Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Associations of fatty acids with cognition, psychopathology, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels in patients with first-episode schizophrenia and related disorders treated with paliperidone extended release

This study assessed fatty acid and brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels in patients with first-episode schizophrenia and related disorders. The levels of erythrocyte fatty acids and plasma brain-derived neurotrophic factor were measured at baseline and week 8 after treatment with paliperidone extended release. Cognitive function was evaluated using the Cognitive Assessment Interview and the cognition subscale of the Neuroleptic-Induced Deficit Syndrome Scale. There were significant decreases in stearic acid and nervonic acid levels and a significant increase in eicosapentaenoic acid levels after eight weeks. At week 8, cognition was positively associated with dihomo-γ-linolenic acid, linoleic acid, and eicosapentaenoic acid levels, and negatively associated with nervonic acid levels. Psychopathology was positively correlated with polyunsaturated fatty acid levels, and negatively correlated with saturated fatty acid levels at week 8. At both baseline and week 8, brain-derived neurotrophic factor level had a negative association with polyunsaturated fatty acids and a positive association with saturated fatty acids and monounsaturated fatty acids. The present study demonstrated that fatty acids have significant associations with cognition and psychopathology at week 8, and with brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels at both baseline and week 8.
Novel three-dimensional long-term bone marrow culture system using polymer particles with grafted epoxy-polymer-chains supports the proliferation and differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells

Hematopoiesis occurs in the bone marrow, where primitive hematopoietic cells proliferate and differentiate in close association with a three-dimensional (3D) hematopoietic microenvironment composed of stromal cells. We examined the hematopoietic supportive ability of stromal cells in a 3D culture system using polymer particles with grafted epoxy polymer chains. Umbilical cord blood-derived CD34+ cells were co-cultivated with MS-5 stromal cells. They formed a 3D structure in the culture dish in the presence of particles, and the total numbers of cells and the numbers of hematopoietic progenitor cells, including colony-forming unit (CFU)-Mix, CFU-granulocyte-macrophage, CFU-megakaryocyte and burst-forming unit-erythroid, were measured every seven days. The hematopoietic supportive activity of the 3D culture containing polymer particles and stromal cells was superior to that of 2D culture, and allowed the expansion and maintenance of hematopoietic progenitor cells for more than 12 weeks. Various types of hematopoietic cells, including granulocytes, macrophages and megakaryocytes at different maturation stages, appeared in the 3D culture, suggesting that the CD34+ cells were able to differentiate into a range of blood cell types. Morphological examination showed that MS-5 stromal cells grew on the surface of the particles and bridged the gaps between them to form a 3D structure. Hematopoietic cells slipped into the 3D layer and proliferated within it, relying on the presence of the MS-5 cells. These results suggest that this 3D culture system using polymer particles reproduced the hematopoietic phenomenon in vitro, and might thus provide a new tool for investigating hematopoietic stem cell–stromal cell interactions.
An ECG-on-Chip for Wearable Cardiac Monitoring Devices

This paper describes a highly integrated, low power chip solution for ECG signal processing in wearable devices. The chip contains an instrumentation amplifier with programmable gain, a band-pass filter, a 12-bit SAR ADC, a novel QRS detector, 8K on-chip SRAM, and relevant control circuitry and CPU interfaces. The analog front end circuits accurately senses and digitizes the raw ECG signal, which is then filtered to extract the QRS. The sampling frequency used is 256 Hz. ECG samples are buffered locally on an asynchronous FIFO and is read out using a faster clock, as and when it is required by the host CPU via an SPI interface. The chip was designed and implemented in 0. 35µm standard CMOS process. The analog core operates at 1V while the digital circuits and SRAM operate at 3.3V. The chip total core area is 5.74 mm2 and consumes 9. 6µW. Small size and low power consumption make this design suitable for usage in wearable heart monitoring devices.
Heart rates and diving behavior of leatherback sea turtles in the eastern pacific ocean

