Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of combined urea and creatinine clearance and prediction equations as measures of residual renal function when GFR is low.

BACKGROUND UK, US and European guidelines recommend the decision to initiate dialysis should be based on a combination of measurements of kidney function, nutritional status and clinical symptoms. Such recommendations assume an accurate and reproducible measure of glomerular filtration rate (GFR). METHODS Prospective study of 97 patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and serum creatinine >200 micromol/l (2.26 mg/dl) who between them contributed 388 24 h urine collections. Our main outcome measure was the number of patients with low residual renal function identified by different tests, using widely accepted thresholds. We calculated sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values and receiver operating characteristic curves for each comparison using a combined urea and creatinine clearance of <15 ml/min to indicate the likely presence of end stage renal disease (CKD stage 5). RESULTS Seventy five patients had a combined urea and creatinine clearance <15 ml/min during the study. Using the highest measurement of serum creatinine for each patient, the best of the prediction equations was the 4-variable modification of diet in renal disease (MDRD) equation (area under ROC curve 0.93). This was followed by Kt/V (AUC 0.91) and Cockroft Gault with and without correction for ideal body weight (AUC 0.89). Further analyses showed that the 4-variable MDRD equation had higher NPV (64%) but lower PPV (89%) than the other tests (NPV 40-49%, PPV 92-100%), for identifying patients whose combined clearance was <15 ml/min. CONCLUSION The 4-variable MDRD formula is currently the best available prediction equation for GFR, but will nevertheless over estimate residual renal function when this is significantly impaired in up to 36% cases. Collection of 24 h urine samples may still have a role in the assessment of patients with stages 4 and 5 CKD.
ARIS meets RUP: The ARIS Unified Information System Development Process

Starting from the Rational Unified Process RUP and the ARIS life cycle model the ARIS Unified Information System Development Process AUP is designed. Similar as the RUP is developed from the classic waterfall model as an iterative and incremental process to build software, the AUP is developed from the ARIS life cycle model as an iterative and incremental process to build business information systems. As software development is a part of the information system development the RUP is integrated in the AUP. The modeling language for the AUP is a combination of UML and diagrams from the ARIS framework concept.
Specular Reflection Separation With Color-Lines Constraint

According to dichromatic reflection model, the previous methods of specular reflection separation in image processing often separate specular reflection from a single image using patch-based priors. Due to lack of global information, these methods often cannot completely separate the specular component of an image and are incline to degrade image textures. In this paper, we derive a global color-lines constraint from dichromatic reflection model to effectively recover specular and diffuse reflection. Our key observation is from that each image pixel lies along a color line in normalized RGB space and the different color lines representing distinct diffuse chromaticities intersect at one point, namely, the illumination chromaticity. For pixels along the same color line, they spread over the entire image and their distances to the illumination chromaticity reflect the amount of specular reflection components. With global (non-local) information from these color lines, our method can effectively separate specular and diffuse reflection components in a pixelwise way for a single image, and it is suitable for real-time applications. Our experimental results on synthetic and real images show that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods to separate specular reflection.
A large nucleoprotein assembly at the ends of the viral DNA mediates retroviral DNA integration

We have probed the nucleoprotein organization of Moloney murine leukemia virus (MLV) pre‐integration complexes using a novel footprinting technique that utilizes a simplified in vitro phage Mu transposition system. We find that several hundred base pairs at each end of the viral DNA are organized in a large nucleoprotein complex, which we call the intasome. This structure is not formed when pre‐integration complexes are made by infecting cells with integrase‐minus virus, demonstrating a requirement for integrase. In contrast, footprinting of internal regions of the viral DNA did not reveal significant differences between pre‐integration complexes with and without integrase. Treatment with high salt disrupts the intasome in parallel with loss of intermolecular integration activity. We show that a cellular factor is required for reconstitution of the intasome. Finally, we demonstrate that DNA–protein interactions involving extensive regions at the ends of the viral DNA are functionally important for retroviral DNA integration activity. Current in vitro integration systems utilizing purified integrase lack the full fidelity of the in vivo reaction. Our results indicate that both host factors and long viral DNA substrates may be required to reconstitute an in vitro system with all the hallmarks of DNA integration in vivo.
Region between α‐helices 3 and 4 of the Mad homology 2 domain of Smad4: functional roles in oligomer formation and transcriptional activation

Smad4 has a unique region of 35 amino acids between α‐helices 3 and 4 (termed H3/4 loop) of the Mad homology (MH) 2 domain. In order to elucidate the functional importance of the H3/4 loop, we prepared chimeric constructs of Smad4 containing the region corresponding to the α‐helix 3, H3/4 loop and α‐helix 4 of different Smads, including a chimera containing that of Smad2 (Smad4‐HL2).
Apophysomyces elegans: an Emerging Zygomycete in India

