Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patterns of smoking behaviour in patients following cardiac surgery. A prospective study

Abstract Objectives. To describe patterns of smoking behaviour in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Design. A prospective population-based study of patients undergoing cardiac surgery between September 2004 and September 2005. Smoking behaviour and socio-demographic variables were obtained by questionnaires at baseline, six and 12 months after surgery. Results. At baseline 534 patients (median age 69 years, 23% females) were included, 89% responded after six and 12 months. At baseline 14% (n=74) were current smokers, 59% (n=316) were former smokers and 27% (n=143) had never smoked. At six months 8% were current smokers (n=36) while 9% (n=40) were current smokers at 12 months. A total of nine smokers had relapsed at 12 months. Conclusion. About half of the current smokers gave up smoking after cardiac surgery. Changes in smoking behaviour were most likely to occur during the first six months. This supports that smoking cessation interventions should continue after discharge. Cardiac surgery can serve as a teachable moment; an opportunity to encourage patients to give up smoking and prevent relapses among those who stopped smoking before surgery.
Reticulophagy and Ribophagy: Regulated Degradation of Protein Production Factories

During autophagy, cytosol, protein aggregates, and organelles are sequestered into double-membrane vesicles called autophagosomes and delivered to the lysosome/vacuole for breakdown and recycling of their basic components. In all eukaryotes this pathway is important for adaptation to stress conditions such as nutrient deprivation, as well as to regulate intracellular homeostasis by adjusting organelle number and clearing damaged structures. For a long time, starvation-induced autophagy has been viewed as a nonselective transport pathway; however, recent studies have revealed that autophagy is able to selectively engulf specific structures, ranging from proteins to entire organelles. In this paper, we discuss recent findings on the mechanisms and physiological implications of two selective types of autophagy: ribophagy, the specific degradation of ribosomes, and reticulophagy, the selective elimination of portions of the ER.
DICE: Dynamic Multi-RAT Selection in the ICN-enabled Wireless Edge

Coupled with the rapid increase in mobile device users and the bandwidth and latency demands are the continuous increase of devices' processing capabilities, storage, and wireless connectivity options. The multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) is proposed to satisfy mobile users' increasing needs. The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is better tuned (than the current Internet Protocol approach) to support multi-RAT communications. ICN eschews the connection-based content retrieval model used today and has desirable features such as data naming, in-network caching, and device mobility--a paradigm ripe for exploration. We propose DICE, an ICN forwarding strategy that helps a device dynamically select a subset of its multi-RAT interfaces for communication. DICE assesses the state of edge links and network congestion to determine the minimum number of interfaces required to to perform data delivery. We perform simulations to compare DICE's performance with bestroute2 and multicast strategies (part of the named data networking simulator, ndnSIM). We show that DICE is the best of both worlds: providing a higher delivery ratio (0.2-2 times) and much lower overhead (by 2-8 times) for different packet rates.
Fast emergency paths schema to overcome transient link failures in ospf routing

A reliable network infrastructure must be able to sustain traffic flows, even when a failure occurs and changes the network topology. During the occurrence of a failure, routing protocols, like OSPF, take from hundreds of milliseconds to various seconds in order to converge. During this convergence period, packets might traverse a longer path or even a loop. An even worse transient behaviour is that packets are dropped even though destinations are reachable. In this context, this paper describes a proactive fast rerouting approach, named Fast Emergency Paths Schema (FEP-S), to overcome problems originating from transient link failures in OSPF routing. Extensive experiments were done using several network topologies with different dimensionality degrees. Results show that the recovery paths, obtained by FEPS, are shorter than those from other rerouting approaches and can improve the network reliability by reducing the packet loss rate during the routing protocols convergence caused by a failure.
Electroencephalography(EEG)-based instinctive brain-control of a quadruped locomotion robot

