Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thresholds and tolerance of physical pain among young adults who engage in self-injury

Thresholds and Tolerance of Physical Pain among Young Adults Who Engage in Self-Injury Katrina McCoy Prevalence rates of non-suicidal self-injury among college students ranges from 17% to 38%. Research indicates that individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) who selfinjure sometimes report an absence of pain during self-injury. Furthermore, self-injury in the absence of pain has been associated with more frequent suicide attempts. The present study examined pain thresholds and tolerance among 44 college students (11 self-injurious and 33 nonself-injurious). Pain thresholds and tolerance were measured using an algometer pressure device which has been used to produce pain previous laboratory research. Self-injurious participants had higher pain tolerances than those who do not engage in self-injury. In addition, self-injurious participants rated the pain as less intense than participants who did not engage in self-injury. Analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) revealed that depression and fear of pain were associated with pain tolerance and pain rating.
Value of lysozyme agar incorporation and alkaline thioglycollate exposure for the environmental recovery of Clostridium difficile.

Clostridium difficile is an increasingly prevalent nosocomial pathogen. Environmental contamination by spores is believed to be a major factor propagating the spread of C. difficile. Various approaches including the use of bile salts have been described to enhance the recovery of C. difficile from clinical and environmental specimens. We found that lysozyme (5 mg/L) incorporated into a selective medium containing bile salts significantly increased the recovery of C. difficile from swabs of 197 environmental sites (11% versus 24% samples positive, P< 0.01). Furthermore, in a separate series of experiments additional use of cooked meat broth enrichment significantly enhanced the recovery of C. difficile (35% versus 45%, P = 0.009). Conversely, we found that pre-exposure to alkaline thioglycollate did not improve the yield of C. difficile. Lysozyme incorporation markedly increases the recovery of C. difficile from environmental samples probably by stimulation of spore germination. Our findings suggest that previous attempts to determine the level of environmental C. difficile contamination have markedly underestimated the true prevalence of this pathogen.
Corneal Epithelial Thickness Map in Long-Term Soft Contact Lenses Wearers

Purpose To map the corneal epithelial thickness in vivo with Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography in long-term soft contact lens (SCL) wearers. Methods This is a cross-sectional observational study. Forty eyes from 40 normal subjects who had never worn SCL and 40 eyes from 40 SCL wearers who had worn lenses for more than 2 years were enrolled. Corneal epithelium over the entire cornea was topographically imaged using a novel optical coherence tomography system. An epithelial thickness map was automatically generated. Epithelial thicknesses of the central 2-mm, paracentral 2- to 5-mm (P1), and midperipheral 5- to 6-mm (P2) zones were obtained. In addition, the epithelial map variability in P1 and P2 zones, including maximum − minimum (MAX − MIN), map SD, and coefficient of variation (CV), was measured and analyzed. Results The average epithelial thickness of the central, P1, and P2 zones was 54.4 ± 1.1 &mgr;m, 53.2 ± 2.2 &mgr;m, and 52.3 ± 2.0 &mgr;m, respectively, in normal eyes and 49.2 ± 1.9 &mgr;m, 48.8 ± 2.2 &mgr;m, and 48.7 ± 2.8 &mgr;m, respectively, in eyes wearing SCL. Compared with normal control subjects, eyes with long-term SCL had significantly thinner epithelial thickness in all three zones (p < 0.05). However, there was no difference in MAX − MIN, SD, and CV of P1 and P2 zones between two groups. In both groups, there was significant difference in the epithelial thickness among different sectors in the paracentral and midperipheral zones. Conclusions There is a decrease in epithelial thickness in subjects who wear SCL long term. Clinicians should take note of the nonuniformity of the paracentral and midperipheral corneal epithelium thicknesses. This method may be useful for detecting early changes in corneal epithelial thickness caused by long-term SCL wear.
Strategies for improving the level of accessibility in the design of MOOC-based learning services

Access to MOOC platforms has barriers: there is a lack of accessibility to educational resources, communications tools and even the personalisation of user interfaces. Added to this are difficulties such as the need to develop specific digital or even social skills for those students with functional diversity. Therefore, a vision of the different strategies in relation to the achievement of accessibility (from the content to user preferences) is presented in this work; strategies which must be tackled with the aim of achieving a better level of accessibility during the design of new learning services based on MOOCs.
Axin expression delays herpes simplex virus‐induced autophagy and enhances viral replication in L929 cells

