Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparisons of serum miRNA expression profiles in patients with diabetic retinopathy and type 2 diabetes mellitus

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to compare the expression levels of serum miRNAs in diabetic retinopathy and type 2 diabetes mellitus. METHODS: Serum miRNA expression profiles from diabetic retinopathy cases (type 2 diabetes mellitus patients with diabetic retinopathy) and type 2 diabetes mellitus controls (type 2 diabetes mellitus patients without diabetic retinopathy) were examined by miRNA-specific microarray analysis. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was used to validate the significantly differentially expressed serum miRNAs from the microarray analysis of 45 diabetic retinopathy cases and 45 age-, sex-, body mass index- and duration-of-diabetes-matched type 2 diabetes mellitus controls. The relative changes in serum miRNA expression levels were analyzed using the 2-ΔΔCt method. RESULTS: A total of 5 diabetic retinopathy cases and 5 type 2 diabetes mellitus controls were included in the miRNA-specific microarray analysis. The serum levels of miR-3939 and miR-1910-3p differed significantly between the two groups in the screening stage; however, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction did not reveal significant differences in miRNA expression for 45 diabetic retinopathy cases and their matched type 2 diabetes mellitus controls. CONCLUSION: Our findings indicate that miR-3939 and miR-1910-3p may not play important roles in the development of diabetic retinopathy; however, studies with a larger sample size are needed to confirm our findings.
Religious People Endorse Different Standards of Evidence When Evaluating Religious Versus Scientific Claims

Recent research has begun to investigate the relationship between religion and science. However, it remains unclear whether religious and nonreligious people differ on the standards of evidence used when evaluating claims in religious versus scientific contexts. Across three studies (N = 702), we presented participants with effects that were attributed to scientific methodology or to God and asked them to rate how many more times an effect needs to be repeated in order to have certainty in the outcome. Results showed that religious people requested fewer repetitions compared to nonreligious people when an effect was attributed to prayer, and fewer repetitions when an effect was attributed to prayer compared to scientific methodology. Nonreligious people were relatively consistent across conditions. These results suggest that religious people have less stringent standards of evidence when evaluating nonscientific claims. Directions for future research are also discussed.
Graphene-based polymer composites: What about it for the HV electrotechnical arena?

In this study, considerations of recent work and new acquired data by the present authors were used to propose an appreciation of the use of graphene-based polymer composites for electrotechnical applications. In particular, electrical charge behavior of specially prepared Polyethyle-Graphene Oxide (GO) was studied and the results exemplified important traits of GO polymer composites. It turns out that the resulting compound PE-GO falls into the category of nanostructured microcomposites, is sensitive to moisture contamination, yet was found to exhibit reduction of space charge accumulation as compared to the behavior observed for the neat matrix. One of the major challenges remains to transfer the magnificent graphene properties to a polymer matrix. In spite of this, polymers containing very low-content of GO show potential for high-voltage applications.
Prospective Links Between Friendship and Early Physical Aggression: Preliminary Evidence Supporting the Role of Friendship Quality Through a Dyadic Intervention

Abstract:Positive friendships have been related to decreasing levels of children's physical aggression over time. While this evidence calls for interventions aimed at helping children build good-quality friendships, tests of causality through experimental manipulations are still needed. The goal of this study was to examine whether an intervention aimed to increase dyadic friendship quality could decrease children's physical aggression at the peer-group level over a school year. A total of 34 aggressive children and each child's best friend were randomly assigned to two groups: an experimental condition where the members in each dyad participated together in 12 weekly intervention sessions and a no-intervention control condition. Multiple sources were used to evaluate changes in friendship quality and children's physical aggression. Results showed an indirect effect of the intervention on decreasing levels of physical aggression through the improvement of one specific feature of friendship quality: conflict resolution. These results point to the usefulness of including this relational aspect in intervention programs targeting aggressive children.
Extraction of Spatial Relation in Arabic Text Using Rule-Based Approach

Relation extraction refers to identification of different semantic relations between named entities. Discovering spatial relations between named entities (NEs) is challenging task with many applications. However, the existing researches only focus on general spatial relation extraction in English and some other languages. This paper introduces a rule-based approach to spatial relation extraction in Arabic natural language text. A set of syntactical rules and patterns of spatial relations are induced and then formalized based on spatial relation annotation corpus, morphological information, spatial terms and location named entity recognition technology. Three types of spatial relations are focused on, which are topological relations, directional relations, and distance relations. Then, these rules and patterns are applied to identify and classify these three types of spatial relations in Arabic documents. The system has been successfully tested on 30 geographical documents that include a mixture of types of spatial relations. The result achieved 86.06% of F-measure. This illustrates that our approach is effective in extracting spatial relations in Arabic texts and its performance is satisfactory.
ONTOLOGY-BASED CONTEXT MODELING FOR VEHICLE CONTEXT-AWARE SERVICES

