Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of quantitative electromyography (EMG) in horses suspected of acute and chronic grass sickness.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING THE STUDY Clinical evidence of motor neuron involvement in equine grass sickness (EGS) has not been reported. HYPOTHESIS Quantitative electromyography (EMG) analysis can elucidate subtle changes of the lower motor neuron system present in horses with EGS, performed ante mortem. METHODS Fourteen horses diagnosed clinically with acute, subacute or chronic EGS were examined and quantitative EMG performed. Previously published data on healthy horses and horses with proven lower motor neuron disease (LMND) were used as controls. In 8 horses post mortem examination was performed, and in 7 muscle biopsies of the lateral vastus muscle underwent histopathology and morphometry. RESULTS Clinical electrophysiological evidence of neuropathy was present in 12 horses. Analysis of data from the first 4 horses resulted in 95% confidence intervals (CI) of nontransformed data for motor unit action potential (MUP) duration in subclavian, triceps and lateral vastus muscle of 11.0-13.7, 14.8-20.3 and 12.2-17.2 msecs, respectively, and for MUP amplitude 291-453, 1026-1892 and 957-1736 microV, respectively. For number of phases the 95% CI was 3.6-4.4, 2.9-3.6 and 2.9-3.4, respectively, and for number of turns 5.0-6.5, 4.3-5.3 and 3.7-4.6, respectively. No changes in duration of insertional activity were measured. Pathological spontaneous activity was observed in all horses. EGS as evidenced by degenerative changes in the autonomic ganglia in combination with minor degenerative changes of the spinal lower motor neurons was observed on post mortem examination in all 8 available autopsies. In muscle biopsies of 4 out of 7 horses changes consistent with slight neurogenic atrophy were found. CONCLUSIONS AND POTENTIAL RELEVANCE EMG results demonstrated the presence of a neuropathy of skeletal muscles in all horses suspected to have EGS. The combination of clinical and electrophysiological evidence may aid differential diagnosis of neurogenic disease in cases of weight loss and colic.
Subtle Expressivity by Relational Agents

Relational agents are computational artifacts designed to build long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. In this paper we argue that subtle expressivity is especially crucial in human-computer interactions with relational agents in which social tasks such as relationship building or negotiation are being performed. We discuss these issues in the context of a relational agent designed to interact repeatedly with users during a one-month exercise adoption program. 1. RELATIONAL AGENTS Over the last three years we have begun investigating the development and use of Relational Agents; computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users (Bickmore, 2003). These can be purely software humanoid animated agents, but they can also be non-humanoid or embodied in various physical forms, from robots, to pets, to jewelry, clothing, hand-held, and other interactive devices. Central to the notion of relationship is that it is a persistent construct, spanning multiple interactions, thus Relational Agents are explicitly designed to remember past history and manage future expectations in their interactions with users. Finally, relationships are fundamentally social and emotional, and detailed knowledge of human social psychology-with a particular emphasis on the role of affect-must be incorporated into these agents if they are to effectively leverage the mechanisms of human social cognition in order to build relationships in the most natural manner possible. Human relationships are primarily established in the context of face-to-face conversation. In addition to primacy of this interactional modality, face-to-face conversation affords many channels of subtle expressivity that are especially crucial in relational conversation. Thus, we have focused on developing relational agents that have anthropomorphic forms, implemented as embodied conversational agents (Cassell, Sullivan, Prevost, & Churchill, 2000)or sociable robots (Breazeal, 2002). The social and subtly expressive communicative cues used by these agents are gleaned from studies of human-human face-to-face conversation. 2. SUBTLE EXPRESSIVITY IN HUMAN RELATIONAL INTERACTIONS Several studies have demonstrated what most business people already know: when the social aspects of an interaction are especially important-such as when you are getting to know a new client or negotiating an important deal-nothing beats face-to-face interaction. In a review of studies comparing video and audio-mediated communication, Whittaker and O'Conaill concluded that video was superior to audio only for social tasks while there was little difference in subjective ratings or task outcomes in tasks in which the social aspects were less important (Whittaker & O'Conaill, 1997). They found that for social tasks, interactions were …
A novel gait recognition analysis system based on body sensor networks for patients with parkinson's disease

Gait analysis of human plays a significant role in maintaining the well-being of our mobility and healthcare, and it can be used for various e-healthcare systems for fast medical prognosis and diagnosis. In this paper we have developed a novel body sensor network based recognition system to identify the specific gait pattern of Parkinson's disease (PD). Firstly, a BSN with 16 nodes is used to acquire the gait information from the PD patients. Then, an algorithm is developed based on local linear embedding (LLE) to extract and recognize the gait features. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme has a recognition rate of about 95.57% for gait patterns of PD, which is higher than the conventional PCA feature extraction method. The proposed system can identify PD patients from normal people and by their gait map with high reliability and appears a promising aid in the diagnosis of the Parkinson's disease.
In Defense of Using Quantitative Approaches to Research Networked Management Learning

