Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms for Extracting a Signal from Noise as Revealed through the Specificity and Generality of Task Training

Visual judgments critically depend on (1) the detection of meaningful items from cluttered backgrounds and (2) the discrimination of an item from highly similar alternatives. Learning and experience are known to facilitate these processes, but the specificity with which these processes operate is poorly understood. Here we use psychophysical measures of human participants to test learning in two types of commonly used tasks that target segmentation (signal-in-noise, or “coarse” tasks) versus the discrimination of highly similar items (feature difference, or “fine” tasks). First, we consider the processing of binocular disparity signals, examining performance on signal-in-noise and feature difference tasks after a period of training on one of these tasks. Second, we consider the generality of learning between different visual features, testing performance on both task types for displays defined by disparity, motion, or orientation. We show that training on a feature difference task also improves performance on signal-in-noise tasks, but only for the same visual feature. By contrast, training on a signal-in-noise task has limited benefits for fine judgments of the same feature but supports learning that generalizes to signal-in-noise tasks for other features. These findings indicate that commonly used signal-in-noise tasks require at least three distinct components: feature representations, signal-specific selection, and a generalized process that enhances segmentation. As such, there is clear potential to harness areas of commonality (both within and between cues) to improve impaired perceptual functions.
Differential Security Evaluation of Simeck with Dynamic Key-guessing Techniques

The Simeck family of lightweight block ciphers was proposed in CHES 2015 which combines the good design components from NSA designed ciphers SIMON and SPECK. Dynamic key-guessing techniques were proposed by Wanget al. to greatly reduce the key space guessed in differential cryptanalysis and work well on SIMON. In this paper, we implement the dynamic key-guessing techniques in a program to automatically give out the data in dynamic key-guessing procedure and thus simplify the security evaluation of SIMON and Simeck like block ciphers regarding differential attacks. We use the differentials from Kölbl et al.’s work and also a differential with lower Hamming weight we find using Mixed Integer Linear Programming method to attack Simeck. We improve the previous best results on all versions of Simeck by 2 rounds.
Predicting drug-disease associations based on the known association bipartite network

Recent studies show that drug-disease associations provide important information for drug discovery and drug repositioning. Wet experimental identification of drug-disease associations is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, the development of computational methods that predict drug-disease associations is an urgent task. In this paper, we propose a novel computational method named NTSIM, which only uses known drug-disease associations to predict unobserved associations. First of all, known drug-disease associations are represented as a drug-disease bipartite network, and a novel similarity measure named linear neighborhood similarity (LNS) is proposed to calculate drug-drug similarity and disease-disease similarity based on the bipartite network. Then, we predict unobserved drug-disease associations in the similarity-based graph by using label propagation process. In the computational experiments, this proposed method achieves high-accuracy performances, and outperforms representative state-of-the-art methods: PREDICT, TL-HGBI and LRSSL. Our studies reveal that known drug-disease associations can provide enough information to build the high-accuracy prediction models; linear neighbor similarity (LNS) can lead to better performances than other similarity measures such as Jaccard similarity, Gauss similarity and cosine similarity; the bipartite network-derived features outperform the drug biological features and disease semantic features.
Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study estimate of patient life-years attributable to modifiable haemodialysis practices in Sweden

Abstract Objective. To examine the association of adherence to Swedish Society of Nephrology guidelines on haemodialysis treatment and patient outcomes in Sweden. Material and methods. A prevalent cross-sectional sample of Swedish haemodialysis patients was obtained from the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS II, 2002–2004), an international, prospective, cohort study that investigates relationships between patient outcomes and haemodialysis practices. The sample was used to estimate life-years gained through adherence to six potentially modifiable practice patterns: dialysis dose, anaemia, serum phosphorus, serum calcium, serum albumin and catheter use for vascular access. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to calculate the relative risk of mortality for all patients outside each guideline. Results. The practices resulting in the largest patient-year gains were increasing patient albumin above 35 g/l and reducing facility catheter use to below 10%. Compliance with the albumin target levels could save approximately 441 life-years (or as many as 904 years). Similarly, by 2010, 409 life-years (or as many as 837 years) could be saved if vascular access target levels were achieved. Conclusion. The analysis suggests potential opportunities to improve haemodialysis patient care in Sweden. Estimates of life-years saved may serve as motivation for the improvement of patient care through adherence to published guidelines supported by international data from the DOPPS.
Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain.

Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain To the Editor The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guideline for prescribing opioids for chronic pain1 is a welcome correction of opioid-prescribing practices that stemmed from inadequate evidence and flawed reviews.2 Although an improvement, the review by Dr Dowell and colleagues1 also had shortcomings. For example, it summarized 3 primary care studies using separate ranges for opioid abuse and dependence and thereby minimized the risk of iatrogenic opioid use disorders from long-term therapy. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [fourth edition] (DSM-IV), abuse and dependence are dimensions of opioid use disorder and should have first been combined into opioid use disorder rates. Also, the review combined rates with different time frames from the 3 studies—past-month,3 past-year,4 and lifetime5—that are not comparable. DSM-IV criteria specify that symptoms of opioid use disorders cluster within 12 months, and the disease has cycles of remission and relapse. After patients with preexisting nonmedical opioid use disorders are removed, measurements should incorporate the entire duration of use, not just symptoms in the last month or year. The 1 primary care study5 that approximated correct procedures excluded nonmedical opioid users from the sample and then found a lifetime opioid use disorder rate of 21%. Current review methods and research are inadequate for determining the risk of iatrogenic addiction.
The theory and practice of entrepreneurship

Contents: Foreword Thomas M. Cooney 1. Introduction David Smallbone, Joao Leitao, Mario Raposo and Friederike Welter 2. Entrepreneurial Climate at Universities: The Impact of Organizational Factors Mario Geissler, Steffen Jahn and Peter Haefner 3. Overcoming Critical Junctures in Spin-offs Companies from Non-elite Universities: Evidence from Catalonia Pablo Migliorini, Christian Serarols and Andrea Bikfalvi 4. Benefiting from Publicly Funded Pre-Competitive Research: Differences between Insiders and Outsiders Verena Eckl and Dirk Engel 5. A Feminist Inquiry into Entrepreneurship Training Janice Byrne and Alain Fayolle 6. Knowledge and Experience in the Internationalization of Knowledge-Intensive Firms Niina Nummela, Sami Saarenketo, Eriika Paavilainen-Mantymaki and Kaisu Puumalainen 7. The Nature of International Relationships and Performance: Policy Implications from the Case of Globally Integrated Small Firms Christos Kalantaridis and Ayvalo Vassilev 8. Exploring Entrepreneurial Exits: A Study of Individual Exit Experiences in Finland and the UK Satu Aaltonen, Robert Blackburn and Jarna Heinonen 9. The Virtualisation Potential of SME Networks: An Exploratory Investigation Emilio Esposito, Pietro Evangelista, Vincenzo Lauro and Mario Raffa 10. Knowledge and Organizational Entrepreneurship: A Relational Perspective Ana Maria Bojica, Maria del Mar Fuentes Fuentes and Matilde Ruiz Arroyo 11. The Impact of Legitimacy Building Signals on Access to Resources Cristina Diaz Garcia and Juan Jimenez Moreno 12. Antecedents of the Entrepreneurial Orientation of the Firm: The Case of St Petersburg, Russia Tatiana Iakovleva 13. Entrepreneurial Orientation and Performance in Micro-sized Firms: Comparing Agricultural and Non-agricultural Firms Jorunn Grande 14. Entrepreneurship in Urban and Rural Switzerland: Similar or Worlds Apart? Heiko Bergmann and Daniel Baumgartner
Analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity of podophyllotoxin derivatives

