Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plasma renin activity, aldosterone and sodium excretion in women with high and low casual blood pressure levels.

Sixty-four women not under treatment for hypertension were selected from a population survey and examined with respect to the relationships of BP levels to plasma renin activity (PRA), plasma aldosterone as well as to the 24-hour urinary excretion of aldosterone, potassium and sodium under strictly defined conditions. The subjects were selected from groups with BP levels above the 95th (group A) and below the 30th percentile (group B). The two groups were age-matched. PRA and plasma aldosterone were measured after one hour of complete rest in the recumbent position (basal PRA and basal plasma aldosterone), PRA was also measured after four hours of ambulation (upright PRA), as well as four hours after oral administration of 80 mg frusemide (stimulated PRA). The decline of PRA and of urinary aldosterone excretion with increasing age were related to the BP level but not to the menopause. No correlations were found between PRA or plasma aldosterone, on the one hand, and urinary sodium excretion, on the other, in women on random diets. Therefore, it is doubtful whether the correction of PRA levels for urinary sodium excretion is worthwhile unless marked sodium depletion or sodium loading is used. Basal plasma aldosterone showed a high interindividual variability and was not correlated to age or BP.
Fast Bounded Online Gradient Descent Algorithms for Scalable Kernel-Based Online Learning

Kernel-based online learning has often shown state-of-the-art performance for many online learning tasks. It, however, suffers from a major shortcoming, that is, the unbounded number of support vectors, making it nonscalable and unsuitable for applications with large-scale datasets. In this work, we study the problem of bounded kernel-based online learning that aims to constrain the number of support vectors by a predefined budget. Although several algorithms have been proposed in literature, they are neither computationally efficient due to their intensive budget maintenance strategy nor effective due to the use of simple Perceptron algorithm. To overcome these limitations, we propose a framework for bounded kernel-based online learning based on an online gradient descent approach. We propose two efficient algorithms of bounded online gradient descent (BOGD) for scalable kernel-based online learning: (i) BOGD by maintaining support vectors using uniform sampling, and (ii) BOGD++ by maintaining support vectors using nonuniform sampling. We present theoretical analysis of regret bound for both algorithms, and found promising empirical performance in terms of both efficacy and efficiency by comparing them to several well-known algorithms for bounded kernel-based online learning on large-scale datasets.
Sphingosine Is a Novel Activator of 3-Phosphoinositide-dependent Kinase 1*

3-Phosphoinositide-dependent kinase 1 (PDK1) has previously been shown to phosphorylate the activation loop of several AGC kinase family members. In this study, we show that p21-activated kinase 1, the activity of which is regulated by the GTP-bound form of Cdc42 and Rac and by sphingosine, is phosphorylated by PDK1. Phosphorylation of p21-activated kinase 1 by PDK1 occurred only in the presence of sphingosine, which increased PDK1 autophosphorylation 25-fold. Sphingosine increased PDK1 autophosphorylation in a concentration-dependent manner and significantly increased phosphate incorporation into known PDK1 substrates. Studies on the lipid requirement for PDK1 activation found that both sphingosine isoforms and stearylamine also increased PDK1 autophosphorylation. However, C10-sphingosine, octylamine, and stearic acid were unable to increase PDK1 autophosphorylation, indicating that both a positive charge and a lipid tail containing at least a C10-carbon backbone were required for PDK1 activation. Three PDK1 autophosphorylation sites were identified after stimulation with sphingosine in a serine-rich region located between the kinase domain and the pleckstrin homology domain using two-dimensional phosphopeptide maps and matrix assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectroscopy. Increased phosphorylation of endogenous Akt at threonine 308 was observed in COS-7 cells expressing wild type PDK1, but not catalytically inactive PDK1, when cellular sphingosine levels were elevated by treatment with sphingomyelinase. Sphingosine thus appears to be a true PDK1 activator.
Drinking patterns and psychosocial aspects at two age points of adolescence: A study on a panel of Italian students at 16 and 18

