Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Use of psychotherapy and psychotropic medication among Norwegian musicians compared to the general workforce

Previous research has reported higher prevalence rates of anxiety and depression among musicians, compared to the general workforce. We compared the use of psychotherapy and psychotropic medication with other major occupational groups, and expected to find higher use among musicians. Musicians from the Norwegian Musicians’ Union (n = 1,607) answered an online questionnaire about demographic characteristics, mental health, use of healthcare services and use of psychotropic medication. They were compared to a sample of the Norwegian workforce (n = 2,550) from the Norwegian survey of level of living. Based on chi-square and logistic regression analysis, adjusted for age, sex, education, and cohabitation status, we found that musicians reported higher use of psychotherapy and psychotropic medication. Use of psychotherapy was reported most frequently among vocalists, while rock musicians reported the most widespread use of psychotropic medication. Overall, musicians had three-fold higher odds of use of psychotherapy and 50% higher odds of use of psychotropic medication compared to the general workforce. This is consistent with previous findings indicating high rates of sleep-difficulties and psychological distress among musicians. The results underline the importance of investigating both the content and quality of services provided.
Linking Ras to myosin function: RasGEF Q, a Dictyostelium exchange factor for RasB, affects myosin II functions

Ras guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) Q, a nucleotide exchange factor from Dictyostelium discoideum, is a 143-kD protein containing RasGEF domains and a DEP domain. We show that RasGEF Q can bind to F-actin, has the potential to form complexes with myosin heavy chain kinase (MHCK) A that contain active RasB, and is the predominant exchange factor for RasB. Overexpression of the RasGEF Q GEF domain activates RasB, causes enhanced recruitment of MHCK A to the cortex, and leads to cytokinesis defects in suspension, phenocopying cells expressing constitutively active RasB, and myosin-null mutants. RasGEF Q− mutants have defects in cell sorting and slug migration during later stages of development, in addition to cell polarity defects. Furthermore, RasGEF Q− mutants have increased levels of unphosphorylated myosin II, resulting in myosin II overassembly. Collectively, our results suggest that starvation signals through RasGEF Q to activate RasB, which then regulates processes requiring myosin II.
Biochemical and Ultrastructural Studies Suggest that the Effects of Thapsigargin on Human Platelets Are Mediated by Changes in Intracellular Calcium but not by Intracellular Histamine

Summary The involvement of intracellular histamine in thapsigargin (Tg)-induced platelet aggregation was studied. Platelet aggregation induced by 0.25 and 0.5 µM Tg was not accompained by a rise in intracellular histamine but a significant (p <0.01) increase in the level of intracellular histamine was observed at 1 µM Tg. Preincubation of platelets with inhibitors of histamine metabolizing enzymes had little effect on intracellular histamine levels in platelets stimulated by 0.5 µM Tg. In addition, the inhibitors of histidine decarboxylase (HDC), α-methyl histidine (α-MH) and α-fluoromethyl histidine (α-FMH) failed to inhibit Tg-induced aggregation. The intracellular histamine receptor antagonist, N,N-diethyl-2-[4-(phenylmethyl)phenoxy] ethanamine. HC1 (DPPE), inhibited Tg-induced aggregation but with IC50 values dependent on the concentration of agonist used. The inhibitory effects of DPPE on Tg-induced aggregation were not reversed by the addition of histamine to saponin-permeabilized platelets suggesting non-histamine mediated effects of DPPE on Tg-induced aggregation. Tg stimulated an increase in the cytosolic free calcium concentration which was unaffected by DPPE indicating that the effects of DPPE are also not due to the inhibition of mobilization of cytosolic calcium. The ultrastructural studies suggest that the major Tg-induced changes (pseudopod formation and granule centralization) are consistent with a primary role for Tg to mobilize calcium; DPPE had very little effect on these ultrastructural changes. The results indicate that the effects of Tg on human platelets are mediated by an increase in cytosolic calcium but not by intracellular histamine.
Ecology and Dynamics of Open Source Communities

The goal of this chapter is to document the evolution of a portfolio of open source communities. These are communities formed around a set of related projects with common governance, which often produce artifacts shared among all projects. It helps to think of a portfolio of project communities as an ecology, in which the projects are mutually dependent, and there is both cross-project collaboration and competition for resources among the communities. As a case study, we explore the ecology of communities within the Apache project, one of the largest and most visible open source projects. We infer the community structure from developer mailing lists, and study how the communities evolve and interact over time. The analysis lends support to the often-stated hypothesis that open source communities grow by a process of preferential attachment. However, we show that the influx of external developers is not the only factor affecting community growth. The structure and dynamics of a community is also impacted by inter-project information flow, and the migration of developers between projects (including the formation of spinoffs).
Chemical Arms Control and the Assimilation of Chemical Weapons

