Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vitamin D status and coronary flow reserve measured by positron emission tomography: a co-twin control study.

CONTEXT Vitamin D insufficiency is associated with increased cardiovascular events in the general population. Additionally, low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] is associated with endothelial dysfunction and arterial stiffness. However, little is known about the association between serum 25(OH)D level and myocardial blood flow. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to examine the association between serum 25(OH)D levels and coronary flow reserve (CFR) measured by (13)N-positron emission tomography in asymptomatic middle-aged male twins. DESIGN The Emory Twin Study is a cross-sectional study of soldiers from the Vietnam Era Registry. SETTING The study was conducted at the General Clinical Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. PARTICIPANTS A total of 368 middle-aged male twins were enrolled for the study. Serum 25(OH)D levels were measured in all subjects and classified as vitamin D insufficiency [25(OH)D <30 ng/ml] or sufficiency [25(OH)D ≥30 ng/ml]. Positron emission tomography with [(13)N]ammonia was used to evaluate myocardial blood flow at rest and after adenosine stress. CFR was measured as the ratio of maximum to rest myocardial blood flow. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Primary outcome was CFR measurement. RESULTS Mean overall serum 25(OH)D concentration was 37.0 ± 21.4 ng/ml; 167 twins (45%) were vitamin D insufficient. CFR was significantly lower in subjects with vitamin D insufficiency compared with subjects with vitamin D sufficiency (2.41 vs. 2.64; P = 0.007), even after adjustment for traditional cardiovascular risk factors, serum PTH, calcium, and phosphorus levels, and season. An abnormal CFR (CFR <2) was more prevalent in subjects with vitamin D insufficiency than with vitamin D sufficiency (31 vs. 20%; P = 0.03). In addition, in vitamin D status-discordant twin pairs, CFR was significantly lower in the vitamin D-insufficient twin than in the vitamin D-sufficient co-twin (2.35 vs. 2.58; P = 0.037). CONCLUSION Vitamin D insufficiency is associated with lower CFR in men. This association may help explain some of the increased cardiovascular risk reported in individuals with vitamin D insufficiency.
Unbiased sampling in directed social graph

Microblogging services, such as Twitter, are among the most important online social networks(OSNs). Different from OSNs such as Facebook, the topology of microblogging service is a directed graph instead of an undirected graph. Recently, due to the explosive increase of population size, graph sampling has started to play a critical role in measurement and characterization studies of such OSNs. However, previous studies have only focused on the unbiased sampling of undirected social graphs. In this paper, we study the unbiased sampling algorithm for directed social graphs. Based on the traditional Metropolis-Hasting Random Walk (MHRW) algorithm, we propose an unbiased sampling method for directed social graphs(USDSG). Using this method, we get the first, to the best of our knowledge, unbiased sample of directed social graphs. Through extensive experiments comparing with the "ground truth" (UNI, obtained through uniform sampling of directed graph nodes), we show that our method can achieve excellent performance in directed graph sampling and the error to UNI is less than 10%.
Ieee Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 1 Improving Contact Realism through Event-based Haptic Feedback

— Tapping on surfaces in a typical virtual environment feels like contact with soft foam rather than a hard object. The realism of such interactions can be dramatically improved by superimposing event-based, high-frequency transient forces over traditional position-based feedback. When scaled by impact velocity, hand-tuned pulses and decaying sinusoids produce haptic cues that resemble those experienced during real impacts. Our new method for generating appropriate transients inverts a dynamic model of the haptic device to determine the motor forces required to create pre-recorded acceleration profiles at the user's fingertips. After development, the event-based haptic paradigm and the method of acceleration matching were evaluated in a carefully controlled user study. Sixteen individuals blindly tapped on nine virtual and three real samples, rating the degree to which each felt like real wood. Event-based feedback achieved significantly higher realism ratings than the traditional rendering method. The display of transient signals made virtual objects feel similar to a real sample of wood on a foam substrate, while position feedback alone received ratings similar to those of foam. This work provides an important new avenue for increasing the realism of contact in haptic interactions.
Implementation details of the coupled QMR algorithm

The original quasi-minimal residual method (QMR) relies on the three-term look-ahead Lanczos process, to generate basis vectors for the underlying Krylov subspaces. However, empirical observations indicate that, in finite precision arithmetic, three-term vector recurrences are less robust than mathematically equivalent coupled two-term recurrences. Therefore, we recently proposed a new implementation of the QMR method based on a coupled two-term look-ahead Lanczos procedure. In this paper, we describe implementation details of this coupled QMR algorithm, and we present results of numerical experiments.
Stepwise Assembly of Dimeric F1Fo-ATP Synthase in Mitochondria Involves the Small Fo-Subunits k and i

