Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intravenous hydrocortisone premedication reduces antibodies to infliximab in Crohn's disease: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND & AIMS We assessed the relationship between antibodies to infliximab (ATI) and the loss of response postinfliximab, infusion reactions and, in a randomized trial, investigated whether intravenous hydrocortisone premedication can reduce ATI. METHODS Initially, we prospectively evaluated clinical response, adverse events, and ATI levels in 53 consecutive patients with Crohn's disease who received 199 infliximab (5 mg/kg) infusions. Subsequently, 80 patients with Crohn's disease were randomized to intravenous hydrocortisone 200 mg or placebo immediately before their first and subsequent infliximab infusions. The primary endpoint was reduction in median ATI levels at week 16. Analysis was by intention to treat. RESULTS Nineteen of our initial 53 patients (36%) developed ATI, including all 7 patients with serious infusion reactions (median ATI level, 19.6 microg/mL). Eleven of 15 patients (73%) who lost their initial response were ATI positive compared with none of 21 continuous responders, (8.9 vs. 0.7 microg/mL, P < 0.0001). Administering a second infusion within 8 weeks of the first (OR, 0.13; 95% CI, 0.03-0.5; P = 0.0007) or concurrent immunosuppressants (OR, 0.19; 95% CI, 0.04-1.03; P = 0.007) significantly reduced ATI formation. In the placebo-controlled trial, ATI levels were lower at week 16 among hydrocortisone-treated patients (1.6 vs. 3.4 microg/mL, P = 0.02), and 26% of hydrocortisone-treated patients developed ATI compared with 42% of placebo-treated patients, P = 0.06. CONCLUSIONS Loss of initial response and infusion reactions post-infliximab is strongly related to ATI formation and level. Administering a second infusion within 8 weeks of the first and concurrent immunosuppressant therapy significantly reduce ATI formation. Intravenous hydrocortisone premedication significantly reduces ATI levels but does not eliminate ATI formation or infusion reactions.
Maternal Hyperthermia and the Risk for Neural Tube Defects in Offspring: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: In animals, excessive core body temperatures have been documented to cause malformations; neural tube defects (NTDs) are among the most frequently reported. In humans, data are inconclusive and often conflicting. The objective of our report is to determine the risk for neural tube defects associated with maternal hyperthermia in early pregnancy Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate available evidence on this topic in humans. MEDLINE, EMBASE, references from published reports, and biologic abstracts from meetings were searched for relevant studies. Reviewers evaluated all the retrieved articles and extracted the relevant data. Individual and summary odds ratios and relative risks were calculated using the Mantel–Haenszel method. Results: Fifteen studies, reporting on 1,719 cases and 37,898 noncases, were included in the meta-analysis. The overall odds ratio for neural tube defects associated with maternal hyperthermia was 1.92 (95% confidence interval = 1.61–2.29). When analyzed separately, the 9 case-control studies had an odds ratio of 1.93 (1.53–2.42). The summary relative risk for the 6 cohort studies was 1.95 (1.30–2.92). Conclusions: Maternal hyperthermia in early pregnancy is associated with increased risk for neural tube defects and may be a human teratogen.
Quality , Taste , and Sustained Superior Performance at the Olympic Games

A key premise of the reputation literature is that reputational signals are functional: reputation is tightly coupled with quality. If we take that literature as the baseline, then any observed and persistent differences in performance should be ascribed to underlying quality differences. However, when quality is a matter of taste and objective performance is difficult to gauge, reputation and quality may not precisely correspond. In addition, when performance assessment includes a subjective component, reputational signals may not be functional, and are difficult to disprove. In such situations, therefore, advantages conferred upon dominant actors (who acquire some ex ante reputation) may be sustained for long periods of time, even when such advantages might not be warranted. We examine these issues in the context of the Olympic games, comparing country-level performance outcomes across Olympic sports. We find that past performance is predictive of current performance in all sports, but that the effect is stronger in subjective outcome sports versus objective outcome sports. That is, past performance is a better predictor of future performance in sports where external judges and referees can influence the outcomes. We contend that the additional prior performance effect in subjective sports represents returns to reputation. Moreover, the findings indicate that judges and referees potentially overrely on reputational cues in determining outcomes, even more so than observed outcomes in objective sports might otherwise warrant.
Fast (Multi-)Evaluation of Linearly Recurrent Sequences: Improvements and Applications

For a linearly recurrent vector sequence P[n+1] = A(n) * P[n], consider the problem of calculating either the n-th term P[n] or L 0 within O((log(1/e)^{1/2} loglog(1/e)) -- as opposed to O(log(1/e)) -- arithmetic steps. * Given m and a polynomial p of degree d over a field of characteristic zero, the coefficient of p^m to term X^n can be computed within O(d^2 M(n^{1/2})) steps where M(n) denotes the cost of multiplying two degree-n polynomials. * The same time bound holds for the joint calculation of any L<=n^{1/2} desired coefficients of p^m to terms X^{n_i}, n_1,. ,n_L <= n.
Exploring the association between lifetime prevalence of mental illness and transition from substance use to substance use disorders: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC).

