Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antibody Conjugates: From Heterogeneous Populations to Defined Reagents

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and their derivatives are currently the fastest growing class of therapeutics. Even if naked antibodies have proven their value as successful biopharmaceuticals, they suffer from some limitations. To overcome suboptimal therapeutic efficacy, immunoglobulins are conjugated with toxic payloads to form antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) and with chelating systems bearing therapeutic radioisotopes to form radioimmunoconjugates (RICs). Besides their therapeutic applications, antibody conjugates are also extensively used for many in vitro assays. A broad variety of methods to functionalize antibodies with various payloads are currently available. The decision as to which conjugation method to use strongly depends on the final purpose of the antibody conjugate. Classical conjugation via amino acid residues is still the most common method to produce antibody conjugates and is suitable for most in vitro applications. In recent years, however, it has become evident that antibody conjugates, which are generated via site-specific conjugation techniques, possess distinct advantages with regard to in vivo properties. Here, we give a comprehensive overview on existing and emerging strategies for the production of covalent and non-covalent antibody conjugates.
The impact of personality on compensatory health beliefs : does the theory of planned behavior play a mediating role?

Unhealthy drinking among young adolescents forms a major problem of today’s society. Various short- and long- term health risks have been reported. There are many strategies justifying a pleasurable, yet unhealthy behavior such as alcohol consumption; one of them are the employment of Compensatory Health Beliefs [CHBs] to reduce cognitive dissonance. CHBs are believes that a negative or unhealthy behavior can be compensated for by performing a healthy behavior. This study examined the relationship between neuroticism and conscientiousness and its combination and general and alcohol- related CHBs and a possible mediating effect of the Theory of Planned Behavior in a cross- sectional survey (n=216). Results showed that there was no direct effect of personality on CHBs and no mediating effect of the Theory of Planned Behavior either. Looking at the gender of the participants, female neurotic participants perceive more subjective norms. Further, female participants had a more positive attitude towards alcohol consumption, perceive more alcohol- specific CHBs and more subjective norms. Concerning the whole sample, conscientious participants perceived less subjective norms, participants consuming more alcohol in general, are likely to hold alcohol- specific CHBs and the more participants drink, the more negative their attitude towards alcohol is. Further research is needed at examining the precise role of personality and all constructs that may trigger the emergence of CHBs to develop suitable alcohol- interventions for people with particular risk traits.
Sexual dysfunction with the use of antidepressants in a tertiary care mental health setting – a retrospective case series

Sexual dysfunction affects patients’ quality of life. It can occur secondary to physical or mental disorders, substance abuse and treatment with prescription drugs like antidepressants. We wanted to study the prevalence of sexual dysfunction associated with antidepressant use in the psychiatric unit of a tertiary care hospital and assess for causality, severity and preventability. We did a retrospective data collection from case records of patients on antidepressants from the Psychiatry outpatient clinic of a tertiary care teaching hospital during the period 1st January 2006 to 31st December 2006, excluding those with complaints of sexual dysfunction prior to treatment. Data are presented as a case series. Documented adverse events were subjected to analysis for causality, severity and preventability using Naranjo's, modified Hartwig and Siegel and modified Schumock and Thornton's Preventability scales respectively. Out of 169 patients, four patients developed sexual dysfunction (2.36%) associated with duloxetine, mirtazapine, trazodone and sertraline. We observed a possible causal relationship of mild to moderately severe ADR (sexual dysfunction) which was not preventable. Prevalence of antidepressant associated sexual dysfunction was lower than quoted in Western literature probably due to the retrospective nature of our study design. Active monitoring and intervention can greatly improve the quality of life and compliance to treatment.
Usability Pattern Identification through Heuristic

Patterns are a popular means to document design knowledge in different fields of application, including HCI. Accordingly, a large number of different HCI pattern formats have been suggested. However, relatively little is said about how to systematically identify such patterns. In order to make the process of identifying patterns more transparent and comprehensible, I apply a usability inspection method to generate data that can be used as input for the systematic creation of usability patterns. This article describes the basic idea of identifying usability patterns through a series of heuristic walkthroughs and illustrates the approach by means of a case study in the field of “linguistic annotation tools”.
Effects of trospectomycin on serum sensitivity of Escherichia coli UC 9451

