Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Common geriatric conditions and disabilities in older persons with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Purpose of review Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases among older persons worldwide and the rapid increase in commonly associated COPD-disabilities requires urgent awareness among healthcare professionals. The presence of pulmonary and extrapulmonary comorbidities is highly prevalent among COPD patients and complicates treatment management, especially in advanced age. Some of the most common geriatric conditions in COPD patients lead to respiratory function decline, physical function impairment with limited physical performance, cognitive decline, and depression. Unfortunately, the activation of each component may lead to the progression of the other, which, if not corrected, will lead to critical clinical outcomes such as disability (as seen by the worsening of each condition) and death. Recent findings Studies in older persons with COPD have shown that disability is mainly due to the severity of comorbidities that have been shown to significantly impact treatment options and the prognosis for such individuals. In addition to spirometric functional parameters, exercise performance and efficacy of specific therapeutic interventions may be useful indicators for overall health status and outcomes. The scientific literature underlines the necessity to use additional parameters other than spirometry for COPD patient monitoring. Summary As disability is a growing phenomenon in COPD and substantially impacts patient perception of the disease, we will highlight the recent literature regarding the importance of common geriatric conditions leading to disability in older COPD patients. In particular, we will discuss the impact of the following conditions in older patients with COPD: respiratory function decline, physical function impairment, and mood disorders. Clinical use for measuring such parameters in COPD elderly will aid in identifying those at risk for severe clinical decline.
Evaluating Serum a-Tocopherol ( Vitamin E ) in Terms o f a Lipid Ratio

It is well known that accurate assessment of serum a-tocopherol requires knowl­ edge of the serum lipids also present. Patient specimens (n = 307) within the stan­ dard reference limit of 5-18 mg/L were used to determ ine the following 95 percent reference interval for a lipid ratio of a-tocopherol to the sum of cholesterol and triglycerides [E/(C + T)]: 1.4 (1.20-1.56) 5.7 (5.51-6.91) mg/g (90 percent confi­ dence interval). In terms of a-tocopherol status, patients with low results (<5 mg/L) were normal on réévaluation with the lipid ratio in 47 percent of those examined (28 of 59), and elevated results (>18 mg/L) were normal or low in 58 percent (26 of 45). Elevated triglycerides developed from non-fasting specimens were one common reason for misleading results when lipids were not considered. W hen measuring a-tocopherol in a patient population, evaluation of the lipid content is needed for accurate assessment in a significant num ber of cases.
Contributions to magnetic susceptibility of brain tissue

This review discusses the major contributors to the subtle magnetic properties of brain tissue and how they affect MRI contrast. With the increased availability of high‐field scanners, the use of magnetic susceptibility contrast for the study of human brain anatomy and function has increased dramatically. This has not only led to novel applications, but has also improved our understanding of the complex relationship between MRI contrast and magnetic susceptibility. Chief contributors to the magnetic susceptibility of brain tissue have been found to include myelin as well as iron. In the brain, iron exists in various forms with diverse biological roles, many of which are now only starting to be uncovered. An interesting aspect of magnetic susceptibility contrast is its sensitivity to the microscopic distribution of iron and myelin, which provides opportunities to extract information at spatial scales well below MRI resolution. For example, in white matter, the myelin sheath that surrounds the axons can provide tissue contrast that is dependent on the axonal orientation and reflects the relative size of intra‐ and extra‐axonal water compartments. The extraction of such ultrastructural information, together with quantitative information about iron and myelin concentrations, is an active area of research geared towards the characterization of brain structure and function, and their alteration in disease. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
No Association between TERT-CLPTM1L Single Nucleotide Polymorphism rs401681 and Mean Telomere Length or Cancer Risk

