Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Communities First (ComFi) study: protocol for a prospective controlled quasi-experimental study to evaluate the impact of area-wide regeneration on mental health and social cohesion in deprived communities

Introduction Recent systematic reviews have highlighted the dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of regeneration on health and health inequalities. ‘Communities First’ is an area-wide regeneration scheme to improve the lives of people living in the most deprived areas in Wales (UK). This study will evaluate the impact of Communities First on residents’ mental health and social cohesion. Methods and analysis A prospective controlled quasi-experimental study of the association between residence in Communities First regeneration areas in Caerphilly county borough and change in mental health and social cohesion. The study population is the 4226 residents aged 18–74 years who responded to the Caerphilly Health and Social Needs Study in 2001 (before delivery) and 2008 (after delivery of Communities First). Data on the location, type and cost of Communities First interventions will be extracted from records collected by Caerphilly county borough council. The primary outcome is the change in mental health between 2001 and 2008. Secondary outcomes are changes: in common mental disorder case status (using survey and general practice data), social cohesion and mental health inequalities. Multilevel models will examine change in mental health and social cohesion between Communities First and control areas, adjusting for individual and household level confounding factors. Further models will examine the effects of (1) different types of intervention, (2) contamination across areas, (3) length of residence in a Communities First area, and (4) population migration. We will carry out a cost-consequences analysis to summarise the outcomes generated for participants, as well as service utilisation and utility gains. Ethics and dissemination This study has had approval from the Information Governance Review Panel at Swansea University (Ref: 0266 CF). Findings will be disseminated through peer-review publications, international conferences, policy and practice partners in local and national government, and updates on our study website (http://medicine.cardiff.ac.uk/clinical-study/communities-first-regeneration-programme/).
Antitumor efficacy of arsenic/interferon in preclinical models of chronic myeloid leukemia resistant to tyrosine kinase inhibitors

Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are the standard treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Despite their clinical success, TKIs are faced with challenges such as treatment resistance, which may be driven by kinase domain mutations, and frequent disease relapse upon the cessation of treatment. The combination of arsenic trioxide (ATO) and interferon‐α (IFN) was previously demonstrated to inhibit proliferation and induce apoptosis in CML cell lines, prolong the survival of primary wild‐type CML mice, and dramatically decrease the activity of leukemia‐initiating cells (LICs).
Permeability Properties of Enac Selectivity Filter Mutants

The epithelial Na+ channel (ENaC), located in the apical membrane of tight epithelia, allows vectorial Na+ absorption. The amiloride-sensitive ENaC is highly selective for Na+ and Li+ ions. There is growing evidence that the short stretch of amino acid residues (preM2) preceding the putative second transmembrane domain M2 forms the outer channel pore with the amiloride binding site and the narrow ion-selective region of the pore. We have shown previously that mutations of the αS589 residue in the preM2 segment change the ion selectivity, making the channel permeant to K+ ions. To understand the molecular basis of this important change in ionic selectivity, we have substituted αS589 with amino acids of different sizes and physicochemical properties. Here, we show that the molecular cutoff of the channel pore for inorganic and organic cations increases with the size of the amino acid residue at position α589, indicating that αS589 mutations enlarge the pore at the selectivity filter. Mutants with an increased permeability to large cations show a decrease in the ENaC unitary conductance of small cations such as Na+ and Li+. These findings demonstrate the critical role of the pore size at the αS589 residue for the selectivity properties of ENaC. Our data are consistent with the main chain carbonyl oxygens of the αS589 residues lining the channel pore at the selectivity filter with their side chain pointing away from the pore lumen. We propose that the αS589 side chain is oriented toward the subunit–subunit interface and that substitution of αS589 by larger residues increases the pore diameter by adding extra volume at the subunit–subunit interface.
Heuristic and metaheuristic methods for computing graph treewidth

The notion of treewidth is of considerable interest in relation to NP-hard problems. Indeed, several studies have shown that the tree-decomposition method can be used to solve many basic optimization problems in polynomial time when treewidth is bounded, even if, for arbitrary graphs, computing the treewidth is NP-hard. Several papers present heuristics with computational experiments. For many graphs the discrepancy between the heuristic results and the best lower bounds is still very large. The aim of this paper is to propose two new methods for computing the treewidth of graphs: a heuristic and a metaheuristic. The heuristic returns good results in a short computation time, whereas the metaheuristic (a Tabu search method) returns the best results known to have been obtained so far for all the DIMACS vertex coloring / treewidth benchmarks (a well-known collection of graphs used for both vertex coloring and treewidth problems.) Our results actually improve on the previous best results for treewidth problems in 53% of the cases. Moreover, we identify properties of the triangulation process to optimize the computing time of our method.
Daily left prefrontal repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for acute treatment of medication-resistant depression.

