Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diagnostic Stability of First-Episode Psychotic Disorders and Persistence of Comorbid Psychiatric Disorders over 1 Year

Objective: Diagnostic stability is an important indicator of the reliability and validity of psychiatric diagnoses and has implications in clinical practice and research. While several studies have investigated the diagnostic stability of first-episode psychosis (FEP) disorders, less is known about psychiatric comorbidity in FEP and the persistence of such comorbid conditions over time. Our study aimed to confirm the diagnostic stability of FEP disorders and determine the variation in persistence of comorbid substance use disorders (SUDs), mood disorders, and anxiety disorders over 1 year. Method: The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR Axis I Disorders—Patient Edition was conducted at first presentation and repeated after 1 year (or reconstructed) for 214 FEP patients at the Prevention and Early Intervention Program for Psychoses–Montreal. Results: Psychotic disorder diagnoses were retained by 76.2% of patients at 1 year, schizophrenia being the most stable diagnosis (92.1%). Most diagnostic shifts were to schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Comorbid SUDs, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders persisted for 50.7%, 64.0%, and 16.7% of patients, respectively. Many new cases of each of these disorders also emerged at 1-year follow-up. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate the stability of primary psychotic disorder diagnoses and greater fluidity of comorbid psychiatric diagnoses, with anxiety disorders persisting as comorbid conditions more than mood disorders and SUDs. These results highlight the importance of repeating a structured diagnostic assessment longitudinally, especially for consideration of comorbid conditions.
Evaluation of a rapid urease test to detect Campylobacter pylori infection

Seventy-five consecutive patients referred for upper gastrointestinal tract endoscopy were evaluated for Campylobacter pylori infection by pathology, culture, and a biochemical test to detect bacterial urease. Forty-eight patients (64%) had C. pylori present based on pathology or culture or both. Thirty-two urease tests were positive after 1 h, all in patients with C. pylori detected by the two other methods (specificity, 100%; sensitivity, 67%). After 24 h, 47 urease tests were positive, but only 40 had C. pylori present (specificity, 74%; sensitivity, 83%). When read after 1 h, the urease test was highly specific and led to rapid presumptive diagnosis.
Master equation approach to the central spin decoherence problem: Uniform coupling model and role of projection operators

The generalized master equation of Nakajima-Zwanzig (NZ) type has been used extensively to investigate the coherence dynamics of the central spin model with a nuclear bath in a narrowed state characterized by a well-defined value of the Overhauser field. We reconsider the perturbative NZ approach and apply it to the exactly solvable case of a system with uniform hyperfine couplings. This is motivated by the fact that the effective-Hamiltonian-based theory suggests that the dynamics of the realistic system at low magnetic fields and short times can be mapped onto the uniform coupling model. We show that the standard NZ approach fails to reproduce the exact solution of this model beyond very short times, while the effective-Hamiltonian calculation agrees very well with the exact result on time scales during which most of the coherence is lost. Our key finding is that, in order to extend the time scale of applicability of the NZ approach in this case, instead of using a single projection operator one has to use a set of correlated projection operators which properly reflect the symmetries of the problem and greatly improve the convergence of the theory. This suggests that the correlated projection operators are crucial for a proper description of narrowed-state free-induction decay at short times and low magnetic fields. Our results thus provide important insights toward the development of a more complete theory of central spin decoherence applicable in a broader regime of time scales and magnetic fields.
Outcome of orthognathic surgery in Chinese patients. A subjective and objective evaluation.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the outcome of orthognathic surgery by objective cephalometric measurement of posttreatment soft-tissue profile and by subjective evaluation of profile esthetics by laypersons and clinicians. MATERIALS AND METHODS The sample consisted of 30 Chinese patients who had completed combined orthodontic and orthognathic surgical treatment. The posttreatment cephalograms of these patients were analyzed with respect to profile convexity, facial height, and lip contours and these were compared to the previously established esthetic norms. Line drawings of the soft-tissue profile were displayed to a panel comprising six laypersons and six clinicians who scored the esthetics of each profile using a 7-point scale. RESULTS Complete normalization of cephalometric soft-tissue variables was not achieved with orthognathic surgery in most patients, with four of the six soft-tissue cephalometric measurements showing significant differences compared to the esthetic norms. There were good correlations in the esthetic scores between laypersons and clinicians, even though clinicians tend to rate the profiles more favorably. Facial convexity and facial height did not significantly influence the subjective scores of both the laypersons and clinicians. Lower lip protrusion was the only cephalometric variable that significantly influenced clinicians' assessment of profile esthetics (P<.01). CONCLUSIONS Profile convexity and lower facial height proportion had little influence on both lay and professional perception of profile esthetics. Lower lip position is the only cephalometric variable that significantly influenced clinicians' assessment of profile esthetics.
CrowdTranscoding: Online Video Transcoding With Massive Viewers