Computing becomes increasingly mobile and pervasive today; these changes imply that applications and services must be aware of and adapt to their changing contexts in highly dynamic environments. Now a days, vehicles have become an increasingly important and exciting test bed for ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), however, context-aware vehicle service to enable high adaptation of service to driver, vehicle or even road in ubiquitous environment is still little addressed in the literature. The context management in pervasive computing environments must reflect the specific characteristics of these environments, e.g. mobility, resource-constrained devices, or heterogeneity of context sources. Although a number of context models have been presented in the literature, none of them supports all of these requirements to a sufficient extent at the same time. This paper focuses on building an ontology modeling approach for Context Management in Intelligent Pervasive Middleware for Context-Aware Vehicle Services. To support contextawareness, we embed capabilities of context modeling and context reasoning in an ontology-based context system, which focuses on management of the context and generates a consistent model which promises the common information representation and facilitates a development of context-aware services.
A Survey of Refining Image Annotation Techniques

Automatic image annotation has been an active research topic in recent years due to its potential impact on both image understanding and semantic based image retrieval. However, the results of the state-of-the-art image annotation methods are still far from satisfaction due to the existence of semantic gap. Thus refining image annotation (RIA) has become one of the core research topics in computer vision and multimedia areas, whose purpose is to reserve the highly correlated annotations whereas remove the irrelevant or weakly relevant annotations by fully exploring the correlations of annotation keywords. RIA, to some extent, can effectively mitigate the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts. So in this paper, we focus on the latest development in image retrieval and provide a comprehensive survey on refining image annotation techniques. In particular, we analyze the key aspects of various RIA methods, including their original intentions and annotation models. Finally, we draw some important conclusions and highlight the potential research directions for the future.
The Relationship between Sex Offender Height and Pedophilic Interest

ABSTRACT The current study examined the relationship between offender height and pedophilic interest (as measured by having a victim under 13 years old) in a sample of 22,228 registered sex offenders in the United States. Results revealed that offenders with victims age 12 and under were, on average, nearly one-quarter inch shorter than offenders of adults, and . 18 inches shorter than those with minor teen victims. Implications for future research about the biological etiology of child sexual abuse perpetration are discussed, including the role of adverse childhood experiences in the neurodevelopment of offenders.
Decadal to century scale trends in North American snow extent in coupled atmosphere‐ocean general circulation models

20th and 21st century decadal scale trends and variability in winter North American snow cover extent (NA‐SCE) are investigated using coupled atmosphere‐ocean general circulation model experiments participating in the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. Significant between‐model variability is found, with most models underestimating mean NA‐SCE. 20th century simulations are poorly correlated with observations, and, while individual ensemble members capture the magnitude of decadal scale variability, the variability of the signal is dampened in the ensemble mean, indicating that decadal‐scale NA‐SCE variability is associated predominantly with internal model variability rather than external forcing. Two 21st century emission scenarios with realistic (moderate or significant) greenhouse gas emission rates produce decreasing NA‐SCE trends, while one unrealistic scenario with fixed concentrations produces little or no NA‐SCE trend. These results suggest that snow cover may be a sensitive indicator of climate change, and that North American snow extent will probably decrease in response to greenhouse gas emissions, although the magnitude of the response may be nonlinear.
Beta Cells within Single Human Islets Originate from Multiple Progenitors

Background In both humans and rodents, glucose homeostasis is controlled by micro-organs called islets of Langerhans composed of beta cells, associated with other endocrine cell types. Most of our understanding of islet cell differentiation and morphogenesis is derived from rodent developmental studies. However, little is known about human islet formation. The lack of adequate experimental models has restricted the study of human pancreatic development to the histological analysis of different stages of pancreatic development. Our objective was to develop a new experimental model to (i) transfer genes into developing human pancreatic cells and (ii) validate gene transfer by defining the clonality of developing human islets. Methods and Findings In this study, a unique model was developed combining ex vivo organogenesis from human fetal pancreatic tissue and cell type-specific lentivirus-mediated gene transfer. Human pancreatic progenitors were transduced with lentiviruses expressing GFP under the control of an insulin promoter and grafted to severe combined immunodeficient mice, allowing human beta cell differentiation and islet morphogenesis. By performing gene transfer at low multiplicity of infection, we created a chimeric graft with a subpopulation of human beta cells expressing GFP and found both GFP-positive and GFP-negative beta cells within single islets. Conclusion The detection of both labeled and unlabeled beta cells in single islets demonstrates that beta cells present in a human islet are derived from multiple progenitors thus providing the first dynamic analysis of human islet formation during development. This human transgenic-like tool can be widely used to elucidate dynamic genetic processes in human tissue formation.
Comparison of different methods for extraction of DNA of fungal pathogens from cultures and blood

