Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding tourists’ leisure expenditure at the destination: a social network analysis

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to identify spending patterns of tourists in relation to the leisure activities performed throughout their day-by-day stay at the destination. Using the methodology of social network analysis (SNA), a tourists–activities bipartite network was identified following a pattern known as core–periphery. The effect of this structure (including typology, number, and timing of performing the activities) on tourism expenditure is analysed using a multiple regression model, to which were added different sociodemographic variables and other variables related to travel. In order to better understand the portfolio of activities, four examples of networks are studied and visually represented. This study reveals that through SNA between tourists and activities, we can study the behaviour of tourists in a novel way.
Novel pathway analysis of genomic polymorphism-cancer risk interaction in the Breast Cancer Prevention Trial.

PURPOSE Tamoxifen was approved for breast cancer risk reduction in high-risk women based on the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project's Breast Cancer Prevention Trial (P-1:BCPT), which showed 50% fewer breast cancers with tamoxifen versus placebo, supporting tamoxifen's efficacy in preventing breast cancer. Poor metabolizing CYP2D6 variants are currently the subject of intensive scrutiny regarding their impact on clinical outcomes in the adjuvant setting. Our study extends to variants in a wider spectrum of tamoxifen-metabolizing genes and applies to the prevention setting. METHODS Our case-only study, nested within P-1:BCPT, explored associations of polymorphisms in estrogen/tamoxifen-metabolizing genes with responsiveness to preventive tamoxifen. Thirty-nine candidate polymorphisms in 17 candidate genes were genotyped in 249 P-1:BCPT cases. RESULTS CVP2D6_C1111T, individually and within a CYP2D6 haplotype, showed borderline significant association with treatment arm. Path analysis of the entire tamoxifen pathway gene network showed that the tamoxifen pathway model was consistent with the pattern of observed genotype variability within the placebo-arm dataset. However, correlation of variations in genes in the tamoxifen arm differed significantly from the predictions of the tamoxifen pathway model. Strong correlations between allelic variation in the tamoxifen pathway at CYP1A1-CYP3A4, CYP3A4-CYP2C9, and CYP2C9-SULT1A2, in addition to CYP2D6 and its adjacent genes, were seen in the placebo-arm but not the tamoxifen-arm. In conclusion, beyond reinforcing a role for CYP2D6 in tamoxifen response, our pathway analysis strongly suggests that specific combinations of allelic variants in other genes make major contributions to the tamoxifen-resistance phenotype.
Remote earthquake monitoring over GEO satellite network

Real-time and remote earthquake monitoring is a powerful tool in developing an Early Warning System (EWS). The Malaysian Meteorological Department (MetMalaysia) has the system implemented all over Malaysia since 2004. This paper describes the modeling of felt earthquake events in Ranau, Sabah, West of Malaysia, which observed active seismic activities since 2008. Due to its remote area, geostationary (GEO) satellite network is used to transmit the seismic data to the processing centre. Seismic data from six felt earthquake events are modeled and analysed. In particular, displacement (D), accelerated velocity (V) and acceleration (A) from 2008 to 2014 are analysed and discussed. The feasibility of modeling two outstanding felt earthquake events is assessed using Gaussian distribution with reasonable RMSE values.
Health and behavioral consequences of binge drinking in college. A national survey of students at 140 campuses.

