Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Health Literacy of HIV-positive Individuals Enrolled in an Outreach Intervention: Results of a Cross-Site Analysis

This article examines health literacy among a group a HIV-positive persons at risk for receiving suboptimal health care due to histories of substance abuse, mental illness, incarceration, and unstable housing or homelessness. Participants receiving services from three outreach programs funded as part of a multisite demonstration project were screened for health literacy using the Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (TOFHLA) at program enrollment. The goal of this analysis was to identify demographics, risk factors, and health indicators associated with different levels of health literacy. Results indicated that although fewer than 30% of the sample scored in the marginal or inadequate range for health literacy, participants with these lower levels of health literacy were more likely to be African American or Latino/a, heterosexual, speak Spanish as their primary language, and have less than a high school education. The disparities in health literacy found in this study point to a need to assess level of health literacy and provide culturally sensitive health literacy interventions for persons with chronic diseases such as HIV. In addition to offering these services within HIV health care settings, health professionals can use other potential venues for health literacy assessment and intervention including substance abuse treatment and community-based social service, education, and training programs. Health care and support service providers also must become aware of the importance of health literacy when caring for all patients with HIV, particularly those most likely to have low health literacy.
Spectrally encoded slit confocal microscopy using a wavelength-swept laser

Abstract. We present an implementation of spectrally encoded slit confocal microscopy. The method employs a rapid wavelength-swept laser as the light source and illuminates a specimen with a line focus that scans through the specimen as the wavelength sweeps. The reflected light from the specimen is imaged with a stationary line scan camera, in which the finite pixel height serves as a slit aperture. This scanner-free operation enables a simple and cost-effective implementation in a small form factor, while allowing for the three-dimensional imaging of biological samples.
Atmospheric Acetaldehyde: Importance of Air‐Sea Exchange and a Missing Source in the Remote Troposphere

We report airborne measurements of acetaldehyde (CH3CHO) during the first and second deployments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). The budget of CH3CHO is examined using the Community Atmospheric Model with chemistry (CAM‐chem), with a newly developed online air‐sea exchange module. The upper limit of the global ocean net emission of CH3CHO is estimated to be 34 Tg/a (42 Tg/a if considering bubble‐mediated transfer), and the ocean impacts on tropospheric CH3CHO are mostly confined to the marine boundary layer. Our analysis suggests that there is an unaccounted CH3CHO source in the remote troposphere and that organic aerosols can only provide a fraction of this missing source. We propose that peroxyacetic acid is an ideal indicator of the rapid CH3CHO production in the remote troposphere. The higher‐than‐expected CH3CHO measurements represent a missing sink of hydroxyl radicals (and halogen radical) in current chemistry‐climate models.
Rescue of Impaired mGluR5-Driven Endocannabinoid Signaling Restores Prefrontal Cortical Output to Inhibit Pain in Arthritic Rats