Five commercially available extraction kits and an in-house DNA extraction method for the release of DNA from Candida albicans and Aspergillus niger cells were assessed for sensitivity, purity, duration, and cost. All commercially available kits helped to shorten the duration of DNA extraction. However, the sensitivity varied from 1 to 1,000 fungal cells/ml and costs varied from $0.10 to 2.30. The QIAmp Tissue kit was the commercially available assay that yielded the same sensitivity and purity of fungal DNA release as the in-house protocol but was the most expensive method. In comparing these two extraction protocols, a 99% concordance of PCR results for 125 blood samples analyzed could be demonstrated.
Incidence, Development, and Prognosis of Diabetic Kidney Disease in China: Design and Methods

Background: Although that glomerulonephritis is the major cause of end-stage renal disease in developing countries such as China, the increasing prevalence of diabetes has contributed to the changing spectrum of predialysis chronic kidney disease. Recent studies have revealed an increased proportion of patients with diabetic kidney disease (DKD) in hemodialysis populations in large cities in China. However, studies regarding the clinical phenotype of DKD in China are extremely limited. The incidence, development, and prognosis of diabetic kidney disease (INDEED) study aims to investigate the incidence, progression, and prognosis of DKD, as well as the associated genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors and biomarkers in patients with DKD in China. Methods: INDEED study is a prospective cohort study based on all participants with diabetes in the Kailuan study, which is a general population-based cohort study in northern China. Altogether, over 10,000 participants with diabetes will be followed biennially. Questionnaires documenting general characteristics, behavioral and environmental factors, and medical history will be administrated. Anthropometric measurements and a series of laboratory tests will be performed in one central laboratory. The DNA, plasma, and urine samples of every participant will be stored in a biobank for future research. Conclusions: INDEED study will provide essential information regarding the clinical phenotype and prognosis of patients with DKD in China and will be valuable to identify factors and biomarkers associated with patients with DKD in China.
Two microphones speech enhancement systems based on instrumental variable algorithm for speaker identification

In this paper, we study the performance limits of a standard GMM speaker identification (SI) system in “adverse conditions” context using several real noises. Adaptive noise cancellation represents one such potentially effective technique and refers to a class of adaptive enhancement algorithms based on the availability of a primary input source and a secondary reference source. It will be shown that with the use of an adaptive noise cancelling called the Double Generalized Least Mean Squares (DGLMS), the SI performance can approach the optimal performance system. Experiments are done on Spidre corpus corrupted by different type of noises. The performance of the SI is improved by more than 35%.
Improved Text Classification to acquire job opportunities for Chinese disabled persons

Text Classification is an important field of research. There are a number of approaches to classify text documents. However, there is an important challenge to improve the computational efficiency and recall. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to segment Chinese words, generate word vectors, train the corpus and make prediction. Based on the text classification technology, we successfully help the Chinese disabled persons to acquire job opportunities efficiently in real word. The results show that using this method to build the classifier yields better results than traditional methods. We also experimentally show that careful selection of a subset of features to represent the documents can improve the performance of the classifiers.
A new strategy for gene targeting and functional proteomics using the DT40 cell line

DT40 cells derived from chicken B lymphocytes exhibit exceptionally high homologous recombination rates. Therefore, they can be used as a convenient tool and model for gene targeting experiments. However, lack of efficient cloning strategies, protein purification protocols and a well annotated protein database limits the utility of these cells for proteomic studies. Here we describe a fast and inexpensive experimental pipeline for protein localization, quantification and mass spectrometry–based interaction studies using DT40 cells. Our newly designed set of pQuant vectors and a sequence- and ligation-independent cloning (SLIC) strategy allow for simple and efficient generation of gene targeting constructs, facilitating homologous-recombination–based protein tagging on a multi-gene scale. We also report proof of principle results using the key proteins involved in RNA decay, namely EXOSC8, EXOSC9, CNOT7 and UPF1.
Remote sensing of a near-Earth neutral line during the 5 October 2000 substorm

In this paper we examined the continuous motions of a near-Earth neutral line during the recovery phase of the 5 October 2000 substorm. Estimation was based on the PSBL ion beam model proposed by Onsager (1991) and the Geotail observations. Estimated distances from the Earth ranged from 20 to 60 R E and retreated tailward at velocities of 250 and 300 km/s. This event initiated with the arrival of solar wind discontinuity. Simultaneous observations of electromagnetic field and electrons indicate the existence of earthward propagating waves associated with field-aligned currents. Based on these observations, we suggest that the source of the PSBL ion beams was the retreating near-Earth neutral line formed by the compression of the magnetosphere. Two scenarios of near-Earth neutral line motion in the tail dynamics are also proposed. One is the formation of plural neutral lines to create a long plasmoid. The other is the oscillation of one neutral line between the near-Earth region and the mid-tail stagnant plasmoid.
Uncorrelated Multi-View Discrimination Dictionary Learning for Recognition

