Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Oral fluoroquinolones and the risk of retinal detachment.

CONTEXT Fluoroquinolones are commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics. Despite numerous case reports of ocular toxicity, a pharmacoepidemiological study of their ocular safety, particularly retinal detachment, has not been performed. OBJECTIVE To examine the association between use of oral fluoroquinolones and the risk of developing a retinal detachment. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Nested case-control study of a cohort of patients in British Columbia, Canada, who had visited an ophthalmologist between January 2000 and December 2007. Retinal detachment cases were defined as a procedure code for retinal repair surgery within 14 days of a physician service code. Ten controls were selected for each case using risk-set sampling, matching on age and the month and year of cohort entry. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE The association between retinal detachment and current, recent, or past use of an oral fluoroquinolone. RESULTS From a cohort of 989,591 patients, 4384 cases of retinal detachment and 43,840 controls were identified. Current use of fluoroquinolones was associated with a higher risk of developing a retinal detachment (3.3% of cases vs 0.6% of controls; adjusted rate ratio [ARR], 4.50 [95% CI, 3.56-5.70]). Neither recent use (0.3% of cases vs 0.2% of controls; ARR, 0.92 [95% CI, 0.45-1.87]) nor past use (6.6% of cases vs 6.1% of controls; ARR, 1.03 [95% CI, 0.89-1.19]) was associated with a retinal detachment. The absolute increase in the risk of a retinal detachment was 4 per 10,000 person-years (number needed to harm = 2500 computed for any use of fluoroquinolones). There was no evidence of an association between development of a retinal detachment and β-lactam antibiotics (ARR, 0.74 [95% CI, 0.35-1.57]) or short-acting β-agonists (ARR, 0.95 [95% CI, 0.68-1.33]). CONCLUSION Patients taking oral fluoroquinolones were at a higher risk of developing a retinal detachment compared with nonusers, although the absolute risk for this condition was small.
Characterization of human and mouse angiopoietin-like factor CDT6 promoters.

PURPOSE Angiogenesis refers to the latter stage of vascular development. It has been reported that angiopoietin-like factor cornea-derived transcript 6 (CDT6) encodes a protein homologous to angiopoietins that could play a critical role in blocking a receptor of angiopoietin (Tie2) and therefore contribute to the avascularity and transparency of the cornea in the developing embryo and the adult. This study was focused on isolation and characterization of the CDT6 promoter. METHODS Rapid amplification of cDNA ends (5'-RACE) was used to isolate the CDT6 promoter from an adaptor-ligated genomic DNA fragment library and to identify the transcription initiation site of the CDT6 gene. The RNase protection assay was performed to confirm the initiation site. The sequence similarity, binding sites for putative transcription factors, and transcriptional activity of human and mouse CDT6 promoters were compared. Corneal and noncorneal cells from humans and other animals were transiently transfected with CDT6 promoter-chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter constructs to analyze the transcriptional activity of the promoter. RESULTS A 2956-bp human CDT6 promoter fragment and a 3142-bp mouse CDT6 promoter fragment were isolated. The major transcription initiation sites of the human and mouse CDT6 genes were located at 224 and 168 bp, respectively, upstream of the translation initiation site. Human and mouse CDT6 promoter sequences were very similar. Both promoters were minus TATA and CAAT boxes close to the transcription initiation site. Transfection into human corneal and noncorneal cells and into nonhuman cells revealed that the human CDT6 promoter probably contains positive and negative cis-regulatory elements that modulate cell, tissue, and species specificity. The human CDT6 promoter contains four interferon (IFN)-stimulated response elements (ISREs). No ISREs could be identified in the mouse promoter. IFN-alpha stimulated transcriptional activity of the human promoter. CONCLUSIONS The human and mouse CDT6 promoters have similar sequences and share many cis-regulatory elements. IFN-alpha appears to have an important role in regulating transcription of the human, but not the mouse, CDT6 promoter.
Human/Machine Reconsidered

this is a draft, if you copy this paper you must include this copyright note, this paper must not be used for commercial purposes or gain in any way, note you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form: Lucy Suchman, 'Human/Machine Reconsidered' (draft) published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at: http://www.lancaster. ac.uk/sociology/soc040ls.html
Models for decision making problems with hesitant fuzzy information