Daily left prefrontal transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over several weeks was first proposed as a treatment for depression in 1993, with double-blind study beginning in 1997. TMS for the treatment of depression was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October 2008 (1). More recently, a large trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health using an innovative sham treatment technique found that a course of active treatment for 3–5 weeks was superior to sham treatment (remission rates were 15% in the active treatment group and 5% in the sham treatment group) and achieved a 30% remission rate in the open-label extension. These findings led to the implementation of the first new Current Procedural Terminology codes for psychiatry since the American Medical Association launched the system in 1966. In the vignette we describe the case of a 55-year-old woman with treatment-resistant recurrent unipolar depression who was successfully treated with repetitive TMS (rTMS) in each of two episodes 3 years apart. Numerous questions remain on the use of TMS for depression, several of which are raised by the case description. They include how to most effectively deliver rTMS—for example, the appropriate scalp location, the optimal “dose” (frequency, train, number of stimuli per day, and pattern of delivery), its use in combination with medications or talking/exposure therapy, and whether one can use maintenance rTMS to prevent relapse after a patient achieves remission. Daily left prefrontal rTMS reflects a paradigm shift in psychiatry in that it uses noninvasive and nonconvulsive circuitbased physiological processes to treat depression in patients who have not responded to medications or who cannot tolerate them.
First evaluation of real-time nitric oxide changes in the coronary circulation in patients with non-ischaemic dilated cardiomyopathy using a catheter-type sensor

Aims No direct method has yet been developed to measure real-time plasma nitric oxide (NO) concentration in humans. In this study, we evaluated a new method for measuring plasma NO concentration in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and in normal controls using a catheter-type sensor. Methods and results We simultaneously measured average peak velocity (APV) of the coronary artery flow and change in plasma NO concentration using the NO sensor placed in the great cardiac vein of 10 DCM patients and 10 control subjects. These evaluations were performed in response to sequential intracoronary infusions of acetylcholine (ACh, 10−8–10−6 M), NG-monomethyl-l-arginine (l-NMMA, 200 µmol) and co-infusion of ACh and l-NMMA. The change in plasma NO concentration in DCM patients was significantly impaired compared with the control group (P < 0.01). Pretreatment with l-NMMA completely suppressed the ACh-induced NO concentration, whereas APV in the left anterior descending coronary artery was partially suppressed in both groups. Plasma NO concentration reached its peak value later than the maximum APV following the injection of ACh (10−6 M) in both groups. Conclusion The catheter-type NO sensor could be applied to clinically evaluate the endothelial function (i.e. reduced endothelium-derived NO bioavailability) in patients with cardiovascular diseases.
Tweetin' in the Rain: Exploring Societal-Scale Effects of Weather on Mood

There has been significant recent interest in using the aggregate sentiment from social media sites to understand and predict real-world phenomena. However, the data from social media sites also offers a unique and — so far — unexplored opportunity to study the impact of external factors on aggregate sentiment, at the scale of a society. Using a Twitter-specific sentiment extraction methodology, we the explore patterns of sentiment present in a corpus of over 1.5 billion tweets. We focus primarily on the effect of the weather and time on aggregate sentiment, evaluating how clearly the well-known individual patterns translate into population-wide patterns. Using machine learning techniques on the Twitter corpus correlated with the weather at the time and location of the tweets, we find that aggregate sentiment follows distinct climate, temporal, and seasonal patterns.
QoS Swarm Bee Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Research and industries are recently more interesting and attracting to the Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) development domain. They contribute to safer and more efficient roads by providing timely and accuracy information to drivers and authorities. Thus, the definition of a quality of service routing protocol for VANETs is one of their challenges. In this paper, we propose QoSBeeVanet, a new multipath quality of service routing protocol adapted for the vehicular ad hoc networks. It is based on ideas of the autonomic bee communication. Simulation results taken with NS2 in realist urban settings were shown that QoSBeeVanet outperforms DSDV and AODV two of the current state-of-the-art protocols, in terms of end-to-end delay, normalized overhead load and packet delivery ratio.
Signal-to-Noise Ratio Measures Efficacy of Biological Computing Devices and Circuits