Background: A recent study reported genetic variants in the TERT-CLPTM1L locus that were associated with mean telomere length, and with risk of multiple cancers. Methods: We evaluated the association between single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs401681 (C > T) and mean telomere length, using quantitative real-time PCR, in blood-extracted DNA collected from 11,314 cancer-free participants from the Sisters in Breast Screening study, the Melanoma and Pigmented Lesions Evaluative Study melanoma family study, and the SEARCH Breast, Colorectal, Melanoma studies. We also examined the relationship between rs401618 genotype and susceptibility to breast cancer (6,800 cases and 6,608 controls), colorectal cancer (2,259 cases and 2,181 controls), and melanoma (787 cases and 999 controls). Results: The “per T allele” change in mean telomere length (ΔCt), adjusted for age, study plate, gender, and family was 0.001 [95% confidence intervals (CI), 0.01-0.02; P trend = 0.61]. The “per T allele” odds ratio for each cancer was 1.01 for breast cancer (95% CI, 0.96-1.06; P trend = 0.64), 1.02 for colorectal cancer (95% CI, 0.94-1.11; P trend = 0.66), and 0.99 for melanoma (95% CI, 0.84-1.15; P trend = 0.87). Conclusions: We found no evidence that this SNP was associated with mean telomere length, or with risk of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or melanoma. Impact: Our results indicate that the observed associations between rs401681 and several cancer types might be weaker than previously described. The lack of an association in our study between this SNP and mean telomere length suggests that any association with cancer risk at this locus is not mediated through TERT. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 19(7); 1862‐5. ©2010 AACR.
HSAS: Hindi Subjectivity Analysis System

With the development of Web 2.0, we are abundant with the documents expressing user's opinions, attitudes and sentiments in the textual form. This user generated textual content is an important source of information to make sound decisions by the organizations and the government. The textual information can be categorized into two types: facts and opinions. Subjectivity analysis is the automatic extraction of subjective information from the opinions posted by users and divides the content into subjective and objective sentences. Most of the works in subjectivity analysis exists for English language data but with the introduction of unicode standards UTF-8, Hindi language content on the web is growing very rapidly. In this paper, Hindi Subjectivity Analysis System (HSAS) is proposed. It explores two different methods of generating subjectivity lexicon using the available resources in English language and their comparative evaluation in performing the task of subjectivity analysis at the sentence level. The first method uses English language OpinionFinder subjectivity lexicon. The second method uses a small seed word list of Hindi language and expands it to generate subjectivity lexicon. Different evaluation strategies are used to validate the lexicon. We achieved 71.4% agreement with human annotators and ~80% accuracy in classification on a parallel data set in English and Hindi. Extensive simulations conducted on the test dataset confirm the validity of the suggested method.
Decomposing Asymmetric Information in China's Automobile Insurance Market

Distinguishing between adverse selection and moral hazard is a difficult but important issue in insurance economics. In the present work, we model and evaluate the distinct roles of adverse selection, ex ante moral hazard, and ex post moral hazard in China's automobile insurance market. Our econometric analysis supports the following conclusions: (1) the effect of asymmetric information on the probability of claims is significant; (2) the effect of ex ante moral hazard on the probability of claims is not significant, establishing adverse selection as the underlying source of information asymmetry; (3) the effect of asymmetric information (including ex ante moral hazard) on the severity of claims is not significant; and (4) the impact of ex post moral hazard on claim severity is significant for a subset of lower‐coverage policyholders. Consequently, it may be advisable for Chinese automobile insurance companies to allocate greater resources to both underwriting (i.e., selecting policyholders) and auditing claims.
Community Return: A Unique Opportunity

Summary: Community return is a novel and unique incentivised, structured and supervised release programme for prisoners combining unpaid work for the benefit of the community with early release and resettlement support. In its development, no equivalent or similar initiative was identified anywhere in the world and none had been reported in academic reviews or criminal justice literature. This paper describes the development and implementation of the Community Return Programme, the results of a descriptive evaluation of the first twenty-six months of Community Return, discusses key issues arising and looks to the future of the Community Return Programme.
Maximum likelihood detection on images