Heart rates and diving behavior of leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) were monitored at sea during the internesting interval. Instruments that recorded the electrocardiogram and the depth and duration of dives were deployed on six female leatherback turtles as they laid eggs at Playa Grande, Costa Rica. Turtles dived continually for the majority of the internesting interval and spent 57-68 % of the time at sea submerged. Mean dive depth was 19+/-1 m (mean +/- s.d.) and the mean dive duration was 7.4+/-0.6 min. Heart rate declined immediately upon submergence and continued to fall during descent. All turtles showed an increase in heart rate before surfacing. The mean heart rate during dives of 17.4+/-0.9 beats min-1 (mean +/- s.d.) was significantly lower than the mean heart rate at the surface of 24.9+/-1.3 beats min-1 (P<0.05). Instantaneous heart rates as low as 1.05 beats min-1 were recorded during a 34 min dive. The mean heart rate over the entire dive cycle (dive + succeeding surface interval; 19.4+/-1.3 beats min-1) was more similar to the heart rate during diving than to the heart rate at the surface. Although dive and surface heart rates were significantly different from each other, heart rates during diving were 70 % of heart rates at the surface, showing that leatherback turtles do not experience a dramatic bradycardia during routine diving.
Up‐regulation of IL‐8 secretion by alveolar macrophages from patients with fibrosing alveolitis: a subpopulation analysis

Neutrophil accumulation in the lower respiratory tract of patients with fibrosing alveolitis is thought to be facilitated by IL‐8, a neutrophil chemoattractant primarily secreted by mononuclear phagocytes. The aims of this study were: (i) to explore IL‐8 secretion by lung and blood mononuclear phagocytes in subjects with cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis, systemic sclerosis with and without fibrosing alveolitis, sarcoidosis and normal individuals; (ii) to examine IL‐8 secretory heterogeneity in alveolar macrophages and peripheral blood monocytes; and (iii) to correlate alveolar macrophage phenotypic profile to IL‐8 secretion. We observed that more monocytes secreted IL‐8 than autologous macrophages and that there was heterogeneity in the in vitro IL‐8 secretion by alveolar macrophages and peripheral blood monocytes. IL‐8 secretion by alveolar macrophages was significantly higher in subjects with fibrosing alveolitis compared with subjects without fibrosing alveolitis, due to a higher percentage of IL‐8‐secreting alveolar macrophages in the fibrotic group both in the absence (P<0.002) and presence of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) (P<0.04) and correlated with bronchoalveolar lavage neutrophil percentage. Using the MoAbs RFD1, RFD7 and RFD9, that distinguish subsets of alveolar macrophages, we have been able to identify associations between secretion of IL‐8 and smaller cells and the cells identified by the MoAb RFD7. In situ hybridization of the bronchoalveolar lavage cell population revealed that alveolar macrophages are the predominant source of IL‐8 in the lung. We conclude that there is an increased number of IL‐8‐secreting alveolar macrophages in the lungs of patients with fibrosing alveolitis, and IL‐8 secretion by these cells is associated with specific phenotypic profile expression.
Stochastic modeling of traffic flow breakdown phenomenon: Application to predicting travel time reliability

This paper presents a modeling approach to generate random flow breakdowns on congested freeways and capture the subsequent wave propagation among heterogeneous drivers. The approach is intended for predicting travel time variability caused by such stochastic phenomena. It is assumed that breakdown may occur at different flow levels with some probability, and would sustain for a random duration. This is modeled at the microscopic level by considering speed changes that are initiated by a leading vehicle and propagated by the following vehicles with correlated-distributed behavioral parameters. Numerical results from a Monte Carlo simulation demonstrate that the proposed stochastic modeling approach produces realistic macroscopic traffic flow behavior and can be used to generate travel time distributions.
Pathogenesis of cerebral malaria: new diagnostic tools, biomarkers, and therapeutic approaches