Abstract Aims: Juvenile alcohol consumption and abuse cohort studies are rare. A three-year-long project, provided a cohort of students followed up at 16 and 18 years of age. Alcohol behaviour is supposed to link drinking patterns with psychosocial influences. A panel of 258 Italian students was interviewed in 2009 and in 2011 using a questionnaire focussed on: drinking habits, alcohol use and abuse awareness and opinions, family cohesion, personality traits self-perception and coping. Methods: Drinking patterns were identified based on Alcohol use, Intoxication and Binge Drinking by means of a multivariate analysis. The results are consistent with findings from the ESPAD study. A set of psychosocial variables used as potential predictors of three drinking patterns has been investigated adopting a Discriminant Analysis. Findings: Results contribute to “fill the gap” of the drinking pattern’s profiles. Those who do not drink to excess show a higher coping disposition and family cohesion. Conclusions: Positive influences derive from awareness of the drinking consequences since the Drinking to Intoxication and Drinking to excess are associated with low awareness of alcohol risks.
The Adoption of a New Classification System: Time-Dependent Variation in Interobserver Reliability of the Thoracolumbar Injury Severity Score Classification System

Study Design. Prospective clinical assessment of the interobserver reliability of the Thoracolumbar Injury Classification and Severity Score (TLISS) in a series of consecutive patients. Objective. To evaluate the time-dependent changes in interobserver reliability of the TLISS system. Summary of Background Data. Reliability of an injury classification system is fundamental to its usefulness. A system that can be taught and implemented effectively will be highly reliable. Vaccaro et al recently introduced a novel thoracolumbar injury classification and treatment recommendation system called the “Thoracolumbar Injury Classification and Severity Score. ” An improvement over previous traumatic thoracolumbar systems, it has been designed to be both descriptive as well as prognostic. To define better the benefits of this system, the purpose of our study was to assess the time-dependent changes associated with implementation of the TLISS system at 1 institution. Methods. Seventy-one consecutive patients presenting with acute thoracolumbar injury were prospectively assessed at a single training institution. Plain radiographs, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging were independently reviewed, and each case was classified according to the TLISS system. Seven months later, 25 consecutive patients presenting with acute thoracolumbar injuries were prospectively assessed at the same institution. TLISS classification criteria were again applied after reviewing plain radiographs, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. The unweighted Cohen kappa coefficient and Spearman correlation values were calculated to assess interobserver reliability at each assessment time. Interobserved reliability at the time of the first assessment was then compared with interobserver reliability from the second assessment. Results. Statistically significant (P < 0.05) improvements in interobserver reliability were observed. Both the unweighted Cohen kappa coefficient and Spearman correlation values increased across all comparable fields: TLISS subscores (mechanism of injury, posterior ligamentous complex), total TLISS, and TLISS management scores. Conclusions. The significant improvements observed in interobserver reliability of the TLISS system suggest that the classification system can be taught effectively and be readily incorporated into daily practice. The strong correlation values obtained at the second assessment time suggest that the TLISS system may be reproducibly used to describe thoracolumbar injuries.
Interpersonal Relationship Orientations, Leadership, and Managerial Level: Assessing the Practical Usefulness of the FIRO-B in Organizations

This paper investigated whether interpersonal relationship orientation, as measured by the Fundamental Interpersonal Relationship Orientations-Behaviour (FIRO-B), predicts ratings of leadership capability and managerial level of attainment. In all, 547 participants reported their managerial level in their organization, and were rated by trained consultants on their leadership capability. Results showed that several scores on the FIRO-B positively predicted ratings of leadership capability and managerial level reached even after controlling for the effect of intelligence and demographic variables. This study provides some initial evidence for the validity of the FIRO-B in the prediction of perceptual and objective measures of leadership capability. Implications for selection and assessment are discussed.
Alignment and scaling of large-scale fluctuations in the solar wind.