Artificial intelligence and bionic control have been applied in electroencephalography (EEG)-based robot system, to execute complex brain-control task. Nevertheless, due to technical limitations of the EEG decoding, the brain-computer interface (BCI) protocol is often complex, and the mapping between the EEG signal and the practical instructions lack of logic associated, which restrict the user's actual use. This paper presents a strategy that can be used to control a quadruped locomotion robot by user's instinctive action, based on five kinds of movement related neurophysiological signal. In actual use, the user drives or imagines the limbs/wrists action to generate EEG signal to adjust the real movement of the robot according to his/her own motor reflex of the robot locomotion. This method is easy for real use, as the user generates the brain-control signal through the instinctive reaction. By adopting the behavioral control of learning and evolution based on the proposed strategy, complex movement task may be realized by instinctive brain-control.
Left Ventricular Lead Electrical Delay Is a Predictor of Mortality in Patients With Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy

Background—Electric left ventricular lead position, assessed by the electric delay from the beginning of the QRS complex to the local LV electrogram (QLV), was found in previous studies to be a strong predictor of short-term response to cardiac resynchronization therapy. We hypothesized that suboptimum electric position of the left ventricular lead is associated with an excess of heart failure events and mortality. Methods and Results—We analyzed the clinical outcome of patients with left bundle branch block or intraventricular conduction delay treated with cardiac resynchronization therapy at our institution during 9 years. Baseline clinical characteristics, QLV/QRS duration (QLV ratio) at cardiac resynchronization therapy implant, and data about heart failure hospitalization and mode of death were collected in 329 patients who were followed for a period of 3.3±1.9 years. Of them, 83 were hospitalized for heart failure and 83 died. Event rates for all-cause mortality, cardiac mortality, noncardiac mortality, heart failure mortality, and sudden death were 25.2%, 14.9%, 10.3%, 12.2%, and 2.1%, respectively. Patients with a QLV ratio ⩽0.70 had significantly worse event-free survival for all study end points—hazard ratio, 1.6; 95% confidence interval, 1.0 to 2.4; P=0.05 for heart failure hospitalization; hazard ratio, 2.9; 95% confidence interval, 1.6 to 5.5; P=0.001 for heart failure mortality; hazard ratio, 1.8; 95% confidence interval, 1.1 to 2.7; P=0.01 for cardiac mortality; and hazard ratio, 2.1; 95% confidence interval, 1.2 to 3.7; P=0.01 for all-cause mortality. In multivariable analysis, QLV ratio ⩽0.70 remained associated with all study end points. Conclusions—Electric left ventricular lead position in cardiac resynchronization therapy patients was a significant predictor of heart failure hospitalization and mortality.
Penn Korean Treebank : Development and Evaluation

With growing interest in Korean language processing, numerous natural languages processing (NLP) tools for Korean, such as part-of-speech (POs) taggers, morphological analyzers , parsers, have been developed. This progress was possible through the availability of large-scale raw text corpora and POS tagged corpora (ETRI, 1999; Yoon and Choi, 1999a; Yoon and Choi, 1999b). However, no large-scale bracketed corpora are currently available to the public, although efforts have been made to develop guidelines for syntactic annotation (Lee et al., 1996; Lee et al., 1997). As a first step towards addressing this issue, we built a 54-thousand-word s Korean Treebank using a phrase structure annotation. At the same time, we also developed annotation guidelines based on the morpho-syntactic phenomena represented in the corpus, over the period of Jan. 2000 and April 2001. The corpus that we used for the Korean Treebank consists of texts from military language training manuals. These texts contain information about various aspects of the military, such as troop movement, intelligence gathering, and equipment supplies, among others. This corpus is part of a Korean/English bilingual corpora that was used for domain specific Korean/English machine translation project at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the main reasons for annotating this corpus was to train taggers and parsers that can be used for the MT project. In this paper, we first discuss some issues in developing the annotation guidelines for POS tagging and syntactic bracketing. We then detail the annotation process in §3, including various methods we used to detect and correct annotation errors. §4 presents some statistics on the size of the corpus, and §5 discusses the results of the evaluation on the Treebank.
Trade-ins, Mental Accounting, and Product Replacement Decisions