Cerebral malaria is a severe neuropathological complication of Plasmodium falciparum infection. It results in high mortality and post-recovery neuro-cognitive disorders in children, even after appropriate treatment with effective anti-parasitic drugs. While the complete landscape of the pathogenesis of cerebral malaria still remains to be elucidated, numerous innovative approaches have been developed in recent years in order to improve the early detection of this neurological syndrome and, subsequently, the clinical care of affected patients. In this review, we briefly summarize the current understanding of cerebral malaria pathogenesis, compile the array of new biomarkers and tools available for diagnosis and research, and describe the emerging therapeutic approaches to tackle this pathology effectively.
A new convex edge-preserving median prior with applications to tomography

In a Bayesian tomographic maximum a posteriori (MAP) reconstruction, an estimate of the object f is computed by iteratively minimizing an objective function that typically comprises the sum of a log-likelihood (data consistency) term and prior (or penalty) term. The prior can be used to stabilize the solution and to also impose spatial properties on the solution. One such property, preservation of edges and locally monotonic regions, is captured by the well-known median root prior (MRP), an empirical method that has been applied to emission and transmission tomography. We propose an entirely new class of convex priors that depends on f and also on m, an auxiliary field in register with f. We specialize this class to our median prior (MP). The approximate action of the median prior is to draw, at each iteration, an object voxel toward its own local median. This action is similar to that of MRP and results in solutions that impose the same sorts of object properties as does MRP. Our MAP method is not empirical, since the problem is stated completely as the minimization of a joint (on f and m) objective. We propose an alternating algorithm to compute the joint MAP solution and apply this to emission tomography, showing that the reconstructions are qualitatively similar to those obtained using MRP.
Rapid innovation in ChIP-seq peak-calling algorithms is outdistancing benchmarking efforts

The current understanding of the regulation of transcription does not keep the pace with the spectacular advances in the determination of genomic sequences. Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by massively parallel sequencing (ChIP-seq) promises to give better insight into transcription regulation by locating sites of protein-DNA interactions. Such loci of putative interactions can be inferred from the genome-wide distributions of ChIP-seq data by peak-calling software. The analysis of ChIP-seq data critically depends on this step and a multitude of these peak-callers have been deployed in the recent years. A recent study reported severe variation among peak-calling results. Yet, peak-calling still lacks systematic quantitative benchmarking. Here, we summarize benchmarking efforts and explain potential drawbacks of each benchmarking method.
Patches, Planes and Probabilities: A Non-Local Prior for Volumetric 3D Reconstruction

In this paper, we propose a non-local structured prior for volumetric multi-view 3D reconstruction. Towards this goal, we present a novel Markov random field model based on ray potentials in which assumptions about large 3D surface patches such as planarity or Manhattan world constraints can be efficiently encoded as probabilistic priors. We further derive an inference algorithm that reasons jointly about voxels, pixels and image segments, and estimates marginal distributions of appearance, occupancy, depth, normals and planarity. Key to tractable inference is a novel hybrid representation that spans both voxel and pixel space and that integrates non-local information from 2D image segmentations in a principled way. We compare our non-local prior to commonly employed local smoothness assumptions and a variety of state-of-the-art volumetric reconstruction baselines on challenging outdoor scenes with textureless and reflective surfaces. Our experiments indicate that regularizing over larger distances has the potential to resolve ambiguities where local regularizers fail.
Improving Task Switching Interfaces

Most interfaces for switching between tasks require slow, visual searches of candidates, where each candidate must be scanned in turn. We developed a logging tool for task switching actions and undertook a log-based study with eleven participants to empirically characterise task-switching behaviour, finding Zipfian distributions for window and application switching, and significant differences in interface use between single and dual monitor users. We then used this data to assist in designing a new interface (Spatially COnsistent Thumbnail Zones or SCOTZ) to allow rapid task-switching performance by utilising spatial memory. In a formal evaluation against three mainstream interfaces under four workspace conditions, SCOTZ attained the lowest mean times for all conditions and scaled better with workspace load, obtaining a significant difference under high workspace load. We conclude with a recommendation for using SCOTZ at all workspace loads, and suggest it be implemented and tested in a real-world environment.
Multi-perspective GNSS-based passive BSAR: Preliminary experimental results

