Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Apolipoprotein(a) is present in urine and its excretion is decreased in patients with renal failure.

To investigate the relation between renal function and concentrations of lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] in serum, we measured Lp(a) in samples of serum and urine from patients with diabetes mellitus and in samples sent to a laboratory center for measurements of creatinine clearance. Serum Lp(a) concentrations were significantly increased in subjects with obvious renal dysfunction (serum creatinine > or = 176.8 mumol/L) compared with normal control subjects. Urinary Lp(a) excretion was decreased in subjects with obvious renal dysfunction compared with subjects without obvious renal dysfunction (serum creatinine < or = 88.4 mumol/L) and was negatively and positively correlated with serum creatinine and creatinine clearance, respectively. More than 80% of urinary Lp(a) was recovered in the d > 1.21 kg/L fraction. At least six bands for apolipoprotein(a) [apo(a)] fragments, which were smaller than native apo(a) in serum, were observed in urine by immunoblotting, and some of these were also detected in serum. Degraded apo(a) fragments are probably present in urine, and their excretion decreases in parallel with decreases in the glomerular filtration rate.
Tag-Weighted Dirichlet Allocation

In the past two decades, there has been a huge amount of document data with rich tag information during the evolution of the Internet, which can be called semi-structured data. These semi-structured data contain both unstructured features (e.g., plain text) and metadata, such as tags in html files or author and venue information in research articles. It's of great interest to model such kind of data. Most previous works focused on modeling the unstructured data. Some other methods have been proposed to model the unstructured data with specific tags. To build a general model for semi-structured documents remains an important problem in terms of both model fitness and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel method to model the tagged documents by a so-called Tag-Weighted Dirichlet Allocation (TWDA). TWDA is a framework that leverages both the tags and words in each document to infer the topic components for the documents. This allows not only to learn the document-topic and topic-word distributions, but also to infer the tag-topic distributions for text mining (e.g., classification, clustering, and recommendations). Moreover, TWDA can automatically infer the probabilistic weights of tags for each document, that can be used to predict the tags in one document. We present an efficient variational inference method with an EM algorithm for estimating the model parameters. The experimental results show the effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of our TWDA approach by comparing it with the state-of-the-art methods on four corpora in document modeling, tags prediction and text classification.
Learning to cluster using high order graphical models with latent variables

This paper proposes a very general max-margin learning framework for distance-based clustering. To this end, it formulates clustering as a high order energy minimization problem with latent variables, and applies a dual decomposition approach for training this model. The resulting framework allows learning a very broad class of distance functions, permits an automatic determination of the number of clusters during testing, and is also very efficient. As an additional contribution, we show how our method can be generalized to handle the training of a very broad class of important models in computer vision: arbitrary high-order latent CRFs. Experimental results verify its effectiveness.
A Study of Multiple Causes of Recidivism among Youth Offenders at Thohoyandou Female/Juvenile Correctional Centre in the Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa

Many of the juveniles in custody often must return to prison as re-offenders, or because of parole or correctional supervision conditions that have been broken. Furthermore, some youth come from dysfunctional families that also provide fertile ground for acts of criminality. The aim of this paper was to explore factors that influence offenders to re-offend at Thohoyandou Correctional Centre within the Female/Juvenile place found in the Vhembe District. The paper investigated recidivism among youth offenders in the Female/Juvenile Correctional Centre at Vhembe District. It focuses on finding out and identifying some of the problems relating to recidivism. The sample consisted of juvenile offenders incarcerated. Male and female juveniles participated in the study. Qualitative research design was used to collect data. Data were collected through interviews. Data were analyzed thematically. The paper revealed that there are pull factors in society that influence youth to offend and re-offend. This paper recommends that rehabilitation of offenders should not be prison-based only but should also focus on addressing communities where offenders come from. It also recommends that the Department must conduct road shows within the communities pertaining to the services they render.
Social Risks as Costly Trait Signals

Costly signaling theory posits that people will sometimes engage in seemingly irrational behavior to show off attractive qualities about themselves. These behaviors may end in or incur a cost to the actor such that only individuals who are highly fit are able to succeed at the behavior, and therefore behavior success is an honest signal of fitness. Previous research has used costly signaling to explain human physical risk taking behaviors such as rock climbing, but the current study seeks to apply them to social risk taking, such as raising one’s hand in class. Should social risk taking prove to be a form of costly signaling, successful risk takers should be seen as more attractive than risk avoiders, and unsuccessful risk takers should be seen as less unattractive. Participants (N=219) from the University of New Mexico read 13 vignettes about individuals who either succeed at, fail at, or avoid taking a social risk. Participants then rated the protagonist on their attractiveness as a potential friend, long term partner, and short term partner. Results indicate that while successful risk takers are indeed attractive as is consistent with costly signaling, unsuccessful risk takers are actually more attractive than risk avoiders, which is inconsistent with predictions. However, this may have been due to the wording of
INSAR railway monitoring validation through high density leveling campaign