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) serves executive functions that are impaired in neuropsychiatric disorders and pain. Underlying mechanisms remain to be determined. Here we advance the novel concept that metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) fails to engage endocannabinoid (2-AG) signaling to overcome abnormal synaptic inhibition in pain, but restoring endocannabinoid signaling allows mGluR5 to increase mPFC output hence inhibit pain behaviors and mitigate cognitive deficits. Whole-cell patch-clamp recordings were made from layer V pyramidal cells in the infralimbic mPFC in rat brain slices. Electrical and optogenetic stimulations were used to analyze amygdala-driven mPFC activity. A selective mGluR5 activator (VU0360172) increased pyramidal output through an endocannabinoid-dependent mechanism because intracellular inhibition of the major 2-AG synthesizing enzyme diacylglycerol lipase or blockade of CB1 receptors abolished the facilitatory effect of VU0360172. In an arthritis pain model mGluR5 activation failed to overcome abnormal synaptic inhibition and increase pyramidal output. mGluR5 function was rescued by restoring 2-AG-CB1 signaling with a CB1 agonist (ACEA) or inhibitors of postsynaptic 2-AG hydrolyzing enzyme ABHD6 (intracellular WWL70) and monoacylglycerol lipase MGL (JZL184) or by blocking GABAergic inhibition with intracellular picrotoxin. CB1-mediated depolarization-induced suppression of synaptic inhibition (DSI) was also impaired in the pain model but could be restored by coapplication of VU0360172 and ACEA. Stereotaxic coadministration of VU0360172 and ACEA into the infralimbic, but not anterior cingulate, cortex mitigated decision-making deficits and pain behaviors of arthritic animals. The results suggest that rescue of impaired endocannabinoid-dependent mGluR5 function in the mPFC can restore mPFC output and cognitive functions and inhibit pain. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Dysfunctions in prefrontal cortical interactions with subcortical brain regions, such as the amygdala, are emerging as important players in neuropsychiatric disorders and pain. This study identifies a novel mechanism and rescue strategy for impaired medial prefrontal cortical function in an animal model of arthritis pain. Specifically, an integrative approach of optogenetics, pharmacology, electrophysiology, and behavior is used to advance the novel concept that a breakdown of metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype mGluR5 and endocannabinoid signaling in infralimbic pyramidal cells fails to control abnormal amygdala-driven synaptic inhibition in the arthritis pain model. Restoring endocannabinoid signaling allows mGluR5 activation to increase infralimbic output hence inhibit pain behaviors and mitigate pain-related cognitive deficits.
Lumbopelvic movement control in contemporary dancers: A multiple case study

The purpose of this study was to describe and evaluate lumbopelvic movement control in professional dancers and to discuss its potential meaning for dance technique, performance, and dance‐related injuries. Lumbopelvic movement control was approached from a perspective of functional testing by adapting existing lumbopelvic movement control tests for dance‐related tasks. Six healthy professional dancers performed a total of 72 balances in three different forms. Following biomechanical variables were determined using a 3D motion analysis system: (a) joint angles of the supporting leg and pelvis, (b) hip joint moments, and (c) lateral shift of pelvis. Results indicated that altered lumbopelvic movement control was common; most often asymmetric pelvis control was observed, and it was typically found in lateral shift of the pelvis. Additionally, increased lateral shift was related to increased frontal plane moments in the hip joint. These findings suggest that lumbopelvic movement control should be evaluated also in highly skilled professional dancers and that healthcare intervention may be required to promote healthy dancing, dance performance, and ethical dance teaching. In addition, the study shows that 3D motion analysis can be used to assess movement control during activities relevant to a specific sport or movement task.
A new and holistic modelling approach for impact of line-edge roughness on dielectric reliability

A new and holistic modelling methodology is developed to investigate the impact of line-edge roughness (LER) on time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB). Unlike the conventional approach with a normal distribution for LER profiles [1-3], a realistic simulation of line-edge roughness (LER) profiles is carried out based on a power-spectrum density (PSD) function including the effects of both roughness and correlation-length (σ and λ). In contrast to the previous work, we show that LER roughness causes a significant reduction not only in T63 (scale parameter) but also in β (shape parameter). While our results show that the thickness dependence of T63 and β with LER follows a similar trend of the conventional percolation model, unlike porosity effect introduced in conventional percolation model the effective defect size (a0) is found to increase with increasing roughness (σ). To examine the strong impact of larger roughness on TDDB, a field-enhancement effect is included in LER modelling. Although the impact of field-enhancement due to protrusions on TDDB has been qualitatively discussed in the past, our LER simulation with a statistical approach has achieved quantitative agreement with experimental data, revealing an in-depth knowledge for the separate roles of LER profiles and field-enhancement. Thus, our methodology can be implemented as a realistic reliability assessment tool for technology qualification.
Analysis of Cellular DNA Content by Flow Cytometry