Abstract Context: Podophyllotoxin is a natural product that inhibits the polymerization of tubulin and has served as a prototype for the development of diverse antitumor agents in clinical use, such as etoposide, teniposide and etopophos. Reumacon, another semisynthetic derivative, reached its clinical phase for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Objective: This study investigated the analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties of three compound derivatives from podophyllotoxin. Materials and methods: During a phytochemical study performed on Juniperus thurifera Linne (Cupressaceae) leaves, among other products, several cyclolignans, such as podophyllotoxin, deoxypodophyllotoxin, deoxypicropodophyllotoxin and thuriferic acid were isolated. These compounds, obtained afterwards through semisynthesis, were assayed as analgesic and anti-inflammatory agents. Additionally, the cytotoxic activity of thuriferic acid was evaluated in three cancer cell lines, P-388, A-549 and HT-29, and these data were compared with previous cytotoxicity results obtained for the other three compounds. Results: Analgesic activity results showed that deoxypicropodophyllin is as effective as deoxypodophyllotoxin to inhibit nociceptive perception induced by acetic acid in mice (77.8% ± 4.1% and 71.3% ± 6.5%, respectively), while its cytotoxicity [1.01 × 10−7 (GI50 M)] is 100-fold less. Other set of experiments showed that thuriferic acid, a derivative of podophyllotoxin a thousand times less citotoxic [1.21 × 10−5 (GI50 M)] than deoxypodophyllotoxin, caused significant inhibition of paw edema development in the carrageenan-induced inflammation test (63.4% ± 3.3%), effect comparable to those of deoxypodophyllotoxin (66.3% ± 4.4%), and the standard drug indomethacin (61.5% ± 2.5%). Conclusion: We conclude that deoxypicropodophyllotoxin and thuriferic acid are effective in reducing edema formation. However, deoxypicropodophyllin is more related with analgesic activity than anti-inflammatory effect.
Reliability of a self-administered medical questionnaire.

A self-administered patient questionnaire comprising 204 commonly used inventory-by-systems questions was tested for reliability. By testing and retesting each medical question both on forms and on cards, it was shown that inconsistency in responses was not related to the mode of questioning, but to the content of the questions. For the total of 204 questions, 95% of the patients changed their answer to less than 6% of the questions. Patients were much more likely to change their second answer when their first response was a "yes", than when a "no." An overall score was developed which ranked each question as to its relative reliability.
Cardioembolic Stroke Diagnosis Using Blood Biomarkers

Stroke is one of the main causes of death and disability in the world. Cardioembolic etiology accounts for approximately one fifth of all ischemic strokes whereas 25-30% remains undetermined even after an advanced diagnostic workup. Despite there is not any biomarker currently approved to distinguish cardioembolic stroke among other etiologies in clinical practice the use of biomarkers represents a promising valuable complement to determine stroke etiology reducing the number of cryptogenic strokes and aiding in the prescription of the most appropriated primary and secondary treatments in order to minimize therapeutic risks and to avoid recurrences. In this review we present an update about specific cardioembolic stroke-related biomarkers at a protein, transcriptomic and genetic level. Finally, we also focused on reported biomarkers associated with atrial fibrillation (a cardiac illness strongly related with cardioembolic stroke subtype) thus with a potential to become biomarkers to detect cardioembolic stroke in the future.
BINAURAL DISTANCE PERCEPTION BASED ON DIRECT-TO-REVERBERANT ENERGY RATIO

The direct-to-reverberant energy ratio has long been recognized as an absolute auditory cue for sound source distance perception in listeners. Traditional methods to extract this energy ratio are based on post-processing of the estimated room impulse response, which is computationally expensive and inaccurate in practice. An alternative is based on estimating the energy arriving from the azimuth of the direct source, under the assumption that reverberant components result in a spatially-diffuse sound field. We propose a binaural equalization-cancellation technique to calculate this energy ratio by locating the source in a delay-line structure, and go on to demonstrate its potential as a distance cue for both simulated and real data. The system is integrated with a Bayesian inference framework, particle filtering, to handle the nonstationary of energy-based measurements. Experiments on simulated room data showed the resulting computational model is capable of estimating source distance based on reverberation information.
Electron spin resonance and electron nuclear double resonance studies of flavoproteins involved in the photosynthetic electron transport in the cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. PCC 7119.

