Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Medical Students’ Awareness of Their Non-Verbal Communication through Automated Non-Verbal Behavior Feedback

The nonverbal communication of clinicians has an impact on patients’ satisfaction and health outcomes. Yet medical students are not receiving enough training on the appropriate nonverbal behaviors in clinical consultations. Computer vision techniques have been used for detecting different kinds of nonverbal behaviors, and they can be incorporated in educational systems that help medical students develop communication skills. We describe EQClinic, a system that combines a tele-health platform with automated nonverbal behavior recognition. The system aims to help medical students improve their communication skills through a combination of human and automatically generated feedback. EQClinic provides fully automated calendaring and video-conferencing features for doctors or medical students to interview patients. We describe a pilot (18 dyadic interactions) in which standardized patients (i.e. someone acting as a real patient), were interviewed by medical students and provided assessments and comments about their performance. After the interview, computer vision and audio processing algorithms were used to recognize students’ nonverbal behaviors known to influence the quality of a medical consultation: including turn taking, speaking ratio, sound volume, sound pitch, smiling, frowning, head leaning, head tilting, nodding, shaking, face-touch gestures and overall body movements. The results showed that students’ awareness of nonverbal communication was enhanced by the feedback information, which was both provided by the standardized patients and generated by the machines.
Interdisciplinary research detection by citation indicators

Methodology to analyze a vast amount of scientific information is becoming an indispensable component of R&D management. Bibliometrics are one of powerful tools for overviewing scientific activities in a manner that individuals cannot handle. However, it sometimes misses minor but essential part of scientific activities such as interdisciplinary research. Complex issues we face such as sustainability and aging society cannot be solved within an academic discipline and interdisciplinary research and transdisciplinary expertise are essential. In this paper, we measure interdisciplinarity of academic papers by a set of indicators that are obtained by citation network analysis. Betweeness centrality, diversity of references, and diversity of references of references were used to measure interdisciplinarity. A case study was performed in sustainability science to evaluate those indicators. These indicators can detect interdisciplinary papers among a pile of papers. But there is a difference in extracted papers according to the indicators. Characteristics of each indicator were discussed.
Temporal and Spatial Expression Patterns of Bone Morphogenetic Protein 3 in Developing Zebrafish

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are important elements in bone biology. We herein report the expression profiles of zebrafish bmp3 (zbmp3) as demonstrated by real-time PCR and in situ hybridization. The expression of zbmp3 was highly detectable by real-time PCR from 1 day post-fertilization (1 dpf) to 2 weeks post-fertilization (2 wpf) and peaked at 1 wpf. For in situ hybridization experiments, zbmp3 was expressed in the otic vesicle at 1 dpf, 2 dpf, 3 dpf, and 5 dpf. It was also expressed in the pharyngeal arches, including the opercle, branchiostegal ray, and pectoral fins, at 2 dpf. Our results suggest that zbmp3 may play an important role in the skeletal biology of developing zebrafish.
The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy

Preface Chapter 1 The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism as the New Normal Chapter 2 Middle-Class Melancholia: Self-Sufficiency after the Demise of Christianized Capitalism (U.S. Style) Chapter 3 Occupy Precarity: Resisting the Limits of Collective Agency under Neoliberalism Chapter 4 The Deep Semiotic Structure of Deservingness: Discourse and Identity in Neoliberal Welfare Policy Chapter 5 The End of Social Work: Implementing a Neoliberal Paternalism (with Basha Silverman) Chapter 6 Schooling the Corporatized Citizen/Corporatizing the School: From Grade School through College Chapter 7 The Next Neoliberal Thing: Social Impact Bonds Chapter 8 Getting Beyond Neoliberalism: The Road to Radical Incrementalism Notes Index
Differential effects of three antibiotics on T helper cell cytokine expression.