We investigate the decision making problems with hesitant fuzzy information. Firstly, some operational laws of hesitant fuzzy elements and score function of hesitant fuzzy elements are introduced. Then, we have developed two induced generalized hesitant fuzzy aggregation operators: induced generalized hesitant fuzzy choquet ordered averaging (IGHFCOA) operator and induced generalized hesitant fuzzy choquet ordered geometric (IGHFCOG) operator. The prominent characteristic of the operators is that they can not only consider the importance of the elements or their ordered positions, but also reflect the correlation among the elements or their ordered positions. We have applied the IGHFCOA and IGHFCOG operators to decision making problems for five kinds of Protein's nutritional assessment with hesitant fuzzy information. Finally an illustrative example has been given to show the developed method.
Experience Dependent Plasticity over short and long timescales

The brain is constantly changing. Genetically specified developmental pathways interact with extrinsic factors including illness, injury and learning to shape the brain. This thesis presents two projects on experience dependent plasticity over different timescales. Exerting its effect across years, deafness provides a model of long term crossmodal plasticity. In the first part of this thesis I ask how deafness affects the thalamus. Diffusion weighted imaging was used to segment the thalamus and with probabilistic tractography, thalamo-cortical connections were traced. Microstructural properties of visual and frontal thalamic segmentations, thalamo-cortical tracts throughout the brain, apart from the temporal thalamo-cortical tract were altered. The neuroanatomical sequelae of deafness are evident throughout the brain. Deaf people have enhanced peripheral vision, facilitating a protective orienting mechanism when hearing cannot be relied upon. Widefield population receptive field (pRF) modeling with fMRI was completed to examine the functional and structural properties of primary visual cortex. Deaf participants had enlarged pRF profiles and thinner cortex in peripheral visual regions, again emphasizing plasticity across many years. In the second part I examine plasticity over the course of days. Visuomotor transformations translate visual input to motor actions, and its neural instantiation might change with training. We used a pattern component model on fMRI data to reveal a gradient of visual to motor information from occipital to parietal to motor cortex. Strikingly, we observed motor coding in visual cortex and visual coding in motor cortex. More tentatively, our results suggest that during sensorimotor skill learning there is decreased dependence on visual cortex as motor cortex learns the novel visuomotor mapping. In summary, I show crossmodal processing and plasticity in regions previously considered not to exhibit these properties, both in long- and short-term plasticity. This work emphasizes the contribution that computational neuroimaging can provide to the field of experience dependent plasticity.
Massively Parallel, Adaptive, Color Image Processing for Au- Tonomous Road following 9.1 Introduction

In recent years, signi cant progress has been made towards achieving autonomous roadway navigation using video images. None of the systems developed take full advantage of all the information in the 512 512 pixel, 30 frame/second color image sequence. This can be attributed to the large amount of data which is present in the color video image stream (22.5 Mbytes/second) as well as the limited amount of computing resources available to the systems. We have increased the computing power available to the system by using a data parallel computer. Speci cally, a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) machine was used to develop simple and e cient parallel algorithms, largely based on connectionist techniques, which can process every pixel in the incoming 30 frame/second, color video image stream. The system presented here uses substantially larger frames and processes them at faster rates than other color road following systems. This is achievable through the use of algorithms speci cally designed for a ne-grained parallel machine as opposed to ones ported from existing systems to parallel architectures. The algorithms presented here were tested on 4K and 16K processor MasPar MP-1 and on 4K, 8K, and 16K processor MasPar MP-2 parallel machines and were used to drive Carnegie Mellon's testbed vehicle, the Navlab I, on paved roads near campus.
The Contemporary American Family: A Dialectical Perspective on Communication and Relationships