In their article in this issue of Management Learning , Hodgson and Watland (2004) analyze the state of research in networked management learning. This is a particular type of technology-mediated learning (TML) environment where managers (or management students) use information and communication technologies (ICT) to connect to other students, instructors or mentors as well as information resources. Computer-mediated communication, interaction and collaboration are the hallmarks of networked learning as an educational approach. Thus it falls within the social constructionist view
WarningBird: A Near Real-Time Detection System for Suspicious URLs in Twitter Stream

Twitter is prone to malicious tweets containing URLs for spam, phishing, and malware distribution. Conventional Twitter spam detection schemes utilize account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. These detection schemes are ineffective against feature fabrications or consume much time and resources. Conventional suspicious URL detection schemes utilize several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTML content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion exist. In this paper, we propose WarningBird, a suspicious URL detection system for Twitter. Our system investigates correlations of URL redirect chains extracted from several tweets. Because attackers have limited resources and usually reuse them, their URL redirect chains frequently share the same URLs. We develop methods to discover correlated URL redirect chains using the frequently shared URLs and to determine their suspiciousness. We collect numerous tweets from the Twitter public timeline and build a statistical classifier using them. Evaluation results show that our classifier accurately and efficiently detects suspicious URLs. We also present WarningBird as a near real-time system for classifying suspicious URLs in the Twitter stream.
Southern Elephant Seals Replenish Their Lipid Reserves at Different Rates According to Foraging Habitat

Assessing energy gain and expenditure in free ranging marine predators is difficult. However, such measurements are critical if we are to understand how variation in foraging efficiency, and in turn individual body condition, is impacted by environmentally driven changes in prey abundance and/or accessibility. To investigate the influence of oceanographic habitat type on foraging efficiency, ten post-breeding female southern elephant seals Mirounga leonina (SES) were equipped and tracked with bio-loggers to give continuous information of prey catch attempts, body density and body activity. Variations in these indices of foraging efficiency were then compared between three different oceanographic habitats, delineated by the main frontal structures of the Southern Ocean. Results show that changes in body density are related not only to the number of previous prey catch attempts and to the body activity (at a 6 day lag), but also foraging habitat type. For example, despite a lower daily prey catch attempt rate, SESs foraging north of the sub-Antarctic front improve their body density at a higher rate than individuals foraging south of the sub-Antarctic and polar fronts, suggesting that they may forage on easier to catch and/or more energetically rich prey in this area. Our study highlights a need to understand the influence of habitat type on top predator foraging behaviour and efficiency when attempting a better comprehension of marine ecosystems.
Characterization of mutations induced by 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine in the colon of gpt delta transgenic mouse: novel G:C deletions beside runs of identical bases.

Mutations induced by one of the typical dietary mutagens/carcinogens, 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP), were characterized using gpt delta transgenic mice. This transgenic mouse model has two selection methods to efficiently detect different types of mutations, i.e. 6-thioguanine selection for point mutations and Spi(-) selection for deletions. The mice were fed with a diet containing 400 p.p.m. PhIP for 13 weeks and gpt and Spi(-) mutations were analyzed from the colon, where the highest mutant frequencies were detected. Concerning the types of gpt mutations from PhIP-treated mice, 81% were single base pair substitutions and G:C-->T:A transversions predominated; single base pair deletions at G:C base pairs were also observed. In untreated mice G:C-->A:T transitions predominated and >80% of these events involved 5'-CpG-3' sites. Concerning Spi(-) mutants from PhIP-treated mice, 76% were G:C base pair deletions and more than half of these events occurred in monotonic G or C run sequences. Interestingly, a novel type of frameshift motif, i.e. G:C base pair deletions beside run sequences, was observed. The most frequently observed mutation in this class was the 5'-TTTTTTG-3'-->5'-TTTTTT-3' event. These results suggest that PhIP induces point mutations, such as base substitutions and single base pair deletions, rather than larger deletions in vivo and that run sequences may play an important role in PhIP-induced G:C base pair deletions.
Soft biometric recognition from comparative crowdsourced annotations

Soft biometrics provide cues that enable human identification from low quality video surveillance footage. This paper discusses a new crowdsourced dataset, collecting comparative soft biometric annotations from a rich set of human annotators. We now include gender as a comparative trait, and find comparative labels are more objective and obtain more accurate measurements than previous categorical labels. Using our pragmatic dataset, we perform semantic recognition by inferring relative biometric signatures. This demonstrates a practical scenario, reproducing responses from a video surveillance operator searching for an individual. The experiment is guaranteed to return the correct match in the the top 7% of results with 10 comparisons, or top 13% of results using just 5 sets of subject comparisons.
Making space for reconciliation in the planning system

