Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment and Management of Chemical Exposure in the Mohs Laboratory

BACKGROUND The correct handling, storage, and disposal of chemicals used in the processing of tissue for Mohs micrographic surgery are essential. OBJECTIVES To identify the chemicals involved in the preparation of Mohs frozen sections and assess the associated occupational health risks. To quantify exposure levels of hazardous chemicals and ensure that they are minimized. METHODS A risk assessment form was completed for each chemical. Atmospheric sampling was performed at our previous laboratory for formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds. These data were used in the design of our new facility, where testing was repeated. RESULTS Twenty‐five chemicals were identified. Ten were classified as hazardous substances, 10 were flammable, six had specific disposal requirements, four were potential carcinogens, and three were potential teratogens. Formaldehyde readings at our previous laboratory were up to eight times the national exposure standard. Testing at the new laboratory produced levels well below the exposure standards. CONCLUSION Chemical exposure within the Mohs laboratory can present a significant occupational hazard. Acutely toxic and potentially carcinogenic formaldehyde was found at high levels in a relatively standard laboratory configuration. A laboratory can be designed with a combination of physical environment and operational protocols that minimizes hazards and creates a safe working environment. The authors have indicated no significant interest with commercial supporters.
Informed consent and the capacity for voluntarism.

OBJECTIVE Informed consent is built upon the elements of information, decisional capacity, and volunteerism. Of these elements, voluntarism in clinical and research consent is the least well understood. This has interfered with the ability to resolve key ethical problems faced by the field of psychiatry. METHOD The author suggests that voluntarism encompasses an individual's ability to act in accordance with one's authentic sense of what is good, right, and best in light of one's situation, values, and prior history. Voluntarism further entails the capacity to make this choice freely and in the absence of coercion. Deliberateness, purposefulness of intent, clarity, genuineness, and coherence with prior life decisions are implicitly emphasized in this construction. RESULTS The author offers and illustrates a framework for voluntarism in clinical and research consent decisions, focusing on four domains of potential influence: 1) developmental factors, 2) illness-related considerations, 3) psychological issues and cultural and religious values, and 4) external features and pressures. CONCLUSIONS It is hoped that improved understanding of voluntarism will help in our efforts to fulfill the principle of respect for persons in clinical care and research.
What no robot has seen before — Probabilistic interpretation of natural-language object descriptions

We investigate the task of recognizing objects of daily use in human environments purely based on object descriptions given in natural language. In particular, we present an approach to transform phrases stated in natural language that describe such objects by their visual appearance into formal, semantic representations of their perceptual characteristics, which in turn can be used in a robot perception system in order to identify objects that the robot has never encountered before. To this end, we learn probabilistic first-order knowledge bases from encyclopedic articles and online dictionaries, which contain textual descriptions of a vast amount of everyday objects. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach on a robotic system in a proof-of-concept evaluation on a selected set of object descriptions acquired from the internet.
Lower bounds on the complexity of polytope range searching

Orthogonal range searching and simplex range searching have received much attention recently in the computational geometry literature. Whereas the former problem is nearing a definitive solution, however, the complexity of simplex range searching has long remained elusive. To state the problem simply, suppose that we are given n points in Euclidean d-space, fixed once and for all, and m units of computer memory. We wish to organize the memory to be in a position to answer the following type of queries efficiently: Given an arbitrary simplex q, how many of the n points lie inside q ? A natural variant of the problem calls for reporting the points in question and not simply counting them. More generally, it is customary to weight the points ahead of time and then ask for the cumulative weight of the subset of points that fall within the query. There is abundant practical application to motivate research on this problem [5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 18, 20, 22]. For example, clipping and removing hidden surfaces in computer graphics are fundamental tasks whose computational bottlenecks are instances of simplex range searching. Also of great interest is the central theoretical question lying underneath: What is the most efficient way of organizing information to support a given class of queries? What takes this question apart from the classical problem of searching a linear list is the power of redundancy. While oversupply of memory space is usually of marginal interest when searching a linear list, it is often the key to efficiency in multidimensional searching. For this reason, the principal research activity in that area has been the investigation of space-time trade-offs. Our main result is a family of lower bounds on the space-time complexity of simplex range searching. We prove that the worst case query time is Q(n/l/Hi) in the Euclidean plane, and more generally, Q((n/ log n)/m'l/d) in d-space, for d > 3, where n is the number of points and m is the amount of storage available. l These bounds hold with high probability for a random point-set
UV irradiation of chromosomal DNA and its effect upon MPF and meiosis in mammalian oocytes