Acknowledgements Preface Chapter 1: A Dialectical Approach to Family Conceptual tools Basic concepts Dialectical management patterns Interface of culture patterns Dialectical classifications Chapter 2: Defining the Contemporary Family Defining family Criteria for defining family Chapter 3: Structural Diversity Contemporary family structures Nuclear family Single parent family Blended family Chapter 4: Cultural Diversity Cultural diversity in the family Religion and family culture Diversity in sexual orientation Racial and ethnic diversity Chapter 5: Developmental Diversity Approaches to development The family life cycle approach The learning approach A dialectical approach Chapter 6: Functional Diversity Functional diversity and the family The impact of alcoholism on the family Domestic violence The dark side of divorce Chapter 7: Family Spirituality Bringing light into darkness A spiritual approach 12-Step programs References
Morbidity and mortality associated with primary and catheter-related bloodstream infections in critically ill patients.

PURPOSE To analyze the impact of primary and catheterrelated bloodstream infections (PBSI/CRBSI) on morbidity and mortality. METHODS A matched case-control study (1:4) was carried out on a Spanish epidemiological database of critically ill patients (ENVIN-HELICS). To determine the risk of death in patients with PBSI/CRBSI a matched Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was performed. RESULTS Out of the 74,585 registered patients, those with at least one episode of monomicrobial PBSI/CRBSI were selected and paired with patients without PBSI/CRBSI for demographic and diagnostic criteria and seriousness of their condition on admission to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). for mortality analysis, 1,879 patients with PBSI/CRBSI were paired with 7,516 controls. The crude death rate in the ICU was 28.1% among the cases and 18.7% among the controls. Attributable mortality 9.4% (HR:1.20; 95% confidence interval: 1.07-1.34; p<0.001). Risk of death varied according to the source of infection, aetiology, moment of onset of bloodstream infection and severity on admission to the ICU. The median stay in the ICU of patients who survived PBSI/CRBSI was 13 days longer than the controls, also varying according to aetiology, moment of onset of bloodstream infection and severity on admission. CONCLUSIONS Acquisition of PBSI/CRBSI in critically ill patients significantly increases mortality and length of ICU stay, which justifies prevention efforts.
Control of Discrete Event Systems

Discrete Event Systems (DES) are a special type of dynamic systems. The "state" of these systems changes only at discrete instants of time and the term "event" is used to represent the occurrence of discontinuous changes (at possibly unknown intervals). Different Discrete Event Systems models are currently used for specification, verification, synthesis as well as for analysis and evaluation of different qualitative and quantitative properties of existing physical systems. The main focus of this paper is the presentation of the automata and formal language model for DES introduced by Raniadge and Wonham in 1985. This model is suitable for the examination of some important control theoretic issues, such as controllability and observability from the qualitative point of view, and provides a good basis for modular synthesis of controllers. We will also discuss an Extended State Machine and Real-Time Temporal Logic model introduced by Ostroff and Wonham in [OW87]. It incorporates an explicit notion of time and means for specification and verification of discrete event systems using a temporal logic approach. An attempt is made to compare this model of DES with other ones. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-92-35. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/cis_reports/523 Control of Discrete Event Systems MS-CIS-92-35 GRASP LAB 313
Distributed dense stereo matching for 3D reconstruction using parallel-based processing advantages