Much attention was paid on monitoring of the subsidence along large-scale man-made linear features (LMLFs). The high resolution SAR data offers impressive details on these infrastructures with multi-temporal INSAR analysis. This paper validates the INSAR results of time series analysis along a certain railway in China using a high density leveling campaign. The Leveling points are distributed along the railway line and each two leveling points are 60 m apart at a time interval of nearly one month. The study area is located in the west of Tianjin downtown, covering an area of 1.5 km · 7.46 km. The validation results show that the average subsidence rate and time series of PS results are agreed well with that of these leveling points.
Attentional Object Detection with an Active Multi-Focal Vision System

A biologically inspired foveated attention system in an object detection scenario is proposed. Bottom-up attention uses wide-angle stereo camera data to select a sequence of fixation points. Successive snapshots of high foveal resolution using a telephoto camera enable highly accurate object recognition based on SIFT algorithm. Top-down information is incrementally estimated and integrated using a Kalman-filter, enabling parameter adaptation to changing environments due to robot locomotion. In the experimental evaluation, all the target objects were detected in different backgrounds. Significant improvements in flexibility and efficiency are achieved.
Patterns of diversification in chionohebe and parahebe (scrophulariaceae) inferred from ITS sequences

Abstract Phylogenetic relationships of Chionohebe and Parahebe were inferred from analysis of ITS sequences. The results suggest that the genus Parahebe is polyphyletic as currently circumscribed, and the genus Chionohebe may be paraphyletic by exclusion of some of the alpine Parahebe. Parahebe lithophila emerges with the Australian endemics Dementia and Hebeformosa. The alpine species of Parahebe emerge with Chionohebe, Hebe cheesemanii, and H. cupressoides. Parahebe Groups A and B of Ashwin emerge with Hebe and Heliohebe. The origin of the New Zealand with Hebetaxa is equivocal. Chionohebe densifolia, C. ciliolata, and Parahebe vandewateri have New Zealand ancestry and have subsequently dispersed to Australia and New Guinea. The mountains of New Zealand are an important centre of diversification, and it appears that evolution in the group has been rapid. Autogamy has independently evolved in at least two lineages and may be an adaptation to alpine environments.
News Recommender Systems with Feedback

The focus of present research is widely used news recommendation techniques such as “most popular” or “most e-mailed”. In this paper we have introduced an alternative way of recommendation based on feedback. Various notable properties of the feedback based recommendation technique have been also discussed. Through simulation model we show that the recommendation technique used in the present research allows implementers to have a flexibility to make a balance between accuracy and distortion. Analytical results have been established in a special case of two articles using the formulation based on generalized urn models. Finally, we show that news recommender systems can be also studied through two armed bandit algorithms.
Application Based Assessment of Frictional Properties for Haptic Data Visualisation

Haptic devices can be used to present visualisations such as graphs and charts to the blind community. Many adopt a visually mediated method of presentation, whereby the haptic graphs are similar in form and structure to their visual counterparts. Exploration through point interaction force-feedback devices has been shown to be possible, but it is often cumbersome and slow. It may be possible to adopt a new method of encoding using more haptically salient properties. In this study, data in bar charts were encoded using friction. This was compared to standard (height-based) haptic bar chart representations using visually-impaired participants. Results showed that that performance using friction encoding was significantly worse than the standard bar charts.
Identification of Physiologically Active Substances as Novel Ligands for MRGPRD

Mas-related G-protein coupled receptor member D (MRGPRD) is a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) which belongs to the Mas-related GPCRs expressed in the dorsal root ganglia (DRG). In this study, we investigated two novel ligands in addition to beta-alanine: (1) beta-aminoisobutyric acid, a physiologically active substance, with which possible relation to tumors has been seen together with beta-alanine; (2) diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen hormone. In addition to the novel ligands, we found that transfection of MRGPRD leads fibroblast cells to form spheroids, which would be related to oncogenicity. To understand the MRGPRD novel character, oncogenicity, a large chemical library was screened in order to obtain MRGPRD antagonists to utilize in exploring the character. The antagonist in turn inhibited the spheroid proliferation that is dependent on MRGPRD signaling as well as MRGPRD signals activated by beta-alanine. The antagonist, a small-molecule compound we found in this study, is a potential anticancer agent.
Testing the Effectiveness of an Online Diversity Course for Faculty and Staff