Bovine oocytes were irradiated at germinal vesicle (GV) or metaphase II (MI) stage, after Hoechst staining, with chromosomally focused UV‐C (254 nm) or UV‐A (> 330 nm). UV‐C irradiation at GV stage did not inhibit germinal vesicle breakdown (GVBD) or chromosomal condensation; spindle formation was abolished and maturation promoting factor (MPF) levels failed to increase. UV‐A irradiation at GV stage caused meiotic arrest at anaphase I; MPF levels were lower than control. UV‐C irradiation at MII stage led to subsequent abnormal parthenogenetic activation when MPF levels failed to decrease. A normal male but no female pronucleus was formed at fertilization. UV‐A irradiation at MII stage also caused abnormal activation; MPF levels declined normally. A normal male and abnormal female pronucleus formed at fertilization. UV‐A irradiation results have implications for oocyte evaluation during development using Hoechst staining. UV‐C irradiation is a potential means for oocyte enucleation in nuclear transfer. © 1995 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Challenges for adaptive dialogue management in the KRISTINA project

Access to health care related information can be vital and should be easily accessible. However, immigrants often have difficulties to obtain the relevant information due to language barriers and cultural differences. In the KRISTINA project, we address those difficulties by creating a socially competent multimodal dialogue system that can assist immigrants in getting information about health care related questions. Dialogue management, as core component responsible for the system behaviour, has a significant impact on the successful reception of such a system. Hence, this work presents the specific challenges of the KRISTINA project to adaptive dialogue management, namely the handling of a large dialogue domain and the cultural adaptability required by the envisioned dialogue system, and our approach to handling them.
Hybrid spiking-stochastic Deep Neural Network

Stochastic computing has been adopted in various fields to improve the power efficiency of systems. Recent work showed that DNN based on stochastic computing can greatly reduce the power consumption. However, stochastic computing has a limitation of high latency overhead as it computes values only one bit per cycle. This paper proposes a new scheme to improve the latency of DNN implementation based on stochastic computing by combining it with the concept of spiking neural networks. It uses a spiking neural network as the front end and pipeline the results to the stochastic-computing neural network at the back end. Such a hybrid spiking-stochastic DNN has the benefits of both approaches including low latency and low power consumption, while maintaining the same level of accuracy.
Co-Channel Interference Modeling in Cognitive Wireless Networks

Cognitive radio is a promising technology for sharing the underutilized frequency bands that have been licensed to primary users. However, due to the uncertainty in detecting the existence of the primary user, the secondary user may interfere with the primary users when both primary and secondary users are active simultaneously. Therefore, understanding the interference and its consequences on the cognitive network is critical. Unlike the statistical models previously reported in the literature that aim at approximation of the interference, based on the solid mathematical analysis, we propose an accurate model for describing the co-channel interference with probability density function, cumulative distribution function, mean, and variance of the interference suffered by the primary users. The proposed model not only takes into account a number of factors, such as the spectrum-sensing scheme, the spatial distribution of secondary users, and the channel conditions, including shadowing and Nakagami fading, but also gives an exact mathematical expression of the influences from these factors. The developed framework supports practical applications such as evaluating the cognitive network of any spatial shape and density of the secondary users and the methods of power control and spectrum sensing used by the secondary users. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the analytical model.
Dual Band Body Worn Antenna

A dual frequency band triangular patch antenna is presented fabricated on clothing materials. The antenna operates over the wireless network bands at 2.45 Hz and 5 GHz. To reduce back radiation the antenna was placed over an electromagnetic band gap surface. Back radiation was reduced by 10 to 15 dB while maintaining the impedance match over the frequency bands.
The impact of project team attributes on ERP system implementations: A positivist field investigation

Purpose – The adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is a major challenge to organizations. Many implementation teams struggle to ensure the success of such projects. The information systems literature indicates that the team attributes of breadth of experience, empowerment, and cohesion are necessary conditions for project success. This paper aims to investigate how the nature of implementation teams may affect adoption success.Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a positivist, qualitative field study approach to investigate the role of the implementation team attributes in ERP system adoption. Project success is assessed on three determinants, i.e. support of organizational activities, stakeholder satisfaction, and system acceptance.Findings – The findings provide new insights as to the extent to which prior assumptions from the information systems literature apply in the ERP system implementation context. The results indicate that team empowerment and cohesion are not nece.
Phrase Detectives Corpus 1.0 Crowdsourced Anaphoric Coreference.