We investigate the dependence of solar wind fluctuations measured by the Wind spacecraft on scale and on the degree of alignment between oppositely directed Elsasser fields. This alignment controls the strength of the nonlinear interactions and, therefore, the turbulence. We find that at scales larger than the outer scale of the turbulence the Elsasser fluctuations become on average more antialigned as the outer scale is approached from above. Conditioning structure functions using the alignment angle reveals turbulent scaling of unaligned fluctuations at scales previously believed to lie outside the turbulent cascade in the "1/f range. " We argue that the 1/f range contains a mixture of a noninteracting antialigned population of Alfvén waves and magnetic force-free structures plus a subdominant population of unaligned cascading turbulent fluctuations.
Method-comparison studies in telehealth: Study design and analysis considerations

When establishing telehealth services, clinicians need to be confident that the examinations, assessments and clinical decisions that they make while using technology are equivalent to conventional best practice. Method-comparison studies are ideally suited to answering these questions, however there is a lack of consistency in the telehealth literature in the study methodologies and data analysis techniques used. Methodologies should closely match clinical practice to maximise external validity and data analysis techniques should match the data types generated in order to be clinically meaningful. In this article we discuss the design, analysis and interpretation of method-comparison studies in the context of telehealth research.
Bounding-Volume Hierarchies Technique for Detecting Object Interference in Urban Environment Simulation

Performing and detecting object interference or collision detection in urban environment simulation is always challenging problem for researchers to come out with fast and efficient collision detection algorithm. Most of previous method seems trying to tackle the problems of involving specific geometric models colliding pairs with restricted rules and guidelines. For example, convex hull bounding-volume tends to solve the collision detection problems by make the collision more accurate. However, its limitation of performing fast collision detection method must be left behind. Hence, in this paper we introduce new traversal algorithm using Bounding-Volume Hierarchies (BVH) for collision detection in urban environment simulation. By using hierarchical approach, the efficiency of detecting object interference in urban simulation is increase. We believe that BVH method can be useful in urban simulation for collision detection between static rigid models and dynamic rigid models. Thus it should be able to overcome the equipment of urban environment simulation. Our result shows that bounding-volume hierarchies achieve favorable frame-rates in real time simulation using top-down binary tree. In practice, the construction of bounding-volume hierarchies in urban environment simulation are not just useful for collision detection but they also useful for others detecting object interference technique such culling and raytracing.
Higher-order Lexical Semantic Models for Non-factoid Answer Reranking

Lexical semantic models provide robust performance for question answering, but, in general, can only capitalize on direct evidence seen during training. For example, monolingual alignment models acquire term alignment probabilities from semi-structured data such as question-answer pairs; neural network language models learn term embeddings from unstructured text. All this knowledge is then used to estimate the semantic similarity between question and answer candidates. We introduce a higher-order formalism that allows all these lexical semantic models to chain direct evidence to construct indirect associations between question and answer texts, by casting the task as the traversal of graphs that encode direct term associations. Using a corpus of 10,000 questions from Yahoo! Answers, we experimentally demonstrate that higher-order methods are broadly applicable to alignment and language models, across both word and syntactic representations. We show that an important criterion for success is controlling for the semantic drift that accumulates during graph traversal. All in all, the proposed higher-order approach improves five out of the six lexical semantic models investigated, with relative gains of up to +13% over their first-order variants.
A Dual Privacy Preserving Scheme in Continuous Location-Based Services