OBJECTIVES To test whether ciprofloxacin, moxifloxacin and clarithromycin affect the expression of the T helper (Th) cell cytokines, interferon-gamma and interleukin-4. Quinolone and macrolide antibiotics are routinely used for the treatment of critically ill patients with sepsis. These antibiotics modulate some aspects of immune cell function. Alteration in the profile of Th cell cytokine expression will affect the T helper cell ratio and subsequent immune responses. METHODS Following ethics committee approval and informed consent, mononuclear cells were isolated from 20 healthy volunteers using single density gradient centrifugation. Cells were incubated with ciprofloxacin (0--100 mg/L), moxifloxacin (0--50 mg/L) or clarithromycin (0--125 mg/L) and stimulated with phorbol myristate acetate and ionomycin. For flow cytometric analysis, cells were stained with antibodies to CD3 and CD4, prior to permeabilization with saponin and intracellular staining with anti-interleukin-4 and anti-interferon-gamma. RESULTS Both moxifloxacin and ciprofloxacin dose-dependently decreased interferon-gamma and interleukin-4 expression by Th cells (both P<0.0001). Only interleukin-4 expression however, was affected by clarithromycin (P=0.04). There was no change in the Th1/Th2 ratio for moxifloxacin or ciprofloxacin, but the Th1/Th2 ratio increased with increasing concentrations of clarithromycin, from a median [range] of 5.3 [1.3--16.0] without antibiotic to 9.1 [1.8--18.8] at 125 mg/L (P=0.017). CONCLUSIONS Moxifloxacin and ciprofloxacin had pronounced effects on both Th1 and Th2 cytokine expression, without altering Th1/Th2 ratios. However, clarithromycin decreased only interleukin-4 expression such that the Th1/Th2 ratio increased. Since a Th1 profile is considered favourable for resolution of infection, elucidation of immunomodulatory profiles of antibiotics may permit more rational antibiotic choice in future.
Tumor and Stem Cell Biology Delineation of aCellular Hierarchy in LungCancer Reveals an Oncofetal Antigen Expressed on Tumor-Initiating Cells

Poorly differentiated tumors in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have been associated with shorter patient survival and shorter time to recurrence following treatment. Here, we integrate multiple experimental models with clinicopathologic analysis of patient tumors to delineate a cellular hierarchy in NSCLC. We show that the oncofetal protein 5T4 is expressed on tumor-initiating cells and associated with worse clinical outcome in NSCLC. Coexpression of 5T4 and factors involved in the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition were observed in undifferentiated but not in differentiated tumor cells. Despite heterogeneous expression of 5T4 in NSCLC patient–derived xenografts, treatment with an anti-5T4 antibody–drug conjugate resulted in complete and sustained tumor regression. Thus, the aggressive growth of heterogeneous solid tumors can be blocked by therapeutic agents that target a subpopulation of cells near the top of the cellular hierarchy. Cancer Res; 71(12); 4236–46. 2011 AACR.
Exploring Mental Lexicon in an Efficient and Economic Way: Crowdsourcing Method for Linguistic Experiments

Mental lexicon plays a central role in human language competence and inspires the creation of new lexical resources. The traditional linguistic experiment method which is used to explore mental lexicon has some disadvantages. Crowdsourcing has become a promising method to conduct linguistic experiments which enables us to explore mental lexicon in an efficient and economic way. We focus on the feasibility and quality control issues of conducting Chinese linguistic experiments to collect Chinese word segmentation and semantic transparency data on the international crowdsourcing platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower. Through this work, a framework for crowdsourcing linguistic experiments is proposed.
Recent Advances and Trends in Large-Scale Kernel Methods

Kernel methods such as the support vector machine are one of the most successful algorithms in modern machine learning. Their advantage is that linear algorithms are extended to non-linear scenarios in a straightforward way by the use of the kernel trick. However, naive use of kernel methods is computationally expensive since the computational complexity typically scales cubically with respect to the number of training samples. In this article, we review recent advances in the kernel methods, with emphasis on scalability for massive problems.
Sequence learning: analysis and solutions for sparse data in high dimensional spaces