Chemical weapons are treated in one of the older extant international agreements which are now regarded as arms control: the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Parties to this treaty have renounced 'the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices. ' The protocol also outlaws 'bacteriological methods of warfare. ' There are no provisions for verification. About a hundred states are parties, including all members of the North Atlantic Treaty and Warsaw Treaty alliances. On the evidence, in particular of numerous resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly over the past fifteen years, the prohibitions expressed in the protocol have entered customary international law and are now binding upon all states. Although chemical warfare may thus appear to be well and truly banned, the search for supplementary control of these arms has been on the active agenda of the principal international negotiating body since 1968. In part this has been a natural consequence of the manner in which the United Nations has approached the task of disarmament: in 1947 the organization defined 'weapons of mass destruction' to include at least some types of chemical weapon whose elimination from national armaments thereby became, in the words of General Assembly resolution 41(1), an 'urgent objective' of the United Nations, one that has dominated subsequent disarmament effort. But in part also the continuing quest for additional chemical arms control has been stimulated by doubts about the existing regime. It would be remarkable
Identifying product features from customer reviews using hybrid patterns

In this paper we have addressed the problem of automatic identification of product features from customer reviews. Costumers, retailors, and manufacturers are popularly using customer reviews on websites for product reputation and sales forecasting. Opinion mining application have been potentially employed to summarize the huge collectionof customer reviews for decision making. In this paper we have proposed hybrid dependency patterns to extract product features from unstructured reviews. The proposed dependency patterns exploit lexical relations and opinion context to identify features. Based on empirical analysis, we found that the proposed hybrid patterns provide comparatively more accurate results. The average precision and recall are significantly improved with hybrid patterns.
Identifying differentially expressed proteins in two-dimensional electrophoresis experiments: inputs from transcriptomics statistical tools

BACKGROUND Two-dimensional electrophoresis is a crucial method in proteomics that allows the characterization of proteins' function and expression. This usually implies the identification of proteins that are differentially expressed between two contrasting conditions, for example, healthy versus diseased in human proteomics biomarker discovery and stressful conditions versus control in animal experimentation. The statistical procedures that lead to such identifications are critical steps in the 2-DE analysis workflow. They include a normalization step and a test and probability correction for multiple testing. Statistical issues caused by the high dimensionality of the data and large-scale multiple testing have been a more active topic in transcriptomics than proteomics, especially in microarray analysis. We thus propose to adapt innovative statistical tools developed for microarray analysis and incorporate them in the 2-DE analysis pipeline. RESULTS In this article, we evaluate the performance of different normalization procedures, different statistical tests and false discovery rate calculation methods with both real and simulated datasets. We demonstrate that the use of statistical procedures adapted from microarrays lead to notable increase in power as well as a minimization of false-positive discovery rate. More specifically, we obtained the best results in terms of reliability and sensibility when using the 'moderate t-test' from Smyth in association with classic false discovery rate from Benjamini and Hochberg. AVAILABILITY The methods discussed are freely available in the 'prot2D' open source R-package from Bioconductor (http://www.bioconductor.org//) under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later). CONTACT sebastien.artigaud@univ-brest.fr or sebastien.artigaud@gmx.com.
Association of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in CYP1B1 and COMT Genes with Breast Cancer Susceptibility in Indian Women

Cytochrome P450 1B1 (CYP1B1) and catechol-$O$-methyltransferase (COMT) enzymes play critical roles in estrogen metabolism. Alterations in the catalytic activity of CYP1B1 and COMT enzymes have been found associated with altered breast cancer risk in postmenopausal women in many populations. The substitution of leucine (Leu) to valine (Val) at codon 432 increases the catalytic activity of CYP1B1, however, substitution of Val to methionine (Met) at codon 158 decreases the catalytic activity of COMT. The present study was performed to evaluate the associations of CYP1B1 Leu432Val and/or COMT Val158Met polymorphisms with total, premenopausal and postmenopausal breast cancer risks in Indian women. COMT and CYP1B1 polymorphisms in controls and breast cancer patients were analyzed employing polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) followed by gel electrophoresis. Although CYP1B1 and COMT genotypes did not exhibit statistically significant association with breast cancer risks when analyzed individually, COMT wild type (Val158Val) in combination with CYP1B1 heterozygous variant (Leu432Val) [OR: 0.21; 95% CI (0.05–0.82), p value; 0.021] and COMT heterozygous variant (Val158Met) in combination with CYP1B1 wild type (Leu432Leu) [OR: 0.29; 95% CI (0.08–0.96), p value; 0.042] showed significant protective association with premenopausal breast cancer risk. The results demonstrate that CYP1B1 wild type in combination with COMT heterozygous or their inverse combination offer protection against breast cancer in premenopausal Indian women.
Microbial Degradation of Octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane

