Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Novel Strategy to Increase the Proliferative Potential of Adult Human β-Cells While Maintaining Their Differentiated Phenotype

Our previous studies demonstrated that Wnt/GSK-3/β-catenin and mTOR signaling are necessary to stimulate proliferative processes in adult human β-cells. Direct inhibition of GSK-3, that engages Wnt signaling downstream of the Wnt receptor, increases β-catenin nuclear translocation and β-cell proliferation but results in lower insulin content. Our current goal was to engage canonical and non-canonical Wnt signaling at the receptor level to significantly increase human β-cell proliferation while maintaining a β-cell phenotype in intact islets. We adopted a system that utilized conditioned medium from L cells that expressed Wnt3a, R-spondin-3 and Noggin (L-WRN conditioned medium). In addition we used a ROCK inhibitor (Y-27632) and SB-431542 (that results in RhoA inhibition) in these cultures. Treatment of intact human islets with L-WRN conditioned medium plus inhibitors significantly increased DNA synthesis ∼6 fold in a rapamycin-sensitive manner. Moreover, this treatment strikingly increased human β-cell proliferation ∼20 fold above glucose alone. Only the combination of L-WRN conditioned medium with RhoA/ROCK inhibitors resulted in substantial proliferation. Transcriptome-wide gene expression profiling demonstrated that L-WRN medium provoked robust changes in several signaling families, including enhanced β-catenin-mediated and β-cell-specific gene expression. This treatment also increased expression of Nr4a2 and Irs2 and resulted in phosphorylation of Akt. Importantly, glucose-stimulated insulin secretion and content were not downregulated by L-WRN medium treatment. Our data demonstrate that engaging Wnt signaling at the receptor level by this method leads to necessary crosstalk between multiple signaling pathways including activation of Akt, mTOR, Wnt/β-catenin, PKA/CREB, and inhibition of RhoA/ROCK that substantially increase human β-cell proliferation while maintaining the β-cell phenotype.
Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation Open Access a New Electromechanical Trainer for Sensorimotor Rehabilitation of Paralysed Fingers: a Case Series in Chronic and Acute Stroke Patients

Background: The functional outcome after stroke is improved by more intensive or sustained therapy. When the affected hand has no functional movement, therapy is mainly passive movements. A novel device for repeating controlled passive movements of paralysed fingers has been developed, which will allow therapists to concentrate on more complicated tasks. A powered cam shaft moves the four fingers in a physiological range of movement.
Evaluation of text-processing algorithms for adverse drug event extraction from social media

The discovery of suspected adverse drug reactions is no longer restricted to mining reports that pharmaceutical companies and health professionals send to regulators for possible safety signals. Patient forums and other social media are being studied for additional sources of information to assist in expediting adverse reaction discovery. Extracting information on drugs, adverse drug reactions, diseases and symptoms, or patient demographics from such media is an essential step of this process, but it is not straightforward. While most studies in this area use a lexicon-based information extraction methodology, they do not explicitly evaluate the impact of text-processing steps on their final results. We experimentally quantify the value of the most popular techniques to establish whether or not they benefit the information extraction process.
Robust dual-wavelength ring-laser based on two spectrally different erbium-doped fiber amplifiers

The authors demonstrate simultaneous lasing at two wavelengths in a fiber ring-laser containing two erbium-doped fiber amplifiers with different spectral characteristics. The lasing wavelengths were selected by a filter combination. For certain wavelength pairs, the ring co-lased even if the loss at one wavelength increased by 8 dB relative to the loss at the other one, while a 1-dB change was enough to prevent co-lasing in a ring with two similar amplifiers. The increased robustness-to-loss variations is a consequence of the overall spectral gain inhomogeneity that results from combining two amplifiers with different gain spectra. The concept is also applicable to dual-wavelength transmission.
The dynamics of intermodal matching: Seven- and 12-month-olds' intermodal matching of affect

The purpose of this experiment was to examine whether and how a common methodological difference frequently employed within the intermodal matching procedure affects infants' intermodal matching. Specifically we examined the effects of incorporating or excluding silent control trials on seven- and 12-month-olds' intermodal matching of affect. Results revealed that seven-month-olds showed reliable matching when presented all in-sound trials whereas 12-month-olds showed reliable matching when half of the trials were presented silently and half of the trials were presented in-sound. Results are discussed in terms of the dynamics of infant attention and those conditions where the inclusion of silent trials may be appropriate.
Do Sex, Sex-Role Orientation, and Exposure to Gender-Congruent Therapy Models Influence Receptivity to Psychotherapy?