The flavins of ferredoxin-NADP+ reductase (FNR) and flavodoxin from the cyanobacterium Anabaena PCC 7119 were obtained in their semiquinone states at pH 7 by photoreduction of the pure proteins in the presence of EDTA and 5-deazariboflavin. For FNR, the ESR signal of the FAD semiquinone was centred at g = 2.005 with linewidths 2.0 mT in H2O and 1.48 mT in D2O. These data are in agreement with those reported for other neutral flavin semiquinones. The linewidths were the same when measured either at X-band (9.35 GHz) or at S-band (4 GHz), indicating that line broadening is due to unresolved nuclear hyperfine couplings, caused in part by exchangeable protons. When the substrate, NADP+, was added to the semiquinone form of the protein no changes in the linewidth or shape of the spectra were detected, but a decrease in the ESR signal due to the FNR semiquinone was observed, consistent with the reduction of NADP+ to NADPH by reduced FNR and, subsequent displacement of the equilibrium. No changes in the shape or linewidth of the FNR ESR signals were observed when photoreduction of FNR was performed in the presence of either flavodoxin or ferredoxin. Electron nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) spectroscopy of FNR semiquinone from Anabaena PCC 7119 provided further information about the interactions of the flavin radical with protons. A group of signals, with couplings of 5-9.5 MHz, is attributed to protons on C6 and on 8-CH3 of the flavin ring. No change in these hyperfine couplings was detected when the protein was studied in D2O, but the coupling Aiso attributed to protons on 8-CH3 decreased from 8.12 MHz to 7.72 MHz in the presence of NADP+. The decrease in the electron spin density distribution on this part of the flavin ring system was attributed to binding of the substrate, polarising the electron density distribution of the flavin towards the pyrimidine ring. A second group of signals was observed, with hyperfine couplings less than 3 MHz, some of which disappeared when the protein was transferred into D2O. Effects of NADP+ binding to the protein were also observed in these weak couplings. These signals are attributed to displaced water protons, or to exchangeable protons from amino acid residues on the protein near the flavin-binding site, involved in substrate stabilization. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Comment-based Keyword Programming

Keyword programming is a technique to generate code fragments automatically from the several keywords provided by the user and the context of the code. It reduces a burden of remembering the details of a particular language or API. In this paper, we extend the technique for using comments, instead of keywords, in the search of expressions. The use of comments is expected not only to motivate us to write comments frequently, but also to give us more semantic information which is useful for improving quality of generated codes.
A Proposition Bank of Urdu

This paper describes our efforts for the development of a Proposition Bank for Urdu, an Indo-Aryan language. Our primary goal is the labeling of syntactic nodes in the existing Urdu dependency Treebank with specific argument labels. In essence, it involves annotation of predicate argument structures of both simple and complex predicates in the Treebank corpus. We describe the overall process of building the PropBank of Urdu. We discuss various statistics pertaining to the Urdu PropBank and the issues which the annotators encountered while developing the PropBank. We also discuss how these challenges were addressed to successfully expand the PropBank corpus. While reporting the Inter-annotator agreement between the two annotators, we show that the annotators share similar understanding of the annotation guidelines and of the linguistic phenomena present in the language. The present size of this Propbank is around 180,000 tokens which is double-propbanked by the two annotators for simple predicates. Another 100,000 tokens have been annotated for complex predicates of Urdu.
Interleukin-1 receptor and receptor antagonist gene expression after focal stroke in rats.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The expression of interleukin-1 beta (IL-1 beta) is upregulated after focal brain ischemia, and previous work has demonstrated its involvement in ischemic injury. The IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1ra), a natural competitive antagonist of IL-1 receptors (IL-1Rs), has been demonstrated to play a role in attenuating brain ischemic injury. To hypothesize the involvement of the IL-1 system in ischemic injury, we examined other IL-1 components, including IL-1ra, IL-1RI, and IL-1RII for their mRNA expression after focal stroke. METHODS Quantitative reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technique was used to examine the mRNA expression profile of IL-1ra and two IL-1R isoforms in a temporal fashion (n = 4 for each time point) after permanent occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCAO) in spontaneously hypertensive rats. IL-1ra and IL-1R mRNA expression was confirmed by Northern blot analysis using poly(A) RNA isolated after 2 and 12 hours of MCAO. RESULTS Very low levels of IL-1ra mRNA were detected in sham-operated or nonischemic cortex. IL-1ra mRNA in ischemic cortex was greatly increased at 12 hours (16.5-fold increase over sham samples, P < .001) and remained elevated for up to 5 days (17.2-fold increase, P < .01) after MCAO. IL-1RI mRNA was relatively highly expressed in normal cortex and was further elevated late after ischemic injury (3.3-fold increase at day 5, P < .001). In contrast, the low basal expression of IL-1RII mRNA was remarkably elevated at 6 hours (5.3-fold increase, P < .05), reaching peak levels 12 hours (10.3-fold increase, P < .001) after MCAO. CONCLUSIONS Differential expression of IL-1 beta, IL-1ra, IL-1RI, and IL-1RII mRNAs after focal stroke may suggest a distinct role(s) for each component of the IL-1 system in ischemic injury. The data also stress the importance of evaluating all the components of a given cytokine system (eg, agonist, receptors, and natural antagonist) after focal stroke.
Extracting Moving Objects from a Moving Camera VideoSequence