Trospectomycin sulfate, a chemically synthesized analog of spectinomycin, exhibits a broad range of activity against both aerobes and anaerobes, including the etiological agents of sexually transmitted diseases. Its activity in vitro against Escherichia coli is considered only moderate. At subinhibitory levels, however, trospectomycin induced changes in a pathogenic strain of E. coli, UC 9451, which significantly increased its sensitivity to serum lysis. This strain of E. coli shows high-level resistance to serum in vitro, typically growing twofold within a 45-min incubation period. Following exposure to one-fifth the MIC of trospectomycin, greater than 99% of the bacteria were killed in 25% serum within 15 min. Surviving bacteria were static in this level of serum for over 3 h. Killing was due to lysis mediated by both the classical and alternative complement pathways. The bacteria exposed to trospectomycin were enlarged in both diameter and length, but they still grew at rates comparable to those of untreated bacteria. No other visible morphological changes could be directly related to the increase in serum sensitivity. The profile of outer membrane proteins obtained by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis was identical for trospectomycin-treated or untreated bacteria. However, the relative proportion of four major outer membrane proteins varied considerably.
Gender Differences in Mathematics and Reading Trajectories among Children from Kindergarten to Eighth Grade

This study examined children's trajectories of mathematics and reading achievements from kindergarten to eighth grade along with the gender differences in these trajectories. A total of 8503 participants drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) formed the sample of the study. The results of the latent growth curve modeling indicate that (a) children's growth is curvilinear, specially, quadratic for both mathematics and reading achievement, and their growth in reading demonstrate a more complex pattern than that of mathematics; (b) there appear to be positive correlations between the intercept parameter (i.e. initial status) and the slope parameter (i.e. growth rate) in both reading and mathematics trajectories, indicating the ‘Matthew effects’ in education; (c) despite the statistically equivalent initial status in mathematics, boys outperform girls as early as first grade in both achievement score and positive growth rate; (d) for reading trajectories, girls outperform boys in both initial status and positive growth rate starting the baseline measurement. Finally, limitations and recommendations for future studies are discussed.
Adapting Slovak ASR for native Germans speaking Slovak

We explore variability involved in speech with a non-native accent. We first employ a combination of knowledge-based and data-driven approaches for the analysis of pronunciation variants between L1 (German) and target L2 (Slovak). Knowledge gained in this two-step process is then used in adapting acoustic models and the lexicon. We focus on modifications in the pronunciation dictionary and speech rate. Our results show that the recognition of German-accented Slovak is significantly improved with techniques modeling slow L2 speech, and that the adaptation of the pronunciation dictionary yields only insignificant gains.
Real-time distributed malicious traffic monitoring for honeypots and network telescopes

Network telescopes and honeypots have been used with great success to record malicious network traffic for analysis, however, this is often done off-line well after the traffic was observed. This has left us with only a cursory understanding of malicious hosts and no knowledge of the software they run, uptime or other malicious activity they may have participated in. This work covers a messaging framework (rDSN) that was developed to allow for the real-time analysis of malicious traffic. This data was captured from multiple, distributed honeypots and network telescopes. Data was collected over a period of two months from these data sensors. Using this data new techniques for malicious host analysis and re-identification in dynamic IP address space were explored. An Automated Reconnaissance (AR) Framework was developed to aid the process of data collection, this framework was responsible for gathering information from malicious hosts through both passive and active fingerprinting techniques. From the analysis of this data; correlations between malicious hosts were identified based on characteristics such as Operating System, targeted service, location and services running on the malicious hosts. An initial investigation in Latency Based Multilateration (LBM), a novel technique to assist in host re-identification was tested and proved successful as a supporting metric for host re-identification.
Cross-Domain Multi-Event Tracking via CO-PMHT

With the massive growth of events on the Internet, efficient organization and monitoring of events becomes a practical challenge. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel CO-PMHT (CO-Probabilistic Multi-Hypothesis Tracking) algorithm for cross-domain multi-event tracking to obtain their informative summary details and evolutionary trends over time. We collect a large-scale dataset by searching keywords on two domains (Gooogle News and Flickr) and downloading both images and textual content for an event. Given the input data, our algorithm can track multiple events in the two domains collaboratively and boost the tracking performance. Specifically, the bridge between two domains is a semantic posterior probability, that avoids the domain gap. After tracking, we can visualize the whole evolutionary process of the event over time and mine the semantic topics of each event for deep understanding and event prediction. The extensive experimental evaluations on the collected dataset well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for cross-domain multi-event tracking.
Senbazuru: A Prototype Spreadsheet Database Management System