It is an ethical imperative that faculty and staff develop a level of cultural competence in order to work effectively with increasingly diverse student bodies, as well as to prepare students to effectively participate in a diverse, global workforce. Online learning offers a promising way to provide meaningful, in-depth diversity and inclusion education to faculty and staff who typically have limited time to devote to professional development activities. However, little is known about the effectiveness of such learning interventions. The current project utilized a pretest-posttest design to examine the effectiveness of a 4-week instructor-led web-based course facilitated on Blackboard Learning Management System. Effectiveness was defined as increasing participants’ cultural competence in terms of cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning related to building a more inclusive campus environment. The findings of this study provide initial evidence for the use of this online course to support the development of faculty and staff cultural competence. Results indicate that participants developed a greater understanding of the value of diversity, an increased openness to learning about other cultures, and a greater awareness of their social privileges. Results also suggest that individuals’ geographic background and comfort level with computer-mediated communication moderate the effectiveness of the course in terms of learning outcomes. Finally, qualitative data from the open-ended questions help support the quantitative analyses and provide a richer understanding of participants’ experiences and learning in the online course. Implications for research on the effectiveness of online diversity courses are discussed.
Corporate housekeeping knowledge engineering and processing using extended COIN

This thesis is divided into two parts. In the first half, I present the current research results from corporate householding knowledge exploration. They include the categories of corporate householding problems, the related research in data quality and family household, commercial approaches to corporate householding problems, and the various areas where corporate householding applies. In the second half of the thesis, I present the design and implementation of a technical solution to an important type of corporate householding problem entity aggregation using a motivational example in account consolidation. The proposed technical approach uses extended COntext INterchange (COIN) technology to manage and process corporate householding knowledge. Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Stuart Madnick Title: John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technology / MIT Sloan School of Management & Professor of Engineering Systems / MIT School of Engineering
Re-examining rumination: An investigation into the relative contributions of reflective and brooding ruminative processes to problem solving

Rumination has classically been associated with depressive symptoms and is often used as a clinical indicator for depression; however, a re-evaluation has recently suggested rumination may comprise of two sub-components: adaptive reflection, and maladaptive brooding. A separate line of enquiry has used evolutionary thinking to suggest that rumination is an adaptive process which facilitates problem solving. To date, there is little in the way of empirical support for these claims, nor have there been investigations into how the reflection/brooding dichotomy may fit into the adaptive framework. Moreover, no comment has been made with regard to the mechanisms through which rumination may influence problem solving. Four experiments sought to address these issues and better understand rumination in non-clinical populations. The results from study one indicate that reflection and brooding are both associated with improved problem solving in social-type and risk-reward problem solving, but not in abstract problem solving. In study two, reflective rumination was found to be positively associated with working memory capacity, whereas brooding and analytical ruminations were associated with slowed responses in a Posner attention task and stop signal reaction time task respectively. Study three explored the novel observation that brooding was useful in risk-reward scenarios, with results indicating that the availability of risk information did not moderate the effects of brooding. Finally, study four explores whether differences exist between trait and state rumination and if these differences may account for inconsistencies between studies. From these results, it is clear that rumination can no longer be treated as a unitary construct. More critically, the notion of brooding as a maladaptive force must be reconsidered by the wider literature, and it is advised that future research consider the relative balance between reflection and brooding in their samples.
N-acetylcysteine does not prevent contrast induced nephropathy after cardiac catheterisation with an ionic low osmolality contrast medium: a multicentre clinical trial

Objective: To evaluate oral N-acetylcysteine in the prevention of contrast induced nephropathy (CIN) in patients at low to moderate risk undergoing cardiac catheterisation with ionic low osmolality contrast medium. Methods: In a multicentre double blind clinical trial 156 patients undergoing coronary angiography or percutaneous coronary intervention with serum creatinine ⩾ 106.08 μmol/l or creatinine clearance < 50 ml/min or diabetes mellitus were randomly assigned to receive N-acetylcysteine 600 mg orally twice daily for two days or placebo. Only low osmolality ionic contrast medium was used. Results: Sixteen patients developed CIN, defined as an increase of 44.2 μmol/l in creatinine in 48 hours: eight of 77 patients (10.4%) in the N-acetylcysteine group and eight of 79 patients (10.1%) in the placebo group (p = 1.00). The mean (SD) change in serum creatinine was similar in both groups: 7.96 (35.36) μmol/l in the N-acetylcysteine group and 6.19 (25.64) μmol/l in the placebo group (p = 0.67). No difference was observed in the change in endogenous creatinine clearance (−0.54 (10.4) ml/min v –2.52 (12.3) ml/min, N-acetylcysteine and placebo, respectively, p = 0.28). Conclusion: Oral N-acetylcysteine did not prevent CIN in patients at low to moderate risk undergoing cardiac catheterisation with ionic low osmolality contrast medium.
Impact of Gruesome Photographic Evidence on Legal Decisions: A Meta-Analysis