Natural Language Engineering tasks require large and complex annotated datasets to build more advanced models of language. Corpora are typically annotated by several experts to create a gold standard; however, there are now compelling reasons to use a non-expert crowd to annotate text, driven by cost, speed and scalability. Phrase Detectives Corpus 1.0 is an anaphorically-annotated corpus of encyclopedic and narrative text that contains a gold standard created by multiple experts, as well as a set of annotations created by a large non-expert crowd. Analysis shows very good inter-expert agreement (kappa=.88-.93) but a more variable baseline crowd agreement (kappa=.52-.96). Encyclopedic texts show less agreement (and by implication are harder to annotate) than narrative texts. The release of this corpus is intended to encourage research into the use of crowds for text annotation and the development of more advanced, probabilistic language models, in particular for anaphoric coreference.
Integration formulas for Brownian motion on classical compact Lie groups

Combinatorial formulas for the moments of the Brownian motion on classical compact Lie groups are obtained. These expressions are deformations of formulas of B. Collins and P. \'Sniady for moments of the Haar measure and yield a proof of the First Fundamental Theorem of invariant theory and of classical Schur-Weyl dualities based on stochastic calculus.
Features Affecting the Ability of Hepatitis Delta Virus RNAs To Initiate RNA-Directed RNA Synthesis

ABSTRACT In models of the replication of human hepatitis delta virus (HDV) RNA, it is generally assumed that circular RNAs are the only templates. However, noncircular HDV RNAs are also produced during replication, and it is known that replication can be initiated by transfection with noncircular RNAs. Therefore, strategies were devised to determine the relative ability of different HDV RNA species to initiate RNA replication. One strategy used in vivo intermolecular competition following cotransfection into cells, between two sequence-marked HDV RNA species. Circular RNA templates were found to be at least severalfold more efficient than a dimeric linear template. Unit-length linear species, that is, equivalent to circles opened at different sites, were in most cases but not always of efficiency comparable to that of each other. Greater-than-unit-length linear species were more efficient than unit-length species, presumably because of the increased opportunities for template switching. Genomic linear RNAs were generally of initiation ability comparable to that of antigenomic RNAs. A second strategy measured the ability of initiation to occur on different regions of HDV RNAs that were twice the unit length. In summary, results from these two experimental strategies make clear that linear HDV RNA species, as well as circles, can contribute to the overall process of HDV genome replication. In addition, the results from the two experimental strategies provided information on the impact of template switching during RNA-directed transcription.
Grouping edge points into line segments by sequential Hough transformation

An algorithm to group edge points into digital line segments with Hough transformation is described. The edge points are mapped onto the parameter domain discretized at specific intervals, on which peaks appear to represent different line segments. By modeling each peak as a Gaussian function in the parameter domain, a region to which the edge points are supposed to be mapped is determined. Then the edge points are grouped and the parameters for a line segment are computed. For the edges including multiple line segments, a sequential Hough transformation for detecting peaks one by one in the parameter domain is implemented, and the points from the region around each peak are grouped, thus the line segments are described. Experiments show the robustness of the algorithm implemented on both the generated edges disturbed by different noise levels and real images taken from an indoor environment.
White matter maturation in visual and motor areas predicts the latency of visual activation in children

In humans, white matter maturation is important for the improvement of cognitive function and performance with age. Across studies the variables of white matter maturity and age are highly correlated; however, the unique contributions of white matter to information processing speed remain relatively unknown. We investigated the relations between the speed of the visually‐evoked P100m response and the biophysical properties of white matter in 11 healthy children performing a simple, visually‐cued finger movement. We found that: (1) the latency of the early, visually‐evoked response was related to the integrity of white matter in both visual and motor association areas and (2) white matter maturation in these areas accounted for the variations in visual processing speed, independent of age. Our study is a novel investigation of spatial‐temporal dynamics in the developing brain and provides evidence that white matter maturation accounts for age‐related decreases in the speed of visual response. Developmental models of cortical specialization should incorporate the unique role of white matter maturation in mediating changes in performance during tasks involving visual processing. Hum Brain Mapp, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Association between dietary antioxidant quality score (DAQs) and bone mineral density in Spanish women.