Abstract This study had two objectives. The first objective was to evaluate how well sex and sex-role orientation predicted receptivity to psychotherapy. The second objective was to evaluate whether exposure to gender-congruent therapy videos influenced participants' receptivity to psychotherapy. Participants were randomly assigned to three conditions: (1) exposure to a more masculine form of therapy, (2) exposure to a more feminine form of therapy, or (3) a control condition. Although both sex and sex-role orientation were significant predictors, sex-role orientation (femininity) emerged as the best predictor of attitudes toward psychotherapy. However, only participant sex (female) predicted willingness to refer oneself to therapy. Contrary to our expectations, neither sex nor femininity interacted with the experimental manipulations in influencing receptivity to psychotherapy. Implications of these findings for clinicians employed in university counseling centers are presented.
Os partidos no eleitorado: percepções públicas e laços partidários no Brasil

This article examines the impact of party policies on the Brazilian electorate. An important indicator of the consolidation of the party system is the conception of image and party binding among voters. As the party system tends to stabilize, we suppose that voters start fixing the profiles of parties and express party preference or loyalty. It meant that electoral volatility, high in the beginning, would tend to decrease along the time and that, the main parties at least, would constitute their identity, working as "shortcuts" to obtain information on the various different candidacies and for the electoral decision. The main preoccupation of this analysis is to verify at what level such knowledge and party identity construction process have occurred in Brazil, taking as empirical basis a research conducted in the Sao Paulo city metro area during the pre-electoral period on 2002.
Fine-grained data partitioning framework for distributed database systems

With the increasing size of web data and widely adopted parallel cloud computing paradigm, distributed database and other distributed data processing systems, for example Pregel and GraphLab, use data partitioning technology to divide the large data set. By default, these systems use hash partitioning to randomly assign data to partitions, which leads to huge network traffic between partitions. Fine-grained partitioning can better allocate data and minimize the number of nodes involved within a transaction or job while balancing the workload across data nodes as well. In this paper, we propose a novel prototype system, Lute, to provide highly efficient fine-grained partitioning scheme for these distributed systems. Lute maintains a lookup table for each partitioned data set that maps a key to a set of partition ID(s). We use a novel lookup table technology that provides low cost of reading and writing lookup table. Lute provides transaction support and high concurrency writing with Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) as well. We implemented a prototype distributed DBMS on Postgresql and used Lute as a middle-ware to provide fine-grained partitioning support. Extensive experiments conducted on a cluster demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach. The evaluation results show that in comparison with other state-of-the-art lookup table salutations, our approach can significantly improve throughput by about 20% to 70% on TPC-C benchmark.
Efficacy of clonidine as an adjuvant to ropivacaine in supraclavicular brachial plexus block: A prospective study

Background and Aims: Bupivacaine has been the most frequently used local anaesthetic in brachial plexus block, but ropivacaine has also been successfully tried in the recent past. It is less cardiotoxic, less arrhythmogenic, less toxic to the central nervous system than bupivacaine, and it has intrinsic vasoconstrictor property. The effects of clonidine have been studied in peripheral nerve blockade. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of clonidine on nerve blockade during brachial plexus block with ropivacaine using peripheral nerve stimulator. Methods: Sixty patients were randomly divided into two groups, Group A and B. Group A received 30 ml of 0.5% of ropivacaine with 0.5 ml normal saline while Group B received same amount of ropivacaine with 0.5 ml (equivalent to 75 μg) of clonidine for supraclavicular brachial plexus block. The groups were compared regarding quality of sensory and motor blockade, duration of post-operative analgesia and intra and post-operative complications. Results: There was a significant increase in duration of motor and sensory block and analgesia in Group B as compared to Group A patients (P < 0.0001). There was no significant difference in onset time in either group (P = 0.304). No significant side effects were noted. Conclusion: The addition of 75 μg of clonidine to ropivacaine for brachial plexus block prolongs motor and sensory block and analgesia without significant side effects.
Breast cancer survival and treatment in health maintenance organization and fee-for-service settings.

BACKGROUND Enrollment in health maintenance organizations (HMOs) has increased rapidly during the past 10 years, reflecting a growing emphasis on health care cost containment. To determine whether there is a difference in the treatment and outcome for female patients with breast cancer enrolled in HMOs versus a fee-for-service setting, we compared the 10-year survival and initial treatment of patients with breast cancer enrolled in both types of plans. METHODS With the use of tumor registries covering the greater San Francisco-Oakland and Seattle-Puget Sound areas, respectively, we obtained information on the treatment and outcome for 13,358 female patients with breast cancer, aged 65 years and older, diagnosed between 1985 and 1992. We linked registry information with Medicare data and data from the two large HMOs included in the study. We compared the survival and treatment differences between HMO and fee-for-service care after adjusting for tumor stage, comorbidity, and sociodemographic characteristics. RESULTS In San Francisco-Oakland, the 10-year adjusted risk ratio for breast cancer deaths among HMO patients compared with fee-for-service patients was 0.71 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.59-0.87) and was comparable for all deaths. In Seattle-Puget Sound, the risk ratio for breast cancer deaths was 1.01 (95% CI = 0.77-1.33) but somewhat lower for all deaths. Women enrolled in HMOs were more likely to receive breast-conserving surgery than women in fee-for-service (odds ratio = 1.55 in San Francisco-Oakland; 3.39 in Seattle). HMO enrollees undergoing breast-conserving surgery were also more likely to receive adjuvant radiotherapy (San Francisco-Oakland odds ratio = 2.49; Seattle odds ratio = 4.62). CONCLUSIONS Long-term survival outcomes in the two prepaid group practice HMOs in this study were at least equal to, and possibly better than, outcomes in the fee-for-service system. In addition, the use of recommended therapy for early stage breast cancer was more frequent in the two HMOs.
Towards a Robot Learning Architecture