We consider the problem of point target detection on images and focal plane arrays (FPA). Imaging sensors are becoming ubiquitous tools in several applications, such as biomedical systems, autonomous surveillance systems, target tracking systems, and robotics. In these applications, matched filter and template matching are commonly used detection strategies, however, these approaches are unable to provide sub-pixel accuracy and avenues for adaptive pixel-width selection for computationally efficient image processing. In this paper, we derive the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of target location on images. The proposed MLE is optimal under the assumption that the FPA contains a point target that has its signal intensity spread in multiple image pixels in the form of a Gaussian point spread function (PSF) with known standard deviation. Further, we derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the estimate and present the hypothesis test for target acceptance, resulting in a novel maximum likelihood detector (MLD) for images. Simulation results are provided to validate the performance of the proposed MLE and MLD; it is shown that the MLE is efficient in very low SNR values, starting at −15 dB, and the MLD achieves probability of detection of near unity with zero false alarms starting at 0 dB.
A randomized lifestyle intervention with 5-year follow-up in subjects with impaired glucose tolerance: Pronounced short-term impact but long-term adherence problems

Aims: To compare data on cardiovascular risk factor changes in lipids, insulin, proinsulin, fibrinolysis, leptin and C-reactive protein, and on diabetes incidence, in relation to changes in lifestyle. Methods: The study was a randomized lifestyle intervention trial conducted in northern Sweden between 1995 and 2000, in 168 individuals with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and body mass index above 27 at start. The intensive intervention group (n = 83) was subjected to a 1-month residential lifestyle programme. The usual care group (n = 85) participated in a health examination ending with a single counselling session. Follow-up was conducted at 1, 3 and 5 years. Results: At 1-year follow-up, an extensive cardio-metabolic risk factor reduction was demonstrated in the intensive intervention group, along with a 70% decrease of progress to type 2 diabetes. At 5-year follow-up, most of these beneficial effects had disappeared. Reported physical activity and fibre intake as well as high-density lipoprotein cholesterol were still increased, and fasting insulin and proinsulin were lower. Conclusions: The intervention affected several important cardio-metabolic risk variables beneficially, and reduced the risk for type 2 diabetes, but the effects persisted only as long as the new lifestyle was maintained. Increased physical activity seemed to be the behaviour that was most easy to preserve.
Building on the National Curriculum Framework to Enable the Agency of Teachers

This paper reflects on the systemic constraints and processes of conventional teacher education that have disempowered the teacher and thereby contributed to the stagnation of the education field in India. It seeks to locate the agency of the schoolteacher in the process of curriculum redesign and development, taking as its frame policy perspectives, current teacher education practice and the exercise in curriculum renewal undertaken by the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005. It makes a strong case for the proactive engagement of the schoolteacher with processes of curriculum redesign as a necessary condition to ensure the success of the NCF.
Phosphorylation of Y845 on the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Mediates Binding to the Mitochondrial Protein Cytochrome c Oxidase Subunit II

