Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Myocardial Triglyceride Content and Cardiac Function in Healthy Subjects and Endurance Athletes

Ectopic fat accumulation plays important roles in various metabolic disorders and cardiovascular diseases. Recent studies reported that myocardial triglyceride (TG) content measured by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) is associated with aging, diabetes mellitus, and cardiac dysfunction. However, myocardial TG content in athletes has not yet been investigated. We performed 1H-MRS and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging in 10 male endurance athletes and 15 healthy male controls. Serum markers and other clinical parameters including arterial stiffness were measured. Cardiopulmonary exercise testing was also performed. There were no significant differences in clinical characteristics including age, anthropometric parameters, blood test results, or arterial stiffness between the two groups. Peak oxygen uptakes, end–diastolic volume (EDV), end–systolic volume (ESV), left ventricular (LV) mass, peak ejection rates and peak filling rates were significantly higher in the athlete group than in the control group (all P<0.02). Myocardial TG content was significantly lower in the athlete group than in the control group (0.60±0.20 vs. 0.89±0.41%, P<0.05). Myocardial TG content was negatively correlated with EDV (r = −0.47), ESV (r = −0.64), LV mass (r = −0.44), and epicardial fat volume (r = 0.47) (all P<0.05). In conclusion, lower levels of myocardial TG content were observed in endurance athletes and were associated with morphological changes related to physiological LV alteration in athletes, suggesting that metabolic imaging for measurement of myocardial TG content by 1H-MRS may be a useful technique for noninvasively assessing the “athlete’s heart”.
Tone mapping via edge-preserving total variation model

The purpose of tone mapping is making a high dynamic range image to be a low dynamic range image and to be displayed in the traditional monitors. Specifically, while a high dynamic range image is being compressed, its details must be preserved as many as possible without artifacts. At present, many tone mapping operators obtain good effects through combining edge-preserving filters with image decomposition. In this paper, we present a tone mapping operator based on an edge-preserving total variation model. We introduce the edge preservation of the total variation model and that how to do the tone mapping using it and the two-scale decomposition of a image. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by comparing it with four other tone mapping operators.
Personality preferences in graphical interface design

The paper presents and discusses the graphical interface design of three interactive television prototypes. These were manipulated in colour and shape in order to display different degrees of extrovert character. The manipulation was based on colour and psychology theory that connects personality traits with visual aesthetics. The first-time impressions of the prototypes were later evaluated in reference to the users' measured personality traits; this since previous work on postures and voice has shown that personality factors influence the users' interface design preferences. The user test concludes that the users do recognise the intended extrovert and introvert features of the prototypes.
Activation of SOCS-3 by Resistin

ABSTRACT Resistin is an adipocyte hormone that modulates glucose homeostasis. Here we show that in 3T3-L1 adipocytes, resistin attenuates multiple effects of insulin, including insulin receptor (IR) phosphorylation, IR substrate 1 (IRS-1) phosphorylation, phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K) activation, phosphatidylinositol triphosphate production, and activation of protein kinase B/Akt. Remarkably, resistin treatment markedly induces the gene expression of suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS-3), a known inhibitor of insulin signaling. The 50% effective dose for resistin induction of SOCS-3 is ∼20 ng/ml, close to levels of resistin in serum. Association of SOCS-3 protein with the IR is also increased by resistin. Inhibition of SOCS function prevented resistin from antagonizing insulin action in adipocytes. SOCS-3 induction is the first cellular effect of resistin that is independent of insulin and is a likely mediator of resistin's inhibitory effect on insulin signaling in adipocytes.
A New Approach to Child Psychotherapy: Teddy Bear Therapy

Teddy Bear has a therapeutic importance in order to understand emotions, thoughts and inner world of the child. Teddy Bear can be perceived as a way to communicate with child. The purpose of this study is to give information about theoretical bases, definition, procedure, indications and importance of teddy bear therapy that is a new approach in the child psychotherapy field. Consequently, in the study was targeted to encourage and increase the use of the teddy bear therapy approach by psychological counsellors, pedagogues, pediatricians and other professionals working in the mental health field.
Towards Unanticipated Runtime Adaptation of Java Applications

Modifying an application usually means to stop the application, apply the changes, and start the application again. That means, the application is not available for at least a short time period. This is not acceptable for highly available applications. One reasonable approach which faces the problem of unavailability is to change highly available applications at runtime. To allow extensive runtime adaptation the application must be enabled for unanticipated changes even of already executed program parts. This is due to the fact that it is not predictable what changes become necessary and when they have to be applied. Since Java is commonly used for developing highly available applications, we discuss its shortcomings and opportunities regarding unanticipated runtime adaptation. We present an approach based on Java HotSwap and object wrapping which overcomes the identified shortcomings and evaluate it in a case study.
Dependence of GaN HEMT Millimeter-Wave Performance on Temperature

