Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Childhood Trauma in Multiple Sclerosis: A Case-Control Study

Objective To investigate the association between childhood trauma and multiple sclerosis (MS) by comparing histories of child abuse and neglect between patients with MS and adults from the general population in a cross-sectional case-control study. Previous research has demonstrated a connection between MS and a variety of emotional stressors, but childhood trauma, which is known to have long-lasting negative consequences for physical health decades into adulthood, has not been studied. Methods The self-reported Childhood Trauma Questionnaire for the assessment of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and emotional and physical neglect was administered to 234 patients with definite MS and 885 adults from the general population. Results After adjusting for sociodemographic factors and current depression, patients with MS scored significantly higher in all Childhood Trauma Questionnaire subscales apart from physical abuse and neglect than adults from the general population. Adjusted odds ratios for these types of childhood trauma were higher in the MS group than in controls, ranging from 2.0 for emotional neglect (95% confidence interval = 1.3–3.2) to 3.4 for emotional abuse (95% confidence interval = 2.0–5.7). Although childhood trauma was not associated with the degree of current MS-related disability, patients with MS with histories of physical and/or sexual abuse had significantly higher relapse rates than patients without early-life stress. Conclusions Our findings suggest an association between childhood trauma and MS in this cross-sectional study. Larger prospective longitudinal studies are needed to clarify the relationship between early-life stress and the risk for MS in genetically susceptible individuals. Abbreviations MS = multiple sclerosis; SDMT = Symbol Digit Modalities Test; CTQ = Childhood Trauma Questionnaire; EDSS = Expanded Disability Status Scale
Alimentación infantil en el ámbito escolar: entre patios, aulas y comedores

As an interdisciplinary group of researchers, we carried out a diagnostic investigation to describe and analyze children's food consumption during recesses in public primary schools of the city of Buenos Aires. Eating during breaks is a widespread practice -without variation in magnitude among different geographic areas of the city- that is conditioned by certain features of school settings: the existence of snack stands within the school, the provision of structured meals, the existence of drinking fountains on the playgrounds and the distribution of fruits. Likewise, food consumption varies by gender, in close relationship to the activities and games that girls and boys carry out during the break. These activities are in turn conditioned by institutional norms and the physical spaces available. Through these characteristics of the school environment, a "hidden" education about food is developed that must be made visible and addressed in health promotion activities at the schools.
Homeostatic adaptation to inversion of the visual field and other sensorimotor disruptions

Adaptation to inversion of the visual eld is studied in a simple simulated model of phototactic behaviour. Inspired by recent ndings in neuroscience, a novel neural architecture based on continuous dynamical neural networks is implemented. Individual cells behave homeostatically by facilitating local plasticity whenever their activity goes out of bounds. Robots are evolved to perform long-term phototaxis on a series of light sources while trying to keep neurons behaving homeostatically. Robots are then tested under the condition of left/right inversion of vision. Initially, their phototactic capability is lost, which in most cases causes neurons to lose homeostasis and trigger plastic changes. After long periods of maladaptation, robots adapt to the new sensorimotor situation, and phototactic behaviour is recovered. The introduction of other disruptions such as radical perturbations to motor and sensor gains also results in eventual adaptation. The model intends to bring Ashbyan ideas on the relation between adaption and internal stability into the context of current research on evolutionary robotics. In spite of the promising preliminary results, a series of unsolved questions are raised by this model. Possible solutions are suggested.
Distinct Domains of the Influenza A Virus M2 Protein Cytoplasmic Tail Mediate Binding to the M1 Protein and Facilitate Infectious Virus Production

ABSTRACT The cytoplasmic tail of the influenza A virus M2 protein is highly conserved among influenza A virus isolates. The cytoplasmic tail appears to be dispensable with respect to the ion channel activity associated with the protein but important for virus morphology and the production of infectious virus particles. Using reverse genetics and transcomplementation assays, we demonstrate that the M2 protein cytoplasmic tail is a crucial mediator of infectious virus production. Truncations of the M2 cytoplasmic tail result in a drastic decrease in infectious virus titers, a reduction in the amount of packaged viral RNA, a decrease in budding events, and a reduction in budding efficiency. The M1 protein binds to the M2 cytoplasmic tail, but the M1 binding site is distinct from the sequences that affect infectious virus particle formation. Influenza A virus strains A/Udorn/72 and A/WSN/33 differ in their requirements for M2 cytoplasmic tail sequences, and this requirement maps to the M1 protein. We conclude that the M2 protein is required for the formation of infectious virus particles, implicating the protein as important for influenza A virus assembly in addition to its well-documented role during virus entry and uncoating.
Towards increased usability of noisy ECG signals in HRV-based classifiers

