Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insulinaemia and insulin resistance in Caucasian general paediatric population aged 2 to 10 years: Associated risk factors

The aim of this study is to determine values of insulinaemia, homeostasis model assessment (HOMA) index and quantitative insulin sensitivity check index (QUICKI) among a population of prepubertal Caucasian children, to analyse factors associated with insulin resistance (IR), and to study its association with cardiovascular risk factors.
The Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development: Overview of conceptual agenda and illustration of research activities.

Founded in 1981 by the late Paul B. Baltes, the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development has helped to establish lifespan psychology as a distinct conceptual approach within developmental psychology. Recently, the Center has extended its research programme into developmental behavioural neuroscience. Here, we provide an overview of the Center's conceptual agenda, and present two of its seven research projects in greater detail. Work at the Center is guided by three propositions: (1) to study lifespan changes in behaviour as interactions among maturation, learning, and senescence; (2) to develop theories and methods that integrate empirical evidence across domains of functioning, timescales, as well as behavioural and neuronal levels of analysis; (3) to identify mechanisms of development by exploring age‐graded differences in plasticity. The Intra‐Person Dynamics Project studies the organization of cognitive abilities within individuals of different ages, and investi.
Social Role-taking: A Review of the Constructs, Measures, and Measurement Properties

Social role-taking is examined psychometrically through a review of the constructs, measures developed to represent the constructs, and the reliability and validity of the measures. The construct is described in several different ways in the literature. Most measures show adequate interrater reliabilities, but there is less evidence regarding temporal stability or internal consistency of the scales. The validation efforts have primarily been on the age-stage relationship rather than on other aspects of the construct, although a more expanded focus has begun within the last few years. The review shows that Chandler’s cognitive, Selman’s sociomoral, and Flavell’s nickel-dime tasks possess the best psychometric properties. Recommendations for improving measurement in the social role-taking area are discussed.
Cognitive Ethnography: A Methodology for Measure and Analysis of Learning for Game Studies

This paper describes cognitive ethnography as a method of choice for game studies, multimedia learning, professional development, leisure studies, and activities where context is important. Cognitive ethnography is efficacious for these activities, as it assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings (Hutchins, 1995, 2010) with emphasis on analysis of activities as they happen in context; how they are represented; and how they are distributed and experienced in space. The methodology is described for increasing construct validity (Cook & Campbell, 1979; Campbell & Stanley, 1966) and the creation of a nomological network (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). This description of the methodology is contextualized with a study examining the literate practices of reluctant middle school readers playing video games (Dubbels, 2008). The study utilizes variables from empirical laboratory research on discourse processing (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1996) to analyze the narrative discourse of a video game as a socio-cognitive practice (Gee, 2007; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996).
Predicting Triple Scoring with Crowdsourcing-specific Features - The fiddlehead Triple Scorer at WSDM Cup 2017

The Triple Scoring Task at the WSDM Cup 2017 involves the prediction of the relevance scores between persons and professions/nationalities. The ground truth of the relevance scores was obtained by counting the vote of seven crowdworkers. I confirmed that features related to task difficulty correlate with the discrepancy among crowdworkers' judgement. This means such features are useful for predicting whether a score is in the middle or not. Hence, the features were incorporated into the prediction model of the crowdsourced relevance scores. The introduced features improve the average score difference of the prediction. The final ranking of my prediction was 4th for average score difference and 12th for both accuracy and Kendall's tau.
Selexipag: an oral, selective prostacyclin receptor agonist for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension

In this phase 2 proof-of-concept study we examined the safety and efficacy of selexipag, an orally available, selective prostacyclin receptor (IP receptor) agonist, as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). 43 adult patients with symptomatic PAH (receiving stable endothelin receptor antagonist and/or a phosphodiesterase type-5 inhibitor therapy) were randomised three to one to receive either selexipag or placebo. Dosage was up-titrated in 200-μg increments from 200 μg twice daily on day 1 to the maximum tolerated dose by day 35 (maximum allowed dose of 800 μg twice daily). Change in pulmonary vascular resistance at week 17 expressed as a percentage of the baseline value was the primary efficacy end-point, and was analysed in the per protocol set first and then in the all-treated set to assess robustness of results. A statistically significant 30.3% reduction in geometric mean pulmonary vascular resistance was observed after 17 weeks' treatment with selexipag compared with placebo (95% confidence limits -44.7– -12.2; p=0.0045, Wilcoxon rank sum test). This was supported by a similar result from the all-treated set. Selexipag was well tolerated with a safety profile in line with the expected pharmacological effect. Our results encourage the further investigation of selexipag for the treatment of PAH.
Simian Homologues of Human Gamma-2 and Betaherpesviruses in Mandrill and Drill Monkeys