Oligomerization of F1Fo-ATP synthase in the inner mitochondrial membrane governs the formation of cristae membrane domains. We show that the F1Fo-subunits Su i and Su k are crucial for the formation and maturation of ATP synthase dimers and oligomers. Su i additionally facilitates the incorporation of new subunits into ATP synthase monomers.
Mesh-based 3D textured urban mapping

In the era of autonomous driving, urban mapping represents a core step to let vehicles interact with the urban context. Successful mapping algorithms have been proposed in the last decade building the map leveraging on data from a single sensor. The focus of the system presented in this paper is twofold: the joint estimation of a 3D map from lidar data and images, based on a 3D mesh, and its texturing. Indeed, even if most surveying vehicles for mapping are endowed by cameras and lidar, existing mapping algorithms usually rely on either images or lidar data; moreover both image-based and lidar-based systems often represent the map as a point cloud, while a continuous textured mesh representation would be useful for visualization and navigation purposes. In the proposed framework, we join the accuracy of the 3D lidar data, and the dense information and appearance carried by the images, in estimating a visibility consistent map upon the lidar measurements, and refining it photometrically through the acquired images. We evaluate the proposed framework against the KITTI dataset and we show the performance improvement with respect to two state of the art urban mapping algorithms, and two widely used surface reconstruction algorithms in Computer Graphics.
Resistance to Multiple Soil-Borne Pathogens of the Pacific Northwest, USA Is Colocated in a Wheat Recombinant Inbred Line Population

Soil-borne pathogens of the Pacific Northwest decrease yields in both spring and winter wheat. Pathogens of economic importance include Fusarium culmorum, Pratylenchus neglectus, P. thornei, and Rhizoctonia solani AG8. Few options are available to growers to manage these pathogens and reduce yield loss, therefore the focus for breeding programs is on developing resistant wheat cultivars. A recombinant inbred line population, LouAu (MP-7, NSL 511036), was developed to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with resistance to P. neglectus and P. thornei. This same population was later suspected to be resistant to F. culmorum and R. solani AG8. This study confirms partial resistance to F. culmorum and R. solani AG8 is present in this population. Six major and 16 speculative QTL were identified across seven measured traits. Four of the six major QTL were found within the same genomic region of the 5A wheat chromosome suggesting shared gene(s) contribute to the resistance. These QTL will be useful in breeding programs looking to incorporate resistance to soil-borne pathogens in wheat cultivars.
Toxoplasma gondii seroprevalence in wild boars (Sus scrofa) in Sweden and evaluation of ELISA test performance

SUMMARY Toxoplasma gondii is a zoonotic protozoan parasite, infecting a wide range of warm-blooded animals. The Swedish wild boar population is expanding and increased hunting provides its meat to a growing group of consumers. We performed a spatio-temporal investigation of T. gondii seroprevalence in Swedish wild boars. An ELISA was set up and evaluated against a commercial direct agglutination test, using Bayesian latent class analysis. The ELISA sensitivity and specificity were estimated to 79% and 85%, respectively. Of 1327 serum samples, 50% were positive. Thirty-four per cent of young wild boars and 55% of adults were positive (P < 0·001). The total seroprevalence ranged from 72% in 2005 to 38% in 2011 (P < 0·001), suggesting a declining trend. The highest seroprevalence, 65%, was recorded in South Sweden. In other regions it varied from 29% in Stockholm to 46% in East Middle Sweden.
Vector based Approaches to Semantic Similarity Measures

This paper describes our approach to developing novel vector based measures of semantic similarity between a pair of sentences or utterances. Measures of this nature are useful not only in evaluating machine translation output, but also in other language understanding and information retrieval applications. We first describe the general family of existing vector based approaches to evaluating semantic similarity and their general properties. We illustrate how this family can be extended by means of discriminatively trained semantic feature weights. Finally, we explore the problem of rephrasing (i.e., addressing the question is sentence X the rephrase of sentence Y? ) and present a new measure of the semantic linear equivalence between two sentences by means of a modified LSI approach based on the Generalized Singular Value Decomposition.
Oocyte Activation after Intracytoplasmic Injection with Sperm Frozen Without Cryoprotectants Results in Live Offspring from Inbred and Hybrid Mouse Strains

