Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of top rope climbing therapy on joint health in adult haemophilia patients with severe arthropathies

Abstract Background Low impact physical activity is important for patients with haemophilic arthropathies, but is often considered boring with suboptimal adherence. There is therefore a need for physical activities that motivate patient engagement. Aims To evaluate the benefits of top rope climbing, increasingly used in other musculoskeletal disorders, as an engaging sports discipline in haemophilia. Materials/Methods Six adult arthropathic patients with haemophilia (PWH) completed 12 sessions of tailored top rope climbing training. Functional and clinical joint status, climbing skills, quality of life (QoL), annual bleed rate (ABR) and joint findings with musculoskeletal ultrasound/power doppler (MSKUS/PD) were assessed before and after climbing. Results Haemophilia joint health scores, dorsiflexion in arthropathic joints and climbing skills all improved. ABRs were comparable before and during climbing, and QoL remained high. MSKUS evaluation demonstrated no detrimental effects on synovial and cartilage health, with a decrease of inflammatory PD signal in some joints. Conclusion We conclude that top rope climbing therapy (“Haemophilia Vertical”) can improve joint health in PWH with arthropathies. Haemophilia Vertical therefore emerges as an innovative athletic concept to promote physical activity among PWH. Further study investigating the longer-term impact in a larger cohort is warranted.
Polymorphisms in the growth hormone receptor: A case‐control study in breast cancer

The human growth hormone receptor (GHR) mediates the effects of growth hormone (GH1), starting a signalling cascade that is involved in the regulation of proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. Recently, an isoform of the GHR gene lacking exon 3 (GHRd3) was associated with accelerated responsiveness to growth hormone. In this study, we investigated the association of the GHRd3 polymorphism with breast cancer risk and performed a haplotype analysis with 3 additional single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (Gly186Gly, Cys440Phe and Ile544Leu) in the GHR coding region in a Polish cohort. We did not observe any effect of the 4 polymorphisms on breast cancer risk. Neither did the 3 most common haplotypes influence breast cancer risk. However, a rare haplotype (dGGC), containing the GHRd3 allele, was associated with a decreased breast cancer risk (OR 0.30, 95% CI 0.11–0.80). © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Gender and Age Differences in College Students' Alcohol Consumption

Respondents (86 men and 141 women) enrolled in classes at a large university in the Midwest participated in this study, designed to examine the role gender and age play in the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The hypotheses that age and gender would produce significant effects were supported. Men reported significantly greater alcohol consumption than did women. In addition, there was a significant interaction between gender and age. Women under legal drinking age had higher rates of consumption than women of legal drinking age or older, while the opposite pattern was found for men. The long-term pattern of alcohol consumption may be different for men than for women. During the college years, women seem to moderate their consumption. Finally, these results indicate that illegal, underage drinking by men and women occurs at a high rate. Research should be designed to evaluate the extent of the problem.
An analysis of wintertime cold-air pool in Armenia using climatological observations and WRF model data

The number of extreme weather events including strong frosts, cold waves, heat waves, droughts, hails, strong winds has increased in Armenia by 20% during the last 20 years. The paper studies the formation of cold-air pools in Ararat Valley, Armenia during the winter season. Observational data from 47 meteorological stations of Armenia were used, and daily minimum temperatures lower than −10 °C were assessed over the period 1966–2017. December, 2016 was considered as the 4-th coldest month, after the years 2013, 2002 and 1973. The focus area of this study is the low-elevated basin of Ararat Valley for which climatological analysis of winter temperature regime has been performed. Monthly average temperatures for December were significantly below normal values, particularly, for low-elevated part of Ararat Valley. 24-hour simulations derived from Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) were used to assess the WRF model's capabilities to reproduce strong cold-air pool (CAP) over the Ararat Valley observed on 20 December 2016 when minimum temperatures decreased up to −20 °C and lower. The WRF model was applied with spatial resolutions of 9 and 3 km and 65 vertical levels based on Global Forecast System model's (GFS) initial and boundary conditions at 0.25×0.25 deg. resolution.
The Validation of MRCPD Cross-language Expansions on Imageability Ratings

In this article, we present a method to validate a multi-lingual (English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi) corpus on imageability ratings automatically expanded from MRCPD (Liu et al., 2014). We employed the corpus (Brysbaert et al., 2014) on concreteness ratings for our English MRCPD+ validation because of lacking human assessed imageability ratings and high correlation between concreteness ratings and imageability ratings (e.g. r = .83). For the same reason, we built a small corpus with human imageability assessment for the other language corpus validation. The results show that the automatically expanded imageability ratings are highly correlated with human assessment in all four languages, which demonstrate our automatic expansion method is valid and robust. We believe these new resources can be of significant interest to the research community, particularly in natural language processing and computational sociolinguistics.
Contract law and Contract theory. A survey and some considerations