Engineering biological cells to perform computations has a broad range of important potential applications, including precision medical therapies, biosynthesis process control, and environmental sensing. Implementing predictable and effective computation, however, has been extremely difficult to date, due to a combination of poor composability of available parts and of insufficient characterization of parts and their interactions with the complex environment in which they operate. In this paper, the author argues that this situation can be improved by quantitative signal-to-noise analysis of the relationship between computational abstractions and the variation and uncertainty endemic in biological organisms. This analysis takes the form of a ΔSNRdB function for each computational device, which can be computed from measurements of a device’s input/output curve and expression noise. These functions can then be combined to predict how well a circuit will implement an intended computation, as well as evaluating the general suitability of biological devices for engineering computational circuits. Applying signal-to-noise analysis to current repressor libraries shows that no library is currently sufficient for general circuit engineering, but also indicates key targets to remedy this situation and vastly improve the range of computations that can be used effectively in the implementation of biological applications.
Topic-driven reader comments summarization

Readers of a news article often read its comments contributed by other readers. By reading comments, readers obtain not only complementary information about this news article but also the opinions from other readers. However, the existing ranking mechanisms for comments (e.g., by recency or by user rating) fail to offer an overall picture of topics discussed in comments. In this paper, we first propose to study Topic-driven Reader Comments Summarization (Torcs) problem. We observe that many news articles from a news stream are related to each other; so are their comments. Hence, news articles and their associated comments provide context information for user commenting. To implicitly capture the context information, we propose two topic models to address the Torcs problem, namely, Master-Slave Topic Model (MSTM) and Extended Master-Slave Topic Model (EXTM). Both models treat a news article as a master document and each of its comments as a slave document. MSTM model constrains that the topics discussed in comments have to be derived from the commenting news article. On the other hand, EXTM model allows generating words of comments using both the topics derived from the commenting news article, and the topics derived from all comments themselves. Both models are used to group comments into topic clusters. We then use two ranking mechanisms Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) and Rating & Length (RL) to select a few most representative comments from each comment cluster. To evaluate the two models, we conducted experiments on 1005 Yahoo! News articles with more than one million comments. Our experimental results show that EXTM significantly outperforms MSTM by perplexity. Through a user study, we also confirm that the comment summary generated by EXTM achieves better intra-cluster topic cohesion and inter-cluster topic diversity.
The Temperamental Determinants of Stressors as Life Changes

Behavioral genetic studies have demonstrated the heritability of many variables taken to be measures of environment and previously thought to be determined only by environment. It has been also shown that personal variables may determine the appearance of stressors understood as life changes (events). The hypothesis underlying this study predicted that the genetic factor does not contribute to the variance of subject-independent stressors, whereas in case of subject-dependent stressors the contribution of the genetic factor is essential. Further, it was hypothesized that temperamental traits that moderate the intensity of experienced stressors account for a considerable portion of the genetic variance of subject-dependent stressors. The study was conducted on 245 pairs of MZ and 219 pairs of DZ twins aged from 19 to 66. Stressors were assessed with the Polish adaptation of the Rahe's Recent Life Changes Questionnaire. Based on two preliminary studies, life events were divided into three following categori.
AR filming: augmented reality guide for compositing footage in filmmaking

Creating videos from compositing multiple footage requires the support of the robotic arm due to the camera motion model needs to be precise. It is extremely difficult to shoot the footage with hand-held camera. However, the cost of the robotic arm is extremely high. Thus, we introduce an augmented reality guiding system to replace it. In our system, we utilized augmented reality to guide the user for the camera motion and implemented an algorithm of stabilization and camera motion alignment for a hand-held camera. The system reduces the cost but remaining good quality of the result at the same time.
Regional Homogeneity Changes in Hemodialysis Patients with End Stage Renal Disease: In Vivo Resting-State Functional MRI Study

