Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Long-Term Growth Hormone Treatment on Final Height of Children with Russell-Silver Syndrome

Background: The aim of this study was to determine the beneficial effects of long-term growth hormone (GH) treatment on final height (FH) in 26 children with Russell-Silver syndrome (RSS). Methods: Twenty-six patients (16 males) were diagnosed with RSS at a median age of 2.9 years according to clinical criteria. All patients were prepubertal at the commencement of treatment. They received treatment with biosynthetic human GH for 9.8 years (median) and all attained FH. Results: The median height at the commencement of treatment was –2.7 SDS and increased to –1.3 SDS (p = 0.001). However, FH did not reach target height (–0.90 SDS, p = 0.003). Predictors of FH outcome were: the height at the start of treatment (r2 = 0.419, p < 0.001) (inversely related) and the height gain at onset of puberty (r2 = 0.257, p < 0.001) (positively related). The overall prediction model accounted for 67.6% of height gain. Sitting height improved gradually during GH treatment (–3.3 to –1.0 SDS, p = 0.012), as did weight (–3.3 to –1.3 SDS, p < 0.001) and BMI (–1.5 to –0.2 SDS, p < 0.001). Conclusions: A significant improvement of growth in RSS children has been shown after 10 years of GH treatment with a FH of –1.3 SDS. The shorter the patient at the start of treatment is, the greater the increment in FH. A significant response is also shown at the onset of puberty. GH treatment may also have a beneficial effect on the spinal length of RSS children.
Uniform Evaluation of Hardware Implementations of the Round-Two SHA-3 Candidates

We describe our high-speed hardware modules for the 14 candidates of the second evaluation round of the SHA-3 hash function competition. Emphasis has been put on bringing as many aspects of design and implementation as possible into agreement in order to receive consistent and comparable evaluation results. For most candidates we have tested a range of different design and implementation options. The evaluation involved a large number of synthesis runs in a uniform setup and under the use of a simple optimization heuristic. In addition to identifying good hardware-design options, this approach has yielded data on numerous possible area-performance tradeoffs for the different hardware modules. The best configurations then underwent place & route in order to reach the highest degree of accuracy of performance metrics short of actual implementation in silicon.
Automatic Generation of Stream Descriptors for Streaming Architectures

We describe a novel approach for automatically generating streaming architectures from software programs. While existing systems require user-defined stream models, our method automatically identifies producer-consumer streaming relationships and translates them into streaming architectures. Data streams between producer-consumer kernels are represented using a combination of stream descriptors and CFGs, which are categorized into four stream types. A bridge module is generated based on the stream type in the streaming architecture to facilitate data streaming between each producer-consumer pair. Several optimizations are also developed to improve throughput and parallelism. We demonstrate our results on a FPGA based platform. The automatically generated streaming architectures show 1.5-3x speedups over the non-streaming designs by employing spatial and temporal data independence to increase parallelism.
Explaining Fertility in Urban-Dwelling Brazilian Women: Importance of Traditional Sex-Role Attitudes and Religious Orthodoxy

Path analysis was used to study the determinants of fertility in 221 urban-dwelling Brazilian women. Traditional sex-role attitudes and religious orthodoxy directly and positively affected family size. Religious orthodoxy also indirectly influenced fertility via its positive influence on traditional sex-role attitudes. Socioeconomic group affected fertility only by way of association with attitudes and beliefs. Contrary to expectation, participation in the labor force had no effect on the number of children women bore. Analysis within socioeconomic groups showed that determinants of fertility vary for women in different stages of cultural development.
Contextual mobility profiling secure routing infrastructure for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) have found strategic importance in real world applications like environment management, remote explorations, disaster and warfare conditions due to their dynamic, self tailoring and adaptive nature. These networks can be quickly deployed in situations where no infrastructure exists. Effective use of these networks is largely dependent on secure and reliable behavior of participating nodes as they are also used for routing and forwarding services. A number of strategies have been proposed to handle security issues in MANET. The key distribution mechanism under such protocols can be improved by adding the dimension of profile-based selection of participating nodes. This paper presents mobility profile driven security architecture for identifying candidate nodes for PKI deployment in MANET. The mobility profiles of nodes can be differentiated between those confined to small area from nodes having high mobility and varying signal / link conditions. The distributed information is used to identify relative stationary or peering node points that collaborate to generate a dynamic knowledge base. The profiles are exchanged between peering nodes as beacons along with routing updates. The wireless domain is thus monitored to locate unpredictable behavior and improve security management over ad-hoc networks. The conceptual phase of the method is now under test on ns2 simulator.
Impact of Spikelets on Hippocampal CA1 Pyramidal Cell Activity During Spatial Exploration