We examine the problem of classifying biological sequences, and in particular the challenge of generalizing to novel input data. The high dimensionality of sequence results in an extremely sparsely populated input space. This motivates a need for regularization (a form of inductive bias), in order to achieve generalization. We discuss regularization in the context of regular Neural Networks and Deep Belief Networks, and provide experimental results on an example problem of DNA barcoding classification. Our results support the importance of using an effective regularization method, and indicate the adaptive, data-depended regularization mechanism of a DBN is more powerful than the simple methods of model selection / weight decay / early stopping.
High Implied Voc (>715 mV) and low emitter saturation current density (∼10fA/cm2) from a lightly B doped implanted emitter

In this paper, we demonstrate a very low emitter saturation current density (J<sub>0e</sub>) of ~10 fA/cm<sup>2</sup> from an implanted lightly doped B emitter (>150 ohm/□) passivated with Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>/SiNx stack. The test cell structure with lightly B doped emitter passivated with Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>/SiNx on front and tunnel oxide/n+ poly silicon passivated back gave a high implied V<sub>oc</sub> of 715~722 mV on ~5 Ω-cm n-type Cz wafers. It is also shown that Ti/Pd/Ag contact resistance on the lightly doped B emitter was ~2 mΩ-cm<sup>2</sup>, but screen printed Ag/Al contact gave a high contact resistance of 25 mΩ-cm<sup>2</sup>. Therefore, a selective B emitter was used in this study, which gave ~21.0% efficiency with V<sub>oc</sub> of 689 mV.
Accelerating of Image Retrieval in CBIR System with Relevance Feedback

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system with relevance feedback, which uses the algorithm for feature-vector (FV) dimension reduction, is described. Feature-vector reduction (FVR) exploits the clustering of FV components for a given query. Clustering is based on the comparison of magnitudes of FV components of a query. Instead of all FV components describing color, line directions, and texture, only their representative members describing FV clusters are used for retrieval. In this way, the "curse of dimensionality" is bypassed since redundant components of a query FV are rejected. It was shown that about one tenth of total FV components (i.e., the reduction of 90%) is sufficient for retrieval, without significant degradation of accuracy. Consequently, the retrieving process is accelerated. Moreover, even better balancing between color and line/texture features is obtained. The efficiency of FVR CBIR system was tested over TRECVid 2006 and Corel 60 K datasets.
Intravitreal Ranibizumab in the Treatment of Choroidal Neovascularization Associated with Idiopathic Central Serous Chorioretinopathy

Purpose We evaluate the functional and anatomic outcome after intravitreal ranibizumab treatment in patients with choroidal neovascularization (CNV) related to chronic central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC). Methods This is a small case series of 5 eyes with CNV associated with chronic CSC treated with intravitreal injection of 0.5 mg ranibizumab in the Jules Gonin University Eye Hospital from July 2007 to July 2009. Baseline and monthly follow-up visits included best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), fundus examination, and optical coherence tomography (OCT). Fluorescein and indocyanine green angiography (ICG) were performed at baseline and repeated at least every 6 months. Results We studied 5 eyes of 4 patients with a mean age of 66 years. Mean follow-up was 21 months (SD 1.9). The mean number of intravitreal injections administered for each patient was 10(SD4.6). The mean initial BCVA was 0.23 (decimal equivalent) (logMAR 0.64, SD 0.13). At the last follow-up, mean BCVA was 0.44 decimal equivalent (logMAR 0.36, SD 0.31). Mean central macular thickness (CMT) measured with OCT was 330 μm (SD 43) at baseline and decreased at the final follow-up to 243 μm (SD 44). Persistent intraretinal or subretinal fluid on OCT and/or multifocal areas of increased choroidal permeability on ICG angiographies were present in all patients at the last follow-up visit. Conclusions Intravitreal ranibizumab appeared to be an effective treatment of CNV related to chronic CSC. However, residual intraretinal or subretinal fluid and increased choroidal permeability persisted. Prospective controlled studies are warranted to evaluate the long-term safety and efficacy of intravitreal ranibizumab.
Vitamin D receptor binding, chromatin states and association with multiple sclerosis

Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the aetiology of multiple sclerosis (MS). More than 50 genomic regions have been associated with MS susceptibility and vitamin D status also influences the risk of this complex disease. However, how these factors interact in disease causation is unclear. We aimed to investigate the relationship between vitamin D receptor (VDR) binding in lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs), chromatin states in LCLs and MS-associated genomic regions. Using the Genomic Hyperbrowser, we found that VDR-binding regions overlapped with active regulatory regions [active promoter (AP) and strong enhancer (SE)] in LCLs more than expected by chance [45.3-fold enrichment for SE (P < 2.0e−05) and 63.41-fold enrichment for AP (P < 2.0e−05)]. Approximately 77% of VDR regions were covered by either AP or SE elements. The overlap between VDR binding and regulatory elements was significantly greater in LCLs than in non-immune cells (P < 2.0e−05). VDR binding also occurred within MS regions more than expected by chance (3.7-fold enrichment, P < 2.0e−05). Furthermore, regions of joint overlap SE-VDR and AP-VDR were even more enriched within MS regions and near to several disease-associated genes. These findings provide relevant insights into how vitamin D influences the immune system and the risk of MS through VDR interactions with the chromatin state inside MS regions. Furthermore, the data provide additional evidence for an important role played by B cells in MS. Further analyses in other immune cell types and functional studies are warranted to fully elucidate the role of vitamin D in the immune system.
Duloxetine in the treatment of major depressive disorder

Since depression impacts all body systems, antidepressant treatments should relieve both the emotional and physical symptoms of depression. Duloxetine demonstrated antidepressant efficacy at a dose of 60 mg qd in two placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind studies and significantly improved remission rates compared with placebo. Duloxetine-treated patients had significant reduction in severity of the symptoms of depression as assessed by the HAM-D17, anxious symptoms as measured by the HAM-A and quality of life measures compared to placebo. Duloxetine also improved somatic symptoms, particularly painful symptoms which may have contributed to significantly improved remission rates compared to placebo. Approximately 10% of the 1139 patients with major depressive disorder in placebo-controlled trials discontinued treatment due to an adverse event, compared to 4% of the 777 patients receiving placebo. In addition to nausea (1.4% incidence), which was the most common reason for discontinuation, dizziness, somnolence, and fatigue were the most common AEs reported as reasons for discontinuation and all were considered drug-related. Duloxetine treatment lacks effects on ECG, increases heart rate, and has little effect on blood pressure or weight.
In Silico Analysis of a Novel Plasmid from the Coral Pathogen Vibrio coralliilyticus Reveals Two Potential “Ecological Islands”

As virulence often correlates with the presence of plasmid replicons in several Vibrio spp. , this study investigated whether non-chromosomal DNA could be found in the coral pathogen, Vibrio coralliilyticus BAA-450. A circular plasmid, 26,631 bp in size, was identified. DNA sequence analysis indicated that the plasmid contained 30 open reading frames, six tRNA genes, 12 inverted repeats, three direct repeats and presented no continuous sequence identity to other replicons within the database. Consequently, these findings indicate that this is a novel, previously unidentified, plasmid. Two putative “ecological islands” were also identified and are predicted to encode for various factors that would facilitate growth and survival under different ecological conditions. In addition, two open reading frames may encode proteins that contribute to the pathogenicity of the organism. Functional cooperativity is also indicated between several plasmid- and chromosomally-encoded proteins, which, in a single instance, would allow a fully functioning nutrient uptake system to be established.
Microsatellite markers associated with genes expressed in developing wings of Bicyclus anynana butterflies

Deriving useful microsatellite markers in lepidopterans has been challenging when relying on scans of genomic DNA libraries, presumably due to repetitiveness in their genomes. We assayed 96 of 320 microsatellites identified in silico from a collection of Bicyclus anynana ESTs, in 11 independent individuals from a laboratory population. From the 68 successful assays, we identified 40 polymorphic markers including 22 with BLAST‐based annotation. Nine of 12 selected polymorphic markers tested in a panel of 24 wild‐caught individuals converted to successful assays and were all polymorphic. We discuss how microsatellite discovery in ESTs is an efficient strategy with important attendant advantages.
The region of mouse mammary tumor virus DNA containing the long terminal repeat includes a long coding sequence and signals for hormonally regulated transcription.