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The association between substance use disorders (SUDs) and mental illness (MI) has been well established. Previous studies reporting this association in various clinical populations have not taken into account former substance use. This may be important as increased prevalence of substance use among individuals with MI may partially explain the strong association between SUDs and MI. METHODS In this study we included only individuals with previous substance use and explored the association between lifetime diagnosis of MI and transition from substance use to SUDs. Analyses were conducted across six different categories of substances (alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants) based on a large representative US sample, the National Epidemiologic Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC, n = 43,093). RESULTS Lifetime diagnoses of any MI, and particularly personality disorders and psychotic disorders, were found to be associated with higher prevalence of transition from substance use to SUDs across most categories of substances. This association was particularly strong for nicotine (adjusted OR = 2.95 (2.72-3.20)). CONCLUSIONS AND SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE This cross-sectional study expands on previous research by highlighting the association between lifetime diagnosis of any MI and increased rates of transition from substance use to SUDs across a range of substances. Longitudinal studies exploring temporal effects of this association are further needed.
Human perception in computer vision

Computer vision has made remarkable progress in recent years. Deep neural network (DNN) models optimized to identify objects in images exhibit unprecedented task-trained accuracy and, remarkably, some generalization ability: new visual problems can now be solved more easily based on previous learning. Biological vision (learned in life and through evolution) is also accurate and general-purpose. Is it possible that these different learning regimes converge to similar problem-dependent optimal computations? We therefore asked whether the human system-level computation of visual perception has DNN correlates and considered several anecdotal test cases. We found that perceptual sensitivity to image changes has DNN mid-computation correlates, while sensitivity to segmentation, crowding and shape has DNN end-computation correlates. Our results quantify the applicability of using DNN computation to estimate perceptual loss, and are consistent with the fascinating theoretical view that properties of human perception are a consequence of architecture-independent visual learning.
Occlusion of rubidium ions by the sodium‐potassium pump: its implications for the mechanism of potassium transport

1. The occlusion of rubidium ions by Na, K‐ATPase has been investigated by suspending enzyme prepared from pig kidney outer medulla in media containing low concentrations of 86Rb, forcing the suspensions rapidly through small columns of cation‐exchange resin, and measuring the amounts of radioactivity emerging from the columns.
Examining Rey Complex Figure Test organization in healthy adults

Introduction: The Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) is a popular measure of visuospatial and executive functioning. Clinical interpretations of RCFT performance are partly based on how an individual approaches the task with piecemeal organization often considered indicative of impairment. This is despite little previous research examining RCFT organizational variability in healthy adults and considerable individual differences previously shown in processing the global and local features of visual stimuli. Method: Fifty-seven undergraduate university students (44 females, 13 males), aged 18 to 34 years (M = 20.14, SD = 3.29) participated in the study. Participants completed the RCFT copy trial followed by a hierarchical shape task. RCFT organization was measured using the qualitative score (Q-score). Results: Extensive variation was demonstrated in the distribution of RCFT organization and global processing scores with largely nonsignificant deviation from a normal distribution (p ≤ .05). Only 53% of participants commenced the RCFT copy by completing the base rectangle using four consecutively drawn lines. The diagonals were completed using two consecutive lines by 40% of participants with only 11% doing so immediately following completion of the base rectangle. Only 32% completed the bisectors as two consecutive lines, and only 18% did so immediately following completion of the base rectangle. Global processing scores significantly predicted RCFT organization (b = 0.63, p = .006) with individuals demonstrating higher global processing on average exhibiting more organized RCFT copies than those demonstrating lower global processing. Conclusions: A sample of healthy individuals demonstrated a wide range of RCFT organizational strategies with the variation partly explained by individual differences in global/local processing.
Low-Overhead Fault Tolerance for High-Throughput Data Processing Systems