ABSTRACT The microbial degradation of low-molecular-weight polydimethylsiloxanes was investigated through laboratory experiments. Octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane was found to be biodegraded under anaerobic conditions in composted sewage sludge, as monitored by the occurrence of the main polydimethylsiloxane degradation product, dimethylsilanediol, compared to that found in experiments with sterilized control samples.
Stateless Computation

We present and explore a model of stateless and self-stabilizing distributed computation, inspired by real-world applications such as routing on today's Internet. Processors in our model do not have an internal state, but rather interact by repeatedly mapping incoming messages ("labels") to outgoing messages and output values. While seemingly too restrictive to be of interest, stateless computation encompasses both classical game-theoretic notions of strategic interaction and a broad range of practical applications (e.g., Internet protocols, circuits, diffusion of technologies in social networks). Our main technical contribution is a general impossibility result for stateless self-stabilization in our model, showing that even modest asynchrony (with wait times that are linear in the number of processors) can prevent a stateless protocol from reaching a stable global configuration. Furthermore, we present hardness results for verifying stateless self-stabilization. We also address several aspects of the computational power of stateless protocols. Most significantly, we show that short messages (of length that is logarithmic in the number of processors) yield substantial computational power, even on very poorly connected topologies.
Dual regulation of Ca2+‐dependent glutamate release from astrocytes: Vesicular glutamate transporters and cytosolic glutamate levels

Vesicular glutamate transporters (VGLUTs) are responsible for vesicular glutamate storage and exocytotic glutamate release in neurons and astrocytes. Here, we selectively and efficiently overexpressed individual VGLUT proteins (VGLUT1, 2, or 3) in solitary astrocytes and studied their effects on mechanical stimulation‐induced Ca2+‐dependent glutamate release. Neither VGLUT1 nor VGLUT2 overexpression changed the amount of glutamate release, whereas overexpression of VGLUT3 significantly enhanced Ca2+‐dependent glutamate release from astrocytes. None of the VGLUT overexpression affected mechanically induced intracellular Ca2+ increase. Inhibition of glutamine synthetase activity by L‐methionine sulfoximine in astrocytes, which leads to increased cytosolic glutamate concentration, greatly increased their mechanically induced Ca2+‐dependent glutamate release, without affecting intracellular Ca2+ dynamics. Taken together, these data indicate that both VGLUT3 and the cytosolic concentration of glutamate are key limiting factors in regulating the Ca2+‐dependent release of glutamate from astrocytes. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
An improved approach to calculation of the optical flow field for color image sequences

To avoid various constraints for solving aperture problem in traditional optical flow calculation, an approach to computation of the optical flow field for color image sequences is proposed based on HSI color model. By applying the three color components H, S, I to optical flow constraint equations, the extensive optical information provided by color images is taken fully advantage of, and the equations of ill-posed problem are turned into posed one. Moreover, a weighted matrix is introduced and the weights of the solution of three components can be determined with the characteristics of the image. So the vector field of optical flow is obtained. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method is superior to the traditional optical flow calculating methods.
Communicating the Scientific Consensus on Human-Caused Climate Change is an Effective and Depolarizing Public Engagement Strategy: Experimental Evidence from a Large National Replication Study

This experimental study evaluated whether communicating the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is likely to be effective with the American public. Drawing on a large national sample (N = 6,301), we set out to replicate and extend the findings of van der Linden et al. (2015). Consistent with the original study, we find robust and replicated evidence that communicating the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change leads to significant and substantial changes in perceived scientific agreement among conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike. These findings prove robust, even among those predisposed to receive counter-attitudinal information (e.g., Fox-news watchers, global warming skeptics). Further, among conservatives, we find the greatest change in perceived consensus among the subset whose own friends and family are least likely to believe in human-caused global warming. In short, we find little evidence of identity-protective cognition and no evidence of belief polarization across these groups. We further find that communicating the scientific consensus has (positive) direct effects (across the political spectrum) on belief that climate change is happening, human-caused, and a serious threat that requires societal action. We also find that these direct effects are mediated by changes in perceived scientific consensus. In other words, public perception of the scientific consensus is an important gateway cognition. Results also show that belief in the scientific consensus is more influential in driving public engagement than perceived consensus among other groups (e.g., Americans). Lastly, although public understanding of the scientific consensus is low, we find that conservatives and moderates are significantly less aware of the scientific consensus than liberals.
Internalized HIV Stigma and Mindfulness