Axin, a negative regulator of the Wnt signaling pathway, plays a critical role in various cellular events including cell proliferation and cell death. Axin‐regulated cell death affects multiple processes, including viral replication. For example, axin expression suppresses herpes simplex virus (HSV)‐induced necrotic cell death and enhances viral replication. Based on these observations, this study investigated the involvement of autophagy in regulation of HSV replication and found axin expression inhibits autophagy‐mediated suppression of viral replication in L929 cells. HSV infection induced autophagy in a time‐ and viral dose‐dependent manner in control L929 cells (L‐EV), whereas virus‐induced autophagy was delayed in axin‐expressing L929 cells (L‐axin). Subsequent analysis showed that induction of autophagy by rapamycin reduced HSV replication, and that inhibiting autophagy by 3‐methyladenine (3MA) and beclin‐1 knockdown facilitated viral replication in L‐EV cells. In addition, preventing autophagy with 3MA suppressed virus‐induced cytotoxicity in L‐EV cells. In contrast, HSV replication in L‐axin cells was resistant to changes in autophagy. These results suggest that axin expression may render L929 cells resistant to HSV‐infection induced autophagy, leading to enhanced viral replication.
A low power circuit of a leaky integrate and fire neuron with global reset

A neuron circuit is a basic processing module which is used to implement a neuromorphic chip. In this paper, a low power circuit of leaky integrate and fire (LIF) neuron is proposed. It is a compact circuit, which is designed and simulated in a 0. 18µm CMOS technology. The static power is about 35pW and it consumes around 2pJ/spike. It also provides a global reset which is used as a lateral inhibitory connection in a WTA module.
Five-year-olds can show the self-reference advantage

The current study developed a new paradigm to determine the age at which children begin to show the self-reference advantage in memory. Four-, 5-, and 10-year-olds studied lists of colourful object pictures presented together with self or other face image, and participants were asked to report aloud “who is pointing at the (object). ” Then incidental free recall was carried out, followed by source judgments based on the earlier test where participants had to distinguish who pointed to the object. In Experiment 1, only 5-year-old children showed self-reference advantage in the recall, but not in source judgments. By increasing task demand in Experiment 2, 5 and 10-year-olds also showed the self-reference advantage in the recall, but not in source judgments. These results indicated that the new paradigm is appropriate to measure children's self-reference effect in memory, and children as young as 5 years begin to show this effect.
A computational study of influence of helmet padding materials on the human brain under ballistic impacts

The results of a computational study of a helmeted human head are presented in this paper. The focus of the work is to study the effects of helmet pad materials on the level of acceleration, inflicted pressure and shear stress in a human brain model subjected to a ballistic impact. Four different closed cell foam materials, made of expanded polystyrene and expanded polypropylene, are examined for the padding material. It is assumed that bullets cannot penetrate the helmet shell. Finite element modelling of the helmet, padding system, head and head components is used for this dynamic nonlinear analysis. Appropriate contacts and conditions are applied between the different components of the head, as well as between the head and the pads, and the pads and the helmet. Based on the results of simulations in this work, it is concluded that the stiffness of the foam has a prominent role in reducing the level of the transferred load to the brain. A pad that is less stiff is more efficient in absorbing the impact energy and reducing the sudden acceleration of the head and consequently lowers the brain injury level. Using the pad with the least stiffness, the influence of the angle of impacts as well as the locations of the ballistic strike is studied.
Efficient Selection of Observation Points for Functional Tests

The fault coverage of existing functional tests can be enhanced by additional observation points. For a given set of functional tests, this paper proposes an efficient fault-dropping fault simulation method for selecting a subset of observation points at a small fraction of the cost of non-fault-dropping fault simulation. Experimental results on industrial circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in achieving close to optimal results in the size of the selected subset with an order of magnitude less time, without losing achievable coverage. The technique is particularly applicable to industrial designs where fault-simulation times can be prohibitively expensive, even when only a sample of faults is simulated using distributed techniques.
The survival of patients with not-for-resuscitation orders.

BACKGROUND Studies have shown higher in-hospital mortality rates in patients with not-for-resuscitation (NFR) decisions. Long-term survival of these patients after their discharge from acute care is largely unknown as is communication of such decisions to primary care givers through letters or discharge summaries. AIM To evaluate the in-hospital mortality and post-discharge survival of general medical patients with documented resuscitation decisions as well as the prevalence of these decisions being communicated to primary health care providers through discharge summaries. DESIGN Retrospective cross-sectional study. METHODS The medical records of 618 general medical patients admitted to an Australian tertiary referral teaching hospital between January and December 2007 were reviewed to determine the documentation of resuscitation decisions. Mortality rates in-hospital and up to 5 years post-discharge were assessed in relation to the nature of any resuscitation decisions. Communication of these decisions in the discharge summaries was also evaluated. RESULTS One hundred and thirty-six (22%) patients had resuscitation decisions documented of whom 91 (67%) did not want resuscitation (NFR). For this NFR group, the in-hospital mortality rate was 20%, and their cumulative 1- and 5-year mortality rates were 53 and 85%, respectively. Of the 112 patients with resuscitation decisions who survived to discharge, 104 of them (93%) had discharge summaries completed but only 9 (8.4%) had resuscitation decisions documented in those discharge summaries. CONCLUSION Many general medical patients with a documented NFR decision survive beyond 1 year after their index admission. The rate of communication of resuscitation decisions in hospital discharge summaries is low.
Privacy algorithm for airport passenger screening portal