ABSTRACT Apophysomyces elegans was considered a rare but medically important zygomycete. We analyzed the clinical records of eight patients from a single center in whom zygomycosis due to A. elegans was diagnosed over a span of 25 months. We also attempted a DNA-based method for rapid identification of the fungi and looked for interstrain polymorphism using microsattelite primers. Three patients had cutaneous and subcutaneous infections, three had isolated renal involvement, one had rhino-orbital tissue infection, and the final patient had a disseminated infection involving the spleen and kidney. Underlying illnesses were found in two patients, one with diabetes mellitus and the other with chronic alcoholism. A history of traumatic implantation was available for three patients. All except two of the patients responded to surgical and/or medical therapy; the diagnosis for the two exceptions was made at the terminal stage of infection. Restriction enzyme (MboI, MspI, HinfI) digestion of the PCR-amplified internal transcribed spacer region helped with the rapid and specific identification of A. elegans. The strains could be divided into two groups according to their patterns, with clustering into one pattern obtained by using microsatellite [(GTG)5 and (GAC)5] PCR fingerprinting. The study highlights the epidemiology, clinical spectrum, and diagnosis of emerging A. elegans infections.
Fourier Tag: A Smoothly Degradable Fiducial Marker System with Configurable Payload Capacity

We describe the design and implementation of a fiducial marker system that encodes data in the frequency spectrum of a synthetic image. This distinctive approach to marker synthesis and data encoding allows for partial data extraction in adverse imaging conditions, and can significantly extend the detection range through graceful data degradation. Additional digital encoding and image construction techniques are used to increase the payload capacity, and also to store 3-D pose information in each fiducial marker. This fiducial marker scheme can be configured to match the needs of the target application. We present several experiments investigating the practical range of various parameters as well as the performance of a specific instance of the system.
Paranoid ideation among elderly African American persons.

PURPOSE The prevalence and correlates of paranoid ideation were investigated. DESIGN AND METHODS On the basis of a sample of 998 independently living elderly African American persons in a cross-sectional study, the study used the Brief Symptom Inventory to measure paranoid ideation and 14 independent variables, including demographic characteristics, cognitive deficit, depression, self-reported memory functioning, emotional and instrumental support, stressful life events, limitation of daily activities, self-rated health status, and self-rated hearing and vision. RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS Paranoid ideation (symptoms of paranoia) was found in 10% of this sample. A multiple regression analysis of the data revealed that of the 14 independent variables used in this study, 6 (income, instrumental support, hearing, stressful life events, self-reported memory deficit, and depression) showed a significant relationship with paranoid ideation.
Effects of Stop Words Elimination for Arabic Information Retrieval: A Comparative Study

The effectiveness of three stop words lists for Arabic Information Retrieval---General Stoplist, Corpus- Based Stoplist, Combined Stoplist ---were investigated in this study. Three popular weighting schemes were examined: the inverse document frequency weight, probabilistic weighting, and statistical language modelling. The Idea is to combine the statistical approaches with linguistic approaches to reach an optimal performance, and compare their effect on retrieval. The LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) Arabic Newswire data set was used with the Lemur Toolkit. The Best Match weighting scheme used in the Okapi retrieval system had the best overall performance of the three weighting algorithms used in the study, stoplists improved retrieval effectiveness especially when used with the BM25 weight. The overall performance of a general stoplist was better than the other two lists.
Examining the heteropatriarchy: Canadian and American male teachers’ perspectives of sexual minority curriculum

This study was concerned with an examination of the heteropatriarchy as it was performed by six self-identified heterosexual male English teachers and two high school administrators in the United States and Canada. These educators explained their efforts regarding their own thinking about identity and curriculum and their attempts to teach a sexual minority curriculum. Queer theory provided the lens for the research when considering pedagogical approaches that addressed differing identities, in general, and sexuality, in particular. Data were produced through individual teacher interviews, classroom observations, written reflections, and school curriculum materials. Administrators were also interviewed regarding school policies and curriculum expectations. These data were collected and analyzed using phenomenological methods, ethnographic techniques, case studies, and biographic life histories between 2006 and 2012 academic years. Participants were included in the meaning making of the documentation process through collaborative interrogation of their interview transcripts. The value of this research lies in its potential to consider pedagogical methods for addressing sexual minority curriculum in the secondary education English classroom in relationship to teacher identity.
KenyaEclipse: learning to program in eclipse