ABSTRACT Recent serological and molecular surveys of different primate species allowed the characterization of several Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) homologues in macaques, African green monkeys, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Identification of these new primate rhadinoviruses revealed the existence of two distinct genogroups, called RV1 and RV2. Using a degenerate consensus primer PCR method for the herpesvirus DNA polymerase gene, the presence of KSHV homologues has been investigated in two semi-free-ranging colonies of eight drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus), five mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx), and two hybrid (Mandrillus leucophaeus-Mandrillus sphinx) monkeys, living in Cameroon and Gabon, Central Africa. This search revealed the existence of not only two distinct KSHV homologues, each one belonging to one of the two rhadinovirus genogroups, but also of two new betaherpesvirus sequences, one being close to cytomegaloviruses and the other being related to human herpesviruses 6 and 7 (HHV-6 and -7). The latter viruses are the first simian HHV-6 and -7 homologues identified to date. These data show that mandrill and drill monkeys are the hosts of at least four novel distinct herpesviruses. Moreover, mandrills, like macaques and African green monkeys, harbor also two distinct gamma-2 herpesviruses, thus strongly suggesting that a second gamma-2 herpesvirus, belonging to the RV2 genogroup, may exist in humans.
Patch-based BTF synthesis for real-time rendering

In this paper, we propose a novel synthesis technique for BTFs. A BTF (bidirectional texture function) is a 6D function which can represent appearances of a texture under arbitrary view and lighting conditions. Until now, several approaches of BTF synthesis have been researched. For ordinary textures, patch based methods are promising techniques for texture synthesis. However, it has not been effectively tried to BTFs yet. This is mainly because data size of BTFs is so large and it is not easy to apply the techniques to BTFs. Further, efficient rendering of BTFs is still under research. In this paper, we extend a patch based synthesis technique for BTFs by utilizing compact representation of BTFs. In addition, we propose a novel technique to render the synthesized BTFs efficiently. With our proposed method, we can successfully and effectively render objects with complicated surfaces under arbitrary sizes.
Audiometric Characteristics of USH2a Patients

Temporal processing, frequency discrimination and frequency resolution, three basic mechanisms involved in speech perception, were studied in 11 USH2a patients from 10 Dutch families. Measurements included loudness scaling, gap detection, determination of auditory filter shapes and difference limen for frequency. The results were compared to values obtained from listeners with normal hearing, DFNA8/12 patients, DFNA13 patients and unselected patients with presbyacusis. Overall, the results for USH2a were most similar to those obtained in patients with sensorineural hearing loss caused by hair cell defects. To our knowledge, this is the first study that presents results on audiometric measurements combined with psychophysical measurements in a group of USH2a patients.
Resistance of herpes simplex virus type 2 to neomycin maps to the N-terminal portion of glycoprotein C

Entry of herpes simplex virus (HSV) into cells is believed to be mediated by specific binding of envelope proteins to a cellular receptor. Neomycin specifically blocks this initial step in infection by HSV-1 but not HSV-2. Resistance of HSV-2 to this compound maps to a region of the genome encoding glycoprotein C (gC-2). We have studied the function of gC-2 in the initial interaction of the virus with the host cell, using HSV-2 mutants deleted for gC-2 and gC-2-rescued recombinants. Resistance to neomycin was directly linked to the presence of gC-2 within the viral genome. In addition, deletion of the gC-2 gene caused a marked delay in adsorption to cells relative to the wild-type virus. HSV-1 recombinants containing chimeric gC genes composed of HSV-1 and HSV-2 sequences were used to localize neomycin resistance within the N-terminal 223 amino acids of gC-2. This region of the glycoprotein comprises an important domain responsible for binding of HSV-2 to cell receptors in the presence of neomycin. A gC-2-negative mutant is still infectious, indicating that HSV-2 also has an alternative pathway of adsorption.
Central corneal thickness correlated with glaucoma damage and rate of progression.