A novel personnel surveillance system has been developed for airport security to detect and identify threatening objects, which are concealed ont he human body. The main advantage of this system over conventional metal detectors is that non- metallic objects such as plastic explosives and plastic guns are detectable. This system is based on millimeter-wave array technology and a holographic imaging algorithm to provide surveillance images of objects hidden beneath clothing in near real-time. The privacy algorithm is based on image processing filters and artificial neural networks. The algorithm examines the millimeter-wave surveillance images to locate and segment the threats and place them on either a silhouette of the person or a wire-frame humanoid representation. In this way, all human features are removed from the final image and personal privacy is maintained. This system is ideally suited for mass transportation centers such as airport checkpoints that require high throughput rates. The system is currently under going evaluation. This paper reports on results from an earlier initial test of portions of the privacy algorithm that detect hidden plastic objects.
Eye Movements and Overt Rehearsal in Word Recall.

Rates of overt rehearsal and eye movement were compared to each other, and were also compared as predictors of immediate and delayed recall, using practiced subjects who studied lists of eight simultaneously presented words. The correlation between number of eye fixations per word and number of rehearsals per word was greater in immediate than in delayed recall. Also, the number of fixations exceeded the number of overt rehearsals, especially under delayed-recall conditions. However, both overt rehearsals and eye movements were slower in delayed recall. The number of overt rehearsals and the number of fixations per word were good predictors of immediate recall, but neither was highly correlated with delayed recall. Engaging in overt rehearsal had the following effects: It slowed down eye movements, seemed to bias the subject toward a serial learning strategy, improved immediate recall, and did not reduce delayed recall. It was concluded that total looking time was the best predictor of long-term retention and that recall performance following overt rehearsal was different from recall performance following silent study.
Explicit Multi-Degree Reduction of Said-Bézier Generalized Ball Curves: Explicit Multi-Degree Reduction of Said-Bézier Generalized Ball Curves

This paper presents an optimal algorithm to compute multi-degree reduction of Said-Bézier generalized Ball curves (SBGB) with endpoints constraints in the L2-norm. Based on the relations between Said-Bézier basis, Power basis and Jacobi basis, this paper deduces the explicit transformation matrix from SBGB basis to Jacobi basis and in reverse order. Then based on the inverse matrix of the above matrix and the orthogonality of Jacobi basis, an explicit constrained algorithm for multi-degree reduction of SBGB curves in the L2-norm is put forward. This algorithm can be used in not only Said-Ball curve and Bézier curve but also the large class curves located between the two curves. This paper proves that the algorithm has some superiorities, including approximating optimal error of the degree reduction estimated beforehand, high order interpolation in the endpoints and multi-degree reduction in one time. Numerical examples demonstrate its validity and superiorities.
Visual and Verbal Styles in Patients with Cognitive Deficits: A Preliminary Study

ABSTRACT This study aims to assess the relationships between the verbalizer–visualizer styles and visuospatial skills in 53 patients with acquired brain injury and consequent cognitive deficits. Results showed a high tendency to mentally visualize in patients with visuospatial neglect and a low tendency toward visualization in patients with attention and memory deficits. The verbalizer–visualizer style did not correlate to performance in perception and imagery visuospatial tasks. This study suggests that patients with neglect can benefit from an imagery training that some might believe to mismatch with the features of the patients’ cognitive functioning.
Short-term traffic flow prediction based on embedding phase-space and blind signal separation

Accurate traffic flow forecasting is one of the important issues for the research of intelligent transportation system (ITS). The capability to forecast traffic flow has been identified as a critical need for dynamic traffic control system. The embedding phase-space theory treats the dynamic evolution of traffic flow as a chaos time series, and this provides the possibility to forecast short-term traffic flow accurately. The theory of blind signal processing is widely used in the area of data mining. Practical historic traffic flow can be regarded as a blind signal mixed of real traffic flow and noise introduced by measurement tools. Blind signal separation is a good method to reduce noise and abstract principal components of historic traffic flow series. This paper proposes an approach based on embedding phase-space and blind signal separation, which enables us to realize the de-nosing and forecasting of the traffic flow synchronously, with another advantage of self-adaptive characteristic.
Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research

This article addresses how critical race theory can inform a critical race methodology in education. The authors challenge the intercentricity of racism with other forms of subordination and exposes deficit-informed research that silences and distorts epistemologies of people of color. Although social scientists tell stories under the guise of “objective” research, these stories actually uphold deficit, racialized notions about people of color. For the authors, a critical race methodology provides a tool to “counter” deficit storytelling. Specifically, a critical race methodology offers space to conduct and present research grounded in the experiences and knowledge of people of color. As they describe how they compose counter-stories, the authors discuss how the stories can be used as theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical tools to challenge racism, sexism, and classism and work toward social justice.
Reflections on Barry W. Boehm's “A spiral model of software development and enhancement”