OBJECTIVE To examine the extent of binge drinking by college students and the ensuing health and behavioral problems that binge drinkers create for themselves and others on their campus. DESIGN Self-administered survey mailed to a national representative sample of US 4-year college students. SETTING One hundred forty US 4-year colleges in 1993. PARTICIPANTS A total of 17,592 college students. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Self-reports of drinking behavior, alcohol-related health problems, and other problems. RESULTS Almost half (44%) of college students responding to the survey were binge drinkers, including almost one fifth (19%) of the students who were frequent binge drinkers. Frequent binge drinkers are more likely to experience serious health and other consequences of their drinking behavior than other students. Almost half (47%) of the frequent binge drinkers experienced five or more different drinking-related problems, including injuries and engaging in unplanned sex, since the beginning of the school year. Most binge drinkers do not consider themselves to be problem drinkers and have not sought treatment for an alcohol problem. Binge drinkers create problems for classmates who are not binge drinkers. Students who are not binge drinkers at schools with higher binge rates were more likely than students at schools with lower binge rates to experience problems such as being pushed, hit, or assaulted or experiencing an unwanted sexual advance. CONCLUSIONS Binge drinking is widespread on college campuses. Programs aimed at reducing this problem should focus on frequent binge drinkers, refer them to treatment or educational programs, and emphasize the harm they cause for students who are not binge drinkers.
Spectral Clustering Wikipedia Keyword-Based Search Results

The paper presents an application of spectral clustering algorithms used for grouping Wikipedia search results. The main contribution of the paper is a representation method for Wikipedia articles that has been based on combination of words and links and it has been used to categorize search result in this repository. We evaluate the proposed approach with Primary Component Analysis and show, on the test data, how usage of cosine transformation to create combined representations influence data variability. On sample test datasets we also show how combined representation improves the data separation that increases overall results of data categorization. The paper reviews the three main spectral clustering methods and we test their usability for text categorization comparing them using external validation criteria with standard clustering quality measures. Discussion on descriptiveness of evaluation measures and performed experiments on test datasets allows us to select the one spectral clustering algorithm that has been implemented in our system. We give a brief description of the system architecture that groups on-line Wikipedia articles retrieved with user-specified keywords. Using the system we show how clustering increases information retrieval effectiveness for Wikipedia data repository.
Recovery Rate and Determinants in Treatment of Children with SevereAcute Malnutrition using Outpatient Therapeutic Feeding Program inKamba District, South West Ethiopia

Introduction: Globally approximately one million children die every year from severe acute malnutrition. It is reported that severe acute malnutrition(SAM) is the commonest reason for paediatric hospital admission in many poor countries; 25 to 30% of children with severe malnutrition die during hospital admissions. Objective: To assess the success rate of OTP in treatment of children with SAM and identify its determinants at Kamba district, South West Ethiopia. Method: Institution based retrospective longitudinal study was carried out on children who were treated on the OTP. A total sample of 711 was selected from 4 health centers and 12 satellite health posts. A structured and pretested data abstraction form were prepared and used for data collection. The data were cleaned, coded and entered into Epi-INFO, analyzed by SPSS. The results were estimated using Kaplan-Meier survival curves, log-rank test and Cox-regression. Result: The recovery rate was 67.7% and the median recovery time was 7.14 weeks (IQR 5.28-8.14). Children treated at a health centers have 1.36 times higher recovery rate than children treated at health post (AHR = 1.495, 95% CI = 1.188, 1.881). Controlling for other factors; the probability of a child to recover from SAM under OTP is 1.25 times higher among children aged greater than two years old than those children aged less than or equal to two years old (AHR = 1.255, 95% CI = 1.012, 1.556). Conclusion and Recommendation: The recovery rate was lower than the international standard. Type of health facility providing the OTP services and age of the child had significant association (at 0.05 P-value) with survival time among children who recovered from SAM under OTP. Special focus should be given to young children and decentralization of OTP service from health centers to health posts should be carried out with great caution.
Lung Cancer Mortality and Carbon Black Exposure: Cox Regression Analysis of a Cohort From a German Carbon Black Production Plant