To address the risk of location privacy disclosure in location-based services (LBSs), existing solutions generally introduce a single trusted anonymizer between the users and the location service provider (LSP). However, a single anonymizer offers limited privacy guarantees and incurs high communication overhead in continuous LBSs. Once the anonymizer is compromised, it may put the user information in jeopardy. In this paper, we propose a dual privacy preserving (DPP) scheme in continuous LBSs to protect the users’ trajectory and query privacy. Our scheme introduces multiple anonymizers between the users and LSP, and combines with Shamir threshold mechanism and K-anonymity technology to improve the users’ trajectory and content privacy in continuous LBSs. An anonymizer alone cannot get the users’ trajectory and query contents, and it thus can be semitrusted. Our scheme can enhance the users’ privacy and solve the single point failure in single anonymizer structure. The security analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme has the ability to protect users’ trajectory and content privacy effectively.
Sinusoidal movement of a grating across the monkey's fingerpad: representation of grating and movement features in afferent fiber responses

Gratings of alternating grooves and ridges were moved sinusoidally back and forth across the monkey's fingerpad. Each grating was completely specified by its spatial period and the movement by its peak speed: together these determined the peak temporal frequency at which grating ridges passed over the skin. Responses of cutaneous, mechanoreceptive afferents innervating the fingerpad were characterized in terms of these 3 parameters. Slowly adapting afferents (SAs), rapidly adapting afferents (RAs), and Pacinian afferents (PCs) had different characteristics. The responses (mean cyclic discharge rates) of the SAs increased when the spatial period of the grating increased (and peak speed of movement remained constant) but did not change with changes in the peak speed of the movement (while the spatial period of the grating remained constant). Conversely, the responses of the PCs increased when the peak speed of movement increased (and the spatial period remained constant) but were relatively insensitive to changes in the spatial period of the grating (while the peak speed remained constant). The responses of the RAs increased as the spatial period of the grating increased (and peak speed remained constant) and also increased as the peak speed of movement increased (and the grating spatial period remained constant). When the peak temporal frequency of the grating ridges was held constant, the responses of all 3 afferent groups changed with changes in the grating spatial period or in the peak speed of movement. Information about the spatial features of the grating, independent of the peak speed of movement, was present in the SA population response and in the ratios of the RA and PC population responses. Information about the peak speed of movement, independent of the spatial period of the grating, was present in the PC population response and could be extracted from the RA population response.
PAC Optimal Exploration in Continuous Space Markov Decision Processes

Current exploration algorithms can be classified in two broad categories: Heuristic, and PAC optimal. While numerous researchers have used heuristic approaches such as epsilon-greedy exploration successfully, such approaches lack formal, finite sample guarantees and may need a significant amount of fine-tuning to produce good results. PAC optimal exploration algorithms, on the other hand, offer strong theoretical guarantees but are inapplicable in domains of realistic size. The goal of this paper is to bridge the gap between theory and practice, by introducing C-PACE, an algorithm which offers strong theoretical guarantees and can be applied to interesting, continuous space problems.
Transcriptomic profiling of Alexandrium fundyense during physical interaction with or exposure to chemical signals from the parasite Amoebophrya

Toxic microalgae have their own pathogens, and understanding the way in which these microalgae respond to antagonistic attacks may provide information about their capacity to persist during harmful algal bloom events. Here, we compared the effects of the physical presence of the parasite Amoebophrya sp. and exposure to waterborne cues from cultures infected with this parasite, on gene expression by the toxic dinoflagellates, Alexandrium fundyense. Compared with control samples, a total of 14 882 Alexandrium genes were differentially expressed over the whole‐parasite infection cycle at three different time points (0, 6 and 96 h). RNA sequencing analyses indicated that exposure to the parasite and parasitic waterborne cues produced significant changes in the expression levels of Alexandrium genes associated with specific metabolic pathways. The observed upregulation of genes associated with glycolysis, the tricarboxylic acid cycle, fatty acid β‐oxidation, oxidative phosphorylation and photosynthesis suggests that parasite infection increases the energy demand of the host. The observed upregulation of genes correlated with signal transduction indicates that Alexandrium could be sensitized by parasite attacks. This response might prime the defence of the host, as indicated by the increased expression of several genes associated with defence and stress. Our findings provide a molecular overview of the response of a dinoflagellate to parasite infection.
Survival times in people with dementia: analysis from population based cohort study with 14 year follow-up