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the content, contributions and subsequentdevelopments of the seminal paper by Barry Boehm, “A spiral model of software development andenhancement” written in 1988. The relationships of this paper to software development, agile projects,real options and present practice are put into perspective.Design/methodology/approach – Basically an essayist approach is taken. First, the contents ofBoehm’s paper are reviewed and then associated with subsequent developments.Findings – Review of the paper as published represents a documentation of cutting-edge softwaredevelopment as it existed at the time. Fundamentally it suggests the viability of a non-linear,customer-influenced, development approach.Practical implications – This basic approach illustrated in the spiral model of course has found itsway into complex project approaches and management.Originality/value – This paper follows the lines of increasing attention to classics, which is thepurpose of this special issue of the journal. In particular, attention is called to the transition ofthought on projects and project management from supplier-oriented, linear processes tocustomer/client-influenced, non-linear ones.
STUDY OF LIGNINOLYTIC BACTERIA ISOLATION AND CHARACTERIZATION FROM DHAMDHA AGRO FIELD OF BHILAI- DURG REGION

Lignin is a complex, three-dimensional aromatic polymer consisting of dimethoxylated, monomethoxylated and non-methoxylated phenylpropanoid subunits. It is the most abundant renewable carbon source on Earth. The majority of plant biomass, including stems and leaves, is composed of lignocellulose. In present study isolation, identification and characterization of ligninolytic bacterial flora were done from the agro-field, using a lignin residue. 2 types of soil samples black and mixed soil were selected from agro fields of Dhamdha of Bhilai-Durg for isolation of ligninolyitc bacterial colony. Microbes from both mixed and black soil samples were grown in solid media by Hungate method and result shown that three types of bacterial colonies (1-MS, 2-BS), were isolated from Dhandha agro field and used to check the activity of lignolytic capability. Out of 3 types colonies only 1types of colony (j-MS), was shown potential of lignin degradation. The Morphological, gram’s reaction and endospores staining reaction, biochemical characteristics of the isolate obtained from this agro-field soil samples identified with reference to Bergey’s Manual of Determinative Bacteriology. These identified isolate (j) - Bacillus species was shown presence of Laccase, Manganese peroxidase (MnP) and Lignin peroxidase (LiP), etc. lignin degrading enzymes. This results concluded that Bacillus sps. strain was able to degrade lignin substrate which was second abundant and waste material in the world. It is also concluded that to expand on the range of products which can be obtained from lignocellulosic biomass. In this study, soil bacteria was isolated by enrichment on Kraft lignin and evaluated for their ligninolytic potential as a source of novel enzymes use to generate 2 nd
Determining the utility of veterinary tissue archives for retrospective DNA analysis

Histopathology tissue archives can be an important source of specimens for retrospective studies, as these include samples covering a large number of diseases. In veterinary medicine, archives also contain samples from a large variety of species and may represent naturally-occurring models of human disease. The formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues comprising these archives are rich resources for retrospective molecular biology studies and pilot studies for biomarkers, as evidenced by a number of recent publications highlighting FFPE tissues as a resource for analysis of specific diseases. However, DNA extracted from FFPE specimens are modified and fragmented, making utilization challenging. The current study examines the utility of FFPE tissue samples from a veterinary diagnostic laboratory archive in five year intervals from 1977 to 2013, with 2015 as a control year, to determine how standard processing and storage conditions has affected their utility for future studies. There was a significant difference in our ability to obtain large amplicons from samples from 2015 than from the remaining years, as well as an inverse correlation between the age of the samples and product size obtainable. However, usable DNA samples were obtained in at least some of the samples from all years tested, despite variable storage, fixation, and processing conditions. This study will help make veterinary diagnostic laboratory archives more useful in future studies of human and veterinary disease.
Localization of LAT in Glycolipid-enriched Microdomains Is Required for T cell Activation*

LAT, a transmembrane adapter protein found in glycolipid-enriched microdomains (GEMs), is essential for T cell activation. In this study, we have utilized a LAT-deficient mutant of the Jurkat T cell line, J.CaM2, to explore various requirements for LAT function. First, we demonstrate that LAT must be present in GEMs for coupling T cell receptor (TCR) engagement to activation of the Ras signaling pathway, increases in intracellular Ca2+, and induction of the transcription factor nuclear factor of activated T cells (NF-AT). Second, we show that the extracellular and transmembrane domains of LAT are dispensable for these TCR-mediated events once LAT has localized to GEMs. These results provide important insights into both the structural domains of LAT and its subcellular localization that are required for effective TCR signaling.