I summarize research toward a robot learning architecture intended to enable a mobile robot to learn a wide range of find-and-fetch tasks. In particular, this paper summarizes recent research in the Learning Robots Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University on aspects of robot learning, and our current work toward integrating and extending this within a single architecture. In previous work we developed systems that learn action models for robot manipulation, learn cost-effective strategies for using sensors to approach and classify objects, learn models of sonar sensors for map building, learn reactive control strategies via reinforcement learning and compilation of action models, and explore effectively. Our current efforts aim to coalesce these disjoint approaches into a single robot learning agent that learns to construct action models in a real-world environment, learns models of visual and sonar sensors for object recognition and learns efficient reactive control strategies via reinforcement learning techniques utilizing these models.
Contributions of Antibiotic Penetration, Oxygen Limitation, and Low Metabolic Activity to Tolerance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilms to Ciprofloxacin and Tobramycin

ABSTRACT The roles of slow antibiotic penetration, oxygen limitation, and low metabolic activity in the tolerance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in biofilms to killing by antibiotics were investigated in vitro. Tobramycin and ciprofloxacin penetrated biofilms but failed to effectively kill the bacteria. Bacteria in colony biofilms survived prolonged exposure to either 10 μg of tobramycin ml−1or 1.0 μg of ciprofloxacin ml−1. After 100 h of antibiotic treatment, during which the colony biofilms were transferred to fresh antibiotic-containing plates every 24 h, the log reduction in viable cell numbers was only 0.49 ± 0.18 for tobramycin and 1.42 ± 0.03 for ciprofloxacin. Antibiotic permeation through colony biofilms, indicated by a diffusion cell bioassay, demonstrated that there was no acceleration in bacterial killing once the antibiotics penetrated the biofilms. These results suggested that limited antibiotic diffusion is not the primary protective mechanism for these biofilms. Transmission electron microscopic observations of antibiotic-affected cells showed lysed, vacuolated, and elongated cells exclusively near the air interface in antibiotic-treated biofilms, suggesting a role for oxygen limitation in protecting biofilm bacteria from antibiotics. To test this hypothesis, a microelectrode analysis was performed. The results demonstrated that oxygen penetrated 50 to 90 μm into the biofilm from the air interface. This oxic zone correlated to the region of the biofilm where an inducible green fluorescent protein was expressed, indicating that this was the active zone of bacterial metabolic activity. These results show that oxygen limitation and low metabolic activity in the interior of the biofilm, not poor antibiotic penetration, are correlated with antibiotic tolerance of this P. aeruginosa biofilm system.
A SUPPLY CHAIN CONFIGURATION TOOL

The manufacturing of complex products often involves the assembly of other products, or sub-assemblies. Furthermore, these sub-assemblies may be manufactured by different suppliers. As a result, the specification of the assembly process for the final product contains relationships between multiple supply chain components, including business entities, manufacturing processes, products, and parts. This specification, involving the coordination and arrangement of supply chain components to support final product assembly, is referred to as a supply chain configuration. A supply chain configuration tool is used to recognize and modify the relationships between these components. Users of this tool may be engineers, purchasing agents, program managers, or other personnel concerned with the configuration’s dependencies. The focus of this paper is on the development of such a tool and its use from the perspective of a purchasing agent. INTRODUCTION Complex products are typically manufactured by assembling a specific set of subcomponents matching and contributing to the desired specifications of the final overall product. These include such products as automobiles and computers, where the final product is composed of various subassemblies, often made by different manufacturers. To perform assembly of the final product, the creation of subassemblies and the coordination of processes among manufacturers must be arranged. This arrangement, the supply chain, represents a configuration of business entities and the parts and processes they provide in order to produce a final overall product. Among these supply chain components (e.g. parts, manufacturing processes, products, sub-assemblies, vendors in the supply chain, etc.), various relationships exist, representing dependencies between the components. These dependencies are based on factors such as product design and specifications, agreements among business entities, and product fabrication requirements. A collection of components and the relationships between them comprises a supply chain configuration. Figure 1 illustrates relationships found between components in a typical supply chain configuration.
Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy under Ultrasound Guidance in Patients with Renal Calculi and Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease: A Report of 11 Cases