Objective: We undertook a lung cancer mortality analysis of 1528 German carbon black workers, followed between the years of 1976–1998, who produced furnace black, lamp black, and gas black. Methods: We used Cox modeling across age with time-dependent covariates, ie, cumulative and mean carbon black exposure, duration of work in departments, adjusting for calendar time, a smoking indicator, and age at hire. Exposures were lagged up to 20 years. Analyses were performed with the full cohort and after restriction to an inception cohort. Results: A total of 50 lung cancer deaths occurred. No positive association was found with carbon black exposure indices. Some models indicated an increasing risk across duration of work in the lamp black producing department. Conclusions: Our results do not suggest that carbon black exposure is a human lung carcinogen. The lamp black results, if no artifact, may point at historical exposures to gaseous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Molecular and Metabolic Adaptations of Lactococcus lactis at Near-Zero Growth Rates

ABSTRACT This paper describes the molecular and metabolic adaptations of Lactococcus lactis during the transition from a growing to a near-zero growth state by using carbon-limited retentostat cultivation. Transcriptomic analyses revealed that metabolic patterns shifted between lactic- and mixed-acid fermentations during retentostat cultivation, which appeared to be controlled at the level of transcription of the corresponding pyruvate dissipation-encoding genes. During retentostat cultivation, cells continued to consume several amino acids but also produced specific amino acids, which may derive from the conversion of glycolytic intermediates. We identify a novel motif containing CTGTCAG in the upstream regions of several genes related to amino acid conversion, which we propose to be the target site for CodY in L. lactis KF147. Finally, under extremely low carbon availability, carbon catabolite repression was progressively relieved and alternative catabolic functions were found to be highly expressed, which was confirmed by enhanced initial acidification rates on various sugars in cells obtained from near-zero-growth cultures. The present integrated transcriptome and metabolite (amino acids and previously reported fermentation end products) study provides molecular understanding of the adaptation of L. lactis to conditions supporting low growth rates and expands our earlier analysis of the quantitative physiology of this bacterium at near-zero growth rates toward gene regulation patterns involved in zero-growth adaptation.
Comparing and Combining Capillary Electrophoresis Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry and Nano–Liquid Chromatography Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry for the Characterization of Post-translationally Modified Histones

We present the first comprehensive capillary electrophoresis electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (CESI-MS) analysis of post-translational modifications derived from H1 and core histones. Using a capillary electrophoresis system equipped with a sheathless high-sensitivity porous sprayer and nano–liquid chromatography electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (nano-LC-ESI-MS) as two complementary techniques, we characterized H1 histones isolated from rat testis. Without any pre-separation of the perchloric acid extraction, a total of 70 different modified peptides, including 50 phosphopeptides, were identified in the rat linker histones H1.0, H1a-H1e, and H1t. Out of the 70 modified H1 histone peptides, 27 peptides could be identified with CESI-MS only, and 11 solely with LC-ESI-MS. Immobilized metal-affinity chromatography enrichment prior to MS analysis yielded a total of 55 phosphopeptides; 22 of these peptides could be identified only by CESI-MS, and 19 only by LC-ESI-MS, showing the complementarity of the two techniques. We mapped 42 H1 modification sites, including 31 phosphorylation sites, of which 8 were novel sites. For the analysis of core histones, we chose a different strategy. In a first step, the sulfuric-acid-extracted core histones were pre-separated using reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. Individual rat testis core histone fractions obtained in this way were digested and analyzed via bottom-up CESI-MS. This approach yielded the identification of 42 different modification sites including acetylation (lysine and Nα-terminal); mono-, di-, and trimethylation; and phosphorylation. When we applied CESI-MS for the analysis of intact core histone subtypes from butyrate-treated mouse tumor cells, we were able to rapidly detect their degree of modification, and we found this method very useful for the separation of isobaric trimethyl and acetyl modifications. Taken together, our results highlight the need for additional techniques for the comprehensive analysis of post-translational modifications. CESI-MS is a promising new proteomics tool as demonstrated by this, the first comprehensive analysis of histone modifications, using rat testis as an example.
Spatio-temporal and finite element method for analysis of the propagation of optical ultra-short pulses in non-linear media