Instead of measuring photo-similarity, SymStereo is a stereo vision algorithm that uses new cost functions to measure symmetry differences between pairs of images. In this paper we propose the acceleration of a complete signal processing pipeline for generating 3D volumes based on dense SymStereo. The outputs here generated achieve superior reconstruction quality namely for slant based scenarios, so typical in autonomous systems, that have to capture pairs of images and perform moving decisions in real-time. In particular, we analyse several parallelization strategies for the compute-intensive aggregation procedure using different parameters and evaluate a trade-off between processing time, and higher precision of the calculated depths and quality of the final reconstructed 3D volume. The developed parallel pipeline allows to process more than 4.5 volumes per second for high resolution images using commodity GPUs, which conveniently suits its application in a variety of robotics systems.
Limited Evidence for the Effect of Sodium Fluoride on Deterioration of Hearing Loss in Patients With Otosclerosis: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Objective To determine the protective effect of sodium fluoride on the deterioration of hearing loss in adult patients with otosclerosis. Data Sources PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and CINAHL. Study Selection A systematic literature search was conducted. Studies reporting original study data on the deterioration of hearing loss in otosclerosis patients treated with sodium fluoride were included. Data Extraction Directness of evidence (DoE) and risk of bias (RoB), using the Cochrane Collaboration’s tool for assessing risk of bias, of the selected articles were assessed. Studies with low DoE, high RoB, or both were excluded. Absolute risks, mean deterioration of hearing in decibels, risk differences, and their 95% confidence intervals were extracted from the included studies. Data Synthesis Our search yielded 168 original titles, of which, 2 placebo-controlled studies were eligible for data extraction. The results of these 2 studies were conflicting. One of the included studies, with high DoE and moderate RoB, reported an absolute risk reduction for deterioration of hearing loss of 18% [95% CI 17; 19] when treating with sodium fluoride. The other included study, with high DoE and moderate RoB, reported no clinically significant difference in mean deterioration of bone-conduction, air-conduction, or air-bone gap between the sodium fluoride group and the placebo group. Conclusion There is weak evidence from one study with significant limitations that deterioration of hearing loss in otosclerosis patients receiving sodium fluoride treatment is less than in patients treated with a placebo.
Inhibiting cell cycle progression reduces reactive astrogliosis initiated by scratch injury in vitro and by cerebral ischemia in vivo

Astrogliosis occurs in a variety of neuropathological disorders and injuries, and excessive astrogliosis can be devastating to the recovery of neuronal function. In this study, we asked whether reactive astrogliosis can be suppressed in the lesion area by cell cycle inhibition and thus have therapeutic benefits. Reactive astrogliosis induced in either cultured astrocytes by hypoxia or scratch injury, or in a middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) ischemia model were combined to address this issue. In the cultured astrocytes, hypoxia induced a cell cycle activation that was associated with upregulation of the proliferating cell nuclear marker (PCNA). Significantly, the cell cycle inhibitor, olomoucine, inhibited hypoxia‐induced cell cycle activation by arresting the cells at G1/S and G2/M in a dose‐dependent manner and also reversed hypoxia‐induced upregulation of PCNA. Also in the cultured astrocytes, scratch injury induced reactive astrogliosis, such as hypertrophy and an increase in BrdU(+) astrocytes, both of which were ameliorated by olomoucine. In the MCAO ischemia mouse model, dense reactive glial fibrillary acidic protein and PCNA immunoreactivity were evident at the boundary zone of focal cerebral ischemia at days 7 and 30 after MCAO. We found that intraperitoneal olomoucine administration significantly inhibited these astrogliosis‐associated changes. To demonstrate further that cell cycle regulation impacts on astrogliosis, cyclin D1 gene knockout mice (cyclin D1−/−) were subjected to ischemia, and we found that the percentage of Ki67‐positive astrocytes in these mice was markedly reduced in the boundary zone. The number of apoptotic neurons and the lesion volume in cyclin D1−/− mice also decreased as compared to cyclin D1+/+ and cyclin D1+/− mice at days 3, 7, and 30 after local cerebral ischemia. Together, these in vitro and in vivo results strongly suggest that astrogliosis can be significantly affected by cell cycle inhibition, which therefore emerges as a promising intervention to attenuate reactive glia‐related damage to neuronal function in brain pathology. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
An Approach to Summarizing Short Stories

This paper describes a system that produces extractive summaries of short works of literary fiction. The ultimate purpose of produced summaries is defined as helping a reader to determine whether she would be interested in reading a particular story. To this end, the summary aims to provide a reader with an idea about the settings of a story (such as characters, time and place) without revealing the plot. The approach presented here relies heavily on the notion of aspect. Preliminary results show an improvement over two naive baselines: a lead baseline and a more sophisticated variant of it. Although modest, the results suggest that using aspectual information may be of help when summarizing fiction. A more thorough evaluation involving human judges is under way.
FREEZE: a new approach for testing sequential circuits