PURPOSE To evaluate whether the amount of glaucomatous optic nerve damage at presentation of the patient and the rate of progression of glaucoma during follow-up are related to central corneal thickness. METHODS The prospective observational clinical study included 861 eyes of 454 white subjects (239 normal eyes of 121 subjects, 250 ocular hypertensive eyes of 118 patients, 372 eyes of 215 patients with chronic open-angle glaucoma). For 567 eyes (304 patients) with ocular hypertension or chronic open-angle glaucoma, follow-up examinations were performed, with a mean follow-up time of 62.7 +/- 33.2 months (median, 60.8; range, 6.2-124.9). All patients underwent qualitative and morphometric evaluation of color stereo optic disc photographs and white-on-white visual field examination. Central corneal thickness was measured by corneal pachymetry. RESULTS Central corneal thickness correlated significantly (P < 0.001) and positively with the area of the neuroretinal rim and negatively with the loss of visual field. Development or progression of glaucomatous visual field defects detected in 119 (21.0%) eyes was statistically independent of central corneal thickness, in univariate (P = 0.99) and multivariate Cox regression analyses (P = 0.19). CONCLUSIONS At the time of patient referral, the amount of glaucomatous optic nerve damage correlated significantly with a thin central cornea. Progression of glaucomatous optic nerve neuropathy was independent of central corneal thickness, suggesting that central corneal thickness may not play a major role in the pathogenesis of progressive glaucomatous optic nerve damage.
Teaching Excellence and the Inner Life of Faculty

n the fall of 1998, two of my English department colleagues died suddenly within weeks of each other. They were active men, barely middle-aged. One died of liver cancer, the other I of meningitis. In discussing their deaths, my doctor spoke of compromised immune systems, and he prompted me to speculate about what factors could have caused these breakdowns. Both were active, respected professionals. Keith had recently been through a divorce. Bill was single and the most isolated man I knew. His neighbors reported that he never had guests. His body was found in his room several days after his death. In his last days he was totally alone. Perhaps this is a grim way to open a discussion of the inner life of faculty. We can’t know for sure what caused these deaths, but in both cases there may have been chronic trauma with psychosocial factors involved. To put it simply, stress may have been a root cause-hardly a new idea in modem mind-body medicine. In the last 14 years I’ve taken a close look at the emotional landscape of faculty life, and these deaths triggered an observation that’s been stirring in me for much of my 35 years in higher education.
Hyperspectral Image Classification Based on Semi-Supervised Rotation Forest

Ensemble learning is widely used to combine varieties of weak learners in order to generate a relatively stronger learner by reducing either the bias or the variance of the individual learners. Rotation forest (RoF), combining feature extraction and classifier ensembles, has been successfully applied to hyperspectral (HS) image classification by promoting the diversity of base classifiers since last decade. Generally, RoF uses principal component analysis (PCA) as the rotation tool, which is commonly acknowledged as an unsupervised feature extraction method, and does not consider the discriminative information about classes. Sometimes, however, it turns out to be sub-optimal for classification tasks. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an improved RoF algorithm, in which semi-supervised local discriminant analysis is used as the feature rotation tool. The proposed algorithm, named semi-supervised rotation forest (SSRoF), aims to take advantage of both the discriminative information and local structural information provided by the limited labeled and massive unlabeled samples, thus providing better class separability for subsequent classifications. In order to promote the diversity of features, we also adjust the semi-supervised local discriminant analysis into a weighted form, which can balance the contributions of labeled and unlabeled samples. Experiments on several hyperspectral images demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm compared with several state-of-the-art ensemble learning approaches.
Signatures of mito-nuclear discordance in Schistosoma turkestanicum indicate a complex evolutionary history of emergence in Europe

SUMMARY High levels of molecular diversity were identified in mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase (cox1) gene sequences of Schistosoma turkestanicum from Hungary. These cox1 sequences were all specific to Hungary which contrasted with the low levels of diversity seen in the nuclear internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) sequences, the majority of which were shared between China and Iran isolates. Measures of within and between host molecular variation within S. turkestanicum showed there to be substantial differences in molecular diversity, with cox1 being significantly more diverse than the ITS. Measures of haplotype frequencies revealed that each host contained its own subpopulation of genetically unique parasites with significant levels of differentiation. Pairwise mismatch analysis of cox1 sequences indicated S. turkestanicum populations to have a bimodal pairwise difference distribution and to be stable unlike the ITS sequences, which appeared to have undergone a recent population expansion event. Positive selection was also detected in the cox1 sequences, and biochemical modelling of the resulting protein illustrated significant mutational events causing an alteration to the isoelectric point of the cox1 protein, potentially altering metabolism. The evolutionary signature from the cox1 indicates local adaptation and long establishment of S. turkestanicum in Hungary with continual introgression of nuclear genes from Asian isolates. These processes have led to the occurrence of mito-nuclear discordance in a schistosome population
A Heuristic Framework for Pivot-Based Bilingual Dictionary Induction