This paper presents preliminary experimental results on passive bistatic SAR imagery acquired at multiple bistatic geometries. Images were obtained using a Space-Surface bistatic SAR topology, with navigation satellites as transmitters of opportunity and a fixed receiver. Details of the experimental program are given and the obtained bistatic images are presented and analyzed. It is demonstrated that diverse scattering effects can be seen for the same scene objects, when viewed from different angles. Such information could potentially be used to increase the amount of information for a given scene.
Key-concept extraction from French articles with KX

We present an adaptation for the French text mining challenge (DEFT 2012) of the KX system for multilingual unsupervised key-concept extraction. KX carries out the selection of a list of weighted keywords from a document by combining basic linguistic annotations with simple statistical measures. In order to adapt it to the French language, a French morphological analyzer (PoS-Tagger) has been added into the extraction pipeline, to derive lexical patterns. Moreover, parameters such as frequency thresholds for collocation extraction and indicators for key-concepts relevance have been calculated and set on the training documents. In the DEFT 2012 tasks, KX achieved good results (i.e. 0.27 F1 for Task 1 with terminological list, and 0.19 F1 for Task 2) with a limited additional effort for domain and language adaptation. MOTS-CLES : Extraction de mots-cles, patrons linguistiques, terminologie.
An exploration of teacher-pupil communication, narrative thinking and learning

This thesis reports some of the complex issues encountered, researched and addressed in the context of participatory, practitioner action research to support student learning in educational settings. Research methods were devised in response to genuine school-based situations working with colleagues within communities of practice. The focus is the interplay between teachers’ communicative competence and teaching styles and students’ communicative competence and learning abilities. A series of four linked studies are reported which involved several hundred participants from pre-school to adult in a range of socio-economic and cultural settings, using mixed methods including interviews, observations and a comparative study. Improvements are reported in the cognitive-linguistic ability of students in relation to their narrative abilities following interventions conducted in classroom settings. The interventions involved support for narrative thinking and communication skills based around exploratory talk. The results suggest a positive relationship between students’ communicative and narrative competences and the potential for effective academic learning. Nursery school observations and interviews in Japan revealed informed and effective educational and cultural support for young children’s narrative competence and Japanese participants’ comparatively advanced development in narrative thinking. The results of the studies suggest that teachers’ classroom interactions involving exploratory talk serve to support and help improve students’ narrative competence and inner speech to support formal academic learning. The findings are discussed in terms of pedagogical knowledge, school culture and the UK educational climate.
The Relationship Between the Accumulated Number of Role Transitions and Hard Drug Use among Hispanic Emerging Adults

Abstract Emerging adults (ages 18 to 25) who experience multiple role transitions in a short period of time may engage in hard drug use as a maladaptive coping strategy to avoid negative emotions from stress. Given the collectivistic values Hispanics encounter growing up, they may experience additional role transitions due to their group-oriented cultural paradigm. This study examined whether those who experience many role transitions are at greater risk for hard drug use compared to those who experience few transitions among Hispanic emerging adults. Participants completed surveys indicating their hard drug use in emerging adulthood, role transitions in the past year of emerging adulthood, age, gender, and hard drug use in high school. Simulation analyses indicated that an increase in the number of role transitions, from 0 to 13, was associated with a 14% (95% CI, 4 to 29) higher probability of hard drug use. Specific role transitions were found to be associated with hard drug use, such as starting to date or experiencing a breakup. Intervention/prevention programs may benefit from acknowledging individual reactions to transitions in emerging adulthood, as these processes may be catalysts for personal growth where identities are consolidated and decisions regarding hard drug use are formed.
Genomic Basis of a Polyagglutinating Isolate of Neisseria meningitidis