Indigenous rights complicate state-led planning with potentially important transformative effects. While rights may grant a particular kind of access to planning venues to create opportunities for challenging prevailing policy views about reconciliation, these opportunities may also be vulnerable to planning system changes. Drawing upon the case of Haida Gwaii, this paper tells a story about a dispute over territorial rights that have been squeezed out of institutional venues for over a century. In seeking to have this dispute heard, the Haida Nation have sought out blockades and the courts, achieving a collaborative planning arrangement with the Province of British Columbia in 2009. These events are set in contrast to a more recent environmental assessment that was initiated by the Government of Canada to consider the controversial Northern Gateway (tar sands) pipeline and tanker project. It is argued that a series of environmental planning reforms tied to this project review are likely to impinge upon the very strategies used by the Haida Nation to achieve collaboration.
Prophecy: Using History for High-Throughput Fault Tolerance

Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) replication has enjoyed a series of performance improvements, but remains costly due to its replicated work. We eliminate this cost for read-mostly workloads through Prophecy, a system that interposes itself between clients and any replicated service. At Prophecy's core is a trusted sketcher component, designed to extend the semi-trusted load balancer that mediates access to an Internet service. The sketcher performs fast, load-balanced reads when results are historically consistent, and slow, replicated reads otherwise. Despite its simplicity, Prophecy provides a new form of consistency called delay-once consistency. Along the way, we derive a distributed variant of Prophecy that achieves the same consistency but without any trusted components. A prototype implementation demonstrates Prophecy's high throughput compared to BFT systems. We also describe and evaluate Prophecy's ability to scale-out to support large replica groups or multiple replica groups. As Prophecy is most effective when state updates are rare, we finally present a measurement study of popular websites that demonstrates a large proportion of static data.
Cardiac-targeted delivery of regulatory RNA molecules and genes for the treatment of heart failure

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) in its many facets of structure and function is becoming more fully understood, and, therefore, it is possible to design and use RNAs as valuable tools in molecular biology and medicine. Understanding of the role of RNAs within the cell has changed dramatically during the past few years. Therapeutic strategies based on non-coding regulatory RNAs include RNA interference (RNAi) for the silencing of specific genes, and microRNA (miRNA) modulations to alter complex gene expression patterns. Recent progress has allowed the targeting of therapeutic RNAi to the heart for the treatment of heart failure, and we discuss current strategies in this field. Owing to the peculiar biochemical properties of small RNA molecules, the actual therapeutic translation of findings in vitro or in cell cultures is more demanding than with small molecule drugs or proteins. The critical requirement for animal studies after pre-testing of RNAi tools in vitro likewise applies for miRNA modulations, which also have complex consequences for the recipient that are dependent on stability and distribution of the RNA tools. Problems in the field that are not yet fully solved are the prediction of targets and specificity of the RNA tools as well as their tissue-specific and regulatable expression. We discuss analogies and differences between regulatory RNA therapy and classical gene therapy, since recent breakthroughs in vector technology are of importance for both. Recent years have witnessed parallel progress in the fields of gene-based and regulatory RNA-based therapies that are likely to significantly expand the cardiovascular therapeutic repertoire within the next decade.
Throughput of Large One-hop Wireless Networks with General Fading

Consider $n$ source-destination pairs randomly located in a shared wireless medium, resulting in interference between different transmissions. All wireless links are modeled by independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables, indicating that the dominant channel effect is the random fading phenomenon. We characterize the throughput of one-hop communication in such network. First, we present a closed-form expression for throughput scaling of a heuristic strategy, for a completely general channel power distribution. This heuristic strategy is based on activating the source-destination pairs with the best direct links, and forcing the others to be silent. Then, we present the results for several common examples, namely, Gamma (Nakagami-$m$ fading), Weibull, Pareto, and Log-normal channel power distributions. Finally -- by proposing an upper bound on throughput of all possible strategies for super-exponential distributions -- we prove that the aforementioned heuristic method is order-optimal for Nakagami-$m$ fading.
Decreased incidence of low output syndrome with a switch from tepid to cold continuous minimally diluted blood cardioplegia in isolated coronary artery bypass grafting.