Cellular DNA content can be measured by flow or laser‐scanning cytometry with the aim of (1) revealing cell distribution within the major phases of the cell cycle, (2) estimating the frequency of apoptotic cells with fractional DNA content, and/or (3) disclosing the DNA‐ploidy of the measured cell population. In this unit, simple and universally applicable methods for staining fixed cells are presented, as are methods that utilize detergents and proteolytic treatment to permeabilize cells. Additionally, supravital cell staining with Hoechst 33342, which is primarily used for sorting live cells for subsequent culturing based on DNA‐content differences, is also described. Also presented are methods for staining of cell nuclei isolated from paraffin‐embedded tissues, and deconvolution of DNA‐content‐frequency histograms to estimate the percentage of cells in major phases of the cell cycle and frequency of apoptotic cells with fractional DNA content.
PERAN KINERJA KEUANGAN UNTUK MEMEDIASI PENGARUH MODAL INTELEKTUAL TERHADAP TINGKAT PENGUNGKAPANNYA

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis pengaruh modal intelektual (capital employed, human capital dan structural capital) terhadap tingkat pengungkapan modal intelektual melalui kinerja keuangan yang diproksikan dengan ROA sebagai variabel intervening. Populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah seluruh perusahaan perbankan yang terdaftar di Bursa Efek Indonesia tahun 2010-2013 sejumlah 37 perusahaan. Metode pemilihan sampel yang digunakan adalah purposive sampling dan terpilih 117 unit analisis sebagai sampel. Teknik analisis data yang digunakan adalah analisis jalur (path analisys) dengan alat bantu AMOS 21. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa CEE, HCE dan SCE tidak berpengaruh langsung terhadap tingkat pengungkapannya, pengaruh tidak langsung CEE terhadap tingkat pengungkapannya lebih besar jika melalui ROA dan ROA berpengaruh terhadap tingkat pengungkapan modal intelektual. Dalam penelitian ini, ROA hanya mampu menjembatani pengaruh tidak langsung CEE dengan ICD. Saran untuk penelitian selanjutnya dapat menggunakan komponen pengungkapan modal intelektual dengan instrument yang sesuai dengan konteks bisnis di Indonesia. The objective of this research is to analyze the influence of intellectual capital (capital employed, human capital and structural capital) on the intellectual capital disclosure trhough financial performing which is proxied by ROA as intervening variable. The population of this research is all banking companies listed on Indonesia Stock Exchange between 2010 to 2013 among 37 companies. The samples selection using purposive sampling method and obtained 117 samples. This research analysis technique used path analysis with AMOS software vesion 21. The result of this research indicates that the Capital Employed Efficiency, Human Capital Efficiency and Structural Capital Efficiency does not affect the Intellectual Capital Disclosure (ICD) directly. The effect of CEE towards ICD is stronger if through the ROA as an intervening variable compared to its direct impact on the ICD and ROA also effect to its ICD. In this research, ROA is only able to bridge the indirect effect of CEE to ICD. It is suggested for another researches to use intellectual capital disclosure komponens with instruments that adjusts the context of existing business in Indonesia.
The transnationalization of trade union action within multinational corporations: A comparative perspective

This article is based on two case studies and an empirical body of data that includes more than 100 interviews with union officials in various countries; it examines how collective union action is constructed within cross-border union alliances. Drawing on three lines of analysis, each grounded in a theory of collective action, it shows that, although the parties involved have invested considerable resources, the long-term presence of key players capable of carrying out framing duties can be a decisive factor in the development of collective action. The article also underlines how important it is for the unions involved to define a mobilizing joint project that can help develop a common sense of belonging. The findings in the two cases are uneven, and the article therefore also highlights one of the main weaknesses of cross-border alliances, namely the fact that they are dependent on stable organizational structures in the multinational corporations.
Non-Rayleigh statistics of ultrasonic backscattered signals