Gruesome crime scene and autopsy photographs are admissible evidence under the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) if their probative value substantially outweighs their prejudicial impact. Despite important methodological differences and mixed results from past studies, recommendations from the psychological literature have been made about the prejudicial impact of gruesome photographs perhaps prematurely. This meta-analysis investigates whether there is sufficient empirical evidence that presenting gruesome photographs in a trial affects legal decisions. The analysis of 23 studies and 4868 participants shows a small but statistically significant effect of gruesome photographs increasing guilty/liable verdicts or punishments, Hedge's g = 0.143, 95% CI: [0.055, 0.232]. However, this effect is significantly, Q(1) = 8.086, p = . 004, and substantially moderated by an important methodological distinction: the effect is much larger when studies compare gruesome photographs with no photographs (g = 0.450) than when they are compared with neutral photographs (g = 0.077). These results suggest that gruesome photographs do increase affirmative verdicts, both through a small effect of gruesome content as well as a larger additive of having visual material. These findings help shed light on the mixed empirical results and suggest that important additional research is needed.
The Condensation Phase Transition in Random Graph Coloring

Based on a non-rigorous formalism called the “cavity method”, physicists have put forward intriguing predictions on phase transitions in diluted mean-field models, in which the geometry of interactions is induced by a sparse random graph or hypergraph. One example of such a model is the graph coloring problem on the Erdős–Renyi random graph G(n, d/n), which can be viewed as the zero temperature case of the Potts antiferromagnet. The cavity method predicts that in addition to the k-colorability phase transition studied intensively in combinatorics, there exists a second phase transition called the condensation phase transition (Krzakala et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 104:10318–10323, 2007). In fact, there is a conjecture as to the precise location of this phase transition in terms of a certain distributional fixed point problem. In this paper we prove this conjecture for k exceeding a certain constant k0.
Distribution and role in regeneration of N-CAM in the basal laminae of muscle and Schwann cells

The neural cell adhesion molecule (N-CAM) is a membrane glycoprotein involved in neuron-neuron and neuron-muscle adhesion. It can be synthesized in various forms by both nerve and muscle and it becomes concentrated at the motor endplate. Biochemical analysis of a frog muscle extract enriched in basal lamina revealed the presence of a polydisperse, polysialylated form of N-CAM with an average Mr of approximately 160,000 as determined by SDS-PAGE, which was converted to a form of 125,000 Mr by treatment with neuraminidase. To define further the role of N-CAM in neuromuscular junction organization, we studied the distribution of N-CAM in an in vivo preparation of frog basal lamina sheaths obtained by inducing the degeneration of both nerve and muscle fibers. Immunoreactive material could be readily detected by anti-N-CAM antibodies in such basal lamina sheaths. Ultrastructural analysis using immunogold techniques revealed N-CAM in close association with the basal lamina sheaths, present in dense accumulation at places that presumably correspond to synaptic regions. N-CAM epitopes were also associated with collagen fibrils in the extracellular matrix. The ability of anti-N-CAM antibodies to perturb nerve regeneration and reinnervation of the remaining basal lamina sheaths was then examined. In control animals, myelinating Schwann cells wrapped around the regenerated axon and reinnervation occurred only at the old synaptic areas; new contacts between nerve and basal lamina had a terminal Schwann cell capping the nerve terminal. In the presence of anti-N-CAM antibodies, three major abnormalities were observed in the regeneration and reinnervation processes: (a) regenerated axons in nerve trunks that had grown back into the old Schwann cell basal lamina were rarely associated with myelinating Schwann cell processes, (b) ectopic synapses were often present, and (c) many of the axon terminals lacked a terminal Schwann cell capping the nerve-basal lamina contact area. These results suggest that N-CAM may play an important role not only in the determination of synaptic areas but also in Schwann cell-axon interactions during nerve regeneration.
Sleep and Internalizing Symptoms in Emerging Adulthood

We examined relations between objectively and subjectively assessed sleep and self-reported psychological distress from internalizing symptoms. Consistent with a health disparities perspective, ethnicity and subjective social status (SSS) were examined as moderators of these associations. Participants were 219 individuals (18–29 years old; 51% female) from diverse ethnic (55% non-Latino White, 27% Latino, and 18% other) and socioeconomic backgrounds. Individuals self-reported on their daytime sleepiness and actigraphs measured sleep duration, sleep efficiency, and variability in sleep onset time. Path models revealed that greater daytime sleepiness and variability in sleep onset time were more robustly related to distress from internalizing symptoms for Latinos and those with lower SSS. Other interactions emerged; longer sleep duration in conjunction with higher SSS related to less distress from internalizing symptoms. The results are novel and indicate that the consideration of ethnicity and socioeconomic position holds promise for better understanding sleep during emerging adulthood.