OBJECTIVES The optimal temperature for blood cardioplegia remains unclear. METHODS A retrospective analysis was performed on 138 patients undergoing isolated myocardial revascularization by a single surgeon in our institution over a period of 2 years. Patients operated on early in the study period received tepid (29°C) continuous minimally diluted blood cardioplegia (minicardioplegia), delivered in an antegrade continuous fashion. Later, our surgeon began using cold (7°C) blood minicardioplegia in all patients. Data pertaining to clinical outcomes and postoperative biochemical data were obtained, and the two groups were compared. RESULTS Low cardiac output syndrome, defined as the need for intra-aortic balloon pump counter pulsation or inotropic medication for haemodynamic instability, was more frequent in the tepid cardioplegia group than in the cold cardioplegia group (16.0 vs 2.4%, P = 0.006). There was no difference in the maximal serum creatine kinase MB between the two groups (cold 25.4 ± 3.21 μg/ml vs tepid 36.5 ± 7.10 μg/ml, P = 0.62), in the rates of perioperative myocardial infarction (cold 1.2% vs tepid 6.0%, P = 0.15) and the need for postoperative insertion of an intra-aortic balloon pump (cold 4.8% vs tepid 0.0%, P = 0.3). There was no other statistically significant difference between the two groups in the measured parameters. CONCLUSIONS A higher rate of low cardiac output syndrome in the tepid cardioplegia group suggests inferior myocardial protection with the tepid cardioplegia. Cold cardioplegia may provide better protection than tepid cardioplegia when minicardioplegia is used.
Physiology, biochemistry, and specific inhibitors of CH4, NH4+, and CO oxidation by methanotrophs and nitrifiers

Ammonia oxidizers (family Nitrobacteraceae) and methanotrophs (family Methylococcaceae) oxidize CO and CH4 to CO2 and NH4+ to NO2-. However, the relative contributions of the two groups of organisms to the metabolism of CO, CH4, and NH4+ in various environments are not known. In the ammonia oxidizers, ammonia monooxygenase, the enzyme responsible for the conversion of NH4+ to NH2OH, also catalyzes the oxidation of CH4 to CH3OH. Ammonia monooxygenase also mediates the transformation of CH3OH to CO2 and cell carbon, but the pathway by which this is done is not known. At least one species of ammonia oxidizer, Nitrosococcus oceanus, exhibits a Km for CH4 oxidation similar to that of methanotrophs. However, the highest rate of CH4 oxidation recorded in an ammonia oxidizer is still five times lower than rates in methanotrophs, and ammonia oxidizers are apparently unable to grow on CH4. Methanotrophs oxidize NH4+ to NH2OH via methane monooxygenase and NH4+ to NH2OH via methane monooxygenase and NH2OH to NO2- via an NH2OH oxidase which may resemble the enzyme found in ammonia oxidizers. Maximum rates of NH4+ oxidation are considerably lower than in ammonia oxidizers, and the affinity for NH4+ is generally lower than in ammonia oxidizers. NH4+ does not apparently support growth in methanotrophs. Both ammonia monooxygenase and methane monooxygenase oxidize CO to CO2, but CO cannot support growth in either ammonia oxidizers or methanotrophs. These organisms have affinities for CO which are comparable to those for their growth substrates and often higher than those in carboxydobacteria. The methane monooxygenases of methanotrophs exist in two forms: a soluble form and a particulate form. The soluble form is well characterized and appears unrelated to the particulate. Ammonia monooxygenase and the particulate methane monooxygenase share a number of similarities. Both enzymes contain copper and are membrane bound. They oxidize a variety of inorganic and organic compounds, and their inhibitor profiles are similar. Inhibitors thought to be specific to ammonia oxidizers have been used in environmental studies of nitrification. However, almost all of the numerous compounds found to inhibit ammonia oxidizers also inhibit methanotrophs, and most of the inhibitors act upon the monooxygenases. Many probably exert their effect by chelating copper, which is essential to the proper functioning of some monooxygenases. The lack of inhibitors specific for one or the other of the two groups of bacteria hampers the determination of their relative roles in nature.
Effect of EDTA Conditioning and Carbodiimide Pretreatment on the Bonding Performance of All-in-One Self-Etch Adhesives

Objective. This study evaluated the effect of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) conditioning and carbodiimide (EDC) pretreatment on the shear bond strength of two all-in-one self-etch adhesives to dentin. Methods. Flat coronal dentin surfaces were prepared on one hundred and sixty extracted human molars. Teeth were randomly divided into eight groups according to two different self-etch adhesives used [G-Bond and OptiBond-All-In-One] and four different surface pretreatments: (a) adhesive applied following manufacturer's instructions; (b) dentin conditioning with 24% EDTA gel prior to application of adhesive; (c) EDC pretreatment followed by application of adhesive; (d) application of EDC on EDTA conditioned dentin surface followed by application of adhesive. Composite restorations were placed in all the samples. Ten samples from each group were subjected to immediate and delayed (6-month storage in artificial saliva) shear bond strength evaluation. Data collected was subjected to statistical analysis using three-way ANOVA and post hoc Tukey's test at a significance level of p < 0.05. Results and Conclusion. EDTA preconditioning as well as EDC pretreatment alone had no significant effect on the immediate and delayed bond strengths of either of the adhesives. However, EDC pretreatment on EDTA conditioned dentin surface resulted in preservation of resin-dentin bond strength of both adhesives with no significant fall over six months.