Driven by the advances in personal computing devices and the prevalence of high-speed network accesses, crowdsourced livecast platforms have emerged in recent years, through which numerous broadcasters lively stream their video content to fellow viewers. Compared to professional video producers and broadcasters, these new generation broadcasters are highly heterogeneous in terms of the network/system configurations and, therefore, the generated video quality, which calls for massive encoding and transcoding in order to unify the video sources and serve multiple quality versions to viewers with different configurations. On the other hand, with the rapid evolution in the hardware industry, high-performance processors become mainstream in personal computer market. More end devices can easily transcode high-quality videos in realtime. We witness huge computational resource among the massive fellow viewers that could potentially be used for transcoding. In this paper, we propose CrowdTranscoding, a novel framework for crowdsourced livecast systems that offloads the transcoding assignment to the massive viewers. We identify that the key challenges in CrowdTranscoding are to detect qualified stable viewers and to properly assign them to the source channels. We put forward a viewer crowdsourcing transcode scheduler to smartly schedule the workload assignment. Our solution has been evaluated under diverse viewer/channel conditions as well as different parameter settings. The trace-driven simulation confirms the superiority of CrowdTranscoder, while our PlanetLab-based and real world end-viewer experiments show the practical performance of our approach, which also give hint to the further enhancement.
Optimal Consumption and Investment under Time-Varying Liquidity Constraints

We study consumption and investment decisions given realistic time-varying constraints on borrowing. We first consider the case where borrowing is constrained by a maximum debt-to-income ratio. We then consider collateral borrowing with a maximum loan-to-value ratio. The resulting implications for optimal policies differ considerably from those obtained in the existing literature based on fixed borrowing limits but are consistent with those documented in the empirical literature.
Toward a Social Capital Theory of Cooperative Organisation

The paper is aimed at developing an approach to an economic rationalisation of cooperative organisation and argues that the latter represents a special, social capital-based, type of organisation in the sense that: 1) it is based on social capital in the same way as market and hierarchy are respectively based on price and authority relation; 2) social capital is the major resource of organisations governed on the basis of cooperative principles. The approach is applied to the following issues: the problem of social orientation of cooperatives; comparative analysis of 'capitalistic' and cooperative organisation; the meaning of cooperative principles.
A low-power parallel-to-serial conversion circuit for CMOS image sensors

A low-power parallel-to-serial conversion circuit for CMOS image sensors (CIS) aimed for high-data-rate and power-restricted applications, is introduced in this paper. Parallel data are scanned and serialized by the delay-locked loop (DLL)-based pulse generator, wired-AND circuit and a current-mode amplifier. Unlike the conventional parallel-to-serial conversion circuit in CMOS image sensors, the proposed circuit doesn't need a clock tree and therefore consumes much less power. The circuit is designed in a 0. 35μm CMOS process. The simulation results show that the power consumption of the proposed parallel-to-serial conversion circuit is reduced significantly compared to the conventional circuits especially in high-data-rate CMOS image sensor applications. The proposed circuit for 12-bit × 256-column CMOS image sensor is capable to operate at the data rate of 600 Mbps consuming 4.07 mW, which is 0.7% and 2.5% of the power consumption of the conventional shift-register scheme and the clock-gating scheme, respectively.
Microbial degradation of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) and poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) in soils