Objective To prospectively investigate and detect early cerebral regional homogeneity (ReHo) changes in neurologically asymptomatic patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD) using in vivo resting-state functional MR imaging (Rs-fMRI). Methods We enrolled 20 patients (15 men, 5 women; meanage, 37.1 years; range, 19–49 years) with ESRD and 20 healthy controls (15 men, 5 women; mean age, 38.3 years; range, 28–49 years). The mean duration of hemodialysis for the patient group was 10.7±6.4 monthes. There was no significant sex or age difference between the ESRD and control groups. Rs-fMRI was performed using a gradient-echo echo-planar imaging sequence. ReHo was calculated using software (DPARSF). Voxel-based analysis of the ReHo maps between ESRD and control groups was performed with a two-samples t test. Statistical maps were set at P value less than 0.05 and were corrected for multiple comparisons. The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) was administered to all participants at imaging. Results ReHo values were increased in the bilateral superior temporal gyrus and left medial frontal gyrus in the ERSD group compared with controls, but a significantly decreased ReHo value was found in the right middle temporal gyrus. There was no significant correlation between ReHo values and the duration of hemodialysis in the ESRD group. Both the patients and control subjects had normal MMSE scores (≥28). Conclusions Our finding revealed that abnormal brain activity was distributed mainly in the memory and cognition related cotices in patients with ESRD. The abnormal spontaneous neuronal activity in those areas provide information on the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment in patients with ESRD, and demonstrate that Rs-fMRI with ReHo analysis is a useful non-invasive imaging tool for the detection of early cerebral ReHo changes in hemodialysis patients with ESRD.
Quality Management and Job Quality: How the ISO 9001 Standard for Quality Management Systems Affects Employees and Employers

Several studies have examined how the ISO 9001 Quality Management System standard predicts changes in organizational outcomes such as profits. This is the first large-scale study to explore how employee outcomes such as employment, earnings, and health and safety change when employers adopt ISO 9001. We analyzed a matched sample of nearly 1,000 companies in California. ISO 9001 adopters subsequently had far lower organizational death rates than a matched control group of non-adopters. Among surviving employers, ISO adopters had higher growth rates for sales, employment, payroll, and average annual earnings. Injury rates declined slightly for ISO 9001 adopters, although total injury costs did not. These results have implications for organizational theory, managers, and public policy.
Strain variation in early innate cytokine induction by Plasmodium falciparum

Previous work has shown that human donors vary in the magnitude and pattern of cytokines induced when peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) are co‐cultured with Plasmodium falciparum–infected erythrocytes. Whether P. falciparum strains vary in their ability to induce cytokines has not been studied in detail and is an important question, because variation in cytokine induction could affect parasite virulence and patterns of clinical disease. We investigated the early inflammatory cytokine response to four P. falciparum laboratory strains and five field isolates. Initial studies showed that parasite strain, parasitaemia and PBMC donor all had significant effects on the magnitude of pro‐inflammatory cytokine responses (IFN‐γ, GM‐CSF, IL‐1β, TNF‐α, IL‐6, P < 0·005 in all cases). However, we noticed that the most highly inducing parasite strain consistently reached schizont rupture more rapidly than the other strains. When timing of schizont rupture was taken into account, parasite strains no longer differed in their cytokine induction (P = 0·383), although donor effects remained significant (P < 0·001). These data do not support the hypothesis that P. falciparum strains vary in induction of early innate cytokine responses from PBMCs, and instead are consistent with the suggestion that conserved parasite products such as haemozoin or GPI‐anchors are the parasite‐derived stimuli for cytokine induction.
Interpretation of pancreatic lipase analyses of cow's milk fat triglyceride structure.

Abstract Initially, cow's milk fat was digested at various temperatures with two levels of pancreatic lipase, but this was unsuccessful in eliminating intermolecular specificity. Next, the fatty acid compositions of the monoglycerides (MG) from similar digestions were determined by gas-liquid chromatography as methyl and butyl esters. These were found to vary with the extent of hydrolysis, the short-chain fatty acids being present in lesser proportions in the MG after extensive hydrolysis. The differing compositions were attributed to preferential digestion of certain triglyceride (TG) species and to the nonrandom distribution of fatty acids in the 2 position among TG classes. Subsequently, this was confirmed when residual TG from a milk fat-pancreatic lipase digestion were submitted to a second digestion and the resulting MG compared to those obtained in the initial lipolysis. During these studies, the presence of butyric acid (4:0) in the 2 position of milk fat TG was also observed. Therefore, possible preferential acyl migration of 2-position 4:0 was investigated by analysis of the free fatty acids (FFA) and MG resulting from digestion of a mixture of synthetic glyceryl-2-butyrate -1,3- dipalmitate and triolein. As indicated by some 2-position 4:0 observed in the FFA, migration possibly occurred, but evidence for preferential migration was inconclusive.It is concluded that for intact cow's milk fat triglycerides, quantitative calculations of the 1,3-random, 2-random type are not valid.