High quality machine readable dictionaries are very useful, but such resources are rarely available for lower-density language pairs, especially for those that are closely related. In this paper, we proposed a heuristic framework that aims at inducing one-to-one mapping dictionary of a closely related language pair from available dictionaries where a distant language is involved. The key insight of the framework is the ability to create heuristics by using distant language as pivot, incorporate given heuristics, and an iterative induction mechanism that human interaction can be potentially integrated. An experiment based on basic heuristics regarding syntactics and semantics resulted in up to 85.2% correctness in target dictionary with correctness of major part reached 95.3%, which proved that we can perform automated creation of a high quality dictionary with our framework.
A New Class of Codes for Boolean Masking of Cryptographic Computations

We introduce a new class of rate one-half binary codes: complementary information set codes. A binary linear code of length <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$2n$</tex> </formula> and dimension <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$n$</tex></formula> is called a complementary information set code (CIS code for short) if it has two disjoint information sets. This class of codes contains self-dual codes as a subclass. It is connected to graph correlation immune vectorial Boolean functions of use in the security of hardware implementations of cryptographic primitives. Such codes permit to improve the cost of masking cryptographic algorithms against side channel attacks. In this paper, we investigate this new class of codes: we give optimal or best known CIS codes of length <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$ < 132$</tex></formula>. We derive general constructions based on cyclic codes and on double circulant codes. We derive a Varshamov–Gilbert bound for long CIS codes, and show that they can all be classified in small lengths <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$\leq 12$</tex></formula> by the building up construction. Some nonlinear permutations are constructed by using <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">${\BBZ}_{4}$</tex></formula>-codes, based on the notion of dual distance of a possibly nonlinear code.
Role of computed tomography scores and findings to predict early death in patients with traumatic brain injury: A reappraisal in a major tertiary care hospital in Nepal

Background: Glasgow Coma Scale has been a long sought model to classify patients with head injury. However, the major limitation of the score is its assessment in the patients who are either sedated or under the influence of drugs or intubated for airway protection. The rational approach for prognostication of such patients is the utility of scoring system based on the morphological criteria based on radiological imaging. Among the current armamentarium, a scoring system based on computed tomography (CT) imaging holds the greatest promise in conquering our conquest for the same. Methods: We included a total of 634 consecutive neurosurgical trauma patients in this series, who presented with mild-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) from January 2013 to April 2014 at a tertiary care center in rural Nepal. All pertinent medical records (including all available imaging studies) were reviewed by the neurosurgical consultant and the radiologist on call. Patients’ worst CT image scores and their outcome at 30 days were assessed and recorded. We then assessed their independent performance in predicting the mortality and also tried to seek the individual variables that had significant interplay for determining the same. Results: Both imaging score (Marshall) and clinical score (Rotterdam) can be used to reliably predict mortality in patients with acute TBI with high prognostic accuracy. Other specific CT characteristics that can be used to predict early mortality are traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage, midline shift, and status of the peri-mesencephalic cisterns. Conclusion: We demonstrated in this cohort that though the Marshall score has the high predictive power to determine the mortality, better discrimination could be sought through the application of the Rotterdam score that encompasses various individual CT parameters. We thereby recommend the use of such comprehensive prognostic model so as to augment our predictive power for properly dichotomizing the prognosis of the patients with TBI. In the future, it will therefore be important to develop prognostic models that are applicable for the majority of patients in the world they live in, and not just a privileged few who can use resources not necessarily representative of their societal environment.
Decolonizing the (Distance) Curriculum

Postcolonial theory remains part of the challenge of literary theory to curriculum development. As the author's personal history suggests, it is more than simply another way of reading and interpretation, but enables an engagement with, a bearing witness to, the gross inequalities of the world today. Drama is a good example, evidenced by the production and impact of South African Athol Fugard's work — introduced as a set text for the first time in an Open University course, while becoming part of the author's published research. The positive response to Fugard made possible the inclusion of substantial new areas of literature in a modern literature course coinciding with the global changes of the late I980s, in turn aiding the inclusion of postcolonial writings and theory in the departmental curriculum and raising awareness of issues outside the students' immediate experience. The texts studied demand an understanding beyond merely formal or `close' critical readings, and it is teachers' responsibility to be alive to the claims of contemporary history and politics.
Supporting Preservice Teachers' Understanding of Place Value and Multidigit Arithmetic

This article provides an analysis of a teaching experiment conducted in the context of teacher education designed to support preservice teachers' understandings of place value and multidigit addition and subtraction. The experiment addresses the following research question: Can the results from research conducted in elementary mathematics classrooms guide preservice elementary teachers' development of conceptual understanding of the same concepts? In both cases, the students (e.g., elementary students and preservice teachers) participated in activities from an instructional sequence designed to support conceptual understanding of both place value and multidigit addition and subtraction. Analyses of the episodes from the teaching experiment document the learning of the preservice teachers and how that learning was supported by initial conjectures grounded in the research on elementary students' ways of reasoning.