The microbial degradation of tensile test pieces made of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) [P(3HB)] or a copolymer of 90% 3-hydroxybutyric acid and 10% 3-hydroxyvaleric acid was studied in soils incubated at a constant temperature of 15, 28, or 40 degrees C for up to 200 days. In addition, hydrolytic degradation in sterile buffer at temperatures ranging from 4 to 55 degrees C was monitored for 98 days. Degradation was measured through loss of weight (surface erosion), molecular weight, and mechanical strength. While no weight loss was recorded in sterile buffer, samples incubated in soils were degraded at an erosion rate of 0.03 to 0.64% weight loss per day, depending on the polymer, the soil, and the incubation temperature. The erosion rate was enhanced by incubation at higher temperatures, and in most cases the copolymer lost weight at a higher rate than the homopolymer. The molecular weights of samples incubated at 40 degrees C in soils and those incubated at 40 degrees C in sterile buffer decreased at similar rates, while the molecular weights of samples incubated at lower temperatures remained almost unaffected, indicating that molecular weight decrease is due to simple hydrolysis and not to the action of biodegrading microorganisms. The degradation resulted in loss of mechanical properties. From the samples used in the biodegradation studies, 295 dominant microbial strains capable of degrading P (3HB) and the poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) copolymer in vitro were isolated and identified. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Multivariate Analysis: The Need for Data, and other Problems

Summary Multivariate analyses are an aid to, not a substitute for critical thinking in the area of data analysis. Meaningful results can only be produced by these methods if careful consideration is given to questions of sample size, variable type, variable distribution etc., and accusations of subjectivity in interpretation can only be overcome by replication. The computer revolution has produced many problems for statisticians, not least of which is the ease with which experimenters may access packages of programs for multivariate analysis, and so bypass a ‘difficult’ (by which is meant one who will not do simply as he is told) statistician. Of course there are many abuses of univariate statistical methods. Here, however, the abuses are not likely to lead to such seriously misleading results as in the multivariate case. Perhaps a major cause of the continuing misuse of statistical methods is the insistence of many journal editors in psychology and related areas, on articles being laced with multivariate analyses, and on encouraging the pedantic use of significance levels, i.e. the inevitable p < —, as if such inclusions lent an air of respectability to their journal which it might not otherwise have had. Research workers in these fields would be better encouraged to devote more time to an initial screening of their data using simple graphical techniques, to ensure that their data are at least approximately suitable for more complicated multivariate analyses.
Subjectifying quality of life as a medical rehabilitation outcome

In the literature of health-status assessment, it has been argued that quality of life has distinct meaning only if it is conceptualized and assessed according to a subjective perspective. This paper applies that viewpoint to the conceptual components of disablement and to assessing subjective wellbeing (i.e. subjective quality of life) as medical rehabilitation outcomes. The definition and measurement of subjective wellbeing are discussed, and its correlates for people generally are reviewed. Findings for people with disabilities are summarized, and several substantive and methodological issues are highlighted that require additional investigation.
gPhysics—Using Smart Glasses for Head-Centered, Context-Aware Learning in Physics Experiments