Rates of both traumatic event exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; 22%-54%) are disproportionately elevated among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA). Trauma and related psychopathology significantly affect quality of life and disease management in this patient population. The current study examined associations between internalized HIV stigma, mindfulness skills, and the severity of PTSD symptoms in trauma-exposed PLHA. Participants included 137 PLHA (14.6% female; Mage = 48.94, SD = 8.89) who reported experiencing on average, five (SD = 2.67) traumatic events; 34% met diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Results indicate that after controlling for sex, age, education, and number of traumatic events, internalized HIV stigma was positively related to overall PTSD symptom severity (β = .16, p < .05) and severity of re-experiencing (β = .19, p < .05) and hyper-arousal (β = .16, p = .05), but not avoidance, PTSD symptom clusters. Among the mindfulness facets measured, acting with awareness was uniquely negatively related to the overall severity of PTSD symptoms (β = − .25, p < .01) and the severity of re-experiencing (β = − .25, p < .05), avoidance (β = − .25, p < .05), and hyper-arousal (β = − .29, p < .01) PTSD symptom clusters. These effects were observed after accounting for covariates and shared variance with other mindfulness facets. Theoretically, the present findings suggest that internalized HIV stigma may serve as a vulnerability factor for the severity of certain PTSD symptoms, whereas acting with awareness may function as a protective or resiliency factor for the severity of PTSD symptoms. Implications for the treatment of trauma-exposed PLHA are discussed.
Construire des applications fiables à base de services mobiles

Along with the emergence of ubiquitous computing there is a need for building reliable and secure applications that provide access to information in a continuous way. In such a context, access to resources and applications must be done in a flexible way through services that come up as a new paradigm for programming and organizing operations. In this paper we present an approach for building reliable mobile applications based on services oriented paradigm and the use of a contract based coordination model. Thanks to contracts, it is possible to associate a personalized behavior to a flow describing the logic of a mobile services based application. Contracts ensure transactional properties at execution time in the presence of exceptions and make applications aware of their execution context (QoS)
Antidiarrheal mechanism of Carpolobia lutea leaf fractions in rats

Context: Carpolobia lutea G. Don (Polygalaceae) leaf is reputable as an antidiarrheal agent among the Efik and Ibibio tribe of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The crude extract is reported to show antidiarrheal and antiulcer effects in rodents. Objective: The isolation and characterization of drug molecules from the leaf fraction with antidiarrheal bioactivity and determination of mechanism of action are reported. Material and methods: Gradient extraction by maceration yielding n-hexane, chloroform, ethyl acetate, and ethanol fractions (770 mg/kg) were used to establish the fractions suitable for drug discovery. The antidiarrheal effect of the leaf fractions of Carpolobia lutea was evaluated using castor oil–induced diarrhea, castor oil–induced intestinal transit, and enteropooling. Results: Results indicate that all fractions produced a significant (p < 0.01–0.001) decrease in castor oil–induced diarrhea in rats. This effect was not antagonized by isosorbide dinitrate (150 mg/kg, p.o), diphenoxylate (5 × 10−3 mg/kg p.o) and yohimbine (1 mg/kg, s.c.) except for the chloroform fraction. The ethyl acetate fraction produced 100% inhibition of intestinal transit, an effect greater than pure drug. Phytochemical analysis of the ethyl acetate fraction yielded polyphenolic compounds. Conclusion: The leaf fractions contain two types of antidiarrheal agents, one mediating its effect through α1-presynaptic adrenoceptor while the other does not. Polyphenols isolated may in part lend credence for observed antidiarrheal activity.
Investigations on A New Proximity Coupled Dual-Frequency Microstrip Antenna for Wireless Communication

The investigations on a new proximity coupled dual- frequency microstrip antenna, which can be operated at GPS and Bluetooth frequency bands of wireless communication, are reported. The patch geometry consists of two square sections joined at the common corners and proximity coupled by a microstrip line. The results show that the antenna has sufficient bandwidth and gain necessary for the above frequency bands and may be used for wireless applications.