Proliferation of wearable devices and the “quantified self” behavior creates massive amounts of data acquired from physiological sensors. Unfortunately this vast amount of data is to date largely untapped for clinical purposes because of low data reliability caused by issues such as contact noise and motion artifacts. One important physiological signal is ECG and one of its important features is the heart rate, obtained from the QRS complex of the ECG signal or beat detection algorithms. This feature is important in characterizing Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and detecting various pathologies such as arrhythmia, chronic heart failure, or sleep apnea. Many such algorithms simply discard data segments which are deemed “unreliable” due to errors in QRS detection. This paper analyzes the impact of changing the noise level and noise duration on the percentage of data segments that are discarded. The paper proposes an approach to improve the usability of ECG data corrupted by noise by analyzing the impact of noise on features of interest and adapting relevant system parameters accordingly. The proposed approach can be used with any classifier operating on short-term HRV features.
ELECTRON MICROSCOPY OF AXIAL FIBRILS, OUTER ENVELOPE, AND CELL DIVISION OF CERTAIN ORAL SPIROCHETES

Listgarten, M. A. (Harvard School of Dental Medicine and Forsyth Dental Center, Boston, Mass.), and S. S. Socransky. Electron microscopy of axial fibrils, outer envelope, and cell division of certain oral spirochetes. J. Bacteriol. 88:1087–1103. 1964. —The ultrastructure of axial fibrils and outer envelopes of a number of oral spirochetes was studied in thin sections and by negative contrast. The axial fibrils measured 150 to 200 A in diameter. Only one end of each fibril was inserted subterminally into the protoplasmic cylinder by means of a 400 A wide disc. The free ends of fibrils inserted near one end of the cylinder extended toward, and overlapped in close apposition, the free ends of fibrils inserted at the other end. In thin sections, some axial fibrils showed a substructure, suggestive of a dense central core. The outer envelopes of most spirochetes appeared to consist of 80 A wide polygonal structural subunits. However, in one large spirochete, the outer envelope demonstrated a “pin-striped” pattern. Cell division in a pure culture of Treponema microdentium was studied by negative contrast. Results suggested that this organism divides by transverse fission, the outer envelope being last to divide. During the course of division, new axial fibrils appeared to originate on either side of the point of constriction of the protoplasmic cylinder. Flagellalike extensions which were found in rapidly dividing organisms were due to protruding axial fibrils, and appeared to be the result of cell division. Some evidence is presented to support the concept of a homologous origin for axial fibrils and flagella.
Building hierarchical automation solutions in the IEC 61499 modeling language

The IEC 61499 modeling language pursues a component-based approach with modular building blocks coupled by ports and arranged in a hierarchical manner. However, as in similar approaches, the IEC 61499 language does not define how functional hierarchies of upper- and lower-level functional entities should be built. In this paper, motivated by our previous work, structuring principles for IEC 61499 for purely hierarchical control solutions are presented. We present elementary design guidelines for structuring automation solutions in several hierarchical layers, outline which elements of IEC 61499 to use, and illustrate the approach by an architecture for an example control system.
Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content

'Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? ' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. ' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time. ' 'That was the curious incident, ' remarked Sherlock Holmes. The quotation from A. Conan Doyle with which this book begins, is a delightfully appropriate summation of the authors' point of view garnered from their fifteen years of experiments on the psychology of reasoning. Dr. Wason and Dr. Johnson-Laird are intrigued by the extent to which most individuals can be considered naturally rational thinkers. They present here the surprising results of their comprehensive investigations of how humans draw explicit conclusions from evidence. Given a set of assertions, the authors write, to what extent can the individual appreciate all that follows from them by virtue of logic alone, and remain unseduced by plausible, but fallacious conclusions? We are not concerned with whether these assertions are true or false, nor with whether the individual holds them among his beliefs, nor with whether they are sane or silly. At the core of the Psychology of Reasoning is a vigorous discussion that incorporates various illustrations--some of them humorous, all of them fascinating--of the use of reason under a wide variety of different conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on the difficulties involved in dealing with negatively marked information that must be combined and used with other information for reaching conclusions. Thorough treatment is given as well to the search for plausible contexts that will render anomalous or ambiguous statements sensible. The authors have strived to isolate the components ofinference, the basic steps of any kind of deductive activity, in order to determine the psychological processes involved in them. What has been the outcome of this research? Dr. Wason and Dr. Johnson-Laird conclude, our research has suggested that the individual's logical competence may be either enhanced or limited by performance variables. And, of these, content has turned out to be vitally important for revealing, or obscuring structure. At best, we can all think like logicians; at worst, logicians all think like us.
Proteomic Analysis of Astrocytic Secretion in the Mouse