A new and efficient spatio-temporal formulation based on the finite element method 2D is applied to simulate the propagation of optical ultra-short pulses in nonlinear media. The excellent performance of this technique in terms of the computational efficiency is demonstrated from its capacity to analyze simultaneously the propagation of the pulses in time domain and spatial domain. The new formulation is expressed in terms of the electrical field and includes perfect matched layers (PML) at the truncated boundaries and the wide angle Pade approach. The propagation occurs along the Z-direction and some key integrated planar structures in non-linear media are analyzed. In addition the time is used as a discretization variable and it makes possible the spectral analyzes of the propagated pulses.
Protocol and baseline for experiments on Bogazici University Turkish emotional speech corpus

This study aims at presenting an emotional corpus collected at Boğaziçi University / Electrical and Electronics Department, on which no previous signal processing and machine learning study was done for classification purposes. It also aims at providing the protocol for further experiments on this corpus. The emotional corpus consists of 484 speech utterances from 11 amateur actors acting 11 emotionally undefined sentences with 4 emotions using Stanislavsky effect. In-line with the state-of-the-art method in the field, functionals were passed over the Low Level Descriptors of the signal to obtain fixed length feature vectors. For this purpose, the openSMILE feature extractor was used with the baseline feature set from the INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge. The training, validation and testing partitions are defined on the corpus. The baseline results obtained using Support Vector Machines and Random Forests are presented.
Knockdown of CUL4B Suppresses the Proliferation and Invasion in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Cells

Cullin 4B (CUL4B), a scaffold protein that assembles CRL4B ubiquitin ligase complexes, was found to be overexpressed in many types of tumors. However, the expression pattern and role of CUL4B in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) remain largely unknown. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the role of CUL4B in NSCLC, and the underlying mechanism was also explored. Our results showed that CUL4B was highly expressed in NSCLC cell lines. Silencing CUL4B obviously inhibited proliferation and migration/invasion of NSCLC cells, and it also suppressed the epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) progress in NSCLC cells. Furthermore, knockdown of CUL4B significantly inhibited the expression of β-catenin, cyclin D1, and c-Myc in NSCLC cells. Taken together, these results suggest that knockdown of CUL4B inhibited the proliferation and invasion through suppressing the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway in NSCLC cells. Therefore, CUL4B may represent a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of NSCLC.
Thurstone Scaling as a Measurement Method to Quantify Subjective Health Outcomes

Background:Many objective health outcome measures are used to monitor patients or evaluate health interventions, but there are also subjective measures. For the latter, it is difficult to derive metric data, which are needed to quantify health outcomes such as functional disability, severity of side effects, and health status. Objective:Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment is presented as an alternative means to derive metric values for subjective health outcomes. The appeal of Thurstone's scaling model is that it can transform subjective individual rank order data or comparative preference data to a single group composite interval scale. To demonstrate its contribution, an empirical study was conducted, focusing on the valuation of health states. Research Design:Rank order data were collected for 18 health states and were then used as input for Thurstone scaling. Visual analogue scale (VAS) values were also collected for the same states. Subjects:An agency for market research recruited 212 Dutch respondents aged 18–75 years. Results:The derived Thurstone values showed a strong relationship with the VAS values. The positions of the 2 worst states were almost identical on the VAS and the Thurstone scale. Intermediate states were scaled somewhat differently by the 2 methods. Conclusions:For many subjective health outcomes, Thurstone scaling and its derivatives may be an attractive methodology to arrive at quantitative measures.
Accelerating image reconstruction in three-dimensional optoacoustic tomography on graphics processing units.