ABSTRACT When co-overexpressed, the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and c-Src cooperate to cause synergistic increases in EGF-induced DNA synthesis, soft agar colony growth, and tumor formation in nude mice. This synergy is dependent upon c-Src-mediated phosphorylation of a unique tyrosine on the EGFR, namely, tyrosine 845 (Y845). Phenylalanine substitution of Y845 (Y845F) was found to inhibit EGF-induced DNA synthesis without affecting the catalytic activity of the receptor or its ability to phosphorylate Shc or activate mitogen-activated protein kinase. These results suggest that synergism may occur through alternate signaling pathways mediated by phosphorylated Y845 (pY845). One such pathway involves the transcription factor Stat5b. Here we describe another pathway that involves cytochrome c oxidase subunit II (CoxII). CoxII was identified as a specific binding partner of a pY845-containing peptide in a phage display screen. EGF-dependent binding of CoxII to the wild type but not to the mutant Y845F-EGFR was confirmed by coimmunoprecipitation experiments. This association also required the kinase activity of c-Src. Confocal microscopy, as well as biochemical fractionation, indicated that the EGFR translocates to the mitochondria after EGF stimulation, where it colocalizes with CoxII. Such translocation required the catalytic activity of the receptor but not phosphorylation of Y845. However, ectopic expression of the Y845F-EGFR prevented the EGF from protecting MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells from adriamycin-induced apoptosis, whereas two mutants of Stat5b, a dominant-interfering mutant (DNstat5b) and a tyrosine mutation at 699 (Y699F-Stat5b) did not. Taken together, these data suggest that, through the ability of EGFR to translocate to the mitochondria, the binding of proteins such as CoxII to pY845 on the EGFR may positively regulate survival pathways that contribute to oncogenesis.
A Representative Local Region Detector Based On Color-Contrast-MSER

In order to extract representative local invariant regions in textured natural images, we propose a Color-Contrast-MSER (CCM) detector with color-contrast pixel ranking, which can reduce the number of meaningless regions extracted from backgrounds. The main contributions are threefold: (1) In contrast with the original MSER[3] which adopts intensity pixel ranking, we develop a new pixel ranking mechanism based on color contrast analysis. (2) In this paper, the pixel ranking value of each pixel is defined as the color contrast between a kernel-sized window and the background. Therefore we propose an adaptive background scale selection mechanism that simulates the background color distribution as the benchmark for color contrast. (3) The experimental results demonstrate that compared with the original MSER detector[3], our Color-Contrast-MSER (CCM) detector can extract more representative local regions with competitive repeatability score at only 50% computational time and 10% memory cost.
ESIM‐OFDM‐based transceiver design of a visible light communication system

Visible light communication (VLC) system has been becoming a potential technology for short‐range data communication over wireless optical channel. In this paper, a real‐time state‐of‐the‐art VLC system prototype is implemented mainly based on enhanced subcarrier index modulation orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ESIM‐OFDM) modulation scheme. The prototype has been designed using NI cDAQ hardware equipment programmed in matlab/labview. In other words, the developed VLC transceiver labview model is loaded into cDAQ to perform real‐time transmission of text data. The design mainly comprises VLC transmitter, VLC receiver, interfacing NI cDAQ with labview, and implementation of ESIM‐OFDM. It should be noted that the direct output of ESIM‐OFDM is not suitable to drive VLC transmitter circuit; therefore, the key contribution lies in making use of sigma–delta modulator to modify ESIM‐OFDM output to produce constant current signal which in turn could drive VLC transmitter. The second main contribution of the work targets the luminous properties of the designed transmitter that have experimentally been characterized using a LUX meter. Finally, the last contribution of the work is the simulation carried out to analyze the performance of the proposed system with other existing VLC modulation schemes. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
HTS Sampler With Optical Signal Input

We are developing waveform measurement systems using a high- superconducting (HTS) sampler. As one of the methods for introducing high-frequency signals into the sampler chip, we are testing optical input systems. A uni-traveling-carrier photodiode (UTC-PD), which has potential bandwidth of over 300 GHz, is used in the systems for converting optical signals to electrical ones in front of the sampler circuit. Our preliminary experiments revealed high enough sensitivity even at temperatures as low as below 40 K for the UTC-PD that is to be cooled with the sampler chip. In the present study, we test two types of modules. One packages the UTC-PD separately from the sampler chip, and the other integrates both of them. In the former type, the optical and sampler modules are connected using V-connectors. The modules are cooled with a cryocooler to the operating temperature of the sampler circuit, which is around 40 K. Signals to be measured are input into the UTC-PD with a 1.55-mum carrier wave. We have succeeded in observing sinusoidal waveforms of up to 20 GHz using both types of modules.
A Patient-Centric Sensory System for In-Home Rehabilitation