When a consumer who already owns a durable‐type product in a category faces the opportunity to upgrade to a new, higher‐quality product, the replacement purchase decision is driven by both normative economic factors and psychological factors. As a normative decision maker, s/he considers the purchase price of the new alternative, but s/he additionally considers the mental cost of retiring the old product before s/he has gotten his/her money’s worth out of it. During ownership of a product, a consumer mentally depreciates the initial purchase price, thus creating a “mental book value” for the product. The write‐off of this mental book value is felt as the mental cost of a replacement purchase. Based on the principles of mental accounting and mental depreciation, I provide a theoretical explanation for this mental cost and why an individual’s replacement purchase decision may be more sensitive to the mental cost than the marginal cost. When applied appropriately, mental accounting can serve a useful purpose.
Profiling of the circadian metabolome in thioacetamide‐induced liver cirrhosis in mice

Liver cirrhosis can disturb circadian rhythms, decreasing patient quality of life. Changes in metabolic products in cirrhosis are poorly understood. We evaluated changes in liver metabolism products using a thioacetamide‐induced mouse model of liver cirrhosis exhibiting circadian rhythm disturbance. Principal component analysis indicated that the circular progression found in the control group was disrupted in the thioacetamide group, and Jonckheere‐Terpstra‐Kendall analysis showed an imbalanced pattern of oscillating metabolic products. In addition to changes in serotonin and other vitamin A–related metabolites, differences in metabolic products associated with energetics, redox homeostasis, bile acid production, inflammation, and other processes were identified. Carbohydrate metabolism showed a reduction in metabolic products associated with the tricarboxylic acid cycle, suggesting up‐regulation of glycolysis and reduced mitochondrial activity. Lipid metabolism showed an increase in ω‐oxidation products, suggesting decreased β‐oxidation. Conclusion: These data will be useful for chronotherapy and modulation of circadian rhythms in patients with liver damage. (Hepatology Communications 2017;1:704–718)
Gliadin, zonulin and gut permeability: Effects on celiac and non-celiac intestinal mucosa and intestinal cell lines

Objective. Little is known about the interaction of gliadin with intestinal epithelial cells and the mechanism(s) through which gliadin crosses the intestinal epithelial barrier. We investigated whether gliadin has any immediate effect on zonulin release and signaling. Material and methods. Both ex vivo human small intestines and intestinal cell monolayers were exposed to gliadin, and zonulin release and changes in paracellular permeability were monitored in the presence and absence of zonulin antagonism. Zonulin binding, cytoskeletal rearrangement, and zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1) redistribution were evaluated by immunofluorescence microscopy. Tight junction occludin and ZO-1 gene expression was evaluated by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Results. When exposed to gliadin, zonulin receptor-positive IEC6 and Caco2 cells released zonulin in the cell medium with subsequent zonulin binding to the cell surface, rearrangement of the cell cytoskeleton, loss of occludin-ZO1 protein–protein interaction, and increased monolayer permeability. Pretreatment with the zonulin antagonist FZI/0 blocked these changes without affecting zonulin release. When exposed to luminal gliadin, intestinal biopsies from celiac patients in remission expressed a sustained luminal zonulin release and increase in intestinal permeability that was blocked by FZI/0 pretreatment. Conversely, biopsies from non-celiac patients demonstrated a limited, transient zonulin release which was paralleled by an increase in intestinal permeability that never reached the level of permeability seen in celiac disease (CD) tissues. Chronic gliadin exposure caused down-regulation of both ZO-1 and occludin gene expression. Conclusions. Based on our results, we concluded that gliadin activates zonulin signaling irrespective of the genetic expression of autoimmunity, leading to increased intestinal permeability to macromolecules.
Combined Cytolytic Effects of a Vaccinia Virus Encoding a Single Chain Trimer of MHC-I with a Tax-Epitope and Tax-Specific CTLs on HTLV-I-Infected Cells in a Rat Model