In this study we parallel Contract theory and Contract law and over a few considerations about the link between the two literatures. First, we highlight that studies in Contract theory can be classi ed in analyses of principal agent relation-ships and analyses of speci c investment problems, and that Contract law mainly focuses on the latter, in general. This leaves aside the analysis of the potential role of the law, for instance, in containing the contractual costs of asymmetric information. Second, we try and clarify under what legal rules the parties fully commit with the contract, or they do not, taking into account that the notions of full and limited commitment are very common in Contract theory whereas they are not in Contract law. This further allows us to provide a uni ed presentation of the literature, based on the features of the contractual environment: complete versus incomplete contracting, full versus limited commitment. Third, we point out that, unlike studies in Contract law, studies in Contract theory devote little attention to the litigation process. For this reason, there is no uni ed analysis of optimal contracts accounting for the transaction costs that appear in the various stages of a contractual relationship.
Logically-Constrained Reinforcement Learning

We present the first model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to synthesise policies for an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), such that a linear time property is satisfied. The given temporal property is converted into a Limit Deterministic Buchi Automaton (LDBA) and a robust reward function is defined over the state-action pairs of the MDP according to the resulting LDBA. With this reward function, the policy synthesis procedure is "constrained" by the given specification. These constraints guide the MDP exploration so as to minimize the solution time by only considering the portion of the MDP that is relevant to satisfaction of the LTL property. This improves performance and scalability of the proposed method by avoiding an exhaustive update over the whole state space while the efficiency of standard methods such as dynamic programming is hindered by excessive memory requirements, caused by the need to store a full-model in memory. Additionally, we show that the RL procedure sets up a local value iteration method to efficiently calculate the maximum probability of satisfying the given property, at any given state of the MDP. We prove that our algorithm is guaranteed to find a policy whose traces probabilistically satisfy the LTL property if such a policy exists, and additionally we show that our method produces reasonable control policies even when the LTL property cannot be satisfied. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated via a set of numerical examples. We observe an improvement of one order of magnitude in the number of iterations required for the synthesis compared to existing approaches.
Characterization of enzymatic reduction of hexavalent chromium by Escherichia coli ATCC 33456

Chromium reduction by Escherichia coli ATCC 33456 quantitatively transferred hexavalent chromium, Cr(VI), to trivalent chromium, Cr(III). The reduced chromium was predominantly present in the external medium. Supernatant fluids of cell extract, obtained by centrifugation at 12,000 and 150,000 x g, showed almost the same Cr(VI) reduction activity, indicating that Cr(VI) reduction by E. coli ATCC 33456 was a largely soluble reductase activity. In studies with respiratory inhibitors, no inhibitory effects on aerobic and anaerobic Cr(VI) reduction were demonstrated by addition of cyanide, azide, and rotenone into both intact cell cultures and supernatant fluids of E. coli ATCC 33456. Although cytochromes b and d were identified in the membrane fraction of cell extracts, Cr(VI) was not reduced by the membrane fraction alone. The cytochrome difference spectra analysis also indicated that these cytochromes of the respiratory chain require the presence of the soluble Cr(VI) reductase to mediate electron transport to Cr(VI). Stimulation of Cr(VI) reduction by an uncoupler, 2,4-dinitrophenol, indicated that the respiratory-chain-linked electron transport to Cr(VI) was limited by the rate of dissipation of the proton motive force.
Cloning and analysis of a gene involved in DNA repair and recombination, the rad1 gene of Schizosaccharomyces pombe

We have cloned the rad1 gene of Schizosaccharomyces pombe by complementation of the rad1-1 mutant, which is deficient in DNA repair and recombination. The coding region of the gene is 582 base pairs long and contains no introns. The predicted product is a strongly acidic, 22-kilodalton protein containing 194 amino acid residues. This gene does not exhibit significant homology to any other known repair gene. The major transcription start site is at 27 base pairs upstream of the putative start codon. Insertion mutagenesis revealed that besides the coding region, at least 151 base pairs of 5'-flanking sequence are required for full complementing activity. A strain carrying a null allele of rad1 was constructed and found to have a phenotype closely similar to that of the rad1-1 mutant. Expression in Escherichia coli of the coding region yielded a protein product of a size close to that predicted from the DNA sequence. This product reacted with antibodies raised against a synthetic peptide with a sequence from that predicted for the protein product. We have localized the rad1 gene to NotI fragment E of the S. pombe genome.
Determinants of spring migration departure decision in a bat