PURPOSE Optoacoustic tomography (OAT) is inherently a three-dimensional (3D) inverse problem. However, most studies of OAT image reconstruction still employ two-dimensional imaging models. One important reason is because 3D image reconstruction is computationally burdensome. The aim of this work is to accelerate existing image reconstruction algorithms for 3D OAT by use of parallel programming techniques. METHODS Parallelization strategies are proposed to accelerate a filtered backprojection (FBP) algorithm and two different pairs of projection/backprojection operations that correspond to two different numerical imaging models. The algorithms are designed to fully exploit the parallel computing power of graphics processing units (GPUs). In order to evaluate the parallelization strategies for the projection/backprojection pairs, an iterative image reconstruction algorithm is implemented. Computer simulation and experimental studies are conducted to investigate the computational efficiency and numerical accuracy of the developed algorithms. RESULTS The GPU implementations improve the computational efficiency by factors of 1000, 125, and 250 for the FBP algorithm and the two pairs of projection/backprojection operators, respectively. Accurate images are reconstructed by use of the FBP and iterative image reconstruction algorithms from both computer-simulated and experimental data. CONCLUSIONS Parallelization strategies for 3D OAT image reconstruction are proposed for the first time. These GPU-based implementations significantly reduce the computational time for 3D image reconstruction, complementing our earlier work on 3D OAT iterative image reconstruction.
Power oscillation damping controller by static synchronous compensator with energy storage

This paper deals with a control strategy for power oscillation damping using Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) with energy storage. First, analysis of power oscillation damping by only active and reactive power injection into the power system will be carried out using a single machine infinite bus and two machines system model. A control strategy that optimizes the use of active and reactive power injection for power oscillation damping based on locally measured signals will be derived. Small signal analysis of the dynamic performance of the proposed control strategy will be made. The effectiveness of the proposed control method to provide power oscillation damping irrespective of the connection point of the device will be verified by simulation.
Quality improvement project for managing elevated blood pressure in a primary care setting

Elevated blood pressure (BP) and prehypertension increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases, a national health concern. This article presents a quality improvement project implemented within a primary care setting that aimed at lowering cardiovascular risk by improving the identification, treatment, and follow-up of patients with elevated BP. This project was designed and implemented to address the identified deficiencies contributing to poor identification and follow-up of patients with elevated BP. The intervention was multi-pronged and comprised a staff educational program, introduction of a new method for measuring BP using the BpTRU™ device, and patient educational intervention. A significant improvement in staff BP knowledge scores was achieved following the intervention (p<0.05). Patient participants also exhibited a significant improvement in post-intervention BP measurements (p<0.05). This project showed that the implementation of a quality improvement project in a primary care setting can lead to significant improvements in staff BP knowledge and patient BP readings. However, future research in this area is required to determine whether particular lifestyle changes are directly associated with the reduction in BP.
ADRENOMEDULLARY HORMONAL AND GLYCEMIC MODULATION FOLLOWING GONADOTROPIN AND SEX HORMONE ADMINISTRATION IN THE SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE LISSEMYS PUNCTATA PUNCTATA

The aim of the current investigation was to ascertain whether gonadotropins and sex hormones can modulate adrenomedullary and glycemic functions in turtles. Exogenous FSH (3.0 µg/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) stimulated adrenomedullary activity by increasing nuclear diameter and cytoplasmic degranulation, and elevating adrenal norepinephrine and epinephrine, and blood glycemic levels in turtles. LH (3.0 µg/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) had no significant effect and the combined treatment of FSH and LH (3.0 µg each/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) failed to show further adrenomedullary stimulation and hyperglycemia beyond that of FSH alone. Estrogen treatment in low dose (25 µg/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) had no significant effect on adrenomedullary activity or glycemia, but at higher doses (50 µg or 100 µg/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) showed dose-dependent adrenomedullary stimulation by inducing the same manifestations as those of FSH. Progesterone in low dose (25 µg/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) had no perceptible effect, but in other doses (50 µg/100 µg per 100 gm body wt daily for 10 days), suppressed dose-dependent adrenomedullary activity by reversing the changes to those of estrogen. Simultaneous treatment with estrogen and progesterone (50 µg each/100 gm body wt daily for 10 days) failed to show further changes beyond that of estrogen alone.