BACKGROUND Several lines of evidence suggest a tight association between oxidative stress and the pathogenesis of osteoporosis in humans. The intake of antioxidants may influence Bone Mineral Density by acting as free radical scavengers, preventing oxidation-induced damage to bone cells. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to assess the association between the Dietary Antioxidant Quality Score and bone mineral density in a sample of healthy women. METHODS A total of 280 women were grouped into three major groups: women aged ≤ 35 years; women aged 36-45, and finally women aged >45 years. Calcaneous Bone Mineral Density (g/cm²) was measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry. Data on the eating habits of each participant were collected with a structured 24-hour diet recall questionnaire. A Dietary Antioxidant Quality Score was used to calculate antioxidant-nutrient intake. RESULTS A significant and positive association was observed among Bone Mineral Density and dietary intake of vitamin C and selenium. Zinc intake was significantly related to Bone Mineral Density in the youngest group. Low antioxidant consumers were considered individuals whose Dietary Antioxidant Quality Score was lower or equal than the median (3.5), and high antioxidant consumers were those whose Dietary Antioxidant Quality Score were higher than 3.5. Bone Mineral Density was higher in the participants defined as high antioxidant consumers in all aged groups. CONCLUSION The study showed that there is an association between Bone Mineral Density and the Dietary Antioxidant Quality Score in all the women studied. Therefore, new therapies for osteoporosis based on higher dietary antioxidant intakes might be developed basing on the results obtained in this study.
Selective Inhibitors of Kv11.1 Regulate IL-6 Expression by Macrophages in Response to TLR/IL-1R Ligands

The mechanism by which the platelet-endothelial cell adhesion molecule PECAM-1 regulates leukodiapedesis, vascular endothelial integrity, and proinflammatory cytokine expression in vivo is not known. We recently identified PECAM-1 as a negative regulator of Kv11.1, a specific voltage-gated potassium channel that functioned in human macrophages to reset a resting membrane potential following depolarization. We demonstrate here that dofetilide (DOF), a selective inhibitor of the Kv11.1 current, had a profound inhibitory effect on neutrophil recruitment in mice following TLR/IL-1R–elicited peritonitis or intrascrotal injection of IL-1β, but had no effect on responses seen with TNFα. Furthermore, inhibitors of Kv11.1 (DOF, E4031, and astemizole), but not Kv1.3 (margatoxin), suppressed the expression of IL-6 and MCP-1 cytokines by murine resident peritoneal macrophages, while again having no effect on TNFα. In contrast, IL-6 expression by peritoneal mesothelial cells was unaffected. Using murine P388 cells, which lack endogenous C/EBPβexpression and are unresponsive to LPS for the expression of both IL-6 and MCP-1, we observed that DOF inhibited LPS-induced expression of IL-6 mRNA following ectopic expression of wild-type C/EBPβ, but not a serine-64 point mutant. Finally, DOF inhibited the constitutive activation of cdk2 in murine peritoneal macrophages; cdk2 is known to phosphorylate C/EBPβ at serine-64. Taken together, our results implicate a potential role for Kv11.1 in regulating cdk2 and C/EBPβ activity, where robust transactivation of both IL-6 and MCP-1 transcription is known to be dependent on serine-64 of C/EBPβ. Our data might also explain the altered phenotypes displayed by PECAM-1 knockout mice in several disease models.
Phylogenetic relationships and genetic diversity of the Polypedates leucomystax complex in Thailand

Taxonomic uncertainty of the Asian tree frog Polypedates leucomystax complex presents the challenging task of inferring its biogeographical history. Here, we describe its dispersion and the genetic relationships among different populations in Thailand, where we connect the population of the P. leucomystax complex of the Sunda Islands to the Indochina (mainland) population based on analyses of 266 sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene. Our maternal genealogy implies that there are four well-supported lineages in Thailand, consisting of Northern A (clade A: Polypedates sp.), Nan (clade B: P. cf. impresus), Southern (clade C: P. cf. leucomystax) and Northern D (clade D: P. cf. megacephalus), with Bayesian posterior probability >0.9. Phylogeny and haplotype networks indicate that clades A, B and D are sympatric. In contrast, clade C (P. cf. leucomystax) and clade D (P. cf. megacephalus) are genetically divergent due to the geographical barrier of the Isthmus of Kra, resulting in an allopatric distribution. Climatic conditions, in particular differences in rainfall on each side of the Isthmus of Kra, may play an important role in limiting the immigration of both clades. For the within-populations of either clades C or D, there was no significant correlation between geographic and genetic distance by the isolation-by-distance test, indicating intraspecific-dispersal of each clade. Population expansion occurred in clade C, whereas clade D showed a constant population. Taken together, the P. leucomystax complex in South East Asia may have diversified under climatic pressure, leading to allopatric and/or sympatric speciation.