This paper presents a patient-centric rehabilitation practice monitoring sensory system, which operates based on monitoring rotational joints' angle. At each joint, an inertial and a magnetometer sensors are simultaneously used to accurately measure a desired angle. Benefiting from a modified complementary filter to combine the results of both sensors, the root mean square errors of less than 1.6 and 1.7 degrees were calculated, respectively, for the static and dynamic evaluation tests. The outcome results show that the errors associated with both the static and dynamic evaluation are in turn ~ 22% and ~ 4.5% lower. To ensure the correctness of practices, the deviation of the measurement results (joint angle) from a known reference over time is considered as a qualification measure. Also, the obtained qualification measure is compared with the overall level of adenosine triphosphate generated in muscles, which is accounted for fatigue. The qualification measure can enable the developed system to calculate to the optimum velocity of specific movements.
Glucose Phosphorylation and Mitochondrial Binding Are Required for the Protective Effects of Hexokinases I and II

ABSTRACT Alterations in glucose metabolism have been demonstrated for diverse disorders ranging from heart disease to cancer. The first step in glucose metabolism is carried out by the hexokinase (HK) family of enzymes. HKI and II can bind to mitochondria through their N-terminal hydrophobic regions, and their overexpression in tissue culture protects against cell death. In order to determine the relative contributions of mitochondrial binding and glucose-phosphorylating activities of HKs to their overall protective effects, we expressed full-length HKI and HKII, their truncated proteins lacking the mitochondrial binding domains, and catalytically inactive proteins in tissue culture. The overexpression of full-length proteins resulted in protection against cell death, decreased levels of reactive oxygen species, and possibly inhibited mitochondrial permeability transition in response to H2O2. However, the truncated and mutant proteins exerted only partial effects. Similar results were obtained with primary neonatal rat cardiomyocytes. The HK proteins also resulted in an increase in the phosphorylation of voltage-dependent anion channel (VDAC) through a protein kinase Cε (PKCε)-dependent pathway. These results suggest that both glucose phosphorylation and mitochondrial binding contribute to the protective effects of HKI and HKII, possibly through VDAC phosphorylation by PKCε.
Predicting novel protein folds by using FRAGFOLD

The results of applying a fragment‐based protein tertiary structure prediction method to the prediction of 8 CASP4 targets are described. The method is based on the assembly of supersecondary structural fragments taken from highly resolved protein structures using a simulated annealing algorithm. Despite the significant degree of success in this case, there is clearly much more developmental work required before predictions with the accuracy of a good homology model, or even a good fold recognition model, can be made with use of this kind of approach. Proteins 2001;Suppl 5:127–132. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Effect of volume of oocyte cytoplasm on embryo development after parthenogenetic activation, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or somatic cell nuclear transfer

Summary Animal cloning methods are now well described and are becoming routine. Yet, the frequency at which live cloned offspring are produced remains below 5%, irrespective of the nuclear donor species or cell type. One possible explanation is that the reprogramming factor(s) of each oocyte is insufficient or not properly adapted for the receipt of a somatic cell nucleus, because it is naturally prepared only for the receipt of a gamete. Here, we have increased the oocyte volume by oocyte fusion and examined its subsequent development. We constructed oocytes with volumes two to nine times greater than the normal volume by the electrofusion or mechanical fusion of intact and enucleated oocytes. We examined their in vitro and in vivo developmental potential after parthenogenetic activation, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). When the fused oocytes were activated parthenogenetically, most developed to morulae or blastocysts, regardless of their original size. Diploid fused oocytes were fertilized by ICSI and developed normally and after embryo transfer, we obtained 12 (4–15%) healthy and fertile offspring. However, enucleated fused oocytes could not support the development of mice cloned by SCNT. These results suggest that double fused oocytes have normal potential for development after fertilization, but oocytes with extra cytoplasm do not have enhanced reprogramming potential.