This paper presents extensive thermal characterization of recently fabricated high-performance millimeter-wave GaN/SiC devices from four sources across temperature (-25°C to + 125°C). The changes with temperature for: output power at millimeter-wave frequencies (P<sub>out</sub>), pinchoff voltage (V<sub>p</sub>), knee-voltage (V<sub>k</sub>), onresistance (R<sub>on</sub>), power-added efficiency (PAE), saturated drain current (I<sub>dss</sub>), power gain (G), and transconductance (g<sub>m</sub>) are measured, statistics studied, and correlations investigated. Temperature-coefficients are established for P<sub>out</sub>, V<sub>p</sub>, V<sub>k</sub>, R<sub>on</sub>, PAE, I<sub>dss</sub>, G, and g<sub>m</sub> in GaN technology. The main findings are: 1) P<sub>out</sub>'s temperature dependence can be negative or positive, opposite of G's and I<sub>dss</sub>'s strong negative temperature dependence, and 2) the pinchoff voltage's dependence on temperature is very weak. The results obtained provide monolithic microwave integrated circuit designers with key information required for meeting performance over a wide temperature range.
Updating Fearful Memories with Extinction Training during Reconsolidation: A Human Study Using Auditory Aversive Stimuli

Learning to fear danger in the environment is essential to survival, but dysregulation of the fear system is at the core of many anxiety disorders. As a consequence, a great interest has emerged in developing strategies for suppressing fear memories in maladaptive cases. Recent research has focused in the process of reconsolidation where memories become labile after being retrieved. In a behavioral manipulation, Schiller et al., (2010) reported that extinction training, administrated during memory reconsolidation, could erase fear responses. The implications of this study are crucial for the possible treatment of anxiety disorders without the administration of drugs. However, attempts to replicate this effect by other groups have been so far unsuccessful. We sought out to reproduce Schiller et al., (2010) findings in a different fear conditioning paradigm based on auditory aversive stimuli instead of electric shock. Following a within-subject design, participants were conditioned to two different sounds and skin conductance response (SCR) was recorded as a measure of fear. Our results demonstrated that only the conditioned stimulus that was reminded 10 minutes before extinction training did not reinstate a fear response after a reminder trial consisting of the presentation of the unconditioned stimuli. For the first time, we replicated Schiller et al., (2010) behavioral manipulation and extended it to an auditory fear conditioning paradigm.
Language trees and zipping.

In this Letter we present a very general method for extracting information from a generic string of characters, e.g., a text, a DNA sequence, or a time series. Based on data-compression techniques, its key point is the computation of a suitable measure of the remoteness of two bodies of knowledge. We present the implementation of the method to linguistic motivated problems, featuring highly accurate results for language recognition, authorship attribution, and language classification.
Grounded theory methodology for knowledge engineering

Grounded theory methods of inductive qualitative field research have been tried and tested in the social sciences with their strong commitment to empirical techniques. They can be used in knowledge engineering for grounding systems on empirical evidence wherever the domain experts’ natural way of thinking is qualitative. After an introductory explanation of grounded theory development we go through two recent studies that discover strategies – those of companies redressing their economic situation and those of expert summarizers doing their job. The work about expert summarizing is pertinent to empirical AI. Therefore I discuss it in detail. The resulting model has given rise to a small implemention. It demonstrates how expert summarization works and that grounding a summarization system on human cognitive processing should be feasible. Grounded theories may be of general interest to AI colleagues who want their systems to have an empirical foundation.
A viable system perspective on enterprise architecture management

A number of approaches towards Enterprise Architecture (EA) management is proposed in literature, differing in the underlying understanding of the EA as well as in the description of the function for performing EA management. These plurality of methods and models should be interpreted as an indicator of the low maturity of the research area. In contrast, some researchers see it as inevitable consequence of the diversity of the enterprises under consideration. Staying to this interpretation, we approach the topic of EA management from a cybernetic point of view. Thereby, we elicit constituents, which should be considered in every EA management function based on a viable system perspective on the topic. From this perspective, we further revisit selected EA management approaches and show to which extent they allude to the viable system nature of the EA.
3D IMAGE UNDERSTANDING AND RECOGNITION IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

This article discusses the state-of-the-art ideas in high level visualization, understanding and interpretation of line-drawings images. A new strategy using parallel generalized linear combination method is presented. It is simple and needs only very few learning samples. Further, it can strengthen advantages of current key methods while overcome their drawbacks. Also, it is able to distinguish objects with very similar patterns and is more accurate than other existing methods in the literature. In addition, it is readily applicable in virtual environments including internet, mulit-media
Tissue engineering of bone: the reconstructive surgeon's point of view