A fundamental part of a Computer Science degree is learning to program. Rather than starting students on a full commercial language, we favour using a dedicated "teaching language" to introduce programming concepts.At the same time, we want to introduce students to popular tools that assist in the software development process. However, up until now our teaching language, Kenya, has not been supported by professional IDEs. Therefore, we have been unable to progress smoothly from first principles to the state of the art within one environment.We present work that integrates the Kenya language into the Eclipse environment. Students can now become familiar with the major features of a professional IDE while learning to program, and experience a smooth transition to commercial languages within the same environment.One of the hardest things to teach students is good programming style. Compilers reveal syntactic and type errors, but do not analyse style. We have harnessed as-you-type code checking, as seen in Eclipse's Java development tools, to provide advice on program style as well as correctness.
Integrins are required for tissue organization and restriction of neurogenesis in regenerating planarians

Tissue regeneration depends on proliferative cells and on cues that regulate cell division, differentiation, patterning and the restriction of these processes once regeneration is complete. In planarians, flatworms with high regenerative potential, muscle cells express some of these instructive cues. Here, we show that members of the integrin family of adhesion molecules are required for the integrity of regenerating tissues, including the musculature. Remarkably, in regenerating β1-integrin RNAi planarians, we detected increased numbers of mitotic cells and progenitor cell types, as well as a reduced ability of stem cells and lineage-restricted progenitor cells to accumulate at wound sites. These animals also formed ectopic spheroid structures of neural identity in regenerating heads. Interestingly, those polarized assemblies comprised a variety of neural cells and underwent continuous growth. Our study indicates that integrin-mediated cell adhesion is required for the regenerative formation of organized tissues and for restricting neurogenesis during planarian regeneration. Highlighted article: Integrin signaling acts to recruit and localize progenitor cells following injury, thereby promoting the correct organization of regenerating planarian tissue.
Cellular and molecular events on the development of mammalian thyroid C cells

Thyroid C cells synthesize and secrete calcitonin, a serum calcium‐lowering hormone. This review provides our current understanding of mammalian thyroid C cells from the molecular and morphological perspectives. Several transcription factors and signaling molecules involved in the development of C cells have been identified, and genes expressed in the pharyngeal pouch endoderm, neural crest‐derived mesenchyme in the pharyngeal arches, and ultimobranchial body play critical roles for the development of C cells. It has been generally accepted, without much‐supporting evidence, that mammalian C cells, as well as the avian cells, are derived from the neural crest. However, by fate mapping of neural crest cells in both Wnt1‐Cre/R26R and Connexin(Cxn)43‐lacZ transgenic mice, we showed that neural crest cells colonize neither the fourth pharyngeal pouch nor the ultimobranchial body. E‐cadherin, an epithelial cell marker, is expressed in thyroid C cells and their precursors, the fourth pharyngeal pouch and ultimobranchial body. Furthermore, E‐cadherin is colocalized with calcitonin in C cells. Recently, lineage tracing in Sox17‐2A‐iCre/R26R mice has clarified that the pharyngeal endoderm‐derived cells give rise to C cells. Together, these findings indicate that mouse thyroid C cells are endodermal in origin. Developmental Dynamics 245:323–341, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Over-activation of the Drosophila melanogaster hsp83 gene by selenium intoxication

Selenium is an important dietary micronutrient and an essential component of selenoproteins and the active sites of some enzymes, although at high concentrations it is toxic. We investigated diphenyl diselenide ((C6H5)2Se2) for its effects on the developmental stages of Drosophila melanogaster and found that in the larval and pupae stages the toxic threshold for this compound when added to the banana-agar medium on which the larva were fed was 350 μmol. In adult flies, fed on the same media, there were no observable toxic effects below 500 μmol but there were toxic effects above 600 μmol, indicating that adult flies were more resistant to selenium intoxication. In larvae, a when diphenyl diselenide was present above the toxic threshold there was increased activation of the hsp83 heat shock protein gene. Selenium promotes oxidation of sulfhydryl groups and affects the folding of proteins and this could explain the over-expression of hsp83 because the product of this gene is involved in protein folding and defense responses, including the response to heat shock.
Configuration complexity assessment of convergent supply chain systems

System designers usually generate alternative configurations of supply chains (SCs) by varying especially fixed assets to satisfy a desired production scope and rate. Such alternatives often vary in associated costs and other facets including degrees of complexity. Hence, a measure of configuration complexity can be a tool for comparison and decision-making. This paper presents three approaches to assessment of configuration complexity and their applications to designing convergent SC systems. Presented approaches are conceptually distinct ways of measuring structural complexity parameters based on different preconditions and circumstances of assembly systems which are typical representatives of convergent SCs. There are applied two similar approaches based on different preconditions that are related to demand shares. Third approach does not consider any special condition relating to character of final product demand. Subsequently, we propose a framework for modeling of assembly SC models, which are dividing to classes.
Bilinear spatiotemporal basis models