Objectives To provide estimates of survival after onset of dementia by age, sex, self reported health, disability, and severity of cognitive impairment. Design Analysis of participants from prospective population based cohort study in 1991-2003, with follow-up of dementia status in all individuals after two and six years (in one centre) and 10 years and in subsamples additionally at six and eight years and mortality until 2005. Setting Multicentre population based study in England and Wales: two rural and three urban centres. Participants 438 participants who developed dementia from a population based study of 13 004 individuals aged 65 years and over drawn from primary care population registers. Main outcome measures Sociodemographic factors, cognitive function, specific health conditions, and self reported health collected at each interview. Cox’s proportional hazards regression models were used to identify predictors of mortality from the selected variables in people who received diagnosis of dementia according the study’s criteria. Results By December 2005, 356 of the 438 (81%) participants who developed dementia during the study had died. Estimated median survival time from onset of dementia to death was 4.1 years (interquartile range 2.5-7.6) for men and 4.6 years (2.9-7.0) for women. There was a difference of nearly seven years in survival between the younger old and the oldest people with dementia: 10.7 (25th centile 5.6) for ages 65-69; 5.4 (interquartile range 3.4-8.3) for ages 70-79; 4.3 (2.8-7.0) for ages 80-89, and 3.8 (2.3-5.2) years for ages ≥90. Significant factors that predicted mortality in the presence of dementia during the follow-up included sex, age of onset, and disability. Conclusion These analyses give a population based estimated median survival for incident dementia of 4.5 years. Such estimates can be used for prognosis and planning for patients, carers, service providers, and policy makers.
The Effect of Different Fatigue Protocols on Choice Reaction Time

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of different exercise-induced fatigue on choice reaction time (CRT). Fifteen male (age= 22.68±0.8 y) were asked to attend the laboratory for 9 days. In five sessions, subjects' characteristics by Conconi test on treadmill and variables of different exercises; Aerobic (AE), Anaerobic (ANE), Mixed (ME), Prolonged Intermittent (PIE) and Super Maximal Intermittent (SMIE)) were measured. In four sessions, participants did exercises randomly, also before and after exercises they did CRT and rating of perceived exertion (RPE). Results indicated that the greatest increase in reaction time occurred after ANE, ME and SMIE and the least increase after AE and PIE. Different exercises negatively affected CRT; however, the extent to which reaction time declined depended on the type of exercise.
Growth Hormone (GH) Receptor C.1319 G>T Polymorphism, But Not Exon 3 Retention or Deletion Is Associated With Better First-Year Growth Response to GH Therapy in Patients With GH Deficiency

We investigated possible influences of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on first-year growth velocity in response to growth hormone (GH) therapy in GH-deficient (GHD) children. We recruited a total of 154 GHD prepubertal children who had undergone GH therapy for 1 y. To exclude the possibility that the genotype/allele variants influenced the height of GHD patients, we studied the same gene polymorphisms in 208 familial short stature (FSS) patients and 100 normal control individuals. In the present study, the first-year growth velocities of GHD patients treated with GH were measured and then compared with the allelic frequencies of various SNP of genes involved in the GH–insulinlike growth factor-I (IGF-I) axis. Only c.1319 G>T of the GH receptor (GHR) gene showed significant correlation with first-year growth velocity (p = 0.02). However, the genetic frequency of the c.1319 G>T polymorphism of GHD did not correlate with FSS and normal controls. Therefore, the c.1319 G>T polymorphism does not influence the height of individuals but can affect the therapeutic efficacy of GH in GHD patients. Moreover, the GHR c.1319 T allele showed higher transcriptional activity and stronger signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT)-5 Tyr694 phosphorylation. Based on these findings, we conclude that the GHRc.1319 T allele is associated with the therapeutic efficacy of GH replacement therapy.