The statistics of the envelope of the backscattered signal from tissues have been known to vary from the well-known Rayleigh model. The K-distribution is used to model this non-Rayleigh behavior, since the generalized K-distribution encompasses a wide range of distributions like Rayleigh, Lognormal, and Rician. Computer simulations were conducted using a simple one-dimensional discrete scattering model to investigate the properties of the echo envelope. Significant departures from Rayleigh statistics were seen as the scattering cross sections of the scatterers became random. The validity of this model was also tested using data from tissue mimicking phantoms. Results indicate that the density function of the envelope can be modeled by the K-distribution and the parameters of the K-distribution can provide information on the nature of the scattering region in terms of the number as well as the scattering cross sections of the scatterers. <<ETX>>
Isoflurane‐induced depolarization of neural mitochondria increases with age

Background and objectives: The mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm) drives the three fundamental functions of mitochondria, namely adenosine triphosphate (ATP) generation, Ca2+ uptake/storage, and generation/detoxification of ROS. Isoflurane depolarizes neural mitochondria. The sensitivity for general anesthetics increases with age, but the mechanism for this age‐related sensitivity is still unknown. We compared the effect of isoflurane on [Ca2+]i and ΔΨm in isolated pre‐synaptic terminals (synaptosomes) from neonatal, adolescent, and adult rats and the influence of interventions in the respiratory chain was assessed.
A review of quadruped robots and environment perception

As legged robots are suitable to be used in unstructured environments, it becomes a popular field of research nowadays. In this paper, the development of quadruped robots is summarized. And several typical and recent robot systems are addressed in details, such as HyQ series, StarlETH, ANYmal, MIT Cheetah and BigDog, etc. Furthermore, some key techniques of environment perception for quadruped robots, including sensors, feature extraction and identification, mapping and SLAM, are also discussed. Finally, future researches of quadruped robots in environment perception are given.
A semi-supervised topic model incorporating sentiment and dynamic characteristic

With the rapid popularization of social applications, various kinds of social media have developed into an important platform for publishing information and expressing opinion. Detecting hidden topics from the huge amount of user-generated contents is of great commerce value and social significance. However traditional text analysis approaches only focus on the statistical correlation between words, but ignore the sentiment tendency and the temporal properties which may have great effects on topic detection results. This paper proposed a Dynamic Sentiment-Topic (DST) model which can not only detect and track the dynamic topics but also analyze the shift of public's sentiment tendency towards certain topic. Expectation-Maximization algorithm was used in DST model to estimate the latent distribution, and we used Gibbs sampling method to sample new document set and update the hyper parameters and distributions. Experiments are conducted on a real dataset and the results show that DST model outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of topic detection and sentiment accuracy.
The continuous real-time 13C-octanoate breath test for patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis using the BreathID system.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Hepatic mitochondrial beta-oxidation is considered to play a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The aim of this study was to determine whether there were differences between patients with NASH and healthy controls in a breath test with 13C-octanoate, a medium-chain fatty acid. METHODOLOGY The subjects were 8 patients (5 men, 3 women, median age 46.5 years) with histologically proven NASH and 6 healthy controls (5 men, 1 women, and median age 27.8 years). The 13C breath test was performed for 4 hours using the BreathID system with a 100 mL of water containing 100 mg 13C-octanoate. RESULTS There were no significant differences between NASH patients and controls about all breath test parameters. CONCLUSIONS NASH-mediated changes in breath test parameters after ingestion of 13C-octanoate were not observed in our study. The present study findings suggest the possible preservation of 13C-octanoate metabolism (mitochondrial beta-oxidation) in patients with NASH.
Cohorts of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in Vitis vinifera, a typical Mediterranean fruit crop.

