Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Respiratory Motor Recovery after Unilateral Spinal Cord Injury: Eliminating Crossed Phrenic Activity Decreases Tidal Volume and Increases Contralateral Respiratory Motor Output

By 2 months after unilateral cervical spinal cord injury (SCI), respiratory motor output resumes in the previously quiescent phrenic nerve. This activity is derived from bulbospinal pathways that cross the spinal midline caudal to the lesion (crossed phrenic pathways). To determine whether crossed phrenic pathways contribute to tidal volume in spinally injured rats, spontaneous breathing was measured in anesthetized C2 hemisected rats at 2 months after injury with an intact ipsilateral phrenic nerve, or with ipsilateral phrenicotomy performed at the time of the SCI (i.e., crossed phrenic pathways rendered ineffective) (dual injury). Ipsilateral phrenicotomy did not alter the rapid shallow eupneic breathing pattern in C2 injured rats. However, the ability to generate large inspiratory volumes after either vagotomy or during augmented breaths was impaired if crossed phrenic activity was abolished. We also investigated whether compensatory plasticity in contralateral motoneurons would be affected by eliminating crossed phrenic activity. Thus, contralateral phrenic motor output was recorded in anesthetized, vagotomized, and mechanically ventilated rats with dual injury during chemoreceptor stimulation. Hypercapnia, hypoxia, and asphyxia increased contralateral phrenic burst amplitude in the dual injury group more than in rats with SCI alone. Dual injury rats also had elevated baseline burst frequency. Together, these results demonstrate a functional role of crossed phrenic activity after SCI. Moreover, by preventing ipsilateral phrenic motor recovery in rats with unilateral SCI, segmental and supraspinal changes could be induced in contralateral respiratory motor output beyond that seen with SCI alone.
Creditworthiness and Contagion How Investors’ Shortcuts Affect Sovereign Debt Markets

How sovereign is a country’s sovereign credit risk? Existing research tends to examine market constraints faced by national governments in relative isolation from the relationships between global capital and other sovereign governments. Where such commonalities are observed, they are typically understood to be grounded in shared exposure to global shocks, such as tightening liquidity or short-term contagion from crisis. We challenge this perspective: we argue that the price at which governments borrow internationally is shaped in the long term by investors’ assessments of other countries with which a government is categorized. Explaining government access to capital markets thus requires that we understand how market actors categorize governments. For it is through such categories that interdependence in sovereign credit risk across nations may be explained. We test this claim through cross-national analysis of sovereign credit risk, measured in secondary market spreads for external sovereign debt and in the price of credit default swaps. We find that risk is shaped by the average credit risk for “peer” nations, where peers are defined by distinct investment categories including region, risk rating, and varying levels of development. An error correction model reveals significant long-term interdependencies in sovereign risk assessments in each category, net of global and domestic predictors of sovereign risk. In addition, short-term (monthly) changes in sovereign credit risk among peer countries bring about shifts in a government’s sovereign risk, the effects of which persist throughout the subsequent year. Paper presented at the 2012 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA, August 30-September 2. Acknowledgement: We thank Raphael da Cunha, Anna Li and Alexandra Mayorga for research assistance and Marcus Kurtz for advice on the empirical model. All errors remain our own.
Introducing Gravitational Force into Affinity Propagation Clustering

Clustering has long been an important data processing task in different applications. Typically, it attempts to partition the available data into groups according to their underlying distributions, and each cluster is represented by a center or an exemplar. In this paper, a new clustering algorithm called gravitational-force-based affinity propagation clustering (GFAPC) is proposed, based on the well-known Newton's law of universal gravitation. It views the available data points as nodes of a network (or planets of a universe) and the clusters and their corresponding exemplars can be obtained by transmitting affinity messages based on the gravitational forces between data points in a network. While GFAPC is inspired by the recently proposed affinity propagation clustering (APC) approach, it provides a new definition of the similarity between data points which makes the APC process more convincing and at the same time facilitates the differentiation of data points' importance. The experimental results show that the GFAPC algorithm, with comparable clustering accuracy, is even more efficient than the original APC approach.
Telehomecare for patients with multiple chronic illnesses: Pilot study.