Adult T cell leukemia (ATL) is a malignant lymphoproliferative disease caused by human T cell leukemia virus type I (HTLV-I). To develop an effective therapy against the disease, we have examined the oncolytic ability of an attenuated vaccinia virus (VV), LC16m8Δ (m8Δ), and an HTLV-I Tax-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) line, 4O1/C8, against an HTLV-I-infected rat T cell line, FPM1. Our results demonstrated that m8Δ was able to replicate in and lyse tumorigenic FPM1 cells but was incompetent to injure 4O1/C8 cells, suggesting the preferential cytolytic activity toward tumor cells. To further enhance the cytolysis of HTLV-I-infected cells, we modified m8Δ and obtained m8Δ/RT1AlSCTax180L, which can express a single chain trimer (SCT) of rat major histocompatibility complex class I with a Tax-epitope. Combined treatment with m8Δ/RT1AlSCTax180L and 4O1/C8 increased the cytolysis of FPM1V.EFGFP/8R cells, a CTL-resistant subclone of FPM1, compared with that using 4O1/C8 and m8Δ presenting an unrelated peptide, suggesting that the activation of 4O1/C8 by m8Δ/RT1AlSCTax180L further enhanced the killing of the tumorigenic HTLV-I-infected cells. Our results indicate that combined therapy of oncolytic VVs with SCTs and HTLV-I-specific CTLs may be effective for eradication of HTLV-I-infected cells, which evade from CTL lysis and potentially develop ATL.
Complex-barrier tunnelling times

In this paper we calculate the analytic expression of the phase time for the scattering of an electron off a complex square barrier. As is well known the (negative) imaginary part of the potential takes into account, phenomenologically, the absorption. We investigate the Hartman-Fletcher effect, and find that it is suppressed by the presence of a (non negligible) imaginary potential. In fact, when a suffficiently large absorption is present, the asymptotical transmission speed is finite. Actually, the tunnelling time does increase linearly with the barrier width. A recent optical experiment seems to be in agreement with our theoretical expectation.
FPGA-specific optimizations by partial function evaluation

Partial evaluation is a common optimization technique in compiler design. It is also used in hardware synthesis for simplifying modules with constant signals. In this paper we introduce a new evaluation method for imperative programs in high-level synthesis, which benefits from control data, whose values do not vary in different program executions and are thus determinable in advance. The key aspect is to collect intermediate-results during evaluation which are then used for hardware-specific optimizations, such as constant folding, reduction of data-widths or elimination and parallelization of memory accesses. In case of memory intensive applications we are able to reduce the runtime of up to 20%.
Assess The Effect of Resistance Training Compared To a Weight Loss Diet Program, on Body Composition, Insulin Sensitivity and Cardio-Vascular Risk Factors In Obese Adolescents.

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of a Resistance training program (BT) versus weight loss diet (DR) on body composition, insulin sensitivity and cardiovascular risk factors in obese adolescents. Methods: Thirty obese adolescents with a BMI above the 97th percentile participated in a training program and diet for 12 weeks. They were randomized into two groups: a diet group (DR, n = 16) with a caloric restriction of 500 kcal / day and Strength training group (BT, n = 14) for all major muscle groups, three sessions / week with an intensity of 50-80% (1.RM) for 3 months. Anthropometric and biochemical measurements were performed for all of our subjects before and after the intervention program of 12 weeks. Results: Significant variations of body composition parameters were observed in both groups. The decrease of BMI, body weight, fat mass and (WC) for the group (DR) was more important than the group (BT) (p <0.01 and p <0.05 respectively). Strength training significantly increases the sensitivity to insulin (HOMA-IR of group (BT), was 4.53 ± 1.2 before and 3.47 ± 1.4 after the training program (p <0.05)), while there was no significant change for the group (DR). 12 weeks of strength training, improves the plasma concentrations of TG and HDL-C the LDL-C/HDL-C reports, TC / HDL-C and HDL-C / TG (p <0.05). The diet of weight loss induced a significant decrease only for the TC and LDL-C. (4,46 ± 0.24 before to 4.15 ± 0.37 after and 2.68 ± 0.18 before to 2.42 ± 0.14 after (p <0.05) respectively). Conclusion: Strength training improves much more the sensitivity to insulin and cardiovascular risk factors than weight loss diet program. The latter is more effective for weight loss, BMI and body fat in obese adolescent boys.
Automatic Creation of Functional Sub-Networks Using Genetic Algorithms