Smart Glasses such as Google Glass are mobile computers combining classical Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) with several sensors. Therefore, contact-free, sensor-based experiments can be linked with relating, near-eye presented multiple representations. We will present a first approach on how Smart Glasses can be used as an experimental tool for head-centered, context-aware, wearable-technology-enhanced, and inquiry-based learning in physics education. Therefore, we developed an app that is based on the Google Glass platform and designed to perform educational physical experiments on the topic of acoustics. Its initial application is intended for high-school students whose task is to study the relationship between the frequency of the sound generated by hitting a glass of water and the amount of water in the glass. The core idea is to have Google Glass automatically measure both the water fill level with the camera and the sound frequency with the microphone, and incrementally generate a fill level/frequency graph in the HMD. We designed an educational setting and studied its effect on cognitive and affective variables with an intervention-control-group design. While the intervention group analyzed the fill level/frequency relationship with the Google Glass platform, control group 1 worked on the phenomenon using the same platform implemented on a tablet PC. Control group 2 analyzed the phenomenon using a tablet PC with a typical mobile-based education platform. We used a two-way ANCOVA to study learning outcome, wondering, curiosity, cognitive load, and experimentation time as dependent variables of 46 high-school eighth-graders together with group membership and gender influence as independent variables. While the positive effects of using Google Glass as a mobile lab on wondering and curiosity as well as a positive trend for experimentation time were detected, no differences were analyzed for learning achievement. Although students have a higher cognitive load when working with Google Glass compared to other devices, the cognitive load level is very low in general.
Immunopathology of Fatal Human Variegated Squirrel Bornavirus 1 Encephalitis, Germany, 2011–2013

Variegated squirrel bornavirus 1 (VSBV-1) is a zoonotic virus that causes fatal encephalitis in humans who are infected after contact with exotic squirrels. We analyzed the brain lesions and the immune responses in all 4 known human cases that showed panencephalitis. Inflammatory infiltrates in areas positive for VSBV-1 RNA and antigen consisted of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, with perivascular B-cell accumulation. Strong microglial response and bizarre astroglial expansion were present. Areas of malacia contained neutrophils and foamy microglia and macrophages. Immunopathologic examination during infection showed cleavage of caspase 3 in brain cells adjacent to CD8+ cells and widespread p53 expression, hallmarks of apoptosis. Cerebrospinal fluid analyses over time demonstrated increasing protein concentrations and cell counts, paralleled by pathologic lactate elevations in all patients. The most severe cerebrospinal fluid and histologic changes occurred in the patient with the highest viral load, shortest duration of disease, and most medical preconditions.
Lightweight Fingerprints for Fast Approximate Keyword Matching Using Bitwise Operations

We aim to speed up approximate keyword matching by storing a lightweight, fixed-size block of data for each string, called a fingerprint. These work in a similar way to hash values; however, they can be also used for matching with errors. They store information regarding symbol occurrences using individual bits, and they can be compared against each other with a constant number of bitwise operations. In this way, certain strings can be deduced to be at least within the distance $k$ from each other (using Hamming or Levenshtein distance) without performing an explicit verification. We show experimentally that for a preprocessed collection of strings, fingerprints can provide substantial speedups for $k = 1$, namely over $2.5$ times for the Hamming distance and over $10$ times for the Levenshtein distance. Tests were conducted on synthetic and real-world English and URL data.
Regulation of the raffinose permease of Escherichia coli by the glucose-specific enzyme IIA of the phosphoenolpyruvate:sugar phosphotransferase system

In enteric bacteria, chromosomally encoded permeases specific for lactose, maltose, and melibiose are allosterically regulated by the glucose-specific enzyme IIA of the phosphotransferase system. We here demonstrate that the plasmid-encoded raffinose permease of enteric bacteria is similarly subject to this type of inhibition.
The development of a white cane which navigates the visually impaired

In this paper, we describe about a developed navigation system that supports the independent walking of the visually impaired in the indoor space. This system is composed of colored navigation lines, RFID tags and an intelligent white cane. In our system, some colored marking tapes are set on along the walking route. These lines are called navigation line. And also RFID tags are set on this line at each landmark point. The intelligent white cane can sense a color of navigation line and receive tag information. By vibration of white cane, the system informs the visually impaired that he/she is walking along the navigation line. At the landmark point, the system also notifies area information to him/her by pre-recorded voice. Ten normal subjects who were blind folded with an eye mask were tested with this system. All of them were able to walk along the navigation line. The performance of the area information system was good. Therefore, we have concluded that our system will be extremely valuable in supporting the activities of the visually impaired.
Reduced glutathione increases quercetin stimulatory effects on HDL- or apoA1-mediated cholesterol efflux from J774A.1 macrophages