Spreadsheets have become a critical data management tool, but they lack explicit relational metadata, making it difficult to join or integrate data across multiple spreadsheets. Because spreadsheet data are widely available on a huge range of topics, a tool that allows easy spreadsheet integration would be hugely beneficial for a variety of users. We demonstrate that Senbazuru, a prototype spreadsheet database management system (SSDBMS), is able to extract relational information from spreadsheets. By doing so, it opens up opportunities for integration among spreadsheets and with other relational sources. Senbazuru allows users to search for relevant spreadsheets in a large corpus, probabilistically constructs a relational version of the data, and offers several relational operations over the resulting extracted data (including joins to other spreadsheet data). Our demonstration is available on two clients: a JavaScript-rich Web site and a touch interface on the iPad. During the demo, Senbazuru will allow VLDB participants to search spreadsheets, extract relational data from them, and apply relational operators such as select and join.
The impact of paying treatment providers for outcomes: difference-in-differences analysis of the 'payment by results for drugs recovery' pilot.

AIMS To estimate the effect on drug misuse treatment completion of a pilot scheme to pay service providers according to rates of recovery. DESIGN A controlled, quasi-experimental (difference-in-differences) observational study using multi-level random effects logistic regression. SETTING Drug misuse treatment providers in all 149 commissioning areas in England in the financial years 2011-12 and 2012-13. PARTICIPANTS Service users treated in England in 2011-12 and 2012-13. INTERVENTION AND COMPARATORS Linkage of provider payments to performance indicators in eight pilot commissioning areas in England compared with all 141 non-pilot commissioning areas in England. MEASUREMENTS Recovery was measured by successful completion of treatment (free from drugs of dependence) and engagement with services was measured by rates of declining to continue with treatment. FINDINGS Following the introduction of the pilot scheme, service users treated in pilot areas were 1.3 percentage points [odds ratio (OR) = 0.859; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.788, 0.937] less likely to complete treatment compared with those treated in comparison areas. Service users treated in pilot areas were 0.9 percentage points (OR = 2.934; 95% CI = 2.094, 4.113) more likely to decline to continue with treatment compared with those treated in comparison areas. CONCLUSIONS In the first year of the pilot 'Payment by Results for Drugs Recovery' scheme in England, linking payments to outcomes reduced the probability of completing drug misuse treatment and increased the proportion service users declining to continue with treatment.
Dietary patterns of young adolescents in urban areas of northeast Brazil.

BACKGROUND Temporal trends in dietary patterns reveal associations between food consumption and increased prevalence of non-communicable chronic disease. OBJECTIVES This study characterized dietary patterns in adolescents in urban area located in northeast of Brazil, relating it to the markers of a healthy diet. METHODS A cross-sectional study used two 24-hour recalls to assess dietary intake in 430 public school students from Natal-RN, Brazil. Principal component analysis was used to derive dietary patterns according to consumption of food based on weight (grams), energy (Kcal), or fiber (grams). The analysis results yielded 3 distinct principal components: 7, 8, and 4 (cumulative variance >70%; factor loadings >0.4). The association between independent variables and the factor scores of all components obtained was determined by the Prevalence Ratio (CI 95%). RESULTS The dietary patterns derived were: (1) Pure Traditional Food System, the highly representative pattern in young adolescents and the first component of the analytical models, (2) Combined and Risk Food System; extraction of total food weight and energy revealed markers of unhealthy diets based on high sugar, saturated fat, and salt consumption, and (3) Modified Traditional Food System represented by fiber; pattern 1 was observed within this model too. The associations observed, predominantly from the TFSm pattern, distinguished by sex, age and nutritional status. CONCLUSIONS Patterns 1 and 3 are characterized by preserved regional food practices that prevent chronic disease, whereas pattern 2 is characterized by health risks. These inter-sectorial findings should be considered in the development of health care policies for children and adolescents.
The Use of Genomics in Clinical Trial Design

Many cancer treatments benefit only a minority of patients who receive them. This results in an enormous burden on patients and on the health care system. The problem will become even greater with the increasing use of molecularly targeted agents whose benefits are likely to be more selective unless the drug development process is modified to include codevelopment of companion diagnostics. Whole genome biotechnology and decreasing costs of genome sequencing make it increasingly possible to achieve an era of predictive medicine in oncology therapeutics. The challenges are numerous and substantial but are not primarily technological. They involve organizing publicly funded diagnostics of deregulated pathways, adopting new paradigms for drug development, and developing incentives for industry to incur the complexity and expense of codevelopment of drugs and companion diagnostics. This article reviews some designs for phase III clinical trials that may facilitate movement to a more predictive oncology.
Mutual Information Based Matching for Causal Inference with Observational Data