ABSTRACT Containment strategies for outbreaks of invasive Neisseria meningitidis disease are informed by serogroup assays that characterize the polysaccharide capsule. We sought to uncover the genomic basis of conflicting serogroup assay results for an isolate (M16917) from a patient with acute meningococcal disease. To this end, we characterized the complete genome sequence of the M16917 isolate and performed a variety of comparative sequence analyses against N. meningitidis reference genome sequences of known serogroups. Multilocus sequence typing and whole-genome sequence comparison revealed that M16917 is a member of the ST-11 sequence group, which is most often associated with serogroup C. However, sequence similarity comparisons and phylogenetic analysis showed that the serogroup diagnostic capsule polymerase gene (synD) of M16917 belongs to serogroup B. These results suggest that a capsule-switching event occurred based on homologous recombination at or around the capsule locus of M16917. Detailed analysis of this locus uncovered the locations of recombination breakpoints in the M16917 genome sequence, which led to the introduction of an ∼2-kb serogroup B sequence cassette into the serogroup C genomic background. Since there is no currently available vaccine for serogroup B strains of N. meningitidis, this kind capsule-switching event could have public health relevance as a vaccine escape mutant.
Reestruturação curricular e auto-intensificação do trabalho docente

In this article we discuss the impacts of the neoliberal educational and curricular restructuring that have affected the fabrication of teachers’ identity and, mainly, intensified the teaching work. These impacts bring modifications into the educational labor process in terms of more or less pedagogical control, more or less autonomy of teachers over their making and thinking and increase the intensification of teachers' work as well. These processes also directly affect the curricular practices. As part of this, new educational requirements are demanded from teachers and schools: the principles of competence and the management models of evaluation are some of them. Finally, we think that these changes not only have interfered in the bodies, but also, and maybe mainly, in the emotional of the teachers, making them internalize the process of intensification, turning it into a process of self-intensification. The concept of biopower allows us to understand the intensification of teaching work as a production of identities that produces effects over teachers in a process of production of themselves
Nanopharmaceuticals (part 2): products in the pipeline

In part I of this review we assessed nanoscience-related definitions as applied to pharmaceuticals and we discussed all 43 currently approved drug formulations, which are widely publicized as nanopharmaceuticals or nanomedicines. In continuation, here we review the currently ongoing clinical trials within the broad field of nanomedicine. Confining the definition of nanopharmaceuticals to therapeutic formulations, in which the unique physicochemical properties expressed in the nanosize range, when man-made, play the pivotal therapeutic role, we found an apparently low number of trials, which reflects neither the massive investments made in the field of nanomedicine nor the general hype associated with the term “nano. ” Moreover, after an extensive search for information through clinical trials, we found only two clinical trials with materials that show unique nano-based properties, ie, properties that are displayed neither on the atomic nor on the bulk material level.
A Novel Method for Video Shot Similarity Measures

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to determine the similarity between video shots. A video shot is treated as an ensemble that consists of multiple video key frames, so the shot similarity can be measured by the ensemble similarity. Based on nonlinear mapping, the original space is mapped to a high dimension space where the ensemble distribution can be supposed as normal distribution. Kernel method is adapted to compute the probability distance that is equivalent to the ensemble similarity. Thus, the shot similarity is also obtained. Experimental results show that this method may achieve superior performance than the traditional methods based on Euclidean distance and histogram intersection methods
Projective Texture Mapping with Full Panorama

Projective texture mapping is used to project a texture map onto scene geometry. It has been used in many applications, since it eliminates the assignment of fixed texture coordinates and provides a good method of representing synthetic images or photographs in image‐based rendering. But conventional projective texture mapping has limitations in the field of view and the degree of navigation because only simple rectangular texture maps can be used.