The MapReduce programming paradigm proved to be a useful approach for building highly scalable data processing systems. One important reason for its success is simplicity, including the fault tolerance mechanisms. However, this simplicity comes at a price: efficiency. MapReduce's fault tolerance scheme stores too much intermediate information on disk. This inefficiency negatively affects job completion time. Furthermore, this inefficiency in particular forbids the application of MapReduce in near real-time scenarios where jobs need to produce results quickly. In this paper, we discuss an alternative fault tolerance scheme that is inspired by virtual synchrony. The key feature of our approach is a low-overhead deterministic execution. Deterministic execution reduces the amount of persistently stored information. In addition, because persisting intermediate results are no longer required for fault tolerance, we use more efficient communication techniques that considerably improve job completion time and throughput. Our contribution is twofold: (i) we enable the use of MapReduce for jobs ranging from seconds to a few tens of seconds, satisfying these deadlines even in the case of failures, (ii) we considerably reduce the fault tolerance overhead and as such the overhead of MapReduce in general. Our modifications are transparent to the application.
Software Projects' Most Important Activities of Quality Management: a Delphi Study Software Projects' Most Important Activities of Quality Management: a Delphi Study

Quality management is a very important contributor for the success of software project management. In quality management area we can find multiple activities to carry out, however organizations cannot always execute all those tasks and many times it is indispensable to make choices about what can and should be made. In order to help the organizations to identify the most important activities in quality management, we carried out a Delphi study with the participation of several senior project managers. The result is the identification of several groups of activities, ordered by importance for the project success. 1. Introduction Organizations recognize that an efficient management is the key for the success of their projects [1], and the number of organizations that use project management to reach strategic objectives is increasing.
NDNBench: A benchmark for Named Data Networking lookup

Content-centric Networking (CCN) and the later proposed Named Data Networking (NDN) have attracted wide attention in both academia and industry, as the clean slate future Internet architecture. Wire speed name lookup for packet forwarding is one of the most challenging tasks in CCN/NDN. As a promising technology, its feasibilities including reachable speed, scalability, and update performance are imperative to be deeply evaluated. However, CCN/NDN is currently on its initial stage and no actual network is deployed, which means no real name routing tables and NDN traffic are available. In order to fulfill performance comparisons among various innovative name lookup solutions and facilitate future name lookup researches, we present NDNBench, a publicly available platform for evaluation, comparison and experiments with different name lookup approaches. NDNBench can generate various Forwarding Information Bases (FIBs), traces with structure and size diversity to conduct the tests thoroughly by adjusting the parameters. NDNBench provides a simulation package tool with flexibility to evaluate various name lookup approaches. Furthermore, in order to verify the effectiveness of NDNBench, we benchmark some existing name lookup schemes and the results are very supportive. NDNBench has been applied to recent work and is publicly available at the following site: http://s-router.cs. tsinghua.edu. cn/~zhangting/.
A comparison of the nutrient intake of a community-dwelling first-episode psychosis cohort, aged 19–64 years, with data from the UK population

Abstract Psychosis increases the risk of CVD, obesity and type 2 diabetes and reduces life expectancy. There are limited data comparing the dietary habits of community-dwelling first-episode psychosis sufferers – with autonomy over diet – and the general population. The data represent the retrospective evaluation of nutritional data collected between 2007 and 2013 from 143 individuals from the UK population receiving treatment for first-episode psychosis. Differences in mean nutrient intakes between the study cohort and the national sample were tested for statistical significance using independent t tests, incorporating Satterthwaite's correction where required. Mean total energy intake was lower for males (P = 0·049) and higher for females (P = 0·016) in the cohort than in the corresponding subgroups of the national sample. Females in the study cohort consumed 12·9 (95 % CI 4·3, 21·5) g more total fat per d, whilst males consumed 7·7 (95 % CI 0·5, 14·9) g less protein per d than the national sample. Males in the study also showed significantly lower mean intakes than nationally of folate, Fe, Se, vitamin D and Zn, but not vitamin C. The proportion of individuals not meeting the lower reference nutrient intakes, particularly for Se (males 54·0 % and females 57·1 %) and for Fe amongst females (29·6 %), is cause for concern regarding potentially severe deficiencies. Further exploration of dietary habits within first-episode psychosis is warranted to assess whether individuals make beneficial dietary changes for their physical and mental health and wellbeing following dietary change intervention. It would also be pertinent to assess any correlation between diet and mental health symptomology.
Unorthodox uses of Bennett's acceptance ratio method

We illustrate the application of Bennett's acceptance ratio method (BAR) to problems in which standard methods to compute free energy differences (thermodynamic integration, exponential formula) are not practical. Our starting point is the observation that BAR can often compute the free energy difference between two states without the need for intermediate states usually employed (and necessary) in alchemical free energy simulations. This is demonstrated first for the free energy difference between ethane and methanol in aqueous solution. We then show how BAR can be used to compute directly rather unusual free energy differences, such as the free energy difference resulting from changing the treatment of electrostatic interactions, from switching the force field, or from using an implicit solvent model. Calculations of this kind should prove useful for force field development and the validation of implicit solvent methods. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2009
Computational Steering by Direct Image Manipulation