Migratory decisions in birds are closely tied to environmental cues and fat stores, but it remains unknown if the same variables trigger bat migration. To learn more about the rare phenomenon of bat migration, we studied departure decisions of female common noctules (Nyctalus noctula) in southern Germany. We did not find the fattening period that modulates departure decisions in birds. Female noctules departed after a regular evening foraging session, uniformly heading northeast. As the day of year increased, migratory decisions were based on the interactions among wind speed, wind direction and air pressure. As the migration season progressed, bats were likely to migrate on nights with higher air pressure and faster tail winds in the direction of travel, and also show high probability of migration on low-pressure nights with slow head winds. Common noctules thus monitor complex environmental conditions to find the optimal migration night.
Output characteristics analysis of gensets for modeling of an expert system for fault detection purposes

In complex systems, such as military organizations, a large number of technical resources requiring regular maintenance is used. These resources are often exposed to difficult working conditions increasing the probability of a fault occurrence. Fault diagnosis as a part of the maintenance process is often a complex process, which is why expert systems for fault diagnosis are developed. One of the possible systems developed for fault diagnosis on gensets uses the Bayesian network to decide on a fault with the highest probability. For proper system operation, it is important to have a reliable “knowledge base” encompassing results of diagnostic tests. Apart from direct measurements, simulation results are also used in order to obtain diagnostic results. Fault simulations are performed on a model developed using the Matlab Simulink program package.
Multiresonance design of a Tonpilz transducer using the finite element method

The design and characterization of a wide bandwidth Tonpilz transducer is carried out using the finite element method. This wide bandwidth has been achieved by introducing a symmetric flexural resonance (sometimes called a "flapping" resonance) in the head-piece of the Tonpilz transducer. This flexural resonance is exploited by lip-mounting of the transducer as opposed to the more traditional nodal mount. Each transducer is characterized by high-power handling, high-electroacoustic efficiency, broad bandwidth (low-Q), and high-electromechanical coupling. These are characteristics which are usually associated with designs employing more complicated electrical or mechanical matching techniques. An array of these transducers was constructed and displays low-ripple (<3 dB) transmission of one-octave 20-40 kHz signals. A comparison with a recent broad-band design by Inoue et al. [1993] which uses a matching plate is also made to illustrate the inherent simplicity of the flexural resonance approach.
You Shall Know a Place by the Conversations it Seeds

In this work, we look at problems of urban sensing from the lens of conversations (tweets) on Twitter. Using techniques from statistical natural language processing on geotagged tweets, we identify areas which exhibit similar aggregate behavior, infer the land-use of areas and predict types of individual establishments. We demonstrate our inferences using over two years of Twitter data, for a wide variety of spatial contexts and evaluate our results against existing open data sets. Our results are novel in extremely detailed resolution of their mapping, and demonstrate that tweets can be a very effective urban sensor and in many regards are superior to other data sources for studying urban spaces. Our techniques are language agnostic, and can be applied to any city where enough similar data is available.
A weighted contrast enhancement autofocus algorithm

Motion errors are inevitably introduced when data are acquired and considerably degrade the image quality in terms of geometric resolution, radiometric accuracy and image contrast, especially in high resolution spotlight synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In this paper, we describe a weighted contrast enhancement autofocus algorithm that is based on spatially variant model and adopts a mean square error (MSE) phase estimator in which the weights are determined by their contrasts of corresponding sub-scenes. The presented algorithm is very robust to deal with substantial errors over a variety of scenes even in conditions of homogenous areas with no prominent point scatters and enables the utilization of fast Fourier transform (FFT). Experimental results obtained by the proposed methods confirm that the analysis extends well to realistic situations.
Teaching english as a foreign language to blind and visually impaired young learners: the affective factor

En eta tesis se analiza la problematica a la que se enfrenta el alumnado ciego y deficiente visual del segundo ciclo de primaria-tanto en regimen de educacion especial como integrada- al aprender un idioma. Estudia, en primer lugar, las caracteristicas de la adquisicion de la lengua materna en ninos invidentes y sus posibles repercusiones en el aprendizaje de una lengua segunda; asimismo evalua los recursos didacticos disponibles para estos alumnos en Espana, concluyendo que son insuficientes e inadecuados. Finalmente presenta un material especialmente disenado para ellos, donde se tienen en cuenta los aspectos tanto cognitivos como afectivos del aprendizaje. De la experimentacion realizada con este material se deduce que los ninos invidentes mejoran notablemente su actitud hacia la lengua inglesa cuando la metodologia empleada suple los estimulos visuales de los libros de texto estandar por otros de indole tactil. Asimismo se concluye que estos recursos didacticos facilitan la integracion social del alumnado ciego en los centros ordinarios al fomentar la cooperacion entre ambos grupos de estudiantes.
A three‐dimensional skin culture model for mouse keratinocytes: application to transgenic mouse keratinocytes