A variety of dynamic objects, such as faces, bodies, and cloth, are represented in computer graphics as a collection of moving spatial landmarks. Spatiotemporal data is inherent in a number of graphics applications including animation, simulation, and object and camera tracking. The principal modes of variation in the spatial geometry of objects are typically modeled using dimensionality reduction techniques, while concurrently, trajectory representations like splines and autoregressive models are widely used to exploit the temporal regularity of deformation. In this article, we present the bilinear spatiotemporal basis as a model that simultaneously exploits spatial and temporal regularity while maintaining the ability to generalize well to new sequences. This factorization allows the use of analytical, predefined functions to represent temporal variation (e.g., B-Splines or the Discrete Cosine Transform) resulting in efficient model representation and estimation. The model can be interpreted as representing the data as a linear combination of spatiotemporal sequences consisting of shape modes oscillating over time at key frequencies. We apply the bilinear model to natural spatiotemporal phenomena, including face, body, and cloth motion data, and compare it in terms of compaction, generalization ability, predictive precision, and efficiency to existing models. We demonstrate the application of the model to a number of graphics tasks including labeling, gap-filling, denoising, and motion touch-up.
Toward a Group-Aware Smartphone Sensing System

Today, social activities are becoming increasingly popular and important to human life. As the number of contacts increases, however, the implicit social graph becomes increasingly complex, leading to a high cost on social activity organization and activity group formation. In this article, the authors present GroupMe, a group-aware smartphone sensing system that supports group management and activity organization in real-world applications. They first present a systematic methodology that can steer the development of mobile group awareness applications, then propose a multigranular group model. Based on the methodology and the model, the authors present their approaches that support various user needs on group formation and management, including closed group suggestion, open/opportunistic grouping, and new group member suggestion. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Molecular analysis of immunoglobulins M and G immune response to protein antigens of Treponema pallidum in human syphilis

Protein antigens of Treponema pallidum precipitated by immunoglobulin M (IgM) and IgG antibodies of sera from patients with untreated primary and secondary syphilis as well as treated secondary syphilis were characterized on a molecular basis. T. pallidum was labeled internally with [35S]methionine and solubilized in 0.1% sodium dodecyl sulfate-1% Triton X-100. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis on 12.5% gels followed by autoradiography revealed 32 distinct proteins with molecular weights between 13,500 and 200,000. Twenty-three proteins of T. pallidum with molecular weights between 15,500 and 115,000 were identified as antigens by double antibody radioimmunoprecipitation with IgM and IgG antibodies of sera from syphilitic patients. The molecular analysis of the IgM and IgG immune response to T. pallidum in human syphilis is in accord with earlier immunological observations. Finally, utilizing syphilitic human sera, we characterized 15 protein antigens of T. pallidum that are common to Treponema phagedenis by partial absorption of IgM and IgG antibodies with an ultrasonicate of T. phagedenis.
Matting and super-pixel based target tracking algorithm

Model updating is a critical problem in target tracking. Inaccurate foreground and background estimating will degrade the tracking performance even cause drift problem. In order to address this problem, a robust tracking algorithm based on super-pixels and Matting is proposed. We use feature matching and color-histogram of super-pixels to offer enough foreground and background information for Matting. In addition, we sample the patches of object to record the appearance information which can deal with the situation of occlusion. Compared with other tracking methods, experiments show that our algorithm can overcome the problem of model drift and track the object with better accuracy.
A study on organisational stress and conflict handling styles among management teachers

Teaching is no longer merely hard work; it has become a highly stressful profession. Teaching in professional institutes has to extend beyond the theoretical inputs. It has to focus on holistic personality development and endeavor towards enhancement of professional acumen and employability of students. This often leads to overwhelming pressures and challenges, which may lead to stress. Conflict is a natural, everyday phenomenon in all private and working spheres. It is an unavoidable component of human activity. Conflict is inevitable, and arises due to various reasons. The objective of the present paper was to study the reasons for organizational stress among the management teachers as affected by gender and experience. It attempted to identify the conflict handling styles used predominantly by teachers to resolve disputes that occur in the institute. It also aimed at identifying the correlation between organizational stress and conflict handling styles. Role stagnation was found to be the highest contributor to stress followed by role erosion. Competing style was found to be the most dominant style of conflict handling followed by the avoiding style among the management teachers of professional institutes.