Computational steering requires the coupling of simulation and visualization elements, but if the latter is targetted at general requirements, little or no information about the calculation itself may survive in the final image. Consequently, changes made there cannot, in general, propagate back to the source. For example, in a study of a chemical reaction, a line on a graph simply consists of linked pairs of x and y coordinates, with no indication that these denote the concentrations of, say, oxygen or hydrogen at certain times. This paper will introduce a new visualization taxonomy and data structure which allow changes in the simulation to be accomplished by direct image manipulation, allowing more intuitive steering of a range of scientific applications.
Data associated iterative channel estimations with non-orthogonal pilot for large MIMO detections

The present paper deals with the under-determined problems caused by channel estimations using insufficient non-orthogonal pilot sequences for large multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) iterative detection in large scaled belief propagation. The under-determined channel estimation problem induces under-determined signal detections. The problem seems to lie in the fact that the non-orthogonal pilot sequences shrink Frobenius norm of a pilot matrix for MIMO channels. For obtaining sufficient value of the Frobenius norm, data associated iterative channel estimation for Gaussian belief propagation detector is proposed. For solving the composite under-determined problems, the validity of the proposed iterative manner is demonstrated by computer simulations.
In-place Arithmetic for Polynomials over Zn

We present space and time efficient algorithms for univariate polynomial arithmetic operations over Z mod n where the modulus n does not necessarily fit into is not a machine word. These algorithms provide the key tools for the efficient implementation of polynomial resultant gcd and factorization computation over Z, without having to write large amounts of code in a systems implementation language. 1 B a c k g r o u n d This paper reports a solution to a dilema we faced during the design and implementation of certain crucial operations in the Maple system [15] namely, computing polynomial resultants, greatest common divisors and factorization in Z[x]. The efficient implementation of polynomial greatest common divisors (Gcds) is perhaps the most single important part of a general purpose computer algebra system. Gcd computation is the bottleneck of many operations. This is because any calculations which involve rational operations will require God computations in order to reduce fractions to lowest terms. For example, in solving a system of equations with polynomial coefficients, polynomial Gcd calculations will be needed to simplify the solutions. WhEreas we can use Euclids algorithm to compute integer Gcds relatively efficiently, compared with integer multiplication and division, the efficient computation of polynomial Gcds is much more difficult. And although the classical algorithms for multiplying and dividing polynomials are fine for most practical calculations, the use of Euclidean based Gcd algorithms results in a phenomenon known as "intermediate expression swell" which causes many intermediate calculations to "blow up". Research on Gcd computations in the 1970's and 1980's [9, 19, 21, 7, 12] led to efficient algorithms for the computation of polynomial Gcds. However, the efficient implementation of these algorithms is quite difficult. The modular based algorithms require efficient computation over the integers rood n. Efficiency is lost in a systems implementation language like C and Lisp, and even more so in an interpreted language. The efficient implementation of polynomial resultants is not as important as polynomial Gcds. And it has become less important since one of the main applications of resultants, namely in solving systems of polynomial equations, has largely been superceded with the Grobner basis approach [5, 10]. However, it has been our experience that some hard problems can only be solved by clever application of resultants [16]. Thus it is still useful to have an efficient implementation of polynomial resultants. The most efficient algorithms for resultants for dense polynomials are those based on modular methods [9, 4].
Non-parametric Algorithm to Isolate Chunks in Response Sequences

Chunking consists in grouping items of a sequence into small clusters, named chunks, with the assumed goal of lessening working memory load. Despite extensive research, the current methods used to detect chunks, and to identify different chunking strategies, remain discordant and difficult to implement. Here, we propose a simple and reliable method to identify chunks in a sequence and to determine their stability across blocks. This algorithm is based on a ranking method and its major novelty is that it provides concomitantly both the features of individual chunk in a given sequence, and an overall index that quantifies the chunking pattern consistency across sequences. The analysis of simulated data confirmed the validity of our method in different conditions of noise, chunk lengths and chunk numbers; moreover, we found that this algorithm was particularly efficient in the noise range observed in real data, provided that at least 4 sequence repetitions were included in each experimental block. Furthermore, we applied this algorithm to actual reaction time series gathered from 3 published experiments and were able to confirm the findings obtained in the original reports. In conclusion, this novel algorithm is easy to implement, is robust to outliers and provides concurrent and reliable estimation of chunk position and chunking dynamics, making it useful to study both sequence-specific and general chunking effects. The algorithm is available at: https://github.com/artipago/Non-parametric-algorithm-to-isolate-chunks-in-response-sequences.