Bone defects represent a medical and socioeconomic challenge. Different types of biomaterials are applied for reconstructive indications and receive rising interest. However, autologous bone grafts are still considered as the gold standard for reconstruction of extended bone defects. The generation of bioartificial bone tissues may help to overcome the problems related to donor site morbidity and size limitations. Tissue engineering is, according to its historic definition, an “interdisciplinary field that applies the principles of engineering and the life sciences toward the development of biological substitutes that restore, maintain, or improve tissue function”. It is based on the understanding of tissue formation and regeneration and aims to rather grow new functional tissues than to build new spare parts. While reconstruction of small to moderate sized bone defects using engineered bone tissues is technically feasible, and some of the currently developed concepts may represent alternatives to autologous bone grafts for certain clinical conditions, the reconstruction of largevolume defects remains challenging. Therefore vascularization concepts gain on interest and the combination of tissue engineering approaches with flap prefabrication techniques may eventually allow application of bone‐tissue substitutes grown in vivo with the advantage of minimal donor site morbidity as compared to conventional vascularized bone grafts. The scope of this review is the introduction of basic principles and different components of engineered bioartificial bone tissues with a strong focus on clinical applications in reconstructive surgery. Concepts for the induction of axial vascularization in engineered bone tissues as well as potential clinical applications are discussed in detail.
Novel Properties Generated by Interacting Computational Systems

In this work we address two questions: first, what is the smallest number of components a computational system needs in order to display genuine novelty? And second, can the novel features of such systems also exhibit novel causal powers? The possibility of generating novelty via computational processes has been an ongoing topic of investigation and debate in artificial intelligence research for several decades. More recently, topics such as self-organization and emergence have been discussed in computational terms within complex systems science. Researchers in complexity have worked to understand the possibility of genuine novelty in computational systems in order to understand the significance of computational models of putatively emergent properties. Putatively emergent properties such as the flocking behavior of birds (Reynolds 1988), the adaptive features of the immune systems (Hofmeyer et al. 2000), and the characteristic patterns of traffic flow (Schreckenberg 1995) have been given computational models. Since “novelty” and “causation” carry different meanings in different scientific contexts, it is important to specify which definitions we use in this work. In this context, a system can be thought to generate genuine novelty given the appearance of processes or behaviors not explicitly coded in the generating algorithm [1]. We roughly follow the
An analysis of the BBO fans online social gaming community

Online social gaming is an emerging Internet application that combines online gaming and online social networking functionality for the benefit of millions of daily users. While researchers have investigated the structure of (social) networks for decades, the activity characteristics and the community structure of online social gaming remain relatively unknown. To address this situation, in this work we investigate the BBO Fans club for online bridge. First, we introduce a method to collect and analyze data from BBO Fans and its underlying gaming platform. Our method is novel in that it addresses the lack of a strict definition of social relationship between BBO Fans players, and it defines several player types with implications on community formation and operation. Second, we use the proposed method to collect and analyze a 40-day BBO Fans dataset comprising over 140,000 unique players and over 3,000,000 unique play sessions. Third, we compare the characteristics of BBO Fans with other large social networking and online gaming applications. We find in particular that BBO Fans generates similar levels of activity as but has different community characteristics than similarly-sized games on FaceBook, the largest social network in the world.
Bioinformatics Analysis Reveals Abundant Short Alpha-Helices as a Common Structural Feature of Oomycete RxLR Effector Proteins

RxLR effectors represent one of the largest and most diverse effector families in oomycete plant pathogens. These effectors have attracted enormous attention since they can be delivered inside the plant cell and manipulates host immunity. With the exceptions of a signal peptide and the following RxLR-dEER and C-terminal W/Y/L motifs identified from the sequences themselves, nearly no functional domains have been found. Recently, protein structures of several RxLRs were revealed to comprise alpha-helical bundle repeats. However, approximately half of all RxLRs lack obvious W/Y/L motifs, which are associated with helical structures. In this study, secondary structure prediction of the putative RxLR proteins was performed. We found that the C-terminus of the majority of these RxLR proteins, irrespective of the presence of W/Y/L motifs, contains abundant short alpha-helices. Since a large-scale experimental determination of protein structures has been difficult to date, results of the current study extend our understanding on the oomycete RxLR effectors in protein secondary structures from individual members to the entire family. Moreover, we identified less alpha-helix-rich proteins from secretomes of several oomycete and fungal organisms in which RxLRs have not been identified, providing additional evidence that these organisms are unlikely to harbor RxLR-like proteins. Therefore, these results provide additional information that will aid further studies on the evolution and functional mechanisms of RxLR effectors.
Training continuous density hidden Markov models in association with self-organizing maps and LVQ