This paper presents an information theory-driven matching methodology for making causal inference from observational data. The paper adopts a "potential outcomes framework" view on evaluating the strength of cause-effect relationships: the population-wide average effects of binary treatments are estimated by comparing two groups of units - the treated and untreated (control). To reduce the bias in such treatment effect estimation, one has to compose a control group in such a way that across the compared groups of units, treatment is independent of the units' covariates. This requirement gives rise to a subset selection / matching problem. This paper presents the models and algorithms that solve the matching problem by minimizing the mutual information (MI) between the covariates and the treatment variable. Such a formulation becomes tractable thanks to the derived optimality conditions that tackle the non-linearity of the sample-based MI function. Computational experiments with mixed integer-programming formulations and four matching algorithms demonstrate the utility of MI based matching for causal inference studies. The algorithmic developments culminate in a matching heuristic that allows for balancing the compared groups in polynomial (close to linear) time, thus allowing for treatment effect estimation with large data sets.
Pseudo-oracles for non-testable programs

The most commonly used method of validating a program is by testing. The programmer typically runs the program on some test cases, and if and when they run correctly, the program is considered to be correct. We know that many difficult problems are associated with testing. One such problem is that it is a fundamental part of the testing process to require the ability to infer properties of a program by observing the program's behavior on selected inputs. The most common property that one hopes to infer through testing is correctness. But unless the program is run on the entire input domain, there are infinitely many programs which produce the correct output on the selected inputs, but produce incorrect output for some other element of the domain.
Design of Totally Self-Checking Sequential Circuits

Methods of designing of Totally Self Checking Sequen- tial Machines are presented in this paper. The main problem in TSC sequential machines (TSC SM) designing is synthesis TSC functional excitation circuit. Formal condition of self testing (ST) property for AND-OR structures are given. New method of circuit minimization is presented and ST of minimized circuits is proofed. We also present a methodology of designing of TSC SM. Owing to our methods we can design TSC circuits in a fully automatic way.
Template Matching Method Based on Visual Feature Constraint and Structure Constraint

Template matching for image sequences captured with a moving camera is very important for several applications such as Robot Vision, SLAM, ITS, and video surveillance systems. However, it is difficult to realize accurate template matching using only visual feature information such as HSV histograms, edge histograms, HOG histograms, and SIFT features, because it is affected by several phenomena such as illumination change, viewpoint change, size change, and noise. In order to realize robust tracking, structure information such as the relative position of each part of the object should be considered. In this paper, we propose a method that considers both visual feature information and structure information. Experiments show that the proposed method realizes robust tracking and determine the relationships between object parts in the scenes and those in the template. key words: template matching, visual feature constraint, structure constraint, linear assignment, genetic algorithm
Erythropoiesis and Blood Pressure Are Regulated via AT1 Receptor by Distinctive Pathways

The renin–angiotensin system (RAS) plays a central role in blood pressure regulation. Although clinical and experimental studies have suggested that inhibition of RAS is associated with progression of anemia, little evidence is available to support this claim. Here we report that knockout mice that lack angiotensin II, including angiotensinogen and renin knockout mice, exhibit anemia. The anemia of angiotensinogen knockout mice was rescued by angiotensin II infusion, and rescue was completely blocked by simultaneous administration of AT1 receptor blocker. To genetically determine the responsible receptor subtype, we examined AT1a, AT1b, and AT2 knockout mice, but did not observe anemia in any of them. To investigate whether pharmacological AT1 receptor inhibition recapitulates the anemic phenotype, we administered AT1 receptor antagonist in hypotensive AT1a receptor knockout mice to inhibit the remaining AT1b receptor. In these animals, hematocrit levels barely decreased, but blood pressure further decreased to the level observed in angiotensinogen knockout mice. We then generated AT1a and AT1b double-knockout mice to completely ablate the AT1 receptors; the mice finally exhibited the anemic phenotype. These results provide clear evidence that although erythropoiesis and blood pressure are negatively controlled through the AT1 receptor inhibition in vivo, the pathways involved are complex and distinct, because erythropoiesis is more resistant to AT1 receptor inhibition than blood pressure control.