Abstract: The study of mouse epidermal biology has been hampered by the lack of a good in vitro model for the culture of mouse keratinocytes which allowed the reconstruction of a fully differentiated epidermis. We adapted the Pruniéras' model, also called the Dead de‐Epidermized Dermis model (DED), to mouse keratinocytes and showed that a neo‐epidermis can be reconstructed exhibiting a complete differentiation program. We also used this model to culture transgenic mouse keratinocytes. We observed that transgene expression occurred in the correct location and that the neo‐epidermis mimed previous in vivo observations obtained with integrin skin‐targeted transgenic mice. Therefore, this model will be a powerful tool to further investigate normal mouse and transgenic keratinocyte biology.
Oxidative Stress in Acne Vulgaris

Acne vulgaris is one of the most prevalent inflammatory skin conditions found in late childhood and adolescence. Despite various studies, the etiology or pathogenesis of acne is still not well understood and a single, primary cause has not been identified. In the past several decades, various studies have indicated that patients with acne are under increased cutaneous and systemic oxidative stress as indicated by observation of oxidative stress biomarkers. The burden of oxidative stress may not be a mere consequence of acne. Instead, the oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation in particular, may be an early event that helps drive the acne process. Administration of local and systemic antioxidants appears to be effectively against acne. Oxidative stress-initiated inflammation and its maintenance within the pilosebaceous unit are important initial steps for the subsequent pathogenic processes of acne development. The favorable environment created by the oxidation of sebum for Propionibacterium acnes (P acne) to grow is also an important contributing factor for these steps. This mechanism suggests the oxidative stress as a therapeutic target in the treatment of acne vulgaris. Citation: Wong A, Zhang B, Jiang M, Gong E, Zhang Y et al. (2016) Oxidative Stress in Acne Vulgaris. J Clin Dermatol Ther 3: 020.
Service Mashups and Developer Support

Physical mobility in major cities has become an ostentatious issue and connected mobility, an application of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has been readily propounded to soothe the situation. The context of connected mobility, where applications generally have to be designed on an adhoc basis to meet the user requirements, has gradually shifted the art of programming from the realms of professional software developers to third party application developers(End-Developers) or possibly even novice end users. The concepts of web mashups can be leveraged here to create IoT applications. This paper discusses the concept of web mashups in details and the tool-kits which provide support for IoT application development. The domain of mashups is interesting but the challenges involved with mashup development in an IoT scenario are quite heavy. The developmental strategies followed by the tool-kits can be classified into either mashup based or model-based. The functionality of these tool-kits have been described in great detail to represent the current state-of-art in the context of IoT application development. These tool-kits have been compared with respect to one another, followed by a discussion on their strengths and weakness. The existing weaknesses signify the open research challenges.
Comparabilty of Corpora in Human and Machine Translation

In this study, we demonstrate a negative result from a work on comparable corpora which forces us to address a problem of comparability in both human and machine translation. We state that it is not always defined similarly, and comparable corpora used in contrastive linguistics or human translation analysis cannot always be applied for statistical machine translation (SMT). So, we revise the definition of comparability and show that some notions from translatology, i.e. registerial features, should also be considered in machine translation
Modifications of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Envelope Glycoprotein Enhance Immunogenicity for Genetic Immunization

ABSTRACT In this study, we have investigated the effect of specific mutations in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) envelope (Env) on antibody production in an effort to improve humoral immune responses to this glycoprotein by DNA vaccination. Mice were injected with plasmid expression vectors encoding HIV Env with modifications in regions that might affect this response. Elimination of conserved glycosylation sites did not substantially enhance humoral or cytotoxic-T-lymphocyte (CTL) immunity. In contrast, a modified gp140 with different COOH-terminal mutations intended to mimic a fusion intermediate and stabilize trimer formation enhanced humoral immunity without reducing the efficacy of the CTL response. This mutant, with deletions in the cleavage site, fusogenic domain, and spacing of heptad repeats 1 and 2, retained native antigenic conformational determinants as defined by binding to known monoclonal antibodies or CD4, oligomer formation, and virus neutralization in vitro. Importantly, this modified Env, gp140ΔCFI, stimulated the antibody response to native gp160 while it retained its ability to induce a CTL response, a desirable feature for an AIDS vaccine.
Requirements for Personal Knowledge Management Tools

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a crucial element as well as complement of enterprise knowledge management (EKM) which has been largely neglected by Enterprise Information Systems, up to now. This paper collects requirements for a specific class of PKM software, which supports personal note taking and the idea of extending the human memory by information management. It introduces the knowledge-cue life cycle which describes how information artefacts can be used for helping to denote, remember, use, and further develop knowledge embodied in people’s heads. Based on this life cycle and on a literature study, this paper derives a comprehensive requirements catalogue to be fulfilled by knowledge articulation tools used in PKM. This requirements list can be used as a design specification and research agenda for PKM tool builders, and to assess the suitability of existing tools for PKM.