Abstract Re-establishment of mouse strains used for mutagenesis and transgenesis has been hindered by difficulties in freezing sperm. The use of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) enables the production of embryos for the restoration of mouse lines using sperm with reduced quality. By using ICSI, simplified sperm-freezing methods such as snap freezing can be explored. We examined the capacity of embryos from the inbred C57Bl/6J and 129Sv/ImJ mouse strains, commonly used for transgenic and N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea mutagenesis purposes to develop to blastocysts in vitro and to term following ICSI with sperm frozen without cryoprotectant. The results were compared to F1 (C57BlxCBA) hybrid embryos. Following freezing, sperm were immotile but could fertilize oocytes at similar rates to fresh sperm. However, embryo development in vitro to the blastocyst stage was reduced in all three strains. No pups were born from C57Bl/6J or 129Sv/ImJ embryos obtained from frozen sperm following transfer to foster females, and only a limited number of F1 embryos developed to term. Activation of oocytes injected with frozen sperm with 1.7 mM Sr2+ (SrCl2) did result in the birth of pups in all three strains. We conclude that the inability of sperm frozen without cryoprotectants to effectively activate oocytes may affect embryo development to term and can be overcome by strontium activation. This may become an effective strategy for sperm preservation and the restoration of most popular strains used for genetic modifications.
The TCN professional practice survey: Part I: General practices of neuropsychologists in primary employment and private practice settings

Abstract The paper presents data obtained from 872 members of the Division of Clinical Neuropsychology (Division 40) of the American Psychological Association. Issues covered a range of professional and clinical practices in primary employment and private practice positions. A hospital-medical center was the primary employment setting of over one-third of the respondents. Another one-third was employed exclusively in a private practice office. Twenty-nine percent reported being in private practice in addition to primary institutional employment. On the whole, Division 40 members spent approximately one-half of their clinical time doing neuropsychological assessment, saw an average of nine patients per month for assessment, the majority of whom were adults. The average hourly charge for assessment was $100, average fixed rate for a neuropsychological evaluation was between $700 and $750, with an average time of approximately 6.5 hours per assessment. In personal injury referrals the plaintiff was represent.
Diversity analysis in collaborative clustering

The aim of collaborative clustering is to reveal the common structure of data which are distributed on different sites. The topological collaborative clustering, based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) is an unsupervised learning method which is able to use the output of other SOMs from other sites during the learning. This paper investigates the impact of the diversity between collaborators on the collaboration's quality and presents a study of different diversity indexes for collaborative clustering. Based on experiments on artificial and real datasets, we demonstrated that the quality and the diversity of the collaboration can have an important impact on the quality of the collaboration and that not all diversity indexes are relevant for this task.
Fall detection of elderly through floor vibrations and sound

Falls are very prevalent among the elderly especially in their home. The statistics show that approximately one in every three adults 65 years old or older falls each year. Almost 30% of those falls result in serious injuries. Studies have shown that the medical outcome of a fall is largely dependent upon the response and rescue time. Therefore, reliable and immediate fall detection system is important so that adequate medical support could be delivered. We have developed a unique and inexpensive solution that does not require subjects to wear anything. The solution is based on floor vibration and acoustic sensing, and uses a pattern recognition algorithm to discriminate between human or inanimate object fall events. Using the proposed system we can detect human falls with a sensitivity of 95% and specificity of 95%.
Personality Traits in Panic Disorder Patients With and Without Comorbidities

Abstract Panic disorder (PD) is often correlated with high neuroticism and low extraversion. This study aims to ascertain whether PD patients differ from healthy controls in regard to personality traits and determine if these traits are correlated with comorbid disorders, anxiety, and depression symptoms. Personality traits of 69 PD patients and 42 controls were compared using the Maudsley Personality Inventory. In PD patients, comorbidities, anxiety, and depression symptoms were also evaluated. PD patients showed higher neuroticism and lower extraversion compared with healthy controls. Patients without comorbidities presented similar results to controls, whereas those with comorbidities presented higher neuroticism and lower extraversion scores. PD per se may be unrelated to deviant personality traits, although comorbidities with major depressive disorder and agoraphobia are probably associated with high neuroticism and low extraversion. These traits show a strong correlation with the accumulation and severity of these disorders.
The Development of Commonsense Psychology

Contents: Preface. Introduction. Commonsense Psychology and the Organization of Social Behavior. The Developmental Approach. The Origins of Social Action in Early Infancy. From Social Interaction to Social Relationships. From Interest in Objects to Sharing Intentions. Social Behavior and Commonsense Psychology in the Second Year of Life: Self-Other Equivalence and Psychology Diversity. Language: Gateway to Childhood. Commonsense Psychology in the Preschool Years. The Self in Time. The Construction of Commonsense Psychology.
Tracheostomy Transfers: A Case Study in the Application of Formal Methods to Intra-hospital Patient Transfers

