of iterations.
Evaluating the Use of Optical Coherence Tomography in Optic Neuritis

Optic neuritis (ON) is an inflammatory optic nerve injury, which is strongly associated with multiple sclerosis (MS). Axonal damage in the optic nerve manifests as retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) deficits, which can be readily quantified with optical coherence tomography (OCT). The RNFL represents the most proximal region of the afferent visual pathway; and, as such, is a unique region of the central nervous system (CNS) because it lacks myelin. Changes in retinal integrity can be correlated with reliable and quantifiable visual outcomes to provide a structural-functional paradigm of CNS injury. Because the eye provides a unique “view” into the effects of CNS inflammation, the ON “system model” may provide greater understanding about disease mechanisms, which underpin disability in MS. This review addresses the applications of OCT in study of ON patients, with specific reference to the published reports to date. The future role of OCT is discussed, both in terms of the potential gains and certain challenges associated with this evolving technology.
3D Model Transmission and Interactive Rendering over Wireless Network

In order to overcome the shortcomings brought by the narrow bandwidth of wireless network and limited computing ability of mobile terminals, this paper mainly proposes a 3D model transmission and interactive real-time rendering method over wireless local area network. Firstly, an optimized model simplified algorithm is presented for preserve the visually important vertices longer than other vertices. Then, an effective real-time interactive rendering method is developed. With the help of the smart model coding and computing task assigning, the progressive model can be delivered from the server to mobile terminal quickly and rendered real-time without any redundant local reconstruct computing. The experimental results on HP210 Pocket PC PDA among 802.11 wireless network show that the proposed method could achieve visually appealing simplified result and gain real-time interactive rendering for multi-resolution model among wireless network.