Space and Spikelets In neurons, spikelets are voltage fluctuations of small amplitude with a spike-like waveform. Spikelets are difficult to detect with extracellular techniques traditionally used to record neuronal activity in freely moving animals. Epsztein et al. (p. 474) used head-anchored whole-cell recordings to analyze spikelet activity during spatial exploration in freely moving rats. A high incidence of spikelets was often followed by action potentials. Like action potentials, spikelets were all-or-none, but had different kinetics and amplitude, and were clearly distinct from excitatory postsynaptic potentials and occurred to a different extent in different cells. In cells with clear place fields, spikelets had similar spatial firing preferences, as did regular action potentials. Thus, spatially modulated spikelets may be involved in information processing in cortical neuronal networks. Bursts of small voltage spikes coordinate neuron firing in the brain during spatial exploration. In vivo intracellular recordings of hippocampal neurons reveal the occurrence of fast events of small amplitude called spikelets or fast prepotentials. Because intracellular recordings have been restricted to anesthetized or head-fixed animals, it is not known how spikelet activity contributes to hippocampal spatial representations. We addressed this question in CA1 pyramidal cells by using in vivo whole-cell recording in freely moving rats. We observed a high incidence of spikelets that occurred either in isolation or in bursts and could drive spiking as fast prepotentials of action potentials. Spikelets strongly contributed to spiking activity, driving ~30% of all action potentials. CA1 pyramidal cell firing and spikelet activity were comodulated as a function of the animal’s location in the environment. We conclude that spikelets have a major impact on hippocampal activity during spatial exploration.
Three-Stream Model for Arterial Traffic

In this article, a new analytical traffic flow model is proposed for traffic dynamics at signalized intersections. During each cycle, both the arrival and the departure traffic are approximated by three distinct traffic streams with uniform density. Because of the similar representation of the arrival and the departure traffic, results from a single intersection can easily be extended to a series of intersections. With this model, the number of parameters of the model is tractable, leading to analytical solutions of the problem. It also is proved that the total delay of one-way traffic is a quasi-convex function in the offset between consecutive traffic cycles. The optimal signal control can be analytically derived under different scenarios, which allows timely adjustments of the control as congestion evolves throughout the day. How different scenarios evolve in a corridor, from one intersection to the downstream one, if there is no traffic from/to side streets, is also studied. All scenarios eventually lead to one scenario after a few intersections. This scenario corresponds to a green wave, which is shown to be in agreement with physical intuition. Finally, the model is tested against data from microsimulation using CORSIM. Vehicle delay predicted by the model is shown to be close to that from the microsimulation.
TRP Channels as Sensors and Signal Integrators of Redox Status Changes

Proteins are capable of sensing the redox status of cells. Cysteine residues, which react with oxidants, reductants, and electrophiles, have been increasingly recognized as the mediators of this redox sensitivity. Cation channels encoded by the transient receptor potential (trp) gene superfamily are characterized by a wide variety of activation triggers that act from outside and inside the cell. Recent studies have revealed that a class of TRP channels is sensitive to changes in redox status and is notably susceptible to modifications of cysteine residues, such as oxidation, electrophilic reaction, and S-nitrosylation of sulfhydryls. In this review, we focus on TRP channels, which directly sense redox status, and discuss the biological significance of cysteine modifications and the consequences of this chemical reaction for physiological responses.
Deposited in DRO : 16 September 2014 Version of attached le : Peer-review status of attached le : Peer-reviewed Citation for published item

A circle graph is the intersection graph of a set of chords in a circle. Keil [Discrete Applied Mathematics, 42(1):51-63, 1993] proved that Dominating Set, Connected Dominating Set, and Total Dominating Set are NP-complete in circle graphs. To the best of our knowledge, nothing was known about the parameterized complexity of these problems in circle graphs. In this paper we prove the following results, which contribute in this direction: • Dominating Set, Independent Dominating Set, Connected Dominating Set, Total Dominating Set, andAcyclic Dominating Set areW [1]hard in circle graphs, parameterized by the size of the solution. • Whereas both Connected Dominating Set and Acyclic Dominating Set are W [1]-hard in circle graphs, it turns out that Connected Acyclic Dominating Set is polynomial-time solvable in circle graphs. • If T is a given tree, deciding whether a circle graph G has a dominating set inducing a graph isomorphic to T is NP-complete when T is in the input, and FPT when parameterized by t = |V (T )|. We prove that the FPT algorithm runs in subexponential time, namely 2 O(t· log log t log t ) · nO(1), where n = |V (G)|.
Relationship of C-reactive protein to risk of cardiovascular disease in the elderly. Results from the Cardiovascular Health Study and the Rural Health Promotion Project.