Nephrolithiasis accelerates the renal failure in the patients with ADPKD. In order to evaluate the role of percutaneous nephrolithotomy in management of calculus in these patients, 11 patients with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease and renal stones were included in the study. Two patients had bilateral renal stones. All patients were treated by percutaneous nephrolithotomy under ultrasound guidance. 13 percutaneous nephrolithotomy procedures were performed in 1 stage by the urology team under ultrasound guidance. 5 people received second operation with flexible nephroscopy in lateral position. The success rate and morbidity and mortality of the technique and hospital stay were recorded. Results. The puncture procedure was fully successful in all cases. The renal function improved in these patients. 5 patients had moderate fever after the surgery. 5 patients received flexible nephroscopy to take out the residual calculi. 2 persons had ESWL therapy after the surgery. Conclusion. PCNL is an ideal, safe, and effective method to remove the stones from those patients with no definite increase in the risk of complication. The outcome and stone-free rate are satisfactory comparable to the PCNL in the patients without ADPKD.
Effects of Centrally Administered Pituitary Adenylate Cyclase-Activating Polypeptide on c-fos Gene Expression and Heteronuclear RNA for Vasopressin in Rat Paraventricular and Supraoptic Nuclei

The effects of intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) on the expression of c-fos gene as well as heteronuclear (hn) RNA for arginine vasopressin (AVP) in paraventricular (PVN) and supraoptic nuclei (SON) of rats were investigated by immunohistochemistry for c-fos protein (Fos) and in situ hybridization histochemistry for c-fos mRNA and AVP hnRNA. The i.c. v. administration of PACAP (200 pmol/rat) caused a marked induction of Fos-like immunoreactivity (LI) in PVN and SON. The nuclear Fos-LI existed in AVP-LI containing cells in the PVN and SON. The expression of the c-fos gene in the PVN and SON was increased in a dose-related manner 30 min after i.c. v. administration of PACAP. PACAP-induced expression of the c-fos gene was significantly reduced by pretreatment with a PACAP receptor antagonist, PACAP-(6-38)-NH2. In addition, Fos-LI and the expression of the c-fos gene were also observed in the periventricular region of the third ventricle after i.c. v. administration of PACAP. The induction of c-fos gene expression in the PVN and SON reached a maximum 30 min after PACAP administration. The expression of c-fos gene in the PVN and SON induced by i.c. v. administration of vasoactive intestinal peptide (200 pmol/rat) was weaker than that induced by PACAP. The hnRNA for AVP in the PVN and SON was significantly increased 30 min after i.c. v. administration of PACAP (200 pmol/rat). Our results suggest that PACAP activates PVN and SON neurons via PACAP receptors and, in parallel, transcription of the AVP gene in the PVN and SON.
TRAINING OLDER AND YOUNGER ADULTS TO USE SOFTWARE

Forty‐six subjects (22 young, 24 old) received three training sessions with software (Borland's “Sidekick"). Each session lasted a maximum of S h. The fourth session was a test. Subjects were randomly assigned to two learning environments, partnered or individual, and half were given a computer “jargon” sheet before training. All instructions were written, learning was self‐paced, and tasks were formulated according to discovery‐method guidelines. Attitudes toward computers were measured before Session 1 and on completion of Session 3. The results showed that older adults took twice as long as younger ones but achieved nearly equal performance levels, exceeding young adults in one condition but falling slightly below them in others. Older adults requested help two to three times as frequently. Session 3 attitude scores were positively correlated with the mark achieved on the final test, and changes in attitudes were related to training conditions.
A meta-analysis study of the effect of chilling on prevalence of microbiological indicators on pig carcasses

Meta-analysis refers to ‘the statistical analysis of a large collection of results from individual studies, such as experimental studies, opinion surveys and casual models, for the purpose of integrating the findings’ [3]. Previously meta analysis have been used widely in combining single, separate epidemiological studies focusing on certain study questions [4]. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that meta-analysis can be used to summarize individual abattoir prevalence to highlight variation between abattoirs effect of chilling on the prevalence of the indicator organisms. in a key stage within the pork processing chain. A traditional parametric approach of meta-analysis (which is widely used in meta-analysis of clinical trials) with the purpose of synthesising findings of prevalence studies of pathogens within the food processing chain was used. Specifically, this study aimed (i) to investigate whether there is support in the sampled population of studies for the causal inference that the chilling stage within pork production had a statistically-significant decreasing effect on Microbial indicators prevalence of pig carcasses; and if so, (ii) to estimate the overall effect of the chilling operation on the studied outcome. To emphasize the importance of selecting the appropriate statistical standardisation to measure effect size This approach was previously explained by Gonzales Barron et al. 2008 [1].