OBJECTIVE To examine the feasibility and efficacy of integrating home health monitoring into a primary care setting. DESIGN A mixed method was used for this pilot study. It included in-depth interviews, focus groups, and surveys. SETTING A semirural family health network in eastern Ontario comprising 8 physicians and 5 nurses caring for approximately 10 000 patients. PARTICIPANTS Purposeful sample of 22 patients chosen from the experimental group of 120 patients 50 years old or older in a larger randomized controlled trial (N = 240). These patients had chronic illnesses and were identified as being at risk based on objective criteria and physician assessment. INTERVENTIONS Between November 2004 and March 2006, 3 nurse practitioners and a pharmacist installed telehomecare units with 1 or more peripheral devices (eg, blood-pressure monitor, weight scale, glucometer) in patients' homes. The nurse practitioners incorporated individualized instructions for using the unit into each patient's care plan. Patients used the units every morning for collecting data, entering values into the system either manually or directly through supplied peripherals. The information was transferred to a secure server and was then uploaded to a secure Web-based application that allowed care providers to access and review it from any location with Internet access. The devices were monitored in the office on weekdays by the nurse practitioners. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Acceptance and use of the units, patients' and care providers' satisfaction with the system, and patients' demographic and health characteristics. RESULTS All 22 patients, 12 men and 10 women with an average age of 73 years (range 60 to 88 years), agreed to participate. Most were retired, and a few were receiving community services. Common diagnoses included hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. All patients had blood pressure monitors installed, 11 had wired weight scales,5 had glucometers, and 5 had pulse oximeters. The units were in place for 9 to 339 days. Three patients asked to have the systems removed early because they did not use them or found them inconvenient. The other patients and their informal caregivers found the technology user-friendly and useful. Health care providers were satisfied with the technology and found the equipment useful. They thought it might reduce the number of office visits patients made and help track long-term trends. CONCLUSION These pilot results demonstrate that telehomecare monitoring in a collaborative care community family practice is feasible and well used, and might improve access to and quality of care.
Stress mRNA metabolism in canavanine-treated chicken embryo cells

Four major chicken stress mRNAs with apparent molecular weights of 1.2 X 10(6), 0.88 X 10(6), 0.59 X 10(6), and 0.25 X 10(6) to 0.28 X 10(6) were separated on acidic agarose-urea gels. Using cell-free translation, the coding assignments of these mRNAs were determined to be stress proteins with apparent molecular weights of 88,000, 71,000, 35,000, and 23,000. Despite high levels of translational activity in vivo and in vitro, no newly synthesized mRNA for the 23-kilodalton stress protein was detected on gels under conditions which readily allowed detection of other stress mRNAs, suggesting activation of a stored or incompletely processed mRNA. Cloned Drosophila heat shock genes were used to identify and measure changes in cellular levels of the two largest stress mRNAs. Synthesis of these mRNAs increased rapidly during the first hour of canavanine treatment and continued at a high rate for at least 7 h, with the mRNAs attaining new steady-state levels by ca. 3 h. Both of these inducible stress mRNAs had very short half-lives compared with other animal cell mRNAs. Using an approach-to-steady-state analysis, the half-lives were calculated to be 89 min for the mRNA encoding the 88-kilodalton stress protein and 46 min for the mRNA encoding the 71-kilodalton stress protein. Chicken 18S and 28S rRNA synthesis was inhibited, and actin mRNA levels measured with cloned cDNA encoding chicken beta-actin slowly declined in canavanine-treated cells.
Coarse “split and lump” bilingual language models for richer source information in SMT

Recently, there has been interest in automatically generated word classes for improving statistical machine translation (SMT) quality: e.g, (Wuebker et al, 2013). We create new models by replacing words with word classes in features applied during decoding; we call these “coarse models”. We find that coarse versions of the bilingual language models (biLMs) of (Niehues et al, 2011) yield larger BLEU gains than the original biLMs. BiLMs provide phrase-based systems with rich contextual information from the source sentence; because they have a large number of types, they suffer from data sparsity. Niehues et al (2011) mitigated this problem by replacing source or target words with parts of speech (POSs). We vary their approach in two ways: by clustering words on the source or target side over a range of granularities (word clustering), and by clustering the bilingual units that make up biLMs (bitoken clustering). We find that loglinear combinations of the resulting coarse biLMs with each other and with coarse LMs (LMs based on word classes) yield even higher scores than single coarse models. When we add an appealing “generic” coarse configuration chosen on English > French devtest data to four language pairs (keeping the structure fixed, but providing language-pair-specific models for each pair), BLEU gains on blind test data against strong baselines averaged over 5 runs are +0.80 for English > French, +0.35 for French > English, +1.0 for Arabic > English, and +0.6 for Chinese > English.
LDL cholesterol as a predictor of mortality, and beyond: to fast or not to fast, that is the question?