In field conditions, grapevine roots normally are colonized by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). However, little is published, from either morphological or molecular studies, on the species composition of these symbionts in production vineyards. The AMF biodiversity of two Piedmont vineyards (at Neive and Lessona), characterized by different soil features, was investigated by morphological and molecular analyses. Several morphotypes were identified from the two vineyard soils. Community composition of AMF, both in soil and root samples, was then analysed with molecular approach to amplify a portion (550 bp) of AM fungal SSU rDNA. Phylogenetic analyses show a different distribution of sequences from the two sites in the main glomeromycotan groups. In the Neive site, the Glomeraceae group A is the only one well represented whereas more groups were found at Lessona. Among the more representative operational taxonomic units (OTUs), only one related to the Glomus irregulare phylotype was shared between the two vineyard soils. The data obtained in this work together with similar results in literature on this important fruit crop reinforce the concept that the general AMF assemblage structure and composition in vineyards might be influenced more by soil type than by host plant features (age, vegetative stages) or management practices.
Verification of an Ad-hoc Serial Communication Protocol through Model-checking: A Case Study with Echo Sounder

Serial data transmission accounts for a considerable share of the overall communication involved in real-time embedded systems. Although there are some standard serial protocols, many systems still use ad-hoc serial protocols for communication between a control computer and a serial peripheral device. Such protocols may have flaws in them which cannot be revealed by computer simulations or testing only. To complement testing, formal methods are now widely used and have proved effective in the verification of various communication protocols. However, for serial communication specifically, most of the previous research is focused on applying formal methods for the verification of standard serial interfaces. In the current work instead, we use formal methods to verify an ad-hoc serial communication protocol between a control computer and an echo sounder. Through our case study, we show how we integrated formal modeling and model-checking methods in an existing system and as a result, we were able to discover a fault in the protocol design, which could have gone unnoticed without formal software verification.
Integrating Online and Offline 3D Deep Learning for Automated Polyp Detection in Colonoscopy Videos.

Automated polyp detection in colonoscopy videos has been demonstrated to be a promising way for colorectal cancer (CRC) prevention and diagnosis. Traditional manual screening is time-consuming, operator-dependent and error-prone; hence, automated detection approach is highly demanded in clinical practice. However, automated polyp detection is very challenging due to high intra-class variations in polyp size, color, shape and texture and low inter-class variations between polyps and hard mimics. In this paper, we propose a novel offline and online 3D deep learning integration framework by leveraging the 3D fully convolutional network (3D-FCN) to tackle this challenging problem. Compared with previous methods employing hand-crafted features or 2D-CNNs, the 3D-FCN is capable of learning more representative spatio-temporal features from colonoscopy videos, and hence has more powerful discrimination capability. More importantly, we propose a novel online learning scheme to deal with the problem of limited training data by harnessing the specific information of an input video in the learning process. We integrate offline and online learning to effectively reduce the number of false positives generated by the offline network and further improve the detection performance. Extensive experiments on the dataset of MICCAI 2015 Challenge on Polyp Detection demonstrated the better performance of our method when compared with other competitors.
A Survey of Methods and Applications for Trace Analysis in Grid Systems

Today, grid computing has become an important component in distributed computing and has lead to rapid advances in many disciplines. Consequently, many novel methods and applications have been proposed for trace analysis in grid systems to better facilitate users' need for grid computing. In this survey, we investigate recent advances in grid trace analysis; discuss advantages and limitations of these fruitful works; and summarize a general framework for trace analysis. We discuss various applications of trace analysis and also show that the methods with integrations of several effective models and techniques tend to perform well.
A procedure for large‐scale plasmid isolation without using ultracentrifugation

An expedient procedure for large‐scale plasmid isolation from Escherichia coli strains without using ultracentrifugation or special setups or reagents is described. The protocol, which utilizes a modified alkaline extraction procedure as well as differential precipitations by isopropanol and lithium chloride, is simple and rapid and yet produces plasmid DNA with a yield of about 2 mg/liter culture. The isolated plasmids consisted of mostly monomeric and dimeric covalently closed circular DNA. The plasmids could be digested by various restriction endonucleases and were compatible with gene cloning, transfection‐gene expression, and viral production.