We present a new method for extracting objects moving independently of the background from a video sequence taken by a moving camera. We first extract and track feature points through the sequence and select the trajectories of background points by exploiting geometric constraints based on the ane camera model. Then, we generate a panoramic image of the background and compare it with the individual frames. We describe our image processing and thresholding techniques.
Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis in a Child with Pycnodysostosis: A Case Report.

Pycnodysostosis is an autosomal recessive osteochondrodysplasia characterized by short stature, dysmorphic facial features, osteosclerosis, and the propensity for frequent fractures1-6. Patients with pycnodysostosis have mutations of the gene that encodes the lysosomal protein cathepsin K. This genetic abnormality results in decreased osteoclastic activity and brittle bones, which are prone to fracture3. Characteristically, diaphyseal fractures of long bones occur2 but fractures of the femoral neck are infrequent1. To our knowledge, epiphyseal separation and slipped capital femoral epiphysis (SCFE) have not been previously reported in children with pycnodysostosis. We present a child with pycnodysostosis who sustained an SCFE. The patient and his parents were informed that clinical details and photographs concerning the case would be submitted for publication, and they provided consent. A nine-year-old boy born to second-degree consanguineous parents had developed pain in the left hip and inability to bear weight on the left limb following a trivial fall. Radiographs had revealed a mildly displaced SCFE (Fig. 1-a). The epiphysis had been stabilized with two smooth pins (Fig. 1-b). When beginning weight-bearing after three months, the patient had experienced hip pain. The surgeon had assumed that the pins were the source of the pain and subsequently had removed them. The pain had increased even more over the next two days, and new radiographs had revealed severe displacement of the capital femoral epiphysis (Fig. 2). The slipped epiphysis had then been reduced and stabilized with …
Shock compression response of forsterite above 250 GPa

Shocked forsterite above 250 GPa indicates incongruent crystallization of MgO, its phase transition, and remelting. Forsterite (Mg2SiO4) is one of the major planetary materials, and its behavior under extreme conditions is important to understand the interior structure of large planets, such as super-Earths, and large-scale planetary impact events. Previous shock compression measurements of forsterite indicate that it may melt below 200 GPa, but these measurements did not go beyond 200 GPa. We report the shock response of forsterite above ~250 GPa, obtained using the laser shock wave technique. We simultaneously measured the Hugoniot and temperature of shocked forsterite and interpreted the results to suggest the following: (i) incongruent crystallization of MgO at 271 to 285 GPa, (ii) phase transition of MgO at 285 to 344 GPa, and (iii) remelting above ~470 to 500 GPa. These exothermic and endothermic reactions are seen to occur under extreme conditions of pressure and temperature. They indicate complex structural and chemical changes in the system MgO-SiO2 at extreme pressures and temperatures and will affect the way we understand the interior processes of large rocky planets as well as material transformation by impacts in the formation of planetary systems.