We review a generic framework for rigorous workflow modelling and verification that was recently applied to healthcare collaboration patterns, and we show how it can be utilised to help both medical staff and health informaticians build a systematic understanding of informal practices followed during intra-hospital patient transfers. A case study is discussed, demonstrating how the logical foundations of our approach help capture and enforce significant aspects of intra-hospital transfers that are pertinent to their improvement.
Web Mining: A Key to Improve Business on Web

ABSTRACT This paper takes an overview of the web mining concept and how it can be useful and beneficial to the business improvement by facilitating its applications in various areas over the internet. The contribution of this paper is towards the various areas containing web sites on internet, which can make best use of different web mining techniques to improve their business decisions based on the user behavior analysis which can ultimately help in improving the relevance of their web site to suit their user needs and adding value to their business growth. It also contributes about the factors responsible and governing the usage of web mining for the web sites to improve business intelligence. The need for techniques which would be able to classify, categories, cluster the web pages in such a way that the web page retrieval can be done in a optimum way and to reduce the burden on the user to keep on searching the required web page from the sea of the information. Web mining is helpful in making business decisions for further trends and patterns of user access of content of the web pages and customer behavior in an effective way. This paper discusses the major business areas which can be benefited by applying web mining techniques.
A digital simulator design for real-time and open-loop applications

This paper describes new design of a digital simulator for relay testing. The main simulator feature is its capability to operate in both real-time and open-loop modes. In the real-time mode, the modeling software used is the Real Time System (RTS) developed by Texas A&M University. In the open-loop mode, a standard Electromagnetic Transient Program (EMTP) is used. A common Graphical User Interface (GUI) is used for both operating modes. The main design features of the simulator are summarized in this paper.
Bidirectional structural priming across alternations: Evidence from the generation of dative and benefactive alternation structures in German

In two experiments, we investigated the primed generation of dative and benefactive alternation structures in German. As benefactive alternation structures differ from dative alternation structures in event semantics but are assumed to inherit some of their syntactic properties, the crucial question here is whether bidirectional cross-alternation priming can be found. Experiment 1 revealed priming of dative alternation structures by benefactive alternation structures whereas Experiment 2 is the first to our knowledge to show priming of benefactive alternation structures by dative alternation structures. We conclude that structural persistence neither hinges on lexical subcategorisation frames nor is it necessarily sensitive to semantic and syntactic differences associated with dative and benefactive alternation structures. However, the effects we found are compatible with both a phrase structural account and a proto-roles account of structural priming. Moreover, the new sentence generation paradigm we designed qualified as an appropriate method to investigate structural priming for nondepictable events.
Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Environmental Toxicants: Epigenetics as an Underlying Mechanism

The increasing prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders, especially autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), calls for more research into the identification of etiologic and risk factors. The Developmental Origin of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesizes that the environment during fetal and childhood development affects the risk for many chronic diseases in later stages of life, including neurodevelopmental disorders. Epigenetics, a term describing mechanisms that cause changes in the chromosome state without affecting DNA sequences, is suggested to be the underlying mechanism, according to the DOHaD hypothesis. Moreover, many neurodevelopmental disorders are also related to epigenetic abnormalities. Experimental and epidemiological studies suggest that exposure to prenatal environmental toxicants is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition, there is also evidence that environmental toxicants can result in epigenetic alterations, notably DNA methylation. In this review, we first focus on the relationship between neurodevelopmental disorders and environmental toxicants, in particular maternal smoking, plastic-derived chemicals (bisphenol A and phthalates), persistent organic pollutants, and heavy metals. We then review studies showing the epigenetic effects of those environmental factors in humans that may affect normal neurodevelopment.
Lazy functional state threads

Some algorithms make critical internal use of updatable state, even though their external specification is purely functional. Based on earlier work on monads, we present a way of securely encapsulating stateful computations that manipulate multiple, named, mutable objects, in the context of a non-strict, purely-functional language. The security of the encapsulation is assured by the type system, using parametricity. Intriguingly, this parametricity requires the provision of a (single) constant with a rank-2 polymorphic type.
Low-switching-voltage InGaAsP/InP waveguide interferometric modulator for integrated optics

An InGaAsP/InP electrooptic Mach-Zehnder modulator consisting of two 3-dB Y-branch couplers and phase modulation arms is fabricated by the metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy growth method. A schematic illustration and cross section of the interferometric modulator as well as the current-voltage characteristics of the arms are shown. The modulator is formed by a waveguide having almost the same cross-sectional configuration as a double-heterostructure laser diode. The switching voltage of 4.5 V applied to one arm of the modulator results in an excitation of about 7 dB. <<ETX>>