The authors propose a novel initialization method for continuous observation density hidden Markov models (CDHMMs) that is based on self-organizing maps (SOMs) and learning vector quantization (LVQ). The framework is to transcribe speech into phoneme sequences using CDHMMs as phoneme models. When numerous mixtures of, for example, Gaussian density functions are used to model the observation distributions of CDHMMs, good initial values are necessary in order for the Baum-Welch estimation to converge satisfactorily. The authors have experimented with constructing rapidly good initial values by SOMs, and with enhancing the discriminatory power of the phoneme models by adaptively training the state output distributions by using the LVQ algorithm. Experiments indicate that an improvement to the pure Baum-Welch and the segmentation K-means procedures can be obtained using the proposed method. <<ETX>>
Children as participants in research. Playful interactions and negotiation of researcher–child relationships

ABSTRACT The consideration of child-centred participation in childhood research is a topic that draws heavily on human rights, and participatory childhood research is performed in a variety of ways. The paper explores issues of adult-child roles in early childhood education with an intention to involve young children in the research as much as possible with reference to Hart’s ladder of participation. A drawing-elicited interview was conducted with four children, 3–5 years of age, regarding their views on favourite adult professionals. The children were encouraged to express themselves through drawing and stories, while the researcher strove to follow child-led initiatives along the way. In the process, the children started to generate crazy stories, to laugh, and experiment with the researcher’s authority and engage in playfulness. The analysis points to ways in which adult researcher–child relationships are negotiated in research, suggesting that the adult engages in playful interactions with children in order for true participation and sharing of perspectives to take place. The study emphasises how improvisation, share of control, and playful interactions with children are important elements to consider in participatory early childhood research because it is crucial in forming a research relationship with young children.
A novel ubiquitin mark at the N-terminal tail of histone H2As targeted by RNF168 ubiquitin ligase

Ubiquitination of histones plays a critical role in the regulation of several processes within the nucleus, including maintenance of genome stability and transcriptional regulation. The only known ubiquitination site on histones is represented by a conserved Lys residue located at the C terminus of the protein. Here, we describe a novel ubiquitin mark at the N-terminal tail of histone H2As consisting of two Lys residues at positions 13 and 15 (K13/K15). This “bidentate” site is a target of the DNA damage response (DDR) ubiquitin ligases RNF8 and RNF168. Histone mutants lacking the K13/K15 site impair RNF168- and DNA damage-dependent ubiquitination. Conversely, inactivation of the canonical C-terminal site prevents the constitutive monoubiquitination of histone H2As but does not abolish the ubiquitination induced by RNF168. A ubiquitination-defective mutant is obtained by inactivating both the N- and the C-terminal sites, suggesting that these are unique, non-redundant acceptors of ubiquitination on histone H2As. This unprecedented result implies that RNF168 generates a qualitatively different Ub mark on chromatin.
Change in Hospital-Level Use of Transradial Percutaneous Coronary Intervention and Periprocedural Outcomes: Insights from the National Cardiovascular Data Registry

Background—Whether increasing use of radial access has improved percutaneous coronary intervention outcomes remains unknown. We sought to determine the relationship between increasing facility-level use of transradial percutaneous coronary intervention (TRI) and periprocedural outcomes. Methods and Results—Within the National Cardiovascular Data Registry CathPCI Registry, we estimated the risk-adjusted association between hospital category of change in TRI use (during the 3-year period from 2009 to 2012) and trends in access site and overall bleeding, fluoroscopy time, and contrast use among 818 facilities with low baseline TRI use. There were 4 categories of hospital change in TRI use: very low (baseline, 0.2% increasing to 1.8% at the end of 3 years), low (0.9% increasing to 8.9%), moderate (1.6% increasing to 27.2%), and high (1.0% increasing to 45.1%). Risk-adjusted access site bleeding decreased over time for all hospital categories; however, the rate of decline varied across hospital categories (P for interaction, <0.001). The decrease in access site bleeding was significantly greater for hospitals with moderate or high increases in TRI use (relative risk, 0.45, 95% confidence interval, 0.36–0.56) when compared with that of very low or low hospitals (relative risk, 0.65; 95% confidence interval, 0.58–0.74; P for comparison, 0.002). Similar findings were observed for overall bleeding. An increase in fluoroscopy time (≈1.3 minutes) was noted at hospitals with moderate and high use of TRI (P=0.01). Trends in contrast use were similar across hospital categories. Conclusions—In a national sample of hospitals performing percutaneous coronary intervention, bleeding rates decreased over time for all hospital categories of change in TRI use. The decline in bleeding outcomes was larger at hospitals with increased adoption of TRI when compared with hospitals with minimal or no change in TRI use.