Markers of inflammation, such as C-reactive protein (CRP), are related to risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) events in those with angina, but little is known about individuals without prevalent clinical CVD. We performed a prospective, nested case-control study in the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS; 5201 healthy elderly men and women). Case subjects (n = 146 men and women with incident CVD events including angina, myocardial infarction, and death) and control subjects (n = 146) were matched on the basis of sex and the presence or absence of significant subclinical CVD at baseline (average follow-up, 2.4 years). In women but not men, the mean CRP level was higher for case subjects than for control subjects (P < or = .05). In general, CRP was higher in those with subclinical disease. Most of the association of CRP with female case subjects versus control subjects was in the subgroup with subclinical disease; 3.33 versus 1.90 mg/L, P < . 05, adjusted for age and time of follow-up. Case-control differences were greatest when the time between baseline and the CVD event was shortest. The strongest associations were with myocardial infarction, and there was an overall odds ratio for incident myocardial infarction for men and women with subclinical disease (upper quartile versus lower three quartiles) of 2.67 (confidence interval [CI] = 1.04 to 6.81), with the relationship being stronger in women (4.50 [CI = 0.97 to 20.8]) than in men (1.75 [CI = 0.51 to 5.98]). We performed a similar study in the Rural Health Promotion Project, in which mean values of CRP were higher for female case subjects than for female control subjects, but no differences were apparent for men. Comparing the upper quintile with the lower four, the odds ratio for CVD case subjects was 2.7 (CI = 1.10 to 6.60). In conclusion, CRP was associated with incident events in the elderly, especially in those with subclinical disease at baseline.
Inferring the origin of an epidemy with dynamic message-passing algorithm

We study the problem of estimating the origin of an epidemic outbreak: given a contact network and a snapshot of epidemic spread at a certain time, determine the infection source. This problem is important in different contexts of computer or social networks. Assuming that the epidemic spread follows the usual susceptible-infected-recovered model, we introduce an inference algorithm based on dynamic message-passing equations and we show that it leads to significant improvement of performance compared to existing approaches. Importantly, this algorithm remains efficient in the case where the snapshot sees only a part of the network.
A Reconfigurable Stochastic Tagger for Languages with Complex Tag Structure

We present a case study of a complex stochastic disambiguator of alternatives of morphosyntactic tags which allows for using incomplete disambiguation, shorthand tag notation, external tagset definition and external definition of multivalued context features. The tagger bases on Naive Bayes modeling and allows for using almost as general context features as in classical trigram taggers as well as more specific ones. Its preliminary results for Polish still do not meet our expectations. Possible sources of the tagger's failures can be: inhomogeneity of the training corpus in preparation, lack of the automatic search of probability models, too general conditional independence assumptions in defining the class of interpretable models.
Efeito do programa de orientação a pais no desenvolvimento lexical de crianças usuárias de implante coclear

INTRODUCTION: Children with severe hearing loss have a delay in the vocabulary repertoire compared to the normal-hearing children of the same chronological age. One of the factors considered to be basic during the process of language development is the family intervention. OBJECTIVE: To propose a program controlled for guiding of parents of children using cochlear implant (CIC) and verify the effectiveness of the program through the variation of the children's lexical performance. METHOD: Prospective study. Eight CIC and their respective families took part in the research and were divided into two groups: GI (with guiding program) and GII (without guiding program). The lexical performance of the children was measured through the List of Evaluation of Expressive Vocabulary (LAVE) with prior and posterior guiding program. The guiding program Participative Family for CIC was composed by four sessions, of weekly application, with duration of 60 minutes each. The topics approached were development of auditory and linguistic skills. RESULTS: The intra-groups ANOVAs didn't present a different significant performance in LAVE for the prior and posterior guiding comparison of both groups. The ANOVAs between groups didn't reveal a statistically significant difference between the groups for lexical performance. CONCLUSION: The groups didn't differ in the effectiveness of the program as measured by LAVE. Such results must be an important indicator of lexical evolution measures based only on the family perception. In future studies the program temporal extension, sample expansion and objective measures of the lexical development must be taken into account.
Decrease in Intracellular Concentration Causes the Shift in Km Value of Efflux Pump Substrates

Passive permeability and active efflux are parallel processes in transcellular flux. Therefore, the observed kinetics of a transporter substrate depends on both of these factors. The transporter expression has been shown to affect both the apparent Km and Vmax values. Kinetic parameters can be obtained from various experimental settings, but these do not necessarily reflect the situation in transcellular flux. Kinetic absorption models need reliable estimates of saturable kinetics when accurate in silico predictions are to be made. The effect of increasing P-glycoprotein expression on apparent transport kinetics was studied using quinidine and digoxin as model compounds. The intracellular concentrations of drugs during the transport process were also measured. A dynamic simulation model was constructed to study the observed data. The apparent Km and Vmax values increased as the P-glycoprotein expression increased. Simulations reproduced the shift in both kinetic parameters as a function of efflux pump expression. In addition, the apparent Km value showed a strong inverse relationship to the passive permeability. In contrast, the apparent Vmax value reached a maximum at intermediate passive permeability and declined above and below this passive permeability. The true Vmax and Km values were never reached. The shift in Km was assigned to a decrease in intracellular concentration at the P-glycoprotein interaction site with both experimental and simulation data. In conclusion, the apparent kinetic parameters in transcellular permeability assays depend on passive permeability and efflux pump activity. Therefore, parameters that are obtained from in vitro assays should be cautiously applied to in vivo predictions.
In Vitro Characterization of Peptidoglycan-Associated Lipoprotein (PAL)–Peptidoglycan and PAL–TolB Interactions