Research has shown a strong correlation between the topology and functional capability of neural networks, though difficulties encountered in traditional neural network design and training increase in relation to the size and complexity of the network. Constructing a neural network topology through the integration of modularized, functional sub-networks has been shown to provide a reduction in overall topological complexity and computational requirements. Furthermore, evolutionary computing based optimization techniques may be used to overcome traditional design difficulties. The research presented in this paper outlines a modular neural network approach for the approximation of a Mealy machine example of a sequential logic circuit. The use of a genetic algorithm for the automatic generation of an optimal set of trained functional sub-networks is described. Results concur with the use of evolutionary computing techniques as a method for overcoming traditional neural network design issues and the use of modularization for the reduction of task complexity.
Cloud Computing Interoperability: The State of Play

Cloud computing is a promising IT paradigm which enables the Internet¢s evolution into a global market of collaborating services. Cloud computing semantic interoperability plays a key role in making this a reality. Towards this direction, a comprehensive and systematic survey of Cloud computing interoperability efforts by standardization groups, industry and research community is carried out. The main objective of this survey is to derive an initial set of semantic interoperability requirements to be supported by existing as well as next generation Cloud systems. Ôhe survey motivates and encourages the Cloud community to adopt a common Cloud computing interoperability framework with core dimensions the creation of a common data model and a standardized Cloud interface (API), which will constitute the base for the development of a semantically interoperable Cloud environment.
Building a Better Backtrace: Techniques for Postmortem Program Analysis

After a program has crashed, it can be difficult to reconstruct why the failure occurred, or what actions led to the error. We propose a family of analysis techniques that use the evidence left behind by a failed program to build a time line of its possible actions from launch through termination. Our design can operate with zero run time instrumentation, or can flexibly incorporate a wide variety of artifacts such as stack traces and event logs for increased precision. Efficient demand-driven algorithms are provided, and the approach is well suited for incorporation into interactive debugging support tools.
Workplace emotion through a psychological contract lens.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify how psychological contract perceptions are used as a lens through which employees make sense of their workplace emotions. Applying Rousseau’s (1995; 2011) conceptualisation of psychological contracts it examines how the emotions linked to both promise perceptions (broken/exceeded) and regulation are made sense of in relation to perceptions of contract type. Design/methodology/approach – This paper takes a unique perspective into the role perceptions of psychological contract type play in the process of emotional sensemaking using qualitative thematic analysis of thirty in-depth interviews. A range of occupations are represented and all participants worked in a full-time capacity. Findings – The paper identifies how the predominant relationship frame (transactional/relational) is used by employees when making sense of the emotions recalled during specific psychological contract events, as well as the emotions they feel are necessary to regulate while at work. Research limitations/implication – The mean age of the study sample was 26 years, comparatively young in terms of the span of the employment age bracket. Taking a lifespan approach would potentially broaden our understanding of how employees use their predominant relationship frame in the process of emotional sensemaking at different stages of their life and careers. Originality/value – This paper identifies an important work-related cue used in the active regulation of specific emotions whilst at work, contributing to both the psychological contract and emotion literature.