Astrocytes, the most abundant cell type in the central nervous system, are intimately associated with synapses. They play a pivotal role in neuronal survival and the brain inflammatory response. Some astrocytic functions are mediated by the secretion of polypeptides. Using a proteomic approach, we have identified more than 30 proteins released by cultured astrocytes. These include proteases and protease inhibitors, carrier proteins, and antioxidant proteins. Exposing astrocytes to brefeldin A, which selectively blocks secretory vesicle assembly, suppressed the release of some of these proteins. This indicates that astrocytes secrete these proteins by a classic vesicular mechanism and others by an alternative pathway. Astrocytes isolated from different brain regions secreted a similar pattern of proteins. However, the secretion of some of them, including metalloproteinase inhibitors and apolipoprotein E, was region-specific. In addition, pro-inflammatory treatments modified the profile of astrocytic protein secretion. Finally, more than two thirds of the proteins identified in the astrocyte-conditioned medium were detectable in the mouse cerebrospinal fluid, suggesting that astrocytes contribute to the cerebrospinal fluid protein content. In conclusion, this study provides the first unbiased characterization of the major proteins released by astrocytes, which may play a crucial role in the modulation of neuronal survival and function.
Careers of skilled migrants: towards a theoretical and methodological expansion

Purpose – The careers of skilled migrant workers is an under‐theorised field of research. This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological expansion of studies of careers of skilled migrants.Design/methodology/approach – The paper offers a critical review of the literature on careers of skilled migrants from a multilevel approach including individual, organizational, and contextual levels.Findings – The review leads to two key theoretical and methodological expansions: first, it demonstrates that migrant careers need to be understood as a relational construct that is at the interplay of individual and institutions and as a multi‐layer and multi‐faceted phenomenon. This approach requires the authors to explore careers in temporal and spatial contexts. The second expansion made requires the adoption of relational methodologies, as well as more reflexive methods which encourages researchers to recognize a wider range of vested interests when framing their research questions and designing their studies.Or.
The Vector Space Model in Information Retrieval-Term Weighting Problem

Many traditional information retrieval (IR) tasks, such as text search, text clustering or text categorization, have natural language documents as their first-class objects, in the sense that the algorithms that are meant to solve these tasks require explicit internal representations of the documents they need to deal with. In IR documents are usually given as extensional vectorial representation, in which the dimensions (features) of the vector representing a document are the terms occurring in the document. The approach to term representation that the IR community has almost universally adopted is known as the bag-of-words approach: a document dj is represented as a vector of term weights −→ dj = 〈ω1j , . , ωrj〉, where r is the cardinality of the dictionary and 0 ≤ ωkj ≤ 1 represents the contribution of term tk to the specification of the semantics of dj . This article analyses and compares many different bag-of-words approaches.
Enhanced Pulse-Density-Modulated Power Control for High-Frequency Induction Heating Inverters

This paper presents a 100-kW 100-kHz insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) series resonant inverter for induction heating applications that uses an improved power control scheme based on the standard pulse density modulation (PDM). This standard power control is a good solution for the design of high-frequency inverters because the output power factor is near to unity in a wide range of output power, resulting in great reduction of switching losses and electromagnetic noise. However, the output current can be in discontinuous mode, particularly for resonant loads of low quality factor or for low output power or low-load operation. This output current fluctuation produces a high output current ripple that can lead to an increase in power losses and loss of accuracy of the response of the frequency tracking control. The proposed control strategy, which is called enhanced PDM (EPDM), provides twice less output current ripple, thus resulting in an improved inverter behavior in terms of frequency tracking accuracy and energy efficiency. Experimental tests have been made, in order to compare the EPDM strategy with standard power control schemes.
Optimizing local pickup and delivery with uncertain loads

The local pickup and delivery problem (LPDP) is an essential operational problem in intermodal industry. While the problem with deterministic settings is already difficult to solve, in reality, there exist a set of loads, called uncertain loads, which are unknown at the beginning of the day. But customers may call in during the day to materialize these loads. In this paper, we call the LPDP considering these uncertain loads as the stochastic LPDP. The problem description and the mathematical modeling of stochastic LPDP are discussed. Then, a simulation-based optimization approach is proposed to solve the problem, which features in a fast solution generation procedure and an intelligent simulation budget allocation framework. The numerical examples show the best strategy to consider the stochastic loads in the planning process and validate the benefits compared to its deterministic counterpart.
The Hydraulic Hypothesis: A Reappraisal