The authors present a new approach for testing sequential circuits which extends the classical concept of a test sequence. The classical approach applies only one vector in every state. In contrast, the new approach temporarily disables the sequential behavior of the circuit by holding the clock inactive and applies a group of vectors in every state. In this way many faults can be combinationally detected. A test generation algorithm called FIRST (fault-independent rapid sequential test generator) was developed based on the new approach. FIRST detected a large percentage of the faults that were detected by a conventional fault-oriented sequential test generator in less CPU time and with shorter sequences. <<ETX>>
MLP-based factor analysis for tandem speech recognition

In the last years, latent variable models such as factor analysis, probabilistic principal component analysis or subspace Gaussian mixture models have become almost ubiquitous in speech technologies. The key to its success is the joint modeling of multiple effects in the speech signal they address. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to use phone and speaker variabilities together to estimate phone posterior probabilities on a tandem speech recognition system. A Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with 5 layers and a central bottleneck linear layer is used as a basic processing block that mimics the processing undergone in factor analysis. With multiple factors, phone and a speaker MLP are merged at the bottleneck level to obtain better estimates for the phone posterior probabilities used in the ASR system. Experiments on the WSJ corpus show that the joint phone-speaker modeling can significantly outperform phone modeling alone in terms of Frame Error and Word Error Rates.
An algorithm combining the subspace identification methods ORT and CCA

A recent identification study using the Tennessee Eastman Process model revealed that the MOESP-based (multiple-input multiple-output output error state space) algorithm (i.e. implementation) of the subspace identification method ORT (orthogonal decomposition) underachieves given this realistic benchmark example. In this paper, the cause of this unexpected weak performance is analyzed. Based thereon an algorithm combining the idea of the ORT method with the algorithm of the CCA (canonical correlation analysis) method is proposed. Presented simulation results of this algorithm illustrate its enhanced reliability (i.e. determination of a correct model) in comparison to existing methods. This concerns the rejection of arbitrarily colored disturbances within linear systems and the identification of realistic processes like the Tennessee Eastman Process.
Characterization of UGT716A1 as a Multi-substrate UDP:Flavonoid Glucosyltransferase Gene in Ginkgo biloba

Ginkgo biloba L. , a “living fossil” and medicinal plant, is a well-known rich source of bioactive flavonoids. The molecular mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of flavonoid glucosides, the predominant flavonoids in G. biloba, remains unclear. To better understand flavonoid glucosylation in G. biloba, we generated a transcriptomic dataset of G. biloba leaf tissue by high-throughput RNA sequencing. We identified 25 putative UDP-glycosyltransferase (UGT) unigenes that are potentially involved in the flavonoid glycosylation. Among them, we successfully isolated and expressed eight UGT genes in Escherichia coli, and found that recombinant UGT716A1 protein was active toward broad range of flavonoid/phenylpropanoid substrates. In particular, we discovered the first recombinant UGT protein, UGT716A1 from G. biloba, possessing unique activity toward flavanol gallates that have been extensively documented to have significant bioactivity relating to human health. UGT716A1 expression level paralleled the flavonoid distribution pattern in G. biloba. Ectopic over-expression of UGT716A1 in Arabidopsis thaliana led to increased accumulation of several flavonol glucosides. Identification and comparison of the in vitro enzymatic activity of UGT716A1 homologs revealed a UGT from the primitive land species Physcomitrella patens also showed broader substrate spectrum than those from higher plants A. thaliana, Vitis vinifera, and Medicago truncatula. The characterization of UGT716A1 from G. biloba bridges a gap in the evolutionary history of UGTs in gymnosperms. We also discuss the implication of UGT716A1 for biosynthesis, evolution, and bioengineering of diverse glucosylated flavonoids.