The 'necessity' of a fasting lipid panel for assessment of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk has been assumed now for decades. The rationale for this position has been the estimation of levels of low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), a major risk factor for ASCVD, by correcting for non-fasting changes in plasma triglycerides using the so-called Friedewald equation developed during the 1960s at the then National Heart Institute1. Because LDL-C determination by ultracentrifugation is time consuming and expensive and direct LDL-C measurements have proven no more accurate than the Friedewald equation, the calculation of LDL-C has remained more than adequate, and was recently endorsed by the 2013 ACC/AHA Risk Assessment Work Group2 and utilized in the 2013 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Treatment of Blood Cholesterol to Reduce Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Adults3. The equation estimates LDL-C after measuring total cholesterol, high density cholesterol (HDL-C) and triglycerides (TG), and then subtracting from the total cholesterol concentration the HDL-C plus very low density lipoprotein cholesterol (VLDL-C) which is estimated by TG/5. This formula is not used when plasma TG >400 mg/dL because in this metabolic setting VLDL particles contain relatively less cholesterol and VLDL-C contribution is therefore overestimated and the calculated LDL-C is falsely low.
MPPT techniques for PV Systems: Energetic and cost comparison

In the future solar energy will be very important energy source. More than 45% of necessary energy in the world will be generated by photovoltaic array. Therefore it is necessary to concentrate our forces in order to reduce the application costs and to increment their performances. In order to reach this last aspect, it is important to note that the output characteristic of a photovoltaic array is nonlinear and changes with solar irradiation and the cellpsilas temperature. Therefore a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique is needed to draw peak power from the solar array in order to maximize the produced energy. This paper presents a comparative study of ten widely-adopted MPPT algorithms; their performance is evaluated using the simulation tool Simulinkreg. In particular, this study compares the behaviors of each technique in presence of solar irradiation variations.
Endoscopic, transmural drainage and necrosectomy for walled-off pancreatic and peripancreatic necrosis is associated with low mortality – a single-center experience

Abstract Objective. Endoscopic transmural drainage and necrosectomy (ETDN) is a promising alternative to percutaneous drainage and surgical intervention in the treatment of walled-off pancreatic and peripancreatic necroses (WONs). We assessed the outcome and safety profile of ETDN in a single-center patient cohort. Materials and methods. In November 2005, ETDN for WON was introduced in our tertiary referral center. During a 6-year period (Nov 2005–Nov 2011), we retrospectively collected data on all patients who underwent ETDN. Results. Eighty-one patients were treated with ETDN (median age 54, 52 men). Gallstones were the predominant etiology of pancreatitis (41%), followed by alcohol (33%). Median time from debut of symptoms to first endoscopic treatment was 44 (9–246) days. Culture-proven infected necrosis was found in 71% of the cases. Twenty-three patients (28%) required admission in intensive care unit. The technical and clinical success rates were 99% and 89%, respectively. Procedure-related complications occurred in 10 (12%) patients, of which 1 was procedure-related death. In-hospital mortality was 11%. Conclusion. ETDN in patients with necrotizing pancreatitis and infected necrosis performed in a single, high-volume center has an acceptable safety profile and is associated with a low mortality.
Pivotal roles of α‐melanocyte‐stimulating hormone and the melanocortin 4 receptor in leptin stimulation of prolactin secretion in rats

Leptin, the obese gene product, was reported to stimulate prolactin (PRL) secretion, but the neuroendocrine mechanism underlying this hormonal response is largely unknown. Thus, in this study we examined the involvement of several important PRL regulators in the leptin‐induced PRL secretion in male rats. Compared with the values in normally fed rats, food deprivation for 3 days significantly decreased both PRL and leptin levels in the plasma. These changes were reverted to normal by a 3‐day constant infusion of 75 μg/kg/day of leptin to the fasted rats, while 225 μg/kg/day of leptin further elevated both PRL and leptin levels. These four groups of animals were used for the following experiments. Results of dopamine and serotonin turnover studies in the brain and the pituitary indicated that neither of these biogenic amines plays a primary role in mediating leptin's effects on PRL. Repeated intracerebroventricular injections over 72 h of neutralizing antibodies against vasoactive intestinal peptide, PRL‐releasing peptide, or β‐endorphin, did not significantly suppress the leptin actions. However, both the blockade of the melanocortin (MC) 4 receptor (R) and the immunoquenching of brain α‐melanocyte‐stimulating hormone (α‐MSH) completely abolished the leptin‐induced PRL release, and the stimulation of the MC4‐R, but not the MC3‐R, significantly elevated PRL levels in the fasted rats. These results suggest that α‐MSH, a cleaved peptide from pro‐opiomelanocortin of which synthesis is stimulated by leptin, may be the pivotal neuropeptide in the brain mediating the leptin's stimulatory influence on PRL secretion. It was also suggested that the MC4‐R may be the primary subtype of the MC‐Rs mediating this action of α‐MSH.
Hepatic Fgf21 Expression Is Repressed after Simvastatin Treatment in Mice