Dictionary learning (DL) has now become an important feature learning technique that owns state-of-the-art recognition performance. Due to sparse characteristic of data in real-world applications, DL uses a set of learned dictionary bases to represent the linear decomposition of a data point. Fisher discrimination DL (FDDL) is a representative supervised DL method, which constructs a structured dictionary whose atoms correspond to the class labels. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in multi-view (more than two views) feature learning techniques. Although some multi-view (or multi-modal) DL methods have been presented, there still exists much room for improvement. How to enhance the total discriminability of dictionaries and reduce their redundancy is a crucial research topic. To boost the performance of multi-view DL technique, we propose an uncorrelated multi-view discrimination DL (UMDDL) approach for recognition. By making dictionary atoms correspond to the class labels such that the obtained reconstruction error is discriminative, UMDDL aims to jointly learn multiple dictionaries with totally favorable discriminative power. Furthermore, we design the uncorrelated constraint for multi-view DL, so as to reduce the redundancy among dictionaries learned from different views. Experiments on several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Exploring Energy-Latency Tradeoffs for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

A collapsible, easily relocatable structure useable for various different purposes but illustrated as an animal shelter for dogs and other animals such shelter has saddle-type, gabled roof joined to side wall panels and formed of opposed, flat sloping roof panels hingedly to the respective side wall panels and hingedly secured centrally at the roof ridge. A floor is formed of flat panels hingedly joined to the side wall panels and hingedly secured centrally. Opposite ends are each formed of a pair of flat end panels hingedly secured to the side wall panels having an opening for ingress and egress of an animal. The shelter is collapsible by outward folding of the roof and floor panels and inward folding of the end panels. A cord arrangement locks the panels in unfolded configuration for maintaining the shelter in an erected condition.
Ocular Hypertension after Pediatric Cataract Surgery: Baseline Characteristics and First-Year Report

Monitoring intraocular pressure (IOP) is essential for pediatric cataract treatment but always difficult due to lack of cooperation in young children. We present the baseline characteristics and the first-year results of a long-term prospective cohort study, which are aimed to determine the relationship of the incidence of ocular hypertension (OH) in children after cataract surgery during the first-year period and the risk of developing late-onset glaucoma. Children were included with the following criteria: they were≤10 years old and scheduled to undergo cataract surgery with/without intraocular lens implantation; they were compliant with our follow-up protocol, which included monitoring IOP using a Tono-Pen under sedation or anesthesia. Incidence of OH, peak OH value, OH onset time and OH duration within a 12-month period following surgery were measured. In brief, 206 patients (379 eyes) were included and OH developed in 66 of 379 (17.4%) eyes. The mean follow-up period was 14.0±3.2 months (median, 12 months; range, 10–16 months). Moreover, 33 of 196 (16.8%) aphakic eyes and 33 of 183 (18.0%) IOL eyes were diagnosed with OH. The peak OH onset times were at 1-week (34/66, 51.5%) and 1-month (14/66, 21.2%) appointments postsurgery. The peak IOP value in the OH eyes was 29.9±7.5 mmHg (median, 29 mmHg; range, 21–48 mmHg). The duration of OH was 30.9±31.2 days (median, 30 days; range, 3–150 days). OH recurred in 13 eyes with a history of OH diagnosed within 1 month postsurgery (13/54, 24.1%), which needed temporary or long term use of antiglaucoma medications. In conclusion, the incidence of OH in children after cataract surgery was 17.4% during the first-year period. Children who have suffered elevated IOP in the first year after cataract surgery should be followed closely to determine if there is an increased risk of developing late-onset glaucoma.
Associating characters with events in films

The work presented here combines the analysis of a film's audiovisual features with the analysis of an accompanying audio description. Specifically, we describe a technique for semantic-based indexing of feature films that associates character names with meaningful events. The technique fuses the results of event detection based on audiovisual features with the inferred on-screen presence of characters, based on an analysis of an audio description script. In an evaluation with 215 events from 11 films, the technique performed the character detection task with Precision = 93% and Recall = 71%. We then go on to show how novel access modes to film content are enabled by our analysis. The specific examples illustrated include video retrieval via a combination of event-type and character name and our first steps towards visualization of narrative and character interplay based on characters occurrence and co-occurrence in events.