Abstract In our in vitro study, we analyzed the effects of incubation of J774A.1 macrophages with reduced glutathione (GSH) and quercetin on the extent of cellular cholesterol efflux by high-density lipoprotein (HDL) or apolipoprotein A1 (apoA1). This combination was the most potent one among other exogenous and endogenous antioxidant combinations, since it significantly increased the extent of HDL-mediated cholesterol efflux from macrophages by 47% versus control cells, whereas quercetin (20 μM) or GSH (200 μM) alone increased it by only 37% or 17%, respectively. Similarly, apoA1-mediated cholesterol efflux was increased by 11% or 22% in quercetin or quercetin + GSH-treated cells, respectively, versus control cells. These stimulatory effects were noted only after 20 h of cell incubation. The combination of quercetin + GSH demonstrated high scavenging capacity of free radicals versus quercetin or GSH alone. In addition, quercetin + GSH significantly decreased macrophage oxidative stress as measured by the scavenging capacity of free radicals in the cells, the formation of reactive oxygen species, and the levels of cellular glutathione and lipid peroxides. There was no significant effect of quercetin + GSH on cellular HDL binding, on ATP-binding cassette A1 (ABCA1) activity, or on ABCG1 messenger RNA (mRNA) levels. In contrast, mRNA levels for ABCA1 and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARα) were both significantly increased by 89% and 93%, respectively, in quercetin + GSH-treated cells versus control cells. Quercetin alone increased the mRNA levels for ABCA1 or PPARα by 42% or 77%, respectively, whereas GSH alone increased it by 22% or 28%, respectively. Mass spectra analysis revealed that oxidized quercetin reacts with GSH to form a new adduct product. We thus conclude that the stimulatory effects of quercetin + GSH on apoA1- or HDL-mediated macrophage cholesterol efflux are related to the ability of GSH to preserve quercetin in its reduced form.
The Corporate Social Responsibility Movement as an Ethnographic Problem

Over the past decade, the business world has devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the concept of "corporate social responsibility. " CSR derives from the idea that the responsibility of a corporation extends beyond the traditional Anglo-American objective of providing maximal financial returns to its shareholders. Instead, CSR proponents have argued, the legitimate concerns of a corporation should include such broader objectives as sustainable growth, equitable employment practices, and long-term social and environmental well-being. CSR is now the focus of a well-defined and energetic movement that has manifested itself in a variety of ways. It is, in the anthropologist Sally Engle Merry's phrasing, a global reform movement that represents a "corner" of globalization itself. The sociologist Ronen Shamir has characterized CSR as a "field of action" shaped by the interplay between popular pressure on corporations and the latter's response to that pressure. The field is the site of a contest between "those players who associate the term "responsibility" with an ever-increasing set of moral duties" and "corporations and a host of other players who tend to associate the concept of CSR with a voluntary and altruistic spirit and insist, at best, on self-regulatory schemes". In this paper we report on an ongoing project in which we endeavor to treat the CSR movement as a "deterritorialized" ethnographic site. We are investigating the meaning of CSR to people in corporations and their various stakeholders, examining the ways in which CSR is practiced, and assessing the potential impact, within a company and beyond, of a firm's undertaking CSR initiatives. It is difficult to observe people "doing" CSR in a physical sense; there is no ready equivalent to a kula voyage. Nonetheless, through participant observation of public CSR events, interviews with many kinds of CSR protagonists, and discourse analysis of CSR texts, we are developing a picture of the complex culture of CSR.