PHILLIPSON, D. W. 1968. The early Iron Age site at Kapwirimbwe, Lusaka. Azania 3:87-106. VOGEL, J. 0. 1969. On early evidence of agriculture in southern Zambia. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 10:524. 1970. Early Iron Age tools from Chundu Farm, Zambia. Azania 5:173-78. 1971. Kumadzulo: An Early Iron Age village site in southern Zambia. Lusaka: Oxford University Press. 1972. On Early Iron Age funerary practise in southern Zambia. CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY 13:583-86. n.d. Simbusenga: The archaeology of the Intermediate Period in southern Zambia. Lusaka: Oxford University Press. In press.
Secure Border Gateway Protocol (S-BGP) - Real World Performance and Deployment Issues

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to distribute routing information between autonomous systems, is an important component of the Internet’s routing infrastructure. Secure BGP (S-BGP) addresses critical BGP vulnerabilities by providing a scalable means of verifying the authenticity and authorization of BGP control traffic. To facilitate widespread adoption, S-BGP must avoid introducing undue overhead (processing, bandwidth, storage) and must be incrementally deployable, i.e., interoperable with BGP. To provide a proof of concept demonstration, we developed a prototype implementation of S-BGP and deployed it in DARPA’s CAIRN testbed. Real Internet BGP traffic was fed to the testbed routers via replay of a recorded BGP peering session with an ISP’s BGP router. This document describes the results of these experiments ‐ examining interoperability, the efficacy of the S-BGP countermeasures in securing BGP control traffic, and their impact on BGP performance, and thus evaluating the feasibility of deployment in the Internet.
Adaptive Hierarchical Surrogate for Searching Web with Mobile Devices

This paper proposes a new web-page search mechanism suitable for mobile devices, called an adaptive hypermedia search. It utilizes hierarchical structure of hypermedia objects for handheld devices, such as cellular phones and PDAs, which have usually limited resources. We developed a tree-filtering algorithm and a Top_K_algorithm that can be used to provide search recommendations for mobile devices. In the experimental section, we implement our system in Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK environment and show that our method can save mobile resource in terms of web- page search time. Also, we show the resource savings according to different wireless technologies such as WiBro, HSDPA, and Wi-Fi.
Pattern-independent current estimation for reliability analysis of CMOS circuits

Accurate and efficient expected current is required in circuit designs to analyze electromigration failure rate, power consumption, voltage drop, etc. A pattern-independent simulation approach for estimating this expected current waveform drawn by CMOS circuitry has been developed. Four original concepts are presented which allow an efficient and accurate estimation of expected current waveforms. They are: probability waveforms, probability waveform propagation, probabilistic circuit models, and statistical timing analysis. This approach is considerably faster than traditional methods and yields comparable results. <<ETX>>
READ-COPY UPDATE: USING EXECUTION HISTORY TO SOLVE CONCURRENCY PROBLEMS

Synchronization overhead, contention, and deadlock can pose severe challenges to designers and implementers of parallel programs. Therefore, many researchers have proposed update disciplines that solve these problems in restricted but commonly occurring situations. However, these proposals rely either on garbage collectors [7, 8], termination of all processes currently using the data structure [10], or expensive explicit tracking of all processes accessing the data structure [5, 15]. These mechanisms are inappropriate in many cases, such as within many operating-system kernels and server applications. This paper proposes a novel and extremely efficient mechanism, called read-copy update, and compares its performance to that of conventional locking primitives.
Exact BER Analysis for a Receiver Windowing OFDM System over Frequency Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels

An exact bit error rate (BER) expression for an OFDM system with windowing reception is derived. The effects of several Nyquist windows, including the raised-cosine window, the "better than" raised-cosine (BTRC) window, the second order continuity window (SOCW), the Franks window, and the double-jump window on the performance of the system are examined based on both BER measure and signal-to-interference (SIR) measure. It is found that the SIR comparison is not necessarily consistent with the BER comparison. The BTRC windowing gives the smallest BER among the five windowing functions considered for small to medium values of pulse roll-off factor. However, the Franks windowing or SOCW windowing shows better BER performance when the roll-off factor approaches one.
Lower Bounds for the Ropelength of Reduced Conformations

This paper generalizes the results of Sadjadi [4] and Alley [1] by providing an algorithm to find a lower bound on the ropelength of any knot which admits a reduced diagram. This lower bound is found by changing this problem of geometry into one of linear programming, which is then solved by the simplex algorithm.