Fibroblast growth factor 21 (Fgf21) is a hormone with emerging beneficial roles in glucose and lipid homeostasis. The interest in Fgf21 as a potential antidiabetic drug and the factors that regulate its production and secretion is growing. Statins are the most widely prescribed drug for the treatment of dyslipidemia. However, the function of statins is not limited to the lowering of cholesterol as they are associated with pleiotropic actions such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and cytoprotective effects. The recently described effect of statins on mitochondrial function and the induction of Fgf21 by mitochondrial stress prompted us to investigate the effect of statin treatment on Fgf21 expression in the liver. To this end, C57BL6J male mice and primary mouse hepatocytes were treated with simvastatin, and Fgf21 expression was subsequently assessed by immunoblotting and quantitative real-time PCR. Hepatic Fgf21 protein and mRNA and circulating levels of FGF21significantly decreased in mice that had received simvastatin in their food (0.1% w/w) for 1 week. This effect was also observed with simvastatin doses as low as 0.01% w/w for 1 week or following 2 intraperitoneal injections within a single day. The reduction in Fgf21 mRNA levels was further verified in primary mouse hepatocytes, indicating that the effect of simvastatin is cell autonomous. In conclusion, simvastatin treatment reduced the circulating and hepatic Fgf21 levels and this effect warrants further investigation with reference to its role in metabolism.
Self-Image and Physical Education-A Phenomenological Study

In this study our aim was to investigate (a) how the awareness of one’s self-image reveals itself as a phenomenon, and (b) if self-image is influenced by physical education in a social context with teachers and pupils. Six pupils, aged 15 and 16 years, attending compulsory school were interviewed with the use of an empirical phenomenological psychological method. The Empirical Phenomenological Psychological (EPP) analysis of the interviews resulted in two main themes in terms of self-concepts: self-image as self-contemplation and the factors of influence upon a pupil’s self-image in physical education each with three subthemes. We end with a discussion about the different aspects on the noetic and the noematic perspectives on self-image and selfcontemplation. Key Words: Phenomenology, Physical Education, SelfImage, Self-Contemplation, Verbal, and Non-Verbal Communication Background
Unique mutation portraits and frequent COL2A1 gene alteration in chondrosarcoma

Chondrosarcoma is the second most frequent malignant bone tumor. However, the etiological background of chondrosarcomagenesis remains largely unknown, along with details on molecular alterations and potential therapeutic targets. Massively parallel paired-end sequencing of whole genomes of 10 primary chondrosarcomas revealed that the process of accumulation of somatic mutations is homogeneous irrespective of the pathological subtype or the presence of IDH1 mutations, is unique among a range of cancer types, and shares significant commonalities with that of prostate cancer. Clusters of structural alterations localized within a single chromosome were observed in four cases. Combined with targeted resequencing of additional cartilaginous tumor cohorts, we identified somatic alterations of the COL2A1 gene, which encodes an essential extracellular matrix protein in chondroskeletal development, in 19.3% of chondrosarcoma and 31.7% of enchondroma cases. Epigenetic regulators (IDH1 and YEATS2) and an activin/BMP signal component (ACVR2A) were recurrently altered. Furthermore, a novel FN1-ACVR2A fusion transcript was observed in both chondrosarcoma and osteochondromatosis cases. With the characteristic accumulative process of somatic changes as a background, molecular defects in chondrogenesis and aberrant epigenetic control are primarily causative of both benign and malignant cartilaginous tumors.
Impact of surface preparation prior to Al2O3 deposition for i-PERC cells

The trend of the photovoltaic industry consisting in decreasing the wafer thickness leads to the strengthening of the requirements related to surface passivation. AlOx is known to be a promising candidate to fulfill these requirements by combining chemical and field effect passivation. However, Al2O3 is not implemented in production yet since its integration still faces some issues (aging, thermal stability blisters.). This work focuses on the impact of the surface preparation prior to the AlOx deposition. We show that HNO3-based cleans are the most suitable for AlOx passivation for a further integration in an industrial solar cell process flow.
Spatio-temporally regularized common spatial patterns (STR-CSP) for single-trial EEG classification

Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) is among the most popular spatial filtering methods used in motor imagery based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). In this paper, a novel algorithm termed spatio-temporally regularized common spatial patterns (STR-CSP) is proposed to enhance CSP such that discriminative spatio-temporal EEG patterns can be extracted. Unlike most previous CSP-based spatio-temporal filtering algorithms in which spatial and temporal filters are optimized in a sequential manner, STR-CSP optimizes spatio-temporal filters simultaneously under a unified criterion with analytical solutions. Moreover, the algorithm enables us to alleviate the over-fitting problem by L2-norm regularization. Successful application to the analysis of a BCI competition EEG data set comprising 18 subsets demonstrates the superiority of STR-CSP over contemporary methods.