Starting from a biologically active recombinant DNA clone of exogenous unintegrated GR mouse mammary tumor virus, we have generated three subclones of PstI fragments of 1.45, 1.1, and 2.0 kb in the plasmid vector PBR322. The nucleotide sequence has been determined for the clone of 1.45 kb which includes almost the complete region of the long terminal repeat (LTR) plus an adjacent stretch of unique sequence DNA. A short region of the 2.0 kb clone, containing the beginning of the LTR, has also been sequenced. Starting with the A of an initiation codon outside the LTR, we detected an open reading frame of 960 nucleotides, potentially coding for a protein of 320 amino acids (36K). Two hundred nucleotides downstream from the termination codon, and approximately 25 nucleotides upstream from the presumptive initiation site of viral RNA synthesis, we found a promoter‐like sequence. The sequence AGTAAA was detected approximately 15‐20 nucleotides upstream from the 3′ end of virion RNA and probably serves as a polyadenylation signal. The 1.45 kb PstI fragment has been transfected into Ltk‐ cells together with a plasmid containing the thymidine kinase gene of herpes simplex virus. The virus‐specific RNA synthesis detected in a Tk+ cell clone was strongly stimulated by the addition of dexamethasone.
A General Framework for Scheduling in a Stochastic Environment

There are many systems and techniques that address stochastic scheduling problems, based on distinct and sometimes opposite approaches, especially in terms of how scheduling and schedule execution are combined, and if and when knowledge about the uncertainties are taken into account. In many real-life problems, it appears that all these approaches are needed and should be combined, which to our knowledge has never been done. Hence it it first desirable to define a thorough classification of the techniques and systems, exhibiting relevant features: in this paper, we propose a tree-dimension typology that distinguishes between proactive, progressive, and revision techniques. Then a theoretical representation model integrating those three distinct approaches is defined. This model serves as a general template within which parameters can be tuned to implement a system that will fit specific application needs: we briefly introduce in this paper our first experimental prototypes which validate our model.
Social Adversity, Genetic Variation, Street Code, and Aggression

Although the diathesis-stress model guides most genetically informed behavior science, the present study investigates the hypotheses derived from the differential susceptibility perspective. This model posits that those persons most vulnerable to adverse social environments are the same ones who reap the most benefit from environmental support. Using longitudinal data from a sample of several hundred African American males, we examined the manner in which variants in 3 genes—5-serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT), dopamine receptor gene (DRD4), and monoamine oxidase gene (MAOA)—modulate the effect of community and family adversity on adoption of the street code and aggression. We found strong support for the differential susceptibility perspective.
Promoting Oral Language Skills in Preschool Children through Sociodramatic Play in the Classroom

Children best learn language through playful learning experiences in the preschool classroom. The present study focused on developing oral language skills in preschool children through a sociodramatic play intervention. The study employed a case study design under qualitative approach. The researcher conducted a sociodramatic play intervention collaboratively with the class teacher for a group of 10 children selected utilizing purposive sampling method in a preschool classroom. The intervention was conducted in a preschool located in Colombo, Sri Lanka for 3 weeks. The observation, interview and reflective journal were the instrument used to collect data. The observation carried under two criteria namely, ability to initiate a conversation and ability to respond in a conversation revealed that the sociodramatic play intervention created many opportunities to develop oral language skills in the children than the regular classroom activities. The sociodramatic play activities enhanced children's oral language skills while creating a language rich playful learning experiences. Keywords : Language development, Early childhood education, Sociodramatic play