ABSTRACT The Tol-peptidoglycan-associated lipoprotein (PAL) system ofEscherichia coli is a multiprotein complex of the envelope involved in maintaining outer membrane integrity. PAL and the periplasmic protein TolB, two components of this complex, are interacting with each other, and they have also been reported to interact with OmpA and the major lipoprotein, two proteins interacting with the peptidoglycan. All these interactions suggest a role of the Tol-PAL system in anchoring the outer membrane to the peptidoglycan. Therefore, we were interested in better understanding the interaction between PAL and the peptidoglycan. We designed an in vitro interaction assay based on the property of purified peptidoglycan to be pelleted by ultracentrifugation. Using this assay, we showed that a purified PAL protein interacted in vitro with pure peptidoglycan. A peptide competition experiment further demonstrated that the region from residues 89 to 130 of PAL was sufficient to bind the peptidoglycan. Moreover, the fact that this same region of PAL was also binding to TolB suggested that these two interactions were exclusive. Indeed, the TolB-PAL complex appeared not to be associated with the peptidoglycan. This led us to the conclusion that PAL may exist in two forms in the cell envelope, one bound to TolB and the other bound to the peptidoglycan.
Vascular Subcortical Hyperintensities Predict Conversion to Vascular and Mixed Dementia in MCI Patients

Background and Purpose— Patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have an increased risk of dementia. The identification of predictors of conversion to dementia is therefore important. The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that subcortical hyperintensities (SH) are associated with an increased rate of conversion to dementia in MCI patients. Methods— This was an observational study on consecutive MCI patients attending a memory clinic. We assessed SH on a baseline MRI scan, using a semiquantitative rating scale. A multivariable Cox regression model was used to test the association of SH with conversion to dementia. Results— We included 170 MCI patients. The median duration of follow-up was 3.8 years. During this period, 67 patients (39.4%, 95% CI: 32.1 to 46.8%) developed dementia: Alzheimer disease (AD) in 29 patients, dementia with Lewy bodies in 19, mixed dementia in 8, vascular dementia in 7, fronto-temporal dementia in 2, and primary progressive aphasia in 2. SH were not associated with the risk to develop dementia as a whole, including AD. However, the risk to develop vascular or mixed dementia increased significantly with increasing amounts of SH at baseline (HR=1.14 [95% CI: 1.06 to 1.24]), especially periventricular hyperintensities (HR=2.71 [95% CI: 1.60 to 4.58]), independently of medial temporal lobe atrophy, age, gender, vascular risk factors, education, and cognitive functions at baseline. Conclusion— The risk of vascular or mixed dementia, but not of other types of dementia, was significantly increased in MCI patients with a large amount of subcortical hyperintensities at baseline.
User satisfaction surveys and cognitive question testing in the public sector: the case of personal social services in England

Obtaining feedback from service users is a key element of the UK Labour Government's agenda for modernization of the public sector. This reflects a growing international trend in Europe and North America. Recognized difficulties in taking an approach to performance assessment based on the concept of user satisfaction are outlined. Ascertaining the views of people who use personal social services poses particular challenges which result from the levels of impairment and illness in the population, local variations in service provision and the 'care and control' functions of social care. It is argued that cognitive testing of questions, based on research knowledge about user views, provides a way of overcoming some of the pitfalls of traditional satisfaction surveys, while developing questions that are meaningful to respondents. The origins and principles of cognitive testing are described, followed by an example of their application in the development of a questionnaire for home care users. Strengths and limitations of the approach are identified.
A Survey and Analysis of the GNSS Spoofing Threat and Countermeasures

Detection and prevention of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) “spoofing” attacks, or the broadcast of false global navigation satellite system services, has recently attracted much research interest. This survey aims to fill three gaps in the literature: first, to assess in detail the exact nature of threat scenarios posed by spoofing against the most commonly cited targets; second, to investigate the many practical impediments, often underplayed, to carrying out GNSS spoofing attacks in the field; and third, to survey and assess the effectiveness of a wide range of proposed defences against GNSS